Patricia Gaffney by Mad Dash Read Free Book Online

made terribly familiar, a feast covered up with a cloth before vanishing. Oh, he was so wrong, but I didn’t have the words to explain it to him.
    “We’re different people, that’s all. No one’s to blame, we’re simply—”
    “Are you trying to sound like the woman?”
    “What?”
    “Go away!”
    He started to, his relief obvious.
    “But don’t think you didn’t break my heart!”
    That stopped him. “I’m so sorry. That’s the last thing I wanted.”
    “What do you want? I don’t understand you. Just tell me.”
    “I’ll send your records back.”
    “You’ll send them?” I’d lent him some CDs, hoping to turn him on to punk rock. The pain and politeness and the badly disguised anguish in his face while he listened to them had wrenched me even deeper into helpless love. “You’ll send them?”
    “I’ve thought about it all night,” he said—a patent lie; I’d heard him snoring. “Relationships are hard enough anyway and, em, I just believe two people need to have as much in common as possible before they…before they even start.”
    “My parents had nothing in common.” I couldn’t believe I was arguing with him—how low could I go? But I thought of my mother and father, how different they were and how ecstatically happy together. I wanted that, but until then I’d never realized it, I think because my mother and I were everything to each other after Daddy died. Andrew—not that he was like my father, but he was the only man I’d ever met whom I could imagine being a father. Or a husband. He seemed ready-made.
    And here he was turning me down. “You and I,” he said, “we’re like…” He squinted in thought; he’s always been horrible at analogies. “We’re like Nixon and James Brown. I just don’t think we’re right for each other.”
    “What about opposites attract?”
    “Attract, yes. Yes,” he agreed. “But then they repel.”
    Repel. The sting of that was scalding. “Didn’t you like fucking me?” I said on purpose. He hates it when I swear, so I don’t anymore, or hardly ever. But I did then, like a sailor, and I wanted to see him blanch.
    “There, that’s—exactly it,” he said. “Don’t you see?” I saw, but then he rubbed it in: He made a gesture that took in everything I suddenly realized he hated about my room, the messiness, the—oh well, the chaos. It’s hard to keep a one-room efficiency apartment neat and tidy. I’d noticed his veiled incredulity the night before, and I’d imagined he was comparing my place with the spare, barrackslike apartment on Twenty-fifth Street he called home. I knew a symbol of incompatibility when I saw one, but I resented having it thrown in my face by him.
    “Okay, leave!” I shouted. “Leave right this instant!”
    He slunk out.
    All day, while I moped, it snowed. Late in the afternoon, Hood and the rest of the guys picked me up in the band’s ancient van, a noisy, foul-smelling, smoke-spewing rust heap they kept registered in Maryland because the inspection laws were looser. We were going out to College Park to practice with another band, maybe hook up with them and start playing country rock, since our punk careers weren’t going anywhere.
    I’d spent the day watching snow swirl past the window, comforted a little by its erasing power, able occasionally to imagine not feeling wretched but cleansed and free, the way I used to feel. Like, yesterday. I was young, and I was also young for my age, but the hurt was real and I knew what I’d lost. Numb as a widow, I stayed all day at the window and watched the snow, trying to make sense of this massive personal catastrophe, this violation of my deepest instincts. I loved Andrew. I did, and it wasn’t infatuation or lust, although it certainly was those, too. I’d met my match, my man, and I knew it, and he’d said, “We don’t suit,” and walked away. The injustice.
    I took my seat in the back of the stinky van, wedged between an amplifier and Hood, who