We're All in This Together (13 page)

This afternoon's first episode concerned a nude circus troupe traveling through Spain.

"George?" Gil held up the glowing garbage joint. He stuck his hand under his arm and squeezed off a juicy fart. He winked
at me. "When you get to college, you'll be glad that you did."

The mention of college put me in mind of pretty, pliant-breasted, red-haired Myrna Carp of Vassar College, and how the pill
had saved her from having to kill anyone, how she planted that kiss on my forehead. At Vassar College, I supposed, weed was
commonplace. I also considered how much it would piss off my mother. Weed was where it always started, and where Ty had started,
too.

"What the fuck," I said.

"That's the spirit," said Gil.

He watched me draw a couple of hacking inhalations before plucking the spliff from between my fingers. "Take a toke," said
Gil, giggling, "but don't choke."

I nursed a stone hard-on through the raven-haired looserope walker's gymnastics, then grew nauseated by the performance of
the clown, a spidery-limbed creature whose balls were painted red, and whose best trick was to pull miniature dildos from
the hair of women seated at ringside. On the couch, Gil watched through a pall of smoke.

I started to feel nervous, sweaty; I was aware of the hair on my forearms and the old man's croaking laughs seemed to resound
within my head.

"Just about makes you want to drop everything, run away and join the circus, doesn't it?" The smoke seemed to cling to Gil's
skull, the way fog hovered over a marsh in a scary movie.

"No," I said. "The clown is fucked up."

"You think he looks like Nader? The clown, I mean."

"What?"

"Ralph Nader," said Gil. "Try and picture the man with no clothes on."

"I don't want to," I said. Ralph Nader was the furthest thing from my mind. "Ever." Now my face felt tired. On the television
the clown was involved in a comical chase with a lion that was dressed in a lion-sized pair of panties.

"I think there's a real resemblance," said Gil.

I nodded off for a couple of minutes, woke up for a second when Gil shut off the television and walked out, then fell completely
asleep. I had a dream about my mother. We were at the table again, passing our notebooks back and forth, as if we were having
a conversation, but our pens were charged with invisible ink. We cackled like mad people. We threw paper everywhere. I went
to a rally in front of my grandfather's house. Ralph Nader was on the stage, at the podium. He began to speak, his voice grave,
his face graver, his skin hanging loose and masklike. "My Fellow Americans . . . I have gathered you here because our democracy
has devolved into a single party system operated at the behest of a few monstrous corporations." He paused for effect. "I
brought you here because my balls are painted red." I dreamt about riding my bike. I wove through miles and miles of road
jammed with station wagon taxis.

My head ached and the clock said it was almost four. I went to the kitchen to find something to eat. The refrigerator, however,
contained only V8 and condiments. In the cabinets I found several half-eaten jars of peanuts, and a few packets of bouillon.

Through the window over the sink, I could see the pool. Gil lay asleep, drifting nude on a purple inflatable recliner. A dictionary
was open on his crotch, but the dark head of his penis poked, molelike, out from under the shelter of the pages.

"Jesus Christ," I said out loud, and hurried to be on my way.

9.

At the foot of Dundee Avenue I parked my bike behind a hedge and finished off a jar of peanuts. When I saw Dr. Vic's BMW drive
past and around the curve, I remounted and started home the long way, looping around town to the south. Near the town line,
without giving it much thought, I took a further detour, and swung into the development where Dale lived.

All of the houses here had been cranked out of the same mold, nondescript ramblers painted either white or sky blue, spaced
out along a series of sweeping lanes that I supposed were meant to make the development seem less prefabricated and more like
a village, but which instead gave the neighborhood a disorienting, House of Mirrors quality. It had been a while, and I got
lost. Around every bend, I immediately recognized every house, only to realize a moment later that it was all slightly different—or
maybe it wasn't, and I'd just come around in a circle. I remembered staying up late one night and watching a remake of
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
It was only later that I started to puzzle over the ramifications of the story; what happened when we were all gone, when
we were all Pod People? I mean, what came next? I guessed maybe the Pod People would try to live like us, but not exactly
know how, and they would end up building developments like this one where Dale lived, everything exactly the same, because
that was what they thought it was like to be human.

When I finally did find Dale's house it was because of the black cat silhouette in the garage door window. I had been with
him when he taped it up a couple of Halloweens ago.

The plastic kiddie pool in the front yard was new, though. As hot as it had been lately, I figured that Mrs. Dahl's kids must
have loved to splash around in it. The driveway was empty.

I bet they played catch out here, Dale and the kids, the way we used to. That was last summer. When we played catch Dale opened
up the front windows and jacked up the sound on the television so we could hear the ballgame at the same time. Cooking lunch,
my mother liked to wheel the grill out into the driveway and watch us.

I fished a SpongeBob SquarePants figure out of the pool and twisted the legs off. I tossed the pieces in the grass, and immediately
felt sorry. I went back, picked up the legs and the grinning sponge-shaped body. The toy's florid torso looked like a sad
wreck to me, sadder still for the expression of happiness on the face, but I guessed some kid probably loved it.

I jammed the legs into their slots and made it a whole again. I set the toy on the rim of the kiddie pool so it looked like
it was sort of hanging out, sunbathing or something.

Maybe Dale bought the kid the toy. Maybe he wrote the kid classifieds about it:

New Life: Sea Creature Sought
Sea crture needed fr wndrful new life. Must be lovble, squishy, bzzre. Excllnt kid, othr toys, hot mom, req.

Going home now felt like some kind of defeat, like admitting something—what I didn't know. I biked to the airport.

I sat at the fence in the shade of a wind-stripped oak tree, and watched the commuter planes and private jets land. On approach,
they descended from the south, always skimming over the interstate at the same place, seeming to follow an invisible corridor,
and sliding down the runway as easily as an arm pulling through a sleeve.

These planes were filled with summer people, vacationers from Connecticut and New York, heading to Kennebunkport and Cape
Elizabeth for the weekend, to fish and Jet Ski and drop soda cans on the ground. For a week or ten days they would drink and
piss in the lakes and buy grotesquely overpriced antiques and eat lobster until their plastic bibs were streaked with butter
and flecks of white meat, before finally piling back onto another plane, aching and sunburned and eager to get back to civilization.

When we lived in Blue Hill my mother's ex-boyfriend Paul Bagley had supported his pottery studio by teaching tourists—and
more often than not their bored, cunning children—how to mold and fire their own souvenir coffee cups and knickknacks. By
nature, Paul was an almost supernaturally mellow man, whose own artistic creations typically represented a tiny man in a posture
of repose, or else a bulbous fish of some kind, sporting a great, sorrowful mustache. That is to say, his sculpture was like
himself: inoffensive, prone to very long naps, a little sad, and heavily whiskered. In the bi-yearly mayoral elections Paul
dutifully stood for the Green Party, in 1994 garnering a mere twelve votes—which didn't include himself, because he forgot
to vote.

But even Paul—soporific and uncritical Paul, who had seen the Grateful Dead two hundred and thirty-one times and swore that
every single show was uniquely great—openly loathed the summer people who gave him his living. "Every year they show up and
wreck the place," he said to me one night as I helped him sweep up. "They mess up my kilns and they mess up my supplies. Their
kids mess up my John. I mean, put up the seat, right? Is that so hard? You put up the seat, right, George?

"Of course you do, but with these people, it's a whole different deal. After they're through, it's like it must have been
after Altamont, like after some Downeast Altamont, except in my studio, you know. Broken shit all over the place."

"Do they even pay?" I asked.

"Sure, they pay," said Paul. He stooped to dig at a chunk of sneaker-printed saltwater taffy. "They always pay. That's the
worst part. They think they can pay for anything. They think everything's got a cash value."

I watched a Learjet touch down in a whine of rubber and steam. When it pulled around to the terminal, a family of five crowded
out. They were all heavyset and dressed in bright shorts and Hawaiian shirts. The son of the family, his torso like a stack
of ice cream scoops under his flapping yellow shirt, jerked along a cocker spaniel on a leash and chugged from a two-liter
bottle of soda. The spaniel yapped and squirted piss on the tarmac. Hurrying behind the family came the pilots of the jet,
each of them bearing one side of an enormous steamer trunk, their ties snapping up in the breeze and whipping their faces.

A few moments after they disappeared into the terminal, the pilots jogged back out to the plane to retrieve the rest of the
luggage.

The heavyset family was clearly rich, which meant they were probably conservatives—probably Republicans—which meant that in
some deep and essential way, they either didn't care about anyone but themselves, or else believed that common decency was
a risk they couldn't afford.

When the summer people went home to their high-rises, and their children returned to their private schools, I envisioned their
daily lives as models for selfishness: I saw their route to work, and knew they drove miles out of their way simply to avoid
the section of the city where black people shot each other. (That I had in my entire life known perhaps three African-Americans
did not, of course, limit my judgement.) I could see the summer people as they went to church in their Mercedes, and I eavesdropped
on their silent prayers and heard as they begged Jesus for lower taxes. (That I had, only a few days earlier, lain in bed
and asked God not only to help me find evidence that Dr. Vic had committed a murder, but also to bring me a new fishing rod,
seemed irrelevant.) I watched as they nodded at the priest's pronouncement that abortion was a mortal sin, and I waited to
see no one stand up and ask, "Then what do we do with all the extra children? Who pays?" (Although I was one of these extra
children, the kind that my mother could easily have aborted, I felt no debt to the Christians. After all, I wasn't extra now.)

Perhaps this kind of thinking wasn't so different from the way some people took comfort in the belief that affirmative action
was the reason they couldn't find a job, and welfare was the reason they couldn't afford to take their children to the dentist.
It threw up a great, thick sheet of tinted glass, and from behind it, I could make faces at passersby, and scream dirty words,
and feel safe.

The reason I could see into the lives of the summer people so clearly was the same reason that my grandfather could see what
a great president Al Gore would have been: because it had to be true.

I couldn't worry about exceptions. It was what they represented as a whole, the way they did what they wanted, and didn't
bother with what anyone else thought, let alone how they voted. I may have been only fifteen years old, and only four years
down the trail from a wholehearted belief in Santa Claus, but I could see that this wasn't about Al Gore. I could see that
Albert Gore Jr., and a man like Henry McGlaughlin—who knew the words of the "Internationale" and relished them so well that
he referred to it as a "hymn," and wanted it to be sung at his grave—were not exactly ideological soul mates.

It wasn't Al Gore that Steven Sugar wrote dirty words all over; it was my grandfather's identity, it was his home.

A home sometimes fell into disrepair: the paint peeled, the porch rotted, doorways grew crooked. People who lived in the place
died. And, yet, this place was still home, and still held the memories of home, like a dusty jar, sealed tight with last winter's
preserves. For my grandfather, there was no time to build a new one.

"So what's your excuse?"

For a moment my voice shocked me into silence. I stood with my fingers laced through the fence, staring at the parked Learjet.
The runways were clear, the sky empty, the pine trees at the edge of the field tipped with brown.

"Fuck you," I told myself.

The family of pear-shaped, brightly clothed summer people emerged from the terminal with their luggage train. The fat boy
yanked his dog's leash; the dog humped the leg of a porter.

They loaded the trunk of the first taxi at the curb, one of the local fleet of battered station wagons, and piled inside.
The door of the taxi slammed shut with a creak of metal and a whine of rust. The cab belched away from the cement island.
I slipped behind a tree, and scooted close to the bole, not wanting to be seen.

A few minutes later, Dr. Vic's BMW came around the parking loop. He honked and released the trunk. I waited for a couple of
minutes, but he just sat in the front seat, tapping his fingers lightly on the wheel and looking straight ahead.

"I don't accept rides from strange men," I said.

"George, get in the damn car, would you? It's air-conditioned."

I tossed my bike in the trunk and climbed inside.

"Hey, you want a peppermint?" Dr. Vic shifted over to dig around in his pocket. He pulled out a broken dog biscuit, gave a
grunt and felt around some more before producing a hard candy. Dr. Vic held it out; his grimace was sympathetic.