Letting Loose Read online

  “Ummm…mmm…mmm…” Oh, this chili was so good.

  “But, here’s what we brought you,” Kelly said turning to me.

  I looked at her hands and save for the chili-covered ladle could see no gift.

  “James, she’s ready for her, uh, souvenir!”

  James came out of their room, looking his tanned and rangy self, his long brown hair wet from the shower. I sometimes wished he were my brother, too.

  “Okay, dude,” he said. “Now keep an open mind.” James called everyone dude, even his mother.

  They both wanted to be professors, and I could see it in Kelly, but James was such a stoner…. At least he was rich, so if he failed at this it wouldn’t be the end of the party for him. He was from California. His parents were both in the movie business. Kelly, on the other hand, came from more humble beginnings in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and had been a high school teacher just like me. It was how we ended up getting along so well and being roommates for the past five years. James entered the picture later; I tolerated him at first for her sake, but he managed to grow on me after a while.

  Anyway, I agreed to keep an open mind.

  “We were hanging out with this dude, and Kelly thought you might like to talk to him…. Smart dude. I think you guys might have a lot in common.”

  I looked from James to Kelly and then back again. The last time they set me up it had been with a guy from their program at BC. The guy was the most boring person I’d ever met, and coming from me that says a lot. I mean, I may struggle with how to spell Ludacris, but at least I KNOW who Ludacris is. His name was actually Tom. No kidding. Tom. Tall, skinny, uptight, nerdy Tom. I took one look at him and thought, “This kid has never been with a sister before and I’m not going to initiate him.” The date ended after I told him that I had a headache and needed to go home and lie down. He looked so relieved my feelings were hurt.

  So who was this smart dude whom I would have something in common with?

  James handed me the picture. It was a picture of them—James, shirtless, with Kelly, camouflage tank top and khaki shorts, and a big, tall brother (my favorite type) wearing a T-shirt that said MOREHOUSE, baggy cargo shorts, and Jesus sandals. Okay. This dude was no Tom.

  “Isn’t he cute?” Kelly sang.

  “Ummm…”

  “We showed him your picture, too, and he sent you his e-mail addy,” James said, smiling.

  I sighed. This could go quite badly or quite well….

  “You gave him my e-mail address?” Did they cross a boundary? Did we have boundaries? Had I spelled out my boundaries to my roommates? And in this case, would that count? Because this guy was F-I-N-E.

  “Your work e-mail…at the school,” Kelly said, searching my face for signs of “boundaries crossed anger.”

  I 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. But now that I’m an adult, or at least now that I think I’m an adult, I’ve mellowed out some. I’m not as intense anymore. I certainly don’t spend most of my time listening to A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, fancying myself some type of street-smart bohemian black nerd. I’m over all that. I don’t hate my mother, Grace Wilson, anymore. Sometimes I feel sorry for her. We’ve had our fights, our blowouts, even a few shoving matches. But I’m staying on the sidelines as she crashes and burns. My new motto is like a doctor’s: Do no harm. I will not give her any money to drink herself into oblivion. But I will continue to buy her groceries every week because she is my mother and that’s just the way it is. And I will let her call me and berate me every week because that’s just the way it is, too. But I don’t internalize that stuff anymore. I’m so over it. I just wish I could have ice cream.

  Chapter 4

  On Saturday, the snow had mostly melted. The temperature struck up to forty-five degrees during the day, leaving gray slushy puddles everywhere. I spent the day doing what I love to do most on Saturdays: spin class, despite my aching back. Then an almond decaf latte at Starbucks with a croissant. Then I ran errands and made sure that I got myself something nice for going to spin class. This week it was a pair of chandelier earrings from Macy’s. I walked by the MAC counter, keeping my eyes straight ahead. Oh, the longing for more makeup. There was no bad mood that a Viva Glam lipstick could not cure. No fat day that a Blunt Matte blush couldn’t lighten. With MAC all things were possible.

  Later, Kelly and James had gone out to meet some of their other hemp-loving friends in Cambridge, and I was glad to have the apartment all to myself. I planned to cook a healthy dinner, maybe spinach with chicken and marinara sauce. No pasta. God, I missed pasta. And bread. And pizza. And Snickers bars. But as my former Weight Watchers leader once asked me: “Do you love chocolate as much as you would love being thin?” That was a terribly cruel question to ask someone who had never been thin, I thought. But each time I was tempted, I rephrased the question: “Amelia, would you love a Snickers bar as much as you would love to be thin?” It wasn’t always an effective deterrent because depending on my mood the answer could be a toss-up.

  But it was only four o’clock, at least two more hours till dinner. I needed a diversion. I went online.

  My little virus-infested Dell laptop is so slow sometimes I think it’s intentionally giving me enough time to really consider whether I want to spend my minutes in that vast and empty time waster called the Internet. The only upside to going online was that if I could somehow lose myself in fantasy on the Neiman Marcus Web site, then that would be one less hour I would spend obsessing about whether I was truly hungry or whether I was seeking emotional comfort in food. I almost fell asleep as the computer crawled its way over to my Yahoo mail.

  As I waited for my in-box to load, my cell phone rang. “Hi, Ma.”

  “Amelia, where you been?” She sounded exasperated.

  “I was out running errands all morning, Ma.” What was her problem!

  “I tried to catch you…I need some…I’m broke…”

  She’s not broke. Her disability check (I forget which disability it’s for) came this week. My guess is she wants attention or she just wants to hassle me. Find out what I’m doing tonight.

  “I don’t get paid for another week.” But what did that matter? If she truly needed money, I’d give it to her. But she doesn’t. The house is all paid off; she’s got a closetful of clothes and a refrigerator full of food. I’ve done my duty.

  “Amelia, don’t do this to me, okay? I just need a twenty. Something to buy the girls a beer tonight.”

  “Ma! I’m not giving you money to go out drinking. How many times do I have to…”

  My in-box loaded and the first unread e-mail message was from a [email protected]. My heart skipped a beat. What a time to be having a fight with her.

  “You’re not GIVING me anything, Amelia!” she snapped. “I’m your mother, don’t you forget that. If it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t be where you are today.”

  “That doesn’t work on me anymore, Grace,” I said.

  “You know what? You know what? You probably just gonna stay home and stuff your face tonight and it’s making you sick that I’m having fun! You’re an ungrateful little witch,” she snarled. “Ungrateful!” She slammed down the phone. I gently pressed the end button on my cell phone. Funny how my family always resorts to calling me ungrateful any time I don’t give them what they want. Moving on. I had an e-mail to read.

  Hello, Amelia, or is it Amy? I hope James and Kelly told you about me by now else you must think I’m some kind of lunatic. Anyway, I was kind of intrigued by what I heard about you. As you may have heard, I’m a former math teacher and I’m truly committed to improving the education system in my country and I’m always interested in talking to other educators. Drop me a line if you can. If not, please look me up if you ever find yourself at 15 25N 61 20W.

  I didn’t do that well in geography! Thank God for Google. Oh, those coordinates would point to Dominica.

  Funny how corny his e-mail came off, I thought. As if he’d written and rewritten it, and then gotten so frustrated that he’d just latched on to the last thing he could come up with. I could tell because that was the M.O. for most of my students. Speaking of which…I had a Steinbeck quiz to prepare for Monday, and if those little urchins weren’t prepared they’d feel my wrath…

  Should I write him back? And if so, what should I say? How should I sound? What did I want him to think of me? Well, I was a smart, independent, curvy…Oh, help me somebody. I need to just be interesting. That’s all there was to it. So, since he used to be a teacher, I’d have to come up with some math joke or some math line to reel hi
m in. That sort of thing worked in Nora Ephron movies all the time.

  Then the phone rang, breaking my concentration.

  It was Whitney. “Girl, what you doing?” She almost always had a conspiratorial tone to her voice, and that was for a good reason. She was always up to something or about to be up to something.

  I’ve known Whitney since Latin. She was the smartest girl in the class, also the nerdiest, and she made me feel good about myself—being the fattest. While I cried about my mother’s meanness, she complained about being placed with yet another greedy foster family that was only “in it for the money.” While I complained about being fat, Whitney blocked me out by talking to herself about math equations and wishing for cuter glasses. MIT had been a good place for her until she fell for that Korean guy who later killed himself. I don’t think he killed himself because of her; kids kill themselves at MIT all the time. But she sure thought that. That had brought a breakdown and a short stay at McLean Hospital, but she was all over it now. So she says.

  “Oh, you can probably help me,” I said. If anyone would know math nerd jokes, Whitney would.

  When I told her about Ramses, er Drew, she sighed.

  “Listen, don’t screw with this bull, okay? The guy’s probably just trying to get his green card off you.”

  “Whitney, he’s not trying to get his green card! He lived in the U.S. for ten years before he went back to his country.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. He’s probably some drug dealer or something. What are you going to do? Have a long distance relationship with him?”

  It was my turn to sigh. “You sound like my mother. Listen, I’m just making a new friend, is that wrong?”

  “It’s not wrong. I just don’t see the point. Those roommates of yours are turning you into freaking Bridget Jones.”

  “Gimme some credit, Whitney. I’m home. I’m bored. Can’t I indulge my little tropical fantasy?”

  “Go ahead and indulge. Just don’t forget to join the rest of us in reality when you’re done. So what’re you doing tonight?”