Chapter 3
I’d been rejected by a vicious Frenchwoman and sniffed out like an Italian sausage by hungry tourists. How could it get any worse?
“Finn! Is that you?”
This is how it could get worse. My mother. She would need a post-game wrap-up of the worst first date since Adam and Eve got caught trespassing. She emerged from the living room, where she’d been fighting with our new air filter. She’d bought it because our house in Pelham was older than our house in Alexandria and she was convinced it was lined in asbestos.
“Finbar!” She began fluttering around me like a hummingbird after a Starbucks Doubleshot. “How was your date?”
“Oh.” I pulled the door shut behind me. “It was good.”
“Did Celine like dinner? You smell like something delicious; it must have been good.”
I smell like humiliation, I thought. As I took off my shoes, my mother followed me. I was accustomed to this. But, for once, she didn’t whip out her brush and pan to sweep up the invisible but deadly molecules of dirt.
“Dinner?” I said. “Well, she ordered a lot of food.”
My mother clapped her hands together rapturously. “That meant she liked it! And what about the book?”
“Uh…” I tried to avoid this question and escape her entirely by going up the stairs, whose banisters were now cloaked in toilet-seat covers. Look what happens when I leave this woman home alone on a Friday night.
My mother followed me shamelessly, up the stairs and into the first room, which Luke and I shared. We’d had separate rooms since the days we rocked out to Raffi songs, but here in Pelham, we shared a room. Luke was rarely here, between his football practices and all the friends he’d made in five freakin’ days. But he left a stench of sweat and overenthusiasm to keep me company, as well as enough cleat-dirt to AstroTurf our bedroom.
Since we were sharing a room, it was a lot harder to avoid Luke than it was in the days when I could refuse his invitation to a Swedish dented-beer-can orgy (or whatever weird event he’d concocted). Nowadays when my mother found a warm bottle of Killian’s Irish Red beer inside a loafer in our closet, I was there for her interrogation (“Finbar, is this yours?” “I don’t drink beer.” “Luke, is this yours?” “I think it came with the shoes. They’re, like, Irish leather.”); I was there when she placed the empty bottle on our dresser and filled it with fresh flowers and a little note she’d written about the dangers of alcohol poisoning. I was there when Luke frowned at the bottle and said, “Hey, I think I recognize that vase. Is that from Grandpa’s house?” And when he spit his gum into the note about alcohol poisoning. But where was Luke when I needed him?
“Did she like the book?” my mother prodded.
I thought for a second. “It certainly caused a scene,” I told her truthfully.
“Great!” My mother curled up on my bedspread and didn’t even pick off the lint balls. She was in her element. She loved hearing about love.
“When are you going to see her again?” she asked eagerly.
“I’m not really sure.”
“You didn’t make another date?”
“Nah.” I tried to sound casual. “I think we’re better as friends.”
When I turned around, my mother was giving me puppy dog eyes.
“Oh, Finbar,” she said. “I’m so sorry….”
I was glad when my father interrupted. Popping his receding hairline in the door, he said, “Hey, Finn! You gotta come downstairs and check out the new TV. This high-def is really something. You can see the sweat on the—”
“Paul!” My mother was offended.
“What?”
My father looked a little scared. We were all scared of my mother.
“You didn’t ask Finbar about his date!”
“Oh. Sorry,” my father said. “Finn, how was your date?”
“Paul! Don’t ask him about his date!” my mother interrupted. Then she scurried over to my father and lowered her voice, but not enough. “It didn’t go well.”
“Finbar,” my father preached suddenly, putting his hands on his hips and taking up the whole doorway. “You will never understand women.”
“Don’t tell him that!” My mother swatted his shoulder. “You understand me.”
“No I don’t,” my father said. “I just pissed you off!”
“Language, Paul.”
“But anyway, I didn’t mean Finbar won’t understand women,” my father explained. “I said ‘you.’ I meant a general ‘you.’ A collective ‘you.’ ‘You,’ as in, all the male—”
“Enough, Paul,” my mother snapped.
“Well, Finn, come downstairs if—”
“Not with the TV again!” My mother spoke for me. “He doesn’t want that kind of radiation—”
And my mother followed my father out of the room. Well, despite her best efforts, she’d actually made me feel a little bit better about losing Celine. Maybe I didn’t need another crazy girl in my life.
My mother had a long-term plan to comfort me and rebuild my self-esteem. She hid notes in my laundry and in my pillowcase that complimented me. For example, the first note I found pinned to my boxers told me: “Any girl would be lucky to have you.” Other notes reassured me about my physique and, disturbingly, my sex appeal. Whoever taught my mother the phrase stud muffin should be prosecuted.
My mother’s short-term plan was that on Saturday we would all get together for a family beach day. We would bask in the sun, swim, restore my sense of masculinity, and eat turkey sandwiches out of a cooler. The plan rapidly deflated. Luke bailed because he had a preseason Fordham football game that afternoon. He would be spending the morning at practice, leaving just Maud, Paul, and me.
My bedroom door swung open at 9 AM. Lifting myself on my sore right shoulder, I squinted across the room. Luke had already left. My mother appeared over me like a prison guard with orange juice.
“Wake up!” she said. “Beach day!”
When I finished the juice, my mother threw me in the car along with the collapsible umbrella, cooler of caffeine-free Diet Coke, and jug of SPF 89. On the way, my parents started arguing about my dad’s new toy—the GPS in the car. When I hear them argue about mundane things like telephone poles and the validity of the expiration date on a package of raisins (“They were always wrinkled, Maud!” “Not this wrinkled, Paul. They’re geriatric!”), I forget that they once fell in love. But they did. In fact, my mother claims it was love at first sight.
Picture it: Chesnut Hill, Massachussetts, 1978. My mother was a nerdy college freshman squinting through inch-thick lenses at the Boston College hockey game. She was giggling and pointing at the cute players with her two roommates. It was hard to determine attractiveness, my mother told me, considering the guys were in full masks, pads, jerseys, and gloves—and the girls had nosebleed seats. But somehow she fell in love with my father, a freshman scholarship left wing on the hockey team. Actually, she fell in love with the FRAME in white stick-on letters on the back of his jersey.
“I couldn’t see his face,” my mother would remember dreamily. “But I loved him. Right then. Through his mask and gloves and everything. Actually…”
(At this point she always looked around to see if my father was there.)
“Actually, to be honest, I thought he had about twenty pounds more muscle on him. The chest pads, you know.”
So my mother was in love with my father after that first freshman year hockey game. My father didn’t know my mother existed. In order to throw herself in his path, my mother became a sports reporter on the school newspaper. She thought they would develop a reporter-subject repartee that could build into love. My mother has kept copies of those college newspapers to this day; she interviewed my father for seven different articles freshman year. My father introduced himself anew each time because he never remembered they had met before.
Sophomore year my mother stepped up her efforts. She became a hockey team manager. At ninety-eight pounds, she lugged enormous duffel bags of skates and pads from Boston to Michigan, from Quebec to Toronto. She traveled with my father. She cleaned out his locker. She sat in a special front-row seat, right on the rink, to watch every game. There was an intimate Bengay incident, the circumstances of which I’ve never been entirely clear about. My father was polite, always thanked my mother for the towels and Gatorade bottles she handed him—but never called her by name.
In my mother’s sophomore yearbook, one of her friends wrote: “Mission for next year: MEET TALL PAUL.” “Tall Paul” was written in letters all skinny and tall like my dad. This bit of pre-parental lust disturbs me, but it also explains my tendency to fall and stay in love from a stalkerish distance.
But my mother almost gave up her stalking—er, love. Junior year, she switched from the sports beat to the college newspaper’s features section. She resigned as hockey team manager. She didn’t even go to hockey games anymore. That is, until the Eagles made the playoffs. Then my mother went to one game, the first playoff game. She sat in the third row, just to the left of the glass divider. My father hit a slap shot into her face.
There was a frantic time-out. Everyone sitting around my mother stood up and swarmed her. My father clawed his way over the wall and through the stands, and through the people, with his giant clumsy hockey gloves. He stomped up the rubber steps in his skates, all the while shedding ice in the aisles.
“Everyone stepped aside, and I saw her there, crying, blood pouring out of her nose,” my father says. This is how he tells the story. “And I loved her right then. I loved her. And I’d never seen the girl before in my life!”
* * *
The beach at Glen Island was a ten-minute drive from our house, and on the Long Island Sound, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean. There weren’t big waves or anything, but it was nice, with buoys and boats and the whole deal. After hauling my dad’s ergonomic beach chair across fifty yards of sand, I was starting to sweat and really looking forward to going for a swim. I also wanted to get in the water and out of it before people my age arrived. My skin got pretty transparent when I was wet. I’d rather wear a white t-shirt than go shirtless, although I looked similar either way.
“Finbar, make sure you use the sunblock,” my mom said.
“Dad has it.”
My dad’s just as pale as I am, but due to advancing age he’s a few steps closer to carcinoma-ville. So I let him attack the SPF 89 first. I took his ergonomic lounge chair (wow, that was comfortable. Not really worth the haul across the sand, but…) and gazed out at the Long Island Sound, thinking all these deep thoughts about water and rebirth and losing my virginity. Or, rather, not losing my virginity. Not being within fifteen miles of losing my virginity. Not being in the same planetary revolution as… okay, you get it.
Suddenly a vision came to me. Me, all wet, a skintight suit. Sounds creepy, I know. But I was picturing myself surfing. Surfer! I could be a surfer! I liked the beach. And I didn’t mind exercise. It was just team sports I hated. They’re so aggressive, and I’m not an aggressive person. Not even at the dinner table. I always get the last chicken breast.
Two girls my age appeared on the beach and quickly confirmed my love of the surfing lifestyle. They were free of ergonomic lawn chairs; they were skipping along barefoot with towels. They were wearing bikinis that were as small as their sunglasses were large. That is, mind-blowingly small. It was unbelievable to me. That they could walk around like that. Their cupped butt cheeks exposed. Their tan thighs. Their round breasts. Yes, I definitely like surfing—or at least the uniforms. I could scout girls like this all day. I could be a beach bum. I could be a lady-killer. I could be…
“Red as a stoplight, Finbar!” my father observed over his blue oxide-covered nose. My mother came over. She was wearing a hat the size of the Rose Bowl. As you can tell, my parents are not embarrassing at all.
“Oh, no!” she gasped. She covered her eyes with both hands. “Oh, Finbar, I can’t even look at you!”
Panicking, I looked down at my shoulder. I’d gotten a six-inch bruise in a rainbow of nasty colors from the green-pepper incident. But I was still wearing my shirt, so it wasn’t the bruise that was freaking out my mom.
“How did he get sunburned that fast?” my father asked. “We’ve only been here twenty minutes.”
“I don’t want to look!” my mother shrieked. Then she peeked out from between her fingers and gasped again.
“Don’t look at his face if it gets you upset,” my dad said.
What was I, the Phantom of the Opera?
“What is it?” I asked. “My face is kinda itchy.”
“And your arms,” my dad said.
“They don’t itch,” I said.
“They will,” he said ominously.
I looked down. Red spheres were erupting along my forearms, like planets with rings. I looked like a pepperoni pizza, only less delicious. In fact, not delicious at all. I was disgusting. There were some large red patches, an inch in diameter, and some that were clusters of bumps. And my father was right. They began to itch.
“Maybe something bit him,” my mother said. “Maybe he got bitten by a New York bug!”
“A what?” My father was puzzled.
“He should definitely go to the doctor,” my mom said, purposefully focusing her eyes on my father and looking away from my freakish self. “All right, Paul, you get the stuff. And I’ll take Fin—”
She steeled herself to see me and then removed her hands from her eyes.
“AHHHH!” she screamed. My eardrums hurt. And my arms hurt too. And my face. And my legs, below the knee. I was breaking out everywhere, red and stinging and itchy.
“Mom, if you want me to go to the doctor, I’ll go by myself,” I said. “I’m not twelve years old.”
“You can take the car, Finn,” my dad said.
“He can’t drive like that!” my mother said.
That didn’t even make sense.
“I’ll take the train,” I said.
“Do you even know where the doctor’s office is?” my mother asked.
“As a matter of fact, I do!” I exploded at her. “It’s the place where you dragged me the other day to get eight vaccinations and a SARS mask!”
I tried to stomp off, but it’s really hard to do that in flip-flops.
The doctor’s verdict was: “You’re allergic to the sun.”
What? How was that possible? The sun is a natural thing. It’s good for you. That’s like being allergic to water, or air. Or something really important, like Pop-Tarts. I spent twenty minutes at the beach thus far this summer and I’m a monster? “Solar urticaria,” the doctor continued. “That’s what it’s called. The sun made you break out in hives.”
Well, I definitely wasn’t going to be a surfer anymore. And I guess I wasn’t going to school anymore either. Or church. Ooh, this would get me out of church! That was a good thing. But being locked up in my room like the Hunchback of Notre Dame? Not so good.
“Has the sun ever done this to you before?” he asked.
Of course it hadn’t. I’m not exactly outdoorsy, but I’d been surviving summer afternoons outdoors since childhood. For every two hours I spent ogling the children’s librarian, I would serve an hour at the Alexandria community pool working on my farmer’s tan.
“Let’s chalk it up to your change of environment,” the doctor said. “I hope it will be temporary. I would say avoid being in the sun for more than a half hour for the next few months. Okay?”
A half hour?
“I’ll write you a prescription for an antihistamine in the meantime,” he said. “And have the nurses come in to bandage you up. Gotta protect that skin!”
Afterward, I rode the train down to the Bronx to meet my parents at Luke’s football game, all the while looking like an escapee from a leper colony. The doctor had given me a pill that cooled off my skin and I didn’t feel as itchy anymore. But while I wasn’t quite as red anymore (more like a peach than a tomato), the nurses had given me those wraparound sunglasses only considered stylish in nursing homes.
The nurses had also wrapped my forearms in bandages, from my wrists all the way up to the hems of my t-shirt sleeves, so from the neck down, I resembled the Invisible Man. But I was not invisible, even slouched in a corner seat by the train toilet. Toddlers kept toddling by and pointing me out. Stay-at-home moms gave me sad and sympathetic glances but pulled their children away from me in case I was contagious. A man in a suit assumed I was blind and threw two dollar bills into my lap. After this incident, I removed the sunglasses.
Hey, at least no one was sitting next to me. Until the Mount Vernon East stop, when a blond girl about my age got on the train. I hate blondes. I seriously do. It’s not that I think blondes are too good for me. But they think they’re too good for me. Every blonde I have ever met has dismissed me immediately. From the Playboy blondes to the hipster blondes with short hair and glasses. Blondes always think you’re trying to hit on them.
I didn’t want to hit on this blond girl. I didn’t want to look at her. I didn’t want her anywhere near me. But she came down the row, passed three different empty seats, and then chose to sit next to me. She looked me over a little, which made me feel strange. I’m not usually the type of dude that girls cruise like an overpriced shoe.
At first, the blonde didn’t say anything. As the train lurched south toward Fordham, she had her head buried in this enormous book. But she kept sneaking glances at the Ace bandages up and down my arms, the splotches of rash on the backs of my hands, the reflection of the oily ointment on my skin. The girl asked me, “What happened to your arms?”
Mind your own business.
“Too much sun,” I grunted. Wow, being pissed off really made me into a caveman.
“I see!” the girl said. This chick was downright jolly, despite my bandages and rash. Apparently she took great pleasure in the pains and misfortunes of others.
Then she asked, “Have you read this book?”
I looked at her. She tilted the cover of the book toward me. There was a creepy stone dungeon on it, as well as bats and a man in a cape with claws and fangs. It was called Nocturnal Terror.
“Nocturnal Terror?” I said out loud. “No, I haven’t read it.”
And I don’t feel like talking, I wanted to add. Even about books.
“Oh, it’s amazing!” the blond girl gushed. Then she began telling me the whole story… all three hundred pages of it. She started with the ancestors of the main characters, and everything that had happened to them all their lives, and then the second generation, and everything that had happened to those characters, and their cousins, and their hairdresser’s brother’s neighbor’s dogs… and so on, and so forth. I can tell you the background story of all these people (and pets) in six words: they all got killed by vampires.
“And so, the great-great-granddaughter thinks that she can change the vampire,” the girl continued. She used so many hand gestures when she talked that I was scared she would smack me in the face.
“So she shows up at the castle at night. And there’s this, like, attraction, there’s this chemistry between them. Like a spark, you know? So they get closer and closer, and they kiss. They’re kissing, and she thinks he has all these human emotions. But then he goes for her neck… and he BITES her! He sucks all the blood out of her body—”
“Hmmm,” I cut her off moodily. “Yeah, that’s interesting. Maybe you shouldn’t tell me any more, though. You shouldn’t spoil the ending for me.”
“Right!” Blondie said enthusiastically. “You should definitely read it. I think you’d really like it.”
I made a noncommittal noise and turned away to look out the window.
She only gave me one minute of silence. Then Blondie leaned in close to me and whispered in my ear.
She said, “I know what you are.”
I jerked my head around and almost hit her in the face.
“What?”
“I know what you are,” Blondie repeated. To make herself clear, she gestured to my arms and my bandages. What? She knew I was allergic to the sun?
Then she pointed to my face, which was not covered in a rash. And to my creepy husky eyes. She knew what I was? What was I? She knew I was the loser in a genetic lottery? A future skin cancer patient?
“A vampire,” she hissed.
Oh, Jesus. Blondes not only hate me, but they are crazy.
She pointed to the cover of her book. There was the vampire, a white old man with creepy fungus-looking fingernails and a face as wrinkled as an expired raisin. He was wearing a super-metrosexual cape. He had left the dead body of a woman in the corner of his creeptastic dungeon. He was chillin’ with some flesh-colored bats who were probably his only friends.
How dare this girl? I am not old! I am not creepy! I am not a murderer! Most importantly, I would never wear a cape. Some kids I competed against in high school quiz bowl used to wear capes instead of varsity jackets, and they were complete weirdos. Furthermore, I don’t sit around in some cold dungeon sucking blood and talking to bats, plotting to lure women down there. I have a brother and a family and a life! Okay, so I still have to plot to lure women. But I don’t drink their blood!
Suddenly, the frustration of a week of accumulated insults caught up with me big time. I hated this blond stranger, hated her with a passion. I hated her blond hair. I hated her dumb creepy book. I hated the assumptions she made about other people based on their unusual medical conditions and their pale skin. I hated her dumb shoes and her dumb clothes. I hated her stupid necklace that said “best friends” on it and was shaped like half a heart. I hated whomever had the other half, because they were a dumbass for being this girl’s friend.
“You know what?” I stormed at her, standing up violently (then falling into the seat in front of me because the train lurched. But I maintained my anger throughout). “If I’m so creepy, if I’m so scary, if I’m a vampire,” I said pretty loudly, “then why did you sit next to me?”
“No,” the girl interrupted. “You don’t understand….”
“I do understand,” I said. I squeezed past her, getting awkwardly stuck on her knees, but shoving my way through. Then I stood in the aisle of the train.
“I understand that you’re obnoxious,” I told her. “And that you could have sat next to that possibly homeless man.”
The possibly homeless man across the aisle looked up at me.
“Or that guy who’s awkwardly checking out that girl’s boobs,” I continued.
That guy, sitting in the third seat of the train car, quickly looked back to his New York Times, which was upside down. That girl, across the aisle from him, buttoned her jacket.
“But you didn’t!” I told Blondie. “You sat next to me.”
“You don’t understand,” the blond girl pleaded. “I really like vamp—”
“I’m leaving!” I told her. “This is my stop!”
I stood there, holding on to the pole, trying to not look back at the blond girl. Or at that guy who I’d called out for looking down that girl’s shirt. Or at that businessman who was pissed that I wasn’t blind—no way was I giving back those two dollars. And then I realized that storming out of the train was becoming kind of anticlimactic because there were about three minutes of agonizing silence left before the train finally stopped and the doors opened at Fordham.