Page 86 of Playworld
“What’re you guys doing?” I asked.
He had not only folded his slice but also the paper plate on which it rested, as if he were going to eat both.
“We’re about to try to kill an ogre,” he said, indicating the rest of the group. “You’re welcome to stay and watch.”
When I told him I was on detention, he said, “Rain check, then.”
—
The following Monday, after I finished shooting that afternoon, I babysat with Amanda.
The building was a small four-story walkup above a grocery store, on Amsterdam Avenue and Seventy-Fourth Street. The stairwell, dimly lit, was narrow and creaky. It wound tightly on itself, each landing bookended by a pair of apartment doors, each with a peephole framed in ornamented metal. I was so nervous and excited to be alone with Amanda in a place where we were not moving, I could barely swallow. With each step, I vowed today was the day I would say no to doubt, I would trust my feelings, like Ben Kenobi urged, I’d speak up and ask her out. I knocked onthe door, which Amanda opened and said, with real surprise—and did I detect the tiniest note of dread?—“You’re here!” And then she led me into the smallest apartment I’d ever seen.
Absent the half bath, it was a single room. Which in and of itself would be unremarkable were it not for the fact that three people lived here. In English the following year, when we readCrime and Punishment,I’d learn that such an apartment was called a “garret,” and I would picture Raskolnikov in this place, drinking from the tap in the kitchen’s tiny sink, all his dishes stored in its single cabinet, to then take a seat on the two-person couch adjacent the front door, his stationery placed atop the gameboard-sized coffee table. The dormer window that faced north was blocked by a dresser; the one facing south was half filled by an AC unit. Beneath this was a twin bed with drawers in its frame. Did the parents of Amanda’s charge sleep head to foot? The other bed, catty-cornered to it, was piled with stuffed animals. The little girl Amanda babysat lay belly down on the floor in front of the television, which was also on the floor. She rested her chin in her hands and had folded her raised ankles one over the other. She looked over her shoulder at me but did not say hello.
“Can you tell Griffin your name?” Amanda asked.
“Suzy,” the girl said. Then she returned to the screen, whose image began to float vertically before she adjusted the TV’s antenna and bopped its top before it reset itself.
Amanda shrugged and tapped a cushion next to her on the couch. Above her top lip, perhaps because I planned to kiss it, I noticed for the first time its thin layer of blond down. Amanda was wearing her school uniform but had taken off her shoes. She rearranged herself, tucking her feet beneath her, and then reopened her binder and math textbook on her lap, which sent a signal for which I was not prepared, since their jackets seemed to wall her off from me. In a ringing tone she said, “Welcome to my job!” and this too rang false. When I asked how often she babysat, she said usually four times a week. She explained that Suzy’s mother managed a restaurant during the day and her father bartended at night, so she covered the gap. I asked how old Suzy was, and Amanda said to her, “Suzy, tell Griffin how old you are,” and without turning around she answered, “Six.”Manners,Amanda mouthed, and gave a big thumbs-down.
The 4:30 Moviewas on. Amanda said, “Suzy, tell Griffin what you’re watching.”
Suzy said,“Gamera vs. Godzilla.”
The monsters were about to do final battle. The Japanese were running for cover. Their army’s laser cannons were having no effect. We watched in silence. It was the moment to ask Amanda out, but before I could speak, she said, “How’sTake Twogoing?” and kept her eyes fixed to the screen as if it were an Academy Award–winning picture. I told her this was probably my last week of shooting, but it was going well. There was another pause, and I said, “I was wondering—” but Amanda interrupted me to ask what I’d done over the weekend. I told her I’d had play rehearsal. When I asked her what she did over the weekend, she said, “I went to Studio 54 on Saturday and spent Sunday recovering.” She remained plastered to the television so I, baffled, turned to watch it too.
It was the movie’s climax. The city lay in waste about the two monsters. Gamera was calling upon his ancient powers to defeat Godzilla. From the sky there descended a cone of energy that supercharged the turtle in light. It was now or never, I thought, it was time to summon my courage, and then Amanda and I said to each other, “Do you—?” at the same time.
Amanda blurted, “Jinx!”
Rules dictated I could not speak.
“Do you want to know the craziest coincidence?” she asked. When I nodded, she said, “You go to Boyd Prep…”
Gamera’s chest opened.
“…and so does my boyfriend.”
Gamera fired his super plasma beam at Godzilla.
“I think you know him…” Amanda said.
Godzilla was engulfed in the fireball.
“He’s a senior…” she said.
The smoke cleared. Tokyo was silent.
“Rob said he was in detention with you Saturday.”
Godzilla, defeated, thudded into the sea.
There Is No Try
And to this day I so rarely feel things when they happen. I remain so insulated from myself that, tucked away in my high tower or secreted in my dungeon’s ninth level (I’d play a lot ofD&Dthat year), I barely detect the pounding on my heart’s three-foot-thick and twelve-foot-high door. And if I do manage a reaction, it’s still often the diametrical opposite of what the moment calls for. That evening, for instance, having left the garret apartment, I spied my idiot grin in storefront windows during my entire walk home, the same one, I imagined, with which I comforted Amanda after she informed me about Rob (“We can still be friends,” she said, to which I, like the actor performing an inflection exercise with my father, replied, “Wecanstill be friends”), because she pulled herself to me immediately afterward, she hugged me with such force her textbook and binder fell to the floor, she pressed her bare knees to my thighs and gathered me into her arms with so much relief that I allowedmyupraised arm to relax, finally, and fall to her shoulder, to revel in her warm forehead against my neck, and I held her too. And having what I’d so desperately wanted before I could even begin to process what I could not, my countenance must’ve set up like Quikrete (“I was so worried I’d lose you,” she said, smushed against me, to which I replied, “You’re not going to lose me”), my expression of shock froze into rictus and driedmy teeth, my grimace made my paralyzed cheeks sore and must’ve given me an oxymoronic appearance—gleefully grim, dismally delighted—because upon first regarding me when I got home, Oren asked, “What happened to you?”
“Nothing,” I replied, which was true, in a way, and I retreated to my study to stare, quakingly quiet, at my corkboard’s collage and ask the simple question I still find I most often do when it comes to love, which is“Why?”