by Wally Lamb
“Yoo-hoo, Albie?” Cindy says. “Why don’t you play us some music?” She slides a quarter to the end of the counter. He asks her what she wants to hear. “Anything,” she coos. “Something you like.” He nods, grabs the coin, and heads over to the jukebox. Ten to one, he’s about to play something by Bobby Darin. He was Albie’s idol, I remember, ever since the day Bobby missed his train back to Manhattan, got a thirty-five-cent cup of coffee at the lunch counter while he was waiting for the next one, and left a five-dollar tip.
Wow, the old jukebox—look at that baby. It was a Seeburg G Select-o-matic 100: polished chrome, light-up purple pilasters. I saw one of these vintage beauties on eBay a while back and the asking price was 5K. The cinematographer’s got the juke in close-up to show the way the player glides back and forth until it finds the record, drops it into place, and plays it sideways.
Splish splash, I was takin’ a bath
Long about a Saturday night . . .
Ha! Just like I thought: Bobby Darin. I read a biography about him a while back. Poor guy: he’d had rheumatic fever as a kid and was still in his thirties when he died of heart complications. And before that, life gave him a triple wallop. First, his marriage to his movie star wife, Sandra Dee, went bust. Then he found out his parents were really his grandparents and his sister was really his mother. And as if that wasn’t enough to mess with his head, he was on-site at the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. when Bobby Kennedy, the presidential candidate he’d been campaigning for, was assassinated. Tough stuff. But sing on, Bobby. It’s 1959, you’re a big star and a generous tipper, and none of the bad stuff has happened yet.
Well, it was a good thing those sailors didn’t order the deluxe platters because they’re just polishing off their cheeseburgers when the Greyhound bound for Springfield chugs up to the station and honks. They slap their money on the counter and grab their duffels. “Later, alligator,” Albie says. They wave and head out the door.
The film stops abruptly. When I turn toward the projector to see what’s wrong, there’s Lois’s ghost.
“Good god, don’t do that!”
“Do what, Felix?”
“Appear out of nowhere and scare me like that!”
“Oh, fiddle-faddle. What would you have me do—send you a calling card via your butler? Now, the camera is about to follow those two bell-bottoms outside and onto the bus. As you may recall, it passed through your hometown of Three Rivers, which is your film’s next destination.”
If I go for that psych eval, I’d better get a physical, too. These spooks must be raising holy hell with my blood pressure. My pulse is racing like cars at the Indy 500.
“The technique you’re about to see employed is the split screen, which, incidentally, was pioneered by yours truly.”
“Yeah, you told me,” I mumble.
“Did I? Well, there you have it. You will see, in side-by-side screens, the point of view from both the left and right windows of the bus.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“Yes?”
“I haven’t seen my mother yet. Let’s stay with the lunch counter scene until—”
“Who’s directing this experience, Felix? You or I?”
“You are, but—”
“That’s correct. I direct. You take direction. Now I want you to go downstairs to the loge. Billie will be joining us in a moment, en costume, and what I should like you to do is narrate what you see along the way, as if you’re explaining the sights as they were back then to a young woman living in today’s world. Your daughter, for instance, or one of her contemporaries.”
“Yeah, hold on a second.” Her mention of Aliza has gotten me worried again about her safety. Illogical? Sure. But this whole goddamned experience is illogical. So, okay, I’m being a helicopter parent. Guilty as charged. Be that as it may, I pull out my cell and speed-dial my daughter to make sure she’s still okay.
“Hello?”
“Oh, hey, kiddo. Guess I must have just butt-dialed you, heh-heh. You okay?”
“Yup. Hey, you were right. This Miss Rheingold stuff is pretty cool.”
When I glance over at ghost-Lois, she looks peeved. “Is it? Okay, great. Well, I’ll let you go then. Talk to you soon.”
“Are you okay, Daddy? You sound a little off.”
“No, no. I’m fine. Excuse the interruption.”
“Sure. No problem. Love you.”
“Love you more.”
The palm of Lois’s see-through hand appears over my right shoulder. Against my better judgment, I surrender my cell phone, which, for some reason, sits there instead of falling through to the floor. It dawns on me that I’ve just given away my option of calling 911 should things get any freakier, if that’s even possible.
“Ah, here’s Billie now,” Lois says. “Hurry down there and join her.”
When I see “the American Beauty,” I do a double take. The Roaring Twenties glamour is gone. She’s wearing a Death Cab for Cutie concert T, leather pants, and stilettos. I guess she’s supposed to be outfitted as the “young person living in today’s world” I’m supposed to be explaining things to. She sits down next to me and Lois shouts “Action!” The film resumes.
It’s a split screen, like she said. In the view out the left window, a woman drives past in an army green Nash, her unseatbelted kids bouncing around in the backseat. Out the right window, a white-uniformed Good Humor guy pulls a Popsicle out of the side of his truck and hands it to a red-haired girl with braids. I can all but taste the Toasted Almond bar I’d get if I were in that line. The bus pulls away from the depot and heads north toward Route 32.
“Ahem,” Lois says from somewhere behind me.
Oh yeah, she wants me to narrate. “So that’s the Coast Guard Academy on the right,” I tell twenty-first-century Billie. She’s shifting distractedly in her seat; I don’t think leather pants are her thing. “And across the road on the left is Connecticut College, where my daughter went—or, where she’s going to go, I guess I should say. It’s still a women’s college at this point, which means housemothers, parietal hours, and propriety. No men in the dorm rooms upstairs, no slacks in the dining room or, god forbid, if you’ve been invited to take tea with the dean. And most of all, no premarital sex. Carnal knowledge is not on the syllabus, so college girls enjoy the presumption of innocence.
“But nature is nature, right? If someone’s sneaking out to ‘do the deed’ with a townie or a cadet from across the road, those two had better use a rubber or the rhythm method. Backroom abortions carry legal risks as well as medical ones, and the Pill is against the law even for married couples. Fifty years from now, abortion will be legal, the morning-after pill will be one of several birth control options, and women’s colleges like this one will be coed. Open and affirming, too—no need for ‘sewing circles’ or ‘lavender marriages’ on college campuses.”
Billie bats her eyes, giving a convincing performance of naïveté.
“And changing sexual mores will be nothing compared to the way technology’s going to shake things up. But this being 1959, nobody’s heard of iPhones, iPads, or iPods yet. They won’t be around for another several decades. Hey, Steve Jobs isn’t even a kindergartener yet.”
On the right screen, the bus passes the vacant building that, once upon a time, was Longo’s Inn. “That’s where my parents had their wedding reception.”
Billie cocks her head. She seems engaged, so I go on.
“They got married right after Pop came back from the war. According to the story that used to get trotted out at family get-togethers, Pop’s brother, my Uncle Iggy, had just returned from San Francisco and, while he was out there, he’d become fond of this ‘tiki drink’ called the Mai Tai. So at Ma and Pop’s reception, he has a few too many Mai Tais and forgets to make his hands behave themselves while he’s dancing with Bruno DiGiorgi’s wife, Ida, who, according to my father, was ‘a real tomato.’ Next thing you know, Bruno punches Iggy in the face, busts his nose, and poor Pop spends his honeymoon night
in the ER with his brother.”
Billie points to the view on the left screen as the bus passes by the drive-in. According to the marquee, Ben-Hur is playing there. “That’s the one with Charlton Heston, not the silent film,” I tell Billie’s ghost. “My folks took my sisters and me to see it that summer, but they made me wear my pajamas in case I fell asleep—which I did. For the next several weeks, my sister Frances needled me about having missed Jesus’ resurrection and, even worse, the chariot race. Ma didn’t make her shut up about it until I started crying. This drive-in’s going to close in the 1980s, after everyone starts buying VCRs and renting videos. Then the state’s going to buy the property, tear down the screen, yank the speaker poles out of the ground, and put up a super-max men’s prison. Like every other prison in this country, the majority of inmates will be black and Latino. No big surprise there. In 2008, we’ll be patting ourselves on the back for electing a half-black president. Declaring that we’re now a post-racial society, which is a bunch of bullsh—horsefeathers. Racism will still be as alive and well; it’ll just be hiding out in prison. Progress, right?”
Billie gives me a silent sigh.
“Oh, that’s the harbor. Pretty, isn’t it? We’re heading into downtown Three Rivers now. Looks busy. Shoppers, city workers, a couple of grocery markets, two different movie houses. After the mall gets built on the outskirts of town and the state hospital starts busing mental patients down here—dropping them off for the day with nothing to do but loiter—this will start to resemble a ghost town. All that idle hanging around coupled with all the shoppers’ fear and misunderstanding about who psych patients are and aren’t: it’ll be sad. But that won’t happen for another decade or so. Right now, the downtown’s all hustle and bustle.”
The bus chugs to a stop in Franklin Square alongside the five-and-ten. People get off the bus, get on. One of those two sailors who boarded in New London hops off and buys a pack of smokes at that newsstand. Lights up and gets back on board. Most of the other passengers are smoking, too; the air is thick with fumes and carcinogens. Bus starts moving again. Takes a turn and heads up Broadway.
“Okay, that’s the Wauregan Hotel on the right. Abe Lincoln once spent the night there—when he was campaigning, I think. . . . Ah, I forgot about this pet store. The guy who runs it wears a patch. Lost his eye in the war. Plenty of those ‘greatest generation’ warriors around at this point, and even some World War I vets. They didn’t have it easy, the guys who fought in those wars, but at least they had tangible enemies they could aim a rifle or lob a grenade at. It will be a different kind of war after 2001 when the mission will be to destroy an abstraction like terror.
“That building up ahead is City Hall. Impressive, isn’t it? Second Empire architecture: a French style that was popular back in 1870 when they built it. Three Rivers was a wealthy town back then, from textile manufacturing mainly. Ponemah, Three Rivers Woolen, Blackstone Linen: those were just a few of the mills in and around town. Here in New England, we like to assume that slavery was an evil we had nothing to do with, but we were complicit. All that cotton they grew in the South during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may have been picked by slaves, but then it was shipped up here, manufactured into cloth, and sent off to other parts of the country and to Europe.
“Okay, top of the hill on the right: that’s Saint Aloysius Gonzaga Cathedral, where my mother, sisters, and I go to Mass every Sunday. My father doesn’t go to church with us, except on Christmas and Easter. Most of the stores close down on Sunday because of the Connecticut Blue Laws, but Pop has to keep the lunch counter open for the travelers. That building next to the church is the parochial school where my sisters go, and where I’ll be going, too, in a few weeks. I’ll be a first grader. Inside, the janitors are probably getting things ready for the coming school year. Waxing the wooden floors, cleaning the glass on the framed portraits of President Eisenhower and Pope John XXIII that hang on the classroom walls, replacing the American flags that only have forty-eight stars with ones that have fifty. Alaska became a state this year, too, about nine months before Hawaii. I’m excited about—”
“Cut!”
The film freezes again. Ghost-Billie has disappeared; her T-shirt, pants, and stilettos are in a pile on her seat. Lois’s ghost approaches from behind, speaking in an imperious tone. “I need you to go downstairs to the orchestra section now, Felix. Step onto the stage with your back to the orchestra seats, and when I call for action, place your palms against the screen. You’ll be traveling back in time at a rapid rate so your ears may pop and you will have the sensation that you are dropping rapidly. You may feel a twinge of queasiness, but that will dissipate as you come closer and closer and land, once again, on terra firma. Then—”
Overcome by another wave of what-the-hell-is-this, I tell her to hold on. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather just—”
“Come, come, dear boy. We have a schedule to keep. Now as soon as you’ve grounded yourself in the scene, you will be a child again, inside your home on Herbert Hoover Avenue, directed by your six-year-old brain.”
“Will my parents be alive?”
“Yes, but they’re down at the lunch counter. Remember? You’re being cared for by your sisters. Now hurry down and do as you’re told. I shall see you on the other side of the scene, when you step back into the now.”
I stare at her for several seconds, then turn and start down the stairs.
“That’s it, dear,” she calls to me. “Now you’re on the trolley!”
FOUR
Looking back at Lois up there in the balcony, I mount the stage from the side, step by hesitant step. What’s that she’s holding? A megaphone? She puts it to her mouth and calls down in an authoritative voice that carries across the auditorium. “Action!”
I turn my back to her and, fingers splayed, put my palms to the screen. It begins to flap and buckle like a giant window shade being jostled by a strong wind. Keeping my hands flat against the screen, I close my eyes and hear moving water—falling rain at first that becomes the sound of a rushing brook that, in turn, intensifies into a roar as loud as Niagara Falls. When I open my eyes again, I am face to face with a wall of falling water. I’m pulled into it and carried down and down, although, strangely, I remain dry. As the falling sensation ends, I’m carried along by a fast-moving river. Then a whirlpool spins me in circles against the current. Dizzy and disoriented, I let go of the screen and cover my eyes. The sound of the water slows to a trickle and stops. I take my hands from my eyes. I’m stationary now but the spinning sensation remains. I stagger across . . . across . . .
Oh! It’s the worn checkerboard linoleum floor of our kitchen on Herbert Hoover Avenue. There’s our old Caloric gas stove with the pilot light that was always having to be relit. There’s the teapot wall clock, the clown cookie jar on the counter. I stumble toward one of our green kitchen chairs and sit. Look down. I’m wearing my old Buster Brown shoes. How the hell are my size 12 feet fitting into . . .
My busquito bites are itching me like crazy! I got them last night when we were playing hide-and-seek. Simone’s friend JoBeth Shishmanian was over at our house and when she was “it,” I couldn’t run in cause she’s such a goal-sticker. So the busquitos just kept biting me and biting me. If I had a machine gun, I would shoot all the busquitos in the whole world and then no one would get bit any more because of me.
Last night JoBeth kept saying her family and her have a big secret that they can’t tell anyone yet, but pretty soon they can. Frances says maybe someone like that rich guy on The Millionaire is giving them a bunch of money. Simone says nobody would do that in real life, only on TV. She thinks maybe they’re getting a puppy or an in-the-ground swimming pool. And if it’s a pool, JoBeth might have a pool party before school starts. I asked Simone if she thought JoBeth would invite me to her pool party, and Frances laughed so hard she started choking on her M&M’s.
Simone is my oldest big sister. She’s going into seventh grade once summer gets over.
Frances is my other big sister and she’s going into fifth. I don’t have any little sisters, just big ones. I’m the only boy in our family, not counting my father, cause he’s a man, not a boy. Ma says I’m her baby, but that just means I’m the youngest. Cause I’m big. Next month I’m going into first grade at the school where my sisters go to already. Last year in kindergarten, I rode the bus, but now I’m gonna be a walker. Simone says I better not dawdle on the way cause the nuns get mad if you’re late and you have to stay after school. And Frances says I better hope Sister Agrippina isn’t teaching first grade. “If you get her, Felix, which you probably will, you should just jump off the Empire State Building instead.” Ma said I shouldn’t listen to Frances cause she loves to exaggerate. That’s kind of like lying but not really.
Simone and Frances are babysitting me today on account of my mother is down at our lunch counter helping Pop with the books. Ma is good at arithmetic and Poppy’s a good cook. Plus he knows how to hang a spoon off his nose and it just stays there and doesn’t fall off. Uncle Iggy can do it, too, and so can Frances. Uncle Iggy is Poppy’s brother and he has a crooked thumb that’s kinda flat. Cause he got it caught in an old-fashioned washing machine a long time ago before I was born.