He couldn’t stay out too late tonight because he had to go home and cook dinner for his mother and settle her in before bed, not that he was going to announce why he had to leave. Maybe they would think he had somewhere to go, a woman to meet. He was a handsome man; he knew that about himself. But in fact the last woman he’d been involved with had been much earlier. Of all people, it had been Kristin Vells. Kristin had been just someone he was aware of on Woburn Road for so long that he had ceased thinking of her as a real person. She was simply someone to whom he and Greer had always felt superior. She had hazily occupied the role of Dumb Girl Who Lives on Our Street. But then when Greer fell out of Cory’s life, and Kristin was living at home and working at Pie Land, Cory would go to the pizza place sometimes in the late afternoon as the day sank into a violet-gray funk.
When he walked in, he would sit and have a slice, and if Kristin was there they would engage in a monosyllabic conversation that might or might not finally flower into the polysyllabic. This went on for a while. One day he was there at closing time, and he and Kristin left together, walking back up the street with bodies close, which was interesting in its newness. Kristin Vells had a well-formed body, and the fragrance of dough rose up from it like a sweet breeze from an open window.
“You want to come over?” he boldly asked this woman who had once been three reading groups below him. The beauty of adulthood was that reading groups did not matter! Or at least they did not insure against anything. You could be in the top reading group of everyone in the world, the alpha Puma among Pumas, and still it would not protect you from your brother dying, or your father leaving, or the person you loved no longer being in your life.
Kristin went with Cory into his house for the first time ever, though they had lived on that same block for such a long time. He remembered the day that Greer had first come here, nearly two decades earlier. Walking into someone’s house was like entering their body. You saw what they were made of, and what they had been stewing in all this time.
His mother was sitting in front of the TV when he appeared with Kristin. “Ma, you need anything?” he asked her, and she looked up from the recliner that she often sat in during the day.
“I’m fine, Cory,” she said, but she squinted uneasily at Kristin. “Who is this girl?”
“Kristin from down the block,” Kristin offered. “The Vellses?”
“With the garden gnomes?”
“That’s us. But actually they’re gone. Someone stole them a while back.”
Cory took Kristin upstairs to his room and shut the door. Being there with her, he was forced to compare her with Greer. Here was a replacement woman, a far less interesting model but a woman too, fragrant and female, someone who knew what life was like here in Macopee and wouldn’t question why Cory chose “to live this way.” Plus, she had a plush mouth, the lower lip bisected into two little cushions. They smoked a joint, which was the only way to manage this moment. Weed had become more of a condiment in his life not long after his brief adventures in heroin with Cousin Sab. Smoking a joint took the edge off, whereas snorting heroin had taken the side off, as if in a tornado, and was to be avoided forever.
So Cory and Kristin smoked silently together, and then he looked up and saw her suddenly perched above him like a construction crane. He lifted himself slowly toward her, their faces colliding. When her mouth opened, she smelled smoky and rusty, as if there was a taint of blood in there somewhere. While kissing Kristin Vells, Cory realized that sexual arousal came in different strengths, different concentrations, but beyond that the body didn’t judge who it was kissing. It had been so long since he had kissed anyone at all.
“You were such a fucking little sissy when you were a kid,” Kristin said after the kiss ended and they pulled apart and observed each other. “With your neat little clothes. Did your mom iron your shirts all that time? You always looked so neat. So clean. Like, Mama’s boy.”
“Yep. And now I iron her clothes. Quid pro quo.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He couldn’t think of anything more for them to talk about then, so instead of talking he eased himself on top of her, using all the strength and interest he could gather.
They remained entangled for a full month—a month in which they smoked weed and lay in bed for a dazzling number of hours. One day as they lay there, the room was suddenly flooded with light and there was a bang, and Cory looked up to see his short mother standing in the doorway. “I’m constipated,” Benedita announced.
“Oh, give me a fucking break,” said Kristin quietly.
“Cory, can you get me the Dulcolax? I look around and I can’t find it.”
“Yeah, Ma, hold on a sec,” he said.
His mother retreated, shuffling away. She had become a shuffler over the years; by now he was so used to the sound of her purple slippers on the floors of the house that it was almost soothing to him, as if it were a fire snapping in a hearth. But Kristin looked at Cory with proprietary anger, and he absorbed it and was angry right back at her, for she had no dominion over him, and why would she think she did?
“How gross that your mom tells you her personal things like that,” she said.
“Yeah, well, she’s got no one else to tell it to.”
“I live with my mom too, but she tells me jackshit. Which is the way I like it.”
Cory shrugged, wanted her gone. Caring for his mother had become part of his job, his way of being. He managed her life, made it no more painful than it had to be. He didn’t want Kristin intruding on that part; she was meant to ignore it, not comment on it. But here she was complaining, pointing it out, offering her opinions, and now everything that had been briefly erotic about Kristin Vells—the tiny tattoo of a doghouse on her ankle, and her long, well-cared-for hair and willing mouth—became a source of revulsion. Cory was now uninterested in everything that had to do with this person, because she had overstepped her bounds and also insulted his mother. Or, more than that, insulted his mother and him. What they were to each other. No, she had just insulted him.
“Kristin, I gotta get up,” he said. When he was around her, he found himself speaking like someone he wasn’t. Gotta. Hafta.
“So, what, Cory, you’re pissed at me because I was grossed out about your mom and her constipation?”
“Something like that.”
“Fuck you, Pinto.”
“Yeah, well, okay, that’s so sweet of you to say.”
He stood and found his pants, then his shirt, and had never been so relieved to get dressed. But Kristin wasn’t moving. She lay in his bed and just took her time. She smoked a cigarette, she flipped around the dial to see what was on TV, and actually settled on a rerun of Boy Meets World, from which he had gotten his name. He had watched this episode, in which Cory quits his school’s production of Hamlet after finding out he has to wear tights, multiple times when he was young, absorbing how all-American it was, feeling so excited by that aspect. He wished he could trade in the name Cory for Duarte now; he was ready to have that be him, except for the fact that it was his father’s name too, and that brought out another set of feelings entirely. Kristin took the remote control and raised the volume. She was planning to watch the whole show, he knew.
You take your time, Kristin, he thought, and he went off to find the Dulcolax. It was exactly where he had visualized it: on a bathroom shelf half-hidden by an ancient, cloudy bottle of something called Jean Naté After Bath Splash. He grabbed the Dulcolax and brought it to his mother.
After Kristin left that day, she and Cory became unspoken enemies. Seeing her on the street as she walked to Pie Land, he would give a grudging wave but she would simply make a guttural sound, like, Are you kidding me? and keep walking. Soon he stopped waving. Now he was not only Greerless, he was also Kristinless.