Nothing Real Volume 3

  Contents

  Just Tom Kelly

  The Theory of Reward

  Gone for Good

  Sugar Babies

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Just Tom Kelly

  Kenneth lived in the only apartment building in town. It was a redbrick building, about twenty stories high, down the block from the Grand Union and across the street from the Mobil station. Ellen liked going over to Kenneth’s rather than having Kenneth to her house, since Kenneth’s mother was rarely home, and her mother—unless she was playing tennis—was almost always sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee or a cigarette, talking on the phone or just staring out the bay window (at what, Ellen did not know).

  Ellen also liked Kenneth’s elevator. It reminded her of being in the city, or of the elevators on TV. She could probably count the number of times she had ridden in an elevator other than Kenneth’s. When she rode Kenneth’s elevator, she sometimes daydreamed about living in the city and wearing heels to work. She leaned against the side of the elevator, as if exhausted by a day of sitting at a desk, talking on the phone, and staring at reams of paper. Her father, who was a lawyer, spent the day this way. Ellen didn’t want to be a lawyer, but she liked offices. She wanted to wear heels, and pencil skirts, and white-silk, button-down blouses.

  “Hey,” said Kenneth, opening the door as soon as she knocked. The promptness put her immediately on guard, as Kenneth was quickest to the door when he was least likely to be on schedule. As she feared, his hair was uncombed, and he had stubble. He was wearing white athletic socks, basketball shorts, and a T-shirt that said “Hastings Yellow Jackets” across the faded yellow front. Their school colors were, regrettably, yellow and green. Worse, Kenneth looked stoned.

  “I thought you’d be ready,” Ellen said. She didn’t take her jacket or scarf off. It was chilly, and they were supposed to be going out to shop for Kenneth’s father’s fiftieth birthday present. She kept the jacket on as a signal to Kenneth that they weren’t hanging out, that she was waiting for him, that he was doing something that annoyed her, by just standing there in his stupid socks.

  “Relax,” he said. He tried kissing her neck and unwinding the blue-flowered silk scarf she had tied in a new way, looping one section and pulling the rest through to form a loose knot. She got the idea from a magazine article called “Twenty Ways to Tie a Scarf.” If you ignored the idiotic suggestions, like wearing a scarf around your arm or thigh, or the obvious ones, like wrapping your ponytail in one, there were a few clever suggestions left. But Ellen liked beauty magazines that stated the obvious. It was soothing to read articles like that, like looking at pictures of yourself you’ve seen a million times before. Ellen’s mother didn’t like her beauty magazines. She called them “beauty porn” and complained that the models were all victims of the patriarchy. Ellen didn’t like the part of the patriarchy that made women have to cook and clean, but she didn’t mind the shopping and makeup part of “being so traditional it gives me a pain in the ass,” as her mother liked to say.

  “Look, I don’t have all day, and it would be a start if we at least had a present for him, and you were wearing actual clothes.” Ellen decided to be direct, even if it meant pissing Kenneth off.

  Kenneth looked grim, his face drained of color and any expression that he might have put on initially to please her. “Ellen.” He pronounced her name as though he had fetched it from memory, was unsure of who exactly she was, or what she was doing there. “The guy moved back from California, and now he wants me to be all, ‘Oh, my dad’s back and he’s buying me a car, and let’s go fishing.’ You know what I think? I don’t give a flying fuck about his party.”

  “We said we’d go. We told Sandy we were coming.” Ellen felt her voice catch. Sandy was Kenneth’s stepmom, and Ellen recognized this point was a weak one. Kenneth didn’t care what Sandy thought. Ellen wasn’t sure why the party meant anything to her, but she’d been picturing the two of them, arm in arm, in the party room at the Tarrytown Hilton all week. She wanted to wear her new black pumps. She had an appointment that afternoon to get her hair done. It was an important family party, the kind real girlfriends went to. Kenneth pulled a carton of milk out of the fridge and chugged out of it unself-consciously.

  “Sandy,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Sandy.” He tossed the empty milk carton in the sink and pulled Ellen close. He pressed her against the fridge, so that the handle dug into her back. He kissed her neck. “Fuck Sandy,” he said. “Let’s go back to bed. You’re all tense. You’re all wrapped up in this crap.” He struggled to undo Ellen’s careful new knot. She eyed the carton of milk in the sink and thought about how she’d have to throw it in the trash, so Kenneth’s mom wouldn’t see it first thing when she got home and start screaming at Kenneth for being such a slob. He was a slob. His mom worked most weekends as a bookkeeper. She had two jobs, one Monday through Thursday and another, over in Jersey, on Friday and Saturday. “My mom works her ass off for me,” Kenneth would say appreciatively, but still, he’d throw milk cartons in the sink.

  “Stop,” Ellen said. “We don’t have time. Seriously.”

  Kenneth stopped, a little too quickly. He held her face in his hands and looked at her. He had a scruffy attractiveness and shaggy hair, and he was a little on the short side, not thin but athletic. It was his eyes that the other girls talked about. He had those sleepy blue eyes. Lashes like girls never get. But Ellen liked his mouth, his slightly off-kilter smile. “Why’re you so wound up about it? He’s not even your father.” He said this petulantly, a boy trying to keep his business to himself.

  “It’s just we said we’d go. It’s his fiftieth. Your mom would be upset if we didn’t. There’s no way we can not go!” In Ellen’s mind, saying you would be somewhere and then not going would have to mean something drastic. She couldn’t remember anyone in her family canceling a plan for any reason other than illness—real illness, vomiting, fever. Her father had a thing about reliability. He’d always say to Ellen and her twin sister, Laura, “You say what you do and you do what you say.”

  Kenneth still didn’t make any move to get dressed. He kept messing around in the kitchen. Opening cabinets. He was making a peanut butter and banana sandwich, one of the things he did that grossed Ellen out. He used white bread and Jif peanut butter. He made it right on a paper towel so he didn’t have to bother with a plate. He never cut the sandwich in two, and sometimes he even rolled the sides up, like it was a hot dog bun. “You promised these people. It will ruin the party if you don’t come. Everyone will be really tense. The whole thing will be about you. You’re being really selfish.” Ellen was glad she’d gotten that out. It wasn’t about her, her disappointment, the mark against her influence on him.

  Kenneth shrugged. “I didn’t tell him to have a big old fiftieth birthday party, did I? I didn’t ask him to move back here either. Think about it, Ellen. He left when I was six. He left. Okay. Fine. Good-bye to all that being-a-family shit. Off he goes to San Francisco. Everything’s great. He makes his shitload of money. In the meantime, it’s just me and Mom here and we’re fine. Now, all of a sudden, he’s back, not just in our lives, but in the same fucking town. What’s that about? Is that really necessary? Now he and Sandy are right here, going to my games and all that crap. Wanting to be a real dad. Guess what? He missed that opportunity. I’m not six anymore.” Standing in the kitchen in his white socks, baggy shorts, and T-shirt, he’d have looked about six, if he had bothered to shave, Ellen thought.

  “He can’t undo what’s done.”

  “No, he can’t,” Kenneth said. “That’s the point. Why should he just forget what happened? Why s
hould everyone forget? Now it’s like his birthday is supposed to be the most important event in my life, and guess what? It isn’t. I don’t really see the point in watching him walk around all night with his hand on Sandy’s fat ass.”

  Ellen considered her options. When Kenneth was like this, it sometimes took all day for him to get out of it. She could offer to go out herself and get his dad a present, a book or something, right in town. Or she could drop the whole thing. They could show up empty-handed, even. As long as they showed up.

  “I could pick something up for him and then swing back later. I’m supposed to take Laura to the hair place at four,” she said. She didn’t add that she was having her hair done, too, for the party. She was planning on getting a blow-out. Kenneth liked the way her hair looked blown out perfectly straight and had no idea she actually paid to have it done. He seemed to think some days her hair was suddenly, naturally, perfect.

  “Fine,” Kenneth said. “Knock yourself out.” He was still eating his sandwich. “But don’t spend more than, like, ten dollars.”

  Ellen felt her stomach knot. She’d been looking forward to shopping together. It was the sort of boyfriend/girlfriend thing she liked best. She liked the feeling of being responsible for something that might have a permanent place in Kenneth’s history. “Oh, that’s the fishing pole Ellen and I bought for Dad back in high school.” It wasn’t that she saw them staying together forever, but she had the habit of thinking of the two of them as though they were in a movie or a story, and she particularly liked events that she could picture in a sort of romantic montage. She liked the way Kenneth sometimes helped her dad out around the house, how he’d explained to her father what might be wrong with the car, how using the more expensive gas might actually stop the engine from making that weird clicking sound. But now here was Kenneth dismissing her coolly, and still promising nothing in particular about the party. She could only hope his mother would get home before they were supposed to leave, and that Carol could be the one to convince him he actually had to go. She could take Carol’s side then, be seen as just defending his mother’s right to make him step up, to not embarrass her. He couldn’t make it seem Carol hadn’t raised him right.

  The trees on Southgate Avenue had just begun to yellow. There was hardly any variation to the color, and Ellen tried to remember which types of trees turned what color. She knew there was a maple somewhere out back, and that it would turn red, since her mother would say at least once a day in the fall, “Would you look at that maple?” If her father was within earshot, he would answer, “Is that the same one that was there yesterday?” and Ellen would wonder why he had to get on her mother’s case like that. She wondered why it was no one could say a stupid thing in their house and get away with it.

  Ellen parked in front of her dad’s garage space, since he was at a weekend-long conference in DC and would therefore not arrive unexpectedly, furious at her for blocking his spot. If she blocked his garage space on a weekday, he would force her, no matter the weather, to go out and move both her car and his. “They’re just cars,” she’d mutter under her breath, but she wouldn’t dare sass him directly.

  When Ellen walked in, Laura was sitting at the kitchen table, and for a second Ellen thought she was their mother. Laura and Ellen had their mother’s wavy blond hair, though they got their father’s height and his light-brown eyes. But more than the hair, it was the way Laura was sitting that made Ellen do a double take. She sat very still, with her hands in her lap, and her shoulders slightly hunched as though she were very tired. She looked old when she sat like that, and Ellen wanted to shake her, snap her out of it. She was offended by the way Laura sometimes seemed to block her out.

  Laura turned when she heard Ellen come in. Her voice was flat. “Mom is up at the club getting lunch. I thought you were shopping with Kenneth.” Ellen sighed. She didn’t really want to have to explain.

  “I was, but then he started getting all weird about the whole party, saying he didn’t want to go, so I just said I’d get his dad something when we went into town. What are you doing? Just sitting there?”

  Ellen picked up a magazine, a bulletin of classes from a local college, and flipped through it absentmindedly. Their hair appointment wasn’t for another hour, and she felt antsy. Things clearly hadn’t gone great with Kenneth, but it was she who’d left, the one who got exasperated. Kenneth was doing what Kenneth always did. “I was just thinking,” Laura said, still flat-voiced, “about Tom Kelly.”

  “Oh, Jesus, why?”

  “I don’t know. He was here, and now he’s not.”

  Tom Kelly had been in Laura’s homeroom, though they’d never hung out in the same crowd. He was just a kid at school. Tom had been killed the week before when he was riding his dirt bike and ran into a chain that had been strung across the old Aqueduct path. Tom had been in Laura’s homeroom since freshman year. On Thursday, there had been a memorial for Tom in the school auditorium, during which Tom’s group of friends had acquired a momentary, grief-fueled glamour. They were mostly ungainly potheads with bad skin, the girls equal to the boys in these deterrents to popularity. But now, the group had become the Group, defined by their privileged journeying en masse to the office of the grief counselor. Other people, even people who didn’t hang out with Tom but had maybe shared a chem lab once with him, wanted to join the Group. Fortunately, Laura hadn’t descended yet to that level of grief-jacking.

  “Look, there was a chain there. Sometimes it was up and sometimes it wasn’t,” Ellen said dismissively. It was too much to think about: Kenneth, her wilting anticipation of the party, and now Tom, a grossly bloodied, spectral image.

  “Why did no one think of that? Either they’d take it down, and the chain wouldn’t keep anyone out, or they wouldn’t see it. Why did no one think of that?” Laura stared hard at Ellen, her lips pursed in a miniature display of fury that Ellen feared threatened to erupt into full size. Ellen feared for her blow-out, the cancellation of which would really set her off.

  “Come on, Laur,” Ellen pleaded. “I think you need to get out, get your mind off this.” She spoke with intentional sweetness, finally giving her twin the acknowledgment she wanted. Laura blinked away a few tears and shrugged, a mute admission that she had no better ideas.

  The hair salon in town was always crowded, usually with other people’s moms, the types who made an effort, and got regular highlights and blow-outs and trims. Their own mother was a DIY type, taking handfuls of her own hair and snipping off the bottoms with sharp silver shears. She cut their father’s hair too, and theirs as well, until the girls had finally rebelled and got bangs together in seventh grade. Now they’d both grown their dirty-blond hair to midway down their backs, though Laura had been threatening for weeks to do something drastic.

  Ellen had Donna, her usual stylist, blow her hair out straight, and had her French-braid the front into a side-parted crown. As Donna worked, Ellen kept her eyes on Laura, who had been taken to the back of the room, where older ladies were getting dyed and permed. Color change had not been discussed, and Ellen wanted to call out to her sister—what was she doing? Being a twin, she felt she had the right.

  Ellen was finished while Laura still sat in the back of the salon, hair in foamy pink rollers.

  “Just go get your shopping done while I finish,” Laura said, as though the perm were an issue of timing and not a betrayal to twinship, to identicality. Of course, their friends could tell them apart easily, at least most of the time, and neither of them strove to look alike, though neither of them had taken looking unalike to any kind of extreme before. It was something Ellen thought Laura should answer for, but Laura just smiled and shrugged, looking cheerful, finally, after moping most of the day. “I’m getting ombre highlights,” she said. “Like that actress.” Ellen rolled her eyes. She didn’t know who her sister was talking about. They shared the inability to remember the names of anyone they did not actually know.

  Ellen bought Kenneth’s dad a coffee-table book
on baseball. It was in the used section of the bookstore in a glass case where they kept stuff that was more expensive than a regular used book should be. The checkout guy said it was a classic. There were lots of black-and-white pictures of baseball players standing awkwardly on fuzzy-looking fields. It always struck Ellen as odd the way people from other time periods looked different, not only in their clothes and hairstyles, but in their postures and expressions, as though being a person felt different at different times. She was pleased with the book. She figured it was like a baseball time line, and that Kenneth’s dad would be able to locate some piece of his own past within the book’s particular history. There must be in its pages a hero he had had when he was young, one of those players old guys worshipped, like they were proof all the really significant people had already come and gone.

  Back at the hair salon, there was a transformed Laura, a girl with hair three or four shades lighter at the ends than at the roots. It wasn’t unattractive, but it looked as though someone had rubbed her hair hard, as if attempting erasure. “You look like Jeanne Lazlo,” Ellen said. “But hotter.” Jeanne Lazlo was a chubby but popular girl who had graduated the year before and had had similar highlights. It was a compliment, though Laura looked stricken and later froze her out in the car on the way home.

  With her own appearance, Ellen would take no risks—at least not tonight. She felt there was too much at stake, with Kenneth already annoyed at his dad, and now, unfairly, at her for wanting to do the right thing. Her hair was a success at least. The braid made her long, straight hair less conventional (though it was no wild departure from form like Laura’s). She wore a high-necked ivory dress with buttons up the back. It was old-fashioned, but sexy, sheer in the front, so you could see fairly clearly the silhouette of her curves. She wore lace-up boots with narrow heels. It was a copy of a look she’d seen in a magazine, but no one at the Tarrytown Hilton, least of all Kenneth, would possibly know that. Fortunately, Kenneth hadn’t put up any more resistance about going, and had even texted her wondering what was taking her so long to pick him up. When she pulled up, he’d been waiting in front of his building. “If we’re going to do this, let’s at least get in and out of there fast,” he’d said.