by Brent, Cora
We’d never been close, my brother and I, not even in those early years when siblings tended to group together just because they were stuck with each other. He was always leading around a pack of the most troublesome Cross Point boys who probably wouldn’t have paid me any attention even if I wasn’t Tony Durant’s little sister and expressly off limits.
“Fuck with my sister,” he always said, “and I’ll fuck you up.” Said by someone else it might have been dismissed as brash grandstanding. But Tony kept his promises, particularly the violent ones.
Even now I thought of Tony as a perpetual Peter Pan, only more ominous. When I gazed at old family photos and found his defiant sneer it seemed impossible we’d grown up in the same house. Tony dropped out of CPV High two months before the end of his senior year. It might not have made a difference at that point; rumor was there was no way the administration was going to let him walk with his class when he scarcely managed to show up. That was the greatest battle in the Durant Family War. My father called Tony a lousy loafing miscreant. Tony flicked a cigarette at him and laughed, “You square little prick,” while my mother threw her body between them before one killed the other. In the end my brother shrugged, packed a bag, and disappeared for a year and a half.
As for me, the only time I vividly recall earning my mother’s disappointment was when she caught me with her hidden copy of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. I was thirteen and the whole ‘zipless fuck’ angle left me a little shaken but eager to find out what the hell it all meant. So even after Grace removed the dog-eared book from my sweaty little hands I was determined to do some research of my own.
Of course the Cross Point Village Library proved woefully insufficient for this endeavor. Even if I’d been able to articulate what I was looking for, I would never have had the guts to shock old half-blind Mrs. Hennessy who had been the librarian since around the time of the Hindenberg disaster.
As such, life had yet to present me with a coherent version of a ‘zipless fuck’. I’m not sure I would have taken the option anyway. But after the Brian disaster, I was beginning to feel the lack.
The ‘Welcome to Cross Point Village’ sign looked rather spotty and abused but I smiled ruefully when I saw it. As I turned down the main street which in grand tradition was titled Main Street, I figured I could navigate this place with my eyes closed.
I peered down the calm strip fading establishments and realized a few key letters of the Durant’s Drug Store sign were missing. Thus, my father was the proprietor of ‘Durant’s rug S ore’. I didn’t see Alan Durant’s ancient Dodge parked out front. Oddly enough, he might have finally decided to trust Nancy, his long suffering counter clerk, to close out for the night.
Aside from a few kids careening around on bicycles, there weren’t many people about. I was grateful. I needed a good night’s sleep before facing mass pleasantries. As the bell of the Congregationalist church choked out a 6 pm chime, I left Main Street behind and turned down the maze of side streets which bordered the center of town.
Polaris Lane was a dead end street at the south end of town. Twenty one distinct homes lined the narrow street and once it was the largest piece of my world. Now, every time I made that right turn it seemed just a little smaller than it had before. When I was a kid I often puzzled over the very name, repeating it silently in my head and wondering over the coincidence. Polaris. The North Star. The way home. God, I never wanted anything so badly as to get away from it.
I stopped in front of the modest Cape Cod style house, braking in front of the maple tree. I noted with some displeasure that the tree was certain to drop leaf detritus on my white luxury vehicle. As I placed the car in park I turned to stare critically at the house I’d been raised in. The hedges were mildly overgrown and the driveway needed to be resurfaced.
“Angela!” They poured out of the front door, radiantly beaming, before I even opened the door.
I grinned in spite of myself. I had thought this was the last place I wanted to be but unconditional adoration did have its pluses. Grace and Alan Durant were folding me into a crushing parental embrace before I’d even gained my footing next to the crumbling curb.
“My beautiful girl!” My mother exclaimed, affectionately patting my long curly hair.
“Missed you, kid.” My father tousled my hair as if I were five.
Grace had baked enough chicken tetrazzini to feed fifteen people. In between hearty bites my parents examined me as if I were a curious museum exhibit and issued a slew of questions.
How was my job? Was I getting enough sleep? And what about that nice young man I’d planning on bringing home?
I swallowed a bite of Italian bread and took a sip of wine, delaying the moment.
“Actually,” I finally said. “I’m not going to be seeing Brian anymore.”
My mother’s eyes widened. “What? Why?”
I shrugged, carefully keeping my eyes cast down. “Just didn’t work out.”
My father nodded vaguely but my mother’s mouth pursed into a little mew of disappointment. Poor Grace, she was virtually frothing at the mouth for grandchildren. Contrary to all his wild liaisons, Tony turned out to be quite careful. At least, no happy accidents had ever stepped forward. And at the rate which I managed to secure long term relationships, my ovaries may as well just wither away and perish.
I tried to change the subject. “How’s business, Dad?”
My father winced. Durant’s Drug Store had been a landmark for over sixty years. But as the fortunes of the populace continued to decline, it was getting increasingly difficult for him to keep the doors open. Anyway, with neither one of his children eager to take the reins it seemed he was only deferring the inevitable.
“Hanging in there, Angela,” my father said reluctantly. He patted my hand. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Have you thought about what we talked about last time? Branching out into other merchandise to broaden your customer base? Or re-opening the deli counter?”
But Grace Durant had little patience for shop talk. “I need your help, Angela,” she interrupted. “I have six apple pies to bake for the party.”
I peered out the window at the row of houses which were as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror. There was the Johnsons’ fading blue monstrosity, the Kilbournes’ trim gingerbread style Victorian, the Bendettis’ ramshackle ranch. I knew them all. Most neighbors didn’t leave Polaris lane. They just faded away and their children built new lives on top of the old ones in the homes they’d grown up in. At this same time tomorrow the street would be closed off and crammed full of activity as the annual block party got underway.
“How is the old neighborhood?”
My mother refilled her wine glass. “Well, the Cortez girl got divorced and moved back with her two little sons. And you know Mary Bendetti’s cancer carried her off in January.” She paused, frowning. “That boy of hers has been skulking around the last few months.”
“Marco?”
She nodded. “It seems he’s still trouble. Gave his poor mother a fine share of grief in his time. And now Diane Kilbourne says he tosses his snuffed cigarettes into her tulip garden.”
I tried not to smile. “Well, I suppose there are worse things he could do.”
My mother stared moodily into her wine glass as she considered the downhill slide of the neighborhood. “Mary left equal shares of the bar to Marco and Damien. I was hoping Damien would come back and take over the house but as far as I know he’s staying in New York.”
I found myself wondering curiously about Marco. I hadn’t exactly been in his orbit back at CPV High. Or even before then. He had a hell of a reputation which stretched back to junior high. Grown women stopped and stared when he sauntered past their purse-clutching frigidity. I supposed I was one of the very few local girls who had come of age in the early part of the decade without having been felt up by Marco ‘Banger’ Bendetti.
I hadn’t seen him since that distant graduation day seven years ago. 1982. I wa
s standing in front of my house, cap in hand, posing under the front yard maple tree to appease Grace.
Marco had rolled up on the motorcycle which had been his constant companion for the last year. He flashed me a grin.
“Want a ride?”
I dropped my tassel right on the freshly cut lawn. Of course I’d grown up seeing Marco all the time but we weren’t friendly. Marco Bendetti could have any Cross Point Village High School female he wanted. All he needed to do was crook a broad finger and they would have come running, panties already in a puddle at their feet. And as Marco sidled there next to my curb with his bike humming between his powerful thighs, I knew I was one of them.
“N-not right now,” I stammered.
Marco grinned, shrugging. “I thought as much,” he said and gunned the bike down the street, turning the corner towards town.
But high school was a long time ago. Marco apparently took off for parts unknown a few days later. From the snippets my mother had gleaned from Mary Bendetti over the years, he was somewhere in the southwest, periodically finding trouble, always breaking his mother’s heart.
My parents kept casting happy glances in my direction and I felt mildly sorry that for a brief moment I hadn’t even wanted to come. I smiled at my mother. “How about we get started on those pies?”
By the time I retreated to my bedroom I reeked of cinnamon and my hands were raw from rolling pie crusts. It felt good to sink into the narrow bed which had held me through years of dreams and uncertainties. My room was a time capsule, virtually unchanged in the seven years since I’d moved out. As if it were always awaiting my return.
I languidly began to undress in front of a poster of The Go-Gos as the events of the day came rushing back. The humiliating recollection of Brian’s copy room infidelity led me to accidentally tear two buttons off my expensive silk blouse. I sat down on the edge of the bed, breathing heavily.
To hell with Brian. To hell with men.
I pulled my heels off and threw them across the room where they twisted wildly before managing to knock over a table lamp. I’d be damned if I was going to waste another minute of this short spin around the earth on shitheads like Brian Hannity. Still, the disgrace aspect was beginning to set in. I would not be eager to return to work next week.
“Angela?” My father’s worried voice was right on the other side of the door.
“I’m fine, Dad. Just dropped a book.”
“Must have been quite a book.” He sighed. “Good night, kid.”
I listened to his tired shuffle echo down the hallway and then the heavy tread of his feet thumping up the stairs. As I reached over and began to paw through my duffel bag I felt restless. I was wishing I really had brought a book. Something steamy and bodice-ripping with a lot of taut muscles and hard thrusts. I doubted there was any such thing in my father’s varnished oak bookcase. I was more likely to find such gems as Notes of Pre-Colonial Yeomen in Western Massachusetts. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to trouble Grace about whatever might be in her secret stash as it would almost certainly trigger uncomfortable Fear of Flying memories.
A flickering light outside caught my attention so I wandered across the small room to the single boxy window. I pulled back the delicate eyelet curtains handmade by Grace about a century and a half ago and gazed into the black summer evening.
There was a dark figure standing on the front porch of the Bendetti house. The flickering was due to the evidently dying porch light. The figure, a man, tapped the base and finally unscrewed the bulb, examining it.
“That boy of hers has been skulking about.”
I felt a little lightheaded as I realized the man had to be Marco Bendetti. There was no moon and with the porch light snuffed out I couldn’t see much of him, other than the outline of his tall, thickly muscled shape and the light of his cigarette as he stood for a moment on the front lawn.
Suddenly I realized that although I could not see him well, the ceiling light was blazing behind me and, if he were facing my direction, he could almost certainly see every inch of me. I further realized that the buttons I had angrily torn a few moments earlier had opened my blouse to the point where the endowments peeking out of my lacy white bra were brazenly visible.
After hastily closing the curtains and backing away from the window I nearly tripped over the bed. I wondered if I could summon the courage to search Grace’s belongings for that clandestine book.
I could use a zipless fuck, even a vicarious one.
CHAPTER THREE
Cross Point Village was one of those quiet throwback hamlets dotting greater New England which didn’t make it on to many maps.
Incorporated: 1761.
Population: Dwindling.
CPV’s greatest historical claim was that a handful of cannons had passed through its bucolic boundaries on the way to Fort Ticonderoga during the Revolutionary War some two hundred and change years ago. It remained a quiet nest of god-fearing farmers until advances of the nineteenth century brought the railroad and a bevy of gilded age capitalist aristocrats eager to escape the industrial choke of the teeming cities. Predictably, as the nation grew more mobile, the wealthy found more glamorous locations to spend their fortunes. On the perimeter of town there remained a handful of Gatsby-esque broken mansions which attracted colonies of mice. And horny teenagers.
Agrarian dependency was on the decline and it seemed CPV might fade into the wilderness like the handful of surrounding towns which lost their meaning. Boston might as well have been the surface of the moon for all the distant small town mattered to the moneyed overlords.
My family, the Durants, had been around since the colonial era when James Durant dragged his limp wife and a bevy of offspring across the Atlantic. My father once drew an exhaustively penciled family tree stretching back to William the Conquerer. But I’ve often stared at that one branch, the point which spoke of caution thrown to the wind, the abandonment of England, of home, for something unknown. I always wondered what James thought he was looking for. I wondered if he found it.
Just as the board of selectmen were beginning to panic over the town’s fading prosperity, someone murdered an archduke on the other side of the world and a deeply pocketed investor decided it was a good time to build a weapons armory in the shadow of the Berkshire Mountains.
The factory jobs attracted new blood to the region and old families like the Durants were joined by Francos and McCaffreys, Kaminskis and Bendettis. And so CPV grew and persevered.
The Great Depression shook a few leaves but the region managed to stay remarkably untouched through those awful years. The tiny Cross Point Village Museum housed in the basement of the library displayed a few pictures of this era. When large swaths of this immense nation were in a Dorothea Lange state of despair, the CPV townsfolk were apparently picnicking by local streams in merry fashion. My great grandfather abandoned his apple orchards and opened Durant’s Drug Store, a landmark which remained in business on the corner of Main Street and Maple.
When the armory closed in 1975 there was abject panic which I well remember. Town meetings were full of red-faced family men who wondered what the hell they were going to do now that the largest employer within driving distance had shut its doors. Western Massachusetts was renowned for the large number of educational institutions which presumably employed people, but all were too far for a comfortable commute.
My father, a lifelong historian and the current proprietor of Durant’s, had a brilliant idea. The Bicentennial was coming, the two hundred year celebration of whatever made a country into a country. Cross Point Village was a slice of Americana if ever one lived. Of course, of course it would appeal to tourists in search of their benighted vision of a patriotic experience.
And so commenced endless Saturdays working with my 4-H club as Main Street was diligently reordered. Those were happy times though, optimistic times. Every tired establishment from Durant’s Drugs to Kaminski’s Hardware received a facelift and a fresh coat of paint. Funds were r
aised to cement a giant replica cannon on a pedestal in the town square complete with a proud brass plaque which read as follows:
In the year of our lord 1775 the storied Green Mountain Boys under the command of Ethan Allen passed through the center of Cross Point Village in the company of a dozen cannons. These brave patriots were en route to capture Fort Ticonderoga in one of the boldest exploits of the Revolutionary War. God Bless them. And God Bless America.
Thirteen years after the failed Bicentennial revival, the plaque remained but the lettering had mercifully faded. The cannon itself had transformed into a rusting hulk often embellished with obscene graffiti. I knew my father still sighed and headed out there on quiet Sunday mornings to blacken the “Fuck CPV” decorative art. I never had the heart to tell him he was fighting a futile battle.
As fortunes declined and residents moved away, the boutique shops along Maple began to close. It was Mary Bendetti who reimagined Grandma’s Attic, a slumbering antique store, into the first Maple Street bar. Many of the old timers grumbled but my father was more pragmatic and his opinion carried a lot of weight. And so Grandma’s Attic became The Cave.
Staid old Maple Street was presently home to five seedy bars. Passing bikers discovered its appeal and began to descend with regularity. A shopper exiting the neat orderliness of Durant’s Drug Store had only to glance up and see rows of gleaming motorcycles squatting outside the low-roofed buildings nearby. It was rather an uneasy mix between the townies and the bikers but real trouble was infrequent.
Cross Point Village High school, home of the Cannons, was built in the 1950s with a hopeful eye towards the future. The building’s capacity far exceeded its population and even when I graduated seven years earlier there were an awful lot of empty rooms for students to duck into for illicit trysts. Not that such concerns ever found me. I graduated second in a class of sixty seven and my sole sexual encounter was when Keith French rudely stuck his tongue in my mouth and pinched my nipple when we spent a semester as uncomfortable lab partners.
