Anyway, the infirmary has been bustling with graduation fever. Today we cast our ballots for king and queen of the last dance. What a sorry lot of choices. Everyone is matching up for the final party, signing yearbooks with promises to get in touch over the summer. As anxious as I am for it to end, I can sense a certain loss, like a distant relative dying. I’ll have to ask myself some fun questions like “What am I going to do with my life?” and spend hours in front of the mirror repeating “I’m not a loser. I’m not a loser.” My grandma wants me to go to college, but I just dread the idea of more school. What else is there to know?
My counselor suggested that if I want to be a filmmaker I should get a job at a video store. “If you want to be a writer,” he said, “try a bookstore.”
“What if I want to be a supermodel?” I asked.
“Well, you’ve certainly got the attitude.” He stood to let me know our session was over. “Don’t be afraid of life’s challenges,” he said, patting me on the back, then waved in the next student.
I went to the library, opened my social studies book, and stared at the same paragraph for an hour. The room smelled like static electricity, the only noise came from the hum of microfiche and Xerox machines. The library was unusually crowded, a side effect of last-minute cramming. I thought I had it bad, but the girl across from me was obviously going through a serious mental breakdown. Her skin had a feverish purple tint and she was breaking out all over the place. She had that hollowed eyed “I’ve been studying for two hundred hours” face, when somebody is trying to cram a whole year’s worth of education into the last twenty minutes. Wearing black on black on black, her orange hair was teased with a couple gallons of hairspray so that she looked like a living troll doll. She was possessed by a book called In Cold Blood, probably picking up a few pointers.
My boat was sinking just as quickly. I have to turn in an economics report on downsizing tomorrow that’s totally depressing because, when all is said and done, downsizing basically means we’ll end up doing our parents’ jobs at half the wages. In some ways it seems like the more intelligent I get the more aware I become of my own inherited doom. I glanced over the next paragraph, then flipped through a few more pages, looking for a chart or a photograph to ease my pain. My eyes were beyond tired.
Sometimes school just seems like a way to keep our minds off television, a little bit of vegetables in a world of brain candy. Other times it felt like a discipline compound, a place to be brainwashed and homogenized, where everyone learned to be just like everyone else. I wonder what it’s done to me and how many years it will take to shed all this skin. I wonder if I could sue for damages.
SIN CITY
WHEN I got home Mom was in the kitchen sporting some slinky black dress, black nylons, and some extra-high heels. A couple pieces of luggage were stacked beside the door.
“Where are you going?” I set my books at the bottom of the staircase.
“Honey.” She posed in front of the hall mirror while adjusting an earring. “Dan has some business in Las Vegas and he asked me to come along.”
“What kind of business?”
“Oh you know, religious stuff.”
“Since when does God hang out in Vegas?”
“I’ll be back on Monday. No parties! Do you hear me young lady?” She acted all authoritarianlike and everything. “I left some money and the number for the Stardust Hotel beside the phone. There’s spaghetti sauce thawing in the fridge.” She kissed me on the cheek and then scribbled on another layer of lipstick. Dan pulled into the driveway. I heard the car door slam, then the doorbell rang.
Mom opened the door. “You’re late,” she said. Dan kissed her. Her shoulders caved and she let out a crazy giggle and gently pushed him away. “Stop it,” she said.
“Hi, Chrissie.” He waved at me all innocent, like he was Tom Sawyer taking Becky for a peek in the caves. The astronaut took my mother’s bags and locked them in the trunk, then swung around the car and opened the door for her.
“You keep an eye on your brother,” Mom said, pointing at me, then leaned into the car. Dan closed Mom’s door then pranced over to his.
Standing at the window was like watching a movie of my own life ending, the cameras still rolling. Mom waved at me from behind the windshield and I waved back at her. The car slid out of the driveway and curled up the cul-de-sac. My stomach was queasy. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a Diet Coke.
The basement door cracked open and the troll popped out of his crypt. “How are we supoosed to get food?” my brother asked, standing in the stairwell, wrapped in his musty bathrobe, suddenly paranoid about his dwindling frozen waffle supply.
“You’ll just have to learn how to use the microwave all by yourself,” I said. “Don’t you think there are a few slightly larger issues here?”
“What? Are we out of frozen pizza?”
“You’re about to be adopted!”
David waddled into the kitchen like a hundred-year-old man and opened the freezer. “I don’t know what you’re getting so worked up about, that guy is about as dangerous as a couch.”
“I think they’re going to Vegas to get hitched.”
“Well then, we should celebrate.” He shut the freezer door and opened the refrigerator.
“That’s it?”
“You got any better ideas?”
DEATH PRINCESS
I went upstairs and lay down on my bed. If I had a dollar for every minute spent staring out my dirty window scribbling wandering poems about misplaced feelings and aborted love I’d be as rich as Madonna, but I never thought I’d be draining ink from my pen worrying about my mother.
It’s weird when your mom’s trial and error starts to overshadow your own. The astronaut has shuttled her off to sin city with the intention of a final seduction. The man is in high gear, whipping out his finest polyester, working all the night moves. Mom is defenseless. She’s a suitcase looking for a vacation, and so she swims into the dark corners of DuPage County and surfaces with Captain Kirk, right-wing lover boy, used-car dealer, man of God. He’s a step back in her evolution. She’s sacrificing big-time. Mom needs to get out more, but I can’t be the cruise director fishing for a dreamboat. Her decision to get married has really put a snag in my tights. I know I should be happy for her and feel all that “if she’s happy, then I’m happy” stuff, but it’s not working. I can’t find the light switch.
My brother is about as helpful as Mr. Potato Head. He’ll spend the rest of his life baking in front of the boob tube, shrugging me off with enlightened arrogance, as if there were any accomplishment to swallowing pills that spin your eyeballs in circles. David’s locked into a superslack depression cycle. Like a giant vacuum cleaner, he sucks all the air out of the room. His obsession with death has been flourishing. His wardrobe has been reduced to black pajamas. He’s taken up clove cigarettes and likes to disappear on long walks through the cemetery where he traces etchings from tombstones. One wall of his room is covered with them. He also bought a bug light a few months ago, hung it on the porch, and started a collection of moths zapped by his purple ring of fire. Their beautiful wings harden into stiff weightless specimens. He spends hours building meticulous wood cases in my father’s workshop to exhibit their frozen eternal beauty. The moths are pinned side by side with their Latin names typed onto small strips of white paper and glued to a purple velvet lining. It’s one of the few occupations he seems to enjoy, as if maybe he were studying to be a taxidermist or an undertaker or a serial killer or something. He’s getting weirder by the minute. But maybe I’m just projecting my own cloud upon him. He could be perfectly normal for all I know.
My death princess hours are usually spent in the willow tree playing with the puppetry of danger, but last night I rode my bike through Denburn Woods and sat beside the Burlington Northern tracks. The greasy scent of railroad ties smelled like ancient history. The tracks looked like an old scar sewing up some forgotten wound. I watched a freight train rumble through t
own. Its tall rattling cars were rusting; beside the faded serial numbers were exotic names like Pacific and Chesapeake. Some steel doors were open and I could see shadowy figures hunched in the moonlight, hobos or homeless people headed for the next stop or the one after that. It was one of those nights when I wanted to either jump the train or put my head on the tracks, but didn’t have the courage to do either one.
Outside the window, beyond the trees, the thick black plume of the Lemont Fire billowed into the heavens like a mushroom cloud, then tilted and dissipated into the upper atmosphere. I wondered if the atmosphere was like an old dishwasher, and whether after a while the glasses would start coming out spotted.
On Earth Day a scientist from Argonne National Laboratory came to our school and told us toxicology was one of the fastest growing fields in the scientific community. Sometimes I dream of being a forest ranger, someone who tracks bears and repairs trails and points in the right direction when befuddled tourists find themselves lost at a trailhead, but something tells me I’m going to end up a cashier at Taco Bell or working the Slurpee machine at 7-Eleven for snotty teenagers raised on Beavis & Butt-head. My greatest fear is to be known as the girl with the purple hair that works at Barnes & Noble.
Tracy says we should move into the city after graduation and get an apartment in Wicker Park because a lot of cool bands live there. She thinks we should start our own band and become famous rock stars with lunch boxes full of money to buy frilly dresses and fingernail polish.
But that dream reeks of some hole-in-the-wall apartment and a menial job that provides a check just barely big enough to blow on potato chips and beer. Tracy wants me to work at a copyshop so I can make free posters. I told her working in a bookstore would make me a better lyricist, then we got into a huge fight over who would write the songs, even though neither one of us can play a single chord on the guitar yet.
7 - ELEVEN
IF you’re going to have a party, life begins at 7-Eleven, the front line of civilization, the glass doors to convenience, the place most likely to accept my fake ID. Tracy bounced into the parking lot and nearly made a hood ornament out of a pair of skaters jumping over empty beer cans. She swayed to the right and parked beside the Dumpster, as far away as possible from the front door. David handed me a twenty. “Think quantity, not quality,” he said, leaning up to let me out of the backseat.
The skaters were dressed like scarecrows: big baggy pants, baby dread hair, and golf caps turned around backward. Their boom box was blasting the new Beastie Boys record. A pair of waifish tomboy groupies stood next to the yellow plastic garbage can with hands planted deep in their front pockets. They looked like a couple of totem poles. A red sign in the window said WE DON’T SERVE SKATERS.
The tallest one jumped off the parking curb, did a curlicue pattern on his board, and followed me up to the door. His hair was dyed Gatorade green, his skin already pockmarked by years of french fries and Pepsi. His eyes had a crazy intensity that made him if not sexy at least alluring.
“Say a … miss, can you do me a favor?” He rolled closer, waved a five spot with his right hand. “I lost my ID and my dog just got run over by a car and my dad, he’s got Alzheimer’s disease ’cause he swears I’m not his son, and well, my friends and I, we’ve come across a wave of hostility from the management of this corporate money-laundering facility.” He pointed at the sign in the window. “Would you mind picking up a few quarts for me and my brothers,” he said, nodding back toward his crew. They looked as gangly and dysfunctional as their leader, rocking out to the skanky noise booming from their blaster.
“You can keep the change,” he said, as if to jelly my toasting decision.
I took his five dollars, opened the glass door and headed for the beer cooler, grabbed a twelve-pack of Old Style for us and two quarts of Schlitz Malt Liquor for satan’s children, then dragged it all up to the counter. The cashier was some aging hottie.
“Weren’t you in my math class?” I tried flirting to avoid the ID mess altogether. His face scrunched up, and I saw him paging his memory bank, trying to come up with a matching face from his glorious past. It usually works. He gave me a second look while ringing up the beer.
“That’s sixteen thirty-seven,” he said. “You got an ID?” I handed him a twenty tucked around my card. He looked at the name, sifted his registry, passed it back. “You must be thinking of someone else.” He sorta puffed up his chest, as if that other guy I was thinking about was Arnold Schwarzenegger or something. He looked marinated in gloom, as if he was just biding time, waiting for the big tornado to put an end to his misery.
“I hated math.” He dipped his fingers into the till, dished out my change.
“Me too.” I stared at the purple stain on his orange smock, grabbed the bag, and walked out the door. The skaters circled me like a bunch of blood-hungry vampires.
“Don’t try and rip us off, lady,” my romeo skatepunk said, whirling toward me.
I set their beers beside the garbage can. “Here ya go, sweetie.” I smiled. “Call me when you get a bigger chariot.” The beer rats jumped on the bag. I scooted out of the way, stepped off the ledge. My brother opened the car door, lifted his seat. He was curled over the dashboard with his ear pinned to the car speaker, trying to tune in some obscure Fox River pirate radio. I squeezed into the backseat. Tracy backed out and spun around the corner, mission accomplished.
For some reason Tracy was being unusually quiet, as if she were trying to emulate my brother’s lack of communication with the outside world, like maybe he would notice her if she too were invisible, someone who made no effort to scrape his fragile surroundings. She obviously saw the DO NOT DISTURB billboard pasted to his pimple-scarred forehead.
“Earth to David,” I said. “Come in David.”
He didn’t respond, fixated with the control knob of the radio, listening for a faint signal in the white noise.
“Yo, dj!” I slapped him on the back of the head.
“What?” he asked, still working the radio dial.
“Why do you take drugs?”
“To distract me from my boredom.”
“Are you bored now?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What can we do to make your life more interesting?”
“Take drugs.”
“I see. Are you suicidal?”
“Maybe.”
“I can’t believe anyone would kill themselves over a concept.”
“It’s a condition.”
“So turn on the air conditioner.”
“There’s a gadget for every weakness, isn’t there?” he asked.
“You’re the one controlling the dial.”
“What are you two talking about?” Tracy asked.
My brother leaned toward Tracy. “The airwaves are full of static,” he said.
Tracy nodded, as if she understood what he meant.
David turned and looked at me. “Can I get off the couch now?” he asked.
“Sorry,” I said. “I just wanted to poke around the fire a bit.”
“And your conclusion, Doctor?”
“There’s plenty of kindling.”
THE PARTY
MOM blasts off with the astronaut so Mister Antisocial comes out of the cellar and decides, under the guided peer pressure of his morbid friends, to have a little get-together to celebrate his dubious accomplishments. Tracy, the social butterfly, has already announced it to half the universe, and I’m instantly Miss Popular at school. When I sat down in the cafeteria I was circled by the dogs of night, a group of degenerate snobs looking for a place to park their boyfriends. I gave them a bogus address, but that just added to the hysteria. I’ve become the flavor of the minute and was even picked for the best volleyball team in gym class.
Tracy drags me shopping, not once, but twice, for the elusive outfit that will capture the Zeitgeist and slay my brother into submission. She thinks that given the opportunity she can snag him into a luscious make-out session that will prove
so distracting he’ll forget his entire past, wrap around the moment, and consume her until kingdom come. I told her all she had to do was just scrape up a few bong hits and buy a twelve-pack of Ding Dongs and she’d be In Like Flint, but Tracy has a mind of her own.
She was wearing a white miniskirt and a skintight baby tee with a small red heart pasted in the center, pink sparkle tights, and white Mary Janes. She looked like a scoop of vanilla ice cream with a cherry on top, which I presume is exactly the comparison she was looking for.
The teenager formerly known as David has decided to jam with some friends at the party, so they’ve been holed up in the basement night and day practicing three-chord moshes. The noise and repetition were unbearable, but the drummer was kind of cute.
This whole party thing was completely the wrong direction, it’s so last year. I’m trying to project myself out of high school, far away from all the riffraff. I don’t want to be the fairy godmother of puking teenagers who lost their car keys. I’m doing this for Tracy, and my brother, who seems strangely motivated by the potential for anarchy. The introvert will finally have a chance to interact with his public.
Tracy will park herself in front of the band and dance like a maniac until my brother looks up from his guitar strings long enough to discover he has groupies. I put her in charge of the backyard decor, so she strung multicolored tiki lights through the tree branches and stuck lawn torches in the grass around the perimeter.
“I want it to look like someone is going to sacrifice a virgin,” she said.
I did a house check, concealed anything remotely valuable, tied the can opener to the refrigerator door, made more ice, found another roll of paper towels in the cabinet. I opened a few more windows and took the fan out of the closet. David and his friends were doing bong hits in the garage, finalizing their set list. I loved David, but his music was a bit harsh.
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