The List of Things to Be Grateful For 1 Oscar licking my hand to wake me up.
2 The type of sleep that comes with anticipation. Reckless dreams and lots of rolling back and forth all night and waking up so early the rest of the house is still asleep. Little baby snores from the next room.
3 Wide hips. My wide hips. The swing of them. The undeniability of them. The way they fill out my ugly jean shorts.
fourteen
I learn very quickly that Bernardo looks as good on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as he does on the West Side. He buys me my very own winter scarf to wear in the summer at a stand on St. Mark’s that is probably the only place in the entire city selling knit scarves in June.
“What if I get sweaty?” I say when he wraps it around me and declares it sexy.
“Sweaty is sexy,” he says.
We eat french fries from the Belgian fry place and I introduce him to garlic mayo, so if he wasn’t falling for me before, he definitely is by the time we’ve finished a whole cone of the things.
“Next time we’ll go to Brooklyn,” he says.
“Next time?” I flutter my eyelashes, but I’m not as uncertain as I’m pretending. When something’s solid, you don’t have to worry about it being a liquid. We are a solid. Sometime in the last few hours, walking around the city, or maybe texting late last night, we became one.
“Do you like guacamole?” he says. It sounds dangerous in my ear, in a way I never thought avocados could be.
“To a kind of scary degree,” I say. “Guac and cheese are pretty much all I need.”
“You’re in luck. My father makes the world’s greatest guacamole.”
“You want me in your home? Me? You’ve seen me, right? Mothers don’t love me.” I could change out of my cutoffs for a meet-the-parents moment. I could get real shoes instead of flip-flops and borrow a blouse from Karissa instead of a T-shirt, I guess. It must be serious if I’m willing to give up T-shirts. But I won’t give up my pink hair.
Our pink hair.
Or the scarf, I guess.
“I want it all,” he says. “And she’ll like you because I like you.”
“You don’t know me,” I say. It’s more Arizona’s voice than my own coming out. It feels like he knows me and that I know him. It feels like all that time spent staring at each other in the park counted as getting to know each other.
But Arizona and I got coffee this morning in the park, and she kept shaking her head when I talked about Bernardo, like I was wrong about my own feelings.
“You can’t like someone all at once,” she said before adding another packet of sugar to her iced latte. She was wearing a straw hat that would look elegant on a model but looked out of place in the park.
“It’s not all at once,” I said. “A lot can happen in a short amount of time, though. And a lot can happen without speaking. And a lot can happen while you’re kissing.”
“You sound like Dad,” Arizona said, and I almost canceled on Bernardo because nothing would be worse and I am so used to trusting whatever Arizona says. I think she expected me to cancel on him too.
“We going to go to that place with the cute crappy cheap dresses in SoHo?” she said. They sell flimsy things in trendy patterns with lots of wood and metal embellishments at the chest and waist. Arizona thinks they’ll have sundresses, but they won’t. Not the kind she likes now.
“I told you I’m going out with Bernardo,” I said.
“And I said I think you’re moving too fast and being a little too girlfriend-y with him,” she said. She might as well have been wagging her finger at me.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I guess I disagree?” Arizona and I must have disagreed a thousand times before she went to college. More, I’m sure. But now we disagree about things that matter. Like we are fighting about the shape of the earth. Whether it goes around and around or reaches an end point that we could all fall off of.
Arizona thinks we could fall off some cliff at the end of the earth, and I know that’s not the shape of things.
Bernardo and I are outside a thrift store in the East Village, and I pull him in.
“Tell me what you like in here,” I say. “That will help me understand you in a way nothing else could.”
Bernardo picks out a fringed leather vest. “This,” he says. “What does this tell you about me?”
“You don’t want to know,” I say.
I try on a hat with a veil, and Bernardo pulls down a retro airline messenger bag situation. He finds a red studded belt and buckles it around his waist. It looks fucking good on him, and I tell him so.
I find an enormous cashmere coat and wrap myself in it. It’s a ridiculous thing to wear in June, but I’m learning from Bernardo that that’s a stupid reason to resist something. Seasons and time don’t mean anything.
With the coat and hat on and the music in the thrift store playing too loud, I ask him to tell me about his ex-girlfriend.
“Casey?”