Downers Grove (10 page)

“He said he was having his exclamation point.”

Tracy cracked up. “So how did you stop him?” She pillaged her tape case, found her Riot Grrl compilation, cranked up L7.

“Stop him what?”

“You know, from a home run on opening day.”

“He stopped himself. I was looking for a condom in my purse when his beeper went off. He told me it meant there was an accident on the highway, but I found out this morning he used the tow truck to steal a car out of the Meadowbrook parking lot.”

“What?”

“Mom's car broke down on the way to church and it was towed to the gas station. When I asked if Bobby was working tonight the guy said the cops had already been there this morning asking the same question.”

“Why would he steal a car? He already has two.”

“I think his friends needed parts for the car. He told me this whole story about his past, now I wonder if any of it was true.”

“Do you suppose he's fired?” Tracy asked.

“He might be in jail.”

Tracy rummaged for a cigarette, working her pockets with increasing speed. She found an empty package, threw it in the backseat.

“What's your mood ring say?” Tracy asked.

I held the ring up to the light. “Blue and white,” I said.

“What's blue and white mean?”

“Moody, I guess.”

We rolled down the hill past the glass-box office buildings snugging the interstate. There were no names on the buildings, no identifying colors.

“Look!” Tracy pointed. Somebody had spray-painted on the Village of Lombard sign,
HOME OF THE UNABOMBER
.

M
Y
locker is on the third floor, which is a drag. There's nothing worse than StairMaster first thing in the morning. We're not allowed to decorate them on the outside, but on the inside it's makeover city. Mine is plastered with pictures torn from magazines of boys whose names I'll never know and whose faces I'll never meet. My music shrine is currently dedicated to Françoise Hardy. She's a French pop star from the sixties. I got hooked after buying a couple of CDs at Jewel's garage sale. How he came across them was a long sordid story involving an Air France pilot that I will not repeat here.

Anyway, the infirmary has been bustling with graduation fever. Today we cast our ballots for king and queen of the last dance. What a sorry lot of choices. Everyone is matching up for the final party, signing yearbooks with promises to get in touch over the summer. As anxious as I am for it to end, I can
sense a certain loss, like a distant relative dying. I'll have to ask myself some fun questions like “What am I going to do with my life?” and spend hours in front of the mirror repeating “I'm not a loser. I'm not a loser.” My grandma wants me to go to college, but I just dread the idea of more school. What else is there to know?

My counselor suggested that if I want to be a filmmaker I should get a job at a video store. “If you want to be a writer,” he said, “try a bookstore.”

“What if I want to be a supermodel?” I asked.

“Well, you've certainly got the attitude.” He stood to let me know our session was over. “Don't be afraid of life's challenges,” he said, patting me on the back, then waved in the next student.

I went to the library, opened my social studies book, and stared at the same paragraph for an hour. The room smelled like static electricity, the only noise came from the hum of microfiche and Xerox machines. The library was unusually crowded, a side effect of last-minute cramming. I thought I had it bad, but the girl across from me was obviously going through a serious mental breakdown. Her skin had a feverish purple tint and she was breaking out all over the place. She had that hollowed eyed “I've been studying for two hundred hours” face, when somebody is trying to cram a whole year's worth of education into the last twenty minutes. Wearing black on black on black, her orange hair was teased with a couple gallons of hairspray so that she looked like a living troll doll. She was possessed by a book called
In Cold Blood,
probably picking up a few pointers.

My boat was sinking just as quickly. I have to turn in an
economics report on downsizing tomorrow that's totally depressing because, when all is said and done, downsizing basically means we'll end up doing our parents' jobs at half the wages. In some ways it seems like the more intelligent I get the more aware I become of my own inherited doom. I glanced over the next paragraph, then flipped through a few more pages, looking for a chart or a photograph to ease my pain. My eyes were beyond tired.

Sometimes school just seems like a way to keep our minds off television, a little bit of vegetables in a world of brain candy. Other times it felt like a discipline compound, a place to be brainwashed and homogenized, where everyone learned to be just like everyone else. I wonder what it's done to me and how many years it will take to shed all this skin. I wonder if I could sue for damages.

W
HEN
I got home Mom was in the kitchen sporting some slinky black dress, black nylons, and some extra-high heels. A couple pieces of luggage were stacked beside the door.

“Where are you going?” I set my books at the bottom of the staircase.

“Honey.” She posed in front of the hall mirror while adjusting an earring. “Dan has some business in Las Vegas and he asked me to come along.”

“What kind of business?”

“Oh you know, religious stuff.”

“Since when does God hang out in Vegas?”

“I'll be back on Monday. No parties! Do you hear me young lady?” She acted all authoritarianlike and everything. “I left some money and the number for the Stardust Hotel beside the phone. There's spaghetti sauce thawing in the fridge.” She
kissed me on the cheek and then scribbled on another layer of lipstick. Dan pulled into the driveway. I heard the car door slam, then the doorbell rang.

Mom opened the door. “You're late,” she said. Dan kissed her. Her shoulders caved and she let out a crazy giggle and gently pushed him away. “Stop it,” she said.

“Hi, Chrissie.” He waved at me all innocent, like he was Tom Sawyer taking Becky for a peek in the caves. The astronaut took my mother's bags and locked them in the trunk, then swung around the car and opened the door for her.

“You keep an eye on your brother,” Mom said, pointing at me, then leaned into the car. Dan closed Mom's door then pranced over to his.

Standing at the window was like watching a movie of my own life ending, the cameras still rolling. Mom waved at me from behind the windshield and I waved back at her. The car slid out of the driveway and curled up the cul-de-sac. My stomach was queasy. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a Diet Coke.

The basement door cracked open and the troll popped out of his crypt. “How are we supoosed to get food?” my brother asked, standing in the stairwell, wrapped in his musty bathrobe, suddenly paranoid about his dwindling frozen waffle supply.

“You'll just have to learn how to use the microwave all by yourself,” I said. “Don't you think there are a few slightly larger issues here?”

“What? Are we out of frozen pizza?”

“You're about to be adopted!”

David waddled into the kitchen like a hundred-year-old man and opened the freezer. “I don't know what you're getting
so worked up about, that guy is about as dangerous as a couch.”

“I think they're going to Vegas to get hitched.”

“Well then, we should celebrate.” He shut the freezer door and opened the refrigerator.

“That's it?”

“You got any better ideas?”

I went upstairs and lay down on my bed. If I had a dollar for every minute spent staring out my dirty window scribbling wandering poems about misplaced feelings and aborted love I'd be as rich as Madonna, but I never thought I'd be draining ink from my pen worrying about my mother.

It's weird when your mom's trial and error starts to overshadow your own. The astronaut has shuttled her off to sin city with the intention of a final seduction. The man is in high gear, whipping out his finest polyester, working all the night moves. Mom is defenseless. She's a suitcase looking for a vacation, and so she swims into the dark corners of DuPage County and surfaces with Captain Kirk, right-wing lover boy, used-car dealer, man of God. He's a step back in her evolution. She's sacrificing big-time. Mom needs to get out more, but I can't be the cruise director fishing for a dreamboat. Her decision to get married has really put a snag in my tights. I know
I should be happy for her and feel all that “if she's happy, then I'm happy” stuff, but it's not working. I can't find the light switch.

My brother is about as helpful as Mr. Potato Head. He'll spend the rest of his life baking in front of the boob tube, shrugging me off with enlightened arrogance, as if there were any accomplishment to swallowing pills that spin your eyeballs in circles. David's locked into a superslack depression cycle. Like a giant vacuum cleaner, he sucks all the air out of the room. His obsession with death has been flourishing. His wardrobe has been reduced to black pajamas. He's taken up clove cigarettes and likes to disappear on long walks through the cemetery where he traces etchings from tombstones. One wall of his room is covered with them. He also bought a bug light a few months ago, hung it on the porch, and started a collection of moths zapped by his purple ring of fire. Their beautiful wings harden into stiff weightless specimens. He spends hours building meticulous wood cases in my father's workshop to exhibit their frozen eternal beauty. The moths are pinned side by side with their Latin names typed onto small strips of white paper and glued to a purple velvet lining. It's one of the few occupations he seems to enjoy, as if maybe he were studying to be a taxidermist or an undertaker or a serial killer or something. He's getting weirder by the minute. But maybe I'm just projecting my own cloud upon him. He could be perfectly normal for all I know.

My death princess hours are usually spent in the willow tree playing with the puppetry of danger, but last night I rode my bike through Denburn Woods and sat beside the Burlington Northern tracks. The greasy scent of railroad ties smelled like
ancient history. The tracks looked like an old scar sewing up some forgotten wound. I watched a freight train rumble through town. Its tall rattling cars were rusting; beside the faded serial numbers were exotic names like Pacific and Chesapeake. Some steel doors were open and I could see shadowy figures hunched in the moonlight, hobos or homeless people headed for the next stop or the one after that. It was one of those nights when I wanted to either jump the train or put my head on the tracks, but didn't have the courage to do either one.

Outside the window, beyond the trees, the thick black plume of the Lemont Fire billowed into the heavens like a mushroom cloud, then tilted and dissipated into the upper atmosphere. I wondered if the atmosphere was like an old dishwasher, and whether after a while the glasses would start coming out spotted.

On Earth Day a scientist from Argonne National Laboratory came to our school and told us toxicology was one of the fastest growing fields in the scientific community. Sometimes I dream of being a forest ranger, someone who tracks bears and repairs trails and points in the right direction when befuddled tourists find themselves lost at a trailhead, but something tells me I'm going to end up a cashier at Taco Bell or working the Slurpee machine at 7-Eleven for snotty teenagers raised on
Beavis & Butt-head.
My greatest fear is to be known as the girl with the purple hair that works at Barnes & Noble.

Tracy says we should move into the city after graduation and get an apartment in Wicker Park because a lot of cool bands live there. She thinks we should start our own band and become famous rock stars with lunch boxes full of money to buy frilly dresses and fingernail polish.

But that dream reeks of some hole-in-the-wall apartment and a menial job that provides a check just barely big enough to blow on potato chips and beer. Tracy wants me to work at a copyshop so I can make free posters. I told her working in a bookstore would make me a better lyricist, then we got into a huge fight over who would write the songs, even though neither one of us can play a single chord on the guitar yet.

I
F
you're going to have a party, life begins at 7-Eleven, the front line of civilization, the glass doors to convenience, the place most likely to accept my fake ID. Tracy bounced into the parking lot and nearly made a hood ornament out of a pair of skaters jumping over empty beer cans. She swayed to the right and parked beside the Dumpster, as far away as possible from the front door. David handed me a twenty. “Think quantity, not quality,” he said, leaning up to let me out of the backseat.

The skaters were dressed like scarecrows: big baggy pants, baby dread hair, and golf caps turned around backward. Their boom box was blasting the new Beastie Boys record. A pair of waifish tomboy groupies stood next to the yellow plastic garbage can with hands planted deep in their front pockets. They looked like a couple of totem poles. A red sign in the window said
WE DON'T SERVE SKATERS
.

The tallest one jumped off the parking curb, did a curlicue pattern on his board, and followed me up to the door. His hair was dyed Gatorade green, his skin already pockmarked by years of french fries and Pepsi. His eyes had a crazy intensity that made him if not sexy at least alluring.

“Say a … miss, can you do me a favor?” He rolled closer, waved a five spot with his right hand. “I lost my ID and my dog just got run over by a car and my dad, he's got Alzheimer's disease 'cause he swears I'm not his son, and well, my friends and I, we've come across a wave of hostility from the management of this corporate money-laundering facility.” He pointed at the sign in the window. “Would you mind picking up a few quarts for me and my brothers,” he said, nodding back toward his crew. They looked as gangly and dysfunctional as their leader, rocking out to the skanky noise booming from their blaster.