The Guy Not Taken Read Free

briskly toward the back door. Nicki spared me a murderous look. The cordless telephone on top of Mom’s towel started ringing. The sound cut through the sticky air, silencing Jon’s laughter and Nicki’s yells. My sister stiffened. Jon turned away, and Mom ducked back under the water, gliding down the length of the pool without a breath.
    When the ringing finally stopped, my sister stomped back across the gravel and snatched up the telephone. She floppedonto her chair, punched in some numbers, and said, “Yes, in Avon, Connecticut, a listing for Friendly’s, please?”
    •   •   •
    This was the summer of 1988. I was nineteen years old, thick of thigh and sunburned of face, home from my freshman year at college. My parents, who’d still been, at least nominally, together in the fall, had both dropped me off on campus in September, but when the school year ended, I took trains back home—the little train from campus to the Princeton station, a bigger train from the station to New York City, then an Amtrak train up past New Rochelle and New Haven to Hartford. My sister met me on the sidewalk and drove me home to Somersby, and our big yellow house with the black shutters on Wickett Way.
    Nicki had gotten her license that spring, but she still looked like a little kid pretending to drive as she sat behind the wheel of our mother’s green station wagon. “Brace yourself,” she said, as she swung the car, tires squealing, down our street and into our driveway. The paint on the house was peeling, the lawn was ragged and overgrown, dotted with dandelions and Queen Anne’s Lace. Someone—Nicki, I suspected—had backed into our mailbox. The wooden post supporting it was splintered and listing to the left, looking like at any minute it would just give up and collapse onto the street.
    Things inside weren’t much better. By my first night home, I’d realized that my brother had basically stopped speaking; my sister seemed to be a perpetual ten seconds away from punching someone; and my mother spent more of her time under water than on land. When she wasn’t doing laps, she was teaching summer school algebra to kids who’d flunked it the first time around, and ignoring the telephone.
    I mowed my way through June and July, reading the entire oeuvre of Judith Krantz in my spare time in the air-conditionedlibrary, scrunched into a carrel along the back wall, trying to avoid my current neighbors and former classmates. When Jon got invited to a dance at the country club, I used a library book to figure out how to tie a tie. When the water heater broke, I cashed in the State of Israel bonds from my bat mitzvah and gave my mother the money to repair it. I’d been expecting an outsize emotional outpouring of gratitude, something like the scene in Little Women where Jo sells her hair to pay for her mother’s trip to her sick husband’s bedside. Instead, my mother had just slipped the money under her towel, nodded her thanks, and done a shallow dive back into the deep end.
    She swam, and seemed not to notice that the azure-blue tiles were falling off the edge of the pool and the water was an odd shade of green now that we could no longer afford the maintenance service and couldn’t get the chemicals quite right ourselves. She’d do laps until eight or sometimes nine o’clock at night, after the sun had set and the thick night air came alive with fireflies. Once a flock of bats had exploded up from the field behind the house and fluttered over the water, flapping their wings and squeaking. She’d churn out lap after lap, mile after mile, as the telephone shrilled and then subsided, and the three of us sat on our lounge chairs, bundled up in damp towels, watching her.
    •   •   •
    Nicki shocked all of us by making, and keeping, an appointment for an interview at Friendly’s, where she was hired on the spot as a scoop girl. It was, she assured us, ideal for her. She’d be working in front of freezers, to keep her