by Jancee Dunn
“Look at the eighth one down. ‘Man Eating Apple.’ And see the next one? He played a teacher’s aide in Summer School Slaughter.”
“Well, he’s working steadily and that’s what actors want to do, I suppose.” Then she snickered. “Summer School Slaughter! Oh, Lillian.” She laughed harder and then let out a snorting noise, kind of like snoik. I knew that she was clapping her hand over her mouth. When we used to get into laughing fits, I would goad her until I heard the snoiking noise.
“Let’s find out how well he’s doing, shall we?” I said. I located his name and address on the White Pages and typed it into the home valuation website that Adam had once showed me, all the while humming fake elevator music to keep Ginny amused. “Aha. So he lives in downtown L.A. in a six-hundred-square-foot apartment. It says here that he paid $229,000 for it two years ago.”
“All of this information is available to the public? Is that ethical? Six hundred square feet. That’s the size of my garage. And where is the fiancée supposed to live?” She paused. “Well, I wish him luck.” In five minutes we had transformed our envy into pity, which was much more manageable.
“He might need some luck. I don’t see any parts in the last year. I definitely—”
“Hang on,” she said. “Blake, Mommy’s talking. What did I tell you about respecting my private time? You can either go watch cartoons or have a cookie. Your decision.” Ginny believed in providing her children with a choice between two things, which gave them freedom but allowed her control. Her every action was supported by a theory and multiple footnotes.
“Cartoons or a cookie,” I repeated, just loud enough for her to hear. “Sophie’s Choice. You’re a real disciplinarian.”
“Wait until you have children.” Blake began to wail. “That’s my cue. See you.”
I meandered downstairs, the beige wall-to-wall carpeting muffling my footsteps. The house was utterly still. My parents preferred to keep the doors and windows shut at all times so that no sounds of a lawn mower or a barking dog ever made their way inside the sanctum. I inspected a pile of books on the kitchen counter that my mother had gotten from the library. Tai Chi for Beginners. Which one of them was learning tai chi? European Travel for Spirited Seniors. Kabbalah and the Power of Self-Transformation. They had never been interested in religion.
I sat down at the kitchen table and leafed through their recent mail. The only arrival that was the least bit compelling was a J. Crew catalog. I realized I was still in my pajamas and it was nearly lunchtime. Pajamas were my at-home attire in New York, no matter what the hour, but they might look strange in front of my mother, who applied lipstick upon arising, and my father, who always wore shoes in the house. I decided I should order some sort of formal leisure wear and dialed the number at J. Crew.
“Hello-welcome-to-J.-Crew-my-name-is-Trish-how-can-I-help-you-today.”
“I’d like to place an order,” I said.
“Wonderful. And could I just have the nine-digit customer number that you’ll find on the upper right-hand corner of your catalog’s mailing label?”
“Oh, sure.” I flipped the catalog over. The label had been carefully scissored away. My father immediately did this to all incoming catalogs and magazines to thwart would-be identity thieves. “Uh, sorry, that page is missing.”
“No problem. Okay, then. What is your first item number?” After giving her the style number of my cotton hoodie and draw-string pants in ‘Bright Sherbet,’ I automatically recited my New York address for shipping. “Ninety-five West Seventy-fifth Street, apartment 3D. Oops. Wait, no. Scratch that. I live with my parents in New Jersey now.”
As I heard her typing in their address, I filled the silence by saying, “I’m also going to be thirty-eight years old.”
“Huh.” She dropped her professional veneer. “Well, it happens. My kid lived with me when she got out of school. I says to her, ‘You got one year, and then you gotta go.’ And she did. A year to the day, almost.”
“Yes, but she wasn’t thirty-eight and divorced very soon.”
“Ma’am, I don’t know you, but you know what? Maybe this could be an opportunity. My mother passed, let’s see, three years and six months ago. Lung cancer. You know what I’d give for one more day with her? Do you want to hear about our sale items today?”
“Oh, ah, no, thanks.”
“My husband is Italian. In Italy they all live at home until they get married. He had a couple of cousins in their forties still at home. So it’s kinda different everywhere. In Italy, no one would bat an eye at you. Think of it that way.”
“I don’t know, Trish,” I said, opening the fridge and rooting through it. “A few of my friends have made snotty remarks.”
She snorted. “Some friends. Do you want standard shipping?”
“Yes, please.”
“Okay, you’ll receive your hoodie and pants in five to seven business days. And I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but you should enjoy being with your folks, and don’t listen to anybody else.”
“Well, thanks. I appreciate it.”
I hung up, strangely cheered.
chapter seven
The afternoon stretched luxuriantly before me. I started by pulling some leftover chicken in a bag out of the fridge to make a sandwich. Maybe I would watch General Hospital, like I used to after school. I could fish out my old Ithaca College sweatshirt and sprawl on the couch. Or I could attempt to find my high school journal. I used to rotate its hiding places to evade Ginny’s snooping, but I had done it so well that now I couldn’t locate it anywhere. I had thoroughly searched my closet, under my mattress, even a spot behind an old air-conditioning unit in the attic where I had stashed it during a particularly paranoid time. I had looked halfheartedly under the bed but only found a large Tupperware box of wrapping paper, tape, and ribbons. The “wrapping station,” a typical first-year project of the recently retired female, along with Finally Getting That Laundry Room in Order.
After changing out of my pajamas, I took a sandwich into the TV room and flopped down with a satisfied sigh. I had stopped watching General Hospital years ago, but perhaps there was a chance I could still pick it up. The theme song was the same, if a little jazzier and with extra guitar thrown in to make it “contemporary.” I preferred the original. I liked show openers to stay exactly the way they were. At least the producers of Days of Our Lives had the good sense to keep the sands in the hourglass right where they belonged.
The show opened on a spray-tanned blonde who was pacing back and forth—agitated, it soon emerged, about whether or not she should go ahead with plans to have a baby. “Sweetheart,” said her graying but hip father. “You have to make the decision based on how you feel.”
“Good Lord,” I said aloud to no one. Her father was Tony Geary, otherwise known as Luke Spencer. Luke! Along with most of America, I had watched his wedding to Laura in 1981. My friends Kimmy Marino, Lynn, and Sandy Swartz raced home from school with me, and the three of us piled onto the same couch I was slumped on at the moment (with new beige slipcovers over the original brown plaid).
And look, there was Jackie Zehman as the scheming Bobbie Spencer, teen prostitute turned head nurse! Back in the eighties, when the other characters would describe poor Bobbie, they would inevitably mention that she was a former call girl from—lower your tone here—Florida. As though that explained it. Florida. Uh-huh. Say no more.
Bobbie was holding up nicely, too. If you watched the show with the shades drawn, it would seem that no time had passed at all, although Bobbie had to be on her fourth or fifth kidnapping at this point. It was easy to pick up the soothingly familiar plot lines—philandering, blackmailing, tense conversations at the fifth-floor nurses station. The best part of all was the program’s final scene. Rick Springfield had returned as Dr. Noah Drake, now a hollow-eyed alcoholic who had drunkenly fricasseed his wife on the operating table.
“I think I need to go on his website,” I announced to no one. “He must have a website, right
?”
Who’s supposed to answer me? Maybe I should take off one of my socks and use it as a hand puppet. “Right!” it could squeak. “You’re my best friend in the whole world!”
A few hours of channel surfing later, I heard a commotion at the front door as my parents burst in. Good. At least we could all eat dinner together. I had a request ready for one of my father’s specialties that I had grown, somehow, to love: teriyaki-marinated filet mignon in a bag. As the meat cooked, it slowly shrank from eight inches to three, while the teriyaki marinade condensed to form an intensely salty, lacquered brown crust. It was strangely satisfying, even if my heart beat a little more heavily after I ate it as my sodium levels spiked.
I turned off the television and jumped up. “Hi, honey,” my mom said, panting and tossing her purse onto a chair. “Listen, we’re not staying, we have a fund-raiser dinner at United Way. Sorry about that.” She and my father dashed upstairs to change.
“Did you have a good day?” I called.
“We did,” hollered my dad. “Listen, there’s a Stouffer’s French bread pizza in the freezer. Pepperoni. Three hundred fifty degrees for twenty minutes.” They whirled through the house, and then, before I could preheat the oven, they were gone.
I hadn’t had a French bread pizza in years. I used to love them. I shoved it into the oven and went up to my bedroom in search of my Rick Springfield tape. Had I loaned it to Kimmy? I rummaged through various drawers, looking beneath carefully folded piles of Original Jams shorts and striped Esprit tops. There it was. I grabbed a Culture Club tape for good measure.
Now for a tape player. I didn’t have my boom box anymore. My father took it outside when he worked in the yard, and eventually it had given out. Was there still a tape player in my folks’ spare car, the ancient Honda Prelude? I thumped down the stairs to the garage. Yes! I wolfed my pizza, grabbed the keys that always hung on a nail near the door, and slid into the front seat.
It was just getting dark. The night sky was clear, and the bracing October air smelled of wood smoke and fallen leaves. Was there anything better than driving alone in the suburbs at night with the music blasting? I wasn’t in a city amid the honking or overwhelmed by the chaos of a highway, so the songs were even more immediate, more satisfying. In the suburbs, sometimes you get the whole road to yourself.
I popped in the tape and pulled out of the driveway. Rick’s voice instantly conjured the sweet, wild feeling of high school anticipation. And being in the car—the windows were down, the car was moving forward, and I was right back in high school on a crisp autumn night that carried the very scent of possibility. I was dressed for a party in my new fall clothes, slightly nervous but excited, singing along with the music as I headed to my friends’ houses to pick them up.
On a Friday night in the suburbs after a certain hour, I always marveled that it was as if the kids took over the roads. The parents went to sleep and disappeared and you passed other kids in their parents’ cars. My friends and I would shout along to Rick Springfield until we neared the party, then we fished out the cassette that we’d rather the guys heard when we pulled up. Where was Bob Marley? Quick! And then, as you walked in the door, that giddy, sick-making anticipation: Anything could happen!
I cranked the volume and sped faster, singing as loudly as I wanted. Why was it, I wondered, that when you loved a song, the feelings it evoked were so profoundly personal? Pop music always reached me in such a specific, hidden place, and my reaction to certain songs was so unthinking, so visceral, that it was almost sexual. Linear thought vanished completely, replaced by images and moods that I could never rationally discuss even with close friends. Hearing “Jessie’s Girl” made me think, simultaneously, of hearing it late at night for the first time on the cheap clock radio by my bed, of watching Michael Garrett put his arm around Lynn during study hall and feeling covetous, and of the video in which a keyed-up Rick smashes his guitar into his bathroom mirror. This was mixed with prickles of elation, the queasy fear of the “make-out room” at parties, unspecified longing, and the vivid recollection of one fall afternoon in which I returned home from a victorious Bethel Rams game, shuffling through the flame-colored leaves on our front lawn and bounding up the stairs of the porch where a fat pumpkin rested by the door. In the kitchen, a Crock-Pot bubbled with the chili that my dad had made earlier. Why this memory was tied to Rick Springfield, I don’t know.
Without even realizing it, I was nearly at Christian’s house. I had driven past it approximately three thousand times and had honed the formula years ago. His house was located on a side street, so I used to cruise by first on the main road to ascertain if his black Jeep was in the driveway. If it was, I would double back, turn down his street, and nonchalantly drive by, my eyes carefully forward but not missing the smallest peripheral detail. I dreaded seeing him, yet I craved a sighting of him—preferably through a window or raking in the backyard, just not in the driveway where I would be caught.
Spotting a family member of Christian’s was almost as exhilarating, particularly his scarily hip older brothers, Marc and Geordie, or his rarely seen workaholic dad. The most prized sighting of all would be to discover—from afar—the three carelessly good-looking Somers boys raking the lawn together. The appearance of his mom was a bit more mundane but still provided insight. Even a glimpse of the dog was a bonus, or a package resting on the porch. Basically any sign of life to the house was significant, down to the new holiday decorations outside, because it got you to wondering: Was Christian involved in the purchase of the decorations? Was he embarrassed by them? Or did he even notice them?
For years as a teenager, I would take the long way to the grocery store or post office so that I could swivel my neck whenever I drove past that house on Linden Lane, but I had learned to be more discreet after an incident involving Kip Williams, a mild crush of mine that had flared up when Christian seemed especially unreachable. I was seventeen, in recent possession of my driver’s license, and was sailing past Kip’s house, using one hand to man the steering wheel because I thought it looked cooler. I was so absorbed in the fleeting sight of someone’s profile in the kitchen window that with a sudden, mortifying crunch, I hit a parked car in front of Kip’s house.
The noise brought six women running out of the split-level next door to Kip’s. I realized with awakening horror that they were all my teachers. Who knew that my homeroom teacher lived next to Kip? In my teenage mind, teachers disappeared inside the classroom’s coat closet and hung themselves up on a hanger until the next school day. But there they were, apparently conducting some sort of meeting. Ever sensible, they had quickly called an ambulance, and within two minutes, one came screeching to the curb. Out jumped a woman who looked vaguely familiar. It was Mrs. Garrett, mother of my third-string crush, Michael Garrett. Mrs. Garrett worked as an EMT? I never knew, or cared, what anybody’s parents did for a living. They were just a vague presence, there to answer doors and exchange awkward pleasantries before I fled with relief to friends’ bedrooms.
My head was throbbing from a hard crack on the windshield, but even if it had been dangling from my neck by a gore-spattered skin strip, there was no way I was going to be publicly bundled into an ambulance, so Mrs. Garrett wrapped a silver blanket around me.
Drawn by the commotion, Kip appeared on his front porch with Brian Miller (known as “Mildew”) to idly watch the action. They were rewarded by the sight of my dad driving by, on his way home from work. When he was halfway down the street, his brake lights blazed. Then he jumped out of the car and ran toward me. “Goddammit, you could have been killed,” he said, choking, and grabbing me in a rough hug. Mildew snickered and I gazed with envy at a squashed squirrel corpse on the side of the road.
chapter eight
I neared Christian’s street and recklessly took a left without doing the investigative drive-by first. I peered at the Somerses’ house. Still the same white aluminum siding and black shutters. Two planters still stood sentry on either side of the f
ront door. In the summer they were filled with red geraniums, but in the fall his mother replaced them with coleus. The mailbox, as always, featured three ducks flying over a lake and the words THE SOMERS FAMILY. An unfamiliar blue sedan was parked in the driveway.
Why had Christian chosen me, all those years ago? I never dared to ask. I did have a good look in those days—dark glossy hair against a deep eighties Bain de Soleil tan, and I was toned from field hockey drills. Adam always went crazy over my dark sheet of hair. Who knows? Maybe I had a certain mystique of my own. I giggled and chattered around girls but was more composed around the boys, more from shyness than an effort to cultivate an alluring detachment.
The moment Christian had started lingering by my locker at the end of my junior year, I shot from the periphery of popularity to being the girl everyone imitated. During that annus mirabilis of Christian’s interest, when we were all seniors, all the elements of my life had woven seamlessly together. It reached a pinnacle on one gold-flecked June morning when I persuaded a few of the class luminaries—including, in a coup, the new pet of the elites, an Australian exchange student named Spencer—to cut class and drive directly down to the shore.
Nine of us had piled into cars (I am making this happen! I exulted), stopping first at Chippy’s Deli, where Christian’s older brother Marc was working and able to slip us a few cases of beer. Then off we went to Jenkinson’s Beach—called “Jenks” by those in the know. As I bounced along in the front seat of Christian’s Jeep, my hair whipping in the salt breeze, he grinned at me as he turned up “Boys Don’t Cry” on the radio and I concentrated so hard on freezing the moment forever that my head ached.
When we returned in the late afternoon, tipsy and sunburned, Christian dropped off everyone but me. “You’re coming over to my house,” he said. “Everyone’s at some lacrosse dinner for Marc.” Geordie, meanwhile, was off at college.