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June & I
by Charles Gershman

“Why don’t you just tell her the truth?”

I couldn’t tell if she was being serious. Her eyes did that bulging thing that they do--it was why I’d resolved years ago that we could never date, only be friends. “The truth?”

“Do you actually think she’d care? She’d probably just roll right over it, not think twice. You know what I think?”

“What?”

“You’re paranoid.”

“I’m not paranoid.”

“Yes you are. You’re afraid she’ll cut you off. Judge you, treat you like you don’t exist. Like Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People with her son, only a Jewish version. I’m so right here. You think that you’ve fucked your life up. What you don’t get is that it doesn’t hinge on your mother. It hinges on you and Carol. On a decision you have to make. Are you gonna go through with it, or not?”

“Come on, June. You’re not being helpful. And you know that’s not my mother.”

Her eyes bulged again, and now I knew it was from anger. Steam jetted from her mouth as we rounded a corner. Her feet began to stomp more than walk. “You asked for my advice,” she said.

We reached the Zoo’s southern entrance, and suddenly she stopped walking and turned towards me. I noticed for the first time that her eyes were slanted upwards at the outer edges. She’d done a shoddy job with her lipstick: it spilled onto the skin below her mouth. I tried to hide a discourteous smile. “You know what I really think?”

“What?”

“That you don’t even care what your mother thinks. And you don’t even care what I think. You just get off on all this talking about you. YOU and YOUR problems. Like the world revolves around you.”

“That is not true, June.”

“You haven’t even asked about me. Not a single question. How my parents are, how my sister is. How we’re liking our new house. Why do I put up with this?”

My gut trembled. I felt bad now. She was right: consumed with my problems, I’d been overly selfish. “How’re your parents?”

“They’re getting divorced.”

“Divorced?” Now I felt completely in the wrong. I knew I had problems, but at least my parents were married. I regretted having begged her to come with me to help me untie the knots in my life. “Divorced?”

She began walking again. “Too painful to talk about,” she said. “I can’t bear to think about it. Thirty-two years and--done. Kaput. No more.”

“Well I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” she said, walking even faster. We were almost at the southwestern corner of the Zoo, near the Ninth Hole, where Dad drank with his buddies Sunday evenings. “Your parents have played it off so well. They’ve pretended to love each other.”

“They do love each other!”

“Right. They do. Hey--how about a crepe?”

“I don’t know. I’m not very hungry. But I’ll sit with you if you want.”

“I want,” she said, her eyes bulging again, but now because she was interested. She turned towards me, like she always does when she’s about to ask a question. “So have you decided yet?”

“Decided?”

“Not you and Carol. But you. What are you going to do?”

“I want the procedure done.”

Carol was my girlfriend of five years. We’d met at Bennington, in a lecture hall. She’d sat next to me one day and told me my fly was open. I looked: it was zipped tight as ever. “I’m kidding,” she’d said. “I’m Carol.” That was how it began. Five years later we were living together unmarried.

“Why don’t you just propose to her?” June said. She said it as though she’d discovered a new planet, like she was the profoundest person in the world.

“I can’t, June. I’m too young.”

“Twenty-seven’s not too young. Two generations ago the average age for a man to marry was twenty-three.”

“Still. I don’t know that she’s the one.”

“You’ve been together FIVE YEARS.” It sounded like she was talking through a megaphone. I loved and hated June for her directness. More loved than hated.

“It’s true. But to rush into marriage, and because of one little accident? How about that crepe?”

We walked to Skinker and plopped at a table outside. I had little appetite, my mind so preoccupied that there was no space for the thought of food.

“Eat a bite?” she said, pointing with her knife at the banana-and-chocolate crepe. She’d saved a sliver for me.

“No. Mm mm.”

“You look lost in thought.”

“I kind of am.” I suddenly wished I hadn’t said I was, because now she’d pry. She’d want to know what I was going to do, how I was going to proceed. “If you want to know if I’ve come to a conclusion about what to do, I haven’t.”

“I wasn’t going to ask,” she said, and I felt embarrassed. “But now that you’ve told me--oh, never mind.” She looked at me quickly, then looked away, like she was playing a game. “I just think that you ought to tell your mother.”

“It doesn’t concern her, June.”

“Doesn’t it? She’ll only be the grandparent. And what a great grandmother she’ll make! Carol’s parents--now they’re a different story.” She couldn’t have been more right. Mom, while occasionally distant, was more often than not attentive, and as full of love as a religious leader. Dad had for the most part done a good job of fathering--it was only recently that he’d begun his love affair with beer. But Carol’s parents were so hands-off that they’d not once visited her at Bennington, had never taken her to visit colleges, and now only spoke to Carol when Carol called them (they didn’t call her). They never even remembered to call Carol on her birthday. I couldn’t envision any scenario where they’d do well as grandparents. They’d probably not even remember the baby’s name.

“Have you thought of names?” Carol said, like she had ESP.

“No. I haven’t. But I don’t want to give it an overly Jewish name.”

“What, for Christ’s sake, is an overly Jewish name?”

“Solomon? Saul?” She looked at me like I was crazy. “I’m kidding. I dunno. Adam, or Jacob or something. I figure, if it’s a boy, call him something New Testament-y, you know, so he blends in. Like Luke, or Matthew.”

“Aren’t you proud of your Old Testament roots?”

“Not especially.”

She gave me a confused glare, then returned to what remained of our (her) crepe. “You know,” she said, scooping up the last bite of banana and chocolate and pancake with her fork. “A birth is really only cause for celebration. Provided you get to that stage, I mean. It’s not like a death. And, who knows? What if he’s the next, like, Einstein?”

The thought made me smile. I felt grateful that June was interested in my troubles, lucky I had her to consult. Suddenly she even looked attractive, bulging eyes and all. Her hips had a nice curve to them, something that, as I watched her and pretended to be looking elsewhere, made me feel hungry. “Would you like another crepe?” I said.

“I am stuffed to the brim.”

We paid and left, and walked North on Skinker, back towards my parents’ house. Suddenly a breeze blew over the trees and seemed to land only on us. I shivered as a slow tinge of cold crept down my spine and legs. June was looking off in the distance. “What are you thinking?” I asked.

“I’m thinking about the weather. The way the wind is blowing. You can almost read the trees--see? They tell you which way the wind is coming from. You can read it in the trees before the wind gets to us.”

I paused to look. Another gust pelted us, and I grabbed June and hugged her for warmth. She squeezed back, then let go. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go. What’s wrong? Come on, it’s cold out.” I started walking. “You need to tell your mother. Let’s go tell her. You’ll get it off your chest. You don’t need to hide this. You oughtn’t be ashamed. Come on, let’s go. LET’S GO!” she shouted. “If you don’t walk I’m leaving you here. Okay, I’m leaving you. Goodbye. Call me later. GOODBYE!”

I couldn’t, didn’t want to move. The cold air kept coming, and I watched June walk away backwards, not blinking, not stumbling, just growing smaller and smaller. Suddenly she disappeared around a corner and was gone.

“GODDAMMIT.”

A black man rolled down his window and yelled, “You okay?”

“Yeah, fine.” I lifted a foot and another foot and began slogging down the street, wishing I were somewhere else.

Charles Gershman's fiction has been rejected by the Michigan Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Boulevard, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The Yale Review, and others. He edits Brink Magazine and lives in New Haven, Connecticut. E-mail him here.