five.”
We were very private and very proud. We met at the furthest bike racks, the ones shunned by the jocks and the hippies; we nodded to each other in the halls, and on the weekends we walked down Bleecker Street, kissing at every street corner and looking into the eyes of people who looked at us. I expanded Yolandas tutoring sessions, which was a good thing anyway, and I watched Huddie’s practices like someone with a little time to kill, sitting down so my legs wouldn’t shake. In all our months together, we saw one local movie and ate pizza by the slice at the revolting train station pizza joint, run by an Indian family who seemed not to notice that all successful Long Island pizza joints were run by Greeks, and the diners by Italians, and that the only exotic food anyone wanted was eaten on Thursday nights at Bruce Ho’s and included canned litchis and large blue tropical drinks. The Patels served watery ham, green pepper, and pineapple specials and flat Coca-Cola, and the drunks and tired women waiting for the Flushing and Bayside trains were the only people we ever saw. The pizza was so bad we started ordering the curry, mentioned only in apologetic small print at the bottom of the menu; astonished and happy, the Patels phased out the worst of the pizzas. We liked rogan josh and chicken vindaloo and the yogurt shakes, which separated us once more from everyone we knew. We made ourselves invisible. We never said why.
We used every private place a small, affluent town has, every well-kept wood, every wintering swimming pool, every empty boathouse, and even the seven-foot-wide granite boulders that some people in Saddle Rock Estates put in tomake their quarter-acre backyards more interesting. Huddie brought us sodas and Twinkies from his father’s store. One night we painted all the little black jockeys in Kennilworth white and made out until dawn, watching for the first homeowner to discover the new ornament on his Ivory Rose-spattered lawn as he picked up
The New York Times
. We lay in the shadows of the boulders and boats and in the big blue bathtubs of empty pools and talked. Big things were happening around us, the Revolution was under way, even here, and when the older kids and decent adults finished changing the country, we would step in and carry on their work. We assumed we knew what we thought about politics, and we assumed we agreed. Brushing and braiding each others hair, unbuttoning shirts, idly running a toe along a bare leg, we talked about our families, about our school and idiot teachers, of our great luck, of his future with the Celtics and mine with
The Village Voice
.
I forgot Max. Every day with Huddie erased him further, until the only truth was that I had had a student crush on him years ago, that I used to babysit for his kids, that he had been kind enough to teach me how to drive a stick-shift, and that I guessed (and I could even smile at this part, flattered but sort of embarrassed) he seemed to find me attractive now that I was grown up. Did anything happen? Huddie asked. No, are you kidding? I said, and put my hand on the jumping muscle in his arm. Every time Max appeared in the parking lot across from the high school to lead me toward his car for our lunchtimes, I was completely surprised. And then I said that Mondays were no good, and then Wednesdays were no good, and I would only do it once in a great while, to cheer him up,and when I couldn’t anymore, I just gave him a little kiss and Rachel stood on the school steps for a whole week, her arms folded, daring him to ask where I was. He didn’t belong near my body now that it was Huddie’s.
Love and desire slammed us into each other, giddy and harmlessly wild as bumper cars. We were separated only, and only occasionally, by my terror of pregnancy and Huddie’s inability to maintain an erection while wearing a condom, a combination that made both of us sneakily skillful and ashamed. My passion for him flooded up like white