The Carnival at Bray

by Jessie Ann Foley

  Kevin stood up and stretched.

  “Well, okay, Mags. If you say you’re sick, you’re sick. It’s just too bad though, because if you were faking it, I was going to bring you out to see a show with me tonight—a big, huge, epic, life-altering show. But it looks like you need your rest.” He deposited his empty beer can in the kitchen trash. “I’m going to hit the shower. If you make a miraculous recovery by the time I get out, let me know.”

  An hour later, Maggie, her face slick with Nanny Ei’s rose-scented makeup, was strapped into the passenger seat of Uncle Kevin’s silver Chevy Nova. He’d bought it a few months earlier at a stolen car auction in Galewood for $800, and had just enough money left over to order a vanity plate. He dubbed the car AG BULLT—“AG being the periodic element for silver,” he explained to her as the engine roared to life. “Remember that next year in chemistry class.” As they peeled out onto Milwaukee Avenue, he shoved Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger into the tape deck and began to lecture her, mainly about music, but also about religion, economic trends, and the situation in Kosovo. Maggie tried to absorb it all as her skinny butt floated off the seat every time he turned, pressing her chest against a duct-taped seatbelt that she prayed would hold.

  They stopped in front of a decrepit apartment building and Kevin trumpeted AG BULLT’s horn until three of his friends emerged, all dressed in slight variations of a faded black uniform. Maggie recognized Rockhead, Taco, and Jeremy from their late-night forages through Nanny Ei’s refrigerator. Taco, the fat one, threw open the passenger side door.

  “Get in the back, kid,” he said. “I need the leg room.”

  Maggie looked at Kevin, who was switching out Badmotorfinger for Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?

  “Go on, Mags,” he said, turning the music to its loudest possible volume. “I can’t have Taco’s fat knees jabbing into the back of my seat. It interferes with my concentration.”

  She climbed into the back, sandwiched between Jeremy and Rockhead, who passed a joint back and forth over her head as they drove east through the summer night. All the windows were rolled down and the speakers hissed and crackled, threatening at any second to blow out completely. A cyclone of ash gusted around the car, settling in Maggie’s hair and in the lap of her black jeans. The music and the wind made it too loud for talking, so she just sat and looked out the window at the city rushing by while Jeremy and Rockhead smoked their weed, until they reached Clark Street and the traffic came to an abrupt standstill.

  “What a shitshow,” Rockhead said, leaning out the window and flicking away the cashed end of the joint. A line of concertgoers in T-shirts and torn jeans and see-through tops snaked from the entrance of the Metro all the way down Clark for nearly half a mile.

  “Where the fuck are we gonna park?” Taco asked. “I told you we should’ve taken the bus. I can’t walk that far!” He turned in his seat to look at Maggie. “Football injury.”

  “Don’t believe him, Maggie,” Jeremy confided. “He’s always making excuses to cover for his morbid obesity.”

  “Excuse me, asshole, but most of this is muscle mass.” Taco reached into the backseat and presented them with a flexed, beefy forearm. “Touch my arm, Maggie! Pure solid muscle.”

  “Do not touch his arm,” Kevin instructed from the front seat as he scanned the street for a parking spot.

  “The problem with you, Jeremy,” Taco continued, withdrawing his arm, “is that you don’t know shit about physiology. It’s not weight that matters, but body fat percentage.”

  Before Jeremy could respond, Kevin slammed on the brakes, yanked AG BULLT into reverse, and swung the car into an open spot directly in front of a fire hydrant.

  “Dude, you can’t park there,” said Jeremy. “They’ll tow your ass.”

  Kevin thrust the parking brake into place.

  “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” he declared, turning off the ignition.

  “What?”

  “That’s Martin Luther King, ignoramuses. ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail.’ ”

  “Can someone please explain to me what’s unjust about not parking in front of a fucking fire hydrant?” Taco sighed. “If this shit gets towed, I am not paying for you to get it untowed.”

  Kevin got out of the car and winked at Maggie.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  The huge, epic, life-altering show was none other than the Smashing Pumpkins, playing at their favorite hometown venue, just weeks after the release of Siamese Dream. After being patted down by security, Maggie reminded herself not to freak out at these facts, at least not visibly, as she followed Kevin and his friends up the curving linoleum staircase that was crammed from rail to rail with sweaty fans.

  “So, do we have good seats?” she asked, scrutinizing the ticket stub that she already knew would be a keepsake for the rest of her life.

  “Seats?” Taco laughed. “What do you think this is—the goddamn opera?”

  “Leave the girl alone, jagoff,” Jeremy defended her, slipping a hand around her waist. “She’s only, what, like eighteen?”

  “Sixteen,” Maggie blushed, feeling the clammy pressure of Jeremy’s fingers on the curve of her waist.

  “Yeah—as in too young for you,” said Rockhead.

  “Damn if she don’t look full-grown to me.”

  Kevin, who was just ahead of them on the stairs, turned and looked down.

  “Get your hand off my niece,” he said, “or I will cut your fucking dick off.” Jeremy’s hand slithered away, and Taco and Rockhead, cowed, averted their eyes and rummaged their pockets for beer money.

  At the top of the stairs, the crowd piled toward the stage, slurping beer from plastic cups and holding their cigarettes aloft while the sound check filled the auditorium with screeches and drum trills. And then all the lights went out. When they came on again, in a blinding burst of white, the opening chords of “Rocket” began like an explosion in the middle of Maggie’s chest. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to contain it.

  “Hey! Mags!” Kevin was kneeling down in front of her in the hazy flashing light. “Get up here!” She climbed onto her uncle’s shoulders and he stood up, squeezing her legs to his chest. Only one hour earlier, she had been sitting on Nanny Ei’s couch, her life dribbling unremarkably along, Vicks VapoRub slathered across her wheezy chest and a mug of boiled milk and onions untouched beside her. The explosion of music that had started in her chest was now expanding outward and outward, encompassing the entire room, the entire city, the entire world.

  “How’s the view?” Kevin shouted, lurching closer to the stage while she clutched at his soaking hair to balance herself. Everything around her was shiny with the patina of smoke and sweat, and a hundred feet in front of her were the Smashing Pumpkins.

  The show was chaos—moshing, shattered bottles, and music so loud that it didn’t even feel like music but just a thumping in her chest, a wailing guitar, and Billy Corgan, who screamed until his throat sounded blood-gargled. After an hour, Maggie lost Uncle Kevin and stumbled through the crowd, fighting the urge not to panic, and then she found him in a corner making out with a blond woman whose shirt was all cut up so that Maggie could see not just the woman’s cleavage but the cleavage under her boobs—she had not known this was possible. He pulled away from the woman, wrapped Maggie in a sweaty hug, and took her up to the bar and bought her a pop. She drank it, fighting the feeling of exhaustion and fever that had descended on her brain and sinuses, and when it was over and the lights were turned on to reveal a shiny-eyed crowd wafting animal smells and trembling down from whatever high they’d been on, the music had latched hold of her. She felt half-crazed, elated, having forever transcended the world of high school, where she was noteworthy only for her ability to diagram sentences faster and more accurately than anyone else in Mr. Blackwell’s English class. One thing was for sure: she would never diagram another sentence, at least not willingly, for as long as she lived.

  Kevin put one arm around Ma
ggie and the other around the blond woman and, together with Taco and Rockhead and Jeremy, they tumbled out into the city and found AG BULLT, adorned with two parking tickets that Uncle Kevin tore from the windshield and dropped down the sewer, and they piled into the car where Maggie was placed on the blonde’s warm, pulsing lap, and they went to someone’s fourth-floor apartment of milk crate bookshelves and more music. Maggie pretended to fall asleep so that Kevin would carry her off to bed, which he did, except she suspected the bed was actually a dog bed—at least it smelled like one—and then she really did fall asleep. She woke up once in the middle of the night, feverish, and saw the shadows of two people moving up and down—Uncle Kevin and the blonde—and the blonde was moving on top of him and he was holding her breasts in each of his hands like Christmas ornaments. Maggie knew what they were doing but it didn’t look so frightening or clinical as when she learned about it during those awful movies in health class. And it didn’t look as disgusting as the porno she’d seen at Katie Grant’s house, which was all spread legs and shaved bodies and smirking plastic faces. This looked—nice, or something. Real. She didn’t know. She fell back asleep.

  In the very early morning, Uncle Kevin shook her gently awake.

  “You want some breakfast?” His breath was thick and beery.

  She nodded sleepily, and he helped her up from the dog bed. He leaned over and kissed the blonde on the forehead, who stirred a little beneath the thin white sheet, her clothes in a pile on the floor, the soft outline of her breasts moving up and down with her breathing. They tiptoed out of the apartment, climbed back into AG BULLT, and drove to the Golden Nugget at Diversey and Clark. Kevin picked a vinyl booth by the window, and as they ate their breakfast, the sky beside them was a pink-dyed Easter egg turning an August blue above the flat rooftops of record stores and hookah shops.

  “So, who was that blond girl?” Maggie asked, cutting into her French toast.

  “Sonia? Ah, she’s nobody. A friend.”

  “Is Jeremy going to get you a bootleg tape of the show?”

  “Now why would I want one of those?” He plucked a bit of mushroom from his hobo skillet and wiped it on the edge of his plate.

  “I don’t know. He said he gets bootlegs of all the shows he goes to.”

  “Jeremy’s a moron. Bootlegs totally defeat the purpose of going to a show. They take away from the preciousness of the lived experience. It happened. You were there for it. And now it’s your responsibility to remember it, not to try and re-create it all the time by listening to some shittily recorded attempt at preservation.” He pointed his fork at her. “Everything that ever happens to you only happens once, so you better never stop paying attention. Now eat your breakfast, kid.”

  He went back to picking at his skillet while Maggie nibbled her French toast and tried not to intrude on his mood, tried to hold in the magic of just being around him. She was glad to be Kevin’s niece. It meant that he would never go sneaking off into some morning without even saying good-bye to her.

  When they got home, Laura, Colm, and Nanny Ei were pacing the front stoop. There had been a fire in the laundry room at the Days Inn Milwaukee and they’d been evacuated. By the time they’d gotten the all-clear signal it was too late to go back to bed, so they’d driven home in the middle of the night and arrived at dawn to an empty apartment. Colm stood behind the two hysterical women with his arms crossed while Laura followed Maggie and Kevin into the house, picked up a sombrero-shaped ashtray, and chucked it at Kevin’s head. He ducked, and it shattered against the front room wall.

  “Where the hell have you been? Are you drunk?” she demanded, grabbing Maggie’s arm.

  “Not at the moment,” Kevin responded.

  “You should never have left her alone with him,” Colm said. He was looking at Kevin the way you’d look at an infected wound.

  Kevin opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. A look came over his face: the same hunted look he wore whenever his family got on his case about what a disappointment he was. He picked up the pieces of the sombrero ashtray, placed them on the coffee table, and walked into his room, closing the door quietly behind him.

  “Are you okay?” Laura demanded.

  Maggie nodded. She was more than okay. Not only was she no longer sick, she felt as if she’d just awoken from the long, safe torpor of her childhood. The night had blasted her free of that shell, and she had emerged new and raw and ready. She felt the ticket stub folded carefully in her pocket. How many kids in Bray would be able to say they’d stood just feet from Billy Corgan, that they’d been at the Metro for the Siamese Dream record release show, that they’d seen Lake Shore Drive on a Sunday morning through the prism of a concert comedown, the runners looking so silly with their skinny legs and their neon shorts, chugging along the footpath with their calorie counters and Gatorade?

  “We had fun, ma,” said Maggie. “Nothing happened.”

  “I’ll bet it didn’t,” fumed Laura. “Get upstairs, you.”

  The night before they moved, Laura’s boss at Oinker’s, the neighborhood tavern where she bartended nights, threw the family a going-away party. He ordered trays of roast potatoes and fried chicken from Papa Chris’s and let everybody drink all they wanted for ten bucks a wristband. All of Colm’s construction buddies came, and so did Laura’s friends from the neighborhood. Nanny Ei even got a few of the livelier members of the Altar and Rosary Society to stop by for Bailey’s and coffees. Maggie and Ronnie spent the night wandering around the bar and giggling at the idiotic behavior of the adults who had either forgotten or simply didn’t care that they were in the presence of children. It was only when the Irish construction guys started singing sad songs that Maggie got sad, too. Gingerly, as if she was touching a scab, she let herself wonder why Kevin hadn’t come. She couldn’t believe he wouldn’t even want to say good-bye to his niece, his goddaughter, his Maggie. She knew he was flaky, and that he didn’t show up at Christmas sometimes, or at Thanksgiving dinner. But this?

  And then, at the end of the night, when her eyelids began to feel like paperweights and Ronnie was already snoring away in the corner of a booth, she was jolted awake by someone forcing open the back door, and the bartender, Mikey, forcing it shut again, and Colm and Laura yelling in that shrieky way of the very drunk.

  “Never forgive ’im,” her mother slurred, waving her cigarette wildly. “Don’t mess with mama bear.” Colm nodded. He gripped her thin waist; his right hand snaking down the long pocket of her tight black jeans to squeeze her butt.

  “It’s only right,” he muttered.

  Through the window, illuminated like an angel in the glow of an Old Style sign, Maggie saw her uncle, his hair long and wild, his guitar strapped to his back as essential a part of him as a turtle’s shell. He pounded on the window like he wanted to break it until he found Maggie’s eyes. He pressed his face against the glass, his breath fogging the window. His mouth shaped one word—he was either saying “bye” or “why,” she couldn’t tell—and then, lifting his hand in a gesture of farewell, he turned on the heels of his black boots and walked away. Maggie, gulping back tears, shoved her way past all the drunk people, fists clenched, in the direction of her mother, who was slumped with Colm near the video poker machine.

  “I’m not going!” she screamed, grabbing her mother by the shoulder. But Laura didn’t even turn around. She hiccupped, once, and watery vomit splashed onto the floor between her legs. Maggie let go of her mother’s shoulder then, her rage replaced not exactly with pity, but with such a tired disgust with her whole pathetic family that she gave up.

  Kevin never came home at all that night, and the next afternoon, Nanny Ei drove them to O’Hare.

  On a damp Saturday afternoon in late October, Maggie sprawled on her bed, leafing through an issue of Spin. To her mother’s absolute shock, Kevin had made good on his promise to send a care package to his goddaughter, and it had arrived earlier in the week, a large manila envelope stuffed with Twizzler’s licorice, a tape
of Selfish Fetus’s new single, “Nightstick,” and all the September music magazines. “I can’t believe it,” Laura had said in wonder. “He never keeps any of his promises.”

  “Maybe not to you,” Maggie responded, snatching the package from her mother’s hands. As she marched off to her room, the sudden anger that had flared up inside of her was now replaced just as quickly with a sour feeling of guilt—these days, she seldom felt the same emotion for more than ten minutes at a time. She closed the door and settled onto her bed with the candy and the magazine, happy, at least, for the privacy of her bedroom. One of the nice parts about moving to Ireland was that Maggie had her own room for the first time since Ronnie was born. And although she sometimes missed the simple reassurance of her little sister’s breathing in the night, Maggie could now listen to “Nightstick” without being asked what the lyrics meant, or cry when she felt sad without being asked what was wrong, or change her clothes without having to hide in the closet so that Ronnie wouldn’t stare at her breasts and ask her how old she was when she grew them (“I don’t know, it’s not like they inflated one night while I was sleeping”), and what they felt like (“skin”), and whether she needed help with all those bra hooks (“No, weirdo!”).

  The house was quiet—Laura had gone into town, where she’d picked up part-time work as a cashier at Dunne’s, Ronnie was over at a new friend’s house, and Colm was outside cutting the front grass. If she listened very carefully, Maggie could hear the waves at the edge of town sucking cold pebbles out to sea and hurling them back again. Just as it occurred to her that this wasn’t such a bad way to pass a Saturday, she heard a tentative knock at her door.

  “Yeah?”

  She put down her magazine and the door opened just enough for Colm, sweaty and reeking of fresh grass, to stick his head in.

  “Neighbor’s dog had puppies last night,” he said. “I thought I’d go up and have a look. Wanna come?”