Twenty Grand

by Rebecca Curtis

  EARLIER THAT NIGHT, our town had had its prom. It was held in the ski lodge and each year it was a grand affair. There was a catered dinner, photographers, champagne, and a committee of mothers who judged a beauty contest and choreographed a couples’ march down a red velvet carpet. Parents attended and observed every event from a balcony over the rafters. Men from the town who were not parents slipped in at midnight and squeezed onto the balcony too. That afternoon, I’d asked my stepfather to stay home. At first he’d seemed surprised at my request. He’d walked outside to consider it. When he returned he said he’d really like to come. I’d answered that I’d like him not to. He’d repeated that he’d like to, if only for a little while, and then my brothers had been sent outside. My mother had no desire, herself, she said, to go to the prom; she was tired, she didn’t feel up for a prom, but she was angry that I’d caused discord over something trivial. My stepfather just kept saying how he wanted to go. How he wanted to take pictures, had been looking forward to it for years, was my stepfather and had paid for my dress. But in the end, he promised not to, if I’d let him take one photograph on the lawn.

  I’d put the dress on and been embarrassed. It was tight, shiny, black, and too small. My boobs were practically falling out. The rhinestone necklace—my mother had come to my room and said, “Here, take this, you might as well”—looked cheap. But they’d taken the picture, and wished me good night, and my date and I had left.

  Soon after we got there, my date wandered off into the crowd.

  I wasn’t deeply disappointed, and after he left I danced in the lodge among the crowd as if I weren’t alone, until I accidentally stepped on, and tore a small hole in, a woman’s long tangerine-colored gown. She made a noise and her boyfriend turned around. I recognized him from my math class, where I’d had a crush on him because he’d been good at math. I apologized to his date. She stared. I offered to pay for the damage. She gathered up the material and studied it sadly. She said, “It’s not a question of money.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll pay double.” As soon as I said it the woman looked satisfied. But her boyfriend did not turn back around. Instead he watched me dance. After a minute he said, “You’re the worst dancer I’ve ever seen.”

  I moved away as if I hadn’t heard, as if my rhythm required it, and looked up at the balcony and saw my stepfather. He was leaning over the railing, peering through the wide pink streamers that had been strung across the beams to give dancers the illusion of privacy. There might have been other people already up there too; I couldn’t tell because of the spotlights. But I knew he’d taken off his bathrobe and gotten re-dressed and left the house to come to the prom. He was forty-six. A guy whose idea of a great day was breaking some ones and spending the quarters at the penny arcades. I felt as if I couldn’t talk. And I sensed, or guessed, that my stepfather couldn’t talk to the other adults on the second floor, either. He had a smile fixed on his face, as if someone had told a joke at his expense. He was standing alone and his head was turning back and forth levelly, as if someone very large were standing behind him and turning it for him. He had on a brand-new red wool sweater.

  I went down to the cellar. The cellar was a cavern that ran under the lodge. I knew it well because it was where he’d taken me each fall to buy used skis. There was a bench against one crumbly rock wall. It smelled like earth. There was dirt, in fact, in the fissures in the floor. I sat on the bench and read the plaques on the beams. I studied the old poles, crossed and nailed, of some skiers who’d gone to our school in the seventies and almost made it to the Olympic tryouts. I was listening to the music that came down through the ceiling vents and sort of dancing by myself when Crystal appeared. She didn’t act surprised to see me or ask what I was doing down there. She just started dancing with me, and after a while a slow song came on and she reached up—she was only five five—and placed her arms around my shoulders. When the song ended she brought her face near mine and said “Let’s leave.”

  When she explained to me that we should lift my stepfather’s boat and go out on the lake, I felt confused. She had her own boat—a speedboat. When I asked why she didn’t just use it, she blushed and said she’d crashed it waterskiing the week before. When I asked her why she’d asked me for a ride instead of one of her friends, she looked up and smiled. She had wide lips and a lopsided grin that showed her incisors.

  “I feel nostalgic,” she said. “I miss you. We haven’t hung out in a really long time.”

  I’D KNOWN HER as a kid, the way everyone knew everyone else. She’d come to my house and we’d spent nights in a blue tent, a plastic one my mother had set up in our backyard. Our house was surrounded by forest, mostly pine and birch because the woods dropped down toward a river—and in the night we’d done stupid kid things. She’d taken her clothes off. We’d been doctors or Indians. She’d lain on her back. I’d said, “I’m going to kiss your nipples.” She’d said, “Okay.” I’d done it, kissed each nipple twice. I’d kissed her belly button. Then I’d felt strange and stopped. Neither one of us had said anything.

  She said, “It felt weird.”

  I said, “I know.”

  She sat up.

  I was afraid because I sensed she’d grow disgusted by me. I thought it was going to happen right then. But in that moment she sat up, on my pink sleeping bag with the dwarves on it, and said, “Now me.”

  IN HIGH SCHOOL, she sat with me on test days. When her friends asked her why she had, she said she did it so she could copy my answers. She wasn’t a good cheater—she copied every answer I chose. I wasn’t a good test taker, either. No matter how much I studied, I always made some mistakes. So at the last minute, I had to slip my paper away and change several right answers to wrong ones, so our tests wouldn’t match and she wouldn’t get caught.

  WE DIDN’T LEAVE the lodge right away. Instead we went back upstairs so she could march when they called her name and get her crown. We sat at a corner table with a pink cloth rose in a vase and watched people dance. Guys dancing the limbo in their tuxes even though there was no limbo bar, and girls floating in bulbous gowns. And after a while, she said happily, “There’s your stepfather.”

  He was thirty feet above us, across the room on the opposite side of the railing now, and he’d taken the red sweater off. Underneath it, he had on a blue-and-white-striped shirt. I saw the shapes of other adults around him pushing close to share his spot, and that he was preventing them by holding his elbows out wide at his sides. He was clutching the sweater, his camera, and a glass of the fake champagne they’d been serving downstairs. When he saw us looking up at him, he frowned. Crystal waved. He waved back, a small wave. Then he disappeared.

  Crystal frowned. “Why didn’t you wave?” she said.

  I didn’t answer.

  She leaned forward. “You’re being childish,” she said.

  Her gown was shiny purple, her bust was a V of black lace. Her dark blond hair was twisted into a gleaming sculpture. She frowned. On her smooth white forehead, two horizontal wrinkles formed. “My parents are here,” she said. “They took a million pictures of me. They even danced together on the dance floor.” She touched her forehead. “I don’t know what your problem with your stepfather is,” she said. “But whatever it is, you better get over it. Because soon you’ll leave town, and then he’ll miss you forever.”

  ON THE WAY to the yacht club we stopped at her house so she could change, and her boyfriend and I sat in her driveway. The family garage was big enough for four cars; the family house was long and cream and seemed flat, but on the lake side it extended down three stories.

  Dirk Drew sighed. His breath was fogging up the car. His huge legs were squeezed under the dash, and he was fiddling with something in his hands: a floatie key ring.

  “So,” he said. “I’ve never talked to you.”

  I nodded.

  “You’re Ruth,” he said. “I’m Dirk Drew.”

  I nodded again.

  He was wearing a blue sweatshi
rt with a long horizontal rip at nipple-height.

  I said: “What’s with the hole?”

  He paused to think. “Sometimes when I’m waiting for Crystal at the high school,” he said, “I steal from the lobby.”

  I waited. He looked down at the hole. He plucked it modestly.

  “It’s a field-hockey sweatshirt,” he said. “I had to rip out the field-hockey stick part.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said. “What are you doing after you graduate?”

  I was going to college.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, “I’m starting a business.”

  “What kind of business?” I said.

  He leaned across the parking brake. “A taxi service for the lake. It’s a great idea. Lots of people who live on the islands or, you know, have summer homes, they need rides sometimes to get groceries when they’re too drunk to drive boats. And there’s no taxi service. A guy with a boat, who started a taxi service, would make loads of money. And me and my business partner, we’re going to need a secretary.”

  Everyone who lived on the lake had two or three boats. I knew they didn’t need rides. They didn’t need anything. I knew that the taxi service was a bad idea. But I could feel his enthusiasm.

  “Crystal’s not really interested,” he said. “She doesn’t have secretarial skills.” He examined the floatie. He squeezed it.

  “You’re pretty,” he said.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Oh yes you are,” he said. “I’ve seen you around, and you’re kind of big, I mean tall, not fat, and you have nice eyes. Anyway”—he touched my arm—“you’d just have to answer the phone when someone needs a ride.”

  Just then Crystal got in the backseat of the car, and said she’d forgotten to take her earrings off and thrust up two diamonds. “Ruth,” she said. “Take these and put them in your purse.”

  WHEN WE STOPPED at my house so I could change, my stepfather was sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. I walked past him and went upstairs. When I came back down, he was still at the table in the dark. He asked me how my night had been. I didn’t answer. “You know,” he said quietly, “I didn’t mean to go.”

  He said, while watching his hands, that he’d meant only to go for a drive. And that he’d happened to take the camera with him. He hadn’t known where he was going. But he’d happened to end up at the lodge. I’d looked so beautiful, he said. He’d enjoyed seeing me in my dress. And—he said this angrily—there were lots of other parents there, so what was the big deal?

  I stepped outside. A second later he appeared in the door frame. His hands were limp at his sides. He said, “I got some good pictures.” When I was almost at the car, he yelled, “I had a great time!”

  I DROVE to the marina fast. We hit 120 on the straightaway by the airport and Dirk Drew clutched the handle on the ceiling meant for dry cleaning and asked where I learned to drive, was it China, and when we pulled into the dirt lot gravel flew up and cracked the glass and Crystal said, “Where should we go?” and I said, “The Witches.”

  And then we sat there for two hours while little by little Crystal let Dirk Drew know that she was going to college, and he asked if he could come with her and sort of secretly stay in her dorm room, and she stood up and said she wanted to go for a swim, and I knew what would happen.

  But the air was fifty-five degrees, and the clouds were refracting the lights of the town even into the pass, and we leaned over and saw her floating on her back, the current carrying her hair toward the rock behind her, and Dirk Drew said, “I’m going in,” and I guessed he loved her and always would. He went into the cabin—hunkered to fit through the door—and I stayed at the side of the boat, and she looked up and gestured at the door and said, “Go ahead, don’t be an idiot.”

  He was on the couch smoking a cigarette. He put it out in the sink when I came in. His mouth tasted like smoke; he put his hands around my back.

  “It’s a nice boat,” he whispered. “But it’s no good for the taxi service.”

  I said, “We should put the ladder down.” I felt sad. That is, I had the impression I did. But in retrospect maybe I didn’t feel sad at all. Because also I remember noting the feeling and trying to memorize it. After I spoke, his eyes widened and he said, “We should.” Then I took my T-shirt off and he forgot.

  I DID FEEL ODD on the lake—I felt close to my mother because she wasn’t there. When I was a kid she’d suffered periods of melancholy, punctuated by episodes in which she smashed platters on the floor and then crawled among the pieces and said explanatorily, “If it weren’t for you I could have had a career.”

  I’d come home from track and she’d be lying on the couch in the living room. I’d clean up the living room and make dinner. I only made what she would have made: boiled brussels sprouts, baked Tater Tots, and fried hamburgers. My stepfather would come home from the garage and say, “Wow! You made dinner!” and when we sat down to eat he’d say, “This is delicious. You’re a very good cook.”

  After dinner, he’d say to her, “Would you like to go sailing?” and she’d say, “No thank you.” After a bit he’d say, “What about a little drive?” and she’d say, “Maybe in a little while,” and fall asleep.

  We drove down to the yacht club where, because his grandfather had, he had a mooring. I’d watch him study the other men—old ones with wide Anglo faces and blotched red cheeks, fat middle-aged ones and their sons—sitting on the long white deck of the clubhouse. I’d watch him mentally decide whose dinghy he should ask to borrow. I’d watch the men glance at each other while he thought. He’d ask the guy he’d asked the least recently, or the one who’d been nicest to him the week before. Usually the man would say, “No Earl, I’d rather you not.” On a good day the man would say: “I suppose so, Earl.” Or just: “Bring it back when you’re done.” We’d walk over to the dinghy and row it out. We’d go out on the lake, and he’d tell me awkward stories about when he was an awkward kid.

  WE WERE LYING in the V berth when we heard the crunch. I was half-dreaming. The crunch was a sound like metal on rock; there was also a ringing sound, like a telephone from another house.

  Dirk Drew’s head went up. He got up, walked to the cabin door, and fumbled with the lock. Eventually I got up and unlocked it for him. Then he walked onto the deck, got the ladder out from the locker under the bench, and hooked it over the boat’s side.

  When I came out of the cabin, he was climbing back up with Crystal over his shoulder. He staggered onto the deck, lowered her into the stern, and helped her to sit down on the bench. Then, while holding her torso upright with one hand, he pulled her wet hair out of her face for her, and draped it over the seat back. He let go; she grinned and fell onto her own lap. After that, he held her against the seat so she wouldn’t fall down.

  He said her name lovingly and peered into her eyes. But as soon as he took his hand off her forehead, her mouth opened up and blood leaked out.

  I knew I wasn’t extremely intelligent. But I felt smart then. Her body was purple and her eyes were wide open. She looked lovely, except for the bruised half of her face where her skull had been crushed.

  “She’s dead,” I said.

  “Shut up,” he said. “You’re not a doctor.”

  He said we should do CPR. He pulled her off the bench and onto the floor, drew her head into his lap, and breathed into her mouth. He waited, gasped a bit, tipped her head back, and blew in again. When he realized that I was just watching, he told me to sit on her legs and shove my fists into her stomach every ten seconds. We did CPR like that for ten minutes. Afterward, he looked up and said, “What am I going to do?” I didn’t answer. I was thinking I’d been wrong about his loving her forever. Because what he’d kept saying, between breaths, was, “They’re going to send me to jail. They’re going to send me to jail.”

  I stood up and wiped my hands on a towel. “What about me?” I said.

  He let her head g
o. It landed on the deck with a thud. “They won’t do anything to you,” he said. “You’re a girl.”

  SINCE HE’D BEEN in juvie already, he was given ten years. My stepfather said he didn’t think that made much sense. Accidents happened all the time on the lake, he said. It was a shame that Dirk Drew, a not-bad kid, was going to get his life taken away. He didn’t understand how these things worked. But he guessed that Crystal’s parents were behind it. They were yacht club members themselves, and that week, for the first time ever, my stepfather was invited to their house for a beer. At their house, they gave him a beer and asked how he was. He said he was terribly sorry. They thanked him for the sentiment. They mentioned that they’d heard I was leaving town. He nodded. They smiled and said, “That’s for the best.” They weren’t angry, they added, at my stepfather. They knew that he must feel terrible. All they asked was that he sell his boat.

  He looked up from the beer. “Now just a minute—” he said.

  “Earl,” Mr. Williams said. “There are codes, regulations.” He covered his mouth, coughed.

  “Well, my boat’s up to code,” my stepfather said.

  Mr. Williams looked at my stepfather. “We’re not really asking,” he said. Then he looked at his watch.

  My stepfather paid movers to pull it out of the water. He washed and waxed the hull. For two weeks he went down every night and worked on it. He cleaned the head and the sink and he polished the Bunsen burner and sewed up a few rips in the couch. Only once he came home and said, “But it doesn’t make any sense.”

  My mother stepped behind him and massaged both his shoulders. When she spoke she used the soft voice she used late at night when they were sitting together on the couch. “Earl,” she said. “You’re not thinking rationally. You’re not objective. Try to see the issue from the other side. The boat was going downhill. It was going to need repairs. It was junk.”