1985: Careless Whisper (Love in the 80s #6)

by Misty Provencher

  I do remember the one when Lisa bought a baggie full of dead, dry leaves that she’d smuggled out of her mom’s underwear drawer. She’d overheard her mom saying she was going to make brownies with it, so we made them instead. That was the night we snuck out after our snack, met up with James and Paul, and ended up passing out in their basement. It was the first time I slept in James’s arms and still don’t remember it. What I do remember is that we got up the next morning, sure that Gada would be waiting for us at the door, standing over our stuffed sleeping bags with her finger on the dial to Lisa and Evelyn’s moms. But, when we skunked home that morning, Gada was still asleep. Having indulged in two of our brownies, she slept past noon that day and never could figure out what kind of flu had gotten hold of her.

  We had sleepovers on weekends in the winter and just about every other day through the summer. We spent our time doing make-overs, taking Cosmo quizzes, and agonizing about how our thighs weren’t like Olivia Newton John’s. And, once Gada went to bed, we’d stuff our sleeping bags with pillows and blankets and sneak out to meet James, Paul, and whoever Lisa was dating at the moment, at the elementary school playground down the street.

  Walking through the grass in the dark, my stomach always flopped around under my ribs like a wild, breathless fish. Then, I’d see the two Stryker boys’ silhouettes perched atop the monkey-bar dome, and that fish would thrash so much, it threatened to crack my ribs. There was nothing like seeing the hot orange tips of James and Paul’s Marlboro Reds burning holes in the dark. Eve and I didn’t smoke, but Lisa would. The three of them would flick their butts out into the grass and I’d watch the embers smolder out like Fourth of July sparklers.

  James sometimes brought a bottle of Peppermint Schnapps or a bottle of their mom’s Boone’s Farm wine. Those were great nights—we’d pass the bottle and talk about what it would be like when our band was playing St. Andrew’s Hall, downtown. We’d argue about whether we’d be new wave, metal, or pop and Paul would threaten to throw Evelyn off the dome whenever she would suggest disco. We argued about what we’d name our band and for a while it was between Smoke Hole Monkeys and The Stinky Shoes. It never mattered that not one of us knew how to play an instrument or lifted a finger to learn.

  Lisa always insisted she would be our frontman, because she could sing. Oh, boy. She really couldn’t.

  James would argue that I should sing (I was worse than Lisa) as he wiped the mouth of the bottle on his sleeve before letting me take a drink. We would all skip Paul until he got pissed and threatened to go home.

  There was one night that we didn’t skip Paul enough. It was a rare night when James had lifted two bottles of wine. Paul got too loud and the neighbors that lived on the far edge of the school playground started flipping on their lights. Juvie (a.k.a. Juvenile Detention, a.k.a. Kid Jail) was familiar to James, as it had been to his three older brothers (two of which were in jail by then).

  Paul knew to run if we saw headlights because it usually meant the cops were coming. That night, Paul was so plowed that porch lights were as good as headlights and he took off running. When we finally caught up with him four streets over, he was bent in half, puking out his mouth and nose. After that, there was no problem skipping Paul with the bottle—he didn’t drink wine anymore.

  On all those wild summer nights, once the booze was gone, the cigarettes smoked, and James and I had rounded as many bases as I would allow (never a homer), we’d sneak back to my house, creep in the back door, and lay awake for another half hour talking about whatever we’d just done that night. Lisa would detail for Evelyn and me the dirty details of anything she’d done with whoever she might’ve been with that night and I’d drift off to sleep, wondering if doing it would be like any of Lisa’s often gaggy scenarios when James and I finally did hit a homer. Lisa’s stories actually locked down my virginity for a lot longer than I would have otherwise.

  And in the mornings following our adventurous sleepovers, Gada would make us pancakes and the Marlboro smoke would cling to my shirt and jeans. I’d sniff it like cologne and immediately think of how James would weave his legs through the giant dome holes so I didn’t fall through whenever I leaned over to kiss him.

  The memories start the prickling of tears in the corners of my eyes, but when I venture into the kitchen to get a plate for my pizza, I wish I would’ve just headed upstairs with the box.

  Lisa and Eve sit at the table, eating in silence, while Paul sits on the kitchen counter, eating Mrs. Riley’s casserole right out of the pan with the huge serving spoon. I grab a plate, fork, and a glass of water before heading upstairs to Gada’s bedroom.

  As I hit the bottom step, the door to the den opens and James steps out. I freeze, caught between old contempt and social graces.

  “You need a hand?” James asks.

  “No,” I say and as I turn for the stairs, I dump the glass of water all over myself.

  “Same old Grace.” James chuckles as he walks past me, into the kitchen.

  “Dickweed,” I grumble, but saying it hurts me for some reason.

  Trudging up to Gada’s bedroom, I think of the storms and bad dreams that had me climbing these same stairs when I was little. I’d dragged my stuffed elephant by its trunk as fast as I could because I knew, once I reached my grandmother’s bed, there was nothing in the world that could get me.

  As a teenager, these steps might as well have been Everest when I had to let Gada know I got a bad grade, dinged her old Monte Carlo, or that I wanted to go out with James again. It wasn’t always bad though. I scurried up these steps to say I made the dean’s list too, and when I got elected class president. I floated up the day that James asked me to go to his homecoming dance. Of course, I stomped back down them when Gada said I couldn’t go because the public school James, Paul, Lisa, and Eve attended was full of ‘rough necks’.

  But Gada could only hold out so long. James became relentless in his goal of making her trust him. He was always welcome around the house, but he made sure to be there to carry groceries and pull weeds and cut the lawn when Gada had too much to do. Senior year, I went to his homecoming with him and all our friends, and it was one of the best nights of my life.

  I freeze at the top of the steps, just inside the door that Gada never closed at night so I could come up if I needed to. I go in, closing it behind me now and locking it, so I can sink to the floor and cry. The dish and fork slide off the pizza box top and clatter on the wood floor.

  The whole room smells of lemon verbena. It’s like Gada’s hugging me from the lungs out. I get up and cross to the bed, laying on it to smother my sobbing in one of her lemon-scented pillows.

  The last thing I need is for any of the idiots downstairs to hear me. I suddenly hate them for being here, hate Mr. Sharles for telling them they need to be. And I’m confused as to why Gada would push us all together like this when she knew how everything that had happened had destroyed me.

  Gada loved my friends, she really did, but it wasn’t like they pulled the wool over her eyes. She knew about James’s record, but when she saw that his infractions weren’t continuing after he started hanging out at our house, she let it be. She loved Lisa, but it didn’t mean that we didn’t spend a hundred dinners discussing “girls like Lisa” and how they always seemed to “get in trouble,” meaning knocked up. She warned me to be careful about following Lisa’s lead because it wasn’t going to lead anywhere good.

  In the end, Gada was more than right. The end of the summer before I left for college, Lisa was knocked up and it was Gada who gave her the ride to the abortion clinic after Lisa threatened to fix it herself with a coat hanger. She wouldn’t tell us who the father was.

  It was Gada and I who nursed her back to normal afterward, locking up the house and secluding ourselves from the outside world, telling everybody we took Lisa with us on vacation to Florida, so no one—most of all, her parents—would know what was going on. I didn’t even tell James.

  It wasn’t like I needed to, si
nce it turned out to be his kid.

  Lisa confessed the whole mess to Gada a week later, the day after Lisa finally was back to normal and went home. Gada broke the news to me. We were sitting on this lemony bed and I cried just as hard that day, knowing it was James’s baby, as I am now. That was the day I lost the love of my life.

  And now I’ve lost Gada too—she was my whole life.

  I fall asleep on the pillow after I’ve soaked it with my tears.

  I try to sleep, but it’s hard to do when you’ve not only lost the most important person in your life, but you also feel like you’re sleeping in a house full of people who could murder you at any second.

  I know it wasn’t fair that I was so mean to Eve yesterday. But then, she told me we weren’t friends and never were. I have a good idea why she said that, and I can’t really be upset with her since it’s all my fault.

  After Gada told me the truth about Lisa’s abortion, the horrible truth is…I shut down. I hadn’t spoken to James all week. It was killing me to keep Lisa’s secret from him, but when I found out he already knew, I never spoke to him again. Or Lisa. Or any of The Band, for that matter.

  “Eve’s on the phone…again,” Gada would tell me at least twice a day, every day.

  “No,” is all I would answer. I was only surviving and only doing it on auto pilot.

  Worse, Gada warned me that no matter how upset I was, I couldn’t tell anyone about what had happened. Even though I wanted her dead, Lisa’s mom might’ve actually done it. And the thought of telling anyone how my boyfriend and my best friend had completely snowed me left me shattered.

  It’s why I made the fastest preparations ever, trying to switch over from attending the local community college to packing up and flying off to Columbia University in New York. It was the one thing Gada was happy about—that I wasn’t going to blow the opportunity to attend the one prestigious college that accepted me. We both knew it would get me on the map, career wise.

  There was no time for goodbyes or angry conversations or healing. I left town without a word to anyone but Gada. What happened during those last few weeks of summer only surface in my mind a few times a week now.

  The pizza is still on the floor, ice cold and untouched, but there is movement downstairs. I debate sitting on Gada’s bed and eating the cold pizza to avoid everyone, but out of respect, I don’t. Gada would’ve killed me. The only time she allowed any food in bed was when I found out about James and Lisa.

  I head down the stairs like I’m going to my execution. The TV is on, and it looks like Paul’s sleeping on the couch, the top of his head and the tips of his feet poking out the ends.

  Eve leans against the wall that separates the kitchen from the living room. She turns her eyes from the TV as I enter.

  “Good morning,” I say, in my boardroom-meeting voice.

  Her lips pull sideways into her right cheek and she turns away.

  Lisa’s in the kitchen, the phone cord twisted around the waist of her puffy, neon running pants. It’s especially strange since she’s also wearing a neon windbreaker over her t-shirt and a headband, as if she just went for a jog. She makes kissy-noises into the phone. Yuck. “I know, baby, I love you too.”

  Lisa always had a weird boyfriend and from the sound of it, nothing’s changed. Eons ago, there was Ricky the Punker, who had a Mohawk with liberty spikes dyed orange and weird platform boots he’d coated with black spray paint. He hung around for a couple weeks, until Paul picked a fight with him when Ricky insisted that nunchucks would do more harm than brass knuckles. Ricky swung the chucks, pummeled himself, and could never show his face to us again. Then, Lisa found Dunn, the three hundred pound meathead that never once spoke, but stared at each of us while rubbing his thighs like a total perv. Mitchel might’ve been the longest contender, but he knocked up a girl from a rival high school and had to move in with her family after a shotgun wedding. Lisa never stayed with anyone long, but she managed to find every loser, freak, and weirdo in a fifty-mile radius.

  And she managed to find James, right down the street.

  “You’re my favorite little wiener boy, yes you are!” Lisa goes on. Wow. That’s a new, creepy low. She adjusts her headband and it threatens to work loose from her spiral perm. So weird. Lisa would never jog.

  I dump the pizza box in the fridge. Eve has retreated to my old room and shut the door with a thunk. These living arrangements are never going to work for a whole week.

  Lisa says, “Put grandma on the phone, baby. Yes, I love you too!”

  Oh my God. I’m a bogus whack job. She’s talking to her kid.

  That’s bizarre all on its own. Lisa—with a kid.

  I’m talking about Lisa, who used to down Mescaline dots—we called them scleaners—on the weekend and lay around in her mom’s basement, hallucinating. She was the queen of things like sneaking out of the house, not getting carded for booze, and babysitting the neighbor kids, Brent and Billy Jacobs, by locking them in the backyard while she made out with her latest loser boyfriend. It was Lisa who told me she had a gang-bang in the girl’s bathroom during an after-school detention. That was Lisa…not this workout-swathed mom talking to her kid.

  Paul walks into the kitchen, wiping his eyes. “There’s a taxi out front with a guy in a suit and he’s shouting for you, Grace.”

  Emilio. My reinforcement is here.

  Lisa smirks as I make a break for the front door.

  Emilio’s in the street, facing the house next door, with a heap of luggage all around him. He packs more crap than I do. He twirls around as the storm door bangs behind me, throwing his hands up in the air. Broad and tall, the strength of his body alone settles me.

  “There you are,” he says. “I think you gave me the wrong address.”

  I didn’t, but whatever. I’m just happy he’s here; an ally in the house.

  I hug him, but he breaks away, peering up at the Michigan sky. He’s right to never trust it. “Let’s get these inside before it starts to rain again, shall we?”

  “We shall,” I say. His professional tone is so amusing and out of place here, I would kiss him if he wasn’t hurrying for Gada’s front door. As I take the handles of two of his suitcases, the blinds in Gada’s den snap shut.

  James stands in the doorway of the den. As Emilio drags in his armoire-sized suitcase, James sticks out a friendly hand.

  “Welcome to the house,” he says.

  Emilio falters, shooting me a confused glance. “And you are?”

  “James Stryker. Gracie’s ex.”

  “Gracie?” Emilio throws a quizzical eyebrow in my direction. He tried calling me Gracie once. Just once. Gada, James, and The Band are the only ones who have ever called me that without repercussion. “She hates being called Gracie,” Emilio says.

  James drops his hand. “Oh, well, we were just kids. She didn’t know any better back then.”

  I shift Emilio’s luggage handle from one hand to the other. “I’m standing right here. Don’t talk about me like I’m dead.” As soon as I say it, a knot lodges in my throat. I swallow it down, dragging Emilio’s pile of luggage to the steps leading upstairs. I just want to get away from the first floor. “We’ve got the penthouse, Emilio. Gada’s final wishes were that everyone stay here for a week before they collect whatever she left them.”

  “Wow, your grandma…can you say control freak?” Emilio mumbles as he brushes past James.

  “Hey, whoever you are,” James calls after him.

  Paul sits up on the couch behind me. Lisa and Eve drift like ghosts into the living room. They all know what’s about to happen.

  James has never allowed anybody to talk down to him. No one. And, whoever James considers family, he also considers an extension of himself. He gave a cop a bloody nose once because the cop said he knew Mrs. Stryker and she was raising a brood of criminals. She was—but that was beside the point to James.

  Emilio turns to face him. Holy shit. I wince at the lethal mix before me of Stryker and Bron
x bad boy.

  “Grace’s boyfriend,” James addresses Emilio with that old silky tone that has a soothing levelness to it. “I want to be the first to welcome you. She’s a great girl and if she’s happy with you, then I’m happy to know you. As for Grace’s grandmother, I’d appreciate it if you’d speak respectfully of her. Every one of us here loved her and considered her to be our own grandmother as well, so you can imagine how it comes across for a stranger to be insinuating that she was a control freak. I’m not looking to start trouble with you, but I’d like to get through the rest of the week as smoothly as we can.”

  Oh my God. James has taken some anger management classes. Not that his compliments mean anything to me—that car roared out of the garage a long time ago—but James Stryker making peace with someone instead of pounding them into agreement? It’s like watching a gorilla go soft over a kitten.

  Except that Emilio isn’t a kitten. His jaw slides forward as he uses his luggage to maneuver James to the side of the stairs. Emilio balances one suitcase on the bottom step and takes two steps up, before turning back to tower over James. It appears that Emilio’s making an effort to talk civilly, as he smoothes down his hair and checks the buttons on the protruding wrist cuffs of his tailored shirt, but I know by his stance and gestures, he’s not calm at all.

  Emilio looks every bit a counselor with a thriving New York practice. In fact, he was my counselor, although I visited him to work through my issues with self esteem in relation to climbing the corporate ladder, instead of the issues from my past that are currently hunkered down all over Gada’s house.

  James folds his arms across his chest, head craned upward to listen. If I can still read James’s body, then he’s preparing himself for anything Emilio might throw at him.

  I hope both can keep their cool. Emilio might look like a gorky pencil pusher in his business suit, but he’s a Bronx boy with one beefcake of a body tucked beneath all the pinstripes. He earned his fighting chops, along with a juvenile record to boot. Both of these men—my ex and my current boyfriend—are more similar than they realize. If this gets ugly, the rest of us might have to spend the night cleaning brains off Gada’s wood floors.