But you can’t worship a girl. It’s just not fair. It can even be boring.
Boring for her, I mean.
Now, in case you’re wondering how I ever got so philosophical and intelligent about all this, don’t worry—it’s not me. I didn’t think of any of that. It all came from my mother. When I was with Laura I spent a lot of time talking about her with my mom. I sure as hell couldn’t talk about her with my dad. Even after we broke up, he just didn’t care, because this was right about the time he started moping around so much, for reasons I’ll get to in a second.
My mom was interested that I finally had a girlfriend, and wanted to tell me things so I wouldn’t mess it up, because when she asked me how I felt about Laura and I told her, to tell the truth, she looked a little worried.
And she would know. My mom did a lot of dating in her day when she was a teen—and I guess she was pretty good at it because she wound up marrying my dad when she was nineteen. Maybe she was too good at it, because when I think about it, nineteen’s still pretty young.
She wouldn’t really talk but just sort of recited from her roster of thoughts about how it is with boys and girls and love and everything, and I will admit that I did get a lot out of what she said. But I didn’t actually accept it all as a sort of, like, gospel of truth, because in lots of ways—though she never actually admitted it—what she told me about how to treat girls was sort of like a criticism of how my dad was. I mean, if she said a boy should do some particular thing, or not do it, it was usually in reaction to something I knew for a fact had to do with my dad.
Anyways, it was her who told me that you can’t worship a girl. They don’t like it. She said if you get too gushy, they start to feel sort of embarrassed by it, and even ignored after a while, like you’re in love with love and not really them, and they start to wonder, you know, if it’s real.
That kind of surprised me.
What’s funny is that my mom left my dad just a few days after Laura left me. That’s the reason why my dad got totally bummed out, but to tell the truth, things hadn’t been so hot between them for months.
He tried keeping it together, but after she left, he stopped going to work. I mean, it’s not like he can’t go back or anything, because he sells real estate and works for himself and can take as much time off as he wants, but he just sort of lost all his vital energy, which is what he always said.
I can’t really say what happened between them. I mean, my mom always complained about how there was never enough money, which is what made my dad mope around a lot, because he felt it was a problem he just didn’t know how to solve.
But other than that they loved each other a lot. My dad was really kind of crazy about my mom. They were crazy about each other. A kid can tell.
Then something happened, and everything changed.
They never really told me about it. It was obviously something personal—something very, very personal that you just can’t explain to your kid. And after my mom left, my dad just lay around on the couch, mainly, watching TV.
Anyways, the night this all started was like that. He was on the couch. The TV was on. I was standing in the hall and I could see him. He looked sort of dazed, or glazed, really—I mean his eyes looked glazed, shining in the dark with little moving pictures of the idiotic show he was watching. I swear he seemed hypnotized.
Now, usually under these sort of circumstances when he sees me out there, he’ll look over and ask me something, usually whether I want to play rummy, because he’s a big rummy fan and used to play it with my mom all the time.
But this night I’m talking about, which was right at the end of last August—right at the end of summer vacation—he didn’t say anything. He just lay there like a zombie, wearing the same old T-shirt he’d had on since that morning when he’d gone out to clip the hedges.
To tell the truth, I knew exactly how he felt. After Laura left me—after she’d told me how her mom had said I was “just a boy” and that she didn’t see me as a guy who’d grow up to “accomplish anything important” like Laura’s dad and everything—I used to mope around a lot too. I’d also lie in bed watching TV shows, stuff I’d never even heard of. I felt so wiped out, I mean so incredibly devastated that Laura had insisted we had to break up, that I just couldn’t move, and I was tired all the time, I mean so completely and totally exhausted, that all I could do was lie around, which of course just intensified how much I was thinking about her.
All I could think about was how beautiful she’d become when she’d left me.
I mean, she was beautiful when we met, but the funny thing was that she became more and more beautiful, until she really did become, at least for me, truly the most beautiful girl in the world, which finally happened the day she said we had to break up.
You wouldn’t believe how she told me, either.
She said, “My mom says you’re just a boy.”
We were standing on this playground behind my old elementary school. We used to go there
