She’d also begun helping Will with his stutter, giving him private lessons and cooking him dinners. I’d come home to find him at the kitchen table, picking at chicken bones, both of them laughing as though I’d narrowly missed a joke told at my expense. Over the summer, Mom had tamed the backyard into a fertile garden. The snapdragons and lilies reaching for the scant sunrays that leaked over the garage. All the flowers seemed to lean eastward. You’d have thought they’d been there all along, but it was Mom who’d planted them, who spent all winter looking forward to the thaw, the slow-blooming life.
Having announced my upcoming move, I sat down to dinner with Caitlin and my mom, wondering why we hadn’t done so more often. If I was abandoning them, no one accused me, and I convinced myself I’d come by often to put myself at their disposal. Once we’d finished eating, I gathered our dishes to wash them.
“That’s a first,” Mom said. “What a nice surprise.”
“You’re never gonna come by here anymore, are you?” Caitlin said.
“It’s a mile away.”
“Yeah, but I know you,” she said. “I know you.”
WITH HER NEW LOOK, Caitlin seemed to gain a new confidence. Some days she was chipper, jamming the booty-bang dance music her coworkers had hipped her to. At any volume, those were sounds that injured my faith in humans, but when I’d barge into my sister’s bedroom intending to cast insults, I’d see her midtwirl, arms raised, clumsily regaining her footing before she’d stick out her tongue and slam shut the door. Working at the steak house, she’d made friends with the kinds of people Will and I had long ago sworn oaths against, clubsters and thugs, left-behind Dearborn roughnecks and barroom shrews who’d done a semester at Henry Ford Community College before joining the local workforce.
“Morons,” I’d tell her, though I knew none of them personally.
But my suspicions were strong, and she knew it.
“Can’t you be happy I have friends?” she said.
Days before I moved out, I answered a knock at the door to find a guy in a sleeveless T-shirt looming on the porch. It was a sunny early March afternoon, yet hardly warm enough for the beach-party garb he wore. His arms were gargantuan oars, and I couldn’t see his eyes through his sunglasses.
“Is Cait home?” he said. It was as though he were requesting someone I didn’t know, until my sister nudged me aside, muttering, “Bye,” as she passed through the doorway.
All I knew of this stud was that he was nicknamed Turbo and grilled rib eyes at the steak house while on leave from the Marines. Caitlin jumped in his pickup, and I assumed she’d taken pity on him, had agreed to counsel him on some other girl, a randy vixen who’d temporarily wrecked his ego.
She’d been spending hours on the phone, listening as her new friends poured out their troubles. If Lauren called the house, it was usually for Caitlin, and their talks were long and hushed and of matters they both referred to as deep. These depths, I wanted to presume, gushed with touchy-feely whispers and pseudo-poetic analyses of love and life; many years later, though, I’d be forwarded several letters they’d exchanged during this time and would meet a side of my nineteen-year old sister I’d only imagined. A girl who wrote artfully about her own suicide attempts, oscillating between images of having her stomach pumped and lucid observations of the snow falling outside whatever window she’d sat before while penning those messages: It’s so beautiful how every flake falls down to earth and is then just kind of absorbed … Lauren, I grazed death physically but inside I felt truly dead. When the ambulance brought me to the hospital they parked me next to a man bleeding all over from being shot, and I don’t remember any of it. Her handwritten tone that of someone desperate to confess her burdens but fearful of the implications: Don’t think I’m psychotic, though; it was a part of my growth and a part of who I am.
And the part that hurt most:
I feel like I know more about you than I do my brother. We were close once but it’s like he’s become like a stranger—a claim Lauren wouldn’t have argued against. She and I had agreed, by then, to break up once and for all. Which didn’t end my hope that she’d be the one to guide my sister away from the many horrible choices available to attractive, confused young women. Choices like Turbo, about whom the only further insight I was able to offer was a useless but universal, “Fuck him.”
Not that I didn’t try to imagine the young man who might have suited Caitlin. I liked to think he existed, perhaps in some nearby town: a steady boy whose head was screwed on in a way mine wasn’t. Desirable strangers did exist, I knew, because I’d recently had a few dates with unusual girls from acculturated suburbs: kind, pretty girls who made mixtapes and talked about vegetarianism. Perfect on paper. That I preferred being alone made me worry there was a problem with my soul, as though my constant thoughts of Blaine’s distant girlfriend were my way of avoiding women altogether.
WORKING AT THE RUG shop, I had plenty of time to mull things over. Day after day, I wore a surgical mask and pulled ancient, dusty threads from the carpets. I opened wounds and stitched them with new yarn, losing myself in the patterns. Cat urine, decades of shed skin, dander, and dirt—they were all there in each piece of unthreaded string. The fibers clouded my face, moting in the sun that came through the showroom window. Certain rugs caused my forearms to swell with hives. Will sat in a corner, sipping coffee and reading the paper until the appearance of a customer required him to flip through the stacks of carpets.
At the record store, I’d spun whatever albums I liked. That Frank Sinatra was the only music the Armenians permitted made the job feel like a type of penance. I might have quit, had Caitlin not been so vigilant about waking me each morning, making sure I’d be on time, regardless of how little I’d slept.
“Time to get up, lazy.” She’d be fully dressed, standing at the foot of my mattress while stressing over a midterm or preparing for the gym. She’d grown by thrusting herself headfirst into change. And if the manic nature of this left me on edge, she seemed happier than she’d been in years.
She was sitting on my mattress in Mom’s basement the day I packed up my room. A prophecy was being fulfilled: that Will and I would work and live and conspire together at all times. As kids we’d talked of co-owning a mansion, with a junglelike atrium housing endangered creatures and a private rock club, a racetrack circling the premises. The upper flat was as close as we’d come.
“It smells down here,” Caitlin said, gazing around the basement. “Probably will for years.”
I peeled posters from my walls and loaded my records into crates. I cleaned up anything my mom wouldn’t want to discover. Caitlin was curious about what I’d take with me and what I’d leave behind. I made sure she was looking as I slipped the trinkets and sweaters she’d given me into the boxes.
“Who’s gonna wake you up for work every morning?” she asked.
“I’m perfectly capable,” I said, as if the wake-up calls had simply been my strategy for seeing her first thing each day, but that wasn’t true. And, really, life never would be so easy to manage without her.
3
She tilted her head. She raised her eyebrows and smiled and waved me over.
I shuffled toward her until I was close enough to hear her say, “I’ve wanted to talk to you all weekend,” to which I replied several ways in my thoughts before realizing I wasn’t yet able to speak. We were in a parking lot outside a veterans’ hall, where the band had just finished our set as part of a Detroit music festival. I was catching my breath, but I’d rehearsed this moment: what the two of us might say if we wound up face-to-face. Now that it was happening, the script I’d prepared seemed pitifully out of reach, a wordless flickering. She wore a green sweater. The sun had fallen, and in the light from the streetlamps her eyes were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Are you busy?” she said.
I’d screamed my throat hoarse, lending my voice a manly rasp it didn’t possess otherwise. “Let’s take a walk,” I said, knowing Bl
aine would be watching.
She nodded, and we started off.
It was late-March, the last night of a three-day extravaganza: bands for days, forty or so in all, packed into a Knights of Columbus hall. I’d known she’d be there, as well as the usual culprits: Will, gussied up like a pilgrim—his latest costume—and the jackass fan who’d set knives on our amps in hopes we’d gash ourselves. And hundreds more who came from god knows where, as far as California. Warden had arrived with his hair gelled into a preposterous afro. Inside the hall he’d fastened a banner that read: CTW- BOYCOTT THIS MOTHERFUCKERS, which he’d stood defiantly beneath, peddling records no one intended to buy.
She and I stepped through the crowds. Musicians gathered around vans. People stood huddled and smoking, showing off the latest albums they’d scored. Some called out, “Good set, man.” They slapped hands with me.
“You know everyone,” she said.
I’d come to feel lonesome at those shows. Now that we’d gored our way into the scene, I felt no reason to be there. The bands and seven-inch singles and T-shirts, the anarchist pamphlets. Loudmouths dressed in safety-pinned shreds of clothes, spouting half-cooked politics. Caitlin had wanted to attend that night, but I’d forbidden it. Soon enough, I’d regret not introducing her to that world of fringe ideals and tube-powered distortion. There were good people to be found there, dreamers looking for answers, but I didn’t want my sister witnessing the person I’d become away from home, the way I badgered the audiences, blaspheming the punkish ceremony even as we were at its center.
But once the sound took hold, everything was worth it. Never mind the crowds—I still believed in music. That if I learned to play with just the right touch, a new beginning would arise, one from which I’d never turn back.
The girl at my side, that’s how it felt to be near her, at the edge of a life-altering hugeness about which I knew nothing, only the lightness of my being.
“I’ve heard so many bands, my head’s going to explode,” she said.
“Mine already has.”
“I noticed,” she said. “It’s a good look.”
WE WALKED TOGETHER BETWEEN the parked cars. She stepped with her hips angled outward, a dancer’s graceful sway, as we moved across the asphalt. It was officially springtime, but gray snow still lined the edges of the parking lot where the winter plows had mounded heaps. Her jeans were baggy, and beneath the cuffs were skateboard shoes, silly things. Boots—you wore boots if you wanted to be taken seriously. I was summoning my sharpest extrasensory capacities, X-ray vision and inner soul surveillance, scanning for evidence that she was a dud or an illusion.
Her face was the kind of thing you wanted to float your hand over before actually touching it. Then, softly as you could, you’d graze your fingers against her cheek, and nerves you didn’t know existed would come alive in your palm, and you’d make the feeling last as long you could. After barely a moment beside her, I felt anchorless, helpless to effect whatever attitude of coolness I might have wished to carry. It was a kind of emotion I couldn’t remember tangling with. When there seemed nothing left to do, I said her name for the first time.
“Well, Angela. Here we are.”
“Where else would we be?”
She was shorter than Lauren, whom I’d forgotten entirely in the moment but who was present like a phantom to which I unconsciously compared Angela, the severe, unnameable differences.
She and drummer Blaine had broken up, or she thought they had.
So I’d heard.
And what else? She was an English major, a ballerina, with a twin sister somewhere. She hosted a radio show; spun good records, heavy ones, sad ones. She lived in a dormitory two hours west, in Kalamazoo.
We were getting toward the back of the parking lot. We were almost alone.
“I have dreams about you,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m doing this, but I feel like I have to know you.”
My minivan had met a timely death outside the band’s rehearsal space one winter evening. “That’s my car,” I said, pointing to my used Escort hatchback parked near the edge of the lot. I opened the passenger door for her, and we sat inside, holding Rolling Rocks I’d stashed beneath the seats; I’d been told it was a hydrating beer. The bottles required an opener, and as I dug through my pockets, Angela took it upon herself to twist off the caps using her teeth.
“Where did you learn that?”
“Oh, you know,” she said. Then she got down to cases. “I just have this feeling about you.”
“What do want to do about it?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
Whatever I felt, I wanted to pull a string and let it come down. “Let’s screw all this and drive to Chicago, right now,” I said, as charming as I knew how to be. My new room in the upper flat didn’t cross my mind. There was little there yet but a mattress, and home, wherever that was, was not where I wanted to take her. I wanted to be as far away as we could go, knowing we might drive for days before it was all straightened out.
“Chicago,” she said. “Why Chicago?”
The band had been playing there every few weeks; it was the first place that had come to mind. “We’ll go,” I said. “You and me. It only costs six bucks to drive there in this thing.”
“I’ve always wanted to do what you do,” she said.
Her hair was chopped short, pinned with barrettes. Her loose clothes—you couldn’t tell what was beneath. All I could see was her face, a look on it like she’d traveled a year carrying a message of great import.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“When you play. Go wild, screaming like that. And then when you touched my back after the show that night, I knew there was more.”
She was there. She was. She might have been the first person I’d ever truly seen. The entirety of her seemed conscious in her welled eyes, a green soul-world of things gorgeous and passionate and totally unknown.
“You look like an alien,” I said.
“I think the same about you.”
Like a bird crashing into a glass pane, a hand slapped the window: Blaine, motioning for me to roll it down.
“What are you guys doing? Making out?”
“We’re discussing literature,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “The book club.”
To impress the festival crowd, he’d shaved his hair into a dismal Mohawk. The brown tuft dangled to his nose. He slapped the window again before vanishing through the parked cars toward the glow of distant cigarettes.
Music was faint, coming from inside the venue.
“I just wanted to tell you,” she said.
I’d meant it about Chicago, driving all night. I felt I had nowhere else to be, ever again. Angela was stalling; maybe she didn’t believe me. Maybe she was too sane to up and leave at the turn of the key, or maybe Blaine had injected his wicked intent into our first moment together.
WE WALKED BACK TOWARD the music as if we didn’t know each other; but we did, before we’d spoken a word. Things like that happen, though I hadn’t known it until that night. The festival was a thousand punks canned inside a banquet hall. A band from Gainesville was onstage: Hot Water Music, the last act of the night and the only one I wanted to see. The singer was a copper-bearded, sunburned badass who’d once put up my band in his Florida mobile home. He bled triumphantly from a collision with a stage diver’s boot. Their music was the spiritual opposite of ours, the kind of thing to get you out of bed instead of stomping your guts. The crowd surged forward, crawling over one another, hollering the words. Battle hymns, a revival—I felt it, too. I imagined myself in their band, shouting an entirely different song.
Angela and I were parted by the crowd. We did nothing to stop it. I pushed toward the front of the stage, watching her swaying among the bodies. She sank beneath the horizon of limbs and bobbed again at the surface.
At the edge of the stage, a tall, blond, knuckleboned skateboarder I knew locked a sweaty arm around my neck and kissed my temple
. With another beat we were wrestling, twisting through the crowd until we stumbled into the parking lot.
All around us, bands loaded equipment into vans and trailers.
The air was damp, but it hadn’t rained—just springtime, the clouds changing form. Having come so close to her, I was wired. I would have done anything, leaped from a building or gnawed cement. I squeezed my friend’s throat in the crook of my elbow, wrenching hard. When I let go, his neck was roped with veins.
“So,” he said. “You wanna get serious?”
We were on that verge, where drunken, friendly sparring could go bloody.
He snatched a canvas bag filled with cymbals and hoisted it like a battering shield as he charged, slamming it into my kidneys.
“Do it,” he said, throwing the sack. It hit the cement with a muffled clatter.
We took turns bludgeoning each other, laughing with each attack. Then we squatted against the fender of a parked car, massaging our ribs, each draping an arm over the other.
She was somewhere inside. Close, yet with a hundred bodies between us. If I sat there long enough, I might catch her leaving. The music would be over, and the cars would vanish; we’d be the only two left, and we’d talk for hours or stare out through the windshield like fugitives clutching this one thing it’d been our right to steal from the incomprehensible world as I drove her to wherever she wanted to be …
Songs Only You Know Page 14