Shaken and Stirred

by Joan Opyr

  I felt pretty clever about my shorts trick until I stepped onto the stage. A roar went up from the crowd, and, too late, I realized that the floodlights behind the podium were shining through the thin acetate of my gown. Susan, my family, and two thousand other people now knew that I wasn’t wearing my navy blue funeral dress. My shorts were so short that they looked like underwear.

  My classmates, thank God, assumed it was a deliberate joke. I got several pats on the back and a smile or two from some of the teachers. I thought it was pretty funny myself when I caught sight of Mr. Chisholm. He looked like he was ready to bite off one or two of his remaining fingers.

  Abby whispered, “Nice one,” when we returned to our row, and then, “They’ll probably take your diploma back.” Beneath her gown, she was wearing an emerald green dress that fit so well I thought I might have to beat Nick, Joe, and John off with a stick.

  “Can I get a ride with you to Kim’s party?” she asked.

  “Sure. Susan’s coming,” I added, not looking at her.

  “She’s here then?”

  “Yes. Sitting over there with my mother.”

  Abby scanned the crowd until she found them. “Get a load of Willie Nelson,” she laughed, pointing at my father.

  “That’s Lucky Eddie.”

  “No way!”

  “Yes way.”

  She laughed again, adding kindly, “You don’t look anything like him.”

  “Thanks. The milkman’s my real father.”

  Outside, we posed for a million pictures, most of them taken by Kim’s parents. They planned to leave for Florida that night in order to absent themselves from Kim’s party. As a consequence, Abby and I considered it essential that Vince and Norma not have a chance to talk to our parents. As soon as I spotted Edna Johnson making her way over to us, I gave Abby a poke in the ribs, and she hurried off to intercept her. Lucky Eddie, unfortunately, proved to be more elusive. His thin ponytail bounced in my peripheral vision as Kim and I posed for a shot beneath a banner that said “Everything and More, The Class of’84.”

  “Frankie!” Eddie held out his arms, leaving me no choice but to hug him. The hug didn’t last long. We both pulled away quickly. He smelled like cigarettes and Brut by Fabergé.

  Susan stood a few feet behind Eddie, looking uncomfortable. The rest of my family stood behind her. Mike and Jack stared at their shoes, my grandmother smiled happily, and my mother looked as if a change in the wind would crack her face. Thanks to graduation rehearsal, staging, and a host of other cleverly made-up excuses, I’d avoided seeing Eddie at all between dinner at the Hang Chow and graduation itself. Mercifully soon, I’d be taking off for Kim’s party. Eddie and Shirley were going back to Detroit tomorrow, leaving Jack with us to be delivered safely to Camp Lejeune. Eddie hadn’t mentioned it, but I assumed he and Shirley were flying back. The car Eddie had driven up was supposedly my graduation present. It was a nice present—a new Ford Escort. Perhaps I’d have to drive them to the airport.

  My mind wandered over the prospect of owning a car just long enough for Kim DiMarco’s father to step forward and introduce himself to Lucky Eddie.

  “Vince DiMarco,” he said, holding out his hand. “This is my daughter, Kim. She and Poppy are old friends.”

  Eddie put his mirrored shades up on top of his head and shook Vince’s hand. “So this is your daughter,” he said, gazing at Kim through red-rimmed eyes. “Very pretty. I see Frankie here has her old man’s taste in girlfriends.”

  Susan blanched. I held my breath. Then I realized that he meant “girl” friend, not “girlfriend.” I exhaled. My father looked his age, but he refused to act it. Eddie liked to convey the impression that he was a man on the make. He was quick off the mark with the dreadful, inappropriate, and frequently inaccurate double entendre. If I were looking for something to admire, I might have admired Lucky Eddie’s unshakable belief that he was witty, attractive, and charming. Unlike me, he didn’t seem to lack self-confidence, and if he insisted on keeping up this new father-daughter relationship, I suspected that he’d soon be asking me to introduce him to my single friends.

  Vince DiMarco gazed at him, puzzled. My father must have looked even more like a space alien to the DiMarcos than he did to me. Vince and Norma were dressed like rich tourists in casual linen suits and sandals. They both wore chunky gold rings and leatherbanded watches, and they each carried a camera, an expensive thirty-five millimeter with a telephoto lens.

  “So,” Eddie said, turning to me. “What was that trick with the underwear under the gown? You do it on a bet?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That was it. Look, Dad, we’ve got to go . . .”

  “Pretty good joke. Of course, at my graduation . . .”

  Oh God, I thought, wait for it. Lucky Eddie had a captive audience. He wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to one-up me with a big fat lie. The worst part was that it would be an obvious big fat lie, a stupid whopper, and he’d tell as if it were gospel truth.

  “I streaked,” he said. “Did it on a dare. Stripped off and ran naked across the stage.”

  My father had graduated from a Catholic high school in 1961. He was an altar boy. Beatrice and Walter’s den was filled with pictures of him in all stages of childhood, infancy, adolescence, and high school graduation. There was a prominent photo of him shaking the priest’s hand as he received his diploma. Fully clothed.

  “Really. I never heard that one before.”

  “Can’t believe I never told you. They revoked my diploma. Your grandmother had to beg the principal to give it back.”

  “The priest, you mean. I hope he spoke Polish.”

  Vince DiMarco had backed away gracefully and begun conversing with my mother and Norma. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Perhaps my mother was telling him to ignore Lucky Eddie, or explaining that he was an escaped mental patient.

  My father opened his mouth, whether to argue with me or expand upon his lie, I didn’t know and didn’t care. “Excuse me,” I said, before he could speak. “I need to go over there and talk to some people.”

  “Poppy,” said Mike Sava, enveloping me in a bear hug. He was a large man, six feet tall and about 250 pounds. He’d been a football player in high school and had some of that muscle-gone-to-fat look. He was very much the successful salesman, exuding professional charm. Still, I liked him, even when I suspected, as I did now, that he was making a conscious effort to come across as warm and genuine. He smiled at me brightly with his very white teeth. “Congratulations. High school graduation, a red letter day.”

  “I didn’t expect to see you here, Mike. Thank you for coming.”

  “Wouldn’t have missed it.” He slipped an envelope into my hand and winked. “A little something for your college fund. Did your grandfather not make it tonight?”

  “No. Something came up.”

  “I see,” he said, and I could tell that he did see.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” he replied. He looked at Susan and cleared his throat.

  “My cue,” Susan said. She laughed easily and handed him a set of car keys. “I told Dad I’d get a ride with you to the party. Is that all right?”

  I nodded happily. “I have my mother’s chariot for the evening. It’s at your disposal.”

  “Well, that’s settled,” said Mike. “I’m sorry to watch you graduate and then run, but I’ve got another engagement. Will you be home tonight, Susan?”

  “Probably not.” She kissed her father on the cheek. “I’ll call you this weekend, though, about that other thing.”

  “Gotcha,” he said. “Good night.”

  We waved to him as he walked out the door.

  “What’s that other thing?” I whispered.

  “My mother,” she said. “Another detox. He’s found a place down in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He’s taking her there weekend after next. It’s a forty-five day treatment, no family contact. She won’t like it.”

  “What if she refuses to go?�
��

  “She can’t. This is an ultimatum. Dry out, or else.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t sure what to say, so I said, “What did my father say to you? You know, when they called my row to come up and get our diplomas. I saw him lean over.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “You lie. What was it?”

  “He said—as your class walked by—he said there were a lot of hot girls out there. He said he wouldn’t mind meeting a few.”

  “Gross but typical. What did you say?”

  “I said that one of them was his daughter, and that perhaps he should pay more attention to the solemnity of the occasion.”

  I laughed. “If we weren’t in public, I’d kiss you.”

  “The Cat’s Cradle,” she said. “That was public.”

  I didn’t know what coming out was, so I couldn’t consider whether or not I was going to do it at that moment on that night in the lobby of the Raleigh Civic Center. We stared at one another, and I felt my breathing grow shallow.

  In the next moment, the moment was lost. When I’d walked away to join Mike and Susan, Lucky Eddie had descended on the hapless Kim. Now he said loudly, “Hey, a party. Great idea! Poppy can ride with Shirley and me and show us the way.”

  I was speechless, so Susan spoke for me.

  “Oh, fuck,” she said quietly.

  And so it was that we wound up sitting in the DiMarco’s basement rec room with my father and his girlfriend, listening to a tape of the Doobie Brothers that Eddie insisted on bringing in from the car.

  I said, “I wish I were dead.”

  “Me, too,” Susan replied.

  “Me, three,” added Abby.

  Eddie was holding court on the sofa, with the spaced-out Shirley sitting quietly by his side. Kim didn’t seem particularly bothered by their presence. She’d discovered Jack Leinweber, and they were ensconced in the far corner, talking intently. John, Joe, and Alan were playing pool. Dave Wilson had brought his younger brother, Tom, and they were taking turns shot-gunning cans of Diet Coke. Nick was stuck on the sofa next to my father, nodding politely like the nice Polish boy he was. There were several other people milling about the room, girls from the volleyball team, friends of Kim’s from the neighborhood, and people from high school that I scarcely knew.

  Abby, Susan, and I propped up the far wall, as far away from Lucky Eddie as we could get without actually leaving the room—though Abby had suggested that leaving might be the better part of valor.

  “Didn’t you say someone else from the volleyball team was having a party?”

  “Lisa Branch. Two girls from the basketball team are having one as well, but it doesn’t matter. We can’t leave.”

  “Why not?” Abby asked.

  “Look around.” I gestured vaguely at the room in general rather than at my father. I didn’t want to draw his attention at all if I could avoid it. “I can’t leave him here. God knows what he’ll do. I can’t stick Kim with that.”

  “And again I say, why not? She was the idiot who told him about the party.”

  “She couldn’t know that he’d invite himself.”

  “So now what?”

  “We pray for a snarl in that Doobie Brothers tape,” Susan suggested. I leaned my head on her shoulder.

  Abby reached over and patted me kindly on the leg. “High school graduation,” she said. “Glory days.”

  Eddie was gesturing broadly, describing something to Nick that was apparently enormous. His idiocy, perhaps. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a Ziploc bag.

  “Hey,” Abby said, tapping me on the arm. “What’s he doing?”

  From the bag, Eddie extracted the largest joint I’d ever seen, not that my experience was especially broad. My crowd of nerds did little more than drink beer, and precious little of that. I’d never been drunk. I’d never been more than slightly tipsy. My father’s joint looked like something Bob Marley might smoke in Rastafarian heaven.

  He pulled out a lighter and fired it up. Time seemed to stop.

  “Here,” he said, passing it to the bemused Nick. “Have a hit.

  “Oh, fuck,” Abby, Susan, and I said in unison.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  My grandfather claimed that he’d never read a book. He read the newspaper but only because he liked the cartoons. He hated Bermuda shorts, Elvis, and men in sandals. He’d grown a mustache once but never a beard. He wouldn’t eat tacos. He said they looked like something somebody already ate.

  I stepped into the weird hospital elevator with its facing doors and pressed the button for the fourth floor.

  He loved Ava Gardner. They shared a birthday, December 24. I sat up late with him one night watching The Snows of Kilimanjaro. At the end he said, “I love that movie—except for that goddamn Gregory Pecker.”

  He played several instruments, the guitar, the harmonica, and that goddamned organ. He could bang out Baptist hymns, Jerry Lee Lewis-style, on the piano. He was always making some kind of noise—he whistled, he jangled the change in his pocket, and he tapped out rhythms on the steering wheel with his wedding ring. He had a wide assortment of annoying habits, cleaning his fingernails with his pocketknife and poking in his ears with his car keys. And, of course, the beer.

  I met with Dr. Adkins for five minutes, and I sat with Hunter for another ten. He’d curled up into the fetal position, his hands and feet drawn up like a desiccated mummy’s. The white stubble on his face had grown longer. He had his first beard.

  Here was a man who was going to disappear from the face of the earth in the next twelve to twenty-four hours. A crazy, alcoholic, bastard of a man who had somehow managed to marry three times, raise a family, and elope in his sixties with a woman in her forties. He’d lived, outrageously, for eighty-two years.

  “I love you,” I told him. “Goddamn you.”

  Abby was waiting for me in the hospital lobby. She’d changed into a more subdued color back at the hotel, trading the blue silk blouse for a black turtleneck. She had on black pants and black loafers, and her contact lenses had begun to itch, so she was also wearing her glasses. The overall effect was very Malcolm X.

  “How is he?”

  “Dying. It all seems so strange. I feel like I should be up there, sitting a vigil. Instead, I’m meeting friends for lunch and dinner. I’m shopping at the flea market and reclining in the Jacuzzi tub at the Velvet Cloak. Nana and my mother, they’re in holiday mode. It’s like I’m just here for a visit, when I’m here to help my grandfather die.”

  “You’re here to do both,” she said. “Visit the living and aid the sick. This is what happens when someone gets old, honey. With your grandfather, it’s all about waiting. You don’t need to do that waiting here in the hospital. It’s better if you don’t.”

  We walked to the car through the cool night air. The breeze felt slightly damp. In the summer there would be no cool nights. Raleigh would turn into a twenty-four-hour-a-day steam bath.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For pretending like my family is normal.”

  “Speaking of which,” she said, “are you ready for dinner at the Kanki?”

  “Only if burning at the stake is not an option.”

  Susan and I gave Abby a ride home from the party. We invited her to come with us to Chapel Hill, but she declined. She said she’d told her mother that she was going to spend the night at Kim’s. Now she was afraid that Edna would call to check up on her and Nick, or Joe, or someone else who’d taken a hit off of Lucky Eddie’s joint would answer the phone.

  “If she smells reefer on me, I’m a dead woman,” Abby said. “She sniffs me for evidence, reefer, sex . . . she’s like a bloodhound.”

  “It’s okay,” I assured her. “You don’t smell like pot. You smell like Lysol.”

  “Good. I sprayed the hell out of myself with the bathroom air freshener.”

  “You’re all right. She’ll never know.”

  “I hope not. You better hope
not. She won’t be satisfied just killing me.”

  “Abby, I’m sorry.”

  “No,” she sighed. “Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”

  I opened the car door and pushed the lever on the front seat so she could get out. We hesitated for a moment, standing there beneath the broken street lamp in front of her mother’s apartment. Susan had left the engine running, and I imagined Edna peering at us through the curtains. Abby must have imagined it too. She glanced quickly at the house and shivered. Then, unexpectedly, she leaned forward and hugged me.

  “I love you,” she said. “You’re my best friend.”

  “I love you, too. You’re still coming to the beach, right?”

  “Yeah. I just need to think of something to tell Edna.”

  “Tell her you’re eighteen.”

  “I might as well tell her to kiss my ass.” When I laughed, she said, “Shh. Poppy, will you call me tomorrow?”

  “I will. First thing.”

  “Do it,” she said seriously. “Please.”

  She waved good-bye to Susan and me and let herself in the front door. There were no lights on inside, so I hoped the coast was clear. The drive to Chapel Hill was long and for the most part silent. I was exhausted. Susan was contemplative. Back at her apartment, we undressed and climbed into bed. I held her tightly, my arm around her waist, her back pressed against my chest.

  “Poppy,” she said. “Do you mind if we just go to sleep?”

  “I don’t mind. I’m tired.”

  “Me too. About the beach trip,” she began. “We need to talk . . .”

  I didn’t hear what she said next. I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

  “If my mother refuses to go to Hilton Head, I’ll have to go home and help my father. You see that, don’t you?”

  I did see. I just didn’t want to. Susan sat on the bed hugging her knees to her chest. I sat across the room with my back against the door, trying very hard to look cool and aloof rather than immature and sulky.