by Amy Jo Burns
Across the street at the local ice cream shop, a pink-and-yellow neon light flickered like the flash of a camera. The light sounded a faint buzz, as if it was just about to go out. That night, as we fell outside the boundary lines, it felt all right to be young and stuck in a dead zone, a place outsiders claimed had “never recovered” from its losses. The last thing I saw was the dark curtain of Pete’s eyelashes as he closed his eyes and leaned toward me.
On the night of Sid’s party, Pete and I shared a stump by the fire. Streaks of orange rose before us, pawing at an endless expanse of black sky. My eyes stung from the smoke, but I couldn’t stop looking at the flames. A discarded plastic cup melted in the heat. My friends piled on the kindling, tossing old furniture, dust rags, and Styrofoam plates—things that had no place in Sid’s new house—into the fire.
It was a night like any other. Foss kept burning his hot dogs. Jill and Kev were fighting. Sam tossed a football in the air. Nora attracted a flock of boys. Some kid ate all the cheese curls. Time passed, first slow, then quick. There was silence, always the silence. Somebody made a joke, a few people laughed. Everyone watched the fire breed.
As summer ended, the rain returned. No more hide-and-seek at nightfall, no more secrets shared beneath the quiet trees. Instead I listened to Pete’s Nine Inch Nails album like he’d asked me to. I’d never heard anything like it, and the music both frightened and seduced me. At times, Trent Reznor’s voice was low, melodic. And then the next second, it changed to a series of hoarse screams. I’d heard that the whole record was meant to represent a character’s psychological devolution, a downward spiral. Even at a low volume, the music refused to be ignored.
Trent’s song “Closer” stood apart from all the others. Its hook had a mod, electronic feel. The beat was slow. Controlled. The probing lyrics about sex and God shot through me as one word took center stage: fuck.
Once a long time ago—before Carly left, before Mr. Lotte—she and I shared a hushed conversation about sex.
“Sex is bad,” she whispered to me while we were sitting in the back of a church. “It’s in the Bible.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I’m never having sex,” Carly told me. “Not even when I’m married.”
It was strange the way Carly appeared in my thoughts, as if an evanescent fog dissipated for a moment, revealing her fixed place in my memory before the fog rushed in again. It was the only way I could have her now, the only way any of Lotte’s girls could have each other. Honesty had to be surrendered or apologized for, so terrible was the consequence of telling the truth.
The way Trent Reznor’s mouth formed the word made me think he wanted his audience to feel every letter. I imagined his likeness as he said it. His teeth dug into his thrusting bottom lip for the “F.” The “U,” his mouth opened in invitation. And the strong click of the “CK” at the back of his throat echoed like the cocking of a gun. The word was not just a verb or an action. It was an emotion. A mood. A statement. Every time he said it, I felt the sound shake my sternum. In Mercury, good girls didn’t say “fuck.”
Our initiation into the sorority of good girls in Mercury begins long before we’re called upon to perform any good-girlish duties. That way, when the time comes, we won’t have to be called upon at all. We learn by watching all the other virtuous beauties who come before us, skinny little things who cheer with the rest of the squad and smile for the camera and bite their nails in secret.
We’re taught that a good girl must be careful who she’s seen with. A good girl seen with the wrong kind of boy can adulterate her virginal status, turning her not into a “bad girl”—because that title suggests a kind of sexuality that makes everyone a bit uncomfortable—but into a “girl who got herself into trouble.” Once a girl gets herself into trouble, her good-girl crown has been cracked and can never be repaired. The best she can hope to become is a “girl who made some mistakes,” or even worse, a “girl who is still figuring it out.” If you’re a girl who is still figuring it out, you may as well give up now and claim your stool down at the bar on the outskirts of town because that’s where you’re going to end up in five years anyway. There’s never much talk about the boys themselves who are responsible for leading good girls astray. Boys will be boys, and girls ought to know better.
Speaking of boys, there are three black boys in town, and they’re handsome like you’ve never seen. Good boys, too—strong hands and worn letter jackets—but you’ll find them walking the road alone at night, always alone, especially when it’s cold. These aren’t summer’s kind of boys. They’re down at the park, they’re behind the elementary school, they’re not looking for a ride.
Every girl’s daddy waits in line to slap these boys on the back after they win Friday night’s game, but don’t you forget. He’d push the same kid off his porch if he dared show interest in his daughter. Don’t you come around here, the grown man would tell him, his face veiled by the screen door. He won’t say it isn’t right, or that it’s not our way. He likes the kid too much to admit the truth.
So every good daughter pines in private. Her daddy never says, “He just ain’t fit for you, honey,” because she already knows not to ask. She thinks she’s not confused about where real danger hides.
A good girl knows she can avoid danger by keeping her mouth shut, and not just about Mr. Lotte, though that time is coming fast. Mrs. Lotte has her own harmless, meant-for-nothing secrets, and we don’t mind keeping them. In the summer of 1991, we spend rotating afternoons with Mrs. Lotte, eyeing her as she sits erect on the couch, her hand squeezing the television remote. Summertime typically means the end of school year piano lessons, but as good girls, we are always eager to improve.
We wait in the velour recliner, and the backs of our legs start to sweat. Their sweltering living room sags with sour air. On the television, we see a man with black jeans and a brown mullet clutching the bow of a ship in the middle of a severe thunderstorm. He screams into the waves. His name is John Black.
When the show goes to commercial, Mrs. Lotte’s body slackens and she collapses against the cushion. After a few ads for detergent and local grocery stores, an image of an hourglass appears on the screen and a voice says, “Stay tuned for the second half of Days of Our Lives.”
As the scenes intertwine, we bite the bottoms of our lips and scoot forward in the armchair. Incipient fascination swells in our chests. Conspicuous clues reveal where evil lurks: in minor chords, behind thick mustaches and well-trimmed beards, between shipping crates in abandoned shipyards. In the final scene, as John Black plants himself at the bow of that cursed ship, defying the storm’s attempts to rock him, the soft underbelly notes of a girl’s version of the theme to the musical Cats waft up from the basement.
At 1:59 p.m., the credits roll. We sink back in our cushions and exhale. A secret has passed between us. Our mothers wouldn’t like knowing we were watching this smut, but shouldn’t Mrs. Lotte be allowed this single indulgence? She is always so kind and, dare we say, oblivious to her husband’s basement behavior. From afternoon until night, her house teems with young girls always playing “Hot Cross Buns” and chromatic scales and the same opening run of notes to “The Entertainer.” Doesn’t she deserve this one little vice? Besides, one good girl should always assist another, and we can tell that Mrs. Lotte must have been a good girl back in her day, from the tight curls of her at-home perm and the white sneakers she wears with her pantsuit on her way to work.
Later, when the time comes for Mrs. Lotte to testify on her husband’s behalf, she’ll lament the past:
Our house was always filled with music. We had a number of two-student families. While one was taking his or her lesson, the other student was welcomed to spend time in our living room doing homework, watching TV, or perhaps even chatting with me. I’m one that’s very friendly to all of the students. As I look back now, I see how trivial many of those things were.
Good girls don’t just do as they’re told. We never need to be told. It�
��s acceptable for a good girl to lie, especially in the interest of protecting someone else. We can be trusted with secrets. We know that bodies aren’t the riskiest things to bare—secrets are. When we realize that sometimes it’s as easy as saying nothing at all, the initiation is complete.
Emerge
IF SUMMERS IN MERCURY were a dream, in fall, time was wide awake. Freshman year began with finding a way into the town’s choreography—the bowing of a league of football players as the band played “The Star Spangled Banner” on a Friday night, the flash of brittle leaves catching fire on the outskirts of town, the crowning of a new homecoming queen on the fifty-yard line in early October before the cold set in. I took my place with the rest of the band fronts on the football field during halftime of every home game, the stadium our autumnal theater. Young girls like me also became members of the corps de ballet, practicing for our coming moment when we’d rise to take the lead role in an entire town’s performance.
Most of Mercury spent the morning after a big Friday night home game nursing their football hangovers, but I reserved the first part of each weekend for what I loved most. Every Saturday morning, my father drove me to ballet lessons in Juniper, a town half an hour away. We always stopped for doughnuts. My father knew those city streets so well he could have navigated them in his sleep. The Burns family had lived in the valleys of Pittsburgh since the time when Andrew Carnegie was still just a messenger boy.
Almost a hundred and fifty years later, I had my ballet lesson in a sleeping city. Full-length mirrors dressed the far wall of the dance studio so the students could monitor their own progress at the barre, which, for the time being, was a row of metal folding chairs. The building’s owners were waiting to accrue enough cash to install an actual wooden rod. But still, on Saturday mornings, the other students and I danced for the row of slender mirrors, the forgotten industrial cityscape yawning at our backs.
Juniper was a bankrupt city, once bloated by the success and breadth of Juniper Steel. The city had been in mourning since the steel mills closed about ten years before in the late 1980s and still hoped for them to return, an Appalachian Miss Havisham, tattered and waiting for someone who would never show.
My ballet teacher Martine began each lesson with pliés and then moved into the port de bras. Slowly, my body warmed and the tightness melted. I’d never been flexible; my body held a tension that never seemed to relent except for the moments I practiced ballet. I didn’t mind the pressure. It was the fighter in me, and I relied on it. In the colder months, my fingers and forearms cast a wan, bluish tint against my black leotard. Even when my core began to sweat, my fingers remained slow to react. But in ballet, this delayed movement was beautiful—ritardando, a slowing down. My fingers, like pale, breeze-blown ribbons, knew how to trail the path of my body.
During the center work in the middle of the room, I relished the thump of my feet beating together before landing on the floor and the way the studio blurred as I pirouetted across the room, zoning in on my mark. I liked to choose small items like a window latch, an abandoned, errant nail in the wall, the folded hands of a mother watching in the corner of the room. As I turned, these small things became my anchor.
In ballet, my body was my own. My fingers were celebrated when limp, rather than urged into action. They did not march; they floated. They did not shout; they spoke. They did not pound; they breathed.
Every Saturday, I shed more than sweat on the studio floor. I surrendered the outer selves I kept polished for the rest of Mercury to see, the prize-pony version of myself that I paraded around town. The straight-A student. The dancer at the end of the kick line on the football field. The girl who could keep a secret. What remained at the end of the hour revealed an inner heat, the heart of my dampened flame that would not die.
Ballet was my vice, but at some point it would not be enough. I’d need some other fix, like Mrs. Lotte needed her afternoon soap operas or Martine, her cigarettes. I once witnessed her smoke a Virginia Slim on the floor of the dance studio kitchen. Just eight years old, I spied her from the crevice between the door and the wall minutes before ballet class was scheduled to begin. She lay flat on her back, her head propped against the cupboard beneath the sink. The tile on the floor was gray, her spandex was gray, her hair was gray, her teeth were gray. Gray smoke lifted from gray ash. Just a small hint of orange burned at the end of the filter. Sometimes I wondered if this was what we feared most in Mercury: a moment of spark, a lifetime of cinders.
At the barre, my fingers were slow, seconds behind the mind, and yet they arrived on time. “The hand does not yet know the body has fallen,” Martine told us from the front of the studio. “Let it drift behind you like a feather.”
My initiation as a pretty young thing in the imaginary wealth of Mercury’s social fabric would not be complete without a costume ball, and homecoming in Mercury was an event not to be missed. Held each year in the school cafeteria at the height of football season, homecoming was the small-town girl’s cotillion, a way to announce one’s own arrival.
The night of the dance, the pool rats—dressed in neckties and taffeta—stopped by the park where we’d spent so many summer afternoons. We wanted to take pictures in the gazebo by the lake. Pete’s father drove us in his maroon Silhouette. The sun set quicker than we’d anticipated; the October days were growing short. Our jackets lay in a heap against the gazebo railing. Waiting in the dark, we appeared only in the flash of the camera. My bare, pale shoulder parting the night. Pete’s black hair blending into the clear sky, his fingers tightly clasped behind his back. The bright snap of the camera washing our skin, the cold air fixing our smiles into half-moons.
This was romance: not the dance, not the corsage, not the crisp, black suit or the party dress. Romance was driving on a highway overpass, sitting in a dusky backseat, looking out the window. Picture yourself standing at the bridge covered in graffiti, peering over as the cars whoosh beneath, yelling into the wind with someone standing next to you. To mix a typical Saturday evening with high heels so later you can remind yourself what it felt like to be young.
Later, we had dinner in a darkened room of a smoky restaurant. Eight of us crammed at a small table, we tried to relax.
“Homecoming is lame,” someone said.
“Fer rill,” said someone else.
Foss cracked a few jokes. We used forks and knives. I took my shoes off beneath the table.
At the dance, we watched the newly crowned homecoming king extend his hand to the queen, dressed in a tiara and a sash, as they took the floor for their solo dance. This was every girl’s dream: to emerge as prima ballerina. For the first time, I witnessed this ritual that had existed before my father went to high school in Mercury, the heartbeat of our town, the power it had to silence a room.
Pete and I had spent an entire summer running from the spotlight, but after I felt the hot glow of Friday night lights in Mercury, I thought I needed another halo to get me through the winter. When football season fizzled, I took my virgin dive beneath small-town stage lights. In November, the choir department held open auditions for the school musical, Anything Goes. Set aboard a ship crossing the Atlantic, the play oozed with manufactured drama. With stowaways, impostors, and love triangles, Anything Goes was the best way to wait out the coming cold.
A portrait of my rookie audition: a girl in jeans and a zip-up hoodie, nerves palpable, fingernails bit. I climbed onto the stage and popped in a tape recording of my sister playing “On My Own” from Les Miserables on the electric keyboard. Unlike me, she still played the piano. Julia had always loved music as much as I loved to dance, and nothing would keep her from it.
Before my audition started, I stuffed my hands in my pockets.
“What part are you auditioning for?” the choir director asked.
“I’ll take whatever you give me,” I answered.
I lifted my chin and pressed my shoulders back as my ballet teacher Martine had taught me. Her best advice: “Don’t let them se
e you sweat.”
After pressing play on the choir department stereo, I planted myself in the middle of the stage that hadn’t been renovated since my father stood on it at his own high school graduation. The piano notes crackled as they wafted out from the boom box. I squinted at the light box at the back of the auditorium for the length of my minute-and-a-half performance, my voice cracking on the high notes. I winced. Polite applause followed. I would take it.
Illusion always blooms best in winter. In the first month of musical rehearsals, the cast was given a single stage direction: “Act like you’ve got money.” We did, and the ruses started to snowball. Pete had been cast as a sailor, and I had been cast as a rich passenger on the ship. The two of us imagined our own secret storyline—a rich, young, parentless heiress falls for a rough-and-tumble seaman who is forbidden to fraternize with the female passengers. Drama ensues.
Ignoring each other onstage had the opposite effect when we left it. In the darkened backstage wings, Pete and I kissed with my back flat against a cement wall.
“This is no time to be subtle,” the director had said.
There was nothing subtle about the ways in which I fooled myself. I couldn’t see how much I needed an artifice—a play, a performance, even a boy—to shield me from what was real. Fear was ruling me, as my father had once warned me against. I was bold with no risk, dressing myself in pearls and fingering fake cigarettes. Inside, I told myself I was still innocent.
Innocence can never be overrated—it’s the small-town girl’s currency, and who among us doesn’t want to be rich? If you know what’s good for you, you’ll realize it’s better not to know what you don’t know, and to unknow what you already do.
Here’s what we won’t admit we know:
In the summer of 1991, the chill of fall weather arrives before it’s due. Our town is wrenched from its summertime reverie by the sound of insistent knocking on Mr. Lotte’s door. Of course we aren’t there to hear it—we’re likely sitting down to dinner with our families, or taking our bikes for one more spin around the neighborhood, or devouring the final pages of Christopher Pike’s latest tale of horror—but the stories find a life of their own as one hungry mouth feeds them to another. The taste is so strong we could swear we witnessed it ourselves.