“Vanessa!” she had heard her mother call again.
She walked into the room, hoping to finally let out this secret that was no longer exactly clandestine, to tell her mother how she did it and how much and where, and also the reasons why, which were furtive even to her, as if she were the girl in her witch’s mask, unable to breathe or even to see her own face. Perhaps, Vanessa thought, her mother would stop her.
She saw her mother’s back, her face reflected in the mirror, her eyes bright with tears. “Will I be able to use my hands?” Her arms were swaddled in gauze, making them look like paws. “Do you think my skin will grow back again?”
“Yes,” Vanessa told the mirror, but how did she know? The doctor said Sharon might not have the use of her hands. I’m here too, she thought. I wish I had a river I could skate away on . . . She wanted to go to her mother and put a hand high on her arm, lean in, hook her chin onto her mother’s shoulder, but instead she did not move.
Her mother turned toward her. Her paws framed her head. “Thank you.”
Vanessa nodded and turned away.
* * *
“What on earth?” Dennis said when he finally opened the front door to see if the morning paper could have arrived at this ungodly hour. They were to leave by 6:30 a.m. and Vanessa was at the kitchen counter. She leaned to the side to watch him head into the gauzy, white down.
Dennis came back in from the yard empty-handed, shaking his feet as if to brush off snow. “What is this?” he said to himself. “Vanessa!”
“I know.” Vanessa was eating her usual breakfast of two hard-boiled eggs, yolks popped out and set aside to be thrown away. More waste, but what could she do? She pushed away the image of barefoot children on dusty roads and looked out into the hallway from the kitchen.
Vanessa felt her anger rising. Why hadn’t her father asked her, Who did this? Why hadn’t her father turned to her as he once had, filled with love, if a little too much intensity, and said, Who did this to you? Why hadn’t her mother just pulled her from the bathroom and stopped her? Why had nobody stopped her? She began to say something—about the skateboarders, about the perfect location of the house, the ideal trees—but stopped herself.
“It’s not my fault!” Vanessa said to her father, placing the last of the egg white in her mouth without touching her lips. “I didn’t do anything.” It had been thrilling to watch them, her hand pressed to the screen as she blew out smoke; it had been like standing by as her house was being burgled.
“I have to call Zachary before we go,” Dennis said, referring to the gardener. “There’s no way we’re leaving with the house looking like this. Sharon?” he sang upstairs, half delighted. “We have a bit of a delay.”
“It’s six in the morning,” Vanessa said. She went into the hallway as her mother looked down from the top of the stairs.
“What is it now then, Dennis? Let me guess. Stalin has come back from the grave and he’s called a meeting. Wait.” Sharon held out the burned hand and curved the other over her chin. “No, no, it’s Lenin,” she said, as if she were guessing at charades. “We might still get to leave if it was Stalin.”
“Ha ha,” Dennis said. “Only it’s neither—why don’t you look out the bedroom window, smarty-pants?”
Sharon retreated and Vanessa could hear her whoop from the bedroom. “What happened?” Sharon returned to stand again before the black-and-white Joe Strummer poster hanging from Vanessa’s bedroom door.
“We got toilet-papered,” Vanessa mumbled.
“And now we need to call the landscaper,” Dennis said.
“We. Got toilet-papered.” Sharon cracked a smile. “What does that even mean?” She shook her head. “I wonder what will be next, Vanessa. Tell me. What will be next?”
Vanessa shrugged, out of her mother’s view.
“You’re going to call him now?” Sharon said.
“Yes, I am.”
“Let’s just hurry up, Dennis, okay?” Sharon’s voice sounded farther away. “Wow,” she said from inside the bedroom. “It looks like it snowed out there.”
Vanessa went back into the kitchen. She hoped they wouldn’t be going up to Boston now. She resented being dragged on this ill-fated family trip, and if its cancellation was the outcome of last night, so be it. As it stood now, she was going to have to miss going to the Bayou tonight, and even though the bouncers there were total assholes, the worst in town, she liked going to shows there. Vanessa’s fake ID was really bad; it was one of her short life’s greatest ironies that, after that whole bit with Sean Flaherty, her ID from that day was essentially unusable while his had turned out perfectly. Every time she held it out to the bouncer there was the stress of the ID’s failing, which it often did, and the humiliation of being turned away. The shame of not being let into a show while everyone else sailed into the throng of buzzing energy would always lead her to think of that afternoon at Sean’s, the way he rolled off her and lay flat on his back, his legs exposed and dangling over the bed. She remembered his feet, so narrow and very white, five protruding bones leading to long, yellowing nails.
Vanessa brought her plate to the sink and headed outside into the lightening morning to see the damage herself. The mid-March day was neither lion nor lamb, and she wove her way through the mess, down to the sidewalk, then turned to face the house to get the full view. Paper looped expansively over the tall branches, as well as along the bushes at the side of the house, continuing, she could tell, into the backyard. Toilet paper was wrapped along the railings at the top of the stairs, and it came down like streamers from the gutters. The swaths of paper hung like loose bandages. Her mother’s bandages; the oozing wounds seeped through for weeks. Then the itching began. She needed help with everything: brushing her teeth, bathing, chopping fruit and opening yogurts and jars of vitamins for the smoothies she was supposed to drink for nourishment, so she would not lose too much weight and her skin would grow back dewy with good health. Vanessa remembered Sean’s nakedness that day, and also the other earlier days, when the three of them had gone to the Virginia side of Rock Creek, and Sean and Jason had jumped off the small cliffs into the river, deep and wild in those parts. It was as if they were all kids again. Jason’s chest collapsed into itself, but Sean was beautiful, his tattoo aglow in the sun, his body nimble as he ran off the ridge screaming, arms circling madly in the wind, white against the blue horizon. Why hadn’t she jumped? Vanessa had sat on a rock, warmed by the sun, her knees drawn to her chest. Once she’d been the kind of girl who had always jumped.
Vanessa went upstairs to her room to call Jason.
“Hi,” she said. “What are you doing?”
“Umm, sleeping.” She could hear him stretching. “What time is it?”
“So why’d you answer the phone then?”
“Because I knew it would be you. And I wanted to get the phone before it woke my mom.”
“Did you go out after I left last night?”
“Didn’t you leave pretty late? Like after midnight?” Jason laughed, as if to conjure up last night’s activities of lying on the couch under a blanket, waiting for Midnight Special to come on, as they did on so many Friday nights.
“Did Sean come by?” Vanessa didn’t laugh back. She’d left when the Village People came on the show, another rerun.
“No, Van, what’s up?”
“Well, he came by here. With Tim and Seth, those assholes from GDS, and George.”
“Tim and Seth are great,” he said.
“Really.”
“I mean usually they are, yeah.”
“And I know how you are about Sean,” she said.
Jason was silent on the other end of the line, but Vanessa could hear his breathing.
“Well, anyway, they came by and completely toilet-papered the house.”
“No!”
“Yes. My father is totally pissed. We’re supposed to be leaving this morning.”
“Did you see them do it?”
“Yup. I watched the w
hole thing,” Vanessa said.
“So why didn’t you do anything?”
Dennis picked up the phone from downstairs, and Vanessa heard the sound of the rotary dial turning. “Hello?” He tapped the receiver several times, trying to get a dial tone. “Hello!”
“Dad, I’m on the phone.” Vanessa tried not to sound as exasperated as she felt.
“Well, how about getting off it then?” he said. “It’s a little early, isn’t it, guys?”
“All right, all right, one second.”
“Is this Jason?” Dennis asked.
“Hi, Mr. Goldstein,” Jason said. “It’s me.”
“I’m sure Vanessa updated you on last night’s activities. I’ve got to call the landscaper. Okay, guys?”
“I’m getting off !” Vanessa said. “Can you hang up the phone for a second, please?”
“Okeydokey. Bye, Jason.”
“Bye, Mr. Goldstein.”
“I’ve got to go. Really I was just wondering if you knew about it, like if you’d seen them before or after,” Vanessa continued.
“Of course I didn’t. How can you think that?”
“Hmmm.”
More silence from Jason. “Well, we’ll miss you tonight,” he said.
“You and Sean, you mean?” She pictured them together again, tapping their feet and bobbing their heads in time with the bass. Everyone was screaming. What was anybody saying? “Me and everyone,” Jason said. “It’s going to be a good show is what I meant.”
“I probably wouldn’t get in anyway. Nope, it’ll just be me and bitter Dad and burnt Mom heading up to my hippie brother’s dorm to be a family. Sounds amazing, doesn’t it?”
“Stop it. You’ll have fun. You miss your brother, you know you do.”
“I’ll call you when I get back. Have fun tonight. Give Sean a kiss for me.”
“Stop it! I’m totally going to find out what happened,” Jason said.
“You do that. You investigate thoroughly and find out why they didn’t do your house,” Vanessa said, and hung up the phone.
“Dad, I’m off,” Vanessa screamed down to her father. “It’s all yours.”
CHAPTER 9
Paths in Utopia
March 21, 1980
Neither Benji nor his roommate could figure out where the stench that had overtaken their room for the past few weeks was coming from. So they just left it there, spending the nights out, Benji across campus at Rachel’s in Ridgewood and Arnie at his brother’s next door in Renfield. Though they both held tight to the belief that the smell would one day just disappear, it had only deepened, becoming all-encompassing, spreading into the cement walls, the bed linens, and the faux Oriental rug Arnie had brought from home, and the roommates took to dashing into the room while holding their breath, to grab clean clothes or stray books, which had also begun to stink, then racing off to class.
It was Arnie who discovered the problem in a brief fit of cleaning brought on by his preparation for parents’ weekend. Not two days previously, Benji came in from Rachel’s dorm, only to walk in on Arnie wearing a frilled apron, pink plastic gloves, and a nose clip. He thrust out a swollen can of Campbell’s chicken-and-stars soup in Benji’s face.
“This was under your fucking sweatshirts,” he said in an even more nasal voice than usual, his nose still pinched by the plastic clip. The soup can had the tiniest slit along the top, as if someone had started to open it and had then gotten too tired to pull the can opener along the rest of the lid. “Positively disgusting, Benji.”
“No way,” Benji said, walking right by the can. “Shit.” Benji had a vague memory of being drawn to the wondrous miracle of stars in his soup late one night and having started to open the can, only to realize he’d much rather eat a less beatific but more satisfying pizza. He’d put the soup back on the shelf of freeze-dried noodles and cans of pineapple—he got these incredible cravings for pineapple, which always reminded him of home—and called Sabatino’s.
Arnie made a big production of putting the bloated can into a garbage bag. “Next time do your bong hits after you open the soup, okay? I can’t live like this! Really, I just can’t.”
“Sorry, Arnie,” Benji said sheepishly.
Arnie peeled off his rubber gloves and threw them in with the soup tin, opened the door, and chucked the bag into the hall, his nose scrunched up and his mouth pursed.
“Thanks for cleaning,” Benji said. “Really. I’ll do the rest.”
Arnie let out a cackle. “Gee thanks, Benji,” he said, his arm outstretched to the cramped room. “There’s so much left to do here.”
Benji promised Arnie he would tidy up his desk and make his bed so the Lefkowitzes didn’t have to look at a disgusting mess when they came up from Teaneck. These tasks alone, in addition to doing over a month’s worth of laundry, would have been overwhelming—Benji rarely paid heed to housekeeping—but now, to top it off, the Goldsteins were also on their way here.
Benji was already trying to finish up schoolwork so he could go with Rachel and some friends to see the Grateful Dead, playing three straight shows next weekend at the Capitol, in Jersey. Benji’s first ever Dead show had been last November, on Long Island, and it had changed him completely, utterly, and powerfully. He would never be the same. Never. Benji was instantly drawn to the sense of community and understanding, this insular world that shirked all preconceived notions of what happened outside it. From the moment he stepped into the Coliseum parking lot before the music started: happiness unadulterated. Pure utopia. Seeing the Dead live was revelatory, a moment of intense connection rarely experienced at all, and yet here it was, among so many. Benji was not prepared for how much this would eclipse his early exposure to the band, those midseventies bootlegs playing loud and hissing with noise from Rachel’s tape deck as they dove under her huge down comforter to fondle each other.
He thought of hitting the parking lot at the Nassau Coliseum for that first show with Rachel and their friends Schaeffer and Eliza, whose parents lived nearby in Bethpage. He walked the lot with Rachel, a silver anklet jingling against the flash of skin between her jeans and her sandals. Her jeans were frayed at the ankles and had holes at the knees and one on the ass, which was partially obscured by a roughly sewn-on Steal Your Face patch. Her billowy white peasant blouse emphasized her large breasts, which pressed against her fringed suede jacket, the color of Bambi. The soft, light suede set off her dark skin, still tanned, even into November, and Benji felt entirely connected to her, cell to cell, molecule to molecule. Because of this he felt totally tethered to the world. Kids were throwing Frisbees, playing recorders, listening to bootlegs of past shows, eating homemade veggie burritos and sausages, laying out beaded necklaces and tie-dyes and bells and beads and batik clothes for sale or barter out on the ground or on card tables. Everything was separate from the real world, yet this new world was a place in which he could make a true home.
Benji bought treats, four tabs with two crossed peppermint sticks stamped on each square, from a shirtless guy in a long skirt, and Rachel, Schaeffer, and Eliza opened wide, closing their eyes and sticking out their tongues. Slowly, before the doors had even opened into the show, something magical began to overtake Benji. He held tightly to Rachel’s hand and knew that she, in turn, held to Eliza, who held in hers the hand of a benevolent world. Here, everyone was equal. The strangers they walked among turned quickly into friends, and Benji’s single longing for something beyond the parking-lot borders was for his friends from home to be here with him now. Where were they right this minute? Where was Ratner? He imagined him on a field, a city skyline rising above the rim of the stadium, lights clicking on on the field and simultaneously in the skyscrapers above. Benji did not miss soccer, yet he found himself indebted to the time he’d spent playing and training. He felt utterly fulfilled by his new life, and grateful that the old one had taught him how to move in tandem with others in earnest. He felt he could always return to it, that soccer was there for him, as reliable as the s
un. What soccer inspired, however, and what Benji wanted to discard from his life, was this useless concept of winning and losing. Benji could no longer embrace the idea that only one team is victorious in a game. His life now was about winners. No one was a loser, and now Benji only hoped they had not taken the tabs too early and that they wouldn’t peak too soon, before the music had really begun.
The love Benji felt that night was shameless and fierce, and he felt it for his new friends, his old friends, for the many splendid people he danced among, and for his first big all-over love, Rachel Feinglass Rachel Feinglass Rachel Feinglass. And for the Grateful Dead. He was overwhelmed as well with love for the band, for the Grateful Fucking Dead, who spoke to him through their music and brought this new world together. Amazingly, Benji found that he was able to break down the division between band and audience by affecting what the band played. Last week he and some friends had taken magic mushrooms and listened to “Fire on the Mountain” over and over. Benji wished they would play the tune tonight. And sure enough—and only, he knew, because he’d wished it—there it was: Long distance runner, what you standin’ there for? Jerry had read his mind.
Benji had gone completely bananas and had felt in control—the sort of control that he could give up and share, but control nonetheless—over the circumstances in the world. Had he been old enough to join those Vietnam protests he would soon start reading about in class, he was quite certain he could have been an instrument of change. He informed such circumstances with his own thoughts as they—as history—had informed him, as it informed his parents, and his grandparents. Now his grandfather came to life on that street corner, speaking to an audience. And the people spoke back to him. What was the difference between the two? For that matter, what was the difference between Benji and his friends, the concertgoers, between himself and the band? Nothing; despite all this physical space, there was no separation. Bowls of weed and opium, mixed, and hash joints rolled with tobacco were passed among the people surrounding them, and they danced for hours and hours, shoes kicked off, their T-shirts and long hair damp with sweat as the Dead played “Looks Like Rain” and “Don’t Ease Me In” and “Candyman.” They just played and played and played.
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