by Cathy Holton
So what? Life wasn’t about perfection. It wasn’t neat and tidy. It was about loss and longing. Emily Brontë had known that when she wrote Wuthering Heights. That was how Mel thought of herself and J.T. now, like Cathy and Heathcliff doomed to loneliness, to regret, to forever seeking the return of that one perfect love. It was depressing and romantic and so hopelessly true. Mel figured the tragic feeling would engender at least one future novel, maybe not as perfect as Wuthering Heights, but compelling nevertheless. Hopefully a New York Times bestseller.
“There,” Annie said, putting the finishing touches on a plate of deviled eggs that she’d made with olives to simulate eyeballs. She’d used carrot shavings for the eyelashes, and the effect was startling. “Do you think I should make some of those little ghost sandwiches?”
“I think we have enough food,” Mel said.
“We never have enough food,” Sara said. “We always run out.”
It was true. The party had grown over the last few years from a small get-together in a dorm room to an affair with close to one hundred guests. “Well, you know what? Those who want to eat will have to get here early.” Mel poured herself another zombie. She was already half-buzzed. Another zombie or two and she wouldn’t have to think about J.T. Radford at all.
“You can’t invite people and then not have anything for them to eat,” Sara told Mel, wiping her fingers on her jeans. She was busy wrapping a brie in a puff pastry that she had decorated with thin strands of dough to look like a spiderweb.
“Sure you can. Besides, half the people who show up aren’t even invited.”
“Go ahead and make those sandwiches,” Sara said to Annie.
They’d been arguing all morning. For days, really, ever since Mel broke up with J.T. and Sara ran into him in the Bulldog Pub. It was just like Sara to take J.T.’s side even though they’d hardly spoken more than a few words to each other in the three years Mel had dated him.
They heard the front screen door slam and a moment later Lola came dancing into the room, dressed in her costume. They’d sent her to the store earlier to pick up a keg and a bag of ice but she came in carrying nothing but a bleached human skull. “Look what I found!” she said, holding it up like a trophy. She looked like a little girl in her black Mary Janes and white stockings with the big bow stuck in her hair.
Annie looked like a little girl, too, only a dangerous one. She was chopping the crusts off a loaf of Sunbeam bread with a meat cleaver. “Careful,” she said, putting her elbow up to keep the dancing Lola at bay. “I’m using a sharp instrument here.”
Mel took the skull from Lola. It was life-size but made of plastic. “Where’d you get this?”
“One of Briggs’s fraternity brothers stole it from the drama department. They did Hamlet last spring.”
“Stole it?”
Lola frowned. She stuck one finger under the edge of the floppy bow and scratched. “Well, borrowed it,” she said. “We can give it back when we’re through.” She took the skull from Mel and went into the dining room, where she placed it in the center of the table between two tall black candelabras. Mel stood in the doorway, watching her.
“Did you get the ice?”
Lola lifted her shoulders under her ears and put her fingers over her mouth like a little girl who’s been bad but knows she’s adorable anyway. “Oops,” she said.
“Never mind. We’ll get someone else to go. Did you get the keg?”
“Briggs is setting it up out back.” Lola clapped her hands, having already forgotten about the ice. She looked gleefully around the decorated room and did a little dance on the tips of her shiny patent-leather shoes. “Oh, look at the King Cake!” she said.
“Thank your mom for us, will you?” Mel said. Maureen ordered King Cakes for her friends and family every January from a bakery in New Orleans. Her great-grandfather had been one of the founding members of Comus, and it was her way of keeping family traditions alive. Lola donated her King Cake every year to the party; whoever got the Baby Jesus won a door prize. This year’s prize was a quart of vodka.
“You better get ready,” Annie said to Mel. She pushed her way through the doorway with the tray of deviled eggs in her hands. “People will start showing up any minute.” She set the tray down on the table and stood back to admire her handiwork. Looking at Lola and Annie standing there side by side in their matching dresses and white tights, Mel grinned.
“Hey, girls,” she said. “Do your thing.”
Lola clasped Annie’s hand and they made their faces go blank. In deadpan voices they said in unison, “Danny, come play with us. Come play with us, Danny.”
“Okay, now that’s just creepy,” Mel said.
Lola said, “Not as creepy as J.T. carrying an ax and saying ‘Here’s Johnny!’” She’d said it without thinking, of course. She leaned over and rearranged a bowl of M&Ms to cover her embarrassment. Mel and J.T. had been a couple for so long it was hard to think of them as anything else.
Mel gave her a wan little smile. The feeling of melancholy she’d carried all day had faded to a dull ache. The zombies helped. She thought suddenly of Junior. The last time she had talked to him he had been calling from a pay phone in Memphis. He was homeless and she could hear him shouting, Get away from my stuff! Get away from my stuff! and then the phone went dead. She never talked to him again.
“Maybe I can carry the ax,” she said to Lola. Every man she’d ever loved had disappointed her in some way. The trick, she’d learned, was to disappoint them before they had a chance to do it to you. “It might be kind of funny if Danny’s mom turns out to be the homicidal maniac.” She shouted to Sara in the kitchen, “What do you think, Danny? Should I chase you around with an ax?”
“Sure,” Sara said. “I can see you doing that.”
Lola had painted two little spots of color on her cheeks but Annie had no need of rouge. Her face had a feverish quality these days; she went everywhere with her eyes glittering and her face flushed with color. Twice Mel had asked her if she was coming down with something, laying a cool hand on her forehead, and both times Annie had jumped as if pierced with a needle and said, “No! Nothing’s wrong! I feel fine!”
Mel put it down to problems with her love life. Annie had neglected to tell Mitchell about the party this weekend, she had begun to duck his calls on Wednesday nights, and it was just a matter of time, Mel knew, before she broke up with him for good. Everyone but Annie seemed to see it coming, although exactly what it was that they were feuding over seemed unclear. Mitchell had probably forgotten to roll up the tube of toothpaste correctly when he visited last time. Annie would not be an easy woman to love, and Mel felt sure she’d never find anyone who loved her as completely as Mitchell seemed to.
Sara came into the room carrying what remained of the pitcher of zombies. She passed out plastic cups from the sideboard and poured the drinks. “Cheers,” she said, and everyone lifted their glasses. “Here’s to our fourth and last Howl at the Moon Party.”
“No, don’t say that!” Lola cried. “It sounds so final.”
“It is final,” Sara said. “This time next year we’ll all be someplace else.”
“Try not to be so fucking pessimistic,” Mel said. “You’re spoiling my buzz.”
Sara sipped her drink and made a face. “Speaking of buzzed,” she said. “What’s in this?”
“Apricot Brandy, pineapple juice, and rum.” Mel held up four fingers. “Four kinds.”
“Four kinds of rum?” Lola said. “I did not know that.” She looked amazed and happy. The white bow drooped over her ear like a gardenia.
Mel ticked off the rums with her fingers. “Heavy-bodied rum, light Puerto Rican rum, and heavy Puerto Rican rum.”
Lola sipped her drink and held it tightly against her chest, licking her lips. “What’s the fourth kind?”
Mel grinned and looked around the room. “Red rum,” she said.
“Jesus,” Sara said.
“You’re welcome,” Mel said.
Chapter 19
ately Mel had taken to wearing berets, smoking Tiparillos, and talking in a husky voice like a bad Marlene Dietrich impersonator. Sara knew then that J.T. was hanging by his fingernails. Everyone else had been shocked when Mel called it off but Sara had seen it coming; no one knew Mel the way she did. Not even J.T. Least of all J.T.
Sara supposed it probably had something to do with Mel’s brother Junior, who’d OD’d in a flophouse in Memphis in late October. Mel hadn’t seen Junior in three years but when she got the news, she shut herself up in her bedroom for two days. When she came out, she wouldn’t talk about him at all. But she’d been different since then.
J.T. had been surprised by Mel’s vehement refusal to discuss her only brother’s tragic death. He seemed bewildered that Mel could close off her emotions so well, could shut her heart away like a magician closing the lid of an intricate Chinese box. This bewilderment would, of course, ultimately be his downfall. You would have had to witness Mel’s childhood to know why she did what she did.
“Why won’t she talk about it?” J.T. asked a week after Junior died. He and Sara were sitting out on the porch on a rainy evening in early November, long after Mel had stalked into the house, slamming the door behind her. Sara sat on the porch swing, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, and J.T. sat on the top step, his back against one of the pillars. A golden light fell cheerily from the front windows, slanting across the porch floor and illuminating his face.
“You need to stop pushing her,” Sara said. “If she wants to talk about it, she will. Don’t try to force her.”
He shook his head stubbornly. “It’s not healthy,” he said. Rain dripped from the eaves and glistened along the asphalt road. From time to time a car would pass, its headlights bright in the swirling fog. “If she doesn’t get it off her chest it could make her sick.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Not now, but later. People who don’t express their emotions have higher rates of cancer and heart disease.”
She figured this statement had more to do with his hurt feelings than it did with worrying about Mel’s health, so she said nothing.
Two weeks later Mel began wearing berets and smoking Tiparillos in preparation for her new literary life in New York, and Sara saw the writing on the wall for J.T. She should have been happy that he was finally going to get a taste of what she had been suffering for the past three years, but she wasn’t happy. She was too tenderhearted to enjoy the suffering of others. She had worn her infatuation for him like a hair shirt, secretly and penitently. She had hidden her feelings over the years by dating other boys (although never for very long), sometimes double-dating with Mel and J.T. In all that time they had only had two real conversations. The first time was when J.T. found out Sara was an English major and they had argued over The Madwoman in the Attic, with Sara taking the side of Gilbert and Gubar, and J.T. holding with Bloom’s more Oedipal interpretation of nineteenth-century literature.
The second time was at a drive-in movie in the spring of Sara’s junior year. She and a boy named Bart had double-dated with Mel and J.T. for a showing of Barry Lyndon. It was intermission and Mel and Bart had gone to use the rest rooms. Sara was snuggled down in the backseat of J.T.’s car while he sat in the front, with his arm stretched along the seat between them.
“What do you think of the movie?” he asked her, staring at the screen, which showed a picture of a box of popcorn with facial features and two stick legs. The popcorn had a cloud swelling out of its box-head like a tumor. Inside the cloud it read, Hot buttered popcorn! Get your hot buttered popcorn now at the concession stand!
“Excuse me?” She wasn’t used to being alone with him and she was nervous.
He turned around and leaned against the door so he could see her more easily. “What do you think of the movie?”
It was a balmy evening in early May. The windows were rolled down and the scent of newly mown grass was in the air. Children played on a rusty swing set erected beneath the wide screen, or ran laughing between the endless rows of automobiles.
“I love Thackeray, but Vanity Fair is my favorite novel.”
“Okay,” he said, smiling as if he found her slightly comical, “but what do you think of the movie?”
She forced herself to look at him. “I think it’s interesting the way Kubrick framed his opening shot almost as if it were an eighteenth-century landscape painting. The dueling figures are so small, so insignificant. It’s as if the landscape takes precedence over the people.”
He tilted his head, listening intently. “And the way he shoots it with the zoom lens makes it feel two-dimensional, almost like an oil painting.”
“Yes.”
He looked down at his T-shirt, smoothing it across his chest. He was tall, probably six feet two or three, but in the enclosed space of the car he seemed larger. “You know, you’re an interesting girl,” he said, as if this had never occurred to him before.
She didn’t know what to say. She turned her head and studied the brightly lit concession building and the crowd of people standing in line outside the door. Mel and Bart were nowhere to be seen. “What’s keeping them?” she said.
“It’s funny because in The Shining Kubrick likes to use the tracking shot to keep up with the action, but in this movie he seems to prefer the long shot. Everything is so still, so carefully arranged.”
“I guess that’s what makes Kubrick a genius.”
“Right.” His hair, straight and lit with strands of gold, framed his face. He pushed it carelessly behind one ear and stretched his arm out again along the back of the seat. She could see strands of red-gold hair glinting there and she wanted to touch it, to stroke his arm like she would a small, soft animal. He said, “Did you see A Clockwork Orange?”
She colored slightly and looked away “I tried to see it but it was too violent. I had to get up and leave in the middle of the ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ rape scene.”
He laughed and dropped his hand over the seat, patting her knee in a friendly manner. Her knee jumped of its own accord, as if it were rigged to an electrical current. It was the first time he had ever touched her. He leaned over to fiddle with the radio and Sara pulled her legs up under her, trying to hide her embarrassment. After a moment she said, “It was the same in The Exorcist. I put my hands over my eyes and ears and kept them there through most of the movie. My date was so mad he’d paid for a movie I never saw, he made me walk home.”
J.T. shook his head. “Nice guy,” he said.
“Not really.”
He leaned against the door again, his fingers tapping lightly against the top of the seat. His face was turned toward her, half in and half out of the shadows. “So why do you do that?” he said.
“Do what?”
“Go out with guys who aren’t good enough for you.”
She looked at him to see if he was joking but he seemed serious. She said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do.” He stopped tapping with his fingers and pointed with his thumb at the concession building behind them. “Like that joker Bart.”
“He’s a nice guy.”
“Is he?”
The color deepened in her face. “Maybe I should ask you before I go out with anyone,” she said stiffly. “Maybe I should clear it with you first.”
He laughed suddenly. “Maybe you should,” he said.
They could hear Mel and Bart returning to the car, whooping and laughing in the darkness. Mel threw open the door and the dome lights came on as she slid in beside J.T, pulling the door shut behind her. She looked at him and then at Sara. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said, leaning to peer at the cardboard tray she held in her hands. “What’d you bring me?”
“A chili dog,” she said.
Bart slid in beside Sara and shoved
a popcorn bag at her. “Here,” he said. “We’ll share it. And the Coke, too.” He was from California, his father was an entertainment lawyer, and he was tall and blond and talked like a Laguna Beach surfer. He was one of Briggs’s fraternity brothers and this was their second date. The first had been to a fraternity semiformal in Charlotte, where he’d gotten so drunk that he passed out under a ballroom table and Sara had to spend the night in Briggs and Lola’s room.
The movie came back on and J.T. turned up the volume on the little speaker box.
“This movie sucks,” Bart said. He slumped down beside Sara on the seat.
“It’s pretty slow,” Mel agreed. J.T. said nothing, slowly chewing his hot dog.
“I like it,” Sara said, shoving an elbow in Bart’s ribs to get him to move over. “I think it’s a masterpiece.”
“I think it’s a masterpiece,” Bart said in a loud falsetto voice. Mel snorted and glanced at him over her shoulder, and he grinned and squeaked, “A masterpiece!”
“Why don’t you shut up so we can hear what’s going on?” J.T. said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Bart stared despondently at the back of J.T.’s head. He wasn’t used to being told to shut up. Back at the fraternity house, he was the life of the party.
On the screen Barry was vowing never to fall from the rank of a gentleman again while the narrator informed them that Barry would eventually die alone and penniless. Caught up in the swelling score of Handel’s Sarabande in D Minor, Sara sat there sad and bewildered, trying to ignore Bart, who was now halfheartedly attempting to stick his hand down her pants. J.T. was right. She only dated men she knew were beneath her. But why did she do that, why did she constantly sabotage her few chances at romance? The answer, of course, was sitting in the front seat of the car, chewing on a chili dog.