“Wasting food is no joke!” he’d shout. “That’s how Karen Carpenter died!”
Gretchen’s parents were uptight Reagan Republicans who spent every Sunday at St. Michael’s downtown, praising God and social climbing. When The Thorn Birds came on, Abby and Gretchen were dying to watch it on the big TV, but Mr. Lang was dubious. He’d heard that the content was questionable.
“Dad,” Gretchen said. “It’s just like The Winds of War. It’s basically a sequel.”
Herman Wouk’s dry-as-dust, fourteen-hour miniseries about World War II was Mr. Lang’s favorite television event of all time, so invoking its name meant they automatically received his blessing. While they were watching episode one of The Thorn Birds, he came home and stood in the door of the TV room long enough to realize that this was no Winds of War. His face turned dark red. Abby and Gretchen were too caught up in the steamy Outback love scenes to notice, but sixty seconds after he left the room, Mrs. Lang came in and turned off the TV. Then she marched them into the living room for a lecture.
“The Roman church can glorify foul language and half-naked priests rutting like animals,” Mr. Lang told them. “But not in this house. Now, there’s no more television tonight and I want you girls to go upstairs and wash your hands. Your mother’s got supper in the oven.”
Halfway up the stairs, they couldn’t hold it in anymore and Abby laughed so hard she peed.
Sixth grade was the bad year. After he’d gone on strike back in ’81, Abby’s dad had lost his job as an air traffic controller and been hired as assistant manager at a carpet cleaner. Eventually they had cutbacks, too. The Rivers family had to sell their place in Creekside and move into a sagging house on Rifle Range Road. Four giant pine trees loomed over their brick shoebox and showered it with spider webs and sap while completely blocking out the sun.
That was when Abby stopped inviting Gretchen over to spend the night and started inviting herself over to the Langs’ house every weekend. Then she started showing up on weeknights, too.
“You’re always welcome here,” Mr. Lang said. “We think of you as our other daughter.”
Abby had never felt so safe. She started leaving her pajamas and a toothbrush in Gretchen’s room. She would have moved in if they’d let her. Their house always smelled like air-conditioning and carpet shampoo. Her house had gotten wet a long time ago and never dried. Winter or summer, it stank of mold.
In 1984, Gretchen got braces, and Abby got politics when Walter Mondale declared Geraldine Ferraro his running mate. It never occurred to Abby that anyone could possibly object to electing the first female vice president, and her parents were too caught up in their own economic drama to notice when she put a Mondale/Ferraro bumper sticker on their car. Then she put one on Mrs. Lang’s Volvo.
She and Gretchen were in the TV room watching Silver Spoons when Mr. Lang came in after work shaking with rage, the shreds of the bumper sticker waving from one hand. He tried to throw the pieces on the floor, but they stuck to his fingers.
“Who did this?” he demanded, voice tight, face red behind his beard. “Who? Who?”
That’s when Abby knew she was going to get expelled from the Langs’ house forever. Without even realizing it, she’d committed the greatest sin of all and made Mr. Lang look like a Democrat. But before Abby could confess and accept her exile, Gretchen spun around on the couch and drew herself up onto her knees.
“She’ll be the first female vice president ever,” Gretchen said, gripping the back of the sofa with both hands. “Don’t you want me to feel proud of being a woman?”
“This family is loyal to the president,” Mr. Lang said. “You’d better hope no one saw that . . . thing on your mother’s car. You’re too young for politics.”
He made Gretchen take a razor blade and peel off the rest of the sticker while Abby watched, terrified she was going to get in trouble. But Gretchen never told. It was the first time Abby had ever seen her fight with her parents.
Then came the Madonna Incident.
For the Langs, Madonna was totally and completely out of the question. But when Gretchen’s dad was at work and her mom was taking one of her nine billion classes (Jazzercise, power walking, book club, wine club, sewing circle, women’s prayer circle), Gretchen and Abby would dress up like the Material Girl and sing into the mirror. Gretchen’s mom had a jewelry box devoted entirely to crosses, so it was basically like she was inviting them to do it.
With dozens of crosses strung around their necks, they stood in front of Gretchen’s bathroom mirror and teased their hair big, tying huge floppy bows in it, cutting the arms off of T-shirts, painting their lips bright coral, shadowing their eyes bright blue, dropping makeup on the white wall-to-wall carpet and accidentally stepping on it, holding up a hair brush and a curling iron as microphones and singing along to the “Like a Virgin” Cassingle on Gretchen’s peach boombox.
Abby had just decided to draw on a beauty spot and was hunting for eyeliner in the makeup carnage on the counter while Gretchen was singing “Like a vir-ir-ir-ir-gin/With your heartbeat/Next to mine . . .” when suddenly Gretchen’s head was yanked backward and Mrs. Lang was between them, tearing the bow out of her daughter’s hair. The music was so loud, they hadn’t heard her come home.
“I buy you nice things!” she screamed. “This is what you do?”
Abby stood there stupidly while the Cassingle looped and Gretchen’s mom chased her daughter between the twin beds, hitting her with a hairbrush. Abby was terrified that Mrs. Lang would notice her, and a part of her brain knew she should hide, but she simply stood there like a dummy as Mrs. Lang followed Gretchen down to the ground between the two beds. Gretchen curled up on the carpet, making a high-pitched sound, while Madonna sang, “You’re so fine, and you’re mine/I’ll be yours/Till the end of
time . . .” and Mrs. Lang’s arm worked up and down, raining blows on Gretchen’s legs and shoulders.
“Make me strong/Yeah, you make me bold . . . ,” Madonna sang.
Gretchen’s mom walked to the boombox and jammed down on the buttons, prying open the door and yanking out the Cassingle while it was still playing, leaving big loops of magnetic tape drooling everywhere. In the sudden silence, Abby heard the motor whine as the gears jammed. The only other sound was Mrs. Lang breathing hard.
“Clean up this mess,” she said. “Your father will be home.”
Then she stormed out and slammed the door.
Abby crawled across the bed and looked down on the floor at Gretchen. She wasn’t even crying.
“Are you okay?” Abby asked.
Gretchen raised her head and looked at her bedroom door.
“I’m going to kill her,” she whispered. Then she wiped her nose and looked up at Abby. “Don’t ever tell I said that.”
Abby remembered a day the summer before when she and Gretchen had tiptoed into Gretchen’s parents’ room and opened the drawer on her dad’s bedside table. Lying inside, under an old issue of Reader’s Digest, was a stubby black revolver. Gretchen took it out and pointed it at Abby and then at the pillows on the bed, first one, then the other.
“Bang . . .” she whispered. “Bang.”
Abby remembered those whispered “bangs,” and now she looked at Gretchen’s dry eyes and she knew that something was happening that was truly dangerous. But she never told. Instead, she helped Gretchen clean up, then she called her mom and asked her to come pick her up. Whatever else happened that night when Gretchen’s dad got home, Gretchen never talked about it.
A few weeks later it had all blown over, and the Langs took Abby with them to Jamaica for a ten-day vacation. She and Gretchen got cornrows in their hair that clicked everywhere they walked. Abby got sunburned. They played Uno every night and Abby won almost every game.
“You’re a card sharp,” Gretchen’s dad said. “I can’t believe my daughter brought a card sharp into our family.”
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Abby ate shark for the first time. It tasted like steak made out of fish. They had their first big fight because Abby kept playing Weird Al’s “Eat It” on the cassette player in their room, until the second to the last day when she found pink nail polish spilled all over her tape.
“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said, enunciating each word like she was royalty. “It was an accident.”
“It was not,” Abby said. “You’re selfish. I’m the fun one, and you’re the mean one.”
They were always trying to figure out which one of them was which. Recently, Abby had been designated the fun one and Gretchen the beautiful one. Neither of them had ever been the mean one before.
“You just tag along with my family because you’re poor,” Gretchen snapped back. “God, I’m sick of you.” Gretchen’s braces
hurt all the time and Abby’s braids were too tight and gave her headaches. “You know which one you are?” Gretchen asked. “You’re the dumb one. You play that stupid song like it’s cool, but it’s for little kids. It’s immature, and I don’t want to hear it anymore. It’s stupid. It makes YOU stupid.”
Abby locked herself in the bathroom, and Gretchen’s mom had to coax her out for supper, which she ate alone on the balcony while the bugs chewed her up. That night, after the lights went out, she felt someone crawl into her bed, and Gretchen slid up next to her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, filling Abby’s ear with her hot breath. “I’m the stupid one. You’re the cool one. Please don’t be mad at me, Abby. You’re my best friend.”
Seventh grade was the year of their first slow-dance make-out party, and Abby tongue-kissed Hunter Prioleaux as they rocked back and forth to “Time after Time.” His enormous stomach was harder than she thought it would be and he tasted like Big League Chew and Coke, but he was also really sweaty and smelled like burps. He followed Abby around for the rest of the night trying to get to third base, until she hid in the bathroom while Gretchen ran him off.
Then came a day that changed Abby’s life forever. She and Gretchen were returning their lunch trays, talking about how they needed to stop getting hot lunch like little kids and start bringing healthy food to school so they could eat outside with everyone else, when they saw Glee Wanamaker standing by the tray window, hands twisting, her fingers squirming and pulling at each other, eyes red and shining, staring into the big garbage can. She’d put her retainer on her tray and then dumped it in the trash, and now she wasn’t sure which garbage bag it was in.
“I’ll have to look in all of them,” she sobbed. “This is my third retainer. My dad’s going to kill me.”
Abby wanted to go but Gretchen insisted they help, and so William, the head of the lunch room, took them out back and showed them the eight bulging black plastic bags full of warm milk, half-eaten pizza squares, fruit cocktail, melted ice cream, wet shoestring fries, and curdled ketchup. It was April and the sun had been cooking the bags into a rank stew. It was the worst thing Abby had ever smelled.
She didn’t know why they were helping Glee. Abby didn’t have a retainer. She didn’t even have braces. Everyone else did, but her parents wouldn’t pay for them. They wouldn’t pay for much of anything, and she had to wear the same navy corduroy skirt twice a week, and her two white shirts were turning transparent because she washed them so much. Abby did her own laundry because her mom worked as a home nurse.
“I do laundry for other people all day,” Abby’s mom told her. “Your arms aren’t broken. Pull your weight.”
Her dad had been working as the dairy department manager at Family Dollar, but they let him go because he accidentally stocked a bunch of expired milk. He’d put up a sign at Randy’s Model Shop to do small engine repairs on people’s remote control planes, but after customers complained that he was too slow, Randy made him take down the sign. Now he had a sign up at the Oasis gas station on Coleman Boulevard saying he’d fix any lawn mower for $20. He had pretty much stopped talking, and he’d started filling their yard with broken lawn mowers.
Abby was beginning to feel like everything was too much. She was beginning to feel like nothing she did made any difference. She was beginning to feel like her family was sliding down a hill and they were dragging her down after them and at the bottom of that hill was a cliff. She was beginning to feel like every test was a life-or-death challenge and if she failed even one of them, she’d lose her scholarship and get yanked out of Albemarle and never see Gretchen again.
And now she stood behind the cafeteria in front of eight steaming bags of fresh garbage, and she wanted to cry. Why was she the one helping Glee, whose dad was a stockbroker? Why wasn’t anyone helping her? She never knew what caused it, but at that moment, Abby changed. Something inside her head went “click” and the next second she was thinking differently.
She didn’t have to be poor. She could get a job. She didn’t have to help Glee. But she could. She could decide how she was going to be. She had a choice. Life could be an endless series of joyless chores, or she could get totally pumped and make it fun. There were bad things, and there were good things, but she got to choose which things to focus on. Her mom focused only on the bad things. Abby didn’t have to.
Standing there behind the cafeteria in the stink of an entire school’s worth of putrid garbage, Abby felt the channels change, the world brighten as the sunglasses came off her brain. She turned to Gretchen and said, “Mama’s got supper in the oven!”
Then she untied the nearest bag, took out a slice of half-chewed pizza, and frisbeed it onto the roof before plunging elbow-deep into an ocean of greasy, slimy, used food. By the time they found Glee’s retainer, strings of congealed cheese stuck in their hair, gobs of fruit cocktail stuck to their shirts, they were laughing like maniacs,
throwing handfuls of limp lettuce at one another and flicking French fries against the wall.
Eighth grade was the year of Max Headroom and Spuds Mackenzie. The year that Abby’s dad started watching Saturday morning cartoons for hours and sleeping on a cot in his shed in the backyard. It was the year that Abby got Gretchen to sneak out of her house so they could ride bikes across the Ben Sawyer Bridge to Sullivan’s Island. Halley’s Comet was passing and everyone had gone to the beach in the middle of the night to see it. They found a deserted spot and lay on their backs in the cold sand, looking up at millions of stars.
“So let me get this straight,” Gretchen said in the dark. “It’s a dirty snowball shaped like a peanut floating through space and that’s why everyone’s so excited?”
Gretchen was not very romantic about science.
“It only comes around once every seventy-five years,” Abby said, straining to see if the speck of light she saw was moving or if she was only imagining it. “We might never see it again.”
“Good,” Gretchen said. “Because I’m freezing and I have sand in my underwear.”
“Do you think we’ll still be friends the next time it comes around?” Abby asked.
“I think we’ll be dead,” Gretchen said.
Abby did the math in her head and realized they’d be eighty-eight years old.
“People are going to live longer in the future,” she said. “We might still be alive.”
“But we won’t know how to set the clocks on our VCRs and we’ll be old and hate young people and vote Republican like my parents,” Gretchen said.
They had just rented The Breakfast Club, and turning into adults felt like the worst thing ever.
“We won’t wind up like them,” Abby said. “We don’t have to be boring.”
“If I stop being happy, will you kill me?” Gretchen asked.
“Totally,” Abby said.
“Seriously,” Gretchen said. “You’re the only reason I’m not crazy.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“Who said you’re not crazy?” Abby asked.
Gretchen hit her.
“Promise me you’ll always be my friend,” she said.
“DBNQ,” Abby replied.
It was their shorthand for “I love you.” Dearly But Not Queerly.
And they lay there on the freezing sand and felt the earth turn beneath their backs, and they shivered together as the wind blew off the water, and a frozen ball of ice passed by their planet, three million miles away in the cold distant darkness of deep space.
Party All the Time
“You guys want to freak the fuck out?” Margaret Middleton asked.
Blood-warm water slopped against the hull of the Boston Whaler. It had been quiet for almost an hour as the four girls drifted in the creek; Bob Marley played low on the boombox, their eyes closed, legs up, sun warm, heads nodding. They’d been waterskiing on Wadmalaw, but after Gretchen wiped out hard, Margaret cruised them into an inlet, cut the engine, dropped the anchor, and let them float. For an hour, the loudest sounds were the occasional spark of a lighter as someone lit a Merit Menthol or the ripe pop as someone cracked a lukewarm Busch. Underneath it all was the endless hiss of marsh grass rustling in the wind.
Abby faded up from her nap to see Glee rattling a beer out of the cooler. Glee made her “Want one?” face and Abby stretched out an arm, dried salt cracking on her skin, and took a slug of the warm watery wonderful Busch. It was their drink of choice, mostly because the old lady who ran Mitchell’s would sell them a case for forty dollars without asking for ID.
Abby was overflowing with a sense of belonging. Out here, there was nothing to worry about. They didn’t have to talk. They didn’t have to impress anyone. They could fall asleep in front of one another. The real world was far away.
The four of them were best friends, and while some of the kids called them bops, or mall maggots, or Debbie Debutantes, the four of them didn’t give a tiddly-fuck. Gretchen was number two in their class, and the other three were in the top ten. Honor roll, National Honor Society, volleyball, community outreach, perfect grades, and, as Hugh Horton once said with great reverence, their shit tasted like candy.
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