by Stuart Dybek
In senior year, after Angel was expelled, Stosh and I pretty much dropped out—though, unlike me, Stosh managed to graduate. He would have lost his Rexall scholarship if he hadn’t. The last months of school we’d show up in the mornings, then cut classes after lunch and joyride. That’s what we were doing on a springlike day in April when we drove to Lincoln Park and hung around watching people get their yachts back into the water. All we knew about boats was that having one was the ultimate dream.
We were walking away from the boat slips when a guy called, “Say, lads, if you have some time I could use help with a boat.”
His white hair was visible beneath a blue captain’s cap. He wore white canvas shoes, a blue blazer, and yellow ascot. Stosh and I glanced at each other. He didn’t seem to fit any of our immediately recognizable categories of weirdo.
“Come on, it’s a perfect day for a boat ride,” he said and set off briskly.
We shrugged and followed.
He led us through the park, keeping a purposeful, nautical pace as he circumvented rain puddles on the winding walkways, explaining to us over his shoulder the differences between ketches and yawls. It was a walk leading away from the harbor, and just about the time we got suspicious enough to stop, he paused. We stood outside a fence surrounding the manmade lagoon that bordered Lincoln Park Zoo. On the other side was a rental stand for bright yellow, molded plastic pedal boats.
“I’m a little short today, fellows,” the captain said, “but if you could pick up the rental, I’d be happy to pedal.”
We crossed Howard Street into Evanston, a border marked only by the last liquor store on the Chicago side, and followed Sheridan Road as it swerved beneath an archway of shady trees, past mansions, and the campus of Northwestern, which stretched for blocks along the lake. The thwack of tennis balls echoed from courts, and the school with its trimmed lawns and ivy walls had a country-club look. Students in polo shirts and Bermuda shorts wandered the grounds; summer classes must have been in session. When we stopped at a light before one of the frat houses that lined the street, a red Porsche convertible with three guys wedged in pulled out of a driveway into the lane beside us. They were grinning; the driver gunned the engine like they wanted to drag.
“What Greek youth gang do you lads belong to?” Stosh inquired.
They shouted something that sounded more like “greaser” than Greek initials, impossible to make out because Stosh had tromped the gas and the Merc stood vibrating like an airliner about to sprint down the runway. A cloud of blue smoke engulfed the intersection. The guys in the Porsche clutched their throats and pretended to retch over the side of the car. The light flashed green, and while Stosh was still thundering at a standstill, they raised a whiskey bottle in salute and shot away.
Stosh popped it into first, and the Merc lurched forward, coughing and choking as it crawled across the intersection, then backfired into second, caught, and pinned us back in our seats. By third we were coming up on them fast with no traffic between us. Two of them whirled around to look back at us and the driver goosed it, but the Merc kept gaining. I glanced at the speedometer and cheap tach bandaged to the dash, but they were jiggling too much to read; then the four-barrel kicked in, and the Merc bolted forward as if it had discovered an extra gear. Stosh downshifted, whining into a curve, and on the next straightaway, rather than passing them, hung on their rear bumper as if to say, “Can you snap it up?” I could see their shoulders hunched, waiting for a blow. The white dome of Baha’i suddenly rose up over the trees, and we braked into a tire-peeling left onto a cobblestone side street, and rolled to a stop along the curb. When Stosh cut the engine, there was an immediate twitter of birdsong and the sense of peace that the temple imposed on the space around it.
“At least the ass end didn’t skate all over the street,” Stosh said as we slammed out of the car doors.
It was the middle of the week and no one was around, no guards—we’d never seen a guard there. Flights of gulls and pigeons circled the polished dome. Even the pigeons looked exotic.
Everything about Baha‘i seemed to circle: the stairs rising past terraced gardens, each garden planted with different flowers to symbolize the beauty of unity in diversity. That all was explained in a brochure I’d picked up during one of our first visits. We’d expected the brochure would be yet another attempt to collect money while saving our souls, but mainly it detailed the design of the temple. The dome rose from a circular-looking nine-sided base—nine because that number symbolizes comprehensiveness, oneness, and unity. The nine doorways were framed by pylons engraved with mystical symbols: the hooked Zoroastrian cross—which we were afraid was a swastika until we read the brochure—the Star of David, the Christian cross, the star and crescent of Islam, and the nine-petaled rosette of the Baha’is. At Baha’i, every detail was symbolic.
But it wasn’t the gardens or the temple itself we’d come to visit. Instead, we jogged back across Sheridan and, ignoring the locked gate and rusted No Trespassing sign, flipped the fence and followed a path that led past a maintenance building polished the same satiny white as the temple. Behind it, a stand of willows concealed a grassy dune sloping to the lake.
The beach was hidden, screened by willows. We’d never noticed any evidence that anyone besides the sandpipers used it. The powdery sand was dazzling white. Our theory was that the sand was quartz, one of the materials that gave the temple its luster, and that the construction crew had dumped what had been left over on the beach. It was gradually washing away, leaving the coarser, natural sand behind. From the shore, the temple dome ascended above the willows as if Wilmette didn’t exist. For us, the beach was the locus of the place we called Baha’i.
We piled our clothes on the sand and weighed them down with our shoes. The mouse below Stosh’s eye looked purple when he set down his shades. We waded out along a sandbar, the shallow water lukewarm with sunlight. When it sloped off we dove under, swam out, then, treading water, turned to face the beach, where we could see the dome over the dune and keep an eye on our clothes.
“Ah! This is the life,” Stosh said. “No jammed parking lots, no lifeguards trying to save you, no peons peeing in the water.”
“Speak for yourself.”
He gave me a look of horror and began splashing wildly. “Is not even Baha’i sacred?”
“I’m experiencing unity and oneness.”
I swam out farther, each stroke another stroke away from the muggy nights of typing overdue papers, the mornings of waiting for the Manpower truck to show, the question of what to do now that high school was over. Out where it was deep, I kicked down through progressive levels of cold that took my breath away, then shot up cleansed, bobbing on the surface of what felt like the eternal present: gently rocking water nearly indistinguishable from the sparkle of sunlight and reflection of cloudless blue sky. Gulls wheeled, yipping, and I yipped back silently. Stosh swam over, and we floated on our backs.
“I finally brought Dahl out here last night,” he said. “Ever since fucked-up prom night she’s been saying, ‘Take me to Baha‘i.’” He caught Dahl’s Lithuanian accent without seeming to mimic her.
“So, how’d she like it?”
“We got into a fight. I think we broke up.”
“Yet again?”
“Yet again,” Stosh said. “It was an evening doomed from the start. She waited until my trousers were down to tell me she’s pissed about my going to Mexico. Then she adds she’s heard maybe I’m already in Mexico—namely one Nita Rosario.”
“Uh-oh. What did you tell her?”
“The old standby: Huh? ‘You heard me’, she says. ‘Did you bring her here to fuck, too? I know when you’re with other girls. I can smell them on you. It changes my period. I see what you do in my dreams’. Does that sound a little spooky?” Stosh asked.
“Perfectly normal,” I said, not adding that any number of things about Dahl seemed spooky. She’d once threatened to light herself on fire if they broke up.
�
�So, trying to salvage Baha‘i, I say, ‘Look, let’s just inhabit the present, drink some vino.’ And she says, ‘Yeah, inhabit the present,’ and when I pass her the vino she takes a long swig, then spits it in my face and clocks me with the bottle. Dahl’s a violent person.”
“Couldn’t convert her to the peaceful Baha’i way: a little unity in oneness and diversity, eh?”
“Not when she’s trying to brain me with a bottle, screaming, ‘I’m not some little twat born yesterday.’”
“You know, that’s got a certain ring to it. Could be a hit.”
“Little Twat Born Yesterday?”
“No, Unity in Oneness and Diversity.”
Sudden swells, perhaps from some enormous freighter that had passed long before and too far out for us to see, were slowly washing us back toward shore. Stosh, floating on his back, was singing in a falsetto voice meant to imitate black girl singers. Gulls yipped. I added a bass line.
Unity and oneness in diversity
dum dum dum dum …
A little twat born yesterday …
I checked the beach for our piled clothes. They were covered by sandpipers.
Baha’i was our final destination on prom night. Laurel and I were supposed to have met up there with Dahl and Stosh after the Blue Note. Stosh and I had loaded towels, blankets, and three bottles of Lancers into the trunk of the Merc. The wine would chill in the lake while we gathered driftwood for a fire on the beach. In the darkness, the illuminated dome would rise over the dune as if the temple housed a moon.
“We can swim, drink wine, dance by the fire,” Stosh said, “stay up all night …”
“Until Gary, Indiana, rises in the east,” I told him.
It sounded perfect, especially since Laurel had said she wouldn’t go to the same old places crowded with promsters. She said the only thing she liked about proms—or funerals or weddings, for that matter—was the flowers. I couldn’t tell if she meant that literally, but I ordered a corsage just in case.
I didn’t mention the beach. I wanted to surprise her the way I’d been surprised with the sight of the glowing temple. If we went for a night swim, I hoped she wouldn’t mind not having a swimsuit.
I spent the entire day of the prom working on my father’s Rambler. First, I removed the customized carriers he’d attached to the roof. He used them to haul scrap from demolition sites to our backyard for possible use later in repairs on the six-flat he owned. It was a standard set of carriers from Sears that he’d strengthened with two-by-fours and secured to the roof with a complex system of duct tape, coat hangers, and ropes that ran up from the bumpers. Removing the carriers exposed a roof covered in black suction marks that were baked into the slime-green paint as if the Rambler had done battle with a giant squid, an impression reinforced by the smell of smoked fish exhaled by the trunk. My father delivered smoked chubs and kielbasa on weekends for my uncle Vincent’s meat market, and I couldn’t eradicate the smell despite applications of undiluted Pine-Sol.
I gave up on the roof and trunk and slid under the car to wire a second coat hanger behind the one my father had already used to secure the dragging muffler. Next, I tried to turn off the heater—my father believed that riding with the heater blasting even in summer saved wear on the engine—but it was stuck. I vacuumed the seats, Windexed, mopped, hosed, and applied numerous coats of Turtle Wax. The cleaner the Rambler got, the worse it looked for trying.
By now I was sweating, not with exertion, but in desperation. I’d lost sight of the image of the beach at Baha’i, and cursed myself for getting into this. I’d never intended to go to the prom. I’d come to hate high school in general and St. Augustine’s in particular, especially after they’d expelled Angel. Instead of spiffing up the Rambler, I should have been spray-painting SAINT A’S SUCKS across the hood. It was only because Laurel had surprised us both by agreeing to be my date that I was going through this agony.
It would have been easier if, instead of meeting later with Stosh and Dahl, we were all going together in the Merc, but I knew that wasn’t an option. There was a powerful aloofness about Dahl. She was tall and athletic looking—lean, not willowy—and the way her long hair fell across her face, as if she was peeking past a blond curtain, gave Dahl the look of one of those Swedish actresses who utter, “I vant to be alone.”
Stosh and Dahl were too unpredictable together. They could be private, almost secretive, her finger hooked through a belt loop of his jeans, their faces close together, partly hidden in her hair, speaking in whispers. Or they could fall silent, pointedly ignoring each other before erupting in an argument. Even when they were getting along, they brought out a craziness in each other; there was a continual sense of dare between them. They’d been arguing, breaking up, and getting back together since freshman year, when Dahl had sent Stosh a letter on a sheet of threering loose-leaf paper she’d decorated along the margins with drawings of vines and flowers.
Oh last night when you held me in your arms your kisses took my soul away and I knew I would love you forever. I want you to hold me like that again, to kiss me, to fuck me.
xxx, Dahlia
Stosh had shown me the letter in the locker room after a boxing practice that had left me with a bloody nose. “What are you going to do?” I asked, astonished.
“Double Trojans and a tube of rubber cement,” he said.
The last time they’d broken up was in winter, on a night, driving around with Angel in the backseat, when Dahl went nuts about being outvoted on the choice of radio stations, smashed her boot heel into the radio, then tried to brand Stosh with the car lighter.
She’d called Stosh out of the blue a couple weeks before the prom, and as always they started up again. Dahl warned him that she wouldn’t be wearing anything under her prom dress, and that after the dance she wanted him, wearing his tuxedo, to screw her on the edge of the roof of St. Augustine High.
“As long as my tux comes with a safety belt,” Stosh told her.
“No safety belt and no net,” she’d answered.
Even at my lowest point with the Rambler, I knew that doubling with Stosh would have been a bad idea.
Instead of renting formal wear, I wore a tux that, along with my tenor saxophone, I’d inherited from Uncle Lefty. He’d once played for weddings in a combo called the Gents. I hadn’t realized until I unfolded it that it wasn’t a tux: It had tails. I tried pinning them up and I tried tucking them into the trousers, but neither worked. By then I was running late. I stopped by the florist and picked up the orchid corsage I’d ordered, then, flooring it, drove, as much like a speed demon as was possible in the Rambler, to Laurel’s neighborhood.
She lived out toward Midway Airport, and I promptly got lost in a maze of side streets. When I finally pulled up beside the bungalow with her address, Laurel, shouting something over her shoulder, slammed out of her front door before I could get out of the car. She looked flushed, and I had the feeling she’d just been arguing. True to her word, she wasn’t wearing a typical prom gown. Her dress was silky black with thin shoulder straps, and it clung to her slim body. She wore a single strand of pearls, and pearls were threaded through her hair, which was up in the way that had thrown me into a trance on the Archer bus before I ever knew her name.
“You look great,” I said, handing her the corsage.
“Thanks. I got tired of prom gowns that made me feel like a bridesmaid,” she said. “You’re looking pretty dapper yourself—perfect for being fashionably late. I mean, you don’t see many guys these days sporting the Fred Astaire look. You must be a really good dancer, huh?” She was undoing the corsage from its backing of ferns. She tilted the rearview mirror so she could watch as she pinned the flower in her hair.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Kind of a jazz singer look. I’m ready for the Blue Note.” She gave me a peck thanks on the lips that turned into a kiss, and suddenly, spontaneously, we were making out. I could feel her tongue tracing a cursive like the curlicue letters on chocolates, and
the vibration of airliners coming in low for landings, and I thought my prom night would be memorable after all.
“Oh, God,” she sighed, pulling away finally, “not in front of my house.”
We made it about a half block from Laurel’s before the engine ground into a sound like corn popping and smoke huffed out from under the hood.
High heels and all, Laurel insisted on helping me push the Rambler to the curb. I raised the hood and stared into the smoke and spattering oil as if I might have some idea as to how to fix things. Either my maniacal driving had been too much for the Rambler or the carriers had been more integral than I thought.
“Usually, you’re supposed to have car trouble at the end of the evening,” Laurel said.
“Really sorry,” I apologized. “There’s a pay phone by the Dairy Queen. I’ll call us a cab.”
“Then how will we cruise around later? I thought you had this big surprise planned, that we were going to stay out till dawn—capital D.”
Laurel insisted we borrow her mother’s Olds. She also insisted that I wait outside with the Rambler. “You don’t want to meet my mother in that tux just now,” she explained, “and she doesn’t want to meet you.”
The prom was where it was always held, at the South Shore Country Club, which was nowhere near the shore, and by the time we found it in the dark the dance was in full swing, which meant that hardly anyone was left on the dance floor. The real party was going on in the parking lot. Guys had positioned their cars to form an arena lit by an inner ring of headlights. Car radios, all tuned to the same station, blared, and drunken promsters gyrated, eyes closed against the blaze of high beams, while along the perimeter, groups stood smoking and passing bottles.