Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac(48)

“You never said.”

“Well, she’s not technically related to me, so…” All of a sudden, it seemed too difficult to explain. Where would I start? From the typewriter case in Moscow Oblast? It would be a very long story. “She’s almost four,” I said. “Roughly the same number of years I lost, you know? Like, if you could take all that time and make a person, it would be her.”

“But you can’t do that.” James shook his head. “My brother,” he began before shaking his head again. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Please, say it.”

“Sasha lived eighteen years on this earth, and all that time didn’t add up to a damn thing. What that time is to me now, is a hole. I…I wish he’d never been born or that I’d never been born. I can’t talk about this.”

He kissed me then and I suppose I was glad for the distraction.

By the time we had gotten on the Metro North Railroad back to Tarrytown, it was pretty late. Having gotten a ride from Alice that morning, we had to call James’s mom, Raina, to pick us up at the train station.

Raina smelled like cigarettes and perfume, and she had this way of looking like she hadn’t seen James in years. “Is everything okay? What happened to the friend who drove you? I didn’t know you were going to be so late,” she said. “I thought the play was a matinee.” Even though she looked on the young side, she was all mom when it came to James.

“It’s fine, Ma. It’s…nothing,” James said. “Ma, this is my friend, Naomi. You remember her? She was in that play I worked on.”

She appraised me, and then we shook hands.

“Raina,” she said.

“Nice to meet you.”

She nodded. “I like your hair.”

Raina dropped me off at my house first. James walked me to my door.

“Sorry about my mom,” he said. “She’s really protective.”

I said something about that just being the way parents were.

“No, it’s not like that,” James said. “Raina’s protective because I’ve given her reason to be. I’ve spent most of my teen years a complete and utter disaster. She’s already lost so much. I guess she’s always on the lookout for signs that I might turn bad again.” His voice made a strange tremor over the word bad, and it made me want to kiss him, so I did.

I loved kissing him. I loved the way his mouth felt on mine. His lips were supple, but always a little chapped. The cigarettes (and the peppermints he ate to cover them up) made him taste bittersweet. But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking.

The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas always passes in about a minute. Before I knew it, James was leaving for Los Angeles to visit his father again, and Dad and I went to Pleasantville to spend the holidays with Rosa Rivera and her twin daughters, Frida and Georgia (aka Freddie and George), who she referred to as “the girls.”

Although they were identical twins, Freddie and George did not look at all alike. George competed on her university’s bodybuilding team, and she was packed with muscles. Freddie was petite, like Rosa. Neither was shy about asking a lot of questions, as I would find out seated between them at dinner.

“Mom said you lost your memory?” George began.

I nodded.

“Our dad had Alzheimer’s, did Mom say?” Freddie asked.

“I heard,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“It sucked,” George said. “It turned him into a total *.”

“George!” Rosa Rivera yelled across the table.

“What? It did.”

“But that’s not what she has,” Freddie said. “Mom said she only forgot the last four years?”

“Well, those years suck anyway,” Freddie said. “Do you remember, George?”

“Man, we had those, like, mullets in seventh grade. What was Mom thinking?”

Freddie shook her head. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be known as the mullet twins?”

“I wish I could forget it,” George said.

I laughed. “By the way, have we met before?” I asked.

“Yeah, we didn’t really like you.”

“We pretty much thought you were a typical snotty teenager.”

“Kind of a jerk.”

“Georgia and Frida Rivera!” Rosa Rivera yelled across the table. “That is not polite.”

“What? We did. She’s not offended.”

I wasn’t. I appreciated their honesty.

“You seem okay now, though.”

For Christmas, Rosa Rivera gave me a pair of fur-lined gloves, and my dad gave me a memoir about climbing Everest. My mother sent me things to help with my photography class: monographs by Cindy Sherman, Rineke Dijkstra, and Diane Arbus, and a new camera, which I left in the box. It was lucky my project with James had already turned into a bust, otherwise that shiny new camera might have found itself taking a trip down the stairs. James bought me two goldfish in a heart-shaped glass bowl with a castle in it. We named them Sid and Nancy. They both died before break was over.

8

I WAS IN JAMES’S ROOM, LYING NEXT TO HIM IN bed. At Tom Purdue, there’s a one-week reading period during January before exams where classes don’t meet and you just review. I was studying physics; James was studying me. “I don’t like to feel so crazy about someone,” he said. “I don’t like to feel like my happiness is so tied up in another person.”