“But I’m—”
She shook her head back and forth.
“—so sorry.”
She pushed her arm into me and the cloth fell off her face. I stood there, my left hand reaching out to her and the Smith & Wesson in my right, sure she’d say something. But she just turned and picked up the washcloth, then shouted, “Get out!”
“But—”
“OUT! OUT! OUT!”
And they were the last words she spoke to me. Even at the airport she sat motionless, her mouth smothered in lipstick, every inch of her face ghosted with white powder, her eyes doused with mascara and shadow, and every time I remembered how long she’d stayed in that bathroom while I sat by the window clinging to the gun in the palm of my hand, just in case those assholes decided to come back, I shivered imagining how much putting on all that crap must have hurt. When the car service dropped her off, she didn’t even say goodbye.
Every time I called, her mom said she’s still gone, it’s a lot to work through, and I wondered whether she was part of the coverup, but when school started again, it was Edie who wouldn’t come to the door or return my calls. If we passed each other in the hall, she quickly looked the other way. It was terrible. Like I creeped her out or something. I stopped sleeping. Spent entire nights watching reruns and drawing storyboards like the ones I’d Xeroxed at the ad agency, cartoon panels of what might have happened to Edie in L.A. One somehow surfaced in People—a joyride ending in a circle of steel-toe boots in Edie’s face. The experts said it was so violent for a girl. I think they thought Edie was you.
My eyes swelled up and stung like bug bites. I wore sunglasses all the time, enjoying the dark shadows my world had become. Nancy stopped me in the kitchen one day and pulled up the glasses. She stared directly into my eyes. “What?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“I’m not stoned.”
“I know.” She set the glasses back on my nose and took a few steps back toward the refrigerator, a fart of Chanel lingering behind her. “I wish you were, sometimes.”
“What?”
“Maybe it would explain things. Your SATs came back.”
“Oh …”
“The math is still terrible. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“It doesn’t matter, I don’t want to go to college,” I said to her ass. She was bent over the refrigerator, the back of her skirt unzipped so I could see her crack inside her stockings, a backward robber’s nose. It was so gross the way she walked around the house in her unbuttoned shirt and stockings, everything just hanging out. I wished she would buy some sweats like the ones Edie’s mom wore.
Nancy turned, caressing a carafe of iced coffee. “There’s another test in December,” she said.
“I’m not taking it.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake.”
“It doesn’t matter if I’m not going to college.”
“You’re going to college. Everyone goes to college.”
“For your information, Nancy, everyone doesn’t go to college.” I was thinking of you, how you hadn’t even finished high school before you got the role on the soap.
“True.” She landed the carafe on the counter between us. It was sweating at the neck. “You want to clean houses or type for a living, they taught you how to type, right? Or you could always work at McDonald’s.”
Whenever anyone wanted to show you how awful life could be, they mentioned working at McDonald’s. What did that say about the hundreds of thousands of people who worked there? They couldn’t all have such lousy lives, and it didn’t seem worse than any other job as long as I didn’t have to work the grill. My skin was bad enough already. Anyway, I was going to do something creative. “Brooke Harrison never went to college,” I said.
“Who?”
“You know … from World.”
Nancy burst out laughing. “You’re comparing yourself to someone on a soap opera? That’s ridiculous. I don’t know where you get this stuff sometimes. Brooke Harrison was training for TV while you were still riding your Big Wheel, and look, nobody would ever accuse her of being a good actress, but she’s got some talent.”
“I have talent. You don’t even know.”
“Oh come on, Lily, we’re talking about real talent here, not your little pictures.” Nancy poured herself a tall glass of iced coffee, and we watched the shit-brown liquid roll over the ice cubes, cracking like the synapses in my brain. I thought it was going to explode, an aneurysm of Nancy-hate. She’d be sorry when I was famous and I told the press my mother was dead.
She added skim milk and two packets of Sweet’N Low to her coffee, then pivoted, drink in hand as if she were hosting a cocktail party, before launching into her usual speech: Maybe if I stopped trying to convince myself I was so different from everybody else I could think a little bit about my future, and if I didn’t want to take the SATs again, fine, we would work with these scores, at least the verbal was okay, and I had that internship at the ad agency and good references from my art teachers (even without talent). But, she said, I really needed to start thinking about getting into a good school or else I wouldn’t have a prayer of grad school and I’d end up working you-know-where. Only the reverse—better scores, better schools, a good job (like hers? she sold houses!)—didn’t seem much different.
She left me so bummed out I drove into the dark, waterlogged afternoon. It had been raining on and off for days, turning the fallen leaves into a soggy brown mattress. My wheels splashed through puddle after puddle, but inside I stayed warm and dry, thinking, what crack-up weather, the beginning of a bad story … on a dark and foggy suburban road … good to be in a high-performance vehicle. Jack had said, “Those Swedes make the safest cars in the world. If we were hawking them I’d get that into the spot for sure.” I could storyboard it for you to star. I’d been compiling tapes of your scenes on World, studying your movements, gestures, and expressions. I knew your kisses, your crying jags, your angst, and, of course, your prayers, now that you’d seen the light and were training to become a nun. We could have made some serious cash from the tapes, you know? There was always someone in Babbling ’Bout Brooke pleading for Jaymie Jo montages, that’s where I got the idea. But you didn’t want me to sell them.
Red lights screamed: Stop! I slammed on the brakes, just missing the station wagon in front of me. Safest car in the world!
Turning my head, I realized I was on Nirvana Avenue, right by school, and wasn’t that the cruelest joke? To build a high school on a path called Nirvana? But it also led to the turnoff for Edie’s house, so I figured what the hell, I’d go and see if she might come to the door this time, but when I arrived there was another car in my favorite spot across the street: the old Chevy. Alone, Bobby Davis sat with his elbow folded in the open window, listening to loud music. I nuzzled up my Saab and, from a button by the driver’s seat, slid down the other window. “Hey, Bobby,” I said.
He leaned a bit further out the window, and boy was he different. About twenty pounds heavier and thicker all over, his blond waves had been cut so short he looked like the guys at the military academy. “Yo, Speck, long time no see,” he said, and there was something sweet about how he called me by my last name.
“S’pose you got a message for me,” he said.
“For you? I don’t think so.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I … I’m just … wait, what are you doing here?”
“Waiting for her to break,” he said, and his steely gray eyes clouded over. They were red around the edges and bloodshot. He’d always looked like he had pink eye, but that day he was even more teary. “She can’t ignore me forever, you know?”
I must have smiled.
“What? What’s so fucking funny?”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
“You want her to talk to me?”
“No, me. She’s ignoring me, too.”
“You? But I thought—”
“Since Los Angele
s.”
“What the fuck happened out there?”
“I’m not sure exactly, but it was really bad.”
“A’right, follow me. Let’s go somewhere else, this feels too weird.”
He turned over the Chevy and skidded out into the damp streets. There was nothing for me to do but join him. I hadn’t hung out with anyone in months, not even in smokers’ corner, which had been overrun by kids who seemed way too young for cigarettes, and I’d been dying to talk to somebody about Edie. So I followed Bobby past the train tracks in the misty, wet twilight, trying to remember an old Middle Eastern saying we’d been hearing a lot of since they discovered the president’s men were involved in arms deals over there. It went something like this: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Crime is a very slippery slope.
When I was in seventh grade they called us into the auditorium to watch a movie about smoking pot. It was full of creepy music and had all of these reformed junkies, prostitutes, and thieves, dressed up like hippies, telling us how everything bad started after they’d smoked their first joint. The narrator said listen carefully: These people were living proof marijuana led to harder drugs. And some of the girls who’d smoked ended up pregnant.
Everyone laughed at the movie. Like it could never happen to us—but I’d smoked my first joint the year before and had been pinching buds from Jack’s drawer ever since. How quickly I’d gone from smoking to stealing. Maybe the hippie addicts had a point. (Note to the president and first lady: If you’d like to use me in your war on drugs, feel free. Just be aware I don’t agree with you on anything else.) The way I see it, my theft and possession of a weapon put me in the big league, criminologically speaking. If I hadn’t lifted that gun and blue bag full of bullets and rolled each one in a pair of jeans, the way Edie’d packed up her pipe and hid it in her suitcase on the way out, then maybe I’d have no need to scratch these words across endless pages of yellow legal pads. I can’t tell you exactly why I took it, but after spending the early morning hours sitting at the windowsill with the gun in my hand, almost wishing those guys’d come back for another round, I wanted that gun. It had become a part of me, the only thing separating me from what happened to Edie out there. I think I knew all along that it wasn’t even loaded.
Bobby Davis taught me how to shoot, just like he said in his deposition. He might have been a high school dropout and a pothead, but he was never delusional, just sad. He reminded me of your boyfriend, John Strong. In an interview you said John was like a giant cat, who, missing his mother, kneaded his claws into everything. I guess most guys were like that.
It was always dark with Bobby, past daylight savings and damp and woody. He never called or came by my house, he was just there in the parking lot after school, waiting like all the older guys who dated high school girls. I followed him along the highways and boulevards, driving through parks and shopping malls and cemeteries and golf courses—Long Island had it all and everything looked different in autumn, when the day people stopped coming and the air smelled like a muddy T-shirt. We always took two cars so we weren’t really together. But Edie couldn’t have missed it, if she’d cared enough to look—the Saab and the Chevy, you couldn’t get much different in looks, personality, bod. He always wanted to talk about her and kept asking me to replay the same story like it was a flashback on a soap. It was okay until he started looking for someone to blame.
“How could you just let her go off? What were you thinking?” he asked me again and again, and I had no answer, at least nothing I could put into words. “You say she was your best friend. You were supposed to watch her back, it’s an unwritten code, a philosophy.”
“She told me we were through,” I defended myself. “She broke the code.”
“Did you ever smell her?”
“No,” I lied.
“She always smelled like grape bubble gum.”
“Yeah, I guess … she was like a funky purple grape.”
Her smell was more flowery perfume and antiperspirant, but she did have a grapey aura, and I wanted Bobby to see I was paying attention. Guys liked girls who were fun, funny, and supportive. I’d read that in Teen magazine. I bought packs of grape bubble gum and left them on my dashboard. He never noticed. But he liked my tape deck. We used to open the front doors of my car and listen to Frank Zappa while we sat on the hood of his Chevy off the Meadowbrook Parkway, smoking pot and watching the cars stream by in the misty twilight, a net of moist brown pine needles beneath our feet. (Even now, where the only pine scent comes in Mimi’s metal bucket, the smell makes me hum Zappa songs.) Bobby loved Zappa; over a couple of afternoons I’d painted his face in oils on the back of Bobby’s jacket. He said it looked just like the album. It made him smile. He liked that Zappa sang about Jewish girls and Catholic girls and dancing and screwing and jamming, and he wasn’t afraid to curse and lose airplay. We never listened to the radio, except when the World Series started, even though Bobby said baseball was a wussy-ass sport, and that seemed so antisocial, so un-American. I could see why Edie’d had such a crush on him. The thing is, I had no idea he’d liked her so much. He never bought her feather roach clips or made her personalized mix tapes like the Ayatollah did, and always acted like he could take her or leave her. He must have known she had other boyfriends.
My father was at game seven. He’d been calling in favors all over town when it started looking like there would be a game seven. I imagined him sucking down hot dogs and plastic cups of beer as he cheered the team he’d followed since they joined the National League. For weeks, he’d been running around the house with his fist in the air shouting, “The ’86 Mets!” They hadn’t won a Series since 1969, the year I was born. When I was a kid and we used to go to games, he liked telling me how he’d watched that entire Series on a small color TV with me, a three-month-old baby, in his lap. I didn’t cry once, he said. I was never a big crier.
Bobby let the game run at longer intervals that last night, although he wanted to hear the Zappa song about a Jewish princess. It reminded him of Edie. He was about to rewind the tape so we could hear it again, when he leaned out of the passenger seat of my car. “Where the fuck did you get this?” he said, Aunt Fifi’s pistol in his hand, looking tinier than ever.
“Be careful, it’s an antique.” I slid off the hood of his car and went to grab it, but he dangled it over my head. “Come on, give it back.”
He laughed. “This can’t be yours.”
I lunged at him and practically fell over. “Please … you’re gonna break it!” I said. I’d lugged that gun all the way back from Los Angeles, took the name tag off my luggage. If it had been discovered I was going to eat the baggage claim check.
Bobby clicked open the barrel, spinning it a few times, a disturbing smile on his face. “It’s not loaded. What good’s it gonna do you if it’s not loaded?”
Evening made his face whiter, and more eerie. From the car came the announcer’s voice and organ music and thousands of people shouting, “Charge!” Something good was happening at the game.
“Let me guess, it’s just for show.”
“No,” I huffed. He fit the barrel back, took a few steps forward, and held the gun in front of him like a TV cop about to say, Freeze!
“See, this is exactly why girls and guns don’t mix,” he said, and pulled the trigger. It sounded like the click of a seat belt. “Girls are total pussies. You got no backbone. When God took that rib outta Adam to make Eve there was nothing to connect it to. He had to improvise, use sand or something, and as a result you’re weak. The whole lot of you. This is why girls follow guys all over the place.”
“I don’t see Edie following you anywhere.”
He pivoted back and slammed me up against his car, the nose of the gun at my cheek. “Don’t you talk about her like that, you hear me? You ruined her!” The gun slid down to my neck. Bobby shoved it under my throat and pushed his body into me, hard. He smelled stale, like bad cheese. “You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?” he said, the gun practically choking me.
I spit out the words as best as I could: “I understand.”
“Understand what?”
“It’s all my fault.”
“That’s better.” He backed off, and we were both heaving, tiny breath clouds sailing between us. “You’re lucky,” he said. “I’m in a good mood tonight. Let’s see if we can’t beat the odds, show you how to use this thing. You got any bullets?”
I directed him toward the glove compartment and blue Tiffany bag, then watched as he loaded and unloaded the gun, explaining about the barrel, the bullets, the safety. He told me the safety was my personal bodyguard, as long as it was on nothing bad could happen, and I felt, well, safe. He showed me how to stand coplike, feet planted directly under my hips, arms extended in front of me, one hand on the gun, the other gripping it from below for extra support on the kickback. It was much heavier when loaded, even with Bobby’s hands over mine. He clicked off the safety and whispered, “Ready?”
I pulled the trigger and immediately slid back into Bobby’s chest, the shot ringing through my head like a hundred cars backfiring, the scent of fireworks overwhelming the wet leaves and Bobby’s boy smells. His hands still guiding mine, he said do it again, and I pulled the trigger, getting better at balancing myself with every shot, although I had no idea what we were shooting at. It was too dark off the parkway, and we’d shut off the interior lights of our cars. Bobby said the noise would attract enough attention. Nobody saw us, but after Bobby’d taken a few shots of his own, a chorus of honks blew through the swish of red and white lights. Someone, somewhere, shouted, “Let’s go Mets!” I grabbed the gun from Bobby and emptied the barrel into the cloudy black sky.
“Easy, now.” He came up behind me.
“They’re winning.”
“You happy?”
I turned around and saw the outline of his face, the white of his eyes. “It’s about time they won a Series.”
“Not that.” He nudged the side of my body closest to the gun in my hand.
With or Without You Page 24