efore she can see that he is not who she thinks, before taking his Amstel with him a little farther down the bar to where she's standing, Michael's asks the bartender for her story.

"Twenty-five, I'd guess. Never seen her before," the bartender said, reaching out of sight to swish a glass in some soapy water. "Paid for your beer with a corporate Amex."

Spit is fifteen minutes from where Michael lives with a roommate in a one-bedroom, mother part of a mother/daughter mortgaged to his parents. During the day, he works with wood at Creative Kitchens in Bayshore. While he talks to her, she untangles herself from the fairy-tale of someone else she'd thought she'd found in his long, blond hair. It's his hair that had caught her eye. There weren't a lot of people with hair like Michael's. She could think of one other who was purportedly out of town and why she was at the cavernous Long Island night club, drinking. Michael doesn't seem to realize that it's all been a mistake, her sending over a drink. While he talks to her, he is in a constant sly motion. His whole body smiles. These are good enough reasons, she thinks, to take his number.

It is Christmas-time and they arrange to meet on a thirty-degree Friday night in front of the Tree. This is his idea this first date kitsch and she knows that she will have to circuit Rockefeller Plaza to find him standing where he considers in front of the tree to be. Before leaving Penn Station, he buys her a rose. It suffocates in hard cellophane. The stem squeezed by a plastic Santa.

Michael pays for dinner with cash. Later she learns it is the money his mother has given him to get his older sister Lori a Christmas gift. Woodworking, does not pay well and the band pays not at all. He plays bass. She laughs when he tells her. She laughs harder yet when he says with a certain amount of ego with whom. A regional band whose demo-tape she can vaguely recall having stuck in her answering machine for incoming messages.

"I work for Hy Sobel, have you heard of him?" she asks wiping some lemon from the snapper away with her napkin. She looks down to avoid his reaction to the name of the man responsible for a third of the Billboard top ten, and sees that the napkin has coated her lap in lint.

Michael drives fifty-two miles through an icy rain in a '74 VW Beetle with no heat to pick her up for their second date. It is New Year's Eve. On the way back out to the Island, he vigorously rubs her thigh to keep her warm. She is less concerned with hypothermia than she is with the tin-can construction of the car. He takes her to a neighborhood with no sidewalks and few street lights. There are plastic reindeer on the front lawn, beer in an ice-filled avocado-green American Standard tub and two six foot subs spanning the kitchen sink. There is some commotion when he arrives. Michael's friends are kind enough, more curious of her than invested. Whoever's name is off limits hangs in the air. MTV supplants Dick Clark and after the countdown and the confetti, the first video of 1991 is Love Shack. The particular way he kisses her at midnight confirms what has been the unlikely decision to stand her friends up over at MTV.

Michael is a riot of movement. He is slick with sweat, and the girl-count is heavy in front of his side of the stage. She sits far away, at the bar. Drinks vodka tonics. Sighs a lot. She still doesn't like the music much, but can admit to the band's musicianship. Their girlfriends cluster for strength. They talk in loud voices, repeating snippets of what has apparently been some optimistic discussion about what a coup it is that Michael is dating her. She is able to dismiss their sardonic tone since she's never mentioned what she is or is not capable of making happen.

He hasn't yet, and she is pretty confident that it is Michael's plan to fuck her later. She lets his tantalizing the hopeful girls in the front act as foreplay.

By last call, there is an inch of snow outside. Michael holds her arm as she tip toes to the car. Someone else drives the Ryder truck with all of their equipment back to the rehearsal space they rent a room behind a pizzeria in a strip mall on Jericho Turnpike. They'll all meet tomorrow and unload before Michael, in whose name the truck has been loaned, needs to return it to A-1 Rent-All at three.

When she gets in the Bug, there is a stuffed animal on her seat. She has never received silly courtship gifts before and becomes momentarily overwhelmed.

"I thought we'd go back to my place." He smiles.

"Don't you have a roommate?"

"He sleeps on the couch."

"Does he get a discount in rent?"

"Yes, actually."

The animal sits in her lap as he drives. She smokes a cigarette over its head.

There is a path of landscape lights to follow. The door to his apartment is in the back yard and is kept unlocked. He takes her hand and brings her past a shadowy heap on a sofa bed to the bedroom. Her heels clap against the linoleum. He closes the hollow-core door behind him. There is a queen size mattress on the floor. She hears the whisper of his clothes and a click. An electric blanket dial glows orange in the dark. Its cord disappears between the mattress and the sheet. The baseboard heating is too expensive to run.

His body is sinewy. Her fingers find grooves that in the light she will discover are traces of growing pains. She is less quiet than he. But right before he comes he warns, "I'm gonna squirt." He seems shocked. She is a little horrified by his word choice.

They are late meeting the others, who are in a huddle beside a maple tree when she and Michael drive up. The one who looks unfortunately like Tiny Tim is eating two slices of pizza at once the orange grease dripping down the heel of a hand that is too cold to feel it. It disappears into the sleeve of a leather motorcycle jacket. As a whole, they do little to hide their discomfiture when they see her.

Brave in the light, the one who sings says, "I think I know you."

She puts her hand in Michael's. "Do you?"

He reads her. "Maybe not."

"Probably not," she says.

Michael brings her home for dinner. There is the cloying mix of tomato sauce on simmer and steam seeping through the vents of a cooling dishwasher. They climb a few stairs and meet his parents in the kitchen. His father stands and slips out from behind a table to greet her. His mother wipes her hands on a terrycloth apron but never offers her one. It is halfway through the meal ravioli when his mother can no longer abide Michael's father's curiosity, either that or in combination with the satisfied look on her son's face. She puts down her fork.

"She's not at all like Olga, Michael." Her small fingers are curled into her palms, her wrists rest on the edge of the table, the heat from her dish adds more color to her face.

"Ma," Michael says.

"I miss her Michael. What can I tell you."

"I would offer something. Clearly you would like me to, but I don't know who Olga is," she says.

"Olga is an old family friend," his father says.

"Olga was my girlfriend for eight years," Michael

tells her.

"She was here only two weeks ago, Michael."

"Ma, we broke up. She's not dead."

"It's just, you've broken up before and you've never done this."

"This?" Not-Olga says.

"This must be very uncomfortable for you," Michael's father tells her. "I guess what my wife is afraid of, well, they were very well suited, Olga and Michael. And you, well, are you here to see how the other half lives?"

She chokes. "The other half?"

"We're very proud of Michael," his father says. "Don't misunderstand me. But aren't you casting your line in the wrong pond?"

The VW makes it to the corner and then dies. She steers while he pushes the little car back to the driveway. Michael directs the heat in his father's Daytona on her feet and leaves it running while he fills the tank at the Hess station near the on-ramp of the Southern State. She watches him in the mirror. Up drafts catch his hair at odd angles.

She rolls down her window. "So, what's Olga doing these days?" she calls out.

"Moving on. It's what we're both doing." He winds the gas cap back on. "So, yes," he tells her, getting into the car. "This is a test. I have no idea how to be with another woman. There's my dirty little secret."

"Everyone, besides your parents, keeps it very well for you. Is she pretty?"

"She's beautiful."

"I stand corrected."

As Michael's new girlfriend, she becomes one of those weekend travelers who clog the great room of Penn Station on Friday nights. She rides the Babylon line, the only one not flashing the conductor a monthly ticket with a patent look of exhaustion.

Masapequa, Masapequa Park, Amityville, Copaigue, Lindenhurst, the conductor says. It is the melody and not the word which prompts her to rise, slide out of the row and ride the gentle rocking in front of the door. She watches her reflection in the glass, and the people behind her. Michael will be waiting under the platform at the foot of the stairs, inside his father's warm car which will be enveloped in white exhaust.

The train doors open. On the weekends she disappears into his world. They grab dinner not far from the station at an Italian joint that prepares the chicken parm just the way he likes. They go to Spit to drink and sometimes dance wildly. They come home drunk, taking back roads, avoiding the cops. They have sloppy sex. Parts of them are embarrassingly stuck together in the morning. They stop at the IHOP at dusk and feed the hangovers made by Rumple Minz, his, and Fuzzy Navels, hers, before he drives her back to the City.

Michael's sister Lori and her husband are making payments on a high-ranch in a half constructed development in Yaphank. One Saturday, Michael takes her to meet his "babbles." They rush him at the door little stockinged feet pounding slippery parquet. They climb him like a jungle gym. She stands aside and admires a vein that is strung across Michael's right biceps when, talking their secret language, he lifts each—brother and sister—with an arm.

The girl climbs down out of the Michael tree, she cocks her head precociously. "Where's Olga?"

"Out of the mouths of babes." His mother's ironic voice floats out of the kitchen.

That night he presents her with a wooden sculpture of a dinosaur, laminated like counter-top. The gift comes in two parts. Herbivore and a dialog bubble that reads: you make me feel primitive.

It takes her a whole month of dirty dancing at Spit for her to realize that the point where he slows down on the back route, across disused train tracks and over some marshy spots, is beneath the window of Olga's apartment. When she realizes it, she doesn't say anything. She doesn't say anything because, at the 7-Eleven one night when he stops for a pack of cigarettes, he donates a dollar to the Muscular Dystrophy Association and fills out a paper heart in their names which hangs over the beer case well past Valentine's day. It is the 7-Eleven nearest Olga's window.

It all begins to unravel when the guitarist in his band gets into a Saturday night car wreck. He totals his Firebird and his face. The group gathers in Jamaica Estates at the guitarist's parents' house where he is convalescing. The crumpled frame of the Firebird has been deposited at an angle at the foot of the brick steps where everyone stops as if it is a font of holy water, before going inside.

The bedroom is stuffy. Band members and their girlfriends encircle the bed, leaning or sitting on whatever surface is accessible. The guitarist's hair is matted with dried blood and there is a good amount of messy stitching as well as the smell of unclean clothes, Aqua Net and beer. The record the band released through an indie label has been framed in a manner consistent with those that have been first professionally dipped in gold. She can't seem to avert her eyes from the ridiculousness of it. Everything shifts.

They have to cancel the gig and this is how it begins. She is in a corner with both her arms and legs crossed. Michael is not too far away. Not close enough to touch. Someone mentions that Olga's called. She wants to come over. "Today?" someone else asks. Everyone looks at Michael who seems genuinely unperturbed.

Michael's new girlfriend brings up the showcase. The occupants of the room glare as though they have forgotten it's what she does for a living, and why they pretend to like her. How unfeeling, their eyes say. Now, Michael's posture changes.

"Name dropper," one of the girlfriends says without addressing her. "As if those people were really going to show up anyway."

The woman with whom Michael has been spending five months of weekends, straightens and uncrosses her arms opens herself up to Michael's silence. What she hears is the vibrato of Hy's laughing after she's had to expose to him that she's fallen for a mediocre musician a bass player.

"Shut this off," Hy had said from a cumulus of pot smoke. Laughing and coughing, barely raising his arm. She'd practically dove at the stereo ejecting the cassette.

"Sure, go ahead. Arrange a showcase," he'd told her as if he'd expected nothing less. "But, you're a poor poker player, my dear."

© RoseMarie London