Cures for Heartbreak by Margo Rabb Page B

middle of my chest; my rouge ran, and the eyeliner, the fake eyelashes, the whole great mass of it smeared off until I must have looked like modern art, a twisted Picasso, features falling all over the place.
    â€œLook, you’re shedding,” Alex said, and plucked a hairy blob of false eyelash off my cheek. She held it up, like a spider.
    I couldn’t stop crying. I knew it was the wrong time to cry publicly now, so late for my mother’s death, so prematurely for my father’s. What no one ever tells you is that people don’t die all at once, but again and again in waves, before their deaths and after. And I wasn’t just crying for watching Richard leave with Gina, or seeing my father’s body, or the fight with my sister, or even my mother. It was everything, suddenly—every person and object and speck of existence in the world seemed as if it could be lost. I kept crying until my sister put her arms around me, my fallen eyelashes folded inside a crumpled tissue, and said, “Come on,” and took me to the cafeteria to eat.

MY MOTHER’S FIRST LOVE
    I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
    â€”Margaret Atwood
    Cat’s Eye                

T hat summer, I kept dreaming about the man who was my mother’s first love. In the dream I followed him, detective-like, slinking through museums, coffee shops, libraries, subway trains, hoping he’d lead me to my mother. He strode like a movie star, confident and oblivious to the rest of the world; at dusk he wound his way through Central Park, down narrow paths along patches of forest to a small, secluded lake. There, drying off by the shore, stood my mother. She looked nothing like she had when I last saw her, with her hair matted against the hospital pillow and her belly bloated with growths. By the lake her black hair gleamed like velvet; her stomach looked taut and smooth. At last you’ve found us, she said, reaching for my hand. I’ve been waiting.
    The dream had started in my summer English class, when Ms. Poletti asked us to write a story about true love.
    Groans all around. Billy Marino sailed a spitball at the blackboard. “I don’t know any love stories,” whined Luisa Rodriguez. Eddie Silva muttered “Bullshit” through his gold teeth. Marisol Peters ignored the class altogether to doodle across her No Guns in School! bookmark—a gift we’d allreceived from the Board of Education. I stared out the barred windows to the rolling pavement of the Bronx. I was in summer school for history and English; the only spring-semester class I’d excelled in was hygiene.
    â€œLove is beauty,” Ms. Poletti sighed, off in her own reverie. We’d just finished reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning in class; Ms. Poletti had recited each stanza in a Britain-meets-Bronx accent, her flower-patterned dress dipping frightfully low as her bosom heaved. She was an anomaly at our school, flitting about like a robin, perching on our desks to impart to each of us seeds of hope. Rumors about her abounded: Luisa swore she’d seen Ms. Poletti adjusting her G-string in the girls’ bathroom; Billy had spotted someone on the subway reading a romance novel by a Madame Poletti. In the cafeteria and on the walk to the D train after school we made fun of her, arching our eyebrows, shrilling our voices, but the consensus was that she was an improvement over Mr. Tortolano, the English teacher we’d had that spring. He had been fired in May after his membership in the North American Man-Boy Love Association had been confirmed. Everyone was passing now—that is, everyone but me.
    Failing English again