by Chris Lynch
He snapped the three tables of Gus’s relatives, all dressed in black. Gus said that in his culture black was festive. But they looked, faces too, as if they meant to be at the wake that was happening on the opposite side of the street. Davey shot a whole roll of them, fascinated at the changeless expressions through it all.
Sneaky Pete and Lois were dancing again. They were dancing together almost exclusively now, the string broken only by Pete’s trips to the bar to refire Lois’s vodka gimlet and his manhattan; or Pete’s visits to the DJ’s table to request yet another special song. Most of the songs said something about remembering. The good old days. When we were young. You’ll always be the one. That sort of thing. Sneaky Sneaky Pete, when he sank his teeth into a vein, he bit hard and he sucked.
He sang softly into her ear:
“I met my old lover
on the street last night . . .”
Davey took a picture of Lois, eyes closed tight, resting her head like a baby on Pete’s shoulder. Then he turned away fast.
While Lois was dancing with Pete, Joanne was dancing with everybody else. All the mourners from Gus’s family. All The Dogs, still grabbing her ass, though now she smacked their hands away. She even danced with Gus once or twice.
“Take this one, Davey. Davey, over here, I just have to have a picture of this. Take a bunch.” There were fifty people all together at the reception, relatives, party slugs, strangers. The kind of crowd you could assemble simply by throwing open the doors of a K of C, VFW, or Elks hall on any sweaty Sunday, without ever sending invitations. It would have been hard to gather any six of the fifty who all liked one another, and it would be even harder to pick six Joanne honestly liked. But now they were all vital to her happiness. “Oh Davey, Davey, get this one, get this one. The Girls, all together for the last time.” The girls all laughed drunkenly, hugged and kissed, and Davey recorded it.
When it was time to cut the cake, Davey was perched fifty feet away, by the swinging kitchen door, photographing that waitress every time she came through.
“Daaayyy-veeeee!” the whole crowd seemed to scream at once. Davey ran over and got there just in time to snap the bride and groom smashing squares of yellow sheet cake in each other’s faces to the sound of hysterical cheering, and “Pop Goes the Weasel” over the loudspeakers.
The cake was still being sliced up when, after a brief, teasing pause, the sound system came back up, louder than before, and the dance floor filled to capacity. It was karaoke time, and as the first bass lines of “Brown-Eyed Girl” thundered beneath the floor, there was Sneaky Pete rising above the dancers, microphone in hand, standing on the table.
“Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
la-la-te-da . . .”
Pete sang well, not his first time with a mike in his hand. He pointed right at Lois as he finished, and she melted like she was a teenager again and Pete was all four Beatles. Even though her eyes were actually black, not brown.
After serenading her once more, with “You Are My Sunshine,” Pete whispered something to the DJ, slapped a big bill in his hand, and stepped down to claim Lois. The heat and the Pete, the gimlets and the wedding of her daughter and the dreamy music were kneading her down. She was cream when Sneaky Pete scooped her up and danced her tight again. She reeled, he pressed. He sang soft and sweet and blew cool on her arched neck at the same time, to Ray Charles’s “You Don’t Know Me.”
“No, you don’t know the one
who dreams of you at night . . .”
Davey watched it, the way the TV host watches animals from the bush on nature programs. He shot. He shot Pete stroking his mother’s hair. He shot his mother nuzzling Pete’s cheek with her nose and playing lightly with his exposed chest hair. He shot his mother nibbling Pete’s trapezoid muscle near his neck, and crying dime-sized tears on the silk floral shirt.
“Forget about them, Davey,” Joanne said, yanking him by the sleeve. “Dance with me.” Joanne walked backward onto the dance floor, tugging Davey, who dragged like a mule.
“I have to take the pictures, Jo,” Davey said, shaking his head frantically. “I’m too busy, can’t dance, can’t dance.”
“Stop it,” she said, grabbing the camera from around his neck. “And smile for a change, will ya, for Christ’s sake.” Joanne giggled as she began snapping pictures of Davey.
“Cut it out, Jo,” he said, covering his face with his hands, turning sideways, looking down at the floor. “That’s enough. Gimme back the camera.” While he waited for her to give it back he stood looking at the floor, his hands plunged into his pockets, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot.”
“C’mon, Dave, it’s only fair. You’re taking everybody else’s picture, and nobody’s taking yours. When I look back, it’ll be like you weren’t even here.” Davey didn’t look up as long as she still held the camera. Joanne stopped giggling, looked at him, frozen stiff in the middle of the floor with people wiggling and singing all around him. She walked up and from her position—six inches shorter then him—stuck her face right in his.
“I ain’t ever seen a photo of you, have I, Davey?”
Davey shrugged his wide, gangly shoulders.
The camera strap hanging around her neck, Joanne took Davey’s face in her hands and turned it up. “Keep it right there,” she scolded. She took a few paces backward, during which Davey’s chin slowly began sinking again. “Ah. Uh-uh,” she called. He straightened up to a dignified, if solemn, pose. She reeled off ten pictures from six different angles, then got a cousin to take the two of them together.
“Now. Dance with me,” she demanded.
Davey didn’t fight this time, because he didn’t want to. Even though he had never danced with anyone in his life. It was a slow song and Joanne simply guided him around in a toddling circle while she held him.
“You gonna be all right now, Davey? With me gone, I mean?”
He nodded.
“Sure you are. I just needed to hear it. It’s not like you need me anymore anyway, huh? Big sucker that you are now. Huh. Huh?”
He nodded again.
“I’m gonna be just a few blocks away anyhow, and you’ll be there a lot, I know. Anytime you want, in fact. Except call first, okay? So I know you’re coming. ’Cause I got a family of my own now, Davey, and I got responsibilities for my own home, understand?” She took Davey’s hand and placed it on her puffed belly, guiding his hand in a sweeping circular stroking motion. He let his hand stay there a few seconds, his mouth opening slightly to a little O, his eyes taking the same shape. Abruptly, he pulled his hand back.
“Ya, you understand,” she said. “Hey, Lois will probably relax, now that I’m gone. She’ll be a pussycat, start babying you up all over the place, you being her only baby bird left. It’ll be great for you, for everybody, right?”
“Yo sport, can I cut in?” Gus was standing there smiling his sleepy smile. Davey looked at him uncomprehendingly. He held Joanne tighter and continued to turn with her.
“Davey, I really should dance with my husband some,” Jo said. She squeezed Davey tight, then gently pushed him away. “Remember, Davey. Anytime you want. Just call first.”
Davey stood looking at her, his fingers suddenly scratching and scratching at the seams along the thighs of his pants. He grabbed the camera from the stunned cousin who was still dancing nearby with it hanging around his neck. Before Jo could put her arms around Gus, Davey pressed the shutter release and started taking pictures. Or picture, the same one over and over and over, the auto winder advancing the film to the next frame, the flash flashing, strobing, a long series of small lightning bursts popping from Davey’s forehead. He stopped when the film ran out. Joanne and Gus went on to dance.
“My baby can dance?” Lois gushed as Davey tried to reload. “When did my little one learn how to dance? How come I didn’t know my boy could dance? I saw you dancing over there, you . . . dancer.”
Davey tried to concentrate on his job, but it didn’t matter. Lois seized him in her
arms and they were dancing, the camera pressed between them.
“What a wonderful day, Davey. Isn’t it a wonderful day?” Lois started welling up again. “Say what you will, your sister and I have certainly had our little moments, but God I love her. And she is the most beautiful bride I have ever seen. And you are the most beautiful photographer.” Lois gave Davey a big sloppy kiss on the lips, from which he shrank. He didn’t like the way she smelled. He didn’t like having to hold practically all of her weight as they danced. He didn’t like her brand of happiness. Lois tried to pull him closer, but he held her waist stiffly out in front of him, like she was a basketball he was about to pass off. “Isn’t she though, Davey? Doesn’t Jo look radiant?”
“It must be that magical dress,” Pete said, stepping up behind Davey. Lois reached over Davey’s shoulder and took her drink. With his newly free hand, Pete clapped his son on the neck. “Your mother looked like a thunderbird in that dress, kid. Put both my eyeballs out, no kidding.” Pete squeezed the muscles in Davey’s neck, which were so stiff it felt as if he had a wooden coat hanger running under the skin, down his spine and out to his shoulders.
“Jesus, Davey, this is a wedding. Ain’t ya havin’ any fun?”
Davey wormed out of his father’s grip, pulled away from his mother, who was sipping and let him go. “Ya. I’m doin’ okay.”
“Here,” Sneaky Pete said, extending his manhattan glass. “Have a splash, why don’tcha. You’re all knotted up.”
Lois laughed, slapping Pete playfully on the arm. Davey looked only at the glass. It looked warm and friendly, reddish amber, with a cherry in it. He took a sip. Without asking, he took another one. The warmth that flowed down his throat, then spread like a sunburst in his belly, felt nothing but nice. He even liked the taste.
“Is this mine?” Davey said, nodding at the glass in his hand.
“From me to you,” Pete said with a broad toothy smile.
“You watch yourself now, Davey,” Lois said, as close as she could manage to motherly. Then she and Pete twirled off.
Davey drank the whole drink right down. The neck muscles loosened, the stomach fluttered again, so sweet a feeling in a place he usually didn’t feel. He loaded his camera and hunted down the waitress.
He found her coming out of the ladies’ room. She smiled for him one more time, so generous with her dandelion face. Then she walked up to him.
“Don’t you think you have enough of those now?”
Davey shivered with the sound of her voice. A little voice, much younger than she must have been. A voice that didn’t sound so wrong next to his own young voice.
“WWWWill you dance with me?” Davey said, feeling the coat hanger being yanked up in his shoulders again.
The waitress tilted her head sideways, the break-my-heart tilt that means love, or pity, or confusion. Please don’t do that, he thought, putting a hand on his jumping belly to quiet it.
“You’re very sweet,” she said, and stroked his cheek. “I have to get back to work now.”
He watched her walk away, her powder-blue skirt swishing with the motion of a fish tail in the water. He closed his eyes, closed them tight enough and long enough to give himself a headache, unless it was the manhattan. He wanted another one, even if it did hurt his head. He didn’t open his eyes until another waitress, not his waitress, bumped him and said an excuse me that sounded a lot like get the hell out of the way boy. He climbed up on a speaker set up at the back of the hall, pulled the camera up to his face and kept it there. Joanne and Gus had changed into their going-away outfits and were saying good-bye to all the guests as they gathered in a huge circle around them.
Davey snapped away, picture after picture, from much too far away for any of the pictures to show anything but little nobody people.
FOR THE GOOD TIMES
Lois was breathless, standing in the doorway. “Davey, got any film left? Take our picture some more. Take it, will ya?” She threw her arm around Sneaky Pete again. Davey shot, again.
The two of them mugged like raggedy teenagers squeezed into a three-for-a-buck black-and-white-photo booth, pressing their cheeks together as they both stared out at Davey and said cheese. Kissing. Lois pushing some hair off of Pete’s sun-wrinkled forehead. Pete pretending to bounce her perm-sprung head like a basketball.
“Isn’t it dreamy,” Lois said, falling back on the sofa after Davey had finally shot the last of the film. “I mean dreamy. Y’know, dreamlike. Like the biggest dream ever.”
“Ya, it’s kinda dreamy,” Davey said, counting up his little canisters of film, piling the twelve of them into a pyramid on the coffee table. Pete fooled with the stereo in the corner.
“Joanne is safely married to that nice man with a good job, it was such a beautiful time, and now . . .”
“Now . . . here you go,” Sneaky Pete said, slipping into the spot next to her on the couch and slipping a glass of wine into her hand. Pete had put a scratchy record on the turntable. Even though he gave her a CD player for one of her birthdays, she never used it. She said she liked to hear the scratches on the albums, that the scratches made her feel like she was alive when the music played, that she somehow existed. Otherwise the music would make her disappear.
She smiled and clinked glasses with Pete, took a sip. “Oh, Jim Reeeeves,” Lois cooed at the singer Pete selected. She swayed to the soft crooning as she spoke. “Just when I thought the house was going to be empty . . .”
Empty, Davey thought.
“. . . Suddenly, poof, one gone, another returned. What do you think of that, Davey? I must be living right or something, to have such luck.”
Davey had no idea what he thought of that. He looked at Pete, who pulled Lois in tighter. Lois lay with her head in Pete’s lap. “We’ll see how it goes,” Pete said evenly to Davey. Pete could always play Lois like a rag doll, but he knew he had to deliver the straight goods to Davey. “That’s all I can tell ya, Davey, okay?”
“Okay,” Davey said, finally, finally, finally, at nearly midnight of a long, supposedly joyous day, finally smiling. He wasn’t like his mother. A tiny spit of real hope made Davey a lot happier than all the sweet singsong in the world.
As Davey headed off to bed, Pete was working Lois up again, singing along with record. Davey looked back over his shoulder to see his father gently stroking his mother’s ear as she lay there purring. Pete looked like a content, real guy, kind of like a husband, or a father. Not like a guy who stuck his thumbs in somebody’s eyes. And not sneaky. He loved what he was doing to Lois as much as she loved having it done.
He sang.
“And make believe you love me
one more time . . .”
Davey heard many noises he didn’t want to hear during the night. The rain on the window was not one of them—it was actually soothing and distracting from the moans and giggles and sudden thrashes coming from the other side of the wall in Lois’s room. He made up his mind to move one door down, into Joanne’s room, tomorrow. But the noise sounded pleasant, at least. Sounded as if his mother were happy, even if it was in a vague, fragile, sticky sickening kind of a way he didn’t quite appreciate. So that was all right with Davey. If Lois was happy, and if Joanne was happy, Davey could be happy about it. He covered his head with his pillow and blankets and tried to sleep.
It was early when he got up, and he hadn’t slept much, but he couldn’t stay in bed anymore. He went into the living room and flipped on the TV. He watched the old clay character shows that were always on Sunday mornings, Gumby and Davey and Goliath. He watched Catholic Mass in Spanish. He watched a knee replacement operation straight through on the medical channel without flinching. By seven o’clock it got boring, even for him, so he got busy moving. He trucked all his clothes down the hall, putting them in the closet and dresser drawers in Jo’s room. He tacked his E.T. poster to the wall. He brought down all his bedding and made his new bed.
Still there was nothing happening in the house, so Davey made himself some froze
n waffles and watched some more TV. He turned off the stereo, which had been on all night and was hot when he touched the top of it. He picked up the wineglasses and coats that had been dropped, washed a few dishes, then stood in the middle of the kitchen with his hands on his hips.
Silence. While it had most definitely never bothered him before, it was chewing at him this morning. But that was no reason to go waking them up. So, despite the rain that was still falling steadily, he went for a bike ride.
He thought he would ride out to the quarry, where he was sure to have the place to himself now. He could give a yell across, test out how it carried in the rain, and ride home again. That would be a decent stretch of pumping and would eat up enough time for his parents—he used the word, in his head, and it jarred him—to wake up. But not halfway there the rain bore down on him, he felt a slim stripe of mud being slung up on his back by the tire tread, his light clothes were soaked through, and the big drops were hitting his matted head so that he felt bald.
Davey turned off from his intended route. Where he turned into was the Greyhound station. He stopped and stared, as he always did. He looked at the people who came to drop friends and family at the station for a long trip maybe to college or the army or a new job in another city or just for a cheap vacation that started so early on a Sunday morning that there were no arrivals to look at, only departures. Almost everyone cried, he noticed, when they put somebody on a Greyhound bus very early on a Sunday morning. It made him sad, but he didn’t want to cry and he didn’t want to make them feel better, he wanted to watch. He saw other people who just put themselves on the bus and nobody cried about it ’cause nobody knew. He saw other people who sat on benches or floors or curbs and didn’t look like they were getting on any buses going to any place. He saw an old old woman wearing a hat that was shaped like a short flour canister with a spray of forget-me-nots sprouting out of the top. A tiny bent thing all pink—makeup, skirt, jacket, blouse, gloves—and breakable enough that she shouldn’t be getting on any big nasty bus. But the driver boosted her up, her cloppy black shoes pausing so neatly together on each step, and she was off to Syracuse or Montpelier. He saw people waiting for buses, at the end or the middle of long waits, sleeping on luggage or pacing around, drinking coffee, reading schedules. One of the sidewalk people interrupted Davey in his watching, waving him over. “Kid, kid, kid, c’mere a minute. No no, don’t look like that, I ain’t gonna pull nothin’, I just want to talk.” Davey wanted to be home more than before. He pedaled his hardest away from the station, the front wheel of the mountain bike lifting a foot off the ground.