by Tom Perrotta
I'd never seen Sharon tipsy before. She seemed more animated than usual, a little less vigilant. When Suzy asked for a dance partner, Sharon was the first volunteer. She was a cool and limber dancer, sexier than I expected.
“Sharon's great,” Dave told me as we made our fourth trip to the rest room.
“Thanks,” I said.
We pressed ourselves against the bannister to make way for Vince Fowler, Harding's superstar heavyweight wrestler. Vince had chosen to wear his bow tie on his forehead, making his face look like a frightening birthday present.
“Fuckin’ prom!” he shouted, slapping us five as he passed.
The rest room attendant greeted us with a nod. His job, as far as I could see, entailed sitting on a stool and listening to the Mets game on a transistor radio.
I followed Dave into an empty stall. He flipped down the toilet seat and climbed on top of it, so anyone passing would only notice one pair of shoes. He took a long swig of blackberry brandy and handed me the flask.
“We're all going to the Arrowhead after this,” he said. “You guys should come.”
“What's the Arrowhead?”
“You don't know?”
I shook my head.
“It's a motel on Route 9. Twenty bucks a night, no questions asked.”
Someone knocked on the door. Dave dropped into a squatting position. The latch rattled.
“Open up. It's only us.”
Giggling, Ted and Robert piled into the closet-size stall. Without a word, they joined Dave on top of the toilet, all three of them balancing precariously on the horseshoe-shaped seat. The flask made another circuit. Ted nudged Robert. They were drunker than we were and had become fast friends.
“Dude,” he said, “you've got to tell these guys.”
“Huh?” Robert seemed a little bewildered. He had one hand on Ted's shoulder and was marching in place on the seat, lifting one white shoe, then the other.
“You know,” Ted told him. “Puke City.”
Robert moaned. “Man, that was a secret.”
Ted turned first to Dave, then to me. He had a big smile on his little face.
“Every time they have sex, Rita loses her lunch.”
Dave and I exchanged grimaces.
“During?” I asked.
“After,” said Robert. “She can't help it. It's some kind of reflex.”
Dave reached past me and patted Robert on the arm.
“That must be awful.”
Robert nodded. “It kind of detracts from the experience.”
“Well,” said Ted, “just hope they have barf bags at the Arrowhead.”
When I got upstairs, Rita Sue was alone at the table. Sharon, Suzy, and Anita were on the crowded dance floor, where a forest of waving arms spelled out the chorus of “YMCA.”
“Hey,” I said. “How come you're not out there?”
She shrugged, took a sip of water, and smiled. “You and Sharon make a good couple.”
“Robert's a nice guy.”
“I'm glad you're all getting along,” she told me. “He can be a little shy.”
Daria Peck was elected Prom Queen. When Mr. Landon announced her name, she let loose with a bone-chilling wail, as if she'd just been informed that her whole family had gone down in a plane crash. She shrieked again when Mrs. Petrosky crowned her with a silver tiara and the crowd burst into applause.
The lights in the banquet hall grew dim.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Jimmy Dee, “I'd like to invite each and every one of you onto the dance floor for the final and most special song of the evening, the one that you, the Harding High Class of ‘79, have chosen as your prom theme. And while you hold on tight to that certain someone, why not take a moment to reflect on the meaning of this wise and beautiful song of love, composed by the multitalented Mr. Billy Joel.”
Despite my write-in vote for Aerosmith's “Dream On,” the class had chosen “Just the Way You Are” by a wide margin. I took Sharon's hand and led her onto the dance floor as the music began. Jimmy Dee's electric piano was sick with reverb, his voice soggy with emotion as he begged his lover not to change the color of her hair.
“I hate this song,” Sharon whispered.
Beams of light ricocheted off the spinning disco ball, painting the dancers with swirling stripes of color. The floor was so packed, all you could do was hold your partner and sway a little from side to side. Couples around us began making out; it reminded me of that scene in Carrie, just before the blood started to fly. I glanced hopefully at Sharon. She smiled back. But before I could kiss her she pulled me close, resting her forehead on my collarbone.
I brushed my fingertips across her shoulders, inhaling the peculiar and luxurious atmosphere of her hair. She didn't protest, so I stroked her neck, ran my knuckles over the ridges of her spine, traced with my palm the soft slope where her hips began. Her body was warm and my hands trembled. I wanted that stupid song to last forever.
I was nervous when we got into the car. We still hadn't figured out what to do next.
“They're all going to a motel,” I said.
“I know. Anita asked if we wanted to go.”
“Should we?”
She stared straight ahead through the windshield, clutching her white shawl tightly to her throat.
“What would we do at a motel?”
“Would it be so awful?”
“I guess we could watch TV,” she conceded.
“That last dance,” I said. “Did you feel my hands?”
“They were shaking.”
“It was nice to touch you.”
“I had a good time,” she said. “It was fun being part of a group like that.”
The cars around us pulled out, forming a long line at the exit. We were like a small island of indecision in a dark corner of the parking lot.
“What should we do?” I asked.
She gave a little shrug and gazed down at her lap. The barrettes were gone; her hair hung moplike, concealing her face. She tried to tuck some behind her ear, but it spilled back out. She lifted her head and fixed me with a suspicious look.
“Can I trust you?”
“Sure.”
“I'm going to tell you something. But first you have to promise to be nice to me.”
I promised. She unclasped her evening bag and took out her wallet. She removed a photograph from a laminated pouch and pressed it into my hand.
“Remember,” she said. “You promised to be nice.”
I flipped on the dome light and found myself looking at a school portrait of a girl with olive skin and straight dark hair. She wore a white turtleneck and a dreamy yearbook expression. Her nose was big, but it seemed to fit with the rest of her face.
“That's Lorraine. She was my best friend.”
“So?”
“We got into big trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
She bit her lip. “You have to understand. We spent a lot of time together.”
A middle-aged waitress with a platinum bouffant stepped out the front door of the Manor. She lit a cigarette and exhaled into the night. The smoke hung momentarily in the air, a ghostly, quivering blob. I turned off the light. Sharon took back her picture.
“Her brother found her diary,” she said. “It had some stuff about us.”
“Stufi?”
“Her parents freaked out. They made her transfer to Catholic school. They wouldn't even let us talk on the phone.” She snapped her fingers. “It happened like that.”
“Wait up,” I said. “What did she write in the diary?”
“I don't know. I didn't see it.”
My hands were shaking again.
“Did you guys do something?”
“It happened,” she said. “I don't see why everybody has to flip out.”
“How many times?”
“I don't know. What difference does it make?”
I had a bad moment. The interior of the car seemed to expand, until a vast distanc
e separated me and Sharon on the front seat. Pictures from dirty magazines flashed through my mind. I turned away from her and found myself startled by the sight of my own tuxedo, the eggshell cummerbund bulging like a pot belly. A sickly laugh escaped from my throat.
“What's wrong?” she asked.
“What's wrong?” My voice was loud with indignation; I didn't want it to sound like that. “What's wrong? You invite me to the goddam prom and then—”
She cut me off. “Look, I'm sorry I brought it up. I thought you would understand.”
“I'm not sure I do.”
“Fine,” she said. “Maybe you should just take me home.”
“Maybe I should.”
The key was in the ignition, but my hands remained frozen in my lap. We just sat there like people at a drive-in, watching the waitress finish her cigarette. She dropped it on the pavement, stepped on it, and went inside.
“Why do you think we moved here?” she asked.
“Because ofthat?”
She waited for me to look at her, then nodded.
“You're kidding.”
“I thought it would blow over, but it kept getting worse. Kids started saying stuff to Gail, and my mother just couldn't deal with it anymore.”
“God.”
“You think we deserved that?”
I shook my head, remembering the way she'd looked her first few days at Harding, so anxious and alert, the way she had hugged her books to her chest, and how badly I'd wanted to get to know her. I remembered, too, how she had always changed the subject when I asked about her old school and the friends she'd left behind.
“I wanted to tell you a few times,” she said. “But I lost my nerve.”
“You ever hear from her?”
“I write her letters, but I don't send them.” She smiled. “I have this dumb fantasy she'll come visit me in college, and I'll dump this stack of like a hundred letters in her lap, and she'll read them and know everything that's happened to me.”
I could see it. Two girls in a bare room, envelopes everywhere.
“Don't forget tonight,” I told her.
Sharon looked at me. Her face was a question, close enough to kiss.
* * *
The front office of the Arrowhead Motel was constructed to resemble a gigantic roadside tepee. The desk clerk, though, was an Indian from India. I expected him to give us a hard time about our age and prom clothes, but he completed the entire transaction without making eye contact or saying anything except the price of the room. I signed us in on the register as “Mr. and Mrs. Billy Joel.”
The room was small, decorated in dark brown and burnt orange. It smelled of an ongoing conflict between mildew and Lysol. A picture of the Eiffel Tower hung crookedly over the bed. Through the thin wall, we could hear the couple in the next room having sex. The man's name was Jack.
“Well,” said Sharon, “at least it's no one we know.”
The black and white TV had no vertical hold. No matter how many knobs I twisted, the picture just kept rolling by, like a broken slot machine.
“Oh no,” said Sharon. “We're stuck in the Arrowhead with no TV. This is one version of hell.”
I made a quick trip to the yellow, slightly funky bathroom, and returned just in time to hear the action in the next room come to a surprisingly abrupt halt. Sharon was standing by the bed, examining a green metal box on the night table. It had a coin slot but no instructions.
“What the heck,” she said.
She took a quarter from her purse and dropped it in. To our amazement, the bed began to rumble and vibrate. We dove on for the ride, rolling toward the center of the saggy mattress. We felt only a gentle trembling at first, but it grew gradually stronger, and then stronger still, until it seemed, for a few turbulent seconds, that it wasn't just the bed, but the earth itself that was shaking beneath us. When it was over, we stared at each other in stunned silence.
We giggled all the way through the second quake. By the end of the third, we were laughing so hard that Jack from next door started pounding on the wall. Lucky for him, we were all out of quarters.
Wild Kingdom
Mr. Norman died the summer after my first year in college. I had insomnia that night. I was lying in bed thinking bad thoughts about my ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend when my bedroom walls started pulsing with pink light. I got up and went to the window. The ambulance was right next door.
My parents were already on the front porch when I got there, my mother wide awake in her robe, my father yawning in shorty pajamas. We watched silently as the first aid squad carried Mr. Norman out of his house on a stretcher. Mrs. Norman came out right behind him in the company of a fat policeman. She wore a windbreaker over a long filmy nightgown that swirled delicately around her legs as she walked. The cop led her down the driveway and past the ambulance to a patrol car parked across the street. He opened the passenger door and helped her inside, almost as though they were going on a date. Both vehicles sped off without sirens.
We didn't find out Mr. Norman was dead until the following evening, when his wife called and asked if I would be one of the pallbearers at his funeral. Her request surprised me. Mr. Norman and I had been on neighborly terms, but we were too far apart in age to ever really be friends. When we saw each other, we said hello.
“I'd be glad to,” I said. “He was a good man.”
I expected my parents to be upset with me for saying yes, but Mr. Norman's death seemed to have wiped his slate clean with them. My father shook my hand. “It's a good thing you're doing,” he said.
The wake was at Woodley's Funeral Home. My parents and I were numbers 7, 8, and 9 on the Register of Mourners, but when we entered the viewing room, the only people there were Mrs. Norman, her daughter Judy Klinghof, and a clean-cut guy I assumed was Judy's husband. Mrs. Norman was holding a handkerchief to her mouth and sobbing. It sounded like she had the hiccups.
Mr. Norman was laid out in a half-open coffin that seemed to be floating on a bed of flowers. My parents knelt at the padded altar in front of him and bowed their heads to pray. I glanced over my shoulder at Judy Klinghof, whom I hadn't seen for years. She had changed from a beautiful hippie girl into this plain-looking woman with rose-tinted glasses and a perm. She was whispering something to her husband, who for some reason had taken off one of his shoes and was holding it up to the light.
When my parents were done, I got down on my knees and made the sign of the cross. Mr. Norman wore a blue pinstriped suit with a tiny American flag pinned to the lapel. He reminded me of an astronaut strapped into a capsule, calmly waiting for liftoff.
I was nine years old the first time I saw him. For my family, at least, it had been an ordinary fall Sunday. After church, we drove to Jersey City so my mother could visit her mother in the nursing home. We made the same drive every week. On the way, we passed a garbage dump that had been on fire for more than twenty years. My father told me that every time the firemen put out the blaze, it started up again a few hours later, so they finally decided to just let it burn. Some days the smoke was so heavy it was like driving through fog; other days you would just see a bonfire or two, as though people were camping out on that mountain of trash, maybe roasting marshmallows. A few miles up the road, we passed a sprawling junkyard where crushed car bodies of every imaginable color were stacked six and seven high.
Only my mother went into the nursing home. My father and I stayed in the station wagon and tuned into the Giants game on the car radio. The Giants were awful, but it was easy to imagine otherwise, listening to Marty Glickman's play-byplay crackling from the dashboard. “Ron Johnson takes the handoff fakes right spins left breaks a tackle and struggles forward before being buried beneath a waveofredjerseysforagainof… one yard.”
A while later, my mother returned carrying a grocery bag filled with Grandma's dirty laundry. She passed the bag to me, and I stowed it in the back, holding my breath to avoid the smells. We got home in time to watch the Giants lose and then remained
in front of the TV for the West Coast game at four o'clock. We ate dinner during the second half. Every time the announcer raised his voice, my father and I put down our forks and rushed into the living room to see the replay.
After the game, that lousy Sunday night feeling sank in. I had homework but couldn't tear myself away from the TV. While my mother worked at the kitchen table, writing checks and licking envelopes, my father and I watched Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.
I was closest to the hallway, so when the doorbell rang, I got up to answer it. I was barely on my feet when it rang a second time.
“Hold your horses,” my father called out from the couch.
I flipped on the porch lights and pulled aside the curtain on the front-door window. For one Strange moment, I thought I was watching an outdoor television: right in front of me, on my own porch, a man was choking a woman, shaking her by the neck as though she were a rag doll. I let go of the curtain and walked backwards into the hallway.
“Who's there?” My father was squatting inches above the cushions on the couch, not sure if he should stand up or sit down.
“It's for you,” I said.
Just then the doorbell rang several times in rapid succession, making a sound like a pinball machine hitting the jackpot.
My father rushed outside. “Hey! HEY!” I heard him shout. “Not on my porch!” He stuck his head inside the door. “Honey! Call the police!”
When my mother hung up, I stepped onto the porch to let my father know the cops were coming. He was standing between the man and the woman, holding them apart like a boxing referee. “Just calm down,” he was saying. “Just everybody calm down.”
The strangler was a big guy, but not scary-looking, not the type you'd expect to find murdering a woman on your front porch. In fact, he looked like he was about to cry. He punched himself in the leg and said, “I had a good life. I was happy. And that… that whore next door ruined it. It's all her fault.”