Downers Grove (11 page)

“You can keep the change,” he said, as if to jelly my toasting decision.

I took his five dollars, opened the glass door and headed for the beer cooler, grabbed a twelve-pack of Old Style for us and two quarts of Schlitz Malt Liquor for satan's children, then dragged it all up to the counter. The cashier was some aging hottie.

“Weren't you in my math class?” I tried flirting to avoid the ID mess altogether. His face scrunched up, and I saw him paging his memory bank, trying to come up with a matching face from his glorious past. It usually works. He gave me a second look while ringing up the beer.

“That's sixteen thirty-seven,” he said. “You got an ID?” I
handed him a twenty tucked around my card. He looked at the name, sifted his registry, passed it back. “You must be thinking of someone else.” He sorta puffed up his chest, as if that other guy I was thinking about was Arnold Schwarzenegger or something. He looked marinated in gloom, as if he was just biding time, waiting for the big tornado to put an end to his misery.

“I hated math.” He dipped his fingers into the till, dished out my change.

“Me too.” I stared at the purple stain on his orange smock, grabbed the bag, and walked out the door. The skaters circled me like a bunch of blood-hungry vampires.

“Don't try and rip us off, lady,” my romeo skatepunk said, whirling toward me.

I set their beers beside the garbage can. “Here ya go, sweetie.” I smiled. “Call me when you get a bigger chariot.” The beer rats jumped on the bag. I scooted out of the way, stepped off the ledge. My brother opened the car door, lifted his seat. He was curled over the dashboard with his ear pinned to the car speaker, trying to tune in some obscure Fox River pirate radio. I squeezed into the backseat. Tracy backed out and spun around the corner, mission accomplished.

For some reason Tracy was being unusually quiet, as if she were trying to emulate my brother's lack of communication with the outside world, like maybe he would notice her if she too were invisible, someone who made no effort to scrape his fragile surroundings. She obviously saw the
DO NOT DISTURB
billboard pasted to his pimple-scarred forehead.

“Earth to David,” I said. “Come in David.”

He didn't respond, fixated with the control knob of the radio, listening for a faint signal in the white noise.

“Yo, dj!” I slapped him on the back of the head.

“What?” he asked, still working the radio dial.

“Why do you take drugs?”

“To distract me from my boredom.”

“Are you bored now?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What can we do to make your life more interesting?”

“Take drugs.”

“I see. Are you suicidal?”

“Maybe.”

“I can't believe anyone would kill themselves over a concept.”

“It's a condition.”

“So turn on the air conditioner.”

“There's a gadget for every weakness, isn't there?” he asked.

“You're the one controlling the dial.”

“What are you two talking about?” Tracy asked.

My brother leaned toward Tracy. “The airwaves are full of static,” he said.

Tracy nodded, as if she understood what he meant.

David turned and looked at me. “Can I get off the couch now?” he asked.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just wanted to poke around the fire a bit.”

“And your conclusion, Doctor?”

“There's plenty of kindling.”

M
OM
blasts off with the astronaut so Mister Antisocial comes out of the cellar and decides, under the guided peer pressure of his morbid friends, to have a little get-together to celebrate his dubious accomplishments. Tracy, the social butterfly, has already announced it to half the universe, and I'm instantly Miss Popular at school. When I sat down in the cafeteria I was circled by the dogs of night, a group of degenerate snobs looking for a place to park their boyfriends. I gave them a bogus address, but that just added to the hysteria. I've become the flavor of the minute and was even picked for the best volleyball team in gym class.

Tracy drags me shopping, not once, but twice, for the elusive outfit that will capture the Zeitgeist and slay my brother into submission. She thinks that given the opportunity she can snag him into a luscious make-out session that will prove so distracting he'll forget his entire past, wrap around the moment,
and consume her until kingdom come. I told her all she had to do was just scrape up a few bong hits and buy a twelve-pack of Ding Dongs and she'd be
In Like Flint,
but Tracy has a mind of her own.

She was wearing a white miniskirt and a skintight baby tee with a small red heart pasted in the center, pink sparkle tights, and white Mary Janes. She looked like a scoop of vanilla ice cream with a cherry on top, which I presume is exactly the comparison she was looking for.

The teenager formerly known as David has decided to jam with some friends at the party, so they've been holed up in the basement night and day practicing three-chord moshes. The noise and repetition were unbearable, but the drummer was kind of cute.

This whole party thing was completely the wrong direction, it's so last year. I'm trying to project myself out of high school, far away from all the riffraff. I don't want to be the fairy godmother of puking teenagers who lost their car keys. I'm doing this for Tracy, and my brother, who seems strangely motivated by the potential for anarchy. The introvert will finally have a chance to interact with his public.

Tracy will park herself in front of the band and dance like a maniac until my brother looks up from his guitar strings long enough to discover he has groupies. I put her in charge of the backyard decor, so she strung multicolored tiki lights through the tree branches and stuck lawn torches in the grass around the perimeter.

“I want it to look like someone is going to sacrifice a virgin,” she said.

I did a house check, concealed anything remotely valuable, tied the can opener to the refrigerator door, made more ice, found another roll of paper towels in the cabinet. I opened a few more windows and took the fan out of the closet. David and his friends were doing bong hits in the garage, finalizing their set list. I loved David, but his music was a bit harsh.

“What do we do if the quarterback shows up with last year's football heroes?” I asked.

“Would you get over that,” Tracy barked. “Those losers wouldn't dare fuck with us because they know we're not afraid to fuck with them.”

“We're not?”

“No, we're not.”

The first people arrived around 9 P.M. and it was like a trout stream steadily thereafter. I stood at the door for a while but hardly recognized anyone. There were a lot of people from last year and the year before that, all my brother's underworld friends. It wasn't long before the backyard was full of slouching nobodies toting twelve-packs. David's bug zapper kept a crowd of stoners entertained. They stood in silent reverence for hours watching insects get toasted.

The party went its usual course. We were out of beer in about ten seconds. Cars lined the cul-de-sac, the house filled up with smoke, someone broke a glass in the kitchen, and then David's band kicked in and the house shook like a truck driving over a rickety bridge. It took one phone call from an irate neighbor and there were instantly men in blue uniforms on the front porch peering through the window. Word spread
through the crowd like there was an Ebola outbreak. People slipped out through the sliding-glass doors and disappeared into The Field, doubling back to collect their cars. The cops were creeping around the yard with flashlights, probably planting evidence like they did to O.J.

David was buried in the mobbed basement experimenting with deafening feedback and distortion. Sergeant Drexler gave me about five seconds to find the fuse box and drain the juice on David's petri dish and send all the rejects home to the safety of their parents' absent love. I smiled ear to ear and played the honor roll student, blamed the noise on the delinquency of today's youth and the lack of alternatives, i.e., a recreation hall where teenagers could mingle on Friday nights under the guidance of supervisors and sip punch and talk about conservative issues, like more cops and more jails. But then Drexler told me to shut up or I'd be spending the night in one, so I did, but only as a silent protest. I knew my rights and nobody had read them to me. Once the music was off, the cops cooled down and suddenly seemed anxious to get back to their doughnuts, coffee, and radar patrol on the backroads of suburban nowheresville.

The party was over before it got started. We were lucky nothing got wasted, considering how many empties were left behind. Tracy and I settled in the living room listening to one of my dad's old Astrud Gilberto records. We were both pretty wasted. David burst into the room and accused Tracy of inviting too many people.

“I did not!”

“You did so!”

And so on.

Some of David's friends made themselves at home and eventually crashed wherever they got comfortable. Tracy waited up half the night but never got the invitation she was hoping for. I found her in my bed sound asleep still wearing her white Mary Janes.

T
HE
next day I awoke with a vicious hangover and a severe dose of paranoia. Mom was coming home, which meant, among other things, that she was married, broke, or maybe both. Vegas was one of those towns in the back of my mind that flickered like an all-night movie. A dreamy world of lights and sensuality, of passion and heartbreak, a place where men are gangsters, women are whores, and the drinks are free.

Mom got out of the taxi wearing sunglasses as big as pancakes, looking like Jackie O. the morning after. She darted for the door as if she were weary about cul-de-sac headlines. I heard the key fit into the slot and the door suck open. Mom dropped her bags at the foot of the stairs. I had a feeling there was trouble. She came home at a strange time and in a strange car. Her footsteps into the kitchen did not hold the weight of true love and happiness. The refrigerator opened and closed. She shuffled through the mail.

“Is anybody home?” she yelled.

I didn't answer her. The house was quiet as a spider's web. The wind rattled the windows, and it looked like there was some serious rain charging out of the west. I wasn't very interested in dealing with one of her moods but felt hopelessly drawn by a scorching curiosity about her weekend, so finally I went downstairs to find out what happened.

Mom was outside picking up pears out of the yard. I could hear them plopping into the bucket. Each thump made me feel a little more uneasy. The trees were so old they shed fruit all year long. The pears weren't edible unless you were a squirrel. Mom used them for her compost. I couldn't tell whether she was working out aggression or just stretching after a long flight.

I opened the screen door. “Welcome back!” I shouted. I could tell a mile away Mom was upset. Her moods were as subtle as a car alarm.

“Need some help?” I asked.

“Sure.” She tossed me an empty bucket. “Did you guys have a party while I was gone?” She immediately put me on the defensive.

“Of course not,” I said. “Why?”

“I found beer bottles in two different places, the grass is matted down, there are cigarette butts everywhere. What was going on here? Woodstock?”

“Must have been those rotten little kids down the street. How was Vegas?”

“All right.” She sounded suspicious.

“Was the hotel nice?”

“It was fine.”

“Did you win any money?”

“Not really.”

“And the drinks were free?”

“Depends on your point of view.”

“Did you get married?”

“Dan took me to a party and turned into Hugh Hefner. He got it in his head that the bunnies were interchangeable.” Mom threw her hair back away from her face, as if she were swatting it all away. “I took a taxi to the airport and left on the next plane.”

“You just left him there?”

“The man got so drunk he fell in the pool.” She bent over and picked up another pear, dropped it into the bucket. “I should have never gotten mixed up with him. He's got some serious problems. I went through all this with your father. I'm not interested in reruns.” Mom reached down, picked up a pear, and dropped it into the bucket.

“Men are about as predictable as the weather,” I said. “One minute they love you and the next minute you're in the way.”

“Wait a minute.” She leaned up. “Since when do you start consoling me about men? Don't you have any homework?”

“I always have homework.”

“Then you should be upstairs studying.”

“I'm taking a little break.”

Mom picked up some more pears. I could almost hear the arguments going on in her head. She seemed more frustrated than angry, as if she had lost the marathon after training for years and years.

“So what are we going to do for your graduation? Should we have a party or did you already take care of that?” She picked up a cigarette butt, flicked it into the pail, then sat on
the rocks outlining the garden. “Sit down.” She patted a rock beside her. “I want to discuss something with you.”

I took a seat and prepared for the worst.

“First of all. I want you to know how proud I am that you're graduating from high school. I know we've had some disagreements on our way to the finish line, I just hope you won't hold them against me, okay? I've always wanted what's best for you kids, but sometimes I slip up. I just hope you learn from my mistakes. Have you heard from any colleges yet?”

“A few,” I lied.

“I hope you get in. Stay around here and you'll end up like all the other mailboxes. Soon the highlight of your day will be scanning the newspaper for coupons.”