by Etta Faire
She held the paper up to him. “You know full well this was typed.”
“Stop saying ‘you know full well.’ You sound like my grandma.”
“Don’t tell me how to talk, or what to say. You don’t get to. Nobody does. I should’ve known you’d deny this.”
“Because I didn’t write those. Look, the one thing I stand by in life is speaking the truth, no matter how harsh it is. You know that about me. I thought you got it.”
“This is nice stationery,” Sylvia said. “Your family owns a paper company.”
“So? Other people can buy nice paper.”
They sat in silence the rest of the way, down one street after another, the truck never really warming up enough for Sylvia. She grabbed her purse, felt for her notes, second guessing every one of them tonight.
I didn’t fast forward her thoughts, even though I could have. I wanted to feel everything she did that night. Every last hesitation. Every second guess. Every hurtful betrayal.
Plus, I liked just staring out the window. It was strange seeing Landover back then. The town was never a thriving metropolis, not now, but certainly not then. We passed by the strip mall the Purple Pony was in. The Bait ’N Breath was there, next to an empty spot with a large banner “Your Name Here.”
Or your unicorn.
Five minutes later, we were driving along a residential street I didn’t recognize. It was filled with 70s cars. Station wagons, short flat-looking sedans, all in orange and brown.
We parked in the driveway of a large brick two-story house, a very impressive investment for a man Jay’s age.
“Did Jay own this house?” I asked Sylvia, wondering if robbery or theft was somehow a factor in his upcoming death.
“I think he was renting from his uncle or his dad,” Sylvia said as we got out next to a rusty green van.
“Do you recognize any of these cars?” I asked.
“I know the van. It’s Paul’s. He was staying with Jay,” she said. “Jay sometimes had people staying with him. Like one or two people passing through. Friends of friends. You know?”
“Like homeless people?” I asked.
“I guess. Not like bums, though. Musicians. Artists. Poets. Jay had a thing for helping them. He thought they were the best people to spread his message.”
“Can you point them out when you see them,” I asked. “The artists staying at Jay’s.”
We walked around to the side of the garage where Jay motioned for Sylvia to enter before him. A man’s voice rang out through the door. He was reading poetry into a mic, talking about the bigwigs in Washington and how they were the ones who started the Vietnam War.
“You, the new bigwigs, have an obligation to the people. Obligation. Not humiliation. But, with reparations and compensation. We will not be used and abused, discarded like trash. We the people deserve to have all people in charge think before they act or attack or react…”
Jay gave us a gentle nudge with the side of his body.
Sylvia put her hand on the knob. “He always wanted me to go in first.”
She opened the door and I could see why. Everyone turned and looked in her direction. The thin blonde man standing center stage in a leisure suit and a black beanie peered up from his legal pad and stopped reading the poem.
Sylvia talked to me in our head again. “I remember what those addresses in the pocket were for now. Poetry guy is Paul, Myrna’s boyfriend. He was throwing Jay a celebration party after he won the election. He was Jay’s biggest supporter. Not sure why. There was no chance Jay was winning that thing, but we believed the power of our minds could create outcomes back then. Self-fulfilling prophecies.”
A low chant began to rumble through the garage, picking up momentum and loudness. “Alderman. Alderman. Alderman.”
Chapter 17
The Young Executives Club
I looked around as the group chanted “Alderman.” Jay was just outside. I could see him in the window of the garage’s side door, peeking in. I definitely got the hint he wanted Sylvia to get the crowd really going.
Sylvia wasn’t having it. Our feet ached, and our armpits were sticky hot in the polyester outfit we were wearing despite the cold garage. The chorus of voices echoing off the walls seemed like portentous chants in a horror movie with the bad acoustics in the room.
There were about thirty of them total including Sylvia. Young people with shaggy long hair and huge sideburns. Some were sitting on trashcans and old tires. Others sat on blankets that had been spread out in places along the concrete floor.
The Young Executives Club seemed a little more like a stoner party than I thought it would.
It was cold with almost no insulation, and the smell of pot mixed with garage oil was about all I could sense right now. “It’s freezing,” I said to Sylvia.
“I know,” she replied. “Jay was a firm believer in mind over matter. Think yourself warm. Think yourself rich. You don’t need to go to the bathroom or drink water during a meeting. You just think you do.”
“Did that work?”
“To an extent. But people still froze to death in life.”
I could tell she was starting to warm up, more with anger than anything else. Mind over matter.
“He wanted me to introduce him like I normally did. I didn’t this time.”
After what felt like a full minute of hearing the word “Alderman” ringing off every cell in my eardrum, a thin man with a bushy mustache, side burns and a snake tattoo that circled up his neck and ended at his jawline jumped onto the stage.
Sylvia talked to me in her head. “Michael Sumner. Curtis’s brother.”
He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. Everyone stopped chanting. “Another fine poem by Paul Gelling. Give it up for him.” The crowd barely snapped. “Annnnd now, Alderman Jay Hunt…”
The alderman opened the door and sauntered into the garage, smiling and waving. The audience snapped vigorously, raising their fists high in the air.
“He likes to make an entrance,” Sylvia explained as Jay rushed up the steps of a wooden makeshift stage at the front of the garage near the entrance to the house like he was a rockstar. Sylvia reluctantly stomped up behind him, standing off to the side. “The only appropriate response during the meetings were snaps or raised fists,” she said to me. “Not sure why. More disciplined than applause, I guess.”
I was starting to guess the controlling alderman might have been the main target that night.
“Thank you,” Jay said in a hushed tone into the mic. “Thank you for being you. For being in the now. That’s what this club is all about, right? Truth. We have no hangups. We’re just a bunch of beings taking a ride together on the same side of the Earth. If we have a problem with each other, we go to that person and we say, ‘This is my beef.’ Like we would with our employees as an executive. But we also have to believe the truth of the other person, no matter how hard that is to hear, no matter what you think you saw or heard…”
There were a few snaps from the audience.
I looked around while Jay passive-aggressively lectured Sylvia from the stage. Everyone was dressed in 70s business casual. Men in loud patterned suits or colorful slacks, coordinating shirts with wild long hairstyles.
There were also about twelve women including Sylvia. Most had fitted wrapped jackets that matched their tight slacks. There were only a few couples, sitting together on rugs or blankets. And I spotted Mr. Peters right away. He was already sporting a receding hairline, but his hair was surprisingly long in the back. He had it bunched to the side, draping over one of his shoulders. It reached past his collar bone.
He was sitting on a green shag rug in the middle of the garage, front and center, just like I expected him to be. A woman sat in front of him, in between his straddled legs. She had thick rosy cheeks and long red hair, held out of her face by a thick gray headband.
They snapped along with the rest of the club. Every once and a while, the couple would look at each other knowingly li
ke they were saying, “We will always trust each other, not like this hypothetical couple the alderman is talking about right now where the girlfriend doesn’t believe the truth that the poor boyfriend is desperately trying to convey to her.”
Watching their happiness and knowing Mr. Peters and Rosalie had just broken up made me feel unexpectedly angry at him, even though Rosalie herself said that everything happens the way it’s supposed to in life. Even the crappy parts. Doors close because you aren’t supposed to go in there anymore. Still, I wanted to close a door on Mr. Peters’s head right now.
Focus, Carly. You’re here for Sylvia.
Jay was talking about the corporate agenda now. “And… and… there is nothing… nothing at all that says being an executive means we have to give into the corporate agenda. Who started that, anyway? Who decided that being rich meant we had to take away other people’s rights? The rights of the workers.”
Sylvia’s thoughts at the time went to the notes sitting in her purse. She did want to do a speech, follow this up with the corporate responsibility executives had to diversity and equality.
Jay continued. “Most corporations are like that girlfriend we were just talking about. Greedy with what they think truth is. They don’t want to know the actual truth, so they don’t listen. The truth could come up to them and say, ‘Hello, I am truth,’ and they would spit on it and tell it that’s not what it is. They only want to barge in there with their own agenda, their own way of doing things. Tell you how it’s supposed to be done. Tell you the only way to believe.”
People snapped vigorously, encouraging him.
“Well, not anymore. Now it’s our turn. We are the young. We have the numbers.” He nodded his head at the crowd. “People are going to listen to us. That’s why we’re here. Right?”
“Sounds like he has a lot on his mind tonight,” I said to Sylvia, making her laugh.
“A lot of guilt,” she replied. “The more he talked about this awful girlfriend as a metaphor for corporate greed and lies, the more I knew we were done. Guilty or not, I didn’t need this.”
Sylvia glanced around the crowd. In the corner, a group of about three men in leisure suits with long collars and white shirts stood. “There are the drifters over there. The ones staying at Jay’s. They always hung out together. Paul is the only one I really knew very well. He was cool. The one who was reading the poetry. He’s dating my cousin. The other two are Danny, the guy who went into the forest with us, and Michael, Curtis’s brother. Danny’s the one in tan standing next to his newest sculpture.”
I couldn’t really see Danny too well. He was behind an overturned wheelbarrow that had a ladder stuck to the top of it and glass Coca Cola bottles jutting out from every angle. I could tell he had a lot of wild hair, though.
“That’s his sculpture?” I asked.
“According to him, it’s supposed to show the juxtaposition of commercialism and the working man.”
“I see,” I said, even though I wasn’t quite sure I did.
Sylvia grabbed her purse from behind the mic stand, pulled her notecards out and tossed the bag back, moving closer to her boyfriend as he talked. He moved away.
She talked to me again. “I was hoping he’d get the hint that I did want a turn at the mic. I knew it might be my last shot to talk to these people. But I guess he really didn’t want me to talk. I was kind of the fake executive in his eyes.”
“Unlike the rest of these people who look pretty legit,” I teased.
“We didn’t look the part, but most of us were very serious young people, embarking on new careers we didn’t wholly feel ready for. Not exactly knowing where we fit in or how to proceed. All we knew was that we didn’t want to do things the way things had always been done. Jay gave us confidence to trust ourselves.”
Rosalie’s words echoed in my head about the cult.
“But now, seeing it again, and remembering things, I wonder if it was all just lies. I’ll never know if Rebecca and Jay really had an affair. I guess it doesn’t matter much now, anyway.”
Jay was wrapping things up. “And that’s how the little things can add up. That’s how you can make a difference.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “We’re wrapping it up early tonight. Be safe. Happy Friday the thirteenth. See you in two weeks.” He kissed the first two fingers of his right hand and raised it to the crowd in a peace symbol.
As the snaps echoed through the garage, Jay put the mic on the stand and took a quick bow. He brushed by Sylvia, barely noticing her standing there with the notecards in her hand. “You still want to do this drive-in thing? You know, scare Rebecca, or do you want me to take you back to your car?”
She didn’t say anything.
“You can’t really think I am somehow having an affair with a girl I don’t even really like to be around, right?” He gathered up a jacket and some notes as he talked, stuffing them into his briefcase.
Sylvia straightened out the striped wrap jacket she was wearing and bit the inside of her cheek. “I was… you know, I was going to talk about the rising role of women in corporate America and the workforce, remember?”
He ran a hand through his wild hair. “What? I thought you decided you wanted to skip that. Seriously, you are acting really whacked tonight.”
I could tell Sylvia was more upset about it than she was letting on. She looked down at her clogs that were digging into her feet at pretty much every angle.
He brought her chin up and looked her in the eyes, tilting his head this way and that. He was so close I could smell his body odor over the lingering Old Spice smell. I could tell Sylvia wanted to kiss him. Her feet tingled a little and it wasn’t just that her awful shoes were cutting her circulation off.
She was starting to believe the jerk, or she wanted to. So much for the “I’m done” part.
“I was still conflicted, I guess,” Sylvia admitted to me in my head.
Jay ran a hand through her hair, tugging just a bit on the end when he reached it. Just the way she liked. Then he bent down and moved in slowly, placing his mouth over ours. A soft kiss, just to see how resistant we were to it.
We were not very resistant.
“I’m not the bad guy here,” he said when they stopped kissing. “I love you and I just want you to believe me in life. I only wonder why that’s so hard for you right now. I would one-hundred-percent believe you if you asked me to. About anything. If you said it was the truth, I would take you at your word.”
“So you’re saying you didn’t write those notes.”
“Of course I didn’t write those notes. I told you that a million times in the truck.”
She managed a smile. “I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt for now, but just so you know, I am going to check with Rebecca.”
“Let’s ask her together,” he said as we walked off the stage, going our separate ways.
Mr. Peters approached us with the woman I was guessing was Priscilla, and Jay walked to the middle of the garage, prepared to talk to every member of his fan club.
Priscilla was taller than Mr. Peters with a strikingly similar build to Rosalie. In fact, the more I looked at her, the more she resembled my boss. Only with red hair and no dreadlocks.
“Just wanted to let you know you were right,” he said to Sylvia, motioning to the woman beside him in the long pleated wool skirt and dark brown turtleneck that Rosalie would never even put on a mannequin. “I’m so much happier now.”
“We’re so much happier now,” his girlfriend added. “We just needed to speak our truth to one other. Search our souls. I didn’t even know he wanted to date me…”
“How could you? My ex-girlfriend was very controlling. Kept me on a short leash.”
“Not anymore. You’re free to be you now,” she said. They paused to nuzzle noses and, if I’d have been in my own body, I would’ve hurled on them.
I wanted to fast forward. There was no way I was listening to Mr. Peters bad mouth my friend, who looked remarkably similar to th
e woman he was badmouthing her with.
“If you’ll excuse us, we’re gonna head over to Deely’s Desserts and Whatnot for some late night apple pie, maybe some whatnot.” He laughed, and I felt like I was going to hurl again.
“The new place on Main?” Sylvia asked.
Priscilla nodded.
Sylvia gave them a quick group hug. “Well congratulations. I told you. Ask Rosie to marry you, and she’ll probably freak out and leave. And when one door closes, another one opens. You change when you’re supposed to. Find out things when you’re supposed to…”
Sylvia paused, listening to her own words. She said good-bye and moved on, catching up with Jay as he talked to Paul.
“Radical, man. I never saw it like that,” Paul said. “But you’re right once again. We have to do it that way. Genius.”
Both men stopped talking when they saw Sylvia.
“Ever the genius, huh, alderman,” Sylvia said.
“We were talking about stepping up the canvassing. Not just this neighborhood but all over Landover,” Jay said. “I think we can make a difference if we tackle it strategically. We can win.”
“The election’s next month. We need all the help we can get,” Paul said, adjusting his beanie. “Myrna will help if you help. You gotta be in.”
“Actually, I’m out. Can you take me to my car?” Sylvia said to Jay. “I’m not feeling well.”
“Look,” Jay began, grabbing Sylvia by the arm and pulling her toward the side door, away from the others. “Is this about that note, again? I thought you were reserving judgment until you heard from Rebecca. I thought you cared about the truth. And us.”
Sylvia took a deep breath.
A strand of Sylvia’s hair had fallen into her face, and Jay swept it away with his pinkie. He kissed our nose. “We’ll see Rebecca tonight. We’ll ask her about everything and straighten this out. I promise you. She’s not going to know a thing about those notes because I did not write those notes. Someone is playing a joke on us, like we’re doing to Rebecca. That’s all.”