Night Kites

by M. E. Kerr

  Before dessert was served, Pete had to leave the table and run to the bathroom.

  “He had too much to drink,” Dad said.

  “He’s had diarrhea for weeks,” Mom said.

  “Do we have to hear about it at the table?”

  “You never let up on him, Arthur!”

  “If he’s had diarrhea for weeks, what does my never letting up on him have to do with anything? He shouldn’t sock away so many martinis if he’s had diarrhea for weeks!”

  “He came out here to give us the good news,” Mom said. “He was celebrating.”

  “The time to celebrate is after the screenplay sells.”

  Mom and I groaned.

  “Am I being hard on him?” Dad said.

  “You, Dad?” I said.

  “Not you,” Mom said.

  “If I was hard on him, I’m sorry,” Dad said.

  “Tell him that,” Mom said.

  But when Pete appeared long enough to tell us he was skipping dessert to sack out for a while, Dad said, “Gin will do that.”

  I figured I had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting Dad’s apartment the first Saturday in October. I decided not to mention the rock concert. Dad got MTV in New York. He said he only had to watch it five minutes to understand why this entire generation was going to hell in a hand barrel. He’d seen Julie Browns video “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun,” and never gotten over it.

  “Just you and Jack want to borrow it?” Dad said.

  “And our dates.”

  “No dates,” Dad said.

  “Dill’s mother would never allow that anyway,” Mom said.

  “She might, Mom. She trusts me.”

  “You and Jack are welcome,” Dad said, “but your dates are not.”

  “Even if Dill’s mother agrees?”

  “I’m still responsible,” Dad said. “I decline that responsibility, thank you.”

  After we finished eating, I went up to Pete’s room and sat down on his bed. Oscar was sleeping next to him. Oscar really did stink—not only his fur, but his breath, too. Oscar was aging fast.

  Both Pete and I had tight, curly red hair. His looked damp, and I put my hand on his forehead. “Are you okay?” He was cold and wet.

  “I’ve been feeling crappy lately. I can’t shake that bug I picked up.”

  While Pete had spent the summer in Europe, I’d stayed in the sublet he had on East Eighteenth Street in New York. Pete had thought I’d like to be independent of Dad, but the truth was I spent most of my time at Dad’s place on East Eighty-second Street. I was too lonely at Pete’s. I wasn’t ever the big reader Pete was. I wasn’t the loner he was.

  “Do you want to sleep?” I asked him.

  “No, stick around.”

  The wall above Pete’s bed featured a montage of Pete sailing, skiing, swimming, surfing. Pete had been a real beach boy when he was my age. Most of the pictures had been taken in the sun. I hated the sun because of the bad burns I’d get, but Pete would burn, peel, go back for more. In some of the pictures his nose, ears, and under his eyes were coated with white sun blocker. Pete was alone in all the pictures but two. He was in one picture with Stan Horton, his boyhood pal and fellow Trekkie. He was in another picture with Michelle Stanton. We’d called her Belle Michelle. She’d been paralyzed after she’d been hit by a wave that damaged her spinal cord, and in that picture Michelle was in her wheelchair. Pete was in her lap, pulling a sun visor down over her eyes, both of them laughing.

  “Whatever happened to Belle Michelle?” I asked.

  “She got married about a year after Stan married Tina,” Pete said. “Tell me about this rock concert you want to go to.”

  “Dad just said no girls in his apartment. … We’ll never get tickets anyway.”

  “Who’s Nicki? A new girl?”

  “She’s Jack’s girl. I’d go with Dill.”

  “Jack’s got a steady girl? The Neanderthal Man’s making out?”

  “Who said anyone was making out? She lives out at Kingdom By The Sea. Nicki Marr’s her name.”

  “Any relation to Annabel Poe Marr?”

  “That was her mother.”

  “I remember Annabel from when I worked at the bookstore,” Pete said. “She’d always come in for books by Edgar Cayce. Books like Seth Speaks. She’d head right for the Occult section. She claimed she was a distant relative of Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Her daughter’s more down-to-earth,” I said. “A little on the fast side.”

  “‘On the fast side’?” Pete hooted. “I didn’t think your generation made those crappy value judgments anymore. That sounds more like Dad’s generation. I thought we paved the way for you in the seventies, but ‘on the fast side’ sounds like the fifties all over again. What happened to women’s liberation?”

  “Dill happened to it,” I said. “Dill’s even talking about an engagement ring. She says if I’m going to be miles away in another college while she’s at Wheaton, I’d better cough up an engagement ring.”

  “Does she really think that’ll stop you?”

  “I think she thinks it’ll stop her. She says she wants to be a real bride, wear white, and have a real old-fashioned wedding night.”

  “Oh, one of those. With the groom so twisted on champagne he can’t get it up, off somewhere in the mountains with a heart-shaped tub in the bathroom.”

  We laughed, and Pete gave my arm a sock. “You’ve got to turn on the charm, Ricky. ‘J’ai tant rêvé de toi qu’il nest plus temps sans doute que je m’éveille.’”

  It was from the same poem that Nicki had mentioned the night before. For a second I felt my blood jump as I remembered Nicki leaning across the table in Sweet Mouth, watching me with her green eyes … “I have dreamed so much of you that it is no longer right for me to awaken.”

  I said, “Is that the only French poem you know?”

  “It’s the only one I know you know … Maybe a night in New York is just what you and Dill need.”

  “Dad’s not going to change his mind. You know Dad.”

  “You can all stay at my place. I’ll move out for the weekend. I’ll stay with Stan and Tina down in SoHo.”

  “Would you do that, Pete?”

  “Anything to get you laid. Tell Dad the girls are staying someplace else. Tell him you prefer my place because it’s nearer all the action.”

  “I probably won’t get laid. I’m not doing a good job of sowing my wild oats before I get married. Dill will probably be the only woman I ever have in my entire life.”

  “Why don’t you play hard to get yourself?” Pete said. “Give Dill some of her own medicine. Tell her The Neanderthal Man and On the Fast Side can have the bedroom. Tell her you’ll sleep in my reclining chair, and she can have the couch. That couch folds out into a bed. You don’t have to mention that … Turn the tables on Dill. She’ll come around.”

  “Oh, a new approach. Approach number four thousand and four.”

  “Try it,” Pete urged. “There’s someone in my Great Writers’ Group who does P.R. work for rock bands. I think I can get you tickets to the Springsteen concert, too.”

  I couldn’t wait to call Dill and tell her.

  Chapter Four

  THE NEXT MORNING PETE was still too sick to drive back to New York with Dad. He was taking the afternoon jitney. Dad said he’d drop me off at school, on his way out of Seaview. That gave him the chance to get on my case about painting the kitchen chairs.

  “When you go home for lunch, I want you to speak to Pete about putting Oscar to sleep, too,” Dad said as he drove toward Seaview High. “Oscar’s too feeble now to enjoy life.”

  “Pete will never do it. Pete loves that old mutt. So do I.”

  “That’s why it should be done. You’re doing Oscar a favor.”

  “Dad? You’re always leaning on Pete. If he told you he’d finished The Skids, you’d say, Well, it’s not published. If he said it was already a screenplay, you’d say, Well, it’s not produced yet—the same wa
y you keep telling him Southworth is nowhere.”

  “Pete doesn’t finish what he starts!”

  “You didn’t let him finish his Ph.D. If you wanted him to be a college professor, you should have let him finish it.”

  “I would have let him. But I wouldn’t pay for it. Pete wasn’t working hard at it. Your grandfather paid for four years of my college. I wasted most of those years … drinking beer, chasing the girls, sowing my wild oats.”

  I was sitting sideways in the front seat watching him. It was hard to imagine Dad younger, drinking beer and chasing girls.

  “I don’t see you as the campus make-out artist,” I said.

  “If I’d stayed one, you mightn’t have seen me at all. Ever. I wouldn’t have been able to afford a family. Luckily, the money ran out. I paid for my own M.B.A. I took any part-time work I could get. That’s when I began to apply myself. Before that I didn’t have any discipline. I didn’t put any value on education until the money came out of my own pocket.”

  Pete and I called this rap Rap #2, the Pull Yourself Up by Your Own Bootstraps rap, twin to Rap #3, the Learn the Value of a Dollar rap. Rap #1 was The Family Is First.

  “Pete could still get his doctorate, couldn’t he?”

  “That’s what I tried to tell him last night.”

  “And wouldn’t you help him?”

  “Erick, Pete hasn’t even looked into it. Pete would rather chase off to Paris every summer.” Pete hardly ever stayed very long in Paris when he went abroad. He couldn’t afford it—he usually earned small grants to go. But Dad invariably described Pete’s trips that way, as though Pete was just living it up somewhere dazzling.

  “Maybe The Skids will bail Pete out,” I said.

  “Five chapters in nine years? What makes him think he’ll write screenplays any faster?” Dad said. “Sometimes I think your brother lives on a pink cloud. He has your mother’s cockeyed optimism. Why would he get himself involved in teaching that Great Writers’ Discussion Group, free of charge, when he needs money, and he needs time for his own writing?”

  “For charitable reasons, maybe? Rain does not fall on one roof alone,” I said. It was Mom’s favorite saying. It was her justification for being involved in enough good causes to qualify her for sainthood or a nervous breakdown, whichever came first.

  “What do you think your mother’s most known for around Seaville?” Dad asked me. “Not all the good works she’s organized, not any of them!”

  I knew what he was referring to, and I said, “She can’t help that.”

  “She’s most remembered for that fiasco: the Bill Ball!”

  She was. True. When her good friend Liz Gaelen’s husband got caught in some Wall Street swindle, and was almost indicted for embezzlement, Mom organized a Bill Ball. All the Gaelens’ bills were put into a fishbowl; anyone attending the ball had to pick out a bill and pay it, as the price of admission. Mom got the Seaville Tennis Club to donate the space for the ball. The Gaelens were bailed out of their immediate financial difficulties, but we never heard the end of it. For months letters to the editor in The Seaville Star complained that only the rich would dream up such a self-serving celebration.

  Dad turned onto School Street. “Pete gets his bleeding-heart ideas from your mother. You know how Pete always was. He was a one-man Salvation Army when he was a kid. Then dating that girl in a wheelchair!”

  “But what a girl, Dad! Belle Michelle!”

  “Pete was dating her because she was in a wheelchair. And I think Michelle was smart enough to know it. I think that’s why she threw Pete over … I like your loyalty to Pete, but don’t try to be Pete. This ambition of yours to be a writer—that’s Pete’s ambition. You don’t even read. I never see you with a book. At least Pete reads … always did.”

  I jumped at the chance to get Dad off that subject. “Look! Dill!”

  “I see her. You’ve been going with her most of high school, hmmm?”

  “I know what you’re going to say: Play the field more.”

  “I like Dill, But now’s the time to sow your wild oats. Why so serious with just one girl, Erick?”

  She was waiting for me on the front steps of school. She was in jeans, a white shirt, a baggy sweater with the shirt tails hanging out from under it, a loosely knotted tie blowing in the breeze.

  “And how do you tell her from a boy?” Dad said.

  “Oh, how do you think?” I said.

  When Dad laughed, I said, “Hey, Dad, what’s that sound you just made?”

  “I almost forgot how to make it, after I saw those S.A.T. scores of yours. I hope you’re studying those Barron review books I got for you.”

  “Not to worry, Dad,” I said as he stopped the car.

  “Not to worry,” he said. “That’ll be the day.”

  I held the door open for Dill, and we walked down the hall toward her locker.

  When I first met Dill, she always smelled like cookies. I’d tease her about it, and she’d tell me the name of her perfume was Vanilla No. 5. I found out months later that she wasn’t kidding. She actually put a few dabs of vanilla extract on every morning.

  My mother always said Dill looked so wholesome. That description wasn’t exactly a turn-on, but I knew what Mom meant. Dill never needed makeup, never wore much. She had that great clean look the cosmetic ads were always telling females they’d have if they slathered their faces with creams and cover-ups.

  “Mom said no to the New York weekend,” Dill said. “I didn’t even tell her we were going to use Pete’s apartment. I said we’d stay at your dad’s. She said is Arthur Rudd out of his mind?”

  “Maybe I should talk to her.” I always got along well with Mrs. Dilberto. Mr. Dilberto was another matter, second only to my father in his curiosity about my S.A.T. scores, college plans, and the general direction of my next seventeen years.

  “It won’t do any good to talk to her, honey,” Dill said. “I want to go so badly, too, even if it is Nicki Marr’s idea.”

  “Just for Jack’s sake, give her a break.”

  “Why doesn’t she give me a break? She looks at me like I’m not there.”

  “She doesn’t know how to socialize.”

  “With females,” Dill said. “I don’t even care. I heard Bruce Springsteen sing ‘I’m on Fire’ last night, and I got goose bumps!”

  We were in front of her locker, and she turned around suddenly so that she was pressed against me. “Do you ever get goose bumps?”

  “Right now. The size of half dollars.”

  Dill liked to tease, and I liked her to. Dill said that there was instant coffee, instant tea, and then there was me: instant hots.

  “Think of something!” I whispered at her. “We need to get away!”

  “I thought all night—there is my Aunt Lana in Washington Heights. She’s Daddy’s kid sister. I think she’d lie for me and say I was staying there. She’s très romantic.”

  “Are you très romantic?” I asked.

  “Are you?” Dill said.

  “I'm on fire.”

  Dill turned back to her locker, working the combination while I stepped back to let my blood cool.

  “Honey?” Dill said. “If I do get Aunt Lana to lie for me, it doesn’t mean I’m going to …” She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to. I knew the end of that sentence by heart.

  “Sweetheart,” I said, “if you can get her to lie for you, don’t worry about that.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise. Just don’t sweat it. Let’s just cool out that weekend. We’ll give Jack and Nicki the bedroom.” I sneaked a look at her expression, to see how that sat with her. I was remembering what Pete had told me. I thought I saw some vague glimmer of regret.

  “I’ll sleep in Pete’s reclining chair. You can have the couch.”

  Dill flashed me one of her dazzling smiles.

  “Super!” she said. “You’d just get horny in the bedroom!”

  Chapter Five

  JACK AND I HA
D a late-Saturday-night tradition. We’d meet at my house and talk until one or two in the morning.

  If we double-dated, we’d drop the girls off first. (Dill always had to be in by midnight.) If we didn’t double-date, Jack would show up around the same time anyway, tell me about his date, if he’d had one, where they went, what they did. If he hadn’t gone on a date, we’d just rap until he left and drove to his house down the street.

  Usually Rock-N-America or Music Magazine was on TV in the background. It was the closest thing to MTV we could get out in Seaville. Jack wasn’t at all interested in rock—he barely watched the videos. I was interested, but not hot for them. I only watched them with one eye.

  The Saturday night before our New York weekend, Dill and I didn’t have a date. She went to Smithtown with her folks, to have dinner at her grandparents’. It was part of her plan to keep her parents in a good mood, so they wouldn’t change their minds about New York. Her Aunt Lana had agreed to say that Dill was staying with her in Washington Heights.

  Dad and Mom were already in bed by the time I was watching the end of Saturday Night Live. I used to love Martin Short on that show, particularly when he played Ed Grimley, the Wheel of Fortune freak whose head came to a point. I was sitting there in front of the tube when I heard Jack’s car pull up. I was in a great mood. Pete had sent the tickets to the Springsteen concert out with Dad. I couldn’t wait to tell Jack.

  Jack let himself in the back door. By the time he’d walked through the kitchen and the dining room, I could smell her perfume.

  “I brought someone with me,” Jack said.

  “I see you did. Hi, Nicki.”

  “Hi, Erick. Is it okay?”

  “Sure!” I was barefoot, dressed in an old sweat shirt and sweat pants. There were two empty Coke cans on the coffee table, and wrappers from a Nabisco devil’s food cake and a Drake’s Yankee Doodles.

  Oscar was sleeping in his bed behind the couch. He was so deaf, he didn’t hear people come into the house anymore.

  Jack was in a sport jacket and a tie, a press in his gray flannel pants and a shine on his shoes.

  Nicki was in this knockout getup: a skinny black-leather skirt, an oversized white T-shirt, a big jeans jacket, a sun-colored scarf the color of her hair, and a couple of wrist chains. She had on fishnet stockings and these sky-high heels.