Too much knowledge, too much worldliness. I wish I didn’t know the things I know about adults. “Sometimes,” I say.
“And I appreciate you meeting me. Especially because you didn’t have to do any of this. You didn’t have to say you’re sorry, because my husband was the one who made the mistake.”
I pull my shoulders in, closer to my chest, as if I’m doing the opposite of a chest-opening, breathe-from-deep-inside yoga move. Because now I’m thinking of what it was like back in seventh grade and it all feels so fresh, and so weird, and so abnormal again.
Like a faucet turned on high, the memories pour out of me. “I had to have dinner with your husband. I had to listen to their jokes. I had to hear them. I had to see him at my house when I got home from school.” The words spill out, like water or rain. They are remarkably easy to say to her, to someone who isn’t my own mom. It’s so simple for me to tell this woman I hardly know how angry I am at her husband. And he’s nothing to me. Just one of many on my mom’s long, long list. One of many names I have recorded in my notebook over the years. But still, I hate him. “Don’t you look at him and think …” my voice trails off, because I don’t want to reopen her wounds by saying what I think: What scum.
Mrs. Lipshitz shakes her head. “I don’t hate my husband. I love him. That’s why I stayed with him even when I saw his e-mails, even when I learned what had been going on. It took a lot of work, but I’m glad I did it. And I don’t hate your mom either.”
A car screeches to a stop somewhere outside of the park, tires squealing against asphalt. The sound jolts me and I key in on what she has said and what it amounts to. Forgiveness. She forgives her husband, she forgives my mom.
“And your letter was beautiful. It meant so much to me that you’d do that. Really.”
My letter was beautiful. My amends are working.
And everything clicks into place, turning one, two, three degrees past where I thought I was going. Because if she can get over what happened, maybe I can too. Maybe I can forgive my mom. Maybe I can let go of the past and my part in it. The possibility feels like floating on the wings of a butterfly. Like freedom and lightness all at once. Like scoring the winning goal in a lacrosse game.
“Thank you for tracking me down, Mrs. Lipshitz,” I say, my mind already racing ahead to the next one and the next and the next.
“Please. Call me Doreen. I really hate the name Lipshitz.”
“It is a pretty awful name.”
*
The letters become my new passion project. The next night we hit a block on the Upper East Side, mixing up our repertoire by leaving cut-out red and pink construction paper hearts with lines on them from Beethoven’s famous “Immortal Beloved” love letter, leaving it for Catey’s mom.
As I position a heart just so on a fencepost, I think of Catey and all we shared when we were younger.
“Do you know why I don’t eat meat?” I say to Lane while we put the finishing touches on this latest ‘public art’ display.
He arches an eyebrow. “Are you going to tell me a story? I love stories. Spill.”
“It’s because of my friend Catey,” I say, then tell him about the day I crossed pepperoni, ham, and chicken off the menu.
Catey had been raised a vegetarian, and she proudly told me she’d never tasted meat.
“Not chicken, not fish, not cow, not pig, not anything,” she said one afternoon as we balanced lazily on our boards after school, back and forth on a smooth section of concrete in the middle of Central Park, surfing on the flat asphalt.
“What about a turkey?” I challenged.
“No gobble-gobble.”
“How about a sheep? Ever had a sheep?”
“A lamb? No way!” she said.
“Duck?”
“Quack-quack, no.”
“Frog legs?”
“I have no idea if they taste like chicken.”
“So why are you a veggie?”
“How could I not be? I mean, I don’t use makeup that was tested on animals, do you?”
Everything I knew about makeup I had learned from my mom, and she only bought the highest-end stuff from department stores. She never elaborated on whether her mascara had made a bunny cry. “I don’t know.”
“Eating animals is kind of the same idea, don’t you think?”
“Maybe.” But I wasn’t convinced yet.
“Second, you don’t really hear about people getting mad cow disease from eating carrots.”
I laughed and shifted my weight to the back end of the board. “Very good point. What else? Give me another reason.”
“Here’s the thing. At the end of the day, do you really want to eat something that can poop?”
“That is so nasty,” I said with a laugh, and we both cracked up. I went veggie the next day and never looked back.
Lane stares at me with narrowed eyes. “Is this your way of trying to convert me to your broccoli-loving habits?”
I laugh and swat his arm as we walk away from our art, leaving it for someone else now to discover. “Maybe. Is it working?”
He shakes his head. “Never. My love for pepperoni is too strong.”
*
Two days later we tackle a block in Gramercy Park. This is a tough one, since the letter is for my mom’s coworker Bailey. Lane and I park our bikes at the end of a block in the East Twenties, hooking our locks together, twisting each through the others.