Letting Loose. Joanne Skerrett

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СКАЧАТЬ shrugged. “It’s okay. I guess. What’s his name?”

      Then James walked away to answer the phone, leaving Kelly and me to chat. This was better, because with James out of the room Kelly could give me the real dirt without fear of injuring James’s fragile man-ego.

      She sat in the chair next to mine. I had already forgotten about the half-eaten bowl of chili in front of me. And I was still holding onto that picture of not-Tom and glancing at it every few seconds.

      Apparently, not-Tom had a name, a rather pedestrian one, Drew Anderson. I looked at his picture and he looked as if he should be named Ramses or Spartacus or at least after some African warrior. Am I losing my mind? Here I was building up this guy in my head to be a warrior and I hadn’t even met him yet. Was I that desperate? Well, yes I was. I think.

      “Oh, he’s so sweet,” Kelly was gushing. They’d met him while they were hiking up Mount Diablotins. (I decided not to ask why a mountain was named after the devil.) Drew was leading some high-school students on a hike, teaching them how to identify different plants and flowers, and James and Kelly decided to tag along. Once they’d stopped to eat lunch on the side of the mountain, James detected a slight American accent as Drew talked to them. Turns out that Drew had been educated in America but had moved back to his homeland after his father, who was the former prime minister of the island, died. He had lofty ideals, from what Kelly was saying. He was a sometime math teacher, a developer, and budding politician who was building schools out in remote villages with his own money. Own money, I asked? Apparently he’d worked in the U.S. during the Internet boom and had left the U.S. before the crash. Lofty ideals, rich, smart. What was wrong with him?

      “He had a lot to tell us about the education system down there. Ames, I’m thinking of focusing my dissertation on how the British system is unsuitable for educating kids in the former Caribbean colonies.”

      I looked at her. Oh. “That sounds interesting.”

      “So are you going to e-mail him?”

      “I thought you gave him my address?”

      “Well, yeah. But I think he might want you to make the first move. He seemed kind of put off by the whole matchmaking thing.”

      “Who wouldn’t be, Kelly?” I rolled my eyes. “This guy must have his pick of beautiful island girls. What would he want with someone two thousand miles away?”

      “Well, from what he said, he doesn’t really have a lot of time to date. And besides, this is the information age. Distance is all relative….”

      “Uh-huh.” I went back to the chili. Two thousand miles was not a relative I wanted to visit. Sure, this guy was cute and sounded near perfect, but he was so far away. I thanked Kelly for her efforts, but I couldn’t entertain any African warrior fantasies. But he is fine. And the son of a former prime minister. Who has lofty ideals. But two thousand miles away? Was I really that desperate? Was he? And if he were some kind of royalty down there, how would he see me?

      “I’ll think about it,” I told Kelly, as I helped her clean up the kitchen.

      “Are you and Whitney heading out tonight?”

      “Nah, too snowy. Besides my back hurts. I think I’ll curl up with a book and some Häagen-Dazs.”

      She shot me a look that was kind yet reprimanding.

      “Okay. I’ll curl up with just a book.”

      “Sure you don’t want to watch a movie with us?”

      “Nah,” I said. I always felt like an intruder when the two of them got all cozy on the couch and I had to sit there with my eyes too embarrassed to do anything but stay glued to the screen.

      So later I lay on my bed reading and thinking while the wind howled outside. I wished I were somewhere warm. I wished I had a date. I wished I could have some Häagen-Dazs. Butter pecan. That was my only addiction. Besides shoes. And I couldn’t even indulge it just slightly because I have no self-control; I could inhale a pint of ice cream in five minutes flat. Yes, I’ve timed myself. It really isn’t my fault; it’s all genetic.

      I come from a family of drunks, and that is why I never touch alcohol. Never once did and never will. My father died of cirrhosis of the liver when I was thirteen. My brother, Gerard, has been through so many programs that I think he’s now well qualified to start his own drug and alcohol rehab business. My mother is a nondiagnosed alkie. She’s not dangerous, just pathetic. It may sound harsh, but you have to understand what I’ve been through with this woman. She was drunk at all my graduations, teacher conferences…I try to stay away from her as much as possible.

      When I think back on my childhood, I have to laugh sometimes. There was never a time in my childhood that there wasn’t a drunk adult in charge. First, my dad, who loved me and my mother, but hated Gerard because he didn’t believe that Gerard was his son. So he beat Gerard every chance he got but treated me like a little princess. The two of us went to the movies every Saturday afternoon, or if it snowed we would rent movies from Blockbuster and make popcorn and just spend the entire afternoon in front of the television. He dropped me off at the Boston Public Library when I told him I wanted to read more books. On Saturday nights, he gave me money and sent me to the liquor store on Seaver Street to get him his Tanqueray and Johnny Walker; the store owner always winked knowingly at me. Back then my mother would only have “a taste” on her way to prayer meeting or bible study. But then my father lost his job as a transportation supervisor at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and he began to drink his unemployment checks away. When those checks stopped coming, my mother found work as a secretary for a big law firm downtown. Then they started to fight. Loud and hard. And she started to have more than a taste.

      When my father got sick, it got worse. I was in private school on scholarship and I didn’t want to come home. I was too scared to see him wasting away. So I made excuses as to why I couldn’t come home from boarding school on weekends. I had extra studying to do. Or tennis practice. Or some other lie I could think up. Gerard called me an ungrateful bitch. But the sicker my dad got, the more time Gerard himself spent on the streets, getting into trouble. It was 1993, and there was a lot of trouble available at the time in Boston.

      I was forced to go home when the chaplain took me out of calculus, solemnly telling me that I needed to go home because of a family emergency. I knew what the emergency was, yet on the way home in the backseat of my English teacher’s Subaru I still prayed that it was anything but my father being dead.

      My mom and I were the only ones who were crying at the funeral. Gerard was sullen. My aunts, uncles, and cousins seemed more glum than anything else. My dad owed them money. And in my family that sometimes was more important than life itself. Even now, my mother would sooner ask me for money than she would ask me how I was doing.

      Once my father was in the ground, I put him out of my mind. I lost myself in books. I talked to no one for about a year, and everyone at my boarding school understood what I was going through because it was a touchy-feely kind of place. Then I came home to go to high school at Boston Latin. I felt as lonely there as I’d felt out in woodsy Concord. Everyone studied so hard and cared so much about what college they would go to. I only knew that I wanted to be far away from my mother. But when that time came I didn’t have much of a choice. I had picked UC Berkeley, but my mother had other plans. She said she couldn’t have me “all the way out there where she couldn’t keep an eye on me.” So I went to Simmons instead, three miles away from where I grew up.

      Had I been angry then? Yes. СКАЧАТЬ