Other Words for Love Read online

  “So how is everything?” she said. “I heard that Evelyn’s having problems.”

  And I heard that you took a crap on the table when you were squeezing out your fourth baby, I thought. Then I looked at the other end of the pool, where Kieran was splashing around with his friends, whose mothers were talking and glancing at me. They all knew about Evelyn’s first meltdown and were probably dying for another one. The phone lines must have been sizzling with discussion of poor Evelyn Cagney and her pathetic relapse.

  “No,” I said. “That’s not true. Evelyn’s fine.”

  “But I heard she’s still in the hospital.”

  “Only because she had some complications with the delivery,” I said, which might have been the truth.

  She nodded and changed the subject. “You know, I can’t believe you’re Evelyn’s sister. You don’t look anything alike.”

  Insult. For sure. Whether it was directed at me or Evelyn, I didn’t know. She could have meant that my face wasn’t as pretty as my sister’s—that my top lip didn’t have a Cupid’s bow and there wasn’t a natural arch in my eyebrows. Or she could have meant that Evelyn couldn’t possibly fit into size-four shorts.

  “Well,” she said. “It was nice talking to you. I really have to go and pee.”

  I really have to go and pee. I hated when grown women said that. They all did, though. All my sister’s so-called friends who were waiting for Kieran to leave so they could rip Evelyn to shreds. They were no different from those hyenas on PBS nature shows—standing in a circle, tearing a carcass apart. I could almost see fresh blood dripping from their chins. And I thought it was sad that some women were still as mean as they’d been in high school. This was their new clique, the housewives who just loved it when one of them couldn’t measure up and got cut from the team.

  Evelyn called from the hospital that night to say she was coming home in two days. I wanted everything to be perfect, so I stayed up late even though Patrick told me not to. He didn’t want me to knock myself out, but I did anyway. I scrubbed the bathtub and cleaned out the hall closet. It was filled with cobwebs and shredded wrapping paper that had been there since Evelyn’s first baby shower.

  The next morning, Patrick refused to let me help him paint the nursery. “Just take it easy,” he said. “You’ve been killing yourself.”

  I didn’t take it easy. He painted and listened to the radio while I changed the contact paper inside the kitchen cabinets and rearranged the dishes. I was almost finished when Summer rang the doorbell. I answered it in my cutoffs and a shabby shirt. I was completely disheveled, but of course Summer wasn’t. She’d taken the subway to Queens after an appointment at a ritzy hair salon in Manhattan and she looked fantastic.

  “You look pretty,” I made myself say as we walked into the kitchen.

  She thanked me and stood on her tiptoes to peer into a cabinet. “It’s so neat around here. I bet Evelyn will be happy when she gets back.”

  “I did a lot of work,” I said. “I hope she’ll like it.”

  “Well, she ought to. She doesn’t know how lucky she is to have a sister like you.”

  I smiled. “You can watch TV if you want. I’ll be finished with the cabinets soon.”

  She settled into the couch in the living room and turned on General Hospital, but she didn’t watch it for long. Ten minutes later I found her standing in Shane’s nursery, leaning against his crib, twisting a lock of newly highlighted hair around her finger.

  She was talking to Patrick. Flirting with him, the way she did with every attractive man who crossed her path. She seemed to think she had to do this to find out if she really was beautiful, or if she was still that mousy girl with the lazy eye and the crooked nose.

  I was used to her flirting, but not when it came to Patrick. She rarely saw him, and when she did, Evelyn was always around. Now Evelyn was in the hospital and Summer was wearing a short skirt. She kept sliding her foot out of her sandal and rubbing her heel against her calf. She reminded me of a hooker I’d once seen on Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan.

  Patrick was painting the closet door. Painting and talking but not flirting. Then he noticed that the knob was loose and he turned toward me. “Go get my toolbox,” he said.

  “ ‘Go get my toolbox,’ ” Summer repeated. “Don’t you know how to say please?”

  He looked at her, his hair dripping over his forehead, his sleeves rolled to his shoulders. “This is my house. I don’t say please to nobody here.”

  “Well,” she said. “Somebody needs to teach you some manners, young man.”

  Unbelievable. Shameless. I saw her staring at Patrick’s arms and it made me sick. She was so nervy to flirt with my sister’s husband—in my sister’s house—right in front of me and Evelyn’s baby! At least I tried to hide my stares. But her comment made Patrick laugh, which annoyed me even more. I stood still until he reminded me about the toolbox, and I rushed to get it from the garage because I didn’t want them to be alone for long.

  “Can I touch your tools?” Summer asked after I came back and Patrick was rummaging through the box in search of a screwdriver. “I’ll bet you’ve got some really big tools.”

  He nodded toward the door. “I’m busy, kid. Go play.”

  She smirked. “Will you play with me, Patrick? Or should I play with myself?”

  The radio was still on. A screeching guitar, pounding drums, Eric Clapton. Patrick shook his head and went back to the doorknob, and Summer followed me to the living room. We sat on the couch and I gave her the cold shoulder.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I spoke in a harsh whisper. “He’s my sister’s husband. Leave him alone.”

  She sank into the couch as if I’d hurt her feelings. “I didn’t mean anything by it, Ari. It was nothing.”

  Later on, after Summer left and Patrick and I were cleaning up from dinner, I found out that he didn’t think it was nothing. “Your friend is wicked bold for a high school girl,” he said as I organized dirty glasses in the dishwasher.

  She was wicked bold. He didn’t approve of her. I loved that. “Do you think she’s pretty?” I asked, staring down at the glasses, bracing myself for his answer.

  “She’s fake,” he said. “Bleached hair and shit. And don’t you get influenced.”

  I looked up. “What are you talking about?”

  He dried his hands on a towel. He had big hands. You know what they say about men with big hands, Summer had told me repeatedly.

  “She’s not a nice girl. But you are. So stay that way.”

  “She’s a nice girl,” I said automatically, because I was so used to defending her. She always gave people the wrong idea. A girl in her neighborhood even called her a dumb blonde to her face. Summer and I laughed at that because we knew better. Tina and Jeff had her tested once and found out that she had a very high IQ.

  Patrick raised an eyebrow. “You know what I mean, Ari.”

  I knew what he meant. I nodded and he left the towel hanging from the sink, all wrinkled and lopsided. I straightened it when he went into the living room to watch the Red Sox with Kieran, thinking that he loved my cooking and he said I was a nice girl, and if he wasn’t my brother-in-law I would have kissed him. I was sure he wouldn’t say that I opened my mouth too wide.

  Later that night, I went to the basement with a basket of laundry. The basement was unfinished, with a concrete floor and two tiny windows. A washer and dryer stood against a wall and Patrick’s barbells were lined up across the room. He was there now, on his back, bench-pressing God only knew how many pounds as I dropped stained bibs into the washing machine. I did everything slowly because I didn’t want to go back upstairs. It was nicer here, with the smell of fabric softener and the sound of Patrick grunting and groaning.

  I was filling a plastic cap with Tide when he finished. He stood up, took off his shirt, and used it to wipe his sweaty face. He threw it at me as he walked toward the stairs.

  “Toss that in,” he said.
r />   “I’m not your maid,” I answered, even though I didn’t mind being his maid.

  When he was gone, I looked at the shirt. It was navy blue with FDNY printed across the front in white letters, and it smelled of him—of beer and charcoal and cologne. The smell made me want to keep it, so I smuggled it into my overnight bag before tucking Kieran into bed. I adjusted his pillows and he mumbled something that I couldn’t understand.

  “What was that, Kieran?” I asked, sitting on his New England Patriots sheets. Brainwashed, I thought, hearing Dad’s voice. Blasphemy.

  “You’re better than Mommy,” he said with a sleepy smile, and I felt good for a second. He probably noticed that I was a more talented cook than Evelyn and that I never yelled at him the way she did. You have no idea what you’re talking about, she’d said last year when I asked her not to raise her voice because it could hurt Kieran’s self-esteem. All you know is what you see on Phil Donahue.

  But the smug feeling quickly changed into guilt. “I’m not better than your mommy,” I said. “I’m just different. So don’t say that to her because it would make her sad. Understand?”

  He nodded and I was worried that he didn’t understand. But he fell asleep before I could be sure.

  The next morning, Kieran went with Patrick to pick up Evelyn at the hospital. I hung a new set of curtains on the kitchen window while dressed in my cutoffs and a sleeveless blouse that I knotted under my chest, and I didn’t have time to change before everybody came back.

  “You could’ve asked me,” Evelyn said, about the curtains and the cabinets and everything else.

  We were standing in the kitchen with Patrick and she didn’t look good—there was a bumpy rash on her chin and her hair had frizzed in the humidity on the way home.

  “Sorry,” I said, disappointed that she wasn’t grateful. “I was just trying to help.”

  She scratched her chin. “There’s a difference between helping and taking over. This is my house, not yours.”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “Ari,” Patrick said in a warning tone that shut me up and annoyed me. I hated when he took Evelyn’s side over mine, but of course he did—she was his wife, she’d just given birth to his baby. I assumed she was rightfully exhausted and grumpy, so I offered to take Kieran to the park.

  When we came back, Patrick was gone. He was at a landscaping job in Manhasset with one of his firefighter friends. Kieran went to the backyard to play on his Slip ’n Slide, while Evelyn stood by the stove boiling noodles for a tuna casserole.

  “Need some help?” I asked, lingering in the doorway.

  “What are you wearing?” she said.

  I was still in my knotted-up shirt and my shorts, and she stared at my bare stomach and legs like I was a stripper on a pole. She seemed to forget about the skimpy things she used to wear when she could fit into skimpy things. But she made me so uncomfortable that I untied the shirt and let it fall over my hips.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just …”

  “What are you trying to do?” she asked, stirring noodles with a wooden spoon as steam rose into her face. “Get Patrick’s attention?”

  She turned away and laughed to herself, as if I was incapable of getting Patrick’s attention. Or any man’s attention. It made me so angry and embarrassed that I couldn’t keep my mouth shut anymore.

  “I don’t want Patrick’s attention,” I lied.

  Evelyn laughed again. She kept her back to me as she lifted the pot from the stove and dumped noodles into a strainer in the sink. “Yeah, sure. You used to climb on his lap whenever you got the chance.”

  Why did she have to bring that up? And it wasn’t whenever I got the chance, it was just once, and I was only ten years old. Patrick had been dating Evelyn then, and he’d been sitting in our living room while she and Mom cooked dinner and I read a comic book on the floor.

  He was on the couch watching TV, and I kept glancing over my shoulder at his light hair and dark eyes. He didn’t notice me, but I wanted him to. I had such a crush on him, even back then. So I jumped up on his knee with the comic book as if my only intention was to read him a particularly funny page, and Evelyn got aggravated after she came out of the kitchen. She told me to get lost, to leave Patrick alone, but he said he didn’t mind, he had three younger sisters in Boston and they always sat on his lap. Then she charged into the kitchen and returned with Mom, who also told me to get lost. Don’t hang on him, Ariadne, she’d said. You’re much too old for that.

  I didn’t want to get into this now, so I set the table while Evelyn diced an onion that made my eyes water. She didn’t say a word until I was finished, when I sat down with a magazine and she stuck the casserole into the oven.

  “Mom is picking you up right after dinner … isn’t she, Ari?”

  She just couldn’t wait. She acted like I was nothing but a pesky mosquito buzzing around her head. After a few seconds, she suggested that I go and watch TV. She was trying to cook for her family, if I didn’t mind.

  Her family. And what exactly was I? Who had taken care of her kids while she was gone? Was she ever planning to thank me? Oh, and by the way, Evelyn, those friends of yours at the pool aren’t really your friends. I defended you to that dingbat with the braces on her teeth.

  But I didn’t want to tangle with Evelyn—she was too dangerous when she was like this—so I kept quiet in the living room until dinner, when Patrick came home. I sat across from Kieran, who spit a mouthful of casserole into his napkin and griped that the noodles were too soggy.

  Evelyn went to the refrigerator. “What do you want? I’ll make a sandwich.”

  “No,” Patrick said. He was sunburned and his eyes were bloodshot. “Kieran can eat what’s given to him or he can go to bed hungry tonight.”

  She slammed a jar of mustard on the counter. “Just because you were raised that ignorant way doesn’t mean I’m doing the same thing to my son.”

  A vein throbbed in Patrick’s neck and I knew why. He was tired, his muscles were sore from mowing lawns, and things had been a lot more pleasant around here before Evelyn came back.

  She gave Kieran his sandwich and it kept him quiet until dessert was served. It was another no-bake cheesecake, and according to the box, it was supposed to be delicious and delightful. Kieran didn’t agree and he complained again.

  “This is disgusting,” he said, singing the last word. “Disgusting, disgusting, disgusting …”

  Evelyn stared at him from her seat, and I wished Kieran would cut it out. The cake was fine; he was acting like a brat. Maybe I had spoiled him when she was away. Maybe if I’d raised my voice once in a while, he wouldn’t be saying that same word over and over and Evelyn wouldn’t have tears in her eyes.

  Patrick must have been thinking the same thing. His voice was stern when he told Kieran to eat his dessert and stop being a pest, but Kieran didn’t stop. He smashed his fork against the cake, turned it over, and left a mess on his plate.

  “This is gross,” he said. “How about a Twinkie?”

  Patrick made a fist. “How about this?”

  I knew Patrick would never touch him, but Kieran didn’t, and he was stunned. Then he sat and sulked until he decided to hurt someone.

  “What’s on your face, Mommy?” he asked.

  She lifted her hand to her chin. “It’s eczema, Kieran. Just a rash.”

  “It’s ugly,” he said. “Ugly like you.”

  Evelyn’s skin reddened and Patrick got furious. He ordered Kieran to his room, it didn’t matter that another Red Sox game was on tonight, and was he planning to play on that Slip ’n Slide thing after dinner? Forget about it. It was going back into the garage until next summer.

  Kieran slammed his bedroom door upstairs and the noise woke Shane. I heard him crying and Evelyn joined him. Tears spilled from her eyes, striping her cheeks with mascara. Patrick tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t listen, so he followed her to the counter, where she turned her back, cried into her hands, and shoved him away.


  “Go fuck your mother,” she said.

  Patrick just sighed because he knew what was going on. Her hormones were a mess and she couldn’t be blamed for anything that came out of her mouth. Then he reached out to touch her but she wasn’t done yet. She shoved him again, narrowing her eyes into an evil squint.

  “That’s what your mother likes, right? Pushing out eight kids, getting knocked up at forty-four. Stupid Irish immigrant. Doesn’t believe in birth control. She can’t keep her scrawny legs shut.”

  Evelyn’s hands were on her hips. Her body shook and this time she didn’t shove Patrick away. He put his arms around her, ran his fingers through her hair, and I just sat there.

  I wasn’t angry with my sister anymore. Now she didn’t seem mean and dangerous—she just seemed young and overwhelmed. I’m sorry, Evelyn, I thought, listening to her cry into Patrick’s shirt. I’m sorry that you had a hard labor and you didn’t get a girl. And I know I shouldn’t feel the way I do about your husband, but I just can’t help it.

  four

  Right before school started, Summer stepped on a rusty nail in her front yard. The cut required seven stitches and a tetanus shot. She could get around on crutches but she didn’t want to. She refused to be seen in public because she had a bandage on her foot and she couldn’t fit into her Gucci shoes.

  She was excused from school for a week, which was bad luck for me because Summer was the only person I knew at Hollister. Before her accident, she’d assured me that she would show me around and sit with me at lunch. Now I had to go to a new school all alone.

  “It’ll be okay,” Summer said over the phone.

  It was the night before the first day of school. I leaned against my kitchen counter, wrapping the phone cord around my wrist, watching it make white crinkles in my skin. “I don’t think so, Summer. I don’t even want to go.”

  “Of course you do. It’s one of the best schools in the city, and it’ll help get you into Parsons.”