by Deb Caletti
If I want to. And I don’t want to. I want to argue with Melanie about a T-shirt being seventy-five dollars.
“Mel, this is ridiculous. This is not some fine fabric. One hundred percent cotton, okay? The same one hundred percent cotton that’s in every other T-shirt.”
“I can tell you’re not a shopper. They are not the same.”
“If I put on that T-shirt and one that cost ten bucks, you would not know the difference.”
“You might not, but other people would,” Melanie says.
“You know what? That’s just insulting. No one could tell the difference. And the reason they can charge that is because you’re insecure enough to worry that people can tell the difference. The T-shirt isn’t just about being a T-shirt. It’s about being a seventy-five-dollar T-shirt. It’s about giving you a false sense of superiority. Remember, Mel, you cut the price tag off—no one’s gonna see it.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Melanie says, but she puts it back on the rack. “You have to pay more, Indigo, for better-quality things. It’s the way they’re made.”
“Aspirin is aspirin and laundry soap is laundry soap and one hundred percent cotton is one hundred percent cotton.”
“What about Egyptian cotton?” Melanie says.
“Does this say Egyptian cotton?” I flip the tags around and point. “‘Made in Sri Lanka.’ I can’t honestly believe I’m standing here arguing about cotton.”
“Let’s just go,” Melanie says.
“Have a good afternoon, ladies,” the saleswoman says. Her breath shoots a blast of arctic air at our backs.
Back at home by the pool, Mel moves her bathing suit straps up, down, over, untied, tied, down again to avoid tan lines.
“I cannot believe you don’t like shopping, Indigo,” she says. “What is wrong with you? You’re the wrong person to give two million dollars to.” She leans over to pick up her glass of lemonade from the table, holding her top with one hand. She takes a drink, then has to rearrange all the straps again.
I’m on the diving board. “Not all shopping. Just not that shopping today. God, those stores. That beach…,” I say, then leap. I like the thwacka-thwacka-thwacka noise it makes when I jump off. It sounds like I’ve done some fantastic dive, even though I can’t dive worth shit. I feel the delicious, sudden swoosh of descent into a watery world. An impressive, bubbly display of bubbles bubble around me. This is the most fun I’ve had all day. It’s vacation fun. I can’t quite get it to feel like real-life fun.
I pop my head up, paddle to the pool edge, hold on to the curve of concrete with my fingertips.
“Indigo, this isn’t like home here. You’re just going to have to relax and go with it.”
“Go with the flow. Hang loose. When in Rome, roam,” I say.
“You want to experience all the things your money can buy? Here it is.”
“Here it is. Huh,” I say.
“Indigo, come on. You’re going to get out of it what you put into it. You didn’t even try to meet anyone at the beach. I know you just broke up with Trevor after a really long time, but it was Trevor.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what I mean. Just look at all your less-limited options here.”
I feel pissed-offness hovering, but then again, what’s so wrong with what she said? Isn’t that what I felt too? Isn’t that part of why I left Trevor, and everyone else?
Melanie’s head is back against the lounge chair. Her eyes are closed. She’s lying still to keep the pieces of clothing in place. “You know, you could have stayed home, but you didn’t want to be home.”
“I don’t want to be home.” I say this and the words sound brave, but inside they feel like a large ornate door that hides an empty room. I want to be beyond missing home, beyond my family and Trevor. I want to be big as two and a half million dollars, but I can’t help wonder about all the things—all the people, all the places—that make me me.
I duck down under again, pop up so that my hair is sleeked back on my head. “God, those people at the beach, though,” I say. “I thought the kids at our school were bad.”
“They’re rich; they’re not bad. Just because they have money, they’re not bad.”
“I know that.” I did know that. “Richard Howards had money, and look at him. You have money.”
“Not like this. Not nearly like this. Not like you even have,” Melanie says.
“Maybe it’s just the way they have money.”
“The way they have money.”
“Maybe that it makes them smaller, when it should make them bigger,” I say. “I don’t know. I’m still figuring it out.”
“Well, stop thinking so much,” Melanie says. She twists, releases the lounge chair so that it lies flat, and rolls onto her stomach. “This all, right here—this is what everyone’s after.”
16
The next day I call Mom when she’s at work. I leave a message, and don’t answer when she calls back, doing that oops-we-missed-each-other lie that cell phones are so handy for. If I talk to her, I’m afraid I’ll feel too much. Too guilty, too sad, too lonely, all the pulls of old that can keep you from new. My two-and-a-half-million-dollar self expects more from me. There are no more messages from Trevor. I check again. Still no messages. I want there to be messages and I don’t want there to be messages. I feel these small shots of hollowness that I refuse to label as missing him. They’re just the leftover echoes of routine, old habits; they’re just my own fear, looking for a safe place to hide.
Melanie and I go back to the beach, and I take off my shorts and talk to the streaky blond-haired guy whose name is Jason Lindstrom. Jason surfs. No, he actually surfs, like in the movies. He has this thing on his car to attach his board to and everything. He shows me the lines on his ankle from where the umbilical cord that attaches him to his board cut into his skin. It looks like a suicide attempt by a very ignorant person.
We take a walk down the beach and Jason tells me about his grandmother who has Alzheimer’s and how every time they see her she thinks it’s his birthday and she gives him money. He tells me his favorite cereal is Cheerios, because he likes how the sugar falls between all the little holes and gathers in a sloopy splotch of syrup in the bottom of the bowl. I like this. I’m glad to find someone here I like besides Melanie.
That night, Allen comes home, the first time we’ve seen him since the airport. We are in the “media room” (it’s actually called that, which seemed obnoxiously self-congratulatory) when he pops his head in the doorway. My liquor knowledge is spotty, so I don’t know exactly what he smells like, only that he smells fumey, like little wavy alcohol lines are coming off of him. It’s the odor of one of the brown alcohols, poured into short glasses over ice. He would give the glass a spin in his hand before sipping, I imagine, so the ice didn’t collide with his nose. He smells like cocktail napkins filled with hors d’oeuvres, like the cling of cigarette smoke on jackets and gazes both too intent and glazey from false interest.
“So there’s a thing this weekend. Saturday night? You can come—bring a friend,” Allen says. “Just one, though. Tickets required.” He pats his jacket pocket.
“What kind of thing?” Melanie asks. She’d been trying to figure out the DVD player, but ditches the whole effort when he says this, as if she was unwrapping a stick of gum and has just been handed an ice cream cone instead.
“Little party for friends of Two Heads Records. Sunset boat cruise.”
“Oh my God,” Melanie says. She looks at me and I look back because Slow Change, Hunter Eden’s band, is part of the Two Heads label.
“Can’t promise who’ll be there,” he says, then takes his bleary self down the hall to his room.
“Did I tell you?” Melanie says. She grabs my arms. Her eyes are as shiny as grocery store paperbacks.
“Two Heads Records,” I say. My heart gives a little flop of anxious-excited. “You don’t think he’ll actually be there, do you?”
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��I told you, I saw him at one of these things before.”
“You said you saw his ass.”
“Like anyone would not know that ass?”
“Oh my God, it was probably some guy that works with your father’s ass,” I say. But my voice is high and jazzed, speeding like a Porsche with my own foot on the accelerator. High, jazzed, and a wind-in-your-hair thrill, even though we’re inside, just clutching each other’s arms and jumping up and down.
The day of the party we skip the beach, but Melanie calls Glenn and Jason and asks them to come to the party that night. Mom calls, but doesn’t leave a message. A strange number appears on my call log, and I hear the uncertain voice of Bomba. …miss you and hope you’ll…Wait, shit, there was a beep. Indigo? Did I press the right number? Can you hear this? I hate these blasted cell phones. That’s supposed to make your life easier? It’s Bomba, if you hear any of this. I miss you. Call me. I picture the photo we have of Bomba on our fridge at home, with her saggy boobs in her funny bathing suit, sitting in a wading pool. I wonder what she would think of where I am right now, in this house on the beach, with the housekeeper that makes every dirty dish vanish as if nothing unseemly like eating has ever really taken place here. I wonder what she would think if she knew that I am going tonight on a yacht to cruise the coastline with the rich and famous. I feel a pang of disloyalty. I’m an economic traitor.
We spend the day getting ready. Or rather, Melanie spends the day getting ready and I splash in the pool and clear the fridge of pine nuts and cheese and some flat bread crackers that are made with spirolina, which sounds like it has the capacity to kill me. It is one of those days when the day is just something to get through until night comes. One big giant endless bowl of soup before the main course. I let Melanie take the Porsche to go shopping, and when she gets home, she tries her hair in various styles and shaves her legs twice. She wants us to get pedicures, but I’m sorry, people buffing and painting your toes is just twisted.
Jason and Glenn are picking us up in Glenn’s Jaguar. I thought only old ladies with tanned purse-leather necks and golf handicaps and aging husband CEOs had Jaguars, but apparently I was mistaken. I sit on the leather couch to wait for them. Melanie hasn’t appeared yet.
“Melanie! Come on! I want to see what you finally decided to wear!” Me, I’m just in my orange skirt and orange tank top. Orange always makes me happy. An orange is a fine thing, itself, and there isn’t anything much nicer than having someone peel one for you. “They’re going to be here any minute!”
I’m in a fine mood, thinking about oranges and wearing orange and being here starting a new life and getting to go on a yacht and maybe seeing Hunter Eden. All the angst about leaving home is missing right now. I’m having a is-this-really-my-life moment, but in a good way. Usually you have those when you have the flu, or when you step in something the cat hecked up, or when you leave your wallet somewhere when you are starving. But this—if I’d thought it up, imagined it, if I’d wished on birthday candles on a cake, it wouldn’t be this moment. It was a moment I wouldn’t even think to dream.
And then Melanie walks in.
“What are you wearing?” I ask. I think I might be seeing things, because I can’t believe it. I really just can’t believe it.
“Indigo, don’t give me any shit about it.”
I stand up. I walk over to her, because I think maybe it’s just the same color. Maybe it’s just a different green T-shirt. I take a pinch between my fingers. “It’s that same T-shirt,” I say.
“Indigo, quit it. You’re going to get it all wrinkled.”
“I cannot believe you would do something so stupid,” I say. I’m not mad. I’m still sort of in my happy-orange mood. I’m not mad, I just think she’s an idiot. You know, fine. Go spend seventy-five dollars on a saltine cracker. Go spend it on a rubber band. Go for it. “What a waste of good money,” I say.
“Well, I didn’t actually spend it,” she says. You can tell she knows she has made a mistake the second the words are out her mouth. She actually looks over her shoulder, back down to her room where she came from, as if she could reverse all this and try again.
“What?” It can’t be that. She didn’t mean that. “What do you mean?” But I’m afraid I know. Suddenly, I’m sure I know.
“Never mind. In? Never mind.”
“Fuck never mind. You didn’t actually spend it. That’s what you said. What do you mean? You didn’t shoplift that, did you?”
“No!” she says.
But she has those little lines around her mouth. The sewn-up lines. And the thing about a conscience is, we’re not the full, single owners of it. We may think we hold it, like an orange, ours, in our hands; we may think we can toss that orange away into a patch of blackberry brambles. But we forget it is made of sections; sections that belong to the people who love us and look out for us. Your mother has a section of that conscience, your father, your family, and I have a section of Melanie’s. Maybe she could lie to Glenn, but she could not lie to me. Maybe because we most successfully lie to the people who we don’t care (never cared, no longer care) if we disappoint.
“Melanie. You did. My God. You did! How could you do such a thing? WHY did you do such a thing? You have money to pay for that if you wanted it so bad.” I look at Melanie, with her silly green T-shirt and her jeans, her manicure, her hair straight and long, and her wide eyes, still showing shock at the way her mouth has betrayed her, and she looks so small to me. At home, she was large; in her circle of friends she was loud and in command and so large. But here she is small. If this is her place, it is a place that makes her small and faded and wrong.
“I just…I wanted it.”
“You wanted it? So you just took it?”
“I wanted it, Indigo, okay? There’s no great big psychological issue here. I just wanted it.”
The doorbell rings then. And then too, a bang, bang, bang, as Glenn and/or Jason knocks on the door. I can hear Jason say something that makes Glenn laugh. I realize Melanie is right about what she said, and the realization makes me slightly sick. It disgusts me. There is no great big psychological issue here. There is no contemporary-society pseudo-psycho-sham explanation of lack of self-esteem or childhood wounds or other such shit. The truth is much more simple. We think a lot about not having. When we don’t have and we think about not having, it’s called dreaming. When we do have and think about not having, it’s called greed.
I sit with Jason in the backseat of Glenn’s Jaguar, and Melanie sits in the front. The back of her head looks guilty to me. I feel the cringing tangle of electricity between Melanie and me, disappointed energy that might as well be solid and real and not just air and feelings. I could almost touch it, but it might burn my fingers. Neither Glenn nor Jason seems to notice the fifth entity in the car.
“Do you think Twisted Minds will be there?” Glenn asks.
“I don’t know, you know, there are no guarantees,” Melanie says. “I don’t want everyone getting disappointed if not.”
“How about Raw?” Glenn asks.
“As long as Hunter Eden’s there, that’s all I care about,” Melanie says.
“Oh man, he’s so gay,” Jason says.
“That’s what all guys say when another guy is really hot,” Melanie says. She may be right, but I’m in no mood to agree with her.
Jason goes on to tell us about some gay surfer he knew who dropped out of school, and then Glenn tells some story about his sister dropping out of school and his parents going nuts, and then Melanie tells some story about the time her mother freaked out and threatened to put her brother in the hospital for depression if his grades didn’t improve, and then we are at the marina. There is a young Latino valet and Glenn hands over the keys and says, If you scratch it, you’ll never say ‘green card’ again to us as we walk off, cracking up Jason and Melanie, and causing me to step on the heel of his shoe on “accident.”
“Hey!” he says.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say. Asshole.<
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It’s a beautiful night, that’s true. The water sparkles glittery white, and the marina boats are strung with lights, their windows glowy and gold. The air shimmers with sound—laughter, and the slam of car doors, and voices lifted with anticipation. There is a warm breeze that makes the palm fronds sway and sing their tick-tick-tick song. Melanie hands over our tickets. Her dad is supposed to be there already. We walk up the ramp of the yacht. We, I, walk up the ramp of a yacht. Do you understand? A yacht that looks like a yacht, long and sleek-nosed and demanding a compliment.
Jason holds my arm. “You okay?” he asks.
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Fine.”
It looks like a house inside here—a house with paintings and furniture, jammed with people holding glasses of tinkling ice cubes and…Wait a sec, someone I recognize. The blond woman in the upswept hair. There she is, over by the stairwell, a portly man’s hand around her waist, and there she is again, in a black dress, getting something from the bar, and there she is, pressed up against a guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt, his stomach bloated and his gray beard full and bragging.
“Let’s find the food,” Jason says.
“Let’s find the booze,” Glenn says.
We are in a little clump, like ducklings who’ve lost their mother. Even Jason and Glenn seem uncomfortable here. The boat begins to move, the scene changing, sliding past, in the windows beyond. We follow Glenn in a line, weaving in between men and women balancing cocktail napkins and drinks, until Glenn reaches the bar. A band starts up, no songs I recognize, but suddenly the sound is thick and the volume on the boat rises so that you have to shout to be heard.
I smile at the bartender, a young guy who has a goatee-in-training. This is his job, which means he is viewing it all from the outside in, same as me. I’m a waitress, see? “Pretty crazy, huh?” I shout to him.