by Cyndy Etler
15
STILL MARCH 1989
TWO YEARS AND ONE WEEK OUT
I fucked up. I really did. It’s like I was possessed or something. I could see what I was doing, but I couldn’t stop myself.
It’s a random Thursday, right? I’m coming down the stairs as my mother’s hanging up the phone. And she’s giggling, which—grody. And she goes, “Why don’t you take the car out for a while. You just have to put gas in it.”
And then, lickety-split, I’m on 95. I’m driving to exit 19, even though it’s 3:00 p.m. and there’s totally no meeting this afternoon. I turn right off the exit instead of left, and I drive down these perfect streets with perfect homes and perfect little stores, where they sell herbal tea and white cotton dresses and wooden key chains carved with family crest names.
And it’s right here, this soft, easy life. It’s right in front of me. It’s have-able, because all of these elegant Southport, Westport, Fairfield people have it. And I could’ve had it too, if my father had kept being famous and composing music, instead of dropping dead. And if I had that life, everything would be perfect. So I’m trying really hard to be thin enough to fit through that fissure, that crack at exit 19 that separates hard-dark-mean from soft-safe-easy.
But I can’t seem to make it work. There’s an invisible wall. I can drive down these streets. I can see the perfect people. I can even visit their houses or go into their stores, like Pier 1 or the Gap. But it’s a force-fit. I’m the clunky Toughskins preschooler who tries too hard, who jams the toy truck through the dollhouse’s front door. The one who wrecks the door plus the whole front wall of the dollhouse and pisses off all the other preschoolers. Stupid kid! Don’t you know trucks are for the dump, not for houses?
But like I said. I can see what I’m doing, I just can’t stop myself.
So I’m driving down these streets, looking at the evergreen windowsills, the black door frames, the heavy cloth curtains hung from metal O’s that clack against the curtain rods when they get pulled shut at closing. Their stores are set up to feel like houses. They’re another place for Westport people to feel safe. I drive stupid slow, studying the decorated shop windows, the doors with their brass flaps for the mail to slide through. You can tell when a store sells the kind of stuff women like, because they have a puffy armchair visible from the street with a reading lamp next to it. A few stores even have chimneys with actual smoke coming out the top.
This is why Grant is so confident. Because he’s from here, this place where every place is a home. There’s always a fire in the fireplace and fresh milk in the fridge. And Grant and his fellow Westporters are always welcomed inside with a smile and, like, some bedroom slippers. How could he not feel sure the world loves him?
The sun is starting to go down. The sky is getting darker. I should drive to the beach and watch the sunset. It would be heaven, because it’s too cold for anyone to be there, staring at me and my cop car. I could walk in the sand and pretend I’m smoking a cigarette. But that stupid, clumsy preschool kid, she never does what she should. Instead, she has to force herself into the games where the other kids don’t want her.
I drive under a cobblestone railroad bridge and come out on the chicest street yet. And there it is: Sinclair’s Grocery. The letters are stenciled across the window. Through it, I can see wooden shelves lined with cans and boxes. My heart goes flash-frozen: it’s one of Grant’s homes. And I’m gonna shove a dump truck through the front door.
I park down the street from the store so my heart can thaw before Grant sees me. Is it even safe to leave a crap car among the Volvos and Rovers, or does it automatically get towed? Safety doesn’t matter, though. Like I said: I have no choice. This is fate at work.
Skinny ladies with cashmere shawls and pearl earrings click past me, arrowing their gazes straight ahead. If I were in L.L. Bean cords and an Irish wool sweater, I might get a glance, even with my big, big hair. But Guess jeans and a sweatshirt? Clearly, I should be somewhere else. The ladies tell me so by pretending they don’t see me.
My brain is a scribble as I step onto Sinclair’s front step, a slab of rock that dates back to the pilgrims. There’s an inch of air between the door’s base and the floor; I can feel the heat on my toes. Sinclair’s can afford to heat the sidewalk because Sinclair’s charges three bucks for a piece of penny candy.
The thumb-latch door handle is soft and warm. It clacks so loud, the cashmere street ladies turn and look. And so does Grant, from his spot behind the wooden counter, next to the antique circle-button cash register. The same cash register as on the business card he gave me.
When Grant sees me, he drops his smile and gets down from the stool he’s sitting on. For once, he looks nervous. God, can I relate.
“Um, hey,” I say, but I doubt he hears me over the bell clanging on its ribbon above the door. I’m half-in and half-out of the store, my front boiling with shame and my back frozen with fear.
“Yeah,” he says, glancing around the empty store. “Hey.”
Grant Lattimore is speechless. First time ever.
“I was, you know… I thought I’d just…” I try again.
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“Um, want me to… I’ll close the door.”
The bell kicks up again as I push the door closed. Somewhere behind Grant, a phone starts ringing. He closes his eyes, and you know he’s thanking God.
“I gotta get that.” He ducks back through a doorway. Then I hear, “Sinclair’s, Grant speaking,” like he’s been saying it since birth. Like he has no fear of doing it wrong. “Yup. Ordered it just for you. I’ll pull a few boxes and hold ’em behind the counter… Anytime.”
I hear the solid click of Grant hanging up, but I don’t hear him move. That customer on the phone—he talked to her like a grandma. Mr. Sinclair trusts Grant with the whole store and register, like a rich uncle. Grant of a thousand homes. Grant of a thousand families. Grant of the lips made of Turkish Delight.
Grant who wishes I would leave.
The store’s so quiet, we can hear the creaking floorboards under my feet. The creak wakes Grant from his daze. He comes back through the doorway with a new kind of smile: a businessman’s smile—no teeth, narrow eyes.
“So. What can I do for you?” he asks, leaning one hand in a tent shape on his stool.
“I—um, I thought there was, but there’s no meeting at Club 12, so I—I came to buy some cigarettes.”
“Okeydoke. I didn’t take you for a smoker, but that’s your biz. What’s your poison?”
“No, I’m not really. I just—my what?”
“Your brand. What brand of cigarettes.” He’s got his back to me, with his arm raised to grab my smokes and fling them out the door so I’ll chase them like a dog.
“Oh, ah—Marlboro, it was. Marlboro reds.” They’re probably like ten bucks here. Holy fuck, I better have enough money. Do I have enough? Holy fuck, holy f—
“Here ya go. On the house,” he says, snapping a pack on the counter. “Matches?” He thumbs at a flat box by the register. I tweeze out a pack of matches with two fingers; the cover has the same antique cash register picture as his card. Sinclair’s Grocery, the matchbook says. I’ll never burn one of these matches. Not ever.
“Okay, well,” he says.
And he’s saved by the bell again, as a Lauren Bacall lookalike swings open the door. Cling-a-cling-a-cling! goes the bell.
She’s got one of those furs around her neck, the kind with the animal’s face still attached. “Grant, darling!”
When she says that, Grant’s real smile comes back.
“And who’s your little…?” Ms. Bacall asks, smiling through her frost-brown lipstick. She’s somehow looking down at me even though we’re the same height.
“Oh, no. She’s not… See you ’round,” he says to me, and I’m dismissed. The bell doesn’t even tinkle for me when I leave.<
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The cold outside is a whole-body douche. That’s where I want to be? That’s who I want to belong with? Frosty pinched lips and business-squint eyes?
I slap the Marlboros on my palm bone, and God, does it feel good. It’s hard. It hurts. It feels great.
It’s really dark now. The cashmere ladies have been joined by their wingtip men. The box-on-bone sound is freaking them out, you can tell, because they’re looking at me now, with lips in the shape of Oh my. Fuck them. Fuck trying to squeeze through the crack into their lives. Fuck their cobblestones and their old-timey grocery stores and their hush-bitter voices.
Ripping the thin cellophane off the lid of my on-the-house Marlboros, I lean back on the cop car’s hood. The cigs are packed tight under the lid. They smell like untapped love. Like hope and freedom and Bridgeport, my scungy anti-Westport, the city where I stayed before Straight. The lid snaps down over the rows of cigarettes; the Sinclair’s matchbook tucks behind the cellophane wrapper.
When we were doing Streetcar, Mrs. Skinner taught us the vocab that goes with proper Southern mores. Gorgeous words: aghast, repugnant, befoul. Words for disgust. Words that are perfect for Westport. I could disoblige Westport by lighting a Marlboro. I could befoul the air with my gauche. But I won’t. That Turkish Delight kid, he didn’t get to stay in Narnia, and I don’t either.
16
APRIL 1989
TWO YEARS AND ONE MONTH OUT
Okay, this you’re not going to believe. Club 12—my Club 12—on Saturday nights? Dances. Sober dances. Every Saturday! All sober people! I don’t even know how I went this long without knowing. It’s as if everyone was keeping it a secret from me because Sober Teen Needs to Focus On Her Sobriety. But fuck that. Sober Teen Needs a Fucking Break. Sober Teen Needs a Little Fun.
You know how I learn about the Club 12 dances? From Grimace. The Deadhead with the toenails; you remember him, the guy from the Westport YP meeting. My mother finally lets me use the car again on a Saturday night, so I head back to that meeting because my booklet doesn’t list a Saturday 8:30 PM at Club 12. And guess who’s there? Grimace John and He-Man Aaron! When I walk in and see them, I want to, like, launch into a tap dance. Grant may hate me, but thank you, Jesus God, there are always other boys.
After the meeting, John says to me and Aaron, “You guys ever do the sober dances?”
I’m like, “Psychic friend! How’d you know about the tap dance?”
“The tap dance? No, I don’t think they tap dance. But I dunno. I’ve never been.”
“Yeah,” Aaron says. “Not my scene either.”
“What’s not your scene? What are you guys talk—”
“The sober dances!” they both say at once, like, uh, duhhh.
“What sober dances? Like, the Hammer dance? The moonwalk?”
“What are you, stup—God,” Aaron goes. “The frigging sober dances. Dances where people with sobriety go. To dance. To mack on chicks. Dances.”
John’s nodding his head, but at least he didn’t start until after Aaron called me stupid.
“But…it’s all sober people?” Maybe I am stupid. It’s just, this is too good to be real. I can’t even process it. “Where?”
“Oh, different places,” John says. “But I know Club 12 has ’em every Saturday. You know Club 12, right?”
“Right now? At Club 12? Right up the road?”
“Right now. At Club 12. Right up the road.”
“Oh my God, let’s go! We’re going! Come on!”
“No, nope, no way, no can do.” That’s both of them, saying every possible version of no. My frigging luck. I get two sober guys—two!—but out of all the guys in the world, I get a surfer and a Deadhead, the two types least likely to go to a dance club. It even sounds like a joke: a surfer and a Deadhead walk into a sober dance…
Fuck them, though. Fuck them, and fuck Grant, and fuck Mary and Donna and the rest of the youth group, and fuck the popular kids and my mother and her boyfriends, and fuck everybody. I’m going to the Club 12 sober dance. I don’t care if I have to go alone. I don’t even care if I have to steal my mother’s car. I’m going where there’s music and sobriety and dancing, where I don’t have to see or worry about any of them. I’m going, and I’m dancing, and I’m forgetting every, fucking, thing, else.
I make that decision, and get a gift from God. I might not get friends or family, but I do get gifts sometimes. Because the very next Saturday night, my mother says I can use the car. She doesn’t even pull a hostage scheme or make me sign my name in blood. She just says, “Okay. Put gas in it.”
You can imagine how peppy I am, seven o’clock on Saturday night. I’ve got my outfit laid out on my bed—Indian skirt, silver anklet with bells, white tank top—and I shower, towel my hair, and put on a little Venetian Violet Flower Water.
And I smile, smile, smile as I head upstairs to my room, past my mother, who’s sitting on the bottom stair, phone pressed to her ear. I smile, smile, smile as I clutch my towel tighter over my boobs, in case her latest boyfriend has X-ray phone vision. I smile, smile, smile till I hit the top stair, where my mother can look up from below and see everything under my towel. I stop there because that’s what animals do, when we hear a scary noise. We freeze.
The noise is my mother’s laughter. It floats up to me like arsenic bubbles.
“Ha! I’ve got a teenage daughter parading around in a towel here…”
I haul my ass out of there before I can hear what I know is coming next: “Want to come over?” There’s this book we learned about in psych class: My Mother, My Self. I could write a new version: My Mother, My Pimp. If she says I can’t use the car after all, I’m burning the house down. Swear to fucking God.
And God knows I’m not kidding, because He makes her leave me alone. Well, almost. Before I can leave, she clamps me in place, hands on my shoulders, and slow drags her gaze up and down my outfit.
“That’s my skirt,” she says, and my butt-stomach-throat cramp into a fist. She puts her hand too close to my z-z, picks up the skirt’s belt, and flips it, to prove her point. But then God must remember I have those Sinclair’s matches, because she says, “You look nice. Have fun.”
And like a shot, I’m out the door. I spend the drive blaring the Milli Vanilli tape that Surfer Aaron lent me and trying to think up a way to make an outfit out of Dunkin’ Donuts mugs. I would so walk around in a heavy plastic suit of DD armor, all orange, pink, and brown. I’d be, like, supernaturally protected.
Wait. A Dunkin’ Donuts suit? What am I even talking about? See, no wonder the second I open my mouth, nobody likes me. I’m not talking to anyone at this sober dance, ’cause I’m not fucking this up. This is my one chance to have a place to go where it’s safe and fun and cool. This could be the greatest thing that ever happened to me. As long as I don’t say a word, it will be.
I make it from the car to the dance, all alone, without a nervous breakdown. I’ve done this walk by myself a hundred times going to meetings, so it’s normalish. Only diff is I have to stop in the doorway and hand over a fiver.
Then I step into the massive wood-floor room, the one you cross through to get to the meetings. And it’s…salvation. It’s rescue and redemption and absolution and sanctification. It’s all those vocab words the Puritans were killing each other for in The Crucible. A few candy-colored lights cut the dark. People are dancing, instead of looking at each other. AA slogans are posted on the walls, like a safety net. And it’s just-right loud, and it’s Steve Winwood, and it’s “Higher Love,” which is a total program song. It’s a love song to his recovery, to his higher power. To God. As soon as I step inside, I swear, the whole room starts singing along with him.
I melt into the crowd and I’m dancing and spinning and I feel hugged and lifted and part part part part of this. I have never felt so safe, so high, so loved, so part of a group. And it’s perfect. And I know my hig
her power is here. And I have people here. And I’ll be fine if I can just keep myself from opening my mouth.
It’s gotta be three hours later when I finally take a break. I’m afraid I might look like I’m in a wet T-shirt contest from dancing so long and so hard, but it’s okay. This is my place. These are my people. I go outside to breathe and look at stars, and I don’t even need to cross my arms over my boobs to feel safe. I just walk through the people smoking and go down to the parking lot, so I’m not standing underneath the Club 12 spotlight.
And talk about gifts from God, there’s a boy down there. An adorable boy. An adorable sober boy who came to a dance at Club 12. And he’s got brown hair and a couple freckles and faded Levi’s and an old gray T-shirt that says COLLEGE. He’s the kind of perfect you’d never even dream of, because some shelves are just too high.
He’s standing under a tree, tucked between two cars, smoking. I don’t even realize he’s there until I hear him speak: “Hey there.” Just like that. “Hey there.” He talked to me. I turn toward the “Hey there,” but I made myself a promise, so I don’t say a word. I just smile.
Neither of us moves and he says, “Sorry.”
I’m still keeping my promise, so I look down.
He speaks again, like, “…for the smoke.”
There’s a million words in my head, laughing and singing and cartwheeling around like, “Oh my God, don’t be sorry. I love the smell of smoke. I just don’t do it. Smoke. My sobriety’s not strong enough. But yours is, obviously. But I love the smell of cigarette smoke, which I think is okay, because it hasn’t made me drink or drug yet, right?”