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7 8 Y L O V E A N D M O N E Y J O A N S I L B E R My high school girlfriend wanted me to marry her. Who gets married in high school? ‘‘My mother isn’t even married,’’ I said. ‘‘That’s your argument?’’ Veronica said. It was very devoted of her, very desperate. She was going o√ to college in the fall, to Michigan, and I was staying home in Queens, neighborhood guy that I was, and she didn’t want to lose me. We had sex whenever we could, that summer before she left, but I didn’t make any false promises. I’d be reeking from my job washing dishes at the restaurant, and she’d act as if sweat and grease were so seductive she couldn’t stand it. All summer we were at it, with melancholy adding deeper pangs to the act. Wherever I was, she was in my head every second, but I knew it couldn’t last forever. And it didn’t. We phoned and emailed every day the first month – miss you, miss you, we wrote – but then she got busy with school and extra activities they had at night, and I was taking computer courses and still putting in my hours at the restaurant, and right when she had to talk to me about a certain person she met in Cinema Club, he knew amazing things about film, I al- 7 9 R ready had a thing going with a girl in my Intro to Data Structures class. ‘‘You know how sorry I am,’’ she said, and she was tearful. My voice was hoarse when I said I was sorry too. Part of me was relieved, but not as relieved as I expected. Veronica married that guy from college, right after graduation, and it turned out his last name was the name of a famous department store. He came from a family with unspeakable sums of money. I never thought that was why she married him – she wasn’t like that – and people told me they lived in a junky apartment in Bushwick before those blocks got so gentrified. I heard he wasn’t into showy spending, the husband. He worked as a cameraman , which paid decently when any film wanted him, which wasn’t that often. People said he was an okay guy. He would never be okay by me, but that wasn’t his fault. Veronica had not grown up fancy. Her dad was the maintenance supervisor (that meant head janitor) of our elementary school, and her mom stayed home with Veronica and the three other kids. When my younger brother, Jack, who always had behavior issues, decided to scribble with Magic Marker all over the lockers, her father had him wash it all o√ with a scrub brush and scouring powder, and he got Jack to do it very peaceably. He scared him just enough to convince him. My mother was always worried about Jack. By the time he was fifteen, he was hanging around with what she always called xanthphai, which was Thai for thugs. Queens had plenty of Asian gangs, big on extortion and drugs and territorial brutality, and they had teenage gangs attached to them, like farm teams. Jack was hovering around a mixed cadre of Chinese and Vietnamese guys, not nice people. My mother was frantic to switch him into another school, get him away from those hoodlums, back to his better self. Mothers had their illusions. And how was she going to do this? Her American lover, our father, who didn’t live with us, had plenty of money. There were schools that could take my brother in hand. Our father refused flat out. His American kids, his regular family, had gone to public schools, and they were perfectly fine. He believed in public education. He wasn’t paying out an extra thirty thou a year in tuition for my crazy brother. There was no 8 0 S I L B E R Y discussing it, as far as he was concerned. They did discuss it, in furious voices, and my mother was so...

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