by Joe Meno
“Wow, look at this.” Gretchen pulled out her parents’ photo album from their wedding and smiled. It was opened to a particular page already, a photo of her mom from her wedding day. It was very pretty but it made me feel sad, right away.
“My mom’s a ghost now. But she was pretty, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said.
In the photo, Gretchen’s mom was laughing, just a very small parting of the lips, and from the picture you could totally hear the sound of it, a small burst of giggles—very delicate, very tiny—which usually ended with her mother pardoning herself, raising the back of her hand to stifle her happiness. It made me feel very awkward and sad, staring at it like that. I hadn’t seen much of her mom’s stuff around, only one or two pictures really, since she had been gone, I guess.
“You miss her bad still?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
In the photograph, Gretchen’s mother was wearing a long white veil made of the thinnest lace you could imagine, her face covered completely, her dark eyes only spots of very delicate softness, making the veil wet with tears. She looked like a tiny, beautiful angel all in white, sitting there at a table with a white plastic tablecloth, posing demurely in a metal folding chair, her own father in a dark suit and her own mother in pale blue standing behind her, looking grim and looking down. Gretchen’s mother was smiling up at the camera with the small fairy-tale smile her sister now had, her immaculate fingers reaching up to press a small sparkling of tears of laughter away, always, always with the back of her hand. She looked like a ghost, like Gretchen said; otherworldly, you know, that was her kind of beauty: so lovely, so precious you felt bad for seeing it, knowing it wouldn’t last. Gretchen didn’t look anything like her mom. She looked like her dad, I guess, short and stocky. I glanced from the photo over to Gretchen. At the moment, Gretchen’s arms and legs and the tops of her hands were covered in black ink that declared, “I am a prisoner of class politics,” and her forehead had broken out in a number of unexplainable blackheads. But there was still something there from her mom—maybe her laugh or that look in the eyes; maybe mischief, I guess.
We went to Jessica’s room next. In there, on her white wood dresser, Jessica had had a framed photograph of John Denver since she was like seven. It was fucking lame, but hilarious. In the photo, John was holding a guitar and singing. Jessica loved John Denver. Once, their parents had taken both of the girls to see him in concert. There wasn’t anything about it that Gretchen ever told me except that after the concert, her dad had carried her up to bed.
Jessica’s room was the opposite of Gretchen’s: mostly pink and white, with framed photo collages on the wall of Jessica’s cheerleading friends, pressed flowers, teddy bears, other miscellaneous girlie crap. The room was a big fucking sore spot between the sisters. Since Jessica had been born first, she had been given the bigger room. The worst part wasn’t that it was bigger, it was the tree: a big oak that ran right up to the window. Jessica had been using it to slip out at night since she was fifteen.
“So?” I said.
“So,” Gretchen said. She stole a tube of glitter lipstick from the dresser and quickly applied it. Gretchen looked around the room for a minute, wondering, and then there was John Denver, grinning hopelessly back, his plain, smiling face and guitar and long hair looking so out of place and Gretchen leapt at it, laughing.
“What are you gonna do?” I asked.
Quickly, Gretchen slipped off the back of the framed picture, removed the photo of John Denver, set it back down on the dresser, and very carefully, only touching the edges of the picture of her mom laughing, placed it within the silver frame.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Let’s take my mom out for a ride,” she said and I nodded, not knowing what to say.
After a little while, listening to the Escort strain to turn over, the Clash blaring “Spanish Bombs,” Gretchen got the car started. She pulled the framed photo from her purse and placed it along the dash, the ghostly reflection of her mom staring back at us.
“That’s a little creepy,” I said.
“You don’t have to come with,” she said, and I nodded again, keeping quiet.
Gretchen jammed the pen into the cassette player and fast-forwarded to “Straight to Hell” as she turned up the volume and drove off. The radio gave a sputter and then stopped working altogether. It made a whiny, clicking sound, then a low buzz. Gretchen turned the volume down and said, “Fuck it.”
Outside, I watched the neighborhood as we quietly went past. It was sunny out, just before sunset, and the leaves in the trees were beginning to lose some of their greenness, giving over to fall, allowing for these bright patches of blue sky. Kids were playing football on their front lawns, shouting, running out in the street.
“Very American,” Gretchen said with a laugh. “All of them are future rapists.”
A mailman was delivering the mail, whistling as he went, the wheels of his mail cart turning, one of them wobbly. We knew him. He had short gray hair and wore shorts well into the winter. We had seen him once sitting on someone’s front porch smoking. There had been a black mailman for a few weeks, but then somebody said something and now there was this white old guy who smoked on people’s front steps. Fucking south side, I thought. Gretchen started to light a cigarette but stopped, smiling at the photo on the dash. She tossed the lit cigarette out of the window and began pointing out the way the world looked as we passed. “It’s real sunny today,” she said to the photo, “and that asshole mailman is leaning against somebody’s fence.”
Some time later, the radio switched on, the cassette became unstuck again, and Momma Cass from the Mamas and the Papas began singing “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”
“Man, that’s real pretty,” I said, and could not fight the feeling that it was her mom’s voice from the photograph, but talking about stuff like that just sounds weird, unless it’s happening at that minute, I guess.
As usual, we drove around with no direction, and ended up finding our way to Stacy Bensen’s. We screeched to a halt in front of the white brick house. “What are we doing here?” I asked.
“Just wait here a minute,” she said. “You too, Mom.” Gretchen jumped out, ran up to Stacy Bensen’s garden, lifted the two blue bunnies, then the elf, then the swan from where they rested, and placed them on the front porch again. This time she placed the two rabbits on top of one another, and the elf beneath the swan, as if they were all doing it together. She nodded, then rang the doorbell and booked back to her car, too out of breath to laugh.
“Dude, there is something seriously wrong with you,” I said.
At the Yogurt Palace, where Gretchen’s sister Jessica worked, we sometimes found ourselves killing time, asking for different samples, staring at the real customers, until Jess demanded we leave. Gretchen would shout, “I am an American! I can do what I damn well please!” then. knock over the straw dispenser and we would run out, screaming.
We came in and Jess sighed and then she saw Gretchen with the framed photo of their mom. Jessica was behind the counter, in a bright pink apron and pink blouse and pink and white Yogurt Palace painter’s cap, and she just shook her head. There was nothing she could do about us. She was there alone until seven when Caffey, the boss she was nailing, came in.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jess asked, folding her arms in front of her chest.
“Hanging with Brian and Mom,” Gretchen said, winking.
“That’s not even funny. If Dad sees you doing that, you’re gonna send him to the loony bin. Don’t you guys have something better to do with your lives?”
“No, not really,” I said.
“This one’s my favorite.” Gretchen handed the frame to her older sister. “But doesn’t she look like she’s just gonna die early?”
Jessica stared at the photo, touched the thin glass, and nodded. “Yeah, she does, I guess.”
“Look at Grandma and Grandpa. Do you think they ever looked happy?”
> “Nope. Wow, look at her eyes,” Jessica said. “She’s laughing so hard she’s crying.”
“You got her smile,” Gretchen said, taking the picture back. Jessica blushed, I dunno, maybe wanting to say something nice, but all she said was, “You guys want anything to eat?”
“Yeah,” Gretchen said. “I’ll take a raspberry blast for Mom and a chocolate vanilla twist for me.”
“Brian, you want anything?” Jess asked.
“No, I’m cool,” I said. “I don’t eat ice cream.”
Jessica nodded and began filling two small Styrofoam cups with each flavor, pulling down on the lever until each one was filled properly.
“Why don’t you get a new job, Gretchen?” Jessica asked. “You guys seem bored as hell.”
“I’m spending quality time with my family,” Gretchen replied, sinking a spoon into the bowl of raspberry.
“Well, where you headed after here?” Jessica asked.
“I dunno. We might go shoplift something.”
“Well, be careful. If you get arrested, you two’ll have to sit around for a while. Dad’s working late and I don’t get off until seven.”
“OK,” Gretchen said. “Hey, Brian and me were talking. How old were you when you lost your virginity?”
“What?” Jessica took a step back, folding her arms in front of her chest again.
“How old were you when someone popped your cherry?” Gretchen asked.
“Why are you asking me this?”
There were no customers in the yogurt shop and the sound of the fans overhead just kept on spinning.
“Forget it,” Gretchen said.
“Well, how do you even know I’m not a virgin?” Jessica asked.
“Because we saw the rubbers in your dresser.”
“Oh.”
“So?”
“I dunno. Sixteen, I guess.”
“With who?”
“Bill Paris.”
“The kid with the blue Camaro?”
Jessica nodded. “Yeah.” Then she asked, “Why’d you want to know?”
“I dunno. We just wanted to know. For comparisons.”
“Well, what about you guys?” Jessica asked.
Gretchen’s face went red. “I dunno. Last year,” she lied.
“With who?”
“My hand,” Gretchen sighed.
“Brian Oswald, what about you?” Jessica asked.
“I haven’t found the right girl yet,” I said. “Why, are you offering?”
“No,” she said, then looked down. “Well, that doesn’t mean anything.
All the people I know who started having sex when they were young are all fucked up now.”
“You don’t have to lie,” Gretchen said, looking up. “We don’t mind. Really.”
“It’ll happen, and when it does, it’ll be nice because you waited.”
“I guess.” Gretchen looked down at the framed photo. “Mom and me and Brian are gonna go meet some sailors. See you later.”
“OK. See ya,” Jess said.
“See yaaaaaa,” Gretchen whispered in a ghostly voice, holding the photograph of her mother up, shaking it. “And Jess?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for not being a douche-bag.”
twenty-eight
Going to somebody’s basement party that Friday night, I decided I would totally have to make my move on Gretchen, do or die. It also meant three things:
1. I would try and tell Gretchen how I felt, but I would probably puss out.
2.. If Bobby B. came with Kim, he would hit someone in the back of the head.
3. Something would happen and Gretchen and I would get in some sort of argument by the end of the evening.
I had been walking around the mall to avoid being at home because my mom had the day off of work, and I was just strutting around, heavy-eyeballing the hot chicks with their light-blue eye shadow and glitter lipstick, in patent-leather high heels and black turtlenecks and mini, mini jean skirts, all of whom worked at the hot-chick stores like Express and Benetton; and also, I had been busy getting a boner in front of the Frederick’s of Hollywood, staring at all the red and purple and black bras and panties, wondering if it might not be so bad making it with one of those mannequins as long as they were wearing those hot panties; and also killing time at the Aladdin’s Castle video arcade to check on a high score of Rampage I had made the week before.
In between all that, I called Gretchen at the pay phone and asked what she was doing and she asked if I wanted to go with her to this girl Esme’s party and I said, “Why the fuck not?” and decided: This. This was most definitely it. There was only like two weeks left before fucking Homecoming and it was a Friday night and still like summer outside, warm and clear, and it made you feel kind of reckless, like you didn’t have a care in the world—which I did, but you know, I was trying to outsmart myself, maybe. I went and bought like a bottle of Drakar, this bullshit Euro-cologne and doused myself in it and took the bus over to Gretchen’s and we went together from there.
OK, have you been to a basement show before? I had been to a couple with Gretchen. It was loud, usually. The way it usually worked was someone’s parents went out of town and someone got a friend’s band to play and then another and another and so about a hundred kids all crowded into someone’s basement to listen to some shitty punk rock band do Ramones covers, while someone else would start moshing and someone else would start making out and someone else would break up with somebody.
Like I said, the punk kids usually annoyed the fuck out of me, with their green liberty Mohawks and ripped-up jeans and safety pins and spikes and shit, because it was all a put-on. The joke was they were supposed to look beat, like scummy and fucked-up and scabby, but if you’ve ever waited for a girl to fucking dress like that, well, it takes time, because none of it is an accident. By the time Gretchen was ready, with all her get-up and gunk in her hair and shit, it was already after eight and we headed over to this girl Esme’s house in the suburbs—Palos Hills, I think—about a half hour southwest of the city.
“Do you know whose house we’re going to?” Gretchen asked.
“I guess,” I said.
“You guess? Brian Oswald, this girl fucking loves you,” she said, laughing.
Which wasn’t exactly true. At a party, I had once made out with this girl, Esme, and I had kind of gotten nervous and blown it by being stupid. When she gave me her phone number to call her, I did. But on the phone I was more uncomfortable and awkward than I was in person, and so I started lying my ass off and said I was a singer in a metal band. When she had asked the name, the best I could come up with on such short notice was “Ramrod” and she said, “Cool,” and she asked if we had any shows coming up and I said, “Sure,” and then she asked if she could come check us out and I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I just stopped calling her.
“Brian, maybe you can sing for her tonight,” Gretchen said with a smirk.
“Maybe you can fuck off for mentioning it. That still is the longest relationship I’ve ever had,” I said, kind of pouting.
We followed the long, winding, tree-lined subdivision road around and around until we found the right house. We pulled up out front, Gretchen and me, her pink hair all spiked-up and shiny, a black spiked choker around her neck, her silver chains dangling from her wrists, all kinds of black mascara and lipstick and glittery eye shadow on her lids. She looked hot—not pretty, but hot like a porn star maybe—but she had to check herself in the mirror again. We were sitting in the magnificent Escort and Gretchen was fixing her lipstick and more than anything in the world I wanted to grab her and kiss her; I wanted to make out with her right there, but I didn’t. Instead, I watched as she took out a piece of Kleenex from her purse, put it between her lips, and then crinkled it up, the imprint of her hot mouth, the kiss I could have had if I wasn’t such a pussy, maybe. It was weird and it made me feel weird to be noticing things like that, but that was what I was thinking. I was thinking abou
t getting her to kiss me. But that was it; I had blown a good chance. We got out of the car and headed up toward the house, me with my hands in my fucking pants.
About this suburban home: It was big and white—about three stories, it seemed—with a two-car garage and a perfect, newly sodded lawn with its own fancy, built-in sprinkler system, which I noticed right away because, hey, I mowed lawns and this was the suburbs and everything. There were like about twenty shitty punk rock cars parked up and down the street which was, like I said, this winding cul-de-sac, which was surrounded by this thick, black, metal, shiny suburban subdivision fence. There were about eight more cars parked in the girl’s driveway, with kids pulling amps and guitars and cases of beer out of their backseats and trunks. The two-car garage door was open and we followed some kid who looked like he was eleven—short, skinny, pimply, with orange spiked hair and a NO FX T-shirt—through the garage, past a pristine black Lexus, into a small hallway and down into the unfinished cement basement.
It was like every other basement I’d ever been in, suburban home or not: one long wood flight of stairs down, a few single light bulbs hanging from single wires, and a washing machine and dryer beside some bed sheets hanging on a line. There were about fifty kids there already and it was hot—real hot—down there, with a few fans blowing, but not much air getting in. Like I said, I knew the girl whose party it was, Esme, and shit. I didn’t know if that was her real name or not, but I always thought it was hot, and she was a sophomore at Mother McCauley and kind of friends with Gretchen and she had her dyed-red hair cut in a Chelsea—you know, with the long bangs but the rest of her hair shaved? Also, she wore these cool, retro black cat’s eye glasses because I think she was slightly cross-eyed. Like I said, I had made out with her once, kind of by accident. We had been at another party, like a year before, and we were sitting on a couch talking about bands, and she said her first record was Appetite for Destruction by GNR and I said that was my favorite record of all time and soon enough we started kissing. Then she giggled and said, “Your name’s not Darren, is it?” and I said, “No, it’s Brian,” and we both laughed and she wrote her name and number on the back of my hand, and then, like I said, I called her and got nervous and lied. More than anything in the world at the time, I wanted to feel her up because she had very small breasts but never wore a bra and always had on these very tight T-shirts, which drove me fucking crazy. I dunno. Now, I guess Esme was only interested in guys who were in punk bands, which is the way it usually goes with those kinds of girls, I guess. I thought the only way to a woman’s heart like that was by being a somebody, and I wasn’t even close to being a somebody. I mean, fuck, I was in the marching band if that says anything.
