Summer in the Land of Skin

by Jody Gehrman

  Soon after Danny’s overdose, Sparky moves back to Tacoma. I think he’s lost without Danny to give him his cues. No one is too sad to see Sparky go—it sounds cruel, but it’s true. He’s the sort of person you barely notice. Even on stage, he was just the bald head sealed within his semicircle of shining gold drums, and in social situations he just continued to slap at things with his hands or utensils, hammering out irritating, machine-gun rhythms instead of engaging in conversation. He leaves town with minimal fanfare—stops by for a quick, awkward goodbye, pays Arlan the forty bucks he owed him, then drives off in his VW bug with a couple of drums strapped to the roof, glinting in the morning sunlight. We watch until he heads left for the freeway and out of sight, then return to the task of drinking more coffee.

  The same day, we go to Boulevard Park for a summer solstice festival. The manicured lawn stretches north and south along the bay, and there’s a big, yellow banner hanging from the two largest elms that reads, Bellingham Sol-Fest: May the Sun Be with You. The world has suddenly peopled itself with the hippies of the new millennium, all of them twenty years old, pink-cheeked, sprouting hair in profusion and wearing corduroys under their sundresses, long johns under their shorts.

  Even I have gone a little bit native today. I’ve replaced my usual off-white-T-shirt-and-jeans uniform with one of Lucy’s dresses, a sleeveless red shift made of fabric so thin and fluid it feels like liquid against my skin. She shoved it at me this morning, insisting that my addiction to off-white is getting nauseating. Then she smiled her sly grin at me, the one I’ve come to recognize as a plea for forgiveness and a challenge wrapped into one.

  It’s the hottest day we’ve had since I got here, and it produces a kind of delirium in the town. The blue skies force people out of their houses in bewildered hordes, and the trees glow a hundred shades of green. The flowers are so bright they look like they belong in those grainy 3-D postcards, and the earth itself seems to hum.

  The sun is on me like a huge, gentle hand, pressing me deeper into the grass. I’m lying on my back, eyes closed; pinwheels of orange and blue ignite against my eyelids. I hike up Lucy’s red dress a little above my knees, and let the sun press there, too, against the very beginnings of my thighs. I doze off for a little while, dreaming of tropical-colored insects.

  When I awake, Lucy’s saying something excitedly to Grady, Arlan and Bill; she’s crouching in the grass like a cat about to pounce. “What are you, cowards? Of course you can do it! Who’s going to stop you?”

  “It’s not that easy,” Bill’s saying, his voice reaching into the nasal registers. Lucy’s description of him as a retarded rat is mean but not inaccurate—he really does look a bit damaged and rodentlike. “We’d have to write new songs, for one thing.”

  “Arlan has enough songs to keep you busy for years!” Everyone looks at Arlan, who is lying back on the old quilt we brought, propped up on one elbow, gazing out at the water. He’s got on the suede cowboy hat he was wearing the day the Gibson got smashed. “Tell them,” Lucy urges. “You do, don’t you?”

  He nods. “I’ve got some songs.”

  “And they’re good, you guys—they’re, like, really fucking good.”

  Arlan chuckles. “Who are you?” he says, still addressing the water. “My agent?”

  “Arlan, you know what I’m talking about! It’s not this bullshit how-fast-can-we-go adolescent angst, like Danny—your music’s got soul. You’d blow Honkey Dory out of the water! The only reason people around here put up with that crap’s because it’s better than listening to self-absorbed dicks like Danny whack off with their guitars.”

  “Even so,” Bill says, “we can’t do it with just me and Arlan. We’d need a drummer, at least.”

  “Exactly,” Lucy says. “That’s where Grady comes in.”

  “Oh, now, wait a minute!” Grady says, holding up one hand. “I’m not a drummer.”

  “You are too!” she says. “You played in college!”

  Arlan’s smiling at him. “Berlin! I didn’t know that.”

  “In a really, really, really bad band, okay? For, like, one summer. It was more a joke than anything. Jesus, Lucy, when did I tell you that?”

  “Anyone can play the drums,” Lucy tells him. “If you won’t do it, I will!”

  “The drummer’s crucial—if he’s off, the whole band’s—” Grady protests, but Lucy won’t hear of it.

  “Yeah, whatever,” she snaps. “I know you want to do it, okay, so cut it out. I’m on your side, for once.”

  A toddler tears wildly across the lawn, her legs wobbling like a colt’s, her mouth stretching wide to release a scream as loud and piercing as a siren. She’s headed straight for Arlan, and before he can stop her, she’s tumbled directly into his lap, her chubby legs going limp upon impact. Her round blue eyes look up at him in surprise. Arlan says, “Hey there, wild thing.” Her face contorts and she starts to cry; her father appears, scoops her up and carries her off on his shoulders. Arlan follows the girl with his eyes.

  Lucy, who considers babies to be the blight of the earth, shakes her head in disgust and lights a cigarette. “So you’ll do it, right?” she says, looking at each one of them in turn. Nobody says a thing. There’s a guy playing REM songs on a makeshift stage near the bathrooms, competing with a boom box that a pack of junior-high kids are gathered around, bobbing their heads to the two and four of rap. “How could you not? It’s the chance of a lifetime.”

  Arlan and Bill look at each other. Bill shrugs. Arlan turns to Grady. “Would you want to give it a try, man?”

  Grady gives him a shy smile. “Shit, I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe.”

  Bill says, doubtfully, “What about Danny?”

  Lucy blows through her lips like this is the most ludicrous question she’s ever heard. Still, it lingers there, unanswered, until at last Arlan leans back on his elbows again and says, “What about him?”

  Grady, it seems, is most at home several stories above the ground. He makes his living trimming trees—selecting which branches have to go, which have to stay. He says his customers are mostly rich people who like to hear him go on about the various plagues and virtues of local flora. He admits it is the perfect profession for someone who refuses to grow up.

  At the moment, he is making his way higher in a towering fir, and he is no larger than my thumb. Arlan and Bill have just volunteered to go get food—I can see the tail end of Arlan’s station wagon pulling out of the parking lot. Lucy and I are alone for the first time in days, lounging on the quilt as the sun pulls higher in the sky. I can see the white shoulders of the festival-goers starting to roast into painful pinks. A group of skinny-legged, squealing girls are waging all-out war against each other with water balloons. Their supply must be endless, because it’s been going on for hours, and they just keep producing the ponderous shapes, heaving the blobs at their friends’ screaming faces. They swear revenge, make and break alliances, laugh so hard that their twiggy, flat-chested bodies contort violently.

  “Do you have money?” Lucy asks. She’s hugging her knees, looking at me. Her skin glows along the ridge of her shins.

  “On me?”

  “No, what are you living on? Inheritance?”

  “Oh,” I say. “No. I—I have a few hundred dollars left. That’s it.”

  She considers this for a moment, then starts rubbing coconut oil onto her legs, making them even shinier. “Me and Arlan are about to be broke,” she says. “His trust fund’s drying up. Did you know he had one?” I shake my head. “Anyway, it’s almost gone. He doesn’t make that much painting….” She sniffs at the bottle of oil and makes a face. “This shit reeks of junior high. Oh well. I need to fry—I’m way too white.” She finishes applying the oil and looks at me again. “I think I can get us some money. All of us, I mean.” She pauses.

  “Yeah? How?”

  “I’ve still got to work out the details,” she says, looking off into the distance. “I’ll tell you soon, though.” She slides a strand of
hair behind her ear. Her ears are tiny and delicate, like translucent seashells. She takes out her lipstick and applies it carelessly. “It’s crazy, the way things turn out. Grady’s got a degree from Yale. What does he do? Yard work! Arlan’s got a B.A., and he paints houses. Everyone I know went to college, and nobody uses it. Man, if I went to college, I sure as hell wouldn’t do manual labor.”

  “How come you don’t?” I ask.

  “Go to college?” She shrugs. “No money, I guess.”

  “There are scholarships.”

  She looks at me sideways. “I’m not good at kissing ass.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  She hugs her legs tighter and turns her face toward me again, resting her cheek on one knee. For a moment, she just looks at me, blinking. “Yeah,” she says, finally.

  “Then you should!” I say, sitting up.

  “I don’t know.” Two tiny lines appear between her eyebrows. “I’m not good at paperwork. Aren’t there, like…applications?”

  “Sure,” I say. “But it’s not that hard. You put out your own magazine—you can handle a couple forms!”

  She lifts her face from her knees and the very beginnings of hope are visible in her eyes. “You really think I’d get in?”

  “Sure I do. Of course! If you wanted to, you could start at a community college and—” Her head flops back down. “What’s wrong?”

  “So I’m smart enough for a stupid people’s school, you mean….”

  “Stupid people’s school?” I echo.

  “My sister’s been going to Seattle City College for five years—where’s it gotten her? She’s more stupid than when she started.”

  “But a lot of people start at community—”

  “No way,” she says. “I’d rather slit my wrists.”

  “Okay,” I say, changing tack. “You wouldn’t have to start there. You could apply directly to a university. It’s more expensive that way, but you’d probably get scholarships and you could definitely get loans.” She looks skeptical, but I press on. “Well, why not? Where would you want to go?”

  “Yale, Harvard or Stanford.”

  She’s obviously given it plenty of thought. I smile. “Only the best, huh?” Her dark eyes are fastened on me now, not even blinking, and I choose my words carefully. “You might want to have a couple backups,” I say. “Those are pretty competitive.”

  “See?” she says. “I can’t do it.”

  “Don’t get like that. All I’m saying is, you’d have your first choice and a couple second choices. Everyone does it like that.” She keeps looking at me with that serious gaze, devouring my face with the unblinking intensity of a child, and then she releases her legs and flops out flat on her back.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “It’d kill me if I didn’t get in.”

  “You could always re-apply, if you didn’t.”

  She stares up at the sky, her eyes wary. “I don’t like to fuck up,” she says, more to herself than to me.

  “You could do it,” I say, and it seems suddenly urgent that she apply—urgent, too, that I help her. “What about Arlan?” I say. “Would he like the idea?”

  Her brow furrows. “I don’t know if he’d want to leave Bellingham. Who knows? I might not even want him anymore.” She shoots me a sly look. “You could have him, maybe.”

  “Stop,” I say, staring at my lap.

  “Yo yo yo!” I look up to see Bill lumbering toward us with a bag of groceries in one hand, announcing his arrival loudly. Arlan’s right behind him, balancing the cooler on his shoulder.

  Lucy sits up quickly, sees them coming and warns, “Don’t tell anyone.”

  I nod, and she goes back to her limp pose on the blanket, arms and legs stretched out carelessly. I watch her there, lying with her eyes closed, her hair splayed out against the quilt, dark and hectic. I think of all the mysterious tensions at work behind those delicate eyelids. Is she flipping through images of her red-haired sister, now, or is it herself she sees, striding through plush green lawns, surrounded by ivy-covered buildings? I feel a curious surge of maternal warmth—an urge to guide her.

  Arlan hands me a bottle of water; it catches the light against its curve of plastic. I look at it a moment before I touch it. I follow the line of the bottle to his hand, his arm, his face—the smooth, dark cheeks, those eyes—and I want him so much I feel sick. “Thanks,” I murmur, and press the bottle against my cheek, needing the cold of it.

  That night, I call Rosie. I don’t plan on it, I just find myself picking up the phone and dialing. As soon as I’ve punched in the final digit, it’s too late to hang up, so I sit there and wait for her husky voice to materialize.

  Outside, Lucy, Arlan and Grady are playing guitar and singing on the porch. I can hear them through the open window, can smell the smoke from their cigarettes mixing with the perfume of freshly mowed grass and the dew collecting in the trees.

  Rosie answers on the fourth ring: “Mmm?”

  The clock on the microwave reads 11:23. “Rosie? It’s me, Anna.”

  There’s a pause, then there’s the clunking sound of the phone hitting furniture before she picks up again and says, “Yes?”

  “Should I call back tomorrow?”

  “Kitten?”

  “Yeah—sorry I woke—”

  “Kitten, my love. Listen to you. You’re alive.” I picture her snuggling back into her zebra-striped sheets, adjusting her sleeping mask to reclaim pure darkness. “Is everything okay?”

  “Pretty okay.”

  “The truck’s still running?”

  “Yeah. Thanks again for—”

  “Did you find Elliot?”

  “Um, yeah,” I say, twisting the curly phone cord around my finger until the tip turns red and then blue.

  “And…?”

  “Well, he’s doing okay,” I say. I haven’t planned an answer for this. I pull the phone cord tighter around my finger.

  “So you’re having a good time?” Her voice, perked up momentarily by surprise, shifts back into a dull sleepiness now. “Bellingham’s not too boring?” She yawns.

  “It’s interesting,” I say. “It rains a lot.”

  “Listen, kitten,” she says. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  I unwrap my blue finger from the cord carefully, like a doctor undressing a wound. Her voice, my heart speeding up, the smell of summer out the window, reminds me of the day she told me about Dad. I used to walk to his shop after gymnastics on Tuesdays. It was late July, oppressively hot, and my sweater was knotted around my waist. I remember I had a leotard on that bothered me—the armholes were tight and scratchy. When I got to the shop, the sign in the window said, Sorry, We’re Closed. Then there was Rosie’s big-haired head instead of my dad’s lean yogi face, peering through the glass. “Listen, kitten,” she said, once she’d opened the door and squatted down to hug me—more a grip, really, than a hug. She was clutching at me, as if she were losing her balance. “There’s something I need to tell you….”

  I blink myself back to the kitchen of Smoke Palace. I’m surprised to discover there are tears stinging at my eyes.

  “You still there?” Rosie asks. I make a noise of assent. “It’s your mom—she’s totally strung out with worry—you know how she gets. I’ve told her you’re all right, but she keeps digging at me for particulars. Do you want to talk to her?”

  “Is she there?” I ask, panicky.

  “No, of course not! I mean, do you want to call her? Let her know you’re okay?” I’m silent. “She’s smoking two packs a day, and she won’t eat a thing.”

  “You think I should call?”

  She sighs. “Oh, kitten, I don’t know. Helen can just snap out of it, but—Muumuu, Mommy will beat you if you get up here again!” Muumuu is Aunt Rosie’s Great Dane, and they’re engaged in a ten-year war over who gets the bed. “On the other hand, she just keeps getting worse. She’s missing work, and you know how she loves that silly job.” During my mother’s thirteen ye
ars in computers, she’s only called in sick four times. She’ll proudly repeat this to anyone with ears. Given her fanatical attendance record, the idea of her screwing that up is more alarming than the two packs a day.

  “That does sound serious.”

  “I know she’s a pain in the ass, baby doll, but she sure loves you. Sometimes I think that’s the problem.”

  “What do you mean?” I hold the phone tighter, pressing it to my ear. I’m surprised by how much I need to hear this.

  “She loves you so much, she can’t let go.”

  I try to picture myself calling Mom from this kitchen, looking out these windows at the Goat Kid Hovel, smelling this damp-fog, old-smoke smell. But my life here is so far from her; it’s so fantastically different from the decade I spent alone with her, pretending that my father never was.

  Rosie yawns again, loudly, into the phone.

  “I’ll let you go back to sleep,” I say.

  “No, no, I’m just…” she protests, but trails off.

  “You’re falling asleep on me,” I say.

  “Are you going to call her?”

  “Soon,” I say vaguely. “Tell her I’m fine.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Take care, kitten.”

  I place the phone back in its cradle. The sight of it there, with its mustard-yellow plastic faintly glowing in the light of the kitchen, makes me feel hollow inside. Ain’t no use, calling out my name now, they’re singing on the porch, like you never did before. My father used to love Bob Dylan; I wonder if he can hear them now. Maybe there’s some part of him gathering in the dew, nestling into the freshly mowed grass, or maybe he’s stretched across the wings of a bat, sweeping across the stars.