by Leah Carroll
I turn to John. “Did you just see the lunar eclipse?”
He sits down next to me and shakes his head no. “Are you cold?” he asks. I don’t respond. He unties a button-down shirt from around his waist and I drape it across my shoulders and almost die from swooning so hard.
When it’s time to leave, Rick and I get into his brown two-door car that sits ominously low to the ground. We’re both still incredibly high. I’ve smoked more pot that night than I ever have in my life and I’m not even close to coming down off the LSD, which at some point I decided to take more of. Rick still has some of the acid and a giant bag of pot on him.
“I should carry that stuff for you,” I say. “Male cops can’t search women.” We both agree this a good idea. Driving down the pitch-black roads from Exeter to Barrington feels like being in video game come to life, and I cling to the sides of the passenger seat as we weave our way around curves. At one point, I see a long line of lights in what seems like the middle of the road. Unlike the lunar eclipse, which only I could see, Rick sees the lights and pulls off to the side of the road
“How will we get around it?” he asks.
We stare and stare and finally realize the lights are headlights, and the floating line is an overpass. All we have to do is drive underneath it. We congratulate one another on keeping it together.
I wake the next morning still wearing John’s button-down shirt. I wander into Derek’s room. My body feels slimy from the acid but I can’t stop smiling. I sit down in the big orange chair Derek had found on the sidewalk and lugged up to his room.
“How was the show?” he asks.
“Derek,” I say, “I am totally in love.” I absentmindedly pat the front pocket of my shirt and feel something puffy. I pull out a giant bag of pot and the cellophane wrapper from a pack of cigarettes containing a strip of blotter paper. I hold them both in my lap and start laughing.
“Whoa,” says Derek. He’s just waking up and his dark hair, so similar to mine that people often assume we’re biological siblings, sticks out in all directions. I’m glad, like always, to have Derek there. We fight but really he knows me better than anyone else. We’ve lived in the same houses, shared the same bathrooms, and for so long that I never think of him as just a “step” brother.
The girls’ reaction to my newfound love is more high pitched. I showed them John’s shirt and ask their advice on how I should go about returning it. We squeal at the various possibilities and drive past his house several times, once even pulling into the driveway, as I scream at Alex to drive away. I don’t see him for the rest of the summer, but they indulge my rattling on about how perfect and amazing he is. Now when we get one of Alex’s friends from the gas station where she works to go to the liquor store for us, my beer of choice is Miller High Life. The group of us sits on a narrow rocky outcropping of the beach and drink it while I recount my amazing discussion with John about colors. Of course, the girls are the ones I really love, the ones who look out for me, and laugh with me, and see the potential inside me that I don’t.
I DON’T SEE Dad most of that summer, but shortly before school starts again, he calls me. I answer the phone in the kitchen, wrapping the cord around my wrist and looking out the window at the driveway. Doc, the downstairs neighbor, is draped across one of our chaise lounges with his eyes closed. His four-year-old daughter goes up and down Taylor’s plastic play slide next to him.
“I was thinking we could go to DC for a few days,” Dad says over the phone.
“Okay,” I say. The last time we’d seen each other we had discussed the recently opened Holocaust Museum.
“We’ll drive through the night and get there in the morning. It takes about eight hours. Do you want to go?”
“Yeah,” I say, and then catching my monosyllabic responses add, “I want to see the Holocaust Museum.”
“Me too,” says Dad. “I think it’s important that you see the Vietnam Wall, too. I’ll pick you up tomorrow night? Around ten?”
“That sounds good.” As I’m hanging up I hear Dad clear his throat.
“Love you,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say, caught off guard. I hang up without saying it back. Should I call him back and tell him I love him too? I unwind the phone cord from my wrist and decide it would be too weird. I walk down the back staircase and out onto the patch of grass behind the house.
“Can I bum a cigarette?” I ask Doc. He opens his eyes and looks at me, his pupils tiny pin pricks. High on heroin, I realize.
“Hey, beautiful,” he says. His voice sounds stuffed up, like he has a cold. He reaches beside him and takes out a cigarette from the beat-up-looking pack of Basics at his side. “Do you need a light?” he asks.
I stand for a moment, cigarette balanced between two fingers. I can still hear the sound of Dad clearing his throat. I feel ashamed.
“Please,” I say.
Doc stands and lights my cigarette. I exhale and lean against the house, conscious of the way I look and hold my cigarette. I can sense that Doc is looking at me, and it makes me embarrassed. I slouch a bit against the wooden shingles. I wish I’d stayed upstairs.
“Nice night, isn’t it?” Doc’s jeans sit low on his narrow hips and I look away quickly from the strip of tanned flesh exposed beneath his T-shirt. Then, suddenly, he’s in front of me, balancing his palms against the side of the house and pinning me between his arms. I try to slip out from beneath him and he grinds his pelvis into mine. “Nice night,” he says again, eyes closed.
I push him away and run up the stairs. When I get to my door I realize I’m still holding the lit cigarette. Disgusted, I throw it into the kitchen sink and run to my room. I sit there in the encroaching darkness, sweating in the stuffy space. I feel like if I try to stand up I won’t be able to.
DAD PICKS ME up the next night around ten. I’d been lying on the yellowing white leather sofa in the living room, wondering if I should have agreed to go at all. It had been a long time since I’d spent more than twenty-four hours with him. What if it didn’t go well and I was trapped on an eight-hour car ride away from home? I heard his car horn outside and gathered my bag of stuff. Ann-Marie’s room was dark. She and Taylor were staying at her new boyfriend’s house.
Dad drives a black five-speed Jetta. After he totaled the Mitsubishi, he’d driven a big Pontiac for a while, but he must have stopped making the payments on it at some point, because a large man had come pounding on the door to our apartment and demanding that Ann-Marie tell him where the car was. After she’d explained to him that they were divorced and she didn’t know, I asked her who he had been.
“The fucking repo man,” she said.
Now, Dad pops the trunk for me and I throw my overnight bag in and get into the passenger seat. Right away I can tell Dad had been drinking. The scent of whiskey and Polo permeates the car.
“Hey kiddo,” he says.
I slump in my seat and make a big show of buckling my seat belt. “How long will it take us to get there?”
“About eight hours,” says Dad. “You can sleep in the back if you want.”
“Can I drive?” I have my license but we only have Ann-Marie’s one car and she doesn’t let me use it, so I never get to drive.
“Why not?” says Dad. “The highway’s easy.” He pulls off onto the side of 95 and we get out of the car and run around the front to switch positions. Cars fly past me in the dark as I jump into the driver’s seat and slam the door shut. Dad talks me through guiding the car into fifth gear and the car rattles along the dirt shoulder, as I rev the engine and grind gears. Once I’m going fast enough Dad looks behind him and yells, “Go!” I don’t even look to my left as I pull onto the highway, heart racing.
“Good job,” he says. “Easy from here on out, just stay in fifth. And I’m not drunk, you know.” I know he is, but I also know he’s not as drunk as he could be, and that means something. I looked straight ahead at the highway in front of me and don’t say anything in response. After hours of dr
iving and another stop on the highway to switch spots, so I can climb into the backseat and sleep for a bit, we get into Washington, DC, a little bit after sunrise.
We pull into the hotel parking lot just outside the city in Northern Virginia. Despite how early it is, it’s already blazing hot. We emerge from the air-conditioned car onto the blistering asphalt of the parking lot. I pull my bag from the trunk and Dad bends over the backseat of the car, rifling through a pile of laundry for a clean shirt.
“Leah,” Dad says, jogging after me. “Jesus Christ, wait up.”
As we check in, the woman behind the counter greets us in a thick Southern accent. I’ve never heard one outside a movie before and when we walk back outside to go to our room, I joke about it with Dad.
“We’re in the South now, baby,” he says.
“We are?” I’ve never thought of Washington, DC, as being “the South.”
“Well, we’re in Virginia,” he says. “You’ll see.”
We throw our stuff in the room and wash our faces and then go to eat breakfast in the hotel lobby. I push my plate down the buffet line and scoop myself a large helping of oatmeal. I join Dad at a table and take a bite of cantaloupe. I hadn’t realized how starving the night of driving has made me. Dad looks at a map he’s picked up at the front desk.
“We could do the Holocaust Museum first,” he says. “And then maybe come back and take a nap. We can go to the Mall tonight. I’d like to get pictures of the Wall at sunset.”
I nod, devouring the food on my plate. I scoop a huge spoonful of oatmeal into my mouth, gag, and look up desperately at Dad. He turns away from the map, sees the look on my face and the mound of food on my plate, and laughs out loud.
“Spit it out, kiddo,” he says, handing me a napkin. “What’s the matter? You never had grits before? I told you we were in the South!”
I do my best to spit the strange rubbery stuff into the napkin, then swallow an entire glass of water trying to get the taste out of my mouth. Dad is still laughing.
“I thought it was oatmeal.” It’s all I can do to keep from wiping my tongue with the napkin.
“People love that shit,” says Dad. “When I got back from Vietnam, they promised to send me to a base near home and I wound up in fucking Alabama. In the middle of fucking July. It was as hot as this at night. And man when they served grits those Southern boys would go wild!”
I push my plate away and smile at Dad. “They’re disgusting,” I say.
“Yes they are, Leah, daughter of mine. Yes they are.”
We leave for the Holocaust Museum after breakfast. By that time, midmorning, the pavement practically sizzles. We wait, the car idling sluggishly at the traffic light, both of us halfheartedly acknowledging the Federal Treasury as we watch for the signal change. It’s so hot that in the barely moving traffic the air-conditioning struggles to work. When we finally get into the cool dark museum, we both breathe an audible sigh of relief. Dad nudges me with his shoulder.
“Seems like there is probably something wrong with being psyched to get into the Holocaust Museum because of the air-conditioning, don’t you think? I mean the ovens and all?” He raises his eyebrows at me. I roll my eyes but I’m trying not to laugh.
We make our way through the winding, stark design of the place. We look at the chart the Nazis used to determine purity: both parents Aryan, blond hair, blue eyes, the most pure; both parents Jewish, dark hair, dark eyes, the least.
“There’s you,” Dad says, pointing at a row near the bottom. “Mother Jewish, dark hair, dark eyes.” I look up at him thinking he might make a joke, but the look on his face is sad and angry. I wondered if he’s thinking about me dying. I wonder if he’s thinking about my mom. Had she lived, I would have been raised an observant Jew. I wonder if Dad feels bad about not having done that.
Outside, we stand on the sidewalk with the Jetta’s doors cracked, waiting for the heat inside to dissipate slightly before we get back in.
“You should see Fiddler on the Roof,” Dad says. It comes out like it’s something he has been thinking about for a long time.
“Okay,” I say. “Is it coming to Providence?”
“If it does,” he says, “you should see it with your aunt and your grandmother. I think they would really like it.” In the car, Dad adjusts the air-conditioning vent, leaning close to it. His face is bright red. I notice how purple and puffy the lines on his nose and cheeks have become. They made his skin look fragile and sore, and I have the sudden urge to ask him if they hurt. “I need a nap,” he says. “That wore me out.”
We go back to the hotel and Dad lies down on the bed near the window. We’re both glistening with sweat just from the walk from the parking lot to our hotel door. “Did you bring a bathing suit?” Dad asks. “There’s a pool.”
I hadn’t brought one.
“Maybe I’ll go in my clothes?” I say to Dad. I think maybe if he wants time to be able to drink, it’s now. I change into a giant tie-dyed T-shirt and a pair of army pants I’ve cut into shorts that go to my knees. I cinch them at my waist with a giant safety pin.
“That’s what you’re going to swim in?” asks Dad, when I emerge from the bathroom.
“So what?” I say, instantly defensive.
“No big deal,” he says. “You might as well just wear one of those Victorian things with the striped arms and legs. I mean are you sure you’ve got enough on? I can see your ankles.” Dad has the ability to see exactly what my specific insecurity is and needle me about it. And I have no ability to disguise emotion on my face. I think of the girls at school sunning themselves on Barrington Beach in their bikinis. I look down at my legs. They’re so white they’re practically blue and covered in the dark stubble that develops if I don’t shave them every single morning. Other girls, I’m sure, are born with golden down on their arms and legs that requires little maintenance. Dad sees the look on my face. “Hey,” he says, “I was just joking around with you. You look fine. Don’t forget to grab a towel.”
There’s only one other family inside the gated pool. The young mother and father bob around the shallow end as their daughter swims between them, every limb encased in a blow-up floatie. She looks less like a toddler and more like an inflatable raft. The mom and dad call to her in baby voices and clap their hands. A listless-looking teenage boy sits in the lifeguard chair, looking out at the highway that runs in front of the motel. I lower myself into the deep end and submerge my body, holding on to the bottom hem of my oversize shirt as I drop to the bottom. When I open my eyes underwater I see the blurry outlines of the parents’ legs, jumping up and down. I move my hands around in front of my face in the blue water. I love swimming pools. I wish I had a bathing suit.
Walking back to the hotel room, dripping wet, I squeeze out the T-shirt and ball the heavy canvas fabric of the shorts into my fist, trying to dry out a little before I go back into the room. A few doors down a maid in a blue-and-white uniform knocks on a door and then props it open. Her cart of towels and sheets blocks the doorway. I walk down to her and peek my head into the darkened room.
“Excuse me,” I say. “Excuse me.” She comes to the door and I gesture to my sopping clothes. “Can I have another towel?” I ask. She stares at me. In the silence I can hear myself dripping water onto the pavement. Finally, she shakes her head and hands me a towel. I press it against myself like a squeegee.
I go to our door and knock. I don’t want to surprise Dad in the middle of anything. Maybe he’s drinking, or watching porn on TV, which I’d caught him doing a few times growing up. I blush just at the word porn and try to tell myself I’m being silly. But even with the key card in my soaking pocket, I won’t go into the room until Dad opens the door.
Once he does, I stand in the air-conditioning and shiver as Dad turns on the TV.
“How was it?” he asks.
“It was really nice,” I say. “It’s so hot.”
Dad flips through the channels. “I thought we could get dinner in Georgetown,�
� he says. “It’s a really cool part of the city, kind of like Thayer Street. I think you’ll like it.”
I nod and sit down at the edge of the bed.
“Maybe you should take a shower and put on new clothes?”
“Oh,” I said dumbly. “Okay.”
I come out of the bathroom, towel around my hair, fully dressed. I feel clean and sleepy. Dad sits at the edge of the bed and counts a large pile of twenty-dollar bills. He has never carried a wallet or money clip and loves to have as much cash on hand as possible. His favorite thing is to pull a fat wad of money from his pocket and wave it in front of Derek and me. He has done it so many times for a laugh that by now it makes me embarrassed just thinking about it. I wonder where he’s getting his money now that he doesn’t have a job. He taps the bills into a neat pile, folds them in half, and puts them into the pocket of the suit pants he has changed into.
“Have you ever seen this show?” he asks, pointing at the TV. I haven’t.
“Oh you’d really like it,” he says. “It’s called Homicide and it takes place in Baltimore and it’s all based on this book about homicide detectives. The book is great. You should read it. Baltimore—it’s like no other city. We should stop there on the way back, do you want to?”
I haven’t been with Dad for this long—almost twenty-four hours straight now—since he and Ann-Marie got divorced. Listening to him talk, telling me what books and movies to see, what he has just read about in a magazine article, is my sole understanding of culture outside Barrington. I want to see Baltimore and I want to read Homicide and I want to eat dinner in Georgetown. And I want to do all those things with Dad. But I start to feel panicky, like the trip will never end. Like I’ll never get back to the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot in Alex’s car, where we’ll smoke cigarettes and drink enormous coffees, while I talk haughtily about the awesome book I’ve just read about homicide detectives.