I found out later-not from Claire-that her father had taken a position at his company’s Paris office. They had rented a three-bedroom apartment in someplace called Montmartre. I wanted to ask Claire about it, or wish her well, or tell her good riddance, but so many people always surrounded her, all the way up to the very end, that I never had the chance.
The excited chatter that Claire was returning from France had started a few weeks ago. Claire hadn’t told anyone the news herself, but someone’s father worked with Mr Ryan and had found out the details. Claire would be attending Peninsula again, but she would be in tenth grade with me, not eleventh. People nudged Devon Reyes, Claire’s old boyfriend, saying that Claire had probably learned a few tricks, living in a country that was so obsessed and open about sex. And me? I didn’t have any reaction to the news, and no one asked me for comment. The time we were friends felt as far away as my birth.
But it surprised me that Mr and Mrs Ryan were getting a divorce-Claire had never seemed worried about her parents’ marriage. After Mrs Ryan and Claire left our apartment, I followed my father into the kitchen. ‘Perhaps Mrs Ryan just needs a private vacation,’ I called out to him, as if we’d been dissecting the Ryans’ divorce for hours. ‘You know, some time to herself. And then, after a while, she’ll move back into the Pineapple Street apartment, and everything will be fine. It’s probably what all couples need, I bet.’
My father looked at me for a long time. His eyes were watery. ‘Maybe,’ he said, eating from a bag of pretzels, letting loose salt fall to the floor. He tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a sniffle.
2
The night after Claire came over, my father declared we had nothing to eat in the house, which wasn’t an exaggeration. We hadn’t gotten the hang of shopping for ourselves yet. But now that we were on our own, we could go out to dinner wherever we wanted, which usually meant Grimaldi’s.
Grimaldi’s was this pizza place down under the Brooklyn Bridge. The pizza was so good that people lined up on the streets for a table. My mother hated eating there because the tablecloths were checkerboard, there were too many children, and they only served pizza for dinner. She hated that all the tables had wobbly legs, and that the wine specials were on a little card-stand next to a pot of fake flowers. As my father, brother, and I piled into the little dining room, I tried to see Grimaldi’s imperfections through her eyes; I scoffed at the place’s paltry selection of sodas, offering Pepsi instead of Coke. I sneered at the paper napkins. That awkward autumn when Claire was pretending she was still my friend, she came here with my family. Just as we were sitting down in a booth, Claire spotted some of the girls from the bus across the room, sans parents, sharing a basket of mozzarella sticks. Claire waved at them enthusiastically, but I shrank down in my seat. ‘Why aren’t you waving?’ my mother hissed. I shrugged; Claire pretended not to hear. Later, I heard my parents talking in the kitchen. ‘Summer should have more girlfriends,’ my mother said in a low voice. ‘Does it matter?’ my father answered. My mother murmured something I couldn’t hear.
I caught a glimpse of Claire this morning in the courtyard at school, just as I was dashing outside to the breakfast cart to get coffees for the popular girls in my first-period French class. Claire was talking to Melissa Green, one of her old friends. Melissa had a frozen, terrified smile on her face, trying to focus only on Claire’s eyes and not the rest of her body. When Claire said goodbye and turned away, Melissa’s expression twisted. She ran back to a gaggle of waiting girls and they started whispering.
‘So what do you think Mom’s doing right now?’ I asked my father as our Grimaldi’s waitress took our order and trudged away.
‘I don’t know, honey,’ my father said wearily.
‘You should try and call her,’ I suggested.
‘She’ll call when she’s ready.’
‘Mom probably wants you to call,’ I said. ‘She could be surrounded by younger guys, wherever she is. She could get tempted, just like Mrs Ryan was tempted by that younger French man.’
My father set down his fork. Even Steven, who had been poring over advanced calculus problem sets-he was a freshman at New York University, but lived in our apartment instead of the dorms-looked up with mild interest. ‘Excuse me?’ my father sputtered.
I repeated what I’d heard from the girls in French class. ‘She had an affair with a younger Frenchman from their local boulangerie. Claire caught them. And that’s why she’s so fat: she ate to console herself. It makes perfect sense.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’ My father looked aghast. ‘And Claire’s not fat. She looks fine.’