“I hate this family,” I said, and closed and locked the door. We had old doors in our house: keyholes with skeleton keys we were required to leave in the hole.
Still, I turned the key, locked the bolt in place, and once the door was shut I watched Sils’s smile dissolve to a mumble and a stare. “Fuck,” she said, fumbling for the joint in her pocket and lighting it with Sans Souci matches. She inhaled and held the smoke deep inside, like the worst secret in the world, and then let it burst from her in a cry.
“Here.” She thrust the joint at me and I headed for the back window with it, on my rug-burned knees before the screen, blowing out the smoke.
“I keep thinking about what’s inside me,” Sils said. “The beginning little Tinkertoys of a kid. But I don’t feel anything.”
I turned to look at her, but we were sitting too close, so I turned my head back toward the window, looked toward the middle distance, then farther, looked out past the trees, at and through the leaves, and I again remembered that night last year, the one with the man and the gun springing up like a jack-in-the-box, the light summer midnight just beyond and past the branches. We had run, always heading for the next group of trees, and then for the next and then the next, like an enactment of all of life.
“I don’t know how I’m ever going to deal with all this without everyone finding out,” said Sils.
Everything was getting funny and vague. My records in a pile on the spindle plopped down one by one: the Moody Blues; Stevie Wonder; Billie Holiday; Crosby, Stills and Nash; the Rolling Stones. Every song had the word “Tuesday” in it. “Tuesday Afternoon.” “Tuesday Heartbreak.” “Ruby Tuesday.” Maybe Tuesday will be my good news day. Will you come see me Tuesdays and Saturdays?
Maybe it was Thursday and Saturday. But I preferred Tuesday. A day of twos. Sometimes when I sang alone, sprawled rapturously on my bed, the windows open and the cheeping summer night outside in big warm rectangles, calling, calling, I just made the words be whatever I wanted.
“I have something to show you,” I said, getting up and handing the joint back to her. I walked over to my record shelf and lifted up my stack of records, the dozens not yet piled on the stereo — Big Brother and the Holding Company, Melanie, Seals and Crofts, a collection of Neil Young concerts lap-recorded by a bootlegger with a cough — and showed her the money, flat and dead, priceless and chloroformed like a flock of butterflies.
Sils stared.
“This is for us,” I whispered. “This is all for you.”
“The money?” She wasn’t comprehending.
I checked the door again. I closed the window and the shades and then sat at my dressing table on the spinning, plush-covered, vanity stool. I turned on the makeup mirror for light. I turned it to Office, its sickly green, and laughed in a cackly way, though I didn’t mean to. “I took it,” I said.
“You took it?”
“I collected it. I kind of — hocked it. I just, I sold stubs and didn’t ring up.”
She looked at me and then at the money for a long time. A pumpkin into a coach: I hoped that was what she would see. For today, Tuesday, I would be her fairy godmother. I tried to swallow, but the pot had made my throat bitter and dry, my gums drained and astringed. I had to concentrate not to giggle. Or weep. Or sing. I had to concentrate to see.
At long last she looked up at me. “Don’t they count the stubs?” was all she said.
“Nope,” I said. “Not that I know of.” And then we did laugh. We laughed the laugh of idiots.
Sils fell into an ironic squawk. “This is going to go on your permanent record, missy,” she said, shaking her finger.
“We make a dollar sixty-five an hour. Do you think Frank Morenton, who owns half this country anyway, do you think he’d ever notice? He’s too busy opening Santa’s Little Village up in Dalesburg.”
“I suppose it serves him right for not giving us a raise.” And now she actually reached toward the money to touch it. “Let’s go to the James Gang concert,” she said suddenly. Now she was holding up bills. She plucked up a twenty and waved it around.
“Pardon me?”
“The James Gang’s giving an outdoor concert at the arts center at the lake,” said Sils. “God, with this money, we could take a cab.”
“Maybe I can get LaRoue to drive us,” I said uncertainly. I wanted to save the money. “Let me go see.”
LaRoue was in the kitchen polishing her riding boots. “We’re thinking of going to a concert,” I said, trying to be kind, lingering, swaying, hinting.
“And you want me to give you a ride.” She looked disgusted but also a little sad.
“You want to go with us?” I asked brightly, fakely.
She looked at her riding boots a long time, as if this were a challenge. The boots were set smack on the kitchen table, on a page of the Horsehearts Gazette. “What concert is it?”
“It’s the James Gang,” I said.
“What time?”
God, she was really going to do it. “At eight. But we want to get there by seven.”
“What about dinner?”
“It’s get-your-own night, Mom said.” Every so often my mother refused to cook, calling it, with a festive flair, “get-your-own” night, or “fix-your-own.” One year, in one of her darker huffs, she canceled Christmas and called it “Christmas Is Canceled Day.”
“Yeah, but I was going to make some brownies and macaroni,” said LaRoue. She was hugely overweight, though not even as much as she would be later in life. I blinked.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Come with us. We can stop at Carroll’s.” Carroll’s was a fast-food shack that would soon be put out of business by McDonald’s. But at the time, we liked Carroll’s best, the bright red and turquoise colors, the squared and streamlined script of the name.
“OK!” she said. And as she said it, I realized again that I never did anything with LaRoue because she was odd and friendless and I was embarrassed by her, in a way that made me feel bad, but in a way that was sad and unshakable.
I sat in the front seat and Sils in the back, and I kept turning around and all the way up to the lake we kept singing “And When I Die,” in the harmony parts we had learned in Girls’ Choir the past year. Our choir director, Miss Field, had worked up a nice arrangement of it.
“I’m not scared of dyin’ and I don’t really care,’ ” began Sils.
“ ‘If it’s peace you find in dying, well then let the time be near.’ ”
“ ‘All I ask of livin’ is to have no chains on me!’ ” We practically shouted it. We were best on that line, taking it loud but slow, with some odd intervals, though most of them thirds. We actually didn’t know any songs by the James Gang, or we knew one, the famous one, the one that was a hit, but we didn’t know it very well.
At Carroll’s we ordered hamburgers and vanilla milk shakes and sat inside at the Formica counter, watching each other eat, or else watching some guy sweep behind the fryer or some guy pull up outside with his car eight-track blaring “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” or LaRoue, watching us, like we were up to something.
The parking lot at the Lake Arts Center was already full, and attendants were routing people into a spare one in the rear, usually reserved for employees. We parked there, got out, and headed for the entrance, an old blanket over our arm, a six-pack of Coca-Cola, and a pack of cigarettes. All around us were young men in beards and cutoffs, women in peasant dresses, buffalo sandals, and silver bracelets, carting thermoses, ice chests, lawn umbrellas that said “Peace.” Police were stationed just inside the entrance to inspect thermoses and ice chests for alcohol, but besides that there was something wonderful in the air: the loud, crowded, summery feeling of a rock concert, not Woodstock maybe, but we had only been twelve then. This was something festive for us now that we were fifteen; everyone older had been doing this for a while, and they did it with calm and know-how; nothing new or disorganized. Some of them carried babies. We observed them, fell in close to them in line, sat next to them on the lawn. Lawn seats were the cheapest: two-fifty apiece. We paid, got our tickets, headed in.