“No way!”
I dropped my voice so Zoë couldn’t hear. She was in the next room, building a jigsaw with my mother.
“It’s a new thing, we’re keeping it quiet.”
“I bet!” she folded her arms and leaned back. I could tell she wasn’t pleased.
“Look, I really like her.”
“Of course, you do!” she said, snorting derisively. “Nikki is gorgeous, she’s what, twenty-two? And you’re thirty, with a child.”
“Thanks for reminding me,” I said sarcastically. “I’d forgotten about Zoë for a bit. What’s the problem? You’re always telling me to go out on dates and meet women!”
“Yeah, not college girls!”
“She’s graduated, just like you,” I said.
But something else was going on here, I realized that Simone didn’t like the idea of us going out, not because of our ages but something else.
“I thought you liked Nikki?”
“I do,” she said, looking down. “It’s just…” She bit her lip. “When it comes to men, she’s been a bit… I don’t know.”
“Just spit it out!” I could see she was trying to be tactful but that wasn’t really our way. We’d always been honest with each other, direct to the point of rudeness.
“Weird, ok!”
This wasn’t what I was expecting at all.
After having Nikki in my house for over a month now, I had seen her almost every day. Weird was the last word I would use to describe her. Sexy, hell, yes. Smart, funny, kind. These were words that jumped to mind straight away. But not weird.
“Weird like Lana Lieberman?”
Lana Lieberman was an ordinary girl from our neighborhood who in college went off the rails. One moment she was studying to become an oral hygienist and the next we heard she’d been caught in a sex act in a dentist’s chair, experimenting with nitrous oxide, better known as laughing gas. Later, all kinds of stories started doing the rounds of her and all of the inappropriate things she was supposed to have done with boys in school. I always felt a bit left out. Why couldn’t she have been inappropriate with me? I knew the answer of course. She might have been interested, but I was too busy doing extra reading for calculus to notice.
“No! Not weird like Lana Lieberman!” Simone said crossly.
“Then… weird like Mrs. Novak?” I thought of the lady who’d moved in across the street from us when we were kids. She’d seemed nice at first but then my mother noticed that she never left the house. We started staring at the house, hoping to catch her coming out, but she never did. Her husband did the shopping, and they had no kids. After a while, our attention wandered to more pressing matters, like passing grades in Simone’s case, and getting a good college scholarship in mine. Then, one night, we heard the ambulance come roaring down the road. Turned out Mrs. Novak had a heart attack. When the paramedics tried to go into the house, they could hardly move in there. The walls were stacked high with old pizza boxes and newspapers. She was a hoarder. This fascinated us. My mother, however, was disgusted. She was relieved when the Novaks moved out.
“Jesus, no!” Simone exclaimed. “Not like Mrs. Novak!”
“Well, then? Tell me!”
Simone put the kettle on, made us some coffee. We sat outside on the steps going down into my mother’s patch of overgrown garden. The grass needed mowing, the flower beds had not been weeded in years, but there was a wildness that I had always liked. My mother always had flowers in a pot or a flowering shrub climbing up against the back door. When the sun was out, the back stoop was a pleasant place to soak up some stillness.
“I love Nikki,” Simone began. “But when it comes to men, she acts strange.”
Before I could ask her what she meant, she went on. “Like, she’s got a type. They’re always sporty, athletes of some kind. Usually totally hyper and into whatever they’re doing. Like crazy sporty. They’re not even that into her or anything! One time, this guy came round with flowers, he kept calling her, begging to go out with her, but she kept saying no. When I asked her why, she said he wasn’t right.”
“So?”
“It’s the way she said it. Like, not that she didn’t like him, which I think she actually did. He was nice looking, I still remember his name, Angelo. No, she said he wasn’t right.”
“In the head?” That I could understand.
Simone gave me a dirty look.
“No, not in the head. It was like… he didn’t check all her boxes or something.”