Free Other Words for Love by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal Page A

“I’m Rachel.”
    “I’m Ari.” I was closer now, so her face was clear. Her skin was olive-toned, smooth and flawless. Her nose was prominent but perfectly straight, her eyebrows were thin and arched, and her eyes were dark and shaped like almonds. Rachel was model-beautiful, as gorgeous as those women on the cover of Vogue . I couldn’t imagine who she was, maybe Leigh’s older sister, but they looked nothing alike.
    “Do you need to use the girls’ room?” she asked. “You go ahead … I’ll wait.”
    I locked myself in the bathroom and took care of business quickly because I couldn’t be rude and keep Rachel waiting. She slipped into the bathroom after I left. Leigh was still reading about Picasso in the kitchen when I walked in.
    “We should go to MoMA,” she said after I sat across from her. “To get a feel for his work. We can write about it better that way, don’t you think?”
    I nodded. Then I heard water running in the bathroom and Leigh heard it too. She said she didn’t know that her mother was awake, and I couldn’t imagine that the woman I’d just met could be anyone’s mother, especially not someone as old as Leigh.
    “Did you see her?” Leigh asked, and I nodded again. “She doesn’t usually emerge from her slumber before five o’clock. You know … the fact that she’s old enough to have a teenage daughter practically gives her the vapors. Not that she’s really old enough to have a teenage daughter. She’s only thirty-four.”
    I subtracted quickly—thirty-four, sixteen. Leigh was born when Rachel was eighteen. Evelyn had been three months short of eighteen when she gave birth to Kieran, but I wasn’t inclined to blab my family secrets, so I didn’t say anything.
    Leigh told me that Rachel always slept during the day. I assumed she had some kind of night job, although I couldn’t imagine what that was. She didn’t seem the type to make change in a tollbooth or take care of sick people in a hospital.
    “What does she do?” I asked, thinking that I was too nosy, but Leigh didn’t mind.
    “Hangs out at nightclubs, mostly. Studio Fifty-four was her favorite when it was really popular. She’s friends with one of the owners. He’s sick now, though. AIDS.” Leigh whispered the last word, like AIDS could be caught just by mentioning it. “My mother actually does have a job … she’s a makeup artist on Broadway. It used to be A Chorus Line and now she’s doing Cats , but only Tuesday through Thursday. She won’t work on weekends—too busy with her social life. She’s lucky that my uncle supports us or I don’t know where we’d be. Living in a cardboard box on the corner, probably. Or in a trailer park in Georgia.”
    She said Georgia with a hokey Southern accent, and that was the last thing she said for a while. We went back to our books, to Picasso. We read about his rose period and his cubism period until I noticed that the apartment wasn’t bright anymore.
    “I’d better go,” I said, glancing around for my coat. “It’s late.”
    I’d forgotten that Leigh hung my coat in the hall closet. She brought it to me and I was closing the buttons when she said something about calling a car service to take me home.
    “I’ll be fine on the subway,” I told her, thinking I only had a ten-dollar bill in my wallet and I was sure that wasn’t enough to pay for a cab ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn.
    “It’s dark outside, Ari,” Leigh said. “And dangerous. The subways are filled with people who’ve been kicked out of Bellevue too early. Don’t you watch the news?” She picked up the phone and started dialing. “This is the service my uncle’s firm uses and it’s completely free … I won’t take no for an answer.”
    I couldn’t find a reason to argue. We rode the elevator downstairs, where we stood with the doorman until a glossy sedan arrived. I slid onto the backseat and watched Leigh wave goodbye through tinted windows. Then I listened to 1010