By Stephen Amidon
In the summer, we’d go to Detroit. It was our annual family vacation. Not Disney World or the Bahamas or Myrtle Beach, but a subdivision north of the city where my mother’s sisters lived. Each year, we’d stay for the two weeks that bookended the Fourth of July. My father would drive the whole way, piloting our station wagon west, through lush Pennsylvania and blasted Ohio until we finally turned north into Michigan. I always made sure to call the way back, though there was really no reason — my older brother Dennis didn’t like its cramped space, while my little sister Kara got car sick. So it was just me, spread out as best I could on the narrow folding bench, surrounded by our luggage and grocery bags stuffed with brightly wrapped boxes.
The gifts — I should explain about these. They were for the big group birthday party that took place a few days before we headed back to Maryland. You see, by some miracle of simultaneous fecundity, every single one of the nine gathered cousins had birthdays that fell within a thirty-day period. The first was Stacy’s on June 16th; the last was mine, on the 14th of July. Even more remarkably, three of these birthdays fell on the eighth, and so this was the day we had the party. If any of us had been math geniuses maybe we could have figured out the odds against this. Still, you had to figure they were fairly astronomical. So each year, there was a giant cake with everybody’s name on it; there were crisscrossed gifts and a rowdy version of “Happy Birthday” that concluded with a rushed recitation of nine names. If it sounds awful, that’s because it was.
In the summer of 1974, when I was about to turn fifteen, the drive to Detroit seemed even longer than usual. We began to fidget and bicker by the time we got to Johnstown, site of the famous flood. Kara had to use the bathroom every few exits and Dennis kept moaning about not being allowed to drive. My father started to curse at other drivers, my mother yawned compulsively. Stopping for lunch helped; it lulled us into a starchy narcotic stupor, though that didn’t last long. In the afternoon, the car appeared to slow to a crawl; Ohio was like a concrete Sahara. It was a particular torture for me that year — I had to wonder what was going to happen between me and Lisa.
We got to Detroit at dusk. Although my parents often spoke about their inner city childhoods in idyllic terms, Detroit no longer held any charm for them. Their families clearly felt the same way — my father’s people had long ago fled to Grand Rapids, my mother’s to Sterling Heights, our destination. We arrived later than usual — a movie was already playing at the drive-in just before our exit at Sixteen Mile Road. It was dark as we rolled into the quiet subdivision. My Uncle Bill had moved his van so we could pull right into his spotless, brilliantly-lit garage — it felt like one of those scenes in science-fiction movies when a small spacecraft slides into a decompression chamber of the mothership. My father honked and Aunt Nancy appeared from the kitchen, her veined hand fumbling for the button to the automatic door, as if it were important that our reunion be shielded from the eyes of neighbors. Uncle Bill followed, snapping his fingers, his scalp wild with hair plugs that weren’t taking; their daughters Stacy and Kris elbowed past him. And then came Aunt Connie and Uncle Nick and their daughters, Melinda and the twins, Nikki and Louise. Seventeen and sixteen and eighteen and thirteen; that summer, all my cousins were teenagers. There were hugs and smiles; voices echoed through the garage’s tool-covered walls. As I was shuffled from one embrace to the next, the thought struck me that my aunts and cousins had all become rough copies of the same woman, brown haired and bug eyed and thick legged and unbelievably, undeniably loud. Last of all, only after the reunions were underway, my Aunt Lois appeared with her only child. Lisa. With her ice blue eyes and small hands and blonde hair, Lisa was the exception to the family prototype. She hung back from the clinches, nodding and flashing a wan smile that withered after a few seconds. It was at moments like these that you could really see that she was adopted.
We piled inside to greet my grandmother, gnarled and sour-faced in the recliner where she’d sat without significant interruption since her husband died twenty years earlier. Our aunts had made a big dinner, though our stomachs were sluggish with soft drinks and Cheetohs and five hundred miles. As I was confronted with a steaming plate of spanakopita and stuffed grape leaves, I tried to catch Lisa’s eye, though she would not look at me. In fact, after just a few minutes, she disappeared through the sliding glass door into the backyard. Her departure was noted by knowing smiles and rolled eyes. Clearly, Lisa was still a problem.
I joined her a few minutes later. My departure would draw no criticism. I was not a problem. As far as anyone knew, I was just being nice to my wayward cousin. We were, after all, practically the same age, just days away from our fifteenth birthdays. The two freshmen in the group. The backyard was dominated by a big new pool, easily the best one in the neighborhood. Uncle Bill had recently installed air conditioning for several of the Detroit Tigers in their mansions in Bloomington and Grosse Pointe. Lolich, Wertz, Freehan — rumor had it he was even talking to the great Al Kaline. Just a handful of jobs, but it was the sort of work that led to other work. He was the guy who cooled the Tigers.
It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the aquatic light. Squadrons of flying insects patrolled the water’s surface. Lisa sat by the small hut that held floats and nets and chemicals. She watched my approach with an unreadable expression. The lounge chair’s rubber and aluminum shrieked as I sat beside her. I waited for her to speak. I always waited for Lisa to speak.
“Do you have a cig?” she asked.
I shook my head in confusion. I was no more likely to carry cigarettes than a bazooka. And this was new — she hadn’t smoked last year. There was a burst of hilarity back at the house. She looked toward the sliding glass door and frowned in disgust. I took the opportunity to study her in the wavering light. You had to work a little to find Lisa beautiful, but I had always been willing to do that work.
“Rick usually brings me cigarettes,” she said. “But he’s hunting with his brother on the U.P. this week.”
I felt a great tightening in my chest. She finally looked at me, squinting as I imagined she would if she were smoking that cig.
“You’re staying at our place again but nothing’s going to happen,” she said. “I’m with Rick now. Do you understand?”
The sliding door opened before I could answer. Aunt Lois. She swayed a little. It was several long seconds before she spotted us.
“Dessert,” she said.
They were already eating my grandmother’s pastries. Koulourakia. Paximadia. Baklava. Uncle Bill broke out the ouzo and Metaxa. He was Syrian but he drank like a Greek. Things got even louder. I said nothing, ate nothing. Once or twice I glanced at Lisa but she would not look my way. Why should she? She was with Rick now.
Part Two
Eventually, my family split up for the night. Each of my three aunts had a single guest room and we used them all. My parents and Kara would stay here, at the mother ship; Dennis would be sleeping next door — he and Melinda were both eighteen, high school graduates now, already crossing over into the adult world. Last summer, Dennis had conducted a whirlwind romance with Melinda’s best friend, the legendary Sandy Kepros. There were rubbers involved — I’d seen a gleaming metallic Trojan packet in Dennis’s wallet. Word must have got out because Sandy was spending this summer with relatives in California. Dennis was undaunted. Melinda had other friends.
I had the farthest to go. My Aunt Lois lived two blocks away. You could get there fastest if you cut through backyards, but she had her car. Not that anyone was going to let her drive after the ouzo. Rumor was that last Thanksgiving she had wound up in a drainage ditch. Luckily, Uncle Bill knew the local cops. Tonight, he drove us back in his Cougar. He’d had a few himself, though nobody would pull my uncle. Not around here.
I sat up front.
“So how are things back in Mary-land?” he asked.
He always said it like that. People still didn’t like the fact that my father had taken my mother so far away from the city they all hated.
“Great.”
“You got a girlfriend?”
I was acutely aware of Lisa behind me.
“Definitely.”
“What’s her name?”
“Susan Snyder,” I said, picking the prettiest girl in my class, to whom I’d not spoken word one.
“Attaboy,” Uncle Bill said, smoothing back those hair plugs, which were looking like my mother’s vegetable garden after a killing frost. “Your uncle’s son.”
I instantly regretted the lie. What if Lisa saw it as the final proof that we were finished? I wanted to take it back, though that would have looked even worse. Mercifully, we arrived a few seconds later. Lisa vanished into the house, leaving my uncle and I to deal with Aunt Lois, who had taken a turn for the worse during the sixty-second drive. We wound up on either side of her, guiding her to her room. Though she wasn’t any bigger than the other Nikitopolous women, you could really feel her weight on the stairs. At one point my uncle looked over at me and gently shook his head. Not unkindly. He was just acknowledging her bad breaks. The miscarriages and then Uncle Pete. Telling me not to judge. My uncle was a decent guy.
A few minutes later my aunt was safely in her room and the Cougar had prowled away. I stood in the upstairs hallway, uncertain what to do but knowing I had to do something. Light leaked from beneath Lisa’s door. There was music, Cat Stevens. I walked down the hall and reached for the knob but then I heard her voice. She had a Princess phone. She laughed and I pulled my hand away. I went to the guest room, two doors down. It looked exactly as I’d left it — Aunt Lois didn’t have many guests. In fact, as far as I could tell, I was the only one who’d ever stayed in the room, at least since Uncle Pete died seven years earlier. I got my toothbrush and went downstairs to the bathroom. There was no way I could ever use the one off my aunt’s bedroom, and the bathroom located between Lisa’s room and mine had been utterly colonized by her things- – bottles and tubes that gave off sweet, alien odors. The last time I’d used it, just after my arrival last summer, there had been a box of Kotex on the counter. And that was the end of that.
The downstairs bathroom was strange, a sort of architectural afterthought between the kitchen and the garage. It was almost as if they’d wound up with some extra space after building the house and decided, fuck it, let’s put in another room. Long and narrow, the first half contained a washer and drier that faced a stack of linen shelves. The room’s back section had a toilet on one side and a deep sink on the other. There was a shower stall at the end of the room with cloudy glass panels that rattled ominously when the water hit them. The strangest thing was that, in the back half anyway, the walls were lined with mirrors. Floor to ceiling. Nobody knew why. Uncle Pete had been a strange guy. Which is a fairly obvious thing to say, given the whole business with the hose and exhaust fumes in the garage not twenty feet from where I now stood. I had a theory about this which I never told anyone except Lisa. The mirrors, I mean; not the incident in the garage. I think he put them in because they made this skinny afterthought look like the biggest room in the world.
Whatever his motives, when you stood at the toilet, your image would be reflected infinitely in the opposing mirrors. A whole progression of geometrically diminishing yous. Which could be disconcerting if you happened to be taking a piss. It was also an issue if you were jerking off. Which was something I had done here the previous summer, more times than I’d care to admit. Okay, I was just about to turn fourteen, there was that, as any guy who’s just about to turn fourteen will tell you. But there was also the fact that I was sleeping in the same house as Lisa. All those unguents and potions in the upstairs bathroom; the way her legs dangled over her never-made bed; how the water ran off her sleek body as she pulled herself out of the pool.
Plus, there were the times in which we lived. It was 1973 and sex was breaking out everywhere. The world around me was coming unbuckled, unbuttoned, unzipped. And it wasn’t just the kids; it was as if the adults were just discovering sex as well. You could see it when my mother and her sisters watched Tom Jones on television, the singer my Uncle Bill referred to as a crotch with perfect pitch. You could see it in the way my uncles left their collars open to let their graying chest hair billow. You could hear it in Dennis’s breathless retelling of the plot of “Deep Throat” or Melinda’s hushed readings from her secret copy of “Fear of Flying.” For God’s sake, our dads would leave Playboy in their bathrooms like it was Reader’s Digest or something.
For me, it all boiled down to an album cover that I’d found while flipping through Uncle Pete’s neglected collection. There, amid the Mitch Mitchells and Kingston Trios, was something very different — Herb Albert’s “Whipped Cream & Other Delights.” The one with “Love Potion #9,” “Lollipops and Roses” and “A Taste of Honey.” The cover featured a dark-haired woman dressed only in a mountain of whipped cream that barely covered her breasts. Who knows how they ever got that much cream — they must have emptied a hundred canisters. Some of it formed a white petal on her hair. She held a single red rose in her left hand; her right hand was raised to her mouth, and you got the feeling it wasn’t because she had a sweet tooth.
It was late at night when I found it. The Fourth of July, in fact — we’d all been to fireworks down by Lake St. Clair. I was restlessly awake. The atmosphere in the house had been tense that summer. Aunt Lois was drinking more than usual, and Lisa was acting strange. Our easy, outlaw friendship had transformed into something I didn’t understand. Sometimes, I was still her confidante, granted prime position on the bean bag chair at the foot of her messy bed while she told me what bitches her cousins were, or how she one day planned to find her real mom and get out of this place. But then, just like that, she’d get mad and send me packing. Most disconcerting were the moments during big meals or by the pool when I’d catch her looking at me with an expression that was neither friendly nor angry.
That night she’d been mad at me for some obscure transgression on the long ride back from the lake. And so, instead of sitting in her room, I was left to wander the house and discover the album. I stared at the woman for a while, then went into the strange bathroom and situated the cardboard jacket on the cistern. I had already begun when I noticed that if I moved a little to the side and looked into the patch of mirror just above the album, her image would be repeated in infinite space. It was an incredible thing to see. Certainly a lot better than looking at myself.
It was three days after I first took the album into the bathroom that Lisa caught me. It was late, well after midnight, the day before our collective birthday. She was leaning against the far wall when I came out of the bathroom, album in my hand.
“What were you doing in there?”
I said nothing. There was nothing to say. I was busted. She took the jacket from me and studied it. After what felt like a very long time she handed it back to me.
“She’s pretty,” she said, her voice faint and a little sad.
She’d walked off before I could say anything. Not that there was anything to say.
Part Three
My shame was so acute that I’d avoided looking at her all the next day. It wasn’t easy. Lisa and I were usually closest during the big birthday party, both of us hating being grouped together with everyone else. Or so I thought. Suddenly, there was no such camaraderie. A few times I sensed her looking at me and all I could think was that she’d pegged me for the dirty little weakling I was. She vanished just after we cut the cake. Normally, I would have gone back with her so we could talk about what jerks they all were, but tonight I lingered until after the cannonball contest before I took the shortcut through the neighbors’ yards.
She emerged from her room as I reached the top of the stairs. Something about her expression told me that I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was thinking. Then she went back into her room, leaving the door open. I didn’t know much, but I knew to follow. Her room smelled of candle smoke. Normally, she sat on a throne of pillows and I took my supplicant’s place on the bean bag. Tonight, however, she stayed on her feet. I did as well. I was still wearing my bathing suit and a T-shirt; she had changed into one of Uncle Pete’s old button-down shirts and a pair of cut-offs. The house was cold — Uncle Bill had installed a top of the line air conditioning unit for my aunt for free. But that wasn’t why I was trembling. And then she walked across the room and kissed me. Her mouth was small and warm. I’d kissed a couple of other girls before, most recently Gail Gaw and her friend Wendy when a bunch of us were fooling around behind my school. But that was just something I’d done. This was different. This was something I’d wanted since I was old enough to start wanting such things.
We wound up sitting on her bed and kissed some more. I suppose we didn’t really know what we were doing but we kept doing it anyway. She leaned away from me after a while and unbuttoned her father’s shirt. I put my hand through the gap. My cousins would tease her for being scrawny but they didn’t know anything. Her body was warm and soft and intricate.
“Take these off,” she said, tugging at my waistband.
My suit came off easily. It was only a bathing suit. I couldn’t believe how much I was shaking now. Her small hand was neither hot nor cold. I didn’t know where to look so I closed my eyes.
“Tell me if I’m hurting you.”
“You’re not hurting me,” I said in a strangled sort of voice.
And then I wasn’t thinking at all. There was only her hand. When I opened my eyes she was holding her finger to her mouth.
“I thought it would be sweeter,” she said.
She pulled the case off one of her many pillows and gently rubbed it over my stomach. When she was done we lay next to each other and stared up at the ceiling.
“It’s not my birthday,” she said after a while.
“What do you mean?”
“I was born in February but when they adopted me they changed it to the day Melinda and Kris have their birthdays. I guess they figured it’d help me fit in. Or maybe it was just easier that way.”
“How do you know this?”
“Lois told me when she was drunk. I asked her about it later and she said it wasn’t true. But it’s true.”
Sometime after this we fell asleep. I woke an hour later to the sound of people in the house. I struggled into my bathing suit and rushed to the open door, even though I knew I would never make it. They were already at the top of the stairs. Feeling doomed, I peeked out — it was Uncle Bill helping Aunt Lois into her room. I contemplated bolting to the guest room but terror froze me. My uncle emerged a few seconds later, frowning and snapping his fingers. All he had to do was walk a few feet and it would all be over. Instead, he hurried back down the steps. He wanted to get back to the fun, I guess. I looked back at Lisa. She’d slept through the whole thing. I pulled the covers over her and then went back to the guest room, figuring I’d pressed my luck enough.
We had three more days together. Nobody knew. I don’t think they would have thought us capable of such a thing. I certainly didn’t. Each night, it was the same. Kissing until our faces were numb. Taking off some of our clothes and leaving on the rest. She became better at touching me, knowing not to be so careful; I grew a little bolder with my caresses, though she always stopped me when I tried to put my hand between her legs. Not that I really had any particular intentions down there. What was happening between us was so monumental that I could not conceive of taking it any further.
On the morning we left Aunt Nancy cooked a big breakfast and then we piled into the Vista Cruiser and the garage door rumbled open. Lisa was not part of the farewell committee. Her door had been shut tight when my brother came over to get me at dawn, and I couldn’t figure out how to wake her without making it look obvious. I wondered if I should leave a note or something but didn’t have a clue what I could write.
Part Four
And now it was a year later and we were back in Michigan and Lisa wanted nothing to do with me. I started to regret not calling her, not writing her any letters. Over the next few days, my attempts to speak with her were cut short by mentions of Rick. I learned a lot about him. His last name was Green. He was going to be a senior at the high school where Lisa had been a freshman. He had a burnt orange Chevelle and a job in a muffler shop. He bought her cigs and he was really strong. And soon, he’d be back from killing things on the Upper Peninsula.
None of these conversations happened in her room. That was off-limits to me now. The day after we arrived, despite what she’d said by the pool, I’d tapped on her door but she told me to go away. After that I didn’t even try. It soon became clear that my only chance of getting close to Lisa was to bring her some cigs. The question was where to get them. There was no way I could buy them over the counter — it was still a couple weeks until I turned fifteen, and nobody had ever accused me of looking old for my age. Which meant a machine. Getting the money wasn’t hard. Uncle Bill left coins all over the house. The man was a human change maker. No, the problem was getting to a restaurant or a bar. I couldn’t ask Dennis or Melinda for a ride — they’d want to know who I was buying them for. Which meant I had to walk to Sixteen Mile.
Even though I set out early, it was still incredibly hot. The sidewalk was under construction; at times the cars and trucks passed so close that I could feel their breeze. I finally found a twenty-four hour diner that had a machine in the small lobby. It took me a while to decide on the brand. Marlboro was for men, Chesterfields and Kents for old geezers. I couldn’t imagine Rick Green buying Virginia Slims And Parliaments, I didn’t even know what the hell a parliament was. So I chose Salem — it was hard to see how you could make a mistake with that neutral green packet. I slotted in the change and pulled on the handle. Nothing happened — it felt like someone was pulling back.
“You got to really jerk this baby.”
It was a man in a jumpsuit with red eyes and B.O. A toothpick dangled from his mouth and a ruined paper was slotted up under his arm. He’d probably just got off the night shift at the Ford or General Dynamics factories I’d passed. I thought he was going to tell me off, but instead he simply reached down and pulled out the knob as easy as if he’d been undoing a shoelace.
Although I was hot and thirsty and would have liked nothing better than diving into Uncle Bill’s pool, I went straight to Lisa’s house. I could hear music coming through the door. Not Cat Stevens, but Marshall Tucker. Rick’s favorite, as I’d been informed. I knocked loudly — there was no reason to be shy now that I was bearing a gift. Lisa looked sleepy, her long hair was unruly. She managed a faint smile as she took the packet from me. For a moment I thought she was going to shut the door, but then she simply turned and went back into the room.
She sat cross-wise on her bed, her back against the throne of pillows; I was once again exiled to the bean bag chair. She tore the cellophane and tapped the pack and lit a cigarette in a way that made me think she was copying Rick. She didn’t offer me one. She caught me staring at her bare, dangling legs and drew them up until they pressed against her chest. Neither of us said anything for a while. The music played, growling redneck rock. She tapped ash onto a small aluminum tray on her windowsill.
“Have you told anyone about us?” she asked.
“Who would I tell?”
“I don’t know. But don’t.”
I wanted to explain that I would have never told anyone about the two of us, not if the North Koreans tortured me for a million years. I wanted to tell her that I could change every single thing about myself if it meant it could be like it was last summer. She only had to tell me what to do. But I didn’t say a word. I just sat there on that stupid bean bag chair.
“Rick gets back tomorrow night,” she said as she stubbed out her cigarette.
Which was her way of telling me to go.
Part Five
Two days later was the Fourth of July. Usually, we didn’t do anything until evening, when we drove to watch fireworks they launched from rafts on the lake. This year, however, there was an afternoon concert at the high school, a fundraiser for a popular girl who had a rare blood cancer and needed special treatment in Houston. The idea was that all the cousins would go while our parents stayed home and drank martinis. Later, we could still go to the lake, but only if we felt like it.
The concert was held in the football stadium. Admission was ten dollars — Uncle Bill had given us a hundred dollar bill from the money clip he always carried in the front pocket of his slacks. The sick girl’s wheelchair was positioned on the track just after you came through the gate. Her mother and a nurse stood on either side of her. She was bald and there were bruise-colored circles under her eyes and her clothes hung loosely from her sharp shoulders. Her mom held a big umbrella over her to keep the sun off her head. She looked like some kind of alien princess.
The band would be performing in one of the end zones. I don’t remember their name, but the guitar player had supposedly toured with Todd Rundgren. A big ‘Get Well’ banner was strung between the goal posts above the small stage. Mothers served homemade food from tables in the other end zone. Kids milled about on the field like after a big win. There were hundreds of them, maybe even a thousand. I don’t know how much it cost to get new blood in Texas but you had to figure this helped.
The food I saw on paper plates looked good but there was no way I was going to take my eyes off Lisa as she anxiously scanned the crowd. And then she spotted someone, a hulking boy with long hair and a pointy face and soft, sloping shoulders. Lisa rushed over to him and I thought this was Rick Green and the heavy gravity in my chest began to lift. He wasn’t so great. But then he pointed back toward the gate and she rushed off without another word. It was easy for me to follow her through the crowd, but then she passed by the sick girl and I knew she was leaving the stadium. It would be impossible to track her out there without being spotted.
The stands were right beside me. I ran as fast as I could up to the top. I wound up right beside the press box. From there, I had the perfect view as Lisa emerged from beneath me. She headed across a field of trampled grass toward the parking lot, where four guys were gathered around an orange Chevelle. One of them leaned back against the hood, his arms stretched behind him. Rick Green. He wore jeans and work boots that had no laces and a T-shirt that was too small for him so you could see his chest muscles. His hair was pretty long but it was thick and bushy, so it stood out at the sides a little, unlike mine, which hung lank down beneath my ears. Although I’d been trying non-stop to imagine Lisa with this guy for the last few days, now that I could see him it was even harder. The other three boys had their backs to me, but I didn’t care about them anyway.
Lisa seemed to be moving very slowly across that dead grass. I couldn’t see her face but something about the way she walked with her arms folded in front of her looked brave. Rick Green saw her coming and said something and the others all looked as well. Their faces were blank. As she arrived they drew aside. Rick stayed where he was, his hands still resting on the hood. He was much taller than her but because he was leaning back they were on the same level. Lisa walked up to within a few feet of him but he didn’t move and so she took a step back, as if she’d bounced off some soft but impenetrable barrier. One of the boys gave her a cigarette and then, as a sort of afterthought, handed her his lighter. It took her several tries to raise a flame. She started talking fast, you could see it in the way her back and shoulders moved. Rick tilted back his head as she spoke, so he was looking down at her.
A voice came over the PA; speakers reverberated right above me on the press box. The concert would be starting soon. Down below, Rick finally launched himself off the hood and looked at his big diver’s watch. You could really see how much bigger he was than her now, how much older. And then, suddenly, moving so quickly it caused me to recoil, he reached down and kissed her. His mouth so wide open it looked like he wanted to eat her head. It went on forever; they were totally frenching. The three boys watched them without expression. Rick finally finished and then, while his hand was still on the back of Lisa’s neck, he shook his head. Three times. One, two, three. The other boys were smiling now. Lisa said something else and he took his hand away and shook his head again.
She turned to walk back to the stadium, but I couldn’t see her face because she was looking at the ground. Behind her, Rick spread his arms out to his side, turning over his hands so his palms faced the sky. The boy on either side of him gave him five.
I stood there for a few seconds and thought about how easy it would be to snipe them if I had a rifle. I’d waste the smiling boys first — one, two, three — so Rick would know what was coming before the bullet smacked against his forehead. But then I remembered Lisa and I hurried back down to the field, my footfalls detonating on the metal seats. My cousins had spread blankets on the twenty yard line; there was food. It turned out there was no reason to hurry — Lisa didn’t show up for a while. When she did, she looked like she’d just washed her face. I secretly watched her as the band played some Alice Cooper covers. They dedicated them to the girl in the wheelchair, who sat by the side of the stage now, wincing at every power chord.
That night, nobody had the energy to go to Lake St. Clair. Too many martinis; too much Michigan sun. Instead, Uncle Bill got some fireworks from a guy he knew. Dennis and Melinda disappeared before the show — my brother had met a girl at the football field. Lisa stayed in her room. I’d knocked on her door after the concert but she wouldn’t answer.
Uncle Bill’s fireworks display was way better than the lake. He let us hold sparklers over the water; he went on the roof to shoot off bottle rockets and Roman Candles. Up above us, illuminated by sulfurous light, his hair plugs silhouetted against the blue-black sky, he looked like some crazy Syrian god bringing fire to mankind. We started to shout for him to jump into the pool and my aunt yelled up that if he broke his neck she was going to divorce him. He smiled and vanished and we thought he really was going to do it, that he was getting a running start and would fly over us and land in the deep end. We watched the smoky night sky, cousins and uncles and aunts, all of us except Lisa. And then we heard the familiar sound of the sliding door and he came out to us. He was laughing, not mocking us or anything, just happy that we would have thought him capable of such a crazy and wonderful act. We started laughing too, though I bet even my Aunt Nancy wished that he’d gone ahead and done it.
After that, they went inside for dessert and I slipped away. The shortcut was very dark and my eyes still flashed from the fireworks. I heard music in Lisa’s room as I went up the steps. Cat Stevens. I knocked and when she opened the door our gaze held for a moment and then she turned away. Leaving the door open. She went to her bed and I collapsed on the bean bag chair. The record ended eventually. The needle bumped against the label a few times before it lifted. In the silence that followed, I wanted to tell her that I’d seen what happened in the parking lot; I wanted to say I would never do that to her. I might be a boy now but I’d be older next year. We’d both be older and then maybe we’d know what to do.
But I said nothing. I waited for Lisa to speak, like I always did
“So how were the fireworks,” she asked eventually.
“Stupid,” I said, afraid to admit I enjoyed myself with the family she would never join.
“Flip the record.”
I did as I was told. The needle touched down and I stood there in that brief scratchy interval of silence.
“You don’t have to sit on the floor,” she said.
I lowered myself beside her on the bed. The music began to play. I leaned over to kiss her but she put a small hand on my chest.
“If Rick calls you have to leave.
I nodded.
“Are you sure you understand?” she asked. “You have to tell me you understand or nothing’s going to happen.”
I told her I understood.