We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  Mrs. Gillis is PHILIP! thought-screamed Heather Houston.

  “Admit it,” Mrs. Gillis sniffled. Snow was settling in the curls of her hair.

  “Admit what?” said Girl Cory.

  “I’m ugly and I embarrass you.”

  “That’s on you, Mom,” Girl Cory shot back. “You made you feel ugly. You made you feel like you weren’t pretty enough to be my mother.” Girl Cory grabbed the bottle of schnapps and took a long swig.

  Mrs. Gillis stepped back. You could see a light dawning in her brain.

  It was Becca Bjelica’s Serbian grandmother Borislava who showed up next. Their scene was fairly anticlimactic. Šta ti je to na vratu? What’s that on your neck?

  “Šljiva,” Becca replied. A plum, which in Serbian meant hickey.

  Borislava was busy doing the math. There were nine other naked girls standing around plus one boy who didn’t look like a lover or a fighter. “I’m a virgin, Baka,” said Becca. “I think I hate men.”

  Borislava clapped her hands together, delighted. Snow tumbled off her shoulders. “Ja, takođe,” she cackled. Me too. Then they both started laughing, their ample bosoms heaving up and down in the firelight.

  The Fiorenza drama took center stage again. “Trust me. Clay’s a natural blond,” said Ana Fiorenza. “The carpet matches the drapes, kiddo.” She sighed before continuing. “Clay didn’t put bleach in your Sun In.” We all looked at one another with eyes startled wide. Ooo, this was going to hurt. Someone preemptively handed Jen the schnapps.

  “Then who did?” Jen said.

  Her mother looked at her sadly, the big reveal about to drop. We waited for it, but Ana was taking her time. Meanwhile, there was so much quality drama to watch, so many cliff-hangers that needed wrapping up—it was like channel surfing.

  “Am I jealous of you?” whispered Mrs. Gillis to Girl Cory. It was obvious she was talking to herself and not her daughter.

  “You can’t be angry in here,” said Dr. Johnson to AJ, again touching her heart. “That kind of anger will slowly kill you.”

  “No, Mom,” said Boy Cory after studying the customized postcard his mother had received that afternoon in the mail. “I haven’t gotten anyone pregnant and I maybe never will.” At the news, one of Mrs. Young’s leg warmers slipped down her calf, the thing pooling wanly around her ankle.

  Jen and her mom were still going strong. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” said Ana Fiorenza. “That maybe your color needed a boost?”

  “Bullshit,” yelled Jen.

  “Okay, no.” Her mother took a deep breath. “Everything was just going so well for you,” she said. “Maybe a little too good. Ever since you became field hockey captain, you’ve been walking around with that hair of yours like it was a freaking halo. Christ, sometimes it felt like that goddamn hair of yours was reading my mind. Nights I could feel it rummaging around in my brain, telling me I should break up with Clay, that he was a mooch and I’d be better off without him.” Mrs. Fiorenza shrugged. “I guess I just wanted to mess with you a little, you know, throw your hair off its game,” she said. “I swear I didn’t know that would happen.” She reached over and ran a hand over her daughter’s ravaged head.

  Then Mrs. Boucher came out of the woods. Crazily, she was still wearing her lunch-lady hairnet. “Ma chérie,” she said. Instantly hers and Mel’s became the most interesting story line to watch.

  “Dis-moi,” she pleaded. “Tu préfères les filles?” You prefer girls?

  “Quoi? Mais no, maman!” Mel retorted as le Splotch shook Its head, laughing.

  Dr. Monique Johnson walked over and shone the penlight she’d used to navigate through the woods on le Splotch. In the direct light, the thing hissed like a wet cat. “Criminy,” she said. “Child, how long have you had that?” She surveyed the rest of Mel’s naked body for other unusual growths, lingering a long moment on her torso, which we’d always just thought of as being boxy and maybe a little bit boxier these past few weeks. Oops! Our bad. Outside the light of the fire the snow swirled thick enough to erase the night. Dr. Johnson switched off her penlight and handed Mrs. Boucher the bottle of schnapps.

  * * *

  —

  “I can’t believe our moms didn’t come,” said Heather Houston to Julie Minh. We were trudging back to the road. The fires were out. The December air cold as the tomb. The world around us had transformed, the trees white and glittering in the cold as if strung with Christmas lights. About half our mothers had shown up. Among the no-shows were Mrs. Houston, Mrs. Kaling, Mrs. Yoon, Mrs. Putnam, Mrs. Smith. Later we would find out it was just chance pure and simple. Nicky Higgins had mailed out her neatly typed bombshells the day before. Some had taken only a single day to arrive in our mailboxes, others wouldn’t hit until tomorrow. Each postcard had a picture of a Halloween witch on the front. Typed on the back was the following note:

  MIDNIGHT THURSDAY

  at the DANVERS RESERVOIR:

  COME FIND OUT WHAT YOUR DAUGHTER HAS BEEN UP TO

  & HOW SHE GOT PREGNANT!

  Why’d she do it? If we’d been paying attention, we would’ve heard that earlier in the week the nominations for the Flamie awards had gone out. Despite what Emilio had promised one rainy night long ago at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, intrepid Falcon Fire reporter Nicky Higgins wasn’t listed among the nominees. It was just revenge, plain and simple, coupled with a lucky guess. Ten teenaged girls. Chances were good one of us would end the season tin roof rusted.

  That night as we left our Gathering, Abby Putnam found a faster path through the woods. It brought us out on a side road, a place with no houses, no streetlights, just one car parked in the dark, the car covered with snow, its features blanketed in white. Yes, it was rocking gently back and forth, somebody obviously home and presumably climbing a stairway to heaven. Little Smitty snuck up and penned a message in the snow on the back window with her green fingers. GET A ROOM! Then Julie Minh noticed the license plate. GODLUVS. She brushed off a small section of the car to reveal a Smurfy-blue bumper. Later we wouldn’t know how to describe the sound she made as she cleared the rear window in a single swipe. A war cry? A bellowing? Or was it just the sound of her whole world shattering at once?

  Talk about cliché. There they were. The religious nut and the Working Girl career woman in the backseat grappling with each other like wrestlers. The thing Heather Houston found most unforgivable about the whole situation wasn’t its unoriginality but the empty candy wrappers haphazardly tossed on the dash.

  DANVERS VS. DANVERS

  Friday afternoon Abby Putnam throws the last two bags of Kingsford in her cart. Slowly she scans the area, a lioness defending her kill, watching to see if anyone has her in their sights. An elderly gentleman at the other end of the charcoal aisle stands squinting in the fluorescents like a gunslinger in the noonday sun, legs akimbo as if ready to draw. Too bad, she thinks. What’s mine is mine. All’s fair in love and charcoal. All around her the chaotic world is proving her point, the Home Depot on Route 114 a madhouse as people willy-nilly grab anything outdoor related and run for the exits. As she wheels her haul down the aisle, Old Man McSquinty tips his battered Red Sox cap her way and winks.

  “Good luck tonight,” he says. He’s probably just a lifelong smoker, she thinks, but there’s something in his voice, something knowing, as if he’s foreseen how her night will unfold, what mayhem she and her crew will spangle across the universe.

  Though she doesn’t want to, Abby takes the bait. “For what?” she asks.

  Prophetically McSquinty points a knobby finger skyward.

  “Right. Thanks,” she replies, then adds, “You too.”

  McSquinty tips his cap at her a second time before strolling off down the aisle. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” a voice says, but she can’t be sure if it’s McSquinty talking or just her moon-addled imagination.

&
nbsp; Thanks to the Internet, today we’re all suffering from acute lunacy. Tonight at two minutes to midnight, all of America will be out in the dark craning their necks toward the southwest quadrant of the sky for what’s billed to be a total lunar event. According to eclipse.nasa.gov, the moon should first turn blood-red as the earth’s shadow engulfs it before disappearing for thirteen minutes. Consequently, emergency rooms across the country are gearing up for large swatches of earthlings to run amok in the biblical dark. Apparently, it’s what we earthlings do. When the cat’s away, the mice will play, in this case, the cat being the light of the natural world that keeps our baser instincts in check.

  Speaking of baser instincts, as she stands in line for the self-checkout, Abby can feel her heart start to pound as she tries not to imagine what will happen if Elle and August come home later this afternoon and neither of them have been chosen. She knows how badly a teen girl can want something, what dark paths that bottomless wanting can lead a girl down. She remembers a certain Friday long ago after we’d all called it a day, how Jen Fiorenza and her crazy hair slipped back into Coach Butler’s office and swapped out the votes in Marge’s Garfield coffee mug. At the time, we all thought Jen being voted captain was simply the will of some ’80s teen heartthrob. It was only Abby who the following Monday just before practice went and picked the actual votes out of Marge’s trash can, Jen’s name written over and over again in the same purple ink.

  Would things have played out any differently if Abby had blown the whistle on her childhood friend, and Cory G. was named captain? Would we have followed the dark blotch on Mel Boucher’s neck all the way to Worcester? And would it still have come down to that one final shot? Maybe, maybe not. You have to admit ever since we signed our names in that book, things turned out pretty damn good for everyone involved, especially in the long run. Que será, será, or however the hell you conjugate it. What has been, has been.

  Madonna’s “Holiday” starts up on Abby’s phone but she silences it without looking. She’s already told her number two at Abby Organics that she’s off-limits this weekend. This weekend her oldest friends in the world are all coming back into town to celebrate the wedding of Mel Boucher. There’ll be plenty of time later to figure out whether or not the new Açai All-Natural Smoothie needs less blue-green algae or more magnesium lactate. Because Abby herself always has the final say, as with everything else, she’ll probably decide it simply needs more banana.

  Damn! Would this kid hurry up with his camping chairs? She’s already late to Cory G.’s, and the twenty-something in front of her obviously has more than ten items in his cart and now can’t seem to find his credit card. Abby sighs and pops the top on an Abby Organics Blackberry Chia Seed Smoothie. Truthfully the thing is 45% banana and 40% apple concentrate, but according to sales, nobody seems to care. Finally a checkout opens up and it’s her turn to play. She settles up in a jiffy with her phone. She always seems to be cashless these days—who has time to hit an ATM? Somewhere in the vast trash can of her mind Abby has vague childhood memories of accompanying her father to the bank; back then if you didn’t make a withdrawal by Friday afternoon at five, you didn’t have any money for the weekend. Sometimes she tries to explain these things to Elle and August, how there was a time before Alexa when you had to physically get your butt up off the couch to change the channel, but her kids just look at her the way they once did when they saw a cow at a petting zoo up in Maine with two separate udders sagging woefully between its legs.

  Now out in the parking lot, the sun a white-hot emoji in the sky, Abby slams closed the back gate on Little Smitty’s old blue Ford that she’s borrowed for the extra hauling space. It’s a miracle the thing even still runs, but they don’t make ’em like they used to. Across the lot she can see Old Man McSquinty getting into his car utterly Kingsford-less, the last two bags safely tucked away in Little Smitty’s truck bed.

  Then she remembers. Abby rubs her eyes as if that will clear the fog from her moony brain. Ever since Mel announced her wedding plans two weeks ago, Abby has found herself floating around on autopilot. Only thing is it’s not 1989 anymore. It’s a whole other millennium. Her twins Elle and August are high-school seniors and members of the Class of 2020. Today is Friday. It’s the start of Labor Day weekend and the last day of Double Sessions over at the high school. Cory G. has a $10,000 top-of-the-line outdoor Viking, the thing with its own gas line. Thirty years ago we would’ve needed charcoal for a night like the one we have planned. Thirty years ago Bush père was both president and decorous. Today you just press a button on the Viking and POOF! You’re in business. Today, politically speaking, the word “decorous” is the passenger pigeon of adjectives.

  Speaking of business, Abby’s phone dings, and then our afternoon collectively takes a hard right onto memory lane.

  * * *

  —

  Meanwhile across town Julie Minh says it’s going to be a beautiful night with a less than 5% chance of precipitation. Hopefully the computer models are right about the weather. Tonight the only lunar eclipse of the last three years is supposed to begin at 11:58. We’ll stake out our spot in the woods along the reservoir’s edge, making sure to put the fire out when the time comes so that we can lift a glass to the total dark. We couldn’t have planned it any better. With a wink, Heather Houston says it proves someone is still looking out for us.

  “Actually,” Julie Minh says, in a voice that signals she’s about to get all wonky, “there’s a high-pressure system stalled over the Berkshires, so there’s really nothing magical about it.”

  “Yeah, but who put it there?” counters Heather like a five-year-old at the start of a rousing game of I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I? The way they argue they sound just like sisters. When Julie Minh doesn’t respond, Heather nods with satisfaction and looks around at the handful of us gathered on Cory G.’s back deck. “All I’m saying is a little credit where credit is due,” she says. “Who here has anything to complain about?”

  Silently we look around.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” Heather says.

  She’s not wrong. For starters, Julie Minh’s Channel 9 White Mountain forecasts are on the money a little more than 95% of the time. She has one of the most accurate track records of any weatherman in the country. In addition to always wearing purple, she’s also famous for sporting one weather-themed item of dress on-air so that viewers now send her meteorological accoutrements, stuff like lightning-bolt earrings or snowflake scarves or that one time somebody mailed in a pair of purple panties with the words APRIL SHOWERS emblazoned over the crotch.

  “When you’re doing the weather,” asks Cory G., “you ever get any of the old inklings from the Big Man upstairs?” Vaguely she points at the sky. “Or is it all just science, pure and simple?”

  Julie Minh fingers the tiny gold wheel hanging on a chain around her neck. It’s a dharmachakra, the one piece of jewelry she’s never without, the wheel of dharma that the Buddha first put in motion when he taught of the Noble Eightfold Path at Deer Park twenty-five hundred years ago.

  “There’s only one big man upstairs at WMUR Manchester,” Julie Minh explains, “and her name’s Caitlyn. Caitlyn expects results.”

  “Amen to that,” says AJ Johnson, who drove up this morning in her Audi roadster from Tribeca where she’s one of the wizards of Wall Street.

  Yeah, amen to results. Those of us already in town lie lazing in a flotilla of lounge chairs scattered about on Cory G.’s back deck up on Treetops Lane. We can already imagine the feel of the night air on our naked skin, the moonlight warm as bathwater. Tonight’s eclipse will be a nice touch, the world temporarily thrown into the darkness from which everything arises. Ever the hostess, Cory G. has made sure we each have a glass of champagne in hand. AJ’s already on her second. Why not? When you’ve got something to celebrate, celebrate early and celebrate often. This is the day that the Lord hath made; let us rejoice and be
glad in it. And we’ve got oodles and oodles to be glad about.

  Among our oodles, Julie Minh Kaling drifted away from Catholicism her junior year at Gordon after she divorced Brunet Mark, whom she’d married just after high school. She then spent a semester studying abroad in Tokyo and came back from the Land of the Rising Sun a Theravada Buddhist—Zen was a little too outré for her. Senior year she transferred to UNH, where she studied atmospheric sciences and got hitched a second time to a fellow weather boy. They now have two kids.

  Heather Houston, on the other hand, is happily sans children but did indeed become an academic. She’s the Halls-Bascom Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Folklore at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She’s also a founding member of the Madison Merry Meet Conclave and has a seat on the American Council of Witches. During tonight’s eclipse she’s hoping to recharge a few crystals.

  AJ Johnson made a name for herself on the Asian trading floor at Merrill Lynch, but she’s smart enough to know that having the numbers in your corner isn’t always enough. If you ask what her secret is, she’ll say it’s a pair of brass cojones, but secretly she knows what sets her apart from the million other sharks on the Street is humility. That plus her natural hair, which she rocks in what’s become her signature style, a series of Bantu knots.

  “Where is everyone?” Becca Bjelica asks. She lets Cory G. refill her flute. She barely knows what to do with herself—it’s her first day off work in weeks. After graduating from Danvers High, Becca went next door to Salem State, then got accepted to one of the med schools down in the Caribbean where she was top of her class. It would seem that coming out as gay was just the thing she needed to turn on her brain. That and a breast reduction, her new figure sporty and svelte, her three bras at a time a thing of the past. “I thought I was going to be the last one here,” she says. “What gives?”