Belong to Me: A Novel Read online

  “Well, I see that at least one of us has decided that smart is the thing that he is,” said Mr. Tripp, which made Dev hate him. Mr. Tripp looked down at his roll book. “Aha. Deveroux Tremain.”

  And then Mr. Tripp had done a shocking thing. In front of the whole class, he’d said, “Oh, I was warned about you, Mr. Tremain. We all had a little sit-down about you before school started.” Mr. Tripp had begun walking around the room, addressing the other students in the class. “Mr. Tremain’s mommy and his elementary school principal decided to come on out and tell us all how special Mr. Tremain is, about how he deserves special treatment.” He’d circled the room and come back to stand in front of Dev again. “Now maybe I’m not as smart as you are, Dev. I didn’t reread the Constitution on my summer vacation, and no doubt you did.” What Dev saw in the teacher’s eyes was pure hatred. “But last time I checked, this was a democracy. Which means no one, not even Mr. Einstein here, I mean Mr. Tremain, deserves special treatment.”

  Naturally, that had been it for Dev, the end. He knew Mr. Tripp had been way out of control, that saying what he’d said in front of everyone was not only evil, but maybe also against the rules, some kind of violation of Dev’s right to academic privacy maybe. Dev knew that if he’d reported Mr. Tripp, the man might have gotten into some kind of hot water. But Dev felt defeated in a way he’d never felt in his life; no matter what they did to Mr. Tripp—and Dev didn’t think they’d actually fire him—the hour in that classroom had doomed Dev.

  So instead of telling on Mr. Tripp, Dev had retreated, folded in on himself every weekday from eight thirty to two thirty. At home, he felt pretty normal, and he’d finish his homework in no time and then would read and talk to Lake about what he’d read. Sometimes, in the evenings or on weekends, he’d go to a playground nearby and play pickup basketball with older guys who didn’t care about anything except that Dev was tall and had a knack for catching even the wackiest, from-out-of-nowhere passes.

  At midterm, without ever opening his mouth in class except to answer questions directed specifically at him, Dev had earned all As, an achievement in which he took no pride. It bugged him, in a way, how easy it had been. Even Mr. Tripp had given Dev an A, probably because even Mr. Tripp knew he’d crossed a line that first day. Probably Mr. Tripp didn’t want to get into any official trouble, and grades were official.

  But after Dev got back from winter break, he found he just couldn’t do it anymore. All of it—memorizing capitals in social studies, doing algebra problems he could’ve solved years before, reading a story in his reading book and answering the accompanying questions—felt pointless, and the pointlessness started to make Dev feel a weird, dull anger accompanied by a weird, lonely ache in his chest, and he stopped doing his homework. He read his own books in class, doodled during tests, and became such a bad student that even his teachers noticed.

  It took them a while, though, so that it wasn’t until the school year was nearly over that Dev found himself spending an excruciating hour in the office of the school psychologist, Leslie Winkle, who told him she’d been observing him without his knowledge in order to assess his needs. In fact, Dev had known she’d been watching him, mainly because she’d sat on the side of the room during several of his classes, staring at him and taking notes, not that he’d cared or altered his behavior. But in her office, he’d said, “You mean, you were spying on me?”

  And she had turned red and said, “I was not spying on you. I was observing you without your knowledge.”

  “Which is totally different from spying.”

  Then the psychologist had asked, “Do you think people spy on you a lot, Deveroux?”

  So when Leslie Winkle called Lake into her office to tell her that, in Leslie Winkle’s opinion, Deveroux had attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and needed to start eating Ritalin for breakfast, lunch, and dinner or whatever, Dev was only surprised that she hadn’t said paranoid schizophrenia and Haldol. Surprised and relieved. But the biggest relief was at what he saw in his mother’s face and heard in her voice. Lake was furious. Lake was taking charge.

  That afternoon, after spending a couple of hours online, Lake called a child psychologist all the way in Berkeley who was so fancy and expensive that Dev couldn’t get an appointment for almost two months. Then, when they finally went, they had to spend the night in a motel because the testing went over two days. Dev worried about the expense, but he enjoyed the tests, which weren’t much like tests at all. More like games. Dev sat in the doctor’s beautiful, elegant office and played games and thought about his mother waiting outside in her jeans with her wild hair and hopeful, worried face. He gave the tests his all, his A game. Because of his disastrous school year, and especially because he had kept from Lake just how disastrous it was, he figured he owed her. More than that, he wanted to make her happy.

  But when the test results finally came, they hadn’t made Dev’s mother happy, Dev could tell that much. Lake had read the letter and the fat sheaf of papers, and then, ignoring Dev’s questions, she’d gone into her bedroom, shut the door, and called the Berkeley psychologist.

  When she came out of her room, she was wearing what Dev immediately recognized as her post-roller-coaster-ride face, a scared-eyes smile: part “God, I hated that,” part “I’m just fine, Devvy.” Until that moment, Dev hadn’t known his mother had a post-roller-coaster-ride face, or he hadn’t realized he’d known. And until that moment, Dev, who was crazy about roller coasters, hadn’t realized that his mother was afraid of them, maybe even hated them. What he figured out right then was that the only reason his mother rode roller coasters at all was to be with him. He felt like touching her arm or hugging her or something, but he didn’t. Instead, he gave her a half grin.

  “So, what’d they say?” he’d asked. “What’s my major malfunction?”

  “Nothing, baby,” said Lake. She kept smiling, but stared right into his eyes as though she were trying to find something in them. “You’re fine.” She patted his cheek. Then she’d paused and said, “But I’ll be damned if you’re going back to that school.”

  Then she’d made dinner and they’d eaten, and she’d told Dev a funny story about a customer at the restaurant where she worked who’d accidentally spilled a martini down his date’s blouse, how the date had fished out the two olives and stuck them in his ears before she walked out.

  But that night, when she thought Dev was asleep, Lake had come into his room, crying softly, and touched his hair, and said, “I’m so sorry, Devvy. I’m so sorry.”

  And a couple of weeks later, without telling Dev what he’d gotten on the test, even though anyone would say he had a right to know, without telling Dev much of anything at all, Dev’s mother had sublet their apartment, loaded the Honda, stuck Dev’s bike on top of it, and sped off for some little black dot on the other side of the country.

  In the backseat, Dev stopped tapping his fingers, closed the book, and looked at his mother, at her fierce, determined eyes and set jaw and at her hands gripping the steering wheel, and wondered if the little black dot was ready. Dev thought that if the black dot could see what was heading straight for it at seventy-one miles an hour, it might inch toward the coast, slip off the map altogether, and let itself drift out to sea.

  FOUR

  Cornelia

  Chicken Soup for the Soul. You’ve heard of these books, am I right? We’ve all heard of them. But I wonder if you’re aware of just how many Chicken Soup books exist on the planet. No offense, but I doubt it. I doubt it because in the time it would take you to come up with a number, the number would have become obsolete. Even as you read this, in some quiet, fecund place, another Chicken Soup book is being born.

  I’ve never actually opened one of these books, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the supposition underlying the series: that souls are highly specific, that they come in a multiplicity of shapes and permutations, that one cannot assume that what heals the NASCAR soul would do diddly for the horse lover’s soul. />
  If there’s ever a volume titled Chicken Soup for Cornelia Brown’s Soul—and clearly, it’s only a matter of time—what will appear on page one won’t be an inspirational story but a full-color, inspirational—ideally, scratch-and-sniff—photo of a plate of pasta. Preferably heaping and preferably spaghetti alla puttanesca, the smellier, fierier, and fishier the better.

  So it wasn’t surprising that a month after the Piper-Armand dinner-party debacle, I found myself in a little Italian bistro tucking away spaghetti alla puttanesca as though my life depended on it and inhaling the scent of garlic, anchovies, olives, and capers as though it were rare Alpine air. But how I came to be in that particular bistro was surprising, was enough to make anyone believe in, at the very most, guardian angels, and at the very least, pure, sweet, dumb luck.

  Finding a sublime plate of spaghetti alla puttanesca in New York or Philadelphia is as easy as falling off a log; in the suburban town I now called home, however, not so easy.

  There were plenty of decent restaurants around—a good-sized handful anyway—and even a few fine ones with wine lists as long as your arm, and therein lay the problem. The restaurants were a little too fine and decent because, truth be told, spaghetti alla puttanesca is a wee bit indecent, a rather lowly dish. Life-alteringly, soul-healingly scrumptious, but lowly. In fact, for reasons best left obscure, “puttanesca” derives from an Italian word for “whore.”

  So, after days of searching in vain for a plate of it, and despite the fact that I find comfort food far more comforting when it’s prepared by someone else, I ended up in a cavernous grocery store, a recipe ripped from Gourmet clutched in my hot little hand. I’ll say this for the suburban grocery store: it may be blindingly lit, it may make you feel like a mouse in a maze, but it is loaded with stuff. Before long, I’d found everything I needed, and was just tossing a bottle of capers into my cart when I heard a voice say, “Puttanesca sauce!”

  I whirled around to find a tall woman with startling blue eyes and a wondrous, untamed wilderness of dark hair. She waved her hand over my cart and smiled at me. There was the tiniest gap between her two front teeth. “Puttanesca. Am I right?” One black eyebrow shot up in a steep, almost-Gothic arch and she gave me the once-over. “The dish of Neapolitan prostitutes?”

  “Watch it, lady,” I said, huffily, “I’m a respectable married woman.” Then I smiled. I liked this person. I liked her even more when she tilted her head back, sending her curls avalanching, and laughed a deep, throaty laugh.

  “You laugh exactly like Garbo,” I told her.

  “But there,” she sighed, “the resemblance ends.” She pointed her chin in the direction of my cart. “So come on, was I right or was I right?”

  I handed her the page from Gourmet. “Comfort food,” I said. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

  “What the doctor ordered for you, maybe.” She wrinkled her nose. “I drown my sorrows in something less garlicky. Like Häagen-Dazs.”

  I wrinkled my nose back and shook my head. “Not so original of you.”

  “I know it. A chick-flick cliché.” She handed the recipe back to me. Her hands were remarkable: long, strong looking, and broad across the palms. A potter, I thought, or a musician, and I was picturing her at the cello, hair electric, eyes blazing, when she said, “The chef at the restaurant where I work makes a mean puttanesca.”

  “You’re kidding,” I gasped. “Which restaurant is that?”

  “Vincente’s.” The woman’s voice chilled, just a tad. “I’m a waitress.” Her use of the word “waitress” instead of “server” seemed deliberate. Since, despite my fairly high-grade educational background, I’d spent years managing a coffee bar, I recognized the defiance in her gaze. “I am not a pastry chef. I do not own the place. I am a waitress,” said the gaze. “Got something to say about it?”

  The only thing I had to say was “Vincente’s? But I stopped in and asked at Vincente’s. No puttanesca.”

  “Ah,” she said, relaxing, “but that’s the menu for customers. Every afternoon, between lunch and dinner, Vinny makes a meal for the staff. The puttanesca is on that menu.”

  “Oh.” It was a forlorn “Oh” for sure, but at least I didn’t do what I felt like doing, which was bleat like a lost lamb.

  “Look,” the woman said, smiling, “I work the lunch shift. Weekdays. Tell me when you’re coming and I’ll pull some strings.”

  “I could just—hug you,” I told her, and it was true. In five glorious minutes, this woman had promised me my pasta and laughed out loud at my joke. I could have hugged her and the kid stocking shelves behind her and the guy at the fish counter and then danced a jig afterward.

  “I’m Cornelia,” I said. I held out my hand. It looked undersized and flimsy compared to hers, like a little, breakable starfish, but she didn’t just shake it. She took it between both of hers and gave it a squeeze. It was the friendliest thing to happen to me in weeks.

  “Hi, Cornelia,” she said, “I’m Lake.”

  Two days later, I sat avidly absorbing an ungodly huge plate of spaghetti alla puttanesca and talking about The Women with Lake, a combination that wasn’t just soothing my soul but was elevating it. In fact, if both the eating and the conversation hadn’t been abruptly and tragically derailed by the entrance of the very last person in the world I wanted to see, I probably would have been lifted bodily into heaven, fork in hand, lips gleaming with olive oil.

  We hadn’t started out talking about The Women. We’d started out talking about the sorrows I was drowning or, to be more accurate, smothering under some three pounds of carbohydrates, and while the shift from my suburban life to the cattiest catfight film ever made might seem a natural one, it wasn’t really, because while that film isn’t exactly a flattering depiction of female friendship, it’s about female friendship and funny. And my life in suburbia was friendless and dull. At that point, having Joan Crawford snatch my husband or Rosalind Russell stab me in the back was looking pretty good; at least, they snatched and stabbed with aplomb.

  On a recent rainy Monday, I’d tried imagining the last month and a half of my life as a feature film, a game I play, secretly, fairly often, and that I’m convinced other people play, secretly, too. (I’m so convinced of this that I consider imagining your life as a feature film to simply be part of human nature. If I’m wrong, don’t tell me; I do not want to know, and I wouldn’t believe you anyway.)

  The imaginary film’s title was either Cornelia in the Wilderness or Babes in Lawnland, neither of which are fabulous titles, but both of which were several thousand times more intriguing than the film itself turned out to be. Because in imagining the imaginary film, I came to realize that—apart from the time I spent with Teo, which wasn’t much, given his new job—the plotline of my recent life was completely flat. The rising action refused to rise; except for an occasional hiccup, it just lay there, bored into prostration.

  The closest thing to a climax I could come up with was the time Piper had stopped by to say she was on her way to the local farmers’ market and wondered if I wanted her to pick up some mums for us. Despite the fact that the offer had been accompanied by her gesturing wincingly toward two empty concrete planters (the previous owners had left them and we’d allowed them to remain empty for over a month) as though they were two steaming piles of elephant dung, I’d been touched by the offer. Touched enough to put aside my dignity and, apparently, every shred of good sense I’d ever possessed and say, “Would you like some company?”

  Needless to say, I’d regretted those words as soon as they were out of my mouth, maybe regretted having said them almost as much as Piper regretted having heard them. But this line, followed by the regret-filled silence, is not the scene’s dramatic high point. The dramatic high point came a minute later, after Piper had eked out a reluctant “Why not?” (to which there were too many answers to count), after I’d gone inside and pounded my head against the wall three times on the way to get my handbag, and as I was preparing to open the passen
ger door of her mammoth SUV.

  Climactic Scene’s Dramatic High Point:

  PIPER (sounding utterly unembarrassed): Oh, this is so embarrassing.

  CORNELIA: What’s wrong?

  PIPER: Would you mind sitting in the backseat?

  CORNELIA: Oh. Sure. I mean, no. I wouldn’t mind. I guess. Why?

  PIPER: It’s just that I can never remember how to disable the air bag. How embarrassing is that? My own car.

  CORNELIA: Disable the air bag?

  PIPER: Air bags are a hazard to children twelve and under, and, well, plenty of twelve-year-olds are bigger than you are, wouldn’t you say?

  CORNELIA: I don’t know if I would say that. I never have said it. I don’t think anyone’s ever said it.

  PIPER: No?

  CORNELIA: No.

  PIPER (perkily): Well, safety first!

  See? As far as dramatic high points go, not so high, and, as far as climactic scenes go, not so climactic. As you know, when you’re imagining the film version of your life, you have to stick to bare, unembellished fact. That’s the rule. And without embellishment, my facts made for pretty slim pickings. One paltry, isolated humiliation after another does not a movie make.

  It probably doesn’t even make for particularly scintillating conversation, although Lake was as engaged a listener as anyone could ask for. We were able to talk because I’d arrived at Vincente’s at 11:10 A.M. on the dot, ten minutes after they opened (standing panting at the door when they came to unlock it would have been too pathetic) and was their sole customer for a good half hour. Vinny, who bore a startling resemblance to Oliver Hardy (minus the Heil, Hitler mustache), had pulled out the chair across from me and guided Lake into it, saying, “Sit, darling, don’t let this lovely little girl eat alone,” with such kindness that I forgave him the “little” on the spot.