by Wendy Wunder
My father’s eyes are blue. Not a blank clear aqueous blue, but a flickering and infinitely faceted blue like the fake gems in class rings. His stare penetrates the collar of my trench coat and burns in two icy hot spots on my neck. I know he is there before I turn around.
Seeing him drunk again is my greatest fear. For two years I’ve been treading lightly around him, tolerating his biting insults, catering to his loneliness and neediness, earning my own money for college with his wacko scheme, just so I wouldn’t have to witness what I know is happening right behind me at this very moment.
It’s like being dropped into a black hole. A vacuum of existence. When I turn around, I will be instantly orphaned because I’ll know no one can hack it. And no one is in charge. But it’s worse than being orphaned because at the same time I am tethered to his failure. His problems are tied around my heart. I will never get away. I am afraid. But I turn around.
He holds my gaze for a second. His eyes and pinkening face look swollen. His thick fingers are clumsy as they stir the melting ice in his emptied rocks glass. He opens his mouth to say something to me across the room, but then his eyes burn in anger. He can so easily turn this into my fault. If I hadn’t witnessed it, it could easily have been denied and forgotten. But since I am here, I am witness, and he is defeat. He lets his head drop to the bar for dramatic effect.
And I learn that facing your greatest fear is liberating. You no longer have to worry about it, because it has already happened. And you have survived. I want to face some more fears, it feels so freaking liberating. I want to just jump off the freaking Brooklyn Bridge.
I also want to cry. But I have to wait till I get into the car.
“What about breeding?” Noah says as I climb back into the passenger seat. He hadn’t stopped talking the entire time I was in the bar, his jaws robotically moving up and down without changing his blank but beautiful facial expression. “What if the extraterrestrials need us to help them reproduce or something, then they could . . .”
“Shut up, Noah,” I say, which is seriously against the rules of this vehicle.
Zoe, who’d been busy backing the car out of the driveway, slams on the brakes and looks at me. “No one tells Noah to shut up,” she says.
“Just this once, I need a tell-Noah-to-shut-the-hell-up card,” I say. I don’t lose my composure, but as I stare at her, one tear slides down over the hump of my chubby cheek.
“What happened in there?” Zoe asks.
“Never mind,” I say.
From the backseat, Noah starts up again. Something about wormholes and dying stars.
“Shut the fuck up, Noah,” Zoe says calmly, and she puts the car back in reverse then peels out of the parking lot.
Noah stays quiet for about three miles and then sheepishly asks, “Do you feel sadness-slash-despair, Hannah?”
“A little, Noah, yeah. I’ll get over it, though. Thanks for checking in.”
“Hannah, guess what?”
“What, Noah?”
“Black holes . . .”
NEGLIGENCE
Ethan Drysdale’s house, like mine, is on the lake.
As a young groom, my father bought a summer cottage at the bottom of a hill and promised to convert it into a real home. That’s numero uno rule of real estate, though: Don’t buy a house at the bottom of a hill. At the bottom of the hill, at the edge of the lake, our tiny house is constantly slipping in a murky puddle of mud. He used to spend his free time on Saturdays, hungover and sour, channeling the masonry skills of his father, trying to build runoff diverters and tamp the constant flow of water into the basement. But he’s given up now. Now that he doesn’t have to live there and step over the puddles in the concrete to get to the washing machine.
My mother and I are used to it.
• • •
Everything in Ethan Drysdale’s house closes properly with a soft and heavy click. Like a quick French kiss.
The French doors. The drawers. The secrets. The Jacuzzi cover. The boathouse. All of them open and close quietly as rich kids set up for the party. The house is nothing less than a compound. There’s an ancient stone carriage house. An art studio. A garage. A tennis court. An outdoor kitchen. A heated pool. Everything aglow with an underwatery light. Someone has strategically placed fishbowls on the tables, each filled with one bright blue betta fish.
The boathouse has a deck on top of it from which a waterslide dives and laps at the lake like a bright turquoise dragon tongue. The three boats and two jet skis have been stowed away in dry dock for the winter, but a water trampoline still floats absurdly off the port side of the dock, tonight’s wicked wind trying to whip it into the air like a giant black Frisbee.
Couples congregate on the patio in chaise lounges situated close to outdoor heaters shaped like big silver trees. The wool blankets they use to keep themselves warm give them an excuse to let their hands wander into each other’s laps.
I don’t know who stripped first, but the Jacuzzi is full of glistening naked adolescents sitting shoulder to shoulder with looks of faux bravado on their faces. Some girl is dropping toasted marshmallows into their mouths as she walks around the perimeter in her string bikini and crocheted cover-up. The missed marshmallows melt in the hot water and create a brownish white meringue foam that floats on top of the water.
We do not blend. Me in my crisp white blouse holding a case of beer, Zoe in her poncho and high gray boots that come over her knees like a swashbuckler, and Noah, who has a cold and who sniffles as he wipes away some snot with the back of his hand. We stand on the deck above the pool and look out across the lake, waiting for someone to notice us.
Across the lake the amusement park rises bold and stark; kids are huddled on the beach in a mist . . . It’s a line from a Bruce Springsteen song that all of us know, whether we admit to it or not. We are from Jersey, after all.
The amusement park is old, crumbling, and abandoned. It kills Ethan Drysdale’s parents that they have to look at it every day. The rumor is they’re trying to buy it and turn it into condos. Which are much less interesting to look at, I would think, than the ghostly remains of a carnival. It’s beautiful to me. The serpentine humps of the old roller coaster. The rusting silver rocket swings still hanging and creaking in this wind. It’s a dream. Or a nightmare, depending on your perspective. I want to draw it.
“Were you invited to this soirée?” I ask Zoe.
“Define invited,” she says.
“Invited means: having requested the—” Noah begins.
“Not in the strictest sense of the word,” Zoe interrupts. “I was loosely invited.”
By whom, I was about to ask, but then I saw him. Tommy Flanagan. He is the link. The crossover. The only one of us who can move fluidly between the schools. The public and the private, because, I surmise, he’s the one selling the marijuana, which he shouldn’t be selling to some of the dudes here, because I recognize them from their mandatory attendance at my father’s AA meetings.
“Ice!” Zoe waves to him, and he gives a little salute, coming up through the basement to meet us on the deck. His hair is prematurely white. People used to call him Salt-n-Peppa when he had begun to go gray in ninth grade, but that was too long, so they abbreviated it to Peppa, and then when he lost all trace of black, he became Ice.
Everyone loves Ice. Except for me. I don’t love him the way he loves me. He stops by the hot dog cart once in a while just to make sure I’m all right, and he calls me Mary. For the Mary in “Thunder Road” or “Mary Queen of Arkansas.” His Bruce Springsteen–obsessed firefighter uncle died on 9/11 and left him all his albums and memorabilia. And now Ice is a Bruce fanatic. Which is kind of anachronistic. It’s as if he just arrived here from a place called 1979.
I’ve told him it’s an insult, calling me Mary. Bruce himself admits she “ain’t a beauty,” but hey, she’s all right.
“You ain’t a beauty right now, Mary,” Ice answers, “but I have a keen vision of the future, and you are going to outshine all of these losers in ten years.”
Ice believes in me. Which is nice. I’m flattered. But just because I’ll probably be stuck here for eternity doesn’t mean I have to date the townie drug dealer. I think of him as a creepy older brother.
“Mary,” Ice says, and he takes my hand and plants a soft kiss on the back of it. I shudder.
“Hi, Tommy,” I say.
“Let me take this for you,” he says, and he hoists the case of beer on his shoulder and escorts us to the patio down by the pool where Ethan is grilling shish kebabs, trying to marinate them with a brush while holding the lid of the grill open against the wind. This does not happen at townie parties. At townie parties there are cans of beer and people playing drinking games around a Formica kitchen table.
Zoe doesn’t waste any time. She glides over to the grill and begins to seduce Ethan with some suggestive wielding of the pepper grinder. I watch her work her magic for a second—Ethan is already licking something off her fingers—and then I search for a room with a TV where I can deposit Noah.
I find a cozy guest room deep in the recesses of the house and tuck Noah under the quilt of an enormous king-sized bed. Lucky for me there is a Star Trek marathon on channel 13.
“Here, Noah,” I say as I fluff his pillow and turn on Star Trek. “If you need me, just call.” I write my cell phone number on a piece of paper and tape it to the landline in the guest room and then go in search of some rich-kid libations.
For the first time ever, I’m not afraid of getting drunk. I’m kicking fear’s ass tonight. Why should I be the only one holding things together? Why can’t I let my hair down, straggly as it is?
Outside, Zoe is in the pool with Ethan, which is bold, but at least they’re semi-clothed and in public. Steam rises from the water like a witch’s brew. The wind is whipping up ripples all around them, and people are starting to head inside. One of the tall space heaters topples over. Some of the private-school girls, their long hair gleaming and glossy as if polished with wax, giggle and point at the couple now kissing in the pool. I overhear the word slumming when Tommy hands me a Coke.
I’m about to run over to Zoe and intervene. Give her the signal that she needs to slow down. We have a signal—an entire language, actually—that we developed to help Zoe check her most outlandish impulses. I’m about to step in, when Tommy says, “Now that’s a power couple.”
“You think?” I consider, as I watch Zoe wrap her legs around Ethan’s torso. They seal their foreheads together as he pushes her through the water toward the steps at the far side of the pool. He seems gentle, and this is obviously consensual. They are immediately intimate, their bodies bent around each other in the shape of a heart. “You really think she’s okay with him?” I ask Tommy.
“Ethan?” Tommy asks. “Take a look around. She could do a lot worse.”
But just then, Zoe unhooks her bra and throws it into a tree, letting out a wild cackle.
“I’m going in,” I say.
“Leave them,” Tommy insists. “He’s a good guy.”
“Okay, but then I’m going to need something stronger than this,” I say, holding up the Coke.
“Not for you. I’m protecting your womb and your skin from the ravages of alcohol.” He is utterly smarmy. The smarmiest.
“Get me a beer,” I tell him, “and one of those Red Bull things.”
He looks at me without moving.
“Now.”
Just then, an enormous white streak of lightning zippers across the sky like a crack in an eggshell, threatening to cut the dark in half.
“Okay,” Tommy says. “You don’t have to invoke the power of the heavens.”
A wild crack of thunder then spanks the house and echoes across the lake.
Ethan and Zoe finally climb giddily out of the pool, but I lose track of them. I think they’ve headed toward the boathouse.
“I hope your friend knows what she’s getting herself into,” one of the private-school girls laughs snidely.
“She can handle herself,” I say as I twist open my first ever beer. Luckily it’s cold enough to mask the taste of it. I plop down on a couch in the basement, drink two of them really quickly.
I grab one of the Red Bull concoctions and begin sauntering around the house. No one sees me. It’s like I’m moving around behind the wallpaper, in another dimension, but I can see everything that they do. My body feels warm. My limbs get slow and heavy, and there’s a numbness in my teeth.
One by one, glossy-haired girls pair off with newly muscled adolescents who pin them against the wall and try to swallow them with open-mouthed kisses.
I stumble my way to the gigantic kitchen, which is made of stone. They even have a fire brick oven for making pizza, and a stone hood built around the stove. “Who lives here?” I ask out loud. “Oprah?” No one answers.
Copper pots and pans glint and gleam in the track lighting as they hang in orderly rows from a wrought-iron ladder above the stone kitchen island. A group of teens engages in the sharp banter of the elite. They stand tall and look each other in the eye. Like teens in Scandinavia, I think foggily. Since preschool, their teachers have been paid to tell them how truly amazing they are, and so they have the supreme confidence of kings and queens.
A broad-shouldered lacrosse-playing specimen leans comfortably against the counter and says, “My dad rents to them. They get all their rent paid through Section Eight, so it’s a guaranteed paycheck for him every month.”
“What’s Section Eight? The government pays part of the rent?” another boy asks.
“The government pays all of it,” lacrosse boy says, waving his beer in the air. “These women just keep having kids with different fathers so they can live for free off the state.”
“That’s interesting,” someone loudly blurts. Wait, was that me? Am I daring to debate lacrosse boy? Everyone looks at me and gets quiet. I put my head down but continue quietly. “So the women are solely to blame?” I ask.
“Yes,” he answers.
“And not the men who get them pregnant and refuse to support their children? The men are within their rights to walk away and let the kids be supported by the government? I guess they didn’t want to have sex. They were tricked into it by these duplicitous women. Interesting,” I say and then move toward the steps that lead to the basement. I can feel a whole group of eyes on me. It is silent until someone says, “Was that the hot dog girl?”
I walk downstairs and look out the sliding glass door. The rain pelts it now and slides down the pane in complicated tributaries. I press my forehead against the glass to cool it and watch as more lightning spiders through the sky. A blue crackling vein. A white tree. An orange zipper.
I’m just about to head out and look for Zoe—it’s been too long—when someone taps me on the shoulder.
I jump and turn around.
It’s Danny Spinelli.
The alcohol has jumbled everything. Turned it upside down. Suddenly everything is hilarious. Ethan. My father. Zoe traipsing braless around the backyard. Rich kids leaning against the counter, their elbows bent up behind them, purposefully flexing their triceps. Hilarious.
“Um,” Danny starts, his face blushing again but only in those two cute circles on his cheekbones. “So what’s funny?” he asks.
And that is funny to me, too. Asking what’s funny is so outrageously funny because how am I going to explain that everything is funny, because if it’s not, it’s just too, too bone-crushingly sad to tolerate.
“Vitameatavegamin,” I slur.
“What?” he says. His eyes wink a little as he sideways grins.
“You know, the I Love Lucy episode,” I say. “Or do rich kids not watch that? I’m outta my league here,” I say, moving my beer bottle around in
a sloppy circle to indicate here. This party.
“I’m not one of them,” Danny says and smiles. “And I know the Vitameatavegamin episode.”
“I just thought since I am a little, like, schnockered, I would try to say Vitameatavegamin. Try it,” I say. “Vita . . .”
“Vita,” he says, looking down.
“Meata.”
“You’re kooky,” he says.
“Kooky? Who says ‘kooky’?”
“I do,” he says.
“Meata,” I say again, touching the lip of my bottle to my own bottom lip.
“Meata,” he obeys, peeling some of the label off his beer bottle.
“Good,” I say. “Vegamin.”
“Vegamin,” he says, and when he does, he looks up. He looks me square in the eye for the first time since that kiss in sixth grade. And every cliché thing from the romance books happens at once. Time stops. We’re alone in a vacuum-like orb. It’s like being inside a snow globe. Things fade in the periphery. My body falls away, except for a slight tingling, you know where. My eyes water. My pupils probably dilate to the size of quarters to let as much of him in as possible. When, dammit, the thunder claps again, and Rebecca’s cheerleading voice echoes down the staircase, popping our wondrous love bubble.
“Danny!”
“Crap,” he says. “I gotta go,” and he rushes up the stairs two at a time. “Call me,” he says. I think he says, “Call me.”
I sit on the couch in complete awe of what just happened. And I’m suddenly extremely heavy with exhaustion. I want to fall asleep as soon as possible. I promise myself I’m just going to close my eyes for five minutes before I go out and find Zoe. I just want five minutes to dream about Danny. Sometimes I can do that. Think about something as I’m falling asleep so it will show up in my dreams.
