by Diana Welch
Amanda chose the same card. We realized this only after the cards were laminated. We decided it made sense that two sisters would go to the same college. But it didn’t make sense to the bouncer at the Ritz, a big man with a handle-bar mustache and tattoos that crept above the neckline of his tight white T-shirt. When he asked for my ID and then for Amanda’s, he examined both closely and called over to the other bouncer, “Get a load of this.” Then he turned back to us and said, “You two sisters?”
“Yep,” Amanda answered. I nodded.
“You go to the same school?” he asked.
“Yep,” Amanda replied coolly, as if she had done this a million times before.
“Your mother in the Guinness Book of World Records?” he asked.
We stared back, confused, and then he pointed to our birth dates. If I was born in February 1964 and Amanda was born in August that same year, we were only six months apart. “So you’re a premature Irish twin?” the bouncer asked Amanda, then threw his head back to laugh so hard I could see the tattoos on his neck skipping with each guffaw.
It was apparently so funny he let us in.
“What’s an Irish twin?” I shouted above Billy Idol screaming “Rebel Yell” on the stereo system. The place was packed with people dressed in black with spiky hair, some wearing dog collars, others in wide-necked Flashdance sweatshirts with leggings, short boots, and glittery eye shadow.
Amanda shrugged and shouted, “Want a beer?”
I nodded and stood in the middle of the dance floor, turning slowly in my big sister’s Frye boots, soaking it all in. The disco-ball lights poked holes through the smoky haze that hovered just above the sea of bobbing heads. Small packs of people hopped from one foot to the other, their shoulders and arms following in fluid motion, their shaggy haircuts bouncing with the beat, their big hoop earrings playing hopscotch on their shoulders.
“This is awesome!” I shouted at Amanda as she handed me a plastic cup full of flat Rolling Rock beer.
We found a spot close to the stage and put down our beers as the music quieted down and the lights above the stage came on, pinks and blues and yellows. The crowd surged forward, slamming Amanda and me against the stage. The drummer wandered out and took a seat behind his set. Then David Johansen came out. We lifted our chins toward the flashing lights, and there he was, so close we could see the frayed threads of his hand-cut sweatshirt vest. His bow tie was pre-tied and attached to the silk ribbon around his neck, not hand-tied like the ones Dad wore. “Hello, New York!” he screamed, and we screamed back.
I began to really dance, fists pumping in the air, boots stomping and kicking, shoulders thrusting and shimmying. I bumped and slammed into strangers lost in their own worlds, some with eyes closed, others wide-eyed and ecstatic. I pounded the floor so hard I thought I’d bore a hole through the Ritz floor, and I was sad when David started bellowing, “Good night, New York!”
Then I remembered the rose I had bought for this moment. I had stuck it underneath the stage with my beer while I danced. I reached down to grab it and then thrust it up toward David in his top hat and tight leather pants. He grabbed my wrist instead, hoisting me onto the stage. He put the rose between his teeth and his sweaty arm around me as the crowd went wild, yowling and screaming and vibrating with applause. He spit out the rose and shouted, “I love you New York!” Then he turned and gave me a long, wet sloppy kiss that tasted like cigarette smoke and stale beer. It was my first kiss ever. It made the peck on the cheek from Brent Lupone in eighth grade insignificant. When he pulled away to take his bows with the band, I felt as if I was floating above the crowd. The noise grew loud. I snapped to attention and suddenly felt ridiculous. I scurried off the stage, nervous that Amanda would be pissed. She should have kissed David, not me, but instead of laying into me she threw her arms around me and screamed, “That was so cool! That was so cool! Oh my God! That was so cool!”
AMANDA
BETWEEN DAD’S DEATH, Mom’s cancer, and our money problems, we completely forgot about the Chilean exchange student. I had signed up for him before Dad died, and when Mom got the letter announcing the date of his arrival, she freaked out. She said it was the last thing she needed. But I told her I’d take care of him, and, well, what could she do? His name was Andres, and he stayed with us for eight weeks, maybe not even that long.
His eighteenth birthday fell on the same weekend Mom went to play in a celebrity golf tournament in Florida. Now that she was back on TV, she thought the exposure would do her good, so she took Diana for the weekend and left me in charge. Before she left, I asked her if it would be okay if we threw Andres a surprise birthday party, and she said she thought that was a great idea. So I invited everyone at Fox Lane, bought a couple of kegs, and charged at the door.
LIZ
ONE AFTERNOON, AMANDA offered me a ride home. I was so excited I followed her to the senior parking lot practically skipping. “So I have an idea,” she said once we were both in the car. “You know how Mom is going away this weekend? Well, it’s Andres’s birthday. I thought we should have a keg party.”
“I love that idea!” I shouted and put my hand up for a high five. Amanda greeted it with an eye-roll. I felt badly for Andres. He probably expected sit-down dinners and Sunday church services when he signed up to come to Bedford. But Amanda made up for that by taking him to New York City nightclubs, teaching him important phrases like “What’s up?” and schooling him in cool American music. He particularly liked Depeche Mode, the Psychedelic Furs, and Public Image Limited. A keg party was the next step in his American teen indoctrination.
“I’ll get a couple kegs,” Amanda said. “And you start spreading the word at school: Party at the Welches’, Saturday night.”
I got to work immediately. By Friday afternoon everyone at school knew. Our property was perfect for a keg party. High school parties usually got busted because of the long lines of cars clogging up cul-de-sacs, but our driveway and lawn alone had space for more than a hundred cars.
That Saturday afternoon, Amanda bought three kegs, which her friends helped roll onto our back porch. She also bought plastic cups and placed them on the glass porch table and ordered me, Dan, and Liz Subin, who had come over to help set up, to follow her into the den, where she had set up her stereo system and records.
“The den is for dancing,” she explained as Liz and I followed, making mental notes. “The kitchen and porch are for drinking, and no one, under any circumstances, is allowed in the living room or Mom’s room.”
By nine o’clock, the kitchen was packed. I followed a couple up the stairs and watched in horror as they opened the door to Mom’s room, clearly looking for a place to fool around. I marched in after them saying “This room is off-limits” just as the phone rang. I picked it up.
“How’s the party, Bitsy?” Mom’s voice chirped through the receiver. “Was Andres surprised?”
My heart began beating and my pulse quickened as I said “Yes, totally!” in a high-pitched voice.
“Did you bake him a birthday cake?” she asked as two kids stumbled in, bong in hand. I covered the receiver with one hand and made wild batting motions with the other, crude sign language for “Get the fuck out of here!” They quietly backed out, closed the door, and stood guard until I was off the phone.
More than two hundred people showed up. Amanda worked the door like a pro, charging football players nearly double and flat-out refusing Patrick O’Casey, captain of the football team. When he arrived with his cheerleader girlfriend, Amanda simply said, “Sorry, we’ve reached maximum occupancy.” The couple turned away, dejected. But I was already slightly tipsy and thought Patrick was cute. I ran around the hedges to meet him on the other side.
“Follow me,” I said, and he smiled wide. Unfortunately, his girlfriend followed too. I led them around back to the porch, where two senior football players were holding a sophomore girl by her ankles over a keg as she drank beer through the nozzle until it started spewing out of her mouth and no
se. I thought she might drown.
“I think it’s called a keg stand,” Liz Subin shouted in my ear as I looked at her, alarmed. Another group of seniors were chugging beer through funnels with long spouts.
Patrick joined in, pinching my cheek beforehand, muttering, “You’re one cool girl.” I watched in awe as he finished an entire beer in three gulps, roared like the Incredible Hulk, and then did weight-lifter poses. Liz and I both wandered into the next room to join the mad tangle of people slam-dancing in the den.
Not too long after that, Amanda started to worry. “Who let that fucking asshole in?” she screamed when she saw Patrick with his buddies splayed out drunk on our lawn furniture. Her eyes darted straight to me, and I shrugged my shoulders, feigning innocence. Things were getting out of control. Someone had broken a glass pane in the French door that led to the TV room, and people were making pancakes with ingredients from our cupboard. Amanda approached Tom Granger, a six-foot-four-inch senior who wore a black trench coat all year long and had a scar that ran diagonally from his left temple to the right side of his chin. She offered him fifty bucks to help her clear the place out. He went room by room, clenching one of Dan’s baseball bats and shouting, “The party is over. Everyone out!” People did as they were told.
AMANDA
THAT WASN’T TOM Granger; it was Matt Garrity. He was a mild-mannered, funny guy who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He did grab a baseball bat to clear people out of the rooms that they shouldn’t have been in, but I didn’t have to pay him. I was freaking out. There were too many people in the house, and I had just found Dan wasted on peppermint schnapps with those Neanderthals Liz let in. I’m still pissed about that.
LIZ
THE PARTY DIDN’T end until two in the morning. By then, those who could drive home had, and anyone else had passed out on every horizontal space our house offered. As Liz Subin and I went searching for a place to sleep, we found four girls asleep in my bed, two Chileans passed out in Andres’s room, and Andres asleep in Mom’s room with a girl from the drama club. Both twin beds in Diana’s room were occupied, even though one had collapsed into a heap on the floor. Dan was asleep, fully dressed, on top of the covers on his bed, his snores mingling with those of two senior football players passed out on his floor. Liz and I ended up sleeping together, wrapped in a twin-size fitted sheet, the only thing left in our linen closet. We made our makeshift bed in the foyer, next to a table.
Not until the next morning did we realize how badly our house was destroyed. There were plastic cups everywhere—on the counters, on the floor, some crushed and empty, others half full with cigarette butts floating in flat beer. The linoleum floor, which Mom had just had redone so she could sell the place, was covered in an inch-thick brown scum that stuck to our bare feet. Liz and I went upstairs to put on shoes. On our way up, we noticed that the banister was wobbly and that there were sneaker marks on the wall. When I came back down, I found Amanda standing among the ruins.
“Fuck,” she said, standing in the kitchen. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” In hopes of cheering her up, I told her I’d make breakfast for everyone.
“Good luck,” she snarled.
I opened the fridge. It was empty except for a box of baking soda, a can of Crisco, and a few old onions. I went to the kitchen walk-in closet and found it empty except for a few canned goods. Even the flour was gone.
“They ate all the condiments,” Amanda said. “Who eats condiments?”
Amanda sent her friend Rasheeda, who had spent the night, on a donut mission and then took Liz and me around the house for a reconnaissance tour.
“We are so screwed,” she kept saying. “Mom is going to kill us.”
It was Sunday morning. Mom would be arriving that night. We had to get busy. As the kids who were too wasted to leave the night before slunk out of the house, we scrubbed, mopped, vacuumed, and filled trash bag after trash bag with plastic cups, cigarette butts, empty mustard jars, and the occasional used condom.
By the time Mom arrived home that evening, we had done an amazing job. But there were still cigarette burns in the crushed-velvet couch in the den and in her brand-new linoleum floor. We had no idea how to fix the broken pane of glass leading into the TV room or the wobbly banister, so we just hoped she wouldn’t notice. If she did, she didn’t say.
Weeks later, Mom called me into the den, using my full name, which she did only when she was angry. I walked in sheepishly.
“Where’s my gnome candle?” she demanded. She was standing in front of the fireplace, her arms crossed, her eyes narrowed.
“Excuse me?” I stammered. I had no idea what she was talking about.
“My gnome candle!” she shouted, her voice shaking. She pointed to an empty spot on the mantel.
Then I remembered. Dad had bought Mom a candle the Christmas before he died. It looked more like a wizard than a gnome and was made entirely of wax—even the long, flowing white beard, the blue hooded cloak, and the brown staff. After Dad died, Mom placed the candle on the mantel and claimed that the gnome was our guardian angel.
The candle was gone. I could see that was true, but I had no idea what happened to it. Maybe someone knocked it off while dancing, or maybe someone stole it. I didn’t have the answer. All I knew was that I could never replace it. And that made me feel terrible.
AMANDA
WHAT MADE ME feel terrible was when Mom got rid of Pony. Granted, I wasn’t riding that much then. It was the classic “As soon as you get your driver’s license, you forget about your horse.” We still had Berry and Bartholomew, but Pony was my first horse. Mom and Dad had given him to me on my fourth birthday. Everybody, Liz, Dan, and Diana, we all learned to ride on him. Worse, she did it behind my back. I came home from school one day, and Pony was gone. When I confronted Mom, she told me that she found him a good home on Old Wagon Road, that the family was really nice and said that we could visit him anytime. So that afternoon, Anna and I drove up and down that damn dirt road looking until we finally saw him grazing. As I stood in that paddock, petting Pony’s nose, I cried harder than I ever had in my life. I cried harder saying good-bye to that horse than I did when Dad died. It just didn’t seem fair. At least I got to say good-bye.
After that, it didn’t take long for the gray house to sell. Mom sold it for a half-million dollars to an English family called the Chisolms. Mom said we were going to move into the cottage until the new house was built, which would take about a year. By then, I had heard from colleges. I didn’t get into any of my top choices, the vet schools. Dad had been the hard-ass about grades, but once he was gone, I didn’t care anymore and my grades started to slip. The only school I ended up getting into was NYU, my safety. I wasn’t too upset about it. I didn’t want to be a vet anymore, and I was psyched that I was going to get to move out of the house and live in the city. I was so glad that I wasn’t going to have to live in the cottage. Going from the gray house, which was practically a mansion, to a tiny three-room shack, would have sucked. In the gray house, we all had our own rooms. In the cottage, Mom and Diana were going to share a bedroom, and I was supposed to share the other bedroom with Liz when I came home on weekends. But it was so teeny you had to walk sideways between the bed and the dresser to get in and out. I figured I’d just sleep on the pullout couch in the main room, which was living room, dining room, and kitchen all in one. Meanwhile, Dan was going to have to sleep in a walk-in closet, which was really lame. But it’s not like any of us really had a choice.
part two
FALL 1983 – WINTER 1985
Christmas 1983 (l–r: Diana, Liz, Dan, Amanda)
LIZ
EVEN THOUGH THE new owners would not move into the gray house until Christmas, Mom thought it best if we all started our new school year in the cottage. So we began our slow move late in the summer of 1983. We could bring only what was necessary, so I packed all my clothes, records, and Mom’s hot curlers and sent my swim team trophies and childhood dolls and photo albums to storage.
&nbs
p; The last day of our move was a sunny Saturday in September, and Mom decided I was old enough to drive one load over by myself. I already knew how to drive. Dad had taught me when I was eight. Coming back home from an errand, he had pulled the Mercedes into the driveway, pushed the driver’s seat as far back as it could go, and said, “Okay, toots.” I climbed onto his lap and took hold of the steering wheel as he instructed—left hand at nine o’clock, right at three—my shoulders scrunched to my ears, my knuckles whitening as I tightened my grip. I steered straight as Dad accelerated, his voice firm but kind, “That-a-girl, nice and steady.”
For this trip, however, my fourteen-year-old legs were long enough to reach the gas without having to scoot forward and point my toes, and I was driving the Jeep on my own, down the driveway instead of up. Midway, there was a dirt road that led out to the cottage just above the horse paddock. I pulled the blinker arm down to signal a left even though there were no other cars in sight and pulled gently on the steering wheel. Amazingly, the whole hunk of metal followed my lead. As I drove alongside the pasture, Berry and Bartholomew galloped beside me until the post and rail fence ended. They stopped, but I continued through a thick forest patch to the cottage on the other side. Mom was already there, waiting for me. She shouted “Brava!” as I awkwardly backed the Jeep toward the garage doors. With each brake pump, glasses and bowls rattled in their boxes, poorly packed with down parkas and pillows as padding. Dad never taught me how to drive in reverse.
