Elegies for the Brokenhearted

by Christie Hodgen

  It wasn’t until late in the day that Malinda found what she was looking for. The beach had emptied out and everyone was going up and down the boardwalk, which was so crowded that Malinda and I were often jostled apart. It was as if a great sale were going on and we were all in competition with one another to save money on a valuable item. Along the boardwalk the air smelled of popcorn and fried dough and hot dogs, and underneath all of that something else—an ancient, dark smell, such as one encounters in a tomb. “I don’t like it here,” I called to Malinda, for the noise was so loud that we had to shout.

  Malinda said, “You don’t like it anywhere.”

  “But this,” I said, “is worse. I really don’t like this.”

  “So go back to the beach then,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m sick of you following me around anyways.” She walked on without bothering to check if I was still behind her. But a moment later, when she finally saw what she’d been looking for, she reached back for my hand with every confidence that it would be there. “Look,” she said, stopping short and pulling me toward her. “Look at those guys.”

  Walking toward us were three skinny men with long, ravaged hair. They wore black satin jackets and tight black jeans. Under their jackets they were shirtless and you could see their pale, skinny chests, their light pink nipples. The one in the middle wasn’t bad-looking—he had dark hair and black eyes, a square jaw—and he wore an expression of boredom. But the others, who might have been twins, looked like greyhounds. Their eyes were brown and wet and searching. They had about them the meanness and desperation of pound dogs.

  Malinda watched them coming and then turned to watch them go. Embroidered in red across the backs of their jackets was the name of an English band whose sole hit had topped the charts two years prior. “Hey!” she said, and slapped me like she always did when she was excited. “I knew it. They’re in that band. I saw signs for them. They’re playing here.” The main attraction of the boardwalk was a small concert hall that tended to attract groups who had risen briefly to fame, then fallen into obscurity. No one actually wanted to see the bands that played there, but then again it was something, people thought, to be able to sit up close to someone who had been famous once, someone who had been on television, it was better than nothing. All along the boardwalk people stopped short as the men walked past, then burst into excited chatter. Girls pressed their fingers to their mouths. I heard the name of the band again and again, and wondered what it would be like to walk through the world and leave a wake behind you, the sound of people speaking your name.

  “We have to meet them,” Malinda said. We started walking toward the men, Malinda rising up on her tiptoes, keeping track of them. When they turned into a jewelry store Malinda positioned herself just outside its entrance, where there was a woman selling mood rings at a small table. Malinda examined the rings, slipped them on and off her fingers, and I stood behind her trying to remember the last time I had seen her so excited, the last time she had displayed an emotion besides contempt. Certainly it was before Bud, before my mother broke up with the married man and we moved out of the condo, which Malinda had loved more than anything else in her life. I watched the rings on Malinda’s fingers, watched them swirl from blue to green to black, mesmerized.

  Then, compelled by some instinct, I looked up, and that’s when I saw you and Bill walking toward us. You hadn’t noticed us yet, and in the few seconds before you saw us I sensed what would happen next. I sensed that Bill, who had long been in love with Malinda and who was always coming up with excuses to talk to her, offering her gum and cigarettes, who often pretended to need a light just so he could ask her for one, a tactic which eventually backfired (“Jesus Christ,” Malinda had said once, “I’m not like your personal fucking match supplier, you know”), would see her, and approach her, and she would brush him off with some swift cruelty. Which is exactly what happened. When Bill saw Malinda he cried out her name as though in ecstasy. “Malinda! Hey, Malinda!” he said. “Malinda, hey! Whatcha doing?” He was so excited to see her he actually punched her in the arm.

  “What’s it look like I’m doing?” she said.

  “You looking at jewelry?”

  “No,” she said, “bathing suits.”

  “Oh,” Bill said. He was a nervous kid in the habit of shifting his weight back and forth between his legs, and he stood there fidgeting for a few seconds, trying to think of something to say. “There’s a party somewhere,” he said. “I think we’re gonna go.”

  “Good,” said Malinda. “Don’t let me keep you.”

  “You wanna come?”

  “With you?” she said. “No.”

  And then you spoke up, angry, your black eyebrows slanted together: Why do you have to be such a bitch?

  “I don’t know,” said Malinda, “why do you have to be such a retard?”

  Fuck you, you said, and walked off. Bill followed you. But behind your back he turned to us and gave Malinda a big smile, a sweeping wave. “Maybe we’ll see ya later!” he said.

  When the men emerged from the jewelry shop Malinda was poised there, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, rifling through her purse. Just at the right moment she turned to the men, as if looking for help from the first person who came along, and asked the man in the middle for a light.

  The man said nothing, but he stopped and reached in his pocket and pulled out a book of matches. He looked Malinda up and down, lit the match and held it out. Malinda bent her head toward him. Then she tilted her head back so he could see the full length of her neck—men were always commenting on her long neck—and released a little cloud of smoke out the side of her mouth.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Marilyn.” This was a name, Malinda believed, that stirred within men certain deeply held longings. When she turned eighteen she planned to go to court to legally adopt it.

  “That’s a awfully grown-up name,” said the middleman.

  She shrugged. “What’s yours?”

  “Flash.” And without looking at his friends he stated the names of the other two. “These are my brothers Matt and Mike.”

  “Hi,” Malinda said. She didn’t bother to look at Matt and Mike either. She and the middleman had their eyes locked on each other, and it was all routine from there. Flash bought Malinda an ice cream cone, Malinda walked up and down the boardwalk licking it, twirling her cone against her tongue—she couldn’t just eat it like a normal person, it had to be some kind of display—and then, the ice cream gone, Flash offered Malinda a drink from a flask he produced from the inner pocket of his jacket; he put his arm around her, she rested her head against his shoulder; they drank more; he said something and she laughed. It all happened very quickly. When Flash led Malinda down the boardwalk steps, then down the street, then steered her into the entrance of a hotel, it wasn’t even fully dark.

  In the elevator up to the room, while Flash and his brothers were laughing about something, Malinda whispered to me, “He’s the drummer!”

  I thought of one of the band’s songs—the one that had played all through the previous summer—and could only call to mind the crooning of the lead singer and a muted trumpet. “I didn’t think they had a drummer,” I said.

  “Well he is. He’s from England.”

  “How old is he?”

  Malinda shrugged.

  “He looks kind of old.”

  “I don’t care.”

  I shrugged back. “Have fun.”

  The hotel room had been done up in some grandmother’s idea of sophistication, in shades of silver and mauve. The wallpaper featured a pattern of giant metallic flowers, and they glowed strangely in the dark, like flora dusted with nuclear fallout. It was a large room, a suite, and it was dark but for the light of a single dim lamp. Flash picked a pair of jeans off the floor and rifled through its pockets. “Here they are,” he said, and opened his palm, full of tiny red caplets. He held them out to Malinda and she took one and put it in her mouth, and swallowed.
Then took another. “Whoa,” said Flash, “take it easy.”

  “My neck hurts,” Malinda said to me. “Flash told me he had some pills.”

  “You want one?” Flash said, looking at me for the first time. “They make you relax,” he said. “You Americans could stand to relax some.”

  “Especially her,” said Malinda. “She’s wound up wicked tight. She never says two words.”

  This was hard to argue with. I took a pill and swallowed it. For a long moment after I felt it in my throat.

  Soon enough Malinda and Flash went into the bedroom under the pretense of Malinda needing a massage. Matt and Mike and I sat around, stolid and dutiful as Buckingham guards, in the manner of all people who sacrifice themselves to the whims of their betters. We were a class of people so common and so hardworking that we might as well have been unionized. Occasionally we grew tired of our work and we complained, carried out little tantrums, made demands—How come we never do what I want? How come we never talk about me?—but for the most part we simply resigned ourselves to our fate.

  “What should we do then?” said one of the brothers. “We can, uh, I don’t know,” he said. He patted down his pockets and frowned as though it were only a matter of bad luck that he didn’t have something in them with which to entertain a sixteen-year-old. “Christ, I don’t know,” he said. He turned on the TV and ran through the channels. He didn’t see anything that satisfied him—a couple of black-and-white movies, the news, commercials—and sat there turning the channels. Like most of the men I had met he looked older up close. His lips were pale and badly chapped. His skin was ruddy and a pattern of purple veins stood out at the side of his sharp, bony nose. Here and there in his mess of long, frizzy hair I could see a gleam of gray. Like an old man he was in the habit of sniffing sharply, and when he breathed in there was a slight whistling sound.

  “What instrument do you play?” I said.

  “Don’t,” one said. “Neither does Rod.”

  “Who’s Rod?”

  “The guy your sister’s with. That’s his name.”

  “Oh. I thought he was the drummer.”

  “Naw,” he said. “We’re just with the band. We do the equipment and sound and all that.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “What year are you in school?”

  “Sophomore. Next year I’ll be a junior.”

  “Sixteen, then?” He narrowed his eyes, as if concentrating on something important, as if wrestling with a momentous decision.

  “That’s too young,” his brother said. “Sixteen. Man.” He shook his head. “Too young.”

  “But girls are more mature,” said the one.

  The other shook his head. “Not that much.”

  “Sixteen isn’t so young. Not all that young, when you think about it. When you think about it we’re sending eighteen-year-olds off to war all the time.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” said the other, sarcastic. He gave his brother a pitying look. “I’m outta here.” He walked off, out of the room. When he was gone I turned to the one left and said, “Who are you again?”

  “Mike,” he said. He had settled on The Three Stooges, who were working as tailors and had found a suit full of money, and its pending loss, which was certain, set off an anxiety in me so powerful the skit’s comedy was lost in it.

  When a commercial broke in Mike said, “I’m gonna get myself a drink. You want a drink?” He opened the little refrigerator and bent over to inspect its contents. “We got Coke.”

  I was expecting a can but when he handed me a drink it was in one of the hotel’s short glasses, amber-colored and dimpled. It tasted like Coke but there was something else to it, something bitter and warm. Rum, or whiskey, I didn’t know the difference. I drank it down and in a minute Mike was up mixing drinks again, and then again. It wasn’t long before I felt loose all over and started laughing at the least little thing. My laughter was loud and low and came out stuttering, without my adding any shape to it. It rang through the room and sounded to me the laugh of a retarded person.

  I was lying on my stomach on the floor. Mike was sitting beside me with his legs crossed, but went so far as to stand up when something was funny and bend over laughing. “Fuck me, that’s funny,” he said. Sometimes when he laughed he grabbed his head like people did in aspirin commercials. I rolled over and watched the television upside down. “Hey,” I said, “you should try this.” Mike stretched out beside me on his back, then started voicing over the characters. “Hey, guys,” he said in Curly’s falsetto, “everything’s all upside down!” And Mo answered, “You’re upside down, you moron.” With an almost scientific detachment I noticed I was having trouble doing more than one thing at a time, for instance watching the television and listening to Mike, for instance laughing and keeping my eyes open, for instance hearing Malinda cry out in something like pain from the next room and pretending I hadn’t. And then everything was reduced to breathing. I was breathing through my mouth as though a person who had been trapped underwater up to the brink of death.

  Sometime later Malinda and Flash, or Rod, came out of their room, and distantly I heard Malinda saying, “Shit! Oh shit!” Then she was pulling my hand, pulling me up and then onto my feet. I was still so far gone it was all as in a dream, wobbly and chimerical, the room looked like a place I’d never seen, Flash and Mike like people I’d never seen, and I was up on my feet being pulled along by Malinda out the door and down the hall—we were running, now, with a swiftness that seemed untenable—and when we got to the elevator Malinda pressed the down button but then couldn’t wait. She kept on running to the end of the hall and banged through the door to the stairwell, which was lit by a single orange bulb. We ran down the stairs and out into the back parking lot, then around the building, and up to the boardwalk, which was empty, its lights out, its stores shut away behind grates, our footsteps like those of criminals, and Malinda saying all the while, “Shit. We’re dead. It’s like one in the morning. Shit.” I thought of my mother and Bill pacing the motel room, calling the police. I thought of cruisers parked in the motel’s lot, their spinning lights keeping everyone awake, massive resentment on the part of the other tenants.

  But when we got back to the motel the lights were on and our mother was passed out in bed fully clothed, facedown and snoring. Bill was nowhere to be found. The room was so thick with the smell of sour tequila my mouth watered.

  “Jesus,” Malinda said. She turned out the lights and went to bed, fell on top of it, and I fell too. We curled toward each other like parentheses. When my eyes adjusted I saw the glow of Malinda’s, wet and mournful. She had always been like that at night, unable to sleep, a sense of regret and sadness about her, a softness. This was the thing about her I knew that no one else did. We had a long history of lying quietly side by side, the troubles of our days—the fights we’d had, the wild swings we’d witnessed our mother go through, the drunken exaltations and rages—drifting around us, unspoken but felt, deeply felt. In the morning she would be back to her usual self. By that time we would just be two girls who’d gone back to a hotel room with a couple of older men, it happened all the time, every day, it wouldn’t even be worth mentioning.

  My mother woke early the next morning and went out for the paper. One of her quirks was that she liked to read the obituaries first thing every day; often she read them aloud to us either for entertainment value (“He was a man fond of playing the flugelhorn!”) or for instructional purposes (“She entered the convent at fourteen, where she lived the remaining years of her life.” Jesus! She must have died of boredom!). When she returned she told Malinda and me to get up and get our things together. “Move it,” she said, “or lose it.”

  “Where are we going?” Malinda said, groggy, her words running together.

  “Get up,” said our mother, who was stuffing all of our things into a red duffel bag. It said Schlitz on the side and had belonged, at one time, to one or another of her boyfriends, though I couldn’t rememb
er which one.

  “Where’s Bud?” Malinda said.

  “I don’t know,” said my mother. “Just get your shit and let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just come on.” My mother was dressed for the beach, in a red bikini and sunglasses. I assumed we were going there but when we got to the beach we just kept walking. Once we’d cleared the strip my mother turned and started walking backwards, facing the line of cars headed out of town, and Malinda, her voice high with disbelief, said, “What are you doing?”

  “Watch,” our mother said, “and learn.” She took her hair out of its ponytail and shook it, arranging it around her shoulders. Then she stuck her thumb out. She was thirty-five and looked, still, like a teenager—it didn’t seem unreasonable to me that someone would stop to pick her up. She had always gotten what she wanted rather easily.

  “What the hell?” said Malinda. “Where’s Bud? What are we doing?”

  “Bud’s gone,” said my mother. “Probably for good.”

  “What’d you do?” said Malinda, and my mother said she didn’t know for sure, that she couldn’t exactly remember, but that she was pretty sure it had something to do with another man.

  “Oh my God,” Malinda said, “this is so embarrassing.” Her voice high, squealing, all the composure of the day before gone, gone. In that moment she was a child.

  I turned backwards then and regarded the beach, as if some explanation might be found there for what had happened. From that angle the stretch of oceanfront property looked thin and flimsy as a Hollywood set, as if it might fall on its face. Also from that angle I could see my mother’s cheek, the slice of flesh hidden behind her sunglasses. I could see that it was bruised to hell. A sharp pain went through me, followed by the pulsing sort of panic that I was prone to in those days. Instinctively I reached for my money, the stash I’d been saving in my pocket. Only then did I realize it was gone.

  We walked for a few minutes, the cars passing us by so slowly that we could not only see all the people inside but determine the mood in the cars, most filled with the exhaustion and annoyance common to the end of family weekends, each curled in his seat and angled away from the rest, though in some of the cars people were still going at it, joking, fighting. Malinda hung her head, angled her body away from the road, the shame of being seen by someone we knew so hot within her it was coming off in waves. A few times there were cars full of men that slowed down and whistled, honked, asked my mother where she was going. But when she named our city, an hour south, the men didn’t want to go that far out of their way and said, “Good luck, baby.” And she said, “I wouldn’t take a ride with you anyways.”