Who Do You Love(50)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

“I don’t think they would have been so bad if they hadn’t been warm.”

“Yeah, sitting in a bus for four hours in July doesn’t do much to improve turkey and cheese.”

He’d bought bottled water to drink, and on our way out we stopped at Bassetts for ice-cream cones, chocolate for me, strawberry for Andy. “What now?” he asked. “Want to see the Liberty Bell?”

“Nothing against our founding fathers, but I want to see where you live.”

His face clouded, but all he said was “Okay.” When we’d finished our cones he took my hand, and we walked down Market Street and followed a pack of people down the stairs to a subway station. Andy gave me a token and we passed through the turnstiles and boarded a northbound train. I’d ridden the subway in New York and the Metro in Washington, but always with my parents, never alone. Sitting next to Andy, with my leg pressed along his, feeling his warmth, the way he smelled like sunshine, like springtime, I felt very grown-up, nervous and excited.

After six stops, we got off at Kensington and Somerset, descended a flight of metal stairs, and started to walk. Ken­sington Avenue couldn’t have been more than ten miles from Walnut Street, with its Tiffany’s and its fancy boutiques, but it was completely different. There were five-and-dimes, with broken neon signs and flyblown, age-warped posters—BUY ONE GET ONE LADIES SLIPPERS; CHILDREN’S COATS 30 PERCENT OFF. Even the chain stores and restaurants, places I knew, looked different. The Burger King in Clearview was freestanding, on a neatly mowed patch of lawn with a parking lot that got repaved every summer. This Burger King was in a storefront, its broken windows patched with cardboard and tape. The sidewalks were stained and dirty, marked by blackened clumps of stepped-on chewing gum and glistening puddles that I didn’t recognize until I saw a man hawk and spit onto the street, as casually as if he’d been dropping an empty cup into a trash can.

“Not much like Clearview, is it?” Andy asked without looking at me. He had never been to my town, but I’d described it and sent pictures—the pastel-painted Spanish-style houses, with red tile roofs, the lawns, the pools, the beach. It was true, this wasn’t much like the placid, quiet, safe place where I’d grown up—it was dirty, noisy, crowded—but it had a kind of thrumming pulse, an energy and vigor that I’d never seen before. Everyone walked faster here, like they had somewhere to be, and there were all different kinds of people—a girl with elaborate braids and big, rectangular gold earrings singing to herself, in a voice just as good as anything I’d heard on the radio; two women in black robes and headdresses that covered everything but their eyes pushing strollers containing regularly dressed babies, one a girl, one a boy; and a man leaning against a telephone pole, on legs that looked like they were about to collapse underneath him, wobbling back and forth. He had on dirty blue jeans and no shoes and no shirt, and he looked like he was drooling as he stood there.

Andy kept one hand on the small of my back, steering me past the homeless people, past the medical-supply stores with unsettling displays of canes and walkers and portable toilets, and past an off-track betting parlor. The air felt like it was leaving a thin film of grime on my skin as he led me around a corner, up a short block, then to a brick building that I recognized from the pictures he’d sent, three stories high with the door painted green. “This is it,” he said, and unlocked the door to the row house where he lived with his mom.

I held my breath as I stepped inside. Andy had described the place, had said that it was small, that it didn’t get much light, that the ceilings were so low his mother told him if he grew any more he’d start bumping his head. What I’d imagined wasn’t anything close to how sad, how poor the little rooms looked, especially after the luxurious Rittenhouse Hotel, where the heavy drapes were held back with tasseled gold ropes, where the carpet was thick and deep and the pillowcases smooth and white and cool. Andy stood in the center of the living room, not meeting my eyes. A television set dominated the room; a coffee table in front of the couch held a few out-of-date copies of People and Vogue. There weren’t any bookcases or books, no pictures on the walls except one that I recognized—Andy’s graduation picture, a shot of him in a red cap and gown. He’d sent me the wallet-sized version. The one on the wall was blown up much bigger. Looking around, I saw a few other pictures, all of either Andy or his mother or the two of them together, one from what must have been his eighth-grade graduation, because he was, once more, in a cap and gown. He’d explained to me once why graduations were such a big deal—because not everyone in his school made it through high school, much less college. I wanted to stay longer, to study a younger Andy, but he took my hand and walked me to the kitchen.