Love in the time of braces.
by Rose Margaret Deniz
The letters come in heavy, marbleized envelopes. Pink with a spray of turquoise inside a paisley loop. Peach and thick, heavy cream swirled like a Creamsicle. On the outside is my name, Abbie, written in Nat’s peaked scrawl. The paper smells like paint and sweat from his fingers. When they appear among unfussy bills and typed memos, my heart always leaps into my throat.
But I do not love Nat.
We sit on my front stoop in the afternoon of a sticky summer day. He wears a tie-die t-shirt, plays the guitar for me. He has braces that shred his lips. Raw acne. A tall, ripped bod. We are in the same class at St. Andrews. He can dunk a basketball with one graceful move.
Our elbows bump and my hand flies up to the back of my neck, worrying the skin into a red splotch. Don’t stare at his crotch. But I can’t help it. Curiosity and something I cannot name swirls in my stomach. I scuff my bare feet on our concrete steps. Inside Nat’s letters are lyrics to songs, passionate musings on love. Clumsy poetry.
I do not want to kiss him. I understand chemistry – I am twelve and no dummy – and we do not have it. I duck my head away when his eye catches mine. I wear big, oversized shirts to hide my gawky frame just in case he might be trying to look at my nonexistent breasts.
Agonizing over how to avoid kissing him gives me a rash on my underarms where I scrape away at dubious hair with a razor. I worry so much about evading his kiss that my best friend Luisa sighs and tells me that I must secretly be in love with him.
“I am not.” My voice is squeaky and whiny. We are pawing through second hand stores in the Third Ward while her father runs errands.
Luisa is always applying reverse psychology techniques on me. She picks them up from her psychoanalyst mother. Right now my throat feels like it is coated in mucus because she bought ice cream – I hate ice cream – and shoved a cone on me. I eat three bites. The ice cream melts in my hand and I toss it when she is not looking. We escape the heat inside a musty vintage store and I find a silky dress that I love so much my teeth hurt. But when I flip over the tag, it is way more than the folded bill that Paw-Paw slipped into my pocket.
“Abbie, you want that.” Luisa’s arms are loaded up with gauzy fabric and slim-leg Levi’s. My throat goes dry. Despite my stork legs, my butt does not under any circumstances fit inside boy-cut jeans.
“No, I don’t.” Inside my chest, my heart is thumping. The price tag is squeezed between my fingers. If I ask her, Luisa will buy it for me. She has allowance money for babysitting her younger brothers. But she already paid for our lunch of nacho fries and cream sodas.
“Your eyes are dilated. Mom says that shows desire.” She raises a knowing eyebrow.
“It has a rip on the sleeve, look.” I drop the tag and point at a hole tinier than an atom. Luisa’s eyes narrow in on the flaw, her dark brown hair swinging around her jawline. Her face is heart-shaped. Her lips are naturally ruby red. I bite mine to bring color to the surface because I am forbidden to wear lipstick, but my lips are always pale.
“Do you think he’d use tongue?” Luisa’s voice drops, her breath sweet from the strawberry gum she is chewing.
“Who?” I wipe my palms on my knee-length army surplus shorts. “What are you talking about?”
“Nat, of course.” Her eyes drop to the dress. It has a dark, glossy sheen that makes me imagine Parisian cafes with wrought-iron chairs. A moonlit cobblestone street. A boy with an irresistible laugh at my side.
“I don’t like Nat like that.” I shudder as the air conditioning kicks in and twist the fabric of the dress between my fingers.
“I know. Tell me again because I forgot.” Luisa sighs like she is in pain. “But we can wonder, right? I mean, remove the braces and give him some topical ointment, and he might be boy wonder.”
“Yuck, you said topical ointment.” We giggle and I untangle myself from the beautiful dress and my vision of Paris at nighttime and follow her around the store taunting her with words on her Hate List. She has an actual list in a spiral notebook and adds to it when she reads or watches movies or overhears conversations.
“Moist. Dufus. Jam. Jockstrap. Ewww, moist jockstrap. That’s a good one.”
Luisa squeals and the shopkeeper, a woman with a beehive that predates the 50’s cocktail dress she is wearing, tsk-tsks from behind a massive wooden desk. The inside of the store has a mothball odor. It smells like a rodent died in an airless closet somewhere. In a nice way.
I almost forget about the dress. Luisa dumps her goods on the counter and wanders back to the racks. She plucks the dress, my dress, off the hanger. For a second, my heart soars. She is going to buy it for me. My smile is ready. You really shouldn’t. I already owe you a plate of pancakes from Crepe House.
Luisa plops the dress on top of her other stuff. “You said you didn’t like it, so you don’t mind, right?” She twists her legs into an elegant pretzel and fiddles with her bangs.
My heart plunges. I imagine Luisa under the twinkling stars, the River Seine flowing past her and a boy in a white t-shirt, his arm around her waist. A lump forms in the back of my throat. Her eyes are a watery blue. Next to her, my hazel ones appear dry and thirsty.
“Of course.” The words taste like sandpaper. The mothball smell mixes with the clotted ice cream in my stomach. I shrug like Luisa does – no biggie, but my shoulders cramp up around my ears.
“Great, thanks!” Her eyes are still crinkly blue, but her voice gives her away. If I am thirsty, Luisa is always hungry.
***
I like someone else. He breathes deeply into the phone when we talk late into the night. He has dark, wavy hair and wears a braided leather bracelet that he made at camp. We talk about everything. His big Italian family. My grandparents who have cataracts and are oblivious to everything unless I try to walk out of the house wearing mascara, or heaven-forbid, lip-gloss.
“I want to see you in red lipstick.” He murmurs into the phone and my breath catches.
We only talk at night after his family has gone to bed and my grandparents are snoring in the room below mine. Every night I hope Paw-Paw does not accidentally knock the phone off its bedside cradle and hand it to Doodle with a gasp. “My word!” Seconds turn into minutes and hours. We talk so long our voices get hoarse, his going so low and sexy that Nat and his psychedelic t-shirts vanish from my mind.
Okay, so we have never kissed. And he does not write me poetry on scented letters. Or sing me songs. He sometimes calls me Kid, but that is just from habit. Luisa does not know about Enzo. And if she did, she would kill me.
Enzo is her brother.
***
If Luisa found out, would she believe me when I said that our relationship – the word a bolt of pleasure straight through my heart – was an accident? I called her house one night and the background was chaotic and loud as always. Four brothers: Enzo the oldest, the other three under ten, and Luisa the only girl.
Enzo answered. The noise quieted as he walked away from the family room and down a long hallway to the closet that Luisa hid in to talk to me. He told me she was at a movie with friends from her Young Scholars group. I did not know about the movie and fought back an ache.
“Kid, that you?” Enzo is only three years older than Luisa and me, but he has had at least three girlfriends, and Amy, his most recent one, came to the Alvino’s for Sunday night dinner. I would sneak covert glances at her across the table. Once, she caught me. Fiddled with her hair and whispered to Enzo. My cheeks flooded with warmth. I was going to burst with longing. To be her, to nudge Enzo’s shoulder. She had long, flaxen hair and smooth, creamy skin. Wore scoop neck t-shirts. I could see her pink bra. They broke up because Amy said she needed to explore other horizons. When Luisa told me this, I thought of Nat. He is always talking about going to the ends of the earth to find himself.
“At your service.” I saluted Enzo through the phone.
It is sort of an inside joke that my role in the Alvino family is to help with chores. Change the littlest Alvino’s diapers. Band-Aid the knees of the other two. Even though Enzo is older than Luisa, she is often roped into making him sandwiches and picking up his laundry. I, as the dutiful best friend, assist.
He laughed, his voice warm. I could imagine his eyes, identical to Luisa’s. I knew he was running his free hand through his wavy hair. I could hear him scrub it over his face. I did not want him to hang up.
“You okay, you know? ‘Bout Amy?” My voice was funny and tight. For just one second, I wanted him to know that I was not his little sister’s friend. I toyed with the choker necklace I was wearing, the one I made in Art class out of black ribbon and lace.
Until that point, most of my interactions with Enzo involved “hey, Kid,” and a knuckle-punch to my shoulder. Or landing facedown on the floor because he tripped me, an evil laugh floating down from his 3rd floor room.
My garret, he calls it. Sloped ceiling, minimalist furniture – a bookshelf and his mattress on the floor. I imagine his sheets soft and warm, smelling like the lavender fabric softener Mrs. Alvino uses for their laundry.
Enzo makes my whole body sweat. Even after weeks of talking in the dark, I still push my fingers into my underarms and find them damp. But that night, the first, I was shaking.
He sighed on the other end of the phone. It wasn’t a Luisa sigh, annoyed and knowing. It was sad and I wanted to dive into it like a pool and pull him back up for air.
“You got anything better to do?” His voice broke. Just a little, and I held my breath. I shook my head side to side, forgetting that he could not see me.
I tried to think of something jokey to say. Some way to pretend everything was normal in case he changed his mind. But I had used up at your service. And I already knew by the tone of his voice that we were way outside our realm of ordinary.
“All yours,” I said.
It took me a whole eon to exhale.
***
“Why are you so tired?” Luisa snaps at me from the other side of her room. I am over after a long night of talking to Enzo until the faintest pink broke the sky.
Take that, Nat. Now that’s a real horizon.
I can’t stop yawning. Enzo had confessed how living in a big family drove him nuts. I told him mine was too quiet. Living with two elderly people made the silence so thick I could hear the walls breathe.
But then his voice dropped. And the night turned electric. He whispered about brushing his thumb over my lips. Pulling me onto his lap. My voice caught. He said, make that sound again. But I can never do anything on demand, like remember my favorite books or movies, or say something in Spanish when I am called on in class. So I blurted out something that had been on my mind night after night.
“What are you wearing?”
His voice came out as a low growl and I slipped into a feeling of weightlessness. Talking about skin – his boxer briefs, and the soft pajamas I wear to bed – is kind of like kissing without the lips. I could imagine the feel of his fingers walking down my neck. His hands running through my hair.
Throb. Another word Luisa hates.
“No reason. Just up late reading a good book.” I wave in the direction of my bag, hoping I zipped one inside. Hopefully Luisa won’t dig through it later for a pen or stick of gum and catch me in my lie.
I am careful now when I come to her house. I don’t ask about Enzo. Somehow I just know, even though Enzo and I have never talked about it, that I am not supposed to mention our long nights. And I want it to remain perfect and ours alone, a secret between the two of us. But a bigger part of me yearns to blurt out everything.
“What do you think of this outfit?” Luisa stands in front of her mirror in a swishy skirt and ballet flats, her ribbed tank top showing off her swimmer arms.
“Hmm.” I tap my mouth with my index finger. “It’s missing something.”
I start digging through her wardrobe, hunting for just the right thing. I pull out a scarf. It has a paisley design like one of Nat’s envelopes, but softer and more feminine with a touch of pink and yellow. I wind it around her neck and tie it like I have seen women in foreign films do it. When I am finished, she looks chic and elegant. Pleased, I step back and smile.
“I look like an airline stewardess.”
My smile drops. I shake my head. Lean forward and adjust the scarf. “No way, it is perfect.”
Luisa scrutinizes herself in her floor-length mirror. Groans. “This won’t do. I need something different.” She tugs off the scarf.
Eyes stinging, I bury myself in her closet. It smells like lavender.
“Where are you going?” I ask the pile of shoes on her closet floor. Fiddle with the choker on my neck. I take a deep breath and exhale out the strain that has been between us since the vintage store.
The delay lasts a lifetime. Finally she answers, her voice airy. “Nowhere. Just trying on stuff.”
I eye-roll the mess in her closet. Fine, reject the scarf. But I am not stupid. She is going somewhere without me again. Instead of throwing a shoe at her, I sort them into type – athletic, kitten heel, and flip-flop. When familiar footsteps down the hallway break my concentration, my heart speeds up.
Enzo. The closet door is blocking my view, but I know by the way he taps his feet that he is excited about something. We talked about our first kisses last night – mine, my pillow, which made him snort with laughter, and his, a girl in fourth grade from St. Andrews. He said her lips tasted like grape soda.
I smack my lips together. I am wearing Dewy Grape lip-gloss that I hid in my bag and applied the second I walked out my front door.
His fingers drum on the door. “Don’t come upstairs. Luisa, are you listening? Keep the boys out.”
I hear Luisa mm-hmm. If I smack my lips again, will he hear it and poke his head around the door? I just want a glimpse. Even if it is just a smile and a ring me later hand signal.
“I’m busy, got it? I got company coming.”
My lips stop moving mid-smack. Company? My throat feels thick all of a sudden. Footsteps echo through the house and the door at the top of the stairs slams shut. I poke my head out of the closet as Luisa is trying on dangly earrings. They are too big and feathery for her face, but I don’t tell her.
She mumbles to herself. “Boy hormones. Someone should shoot him. Or me. I don’t know which one of us first.”
My eyes water. The need to spill everything to Luisa eats away at me from the inside out, but all the words get lodged inside. I want Enzo to think I am easygoing, irresistible. I want him to sneak me into his room so we can watch the stars from the tiny window in his roof. He promised.
As I am leaving that day, I take the scarf Luisa rejected.
***
That night, my hand dials without thinking and he answers on the first ring.
“We gotta stop doing this.” Enzo is breathy like he has just run a marathon.
“This?”
“Talking.”
I can’t speak. He’s joking right? My tongue gets all tangled in my mouth and I mumble something that sounds like why?
“Look I’m sorry, Kid.” He tries to make his voice gruff, but it cracks at the end. I laugh. Nervous and hiccup-y. Luisa already told me that she caught Amy with her shirt off sitting on Enzo’s lap, her hair tumbling over her shoulder.
“Uh, he is so gross.” Luisa threw a sock at his head. Yelled. Get your own clean underwear from now on.
I hid in the smallest corner of my room and tried not to throw up when she told me. I held it in until after I got all the gory details, including Luisa informing me bra strap would be added to her Hate List. In Doodle’s pink bathroom with cherub figurines on glass shelves, I leaned over the sink and cried until my throat burned. Enzo had told me he imagined holding me just that way. Said he would be gentle.
The silence on the phone is not electric at all. How can he turn it on and off like that? If only I could reach out and take his hand, flip the switch back on again. Part of me hopes he will offer to keep up our nightly ritual anyway.
But he says nothing. And I am shaking again, but in the wrong way.
After Enzo and I hang up, I realize that in all our late night conversations, he never asked me why I lived with my grandparents. Maybe Enzo already knew my parents died when I was eight years old because Luisa or Luisa’s mom told him. Or maybe I allowed the Alvino family to swallow me up. They wrote lines for me. Gave me a part in their messy play so I could forget my parents were gone. And Enzo did not want to hurt me by bringing it up.
Or maybe he never cared.
***
I knock on his door at dusk. Luisa’s scarf is wrapped around my neck. I look like a Parisian film star. My straw-colored hair is braided and coiled on top of my head.
“Is Nat in?”
Nat’s mom grins. I can see where Nat gets his dimples and unruly blonde hair.
“Oh, you just missed him, Abbie. He’s at the park.” Nat’s mom winks at me like we are in on a secret. Are we? I am here to make amends, and in my hands are a bundle of his letters. I memorized the lyrics he wrote me, and passages on journeying into the unknown. The envelopes remind me of flowers, some hot pink, others pale blue and bright yellow.
I smile and wave goodbye, eager to find Nat. It has been almost three weeks since we hung out on my stoop. I decide I was wrong about him, and that Luisa is right – under the skin issues and braces, he is thoughtful and attentive, and with some Chapstick, his lips might be kissably soft.
The sun is tucking itself behind the trees as I crest over a long, low hill that slopes down into Washington Park. Past the soccer field, near the swing set, I glimpse a broad back. Those are basketball-playing muscles. And a Day-Glo shirt. Nat!
I race across the field, but my clogs, the ones I bought at a rummage sale, slow me down and bang into my heels.
“Nat!” He does not hear me. In my head are his words. A handful of coins in a wishing well, rays of light beaming down on a boy and a girl. Peace out.
That boy and girl – it could be us. We will take the long way home holding hands, and maybe this time at my front door, I won’t turn my head away.
I am almost within sprinting distance when I realize Nat is not alone. Someone is perched on his lap and I get a glimpse of knobby-kneed freckled legs. The swish of dark, glossy fabric against a girl’s thighs.
My heart sinks into the grass like my clogs. Luisa is wearing my Parisian Night dress. And she is kissing Nat.
Nat’s hand caresses Luisa’s face with slow fingers. Her bottom lip pops out from between Nat’s lips like he was sucking on it. Creamsicle. Candy-coated. Like his letters. Luisa’s hair is pulled back of her face with a clip like I am always telling her to do. Seriously, this time she takes my suggestion?
I back away before Luisa catches me staring. Or maybe that was the whole point? She wants me to see what I cast away. Nat’s envelopes flutter from my hands like scattered petals. The swirls of paint on the paper like small drips from the sunset exploding across the sky. I slip off my clogs, letting them drop into the grass, and leave them.
