The Brutal Language of Love by Alicia Erian

Author:Alicia Erian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2001-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

On the Occasion of my Ruination

It was summer, as I suppose it tended to be. I was living with my mother, who had taken a job as a secretary with the city’s minor league baseball team. She was a high school teacher by trade, so money was nonexistent during the summer months. For the rest of the year, she complained about how much she hated teenagers.

I had enrolled in community college after graduating high school, then dropped out after the first year to work. Now, a year after dropping out, I was on the verge of leaving home for a state school a couple of hours away. I had found a room with an attached porch in a house with three other transfers, and my father had reluctantly agreed to pay rent. He and my mother had been divorced for several years, and he had a lot of concerns about the two of us living high on the hog. “What kind of mansion are we talking about here?” he asked me, and I assured him it was really just an old, sagging house with an attached porch.

But I still had three weeks left of work at the mall, in a lingerie store called Angelina’s Whisper, a rip-off of Victoria’s Secret. All the same, if you worked at Angelina’s, the other mall employees seemed to think you were really something—that you had a lot of sex, that your underpants were always wet, that your skirt slid across your ass so smoothly because you were wearing something satiny underneath. Maybe this was true of my co-workers, Evelyn and Mina, but I wasn’t interested in lingerie. I tried it on once and it made me look like an idiot.

In particular, the guys at the pizza place across from Angelina’s seemed to pay a lot of attention to us. They flirted more with Evelyn and Mina, who were both married and knew what they were doing, but also with me sometimes, if the mood struck them. I wasn’t all that good at flirting. Renaldo, who owned the pizza place, told me I should smile more—that my smile was bella, and that boys no like no smile. So I would smile at him and he’d say, “Thatsa good!” which I didn’t get, since when I duplicated the smile at home in the mirror I thought I looked tense and miserable. One day I said, “Renaldo, isn’t it possible that a person who isn’t smiling could feel fine on the inside?” He shook his head, and seemed extremely disappointed in me.

Every day we went to the pizza shop for coffee, Coke, pizza, and salads. Evelyn and Mina flirted with Renaldo and his son Bert, while I went after the new part-time guy who didn’t look Italian at all. He had blond hair and icy green eyes that were spaced a little too far apart. He was well-built, and I pitied him the plastic food-handling gloves that cut off the circulation in his meaty hands. Whenever he waited on me, he removed them and handled my food personally, which I took to be a sign of intimacy.

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