Laura Elliot is my fucking stupid.
I call her right when I wake up, still hungover more than thirty hours after my last sip of alcohol.
“Four weeks?” She makes that cooing, mopey sound with her voice that always gets me. “I can’t go that long without seeing you.”
“You see me every day at school.”
“But that’s not the same.”
“Look, I have study hall last period three times a week. Maybe I can snag a couple hall passes from my mom. We can hang out before I go to wrestling practice or something.”
“But I want to be with you…” She trails off. “Alone.”
A flash of her parents’ basement. The dueling dryer and dehumidifier each trying to upstage the other, the smells of fabric softener and musty throw rugs, a scratchy old couch relegated to rec room duty but enjoying a most active retirement. Laura’s head bent awkwardly against the couch’s armrest.
“Hank, you still there?”
I nod like she can see me. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m here.”
I realized I liked Laura about a month ago. She’s a senior and a year older than me. It just kind of happened. Two hours after the Christmas Dance ended, our dates kicked to the curb, we were making out on her front porch. Laura introduced me to her mom and dad. They went to bed. We made out on the couch in her family room. We made out in the kitchen. We made out in the dining room. She stopped me as I was pulling out of the driveway, jumped in my car, and we made out in my car. Two weeks ago, we fooled around all night in a hot tub at a New Year’s party and missed Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. And I never fucking miss Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.
“Hank? Hello?”
“I said I’m still here.”
“Well, you’re not talking much.”
Sixty minutes into a phone conversation, and she wants to ratchet up the chit chat. I could tell her about the guilt I feel over the whole Mary thing, if I felt any. Thanks to Hatch’s sweaty bare ass, I’ve managed to rationalize away any culpability.
“I’m just bummed out, I guess.”
“Yeah, me too.”
She does it again, that cooing thing with her voice. I can’t take it any longer. “Hey, Laura.”
“Yeah?”
“You working tonight?”
“Sure am.”
“When’s the last show end?”
“Midnight-ish.”
“I’ll be there.”
Laura giggles. “See you then.”
Mom fixes us spaghetti for dinner. She makes the sauce from scratch, with ground-up Italian sausage instead of meatballs, because the sauce tastes better that way. Grandpa George is visiting some cousins in Kentucky for the week, so she only makes half as much as normal. After dinner, Dad asks Mom to join him for a walk around the block. Mom doesn’t want to. The thirty pounds she’s put on not even halfway through her pregnancy tells me she’s won this argument once or twice. But Dad insists. He issues instructions to his progeny.
“Clean the kitchen, son.”
I nod. “Sure thing, Dad.”
“And, Jeanine?”
“What?” my sister asks. She has a tendency to whine more than talk when she’s annoyed by the world. She whines a lot.
“Help your brother.”
“But, Dad, I cleaned after lunch.”
I look at Jeanine. She’s the one most opposed to the new baby, for fear of breaking her stranglehold on the getting-away-with-murder privileges afforded her as the youngest child. “We went out to eat for lunch today,” I say to her. “You were the one who begged us to go to Taco Bell.”
“Did not.”
“Did, too.”
“Do you or don’t you want to go to the New Kids on the Block concert?” I ask. “Because I can always back out as your chaperone.”
“Uh…” I can see the horror in Jeanine’s face. “I guess I just forgot.”
“Just do it!” Dad orders, shutting the door.
My sister thinks I’m doing her a favor when I tell her I’ll take care of the kitchen and she should go watch a movie. But the truth is I don’t want any witnesses.
I clear the dinner table and wipe it down with a wet rag. I carry the butter to the refrigerator, open the refrigerator door, and place the butter on its plastic shelf inside the door. I grab the gallon of milk and the carton of large eggs. The milk is just opened. Two eggs are missing from the dozen. I carry the milk and the eggs over to the sink.
“I want a snack.”
I jump, startled. Jeanine stands behind me. Her mop of curly blonde hair makes her look younger than thirteen.
Between us, I most resemble Dad—the longer face, the prominent nose, the large eyes setting off a more straight than curved smile. Jeanine is her mother’s daughter, the eyes smaller and closer together in the middle of a more circular face, the nose not as obvious, all of which sit perched above a deep sickle-shaped smile that overwhelms all her features whenever she laughs.
I turn to block the evidence. “You just ate.”
“What about dessert?” Jeanine asks.
“How’s ice cream sound?”
“With Magic Shell?”
“Yes, with Magic Shell.”
“I want the stuff that gets hard. Not Hershey’s Syrup.”
“I know the difference between the two.”
My sister leaves the kitchen. I start to unscrew the cap to the milk when I hear the sound of feet sliding on oak hardwood floors.
Jeanine peeks into the kitchen.
“What?” I say.
“I changed my mind. I don’t want Magic Shell now. I want Hershey’s Syrup.”
“Okay.”
“And another thing.”
I grab the edge of the sink in exasperation. “Good Lord, what now?”
“I think we’re out of Hershey’s Syrup.”
“So you want Magic Shell?”
“No…” Jeanine pauses, taps her finger on her mouth. “If we’re out of Hershey’s Syrup, and if all we have is chocolate ice cream, I’ll have mine plain. But if we have vanilla, I’ll have Hershey’s Syrup.”
“You mean Magic Shell?”
“I don’t like Magic Shell.”
“Get out of here!” I push her out of the kitchen. “You’ll eat what I bring you.”
I pour out the gallon of milk. I grab the eggs, shove them one by one down the drain, then turn on the disposal. I throw away the empty milk jug, and wait.
Mom goes to bed around nine. At ten o’clock Dad takes his exalted place on the couch in front of the television. Halfway into the Channel 13 weather forecast, I “suddenly” realize we don’t have any milk or eggs for breakfast. Dad asks if I wouldn’t mind making a late night grocery run.
The five screen Regency 5 Theater sits behind my neighborhood on the corner of Regence and Farr, a mile from my house. I look at my Swatch as I pull into the theater parking lot, trying to discern the time. The face of the Swatch has no numerals. The small hand is pointing to a mint-green triangle in the upper left corner, and the big hand is about halfway between a fluorescent-orange squiggly line and a yellow circle near the bottom of the watch. 11:35 p.m. is my best guess. Dad is falling asleep right about now in the middle of Carson’s monologue.
Regency 5 used to be a two-screen theater, a nondescript brick building tacked onto the south end of a Hills department store. Then, two screens became three, and then they skipped four and went straight to five. The biggest mystery is how they managed to add three extra screens without ever expanding the building itself.
I drive a cheap-ass, late-seventies Subaru even though my father has an entire parking lot of brand-new Oldsmobiles, mostly because I have an affinity for wrecking brand-new Oldsmobiles. I park my red Subaru wagon in a handicap spot at the front of the theater. A row of glass
doors wrap the front of the theater below the marquee. I give the doors a shake. They’re locked. The lights are dimmed inside, but I see someone walking toward me. She opens the doors.
“You’re early.” She closes the door behind me and locks it again.
“I know. Just thought I’d surprise—”
Her arms are around my neck, her lips already pressed against my own. She pretends to rub her lipstick off my lips but leaves it there. Laura likes to mark her territory. I can’t get enough of her: her smell, her taste, her touch, that smoky lilt in her voice when she pouts to get what she wants. We kiss again.
“Sorry, but I just want to eat you up,” Laura says, nibbling my neck. She rests her cleft chin on my shoulder.
Laura’s long, brown hair is pulled back into a ponytail, a few stray curls sneaking out the sides. Even smelling of popcorn oil and garbed in her Regency 5 standard issue uniform—white oxford, red vest, blue pants—I find her irresistible. Her shirt looks a size too small, but that’s just her breasts. I’m not going to lie, they’re the first thing I ever noticed about her—soft and big, with a slight downward slope to them, almost too large for her age. Not belly dancer perfect, but as perfect as I’ve ever felt. Next to her substantial rack, her most striking feature is her mass of brown curls she spends hours teasing and spraying into something that emerges, quite miraculously, gorgeous. Laura is more confident about her looks than most girls her age but not in an obvious way. She’s coy in public, taking the sexy route behind closed doors.
I grin. “No apologies necessary.”
Laura grabs my hand. “Want to catch the last ten minutes of a flick?”
“What’s on?”
“Working Girl.”
“The movie isn’t on my must-see list. Anything else?”
“Nope,” Laura says. “Last show of the night.”
“Why don’t we just stay out here?”
Laura pushes me. “You’re no fun.”
I grab her by the hips and pull her toward me. “It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
“Unless it involves an alien popping out of someone’s chest cavity or a giant marshmallow man, I don’t care for Sigourney Weaver.”
“And I suppose you don’t like Melanie Griffith, either?”
“I happen to like Melanie Griffith very much, at least when she plays a stripper and when Brian De Palma is her director.”
She doesn’t catch the reference.
“You know, Body Double?”
Still nothing.
“Holly Body? Frankie Goes to Hollywood? Relax, don’t do it, when you wanna go to it? Not quite legendary B-movie actor Craig Wasson?”
Laura hasn’t seen the movie. By the time we finish arguing about it, Working Girl is over. Three couples file out the front door of the theater to the tune of Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run.” I refuse to admit I like this song, although it is quite catchy. Any acknowledgment of its positive attributes takes me right back to that impressionable four-year-old boy whose mother played Helen Reddy’s Greatest Hits (And More) so many times he memorized the lyrics. Mom would invite friends over and have me sing “I Am Woman” and “Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady,” and they’d all tell me how cute I was. Yeah, Mom, it’s cute to emasculate your four-year-old son for the neighbors’ amusement.
“Time to close up.” Laura starts to segue into another subject. I pretend I’m listening, but the only thing in my head at the moment are the lyrics to “Delta Dawn.”
“What do you think?” she asks.
I have no idea what I’m about to agree to, but nonetheless I nod eagerly. “Sounds good.”
Laura hands me a broom and dustpan, so I’m guessing I agreed to help her sweep down the aisles of Screen 3. At least Helen Reddy has stopped singing. Scraping Dots and Milk Duds off a sticky, cola-stained floor of a movie theater is not what I had in mind for tonight. I tell myself it’s all for the cause.
Laura walks by and gives me a peck on the check. “You’re such a cutie.”
Hopefully somewhere down the road, “the cause” involves a little more than a peck on the cheek and being cute.
Chapter five
Laura hands me an oversized red-and-pink cardboard heart stuffed with chocolates. “They’re coconut-filled,” she says. “Your favorite, right?”
“Yeah, right.” I think about all those Halloweens waiting for Jeanine to empty her treat basket and hand over her discarded Almond Joy and Mounds bars. Have I already told Laura that story? Fuck, what haven’t I told her?
We sit on Laura’s front porch, the two dozen red roses on her dresser visible through her bedroom window. I had them delivered by a local florist, courtesy of the Fitzpatrick Olds-Cadillac-Subaru expense account. Laura told me the roses were the most beautiful flowers anyone had ever given her. I told her I paid for them with my own money and then ended with the exclamatory flourish, “Two dozen roses for two months of being in love.”
Yes, I said it. Fucking goddamn right I said it.
The Valentine’s Day dance was last night. Laura and I were on the dance floor. I floated the word out there for public consumption sometime during Aerosmith’s “Angel.” She floated the word back at me during Patrick Swayze’s “She’s Like the Wind.” We said it together during George Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set on You.”
The chasm separating the act of being in love and the act of making love is filled with the nervous sweat and rendered tears of my many unconsummated relationships. I’m a junior, of course, turning seventeen in April. Laura is a senior, and turned eighteen right before we started dating. Up until now, we have acted under the tacit assumption that neither of us are virgins. More to the point, I know she isn’t a virgin, and she has bought into my bullshit sexual history.
Laura puts her head in my lap. She reaches up and runs her hand through my hair. “You were such a gentleman last night.”
We ended up in Laura’s basement after the dance, both of us a little tipsy on purple passion—a noxious mix of grape soda and Everclear. I got her naked on the old couch. Loose change kept rattling inside the clothes dryer behind our heads. She gave me a hickey and a hand job. I buried my face in her bare chest, squeezed her nipples until they turned red, and fingered her until she came. A lesser girl would come right out and say, “Why didn’t you fuck me last night?” But for whatever reason, Laura seems intent on mistaking my awkwardness for chivalry.
“What’s all that?” I nod at the stack of letters in her other hand.
“These?” Laura throws the letters aside. “Nothing but junk mail. Ever since we booked a room down in Panama City, I’m guessing my name got on a ton of spring break mailing lists. I sift through a half dozen of these things every day.”
“Spring break?”
“Hell yeah! Senior year, rite of passage, the last hurrah.”
Senior spring break has been looming on the horizon. With Laura being a senior and me a junior, it’s the one thing that has scared me more than anything else in our relationship. She will go to Florida my girlfriend, and she will come back single. That is just how the world works.
“This is news to me.” I reach over and grab one of the letters. I pull out and unfold a full color poster of sunburned frat boys with bulges in their pants ogling drunken bikini-clad girls.
Laura scoots right up next to me and takes my hand in hers. She kisses me on the cheek. I want to say, “I love you,” or, “don’t go,” or something, but anything comprehensible or appropriate defers to an internal reel of Laura climbing out of a pool Phoebe Cates-like in a red-string bikini to The Cars’ “Moving in Stereo.”
“Hank?” Laura grabs my chin with her hand, pulling me around until we were facing one another. “You okay?”
If okay means watching my girlfriend’s bare breasts burst out of her bikini top while Benjamin Orr serenades her, I’m fine.
I nod but don’t say anything.
I’ve never been jealous. Is this what it feels like? Is this what love feels like? Panic. Mistrust. Paranoia. Life gives you every reason to be happy, and you’re all, “Fuck it, bring on the misery.”
I stand, taking Laura in my arms. I reach around and grab her ass, pulling her hard into me. I kiss her, my tongue pushing into her mouth, prying open her teeth. It’s an obvious kiss, at least to me. More desperate than passionate.
Whitesnake is in my head as I kiss her. And why wouldn’t Whitesnake be in my head? For one, their ’79 album Lovehunter is graced by the greatest piece of cover art in rock history—a naked, bare-assed Amazonian warrior princess astride a giant snake. For another, it is both a blessing and a curse of my generation that we set our lives to a constant soundtrack of suspect music and even more suspect decisions, the pitiful made indescribable by David Coverdale’s cautionary serenade that I should have known better, than to let you go aloooone.
I just now realize that Whitesnake is a euphemism for penis.
Chapter SIX
Mom lost another baby again. Her doctor told her that the first trimester was the most critical time for the viability of the fetus, but he made the mistake of counting on my mom’s uterus. She almost made it to six months this time, three months longer than the first miscarriage.
My father was better this time around. He has been an absolute rock, if I’m being honest. Yesterday, Uncle Mitch called to tell him the annulment with Aunt Ophelia was final and that he was relocating to the West Coast. Dad seemed more angry than sad. I was more resentful than grateful that he didn’t want to talk about it.
Chapter seven
Laura squeezes my shoulder. “How’s your mom doing?”
“Good.”
“Really?”
“Almost too good. Mom and Dad say they’re trying again as soon as they get the okay from the doctor.”
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride Page 5