Matchmaking for Beginners
Page 20

And then one day, after we’d done nothing more than routine kissing for months and months, he said, “I think we should take our friendship to the next level.”
I was only moderately cute back then. He was cute, too, in a kind of understated way: he had dark hair and nice eyes and a slight mustache that clearly needed years to grow into something better, and I didn’t understand why he wasn’t embarrassed enough at its scraggliness to shave it off until it could be magnificent. But that’s the way Jeremy was. He shrugged off imperfections. He was kind of too normal, was the truth of it. Besides that inadequate mustache, he had a standard-issue nonathlete boy’s body—a little too plump—and hands that sweated when I held them, oily hair, and pimples on his cheeks. Not that I was so dazzling in the looks department, you understand. I had blonde hair that had a definite greenish cast to it from the chlorine in the pool, and I wore both a dental retainer and glasses. I thought my knees were too sharp and bony, my feet too big.
All around us, our classmates were fucking like rabbits, and it struck me as crazy that here we were, sitting in his car one afternoon in the school parking lot, and we were talking about sex like you might talk about whether to go to Taco Bell or try something dramatic, like Hardee’s. Should we, or should we not? I was leaning against the window, facing him with my legs curled under me.
He presented the idea of sex calmly and scientifically, like it would be an experiment. Nothing more than that.
“Okaaaaay,” I said. “I’ll do it, but you have to go buy the condoms.”
His face went pale.
“Or you could borrow some from somebody, I suppose,” I said.
He stared out through the windshield. It was drizzling, the windows were fogging up, and soon we wouldn’t be able to see to drive. “I don’t know,” he said. “I sort of wanted to do it right now.”
“Sex? You wanted to have sex right this minute? In your car? Are you crazy?”
“People do have sex in cars.”
“I know, but usually they do it in the dark. So all the other humans can’t see. Like, the police get involved if they see you having sex in a car.”
He twisted in his seat, drummed his fingers on the gearshift knob. “Anyway, I didn’t say it had to be in the car. We could go someplace, maybe.”
“Well, we’re not going to my house. My mother is in and out of there all day long.”
“We could go to my house. My mom is at work and my dad is back in the hospital.”
“Do your parents have any condoms?”
“What?” He stared at me. “Ewww. I can’t believe you said that.”
“Well . . . if no one has any, then you’re going to have to buy them. I am not going to have sex with you without a condom.”
“I know, I know.”
I looked at him and felt a stirring of interest. “Do you even know how to use a condom?”
“Yeah. In sex ed, they showed us with a banana.” I’d been absent that day so he pantomimed pulling something over an imaginary banana, and that made me crack up.
“I don’t know,” I said to him. “What if we did it, and it didn’t work out all right, and then we weren’t even friends anymore?”
“I’ve been thinking about this, and that’s one of my arguments for why we should do it. We’re good friends, we’ll always be good friends, and if it goes badly—like if we don’t like it or something—we can both laugh about it. That’s what we’re so good at—laughing at things.”
“Don’t you think we should be like crazy in love so we can get through it?”
“Get through it!” he said. “Do you think it’s going to be something bad? I think it’s going to be awesome, and then we’ll have it all out of the way so that when we end up with other people someday, we’ll already know what to do. For once in our lives we’ll be ahead of the curve.”
So we drove to the CVS, and he went in—I refused to go with him—and then he came right back out and said it was too horrifying. He knew people in there. One of his mom’s friends was buying shampoo right that minute, in fact.
So we didn’t have sex that day, and I remember feeling a bit disappointed when he took me home. I mean, if it had really been important to him, couldn’t he have worked up even an iota of courage?
So—and now we hit the tragic part for Jeremy and me—two weeks later he sauntered over to me at my locker and said out of the side of his mouth, “So, schweetheart, I got the goods. I ordered us some condoms by mail order, you see, and they came yesterday and somehow we’ve got ten boxes of the stuff. Enough for the rest of our lives.” He pretended to smoke an imaginary cigar.
The thing was, it was two whole weeks later, which is forever when you’re seventeen, and everything had changed. I had, against all odds, somehow been plucked from high school obscurity by a guy who was so out of my league that it was pathetic. Brad Whitaker, a guy that Jeremy and I had spent much of the semester making fun of, had asked me out! Never mind that I had had zero action before this point, now I was on the verge of achieving something approaching coolness. And, as I carefully explained to Jeremy, I was in love.
Jeremy was devastated, which I felt terrible about. We had an awful scene, and he said I was making a humongous mistake, that I was a traitor to the cause of irony and sarcasm and normal human intelligence, and by the way, good luck dating a guy who didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Also—he couldn’t resist pointing this out—he’d bought a lifetime’s supply of condoms for me, and now what was he supposed to do with them? Sell them to Brad Whitaker?
Sure, I shot back. Why don’t you do that?
I was in that dopey state of first love, first passion, and so I was immune to Jeremy’s pain. I just wanted to get away from him. I was on the brink of one of life’s great moments, and why did he have to make me feel so guilty?
Later that week, I lost my virginity in Brad Whitaker’s bedroom while his parents were at work, to the soundtrack of the Backstreet Boys. I remember feeling slightly confused by the sweaty intensity of sex, all the writhing and the pushing, the way it felt more like an athletic event than what I’d been picturing from the passionate kisses in movies I’d seen. Jeremy and I could never have pulled off something that was this dead serious. We would have laughed ourselves sick.
Still, I was proud of myself for not complaining about the pain and the disappointment and also not minding the fact that, overall, Brad Whitaker didn’t really care anything about me. I just did what you do in those times of your life when you’re trying to make yourself be something you’re not: I stepped up my game, tried harder, shortened my skirts, wore my hair in a side ponytail (you’ll have to trust me that this was übercool), and took to lowering my eyes and holding my mouth in such a way that I looked charmingly bored.
It didn’t really do any good. Brad turned out to be a heartbreaking narcissistic toothache of a guy, and he forgot that guys are supposed to take their girlfriends to the prom, and he took some other girl instead. I got to be the Wronged Woman and everybody felt sorry for me, and my mother said, “You should have stuck with that Jeremy Sanders. Now there was a nice guy!”
So, great. Just great. He’s moved back home.
Cheers.
TWELVE
MARNIE
A week later, I’m at Natalie’s house painting a mural on a wall in the nursery, having decided that a scene with a budding dogwood tree, a rolling green hill, and a garden of purple tulips would be just the thing to welcome little Amelia Jane to the world, once she makes up her mind to get here, that is.
Natalie has been in the kitchen reorganizing her spice cabinet, but when I look up, I see her leaning against the doorway of the baby’s room, holding on to her belly and squinting at the wall. I do not think she really likes this mural. Her idea was to paint the baby’s room gray. Gray! Can you even imagine what that might do to a newborn’s psyche?
“Would you do me a huge, huge, huge favor?” she says.
“Drive you to the hospital because you’re now in labor?”
“Stop it,” she says. “Believe it or not, I have to go to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned, and I honestly don’t fit behind the wheel anymore. So will you drive me?”