Casey's Home (12 page)

“Let me make you something else,” she said
as Ben settled awkwardly on a cracked brown vinyl stool. “You like milkshakes?”

He watched her hands as she made them each
a drink, scooping ice cream from a vat and adding it to the silvered shaker.
She had fine, delicate skin that showed her veins.

“What’s your name?” she asked as the
machine stirred the liquid behind her.

“Ben,” he answered. “Ben McDunnough.”

She showed no sign of recognition. “Lacey
Delaney,” she told him. “It’s Irish, like yours.”

Leaning across the counter toward him, she
rested her chin on one hand and stared at him.

“So,” she said. “What do you do?”

He had to think about it for a moment,
unsure.

“I coach,” he answered at last.
“Baseball.”

“Oh, you used to play? You look like you
used to play.” When he nodded, she continued. “My brother used to play
football. He was real good, too. Got to go to college, till he blew out his
knee. He’s a mechanic now.”

Ben felt a certain sympathy for this
unknown brother, even if he was a son of a bitch.

Lacey took the shaker from the machine and
poured a bright pink concoction into the glasses. Because of the neon lighting,
Ben wasn’t sure whether it was strawberry or vanilla until he brought it to his
lips. She sipped hers through a bendable straw and eyed him curiously.

“You married?” she asked, licking her
lips.

“No,” he answered. “You?”

She shrugged and looked past him to the
window. “Sorta. I got a kid with someone. She’s staying at my sister’s tonight.
She’s only three.”

“What’s her name?” Ben asked, letting the
cold drink slip down his scorched throat.

“Huh?” She turned back to him and then
grinned. “Britney. Her name’s Britney.”

They sat quietly after that, as if they
had found out just enough about each other and anything more would push the
balance of the evening toward something else, something hesitant and shaking.
Lacey slipped out of the bar and started the jukebox with the quarter he
offered her from his pocket and a well-placed kick. Ben didn’t recognize the
tune, it was something country and sad, maybe Willie Nelson. Lacey knew it,
though, and hummed along.

“Let me drive you home,” he said as the
clock rolled slowly toward midnight.

“That’s okay,” she said. “The bus’ll be
along eventually. They run all night, you know.” He didn’t know. They walked
slowly back toward her bus stop through the still, hot night.

“How long you staying?” she asked. He was
holding her duffel bag and his car keys, intent on persuading her to let him
drive her home.

“Just tonight,” he said.

She made a small gesture toward his room
with her chin. “You got a nice TV in there?”

Something within him flared briefly and he
could taste the strawberry of the drink against his tongue. “No,” he admitted.
“But it’s got air.”

They were barely in the door before she
had pulled his shirt over his head and had her mouth on his skin. The room was
stifling even with the air-conditioning, but his teeth kept threatening to
chatter. She was still luminously lovely. He told her so and she laughed.

“You think?” she said, sitting on the edge
of the bed and patting the spot beside her. He sat, their legs barely touching.
“My brother says I oughta go to Hollywood, but I keep telling him, I’d rather
be a waitress here where I can earn enough money to maybe someday buy myself a
little something, than to go out there and get screwed, you know?”

He nodded, fascinated by the thick braid,
red and gold woven together like rope. “Can I undo this?” he asked and she shrugged.

“If you like,” she said.

His fingers were trembling as he pulled
the rubber band from the bottom of the braid and began to comb through her
hair. It loosened easily, as if happy to be free, tumbling over her shoulders
and down her back to rest in a puddle on the bedspread. It was nearly medieval,
her hair, and she was the woman in the ivory tower. He pulled it back from her
neck and kissed her, right behind her ear.

“That’s nice,” she said, so he did it
again. She smelled so fresh and young, like Iowa corn fields, like rain and
sunshine, like the proverbial apple pies of his childhood.

“Who’s in Florida?” she whispered as he
touched her shoulder, bared by her loosened shirt.

He shrugged and she reached for the first
button on his fly.

“Guess it don’t matter,” she whispered,
popping the buttons one by one with her neatly manicured hands.

He lifted his hips to allow her to pull
his pants and underwear down, and then she was kissing him. He could hardly
breathe, it was all so sweet and unexpected and hell, he hadn’t gone into the
diner looking for this, but here it was and oh, it was wonderful. His whole
body quivered and shook and he let it out, all of it, the whole god-awful day
and any more that might be coming in one long, aching wail. When she was
finished, she lay down on top of his prone body and kissed him chastely on the
lips.

He was unable to move until the pleasure
stopped pinging behind his eyes, but at last he slid her jeans off her hips and
over her toes as she slipped off her sandals. She made no movement or noise to
help him, but came as simply and easily as a dream.

“Just stay here for a minute,” he said,
his voice gruff to his own ears, and pulled her close to him so he could take
in the clean, clean scent of her.

“You seem real nice,” she said softly,
rubbing his chest in an abstracted way. “You don’t got a girlfriend or
nothing?”

“No,” he told her. “I did, but not right
now.”

“Shame you ain’t staying in town,” she
said and he thought vaguely beneath all his pleasure that it was a shame. He
had a momentary vision of himself, living in Baton Rouge and married to this
sweet little waitress, surrounded by their red-headed children. He shook it
away. “I’d best be going,” she said, after a while, and rose off him. He reached
to stop her, but she had become insubstantial already, and avoided his grasp
like a spirit. He watched in silence as she pulled on her clothes and
re-braided her hair in the gray motel mirror.

With the duffel in hand, she paused at the
door, looking no different than she had two hours before. “You seem kinda sad,”
she said. “That’s why I stayed. I thought you could use some cheering up.”

“Thank you,” he said. “You could stay if
you wanted. Or I can drive you.”

She shook her head. “Nah,” she said.

Ben pulled on jeans and a t-shirt, and
pushed his feet into his unlaced shoes. They stood together at the bus stop for
a few moments before he saw the round, white lights of the bus, far down the
street. Lacey grasped his hand, briefly, and squeezed once before letting go.

“I needed some cheering up too. Guess most
people do. You sleep tight,” she said, shouldering the duffel. The bus pulled
closer and he leaned down to kiss her.

And then she was gone. It seemed, when he
examined it in his mind, like a dream. But the warm smell of her body was still
lingering in the air around his bed, and his groin throbbed in a gentle way,
recovering. Slipping between the stiff sheets of the motel bed, Ben curled into
his belly, feeling soft and exposed, newly-born. Outside the window, just
beyond the crack where the curtains, like all motels, refused to close, he
could see the diving women. Blinking, blinking, blinking, until he closed his
eyes and let them finally hit the water.

1981

I don’t care who you are, geek or Homecoming Queen,
there is something sacred about the Senior Prom. We all know it, though those
of us who’ve never had the real opportunity of going spend an inordinate amount
of time pretending it’s just the gathering of a bunch of socially precocious
teenagers and not a rite of passage into adulthood as monumental as
circumcision to another culture. I wanted to go. I bought Seventeen Magazine
and perused the prom section, girls decked out in flounce after flounce of soft
pink or peach or baby blue, like the fluffy dolls women crochet to go over
toilet paper rolls. Like Scarlet O’Hara. That year, you were no one if you
weren’t wearing a hoop skirt so big you could barely pass through a doorway. It
was either that or a one-armed polyester something so slinky it wouldn’t have
looked out of place on the back-up singers at a Marvin Gaye concert. “Sexual
Healing,” indeed. I craved the Prom. For three years I had been denied and I
could barely face this final failure with any resistance. Please, I prayed each
night to a god I mostly ignored, let someone ask me. Anyone. I’ll even go with
one of those horrible boys in Mr. Richards’ science class, the ones who know
way too much about blowing things up.

I wasn’t popular. I wasn’t
hanging around the fringes wearing clothes from 1972 or anything, but I wasn’t
“in.” I had a few friends, loyal in the way fellow misfits always are, but no
one went out of their way to talk to me in gym. I’d never had a date. I had
kissed a boy once, at a party, for about five minutes in a very smelly coat
closet during a game of truth or dare, but it doesn’t count when all you’re
thinking is: that’s it?

Lee had been Homecoming Queen, a
cheerleader, and she was voted “Most Likely to Set the World on Fire” her
senior year. For two lovely years, I was able to bask a bit in that carefully
polished glow, but it was more like radiation after she’d gone. So there I was,
seventeen years-old and date-less for the Senior Prom. It was as significant as
not having teeth.

Two weeks before the Great Event,
I left my World Philosophy class (which taught me nothing about either subject,
like most of high school) and tried, with my usual lack of success, to get my
locker to open. Thirty-eight, twenty-two, sixteen. Bang on the door. Thirty-eight,
twenty-two, sixteen. Bang. Finally. I slipped my books onto the shelf,
retrieved my coat, and prepared to shut the door. Much to my surprise, there
was suddenly a large hand on the edge of the locker door, another to my left,
trapping me where I was.

I had never been mercilessly
teased or tormented, so I wasn’t frightened, just startled. Especially when I
saw who was pinning me there.

Jake Munsey was Popular with a
capital “p”. Captain of the baseball team, handsome, rich, funny, bound for the
kind of glory that shows itself early and burns long, for a lifetime even. He
wasn’t the massive mound of man he would later become. That would surface after
the careful shaping of his genetics that only a professional coach and perhaps
some drugs could provide. Instead he was tall and strong and yet lanky in the
way most eighteen year-old boys are. I frowned.

“Casey Wells,” he said, as if he
were confirming my identity. Which, considering the number of times we had
actually spoken, he might have been.

“Hi Jake,” I said, mind
frantically searching for a reason for this assault. Did he need help in
English? Had I somehow insulted him in the only class we had together, Earth
Science? Did he want me to be his lab partner instead of that loathsome Cindy
Griep, who wouldn’t know a hunk of obsidian from her own ass?

“Where’re you off to?”

“Um... home?” I said, fearing
that answer might be the wrong one, somehow.

He shook his head gently, and I
was suddenly aware of just how blindingly good-looking he was. Thick, strong
body and he smelled like aftershave, which is quite an experience when combined
with the coursing hormones of a teenager. “I thought you and I could talk for a
minute.”

“Huh?” I said, sounding
extraordinarily stupid. “Uh, ok.”

He smiled and let me escape the
confines of my locker and his arms. I shrugged my coat on and tried to toss my
bag over my shoulder with a casual air, as if I were about to stroll down the
runway in Milan.

“Where to?” I asked, realizing he
was in control.

“Why don’t I give you a ride
home?” he said.

“Uh, sure.”

My normally verbose and frantic
mind had slowed to a sudden lust-induced crawl. He just looked so damn good and
never in the four years I had known him had I allowed myself to dream about
that, or even to acknowledge it. Why torture yourself, when you know you’ll
never have something?

Jake drove a Camaro, which ought
to surprise no one. I slid into the sleek, dark interior and it was like
stepping into a giant penis. The smell of masculinity oozed off the seats and
permeated the vinyl of the door panels, completely obliterating the fresh pine
scent of the tiny tree air-freshener hanging from the rear view mirror. Jake
threw it into first and pounded the gas, and the beast jumped and bucked
beneath us. I was enthralled. This was why women went crazy for men, I suddenly
knew in a blinding flash of lucidity. This was it, this was sex. Jesus.

“So,” he said slowly as the car
purred out of the parking lot and stalked down the street. “Crazy year, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said, stroking the
furry seat covers with my hidden right hand. They felt like velvet and were the
color of blood. “Crazy.”

We were silent for a moment,
until we reached a stop light. “So, you wanna go to the Prom with me?” he asked
over the roar of the idle.

For a moment, I was dumbstruck.
It was like I had just been approached by space aliens telling me I was the new
messiah. It just didn’t compute at all, not that I knew the word compute at
that point.

“Uh, ok?” I said, questioning my
own response. What had I just done? I felt like I was riding with the Devil, he
was so powerful and sexy. “Sure.”

“Great,” he said and put one hand
on my knee. I was instantly so turned on I could hardly move. Never much of a
sensualist, I realized that I was going to go home and masturbate like nobody’s
business.

We drove in silence the rest of
the way to my house, if you could consider riding on a suped-up V8 with
everything tuned to perfection riding in silence. Pulling half into the
driveway, Jake finally removed his hand from my knee and grinned.

“So, I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” I said, barely breathing.

“Great,” he said again. “Say ‘hi’
to your dad for me.” I managed somehow to get out of the car and watched it
roll away with what I’m sure was a gratifyingly stunned expression on my face.

Lee met me at the door.

“What were you doing in Jake
Munsey’s car?” she demanded.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
“I really have no idea.”

“What the hell does that mean?”
Lee said, ever direct.

“He just asked me to the Prom,” I
whispered, dropping my bag in the hall and staring at my older sister.

“Oh Baby!” she cried and wrapped
her arms tightly around me. “That’s so great! I assume you said yes? What are
you going to wear?”

I was closer to my sister in the
next two weeks than I ever had been or ever would be again. I had become her
project. My after-school hours were filled with shopping, with make-up
application, with coaching in kissing and... other things. I don’t know how
much Lee actually knew about sex beyond that frenzied fifteen minutes beneath
the bleachers, but it seemed she knew all sorts of things about the stuff that
led up to sex. I felt like taking extensive notes: First, the hand is allowed
to go HERE, then HERE, but never, ever HERE.

By the night in question, I was
nearly hysterical with fear and information overload.

“I can’t do this,” I screamed to
my father when he popped his head briefly in through the bedroom door.

He simply smiled at me, the way
parents do when they recognize your fear and think it’s cute, then ducked out
again. Lee was glaring at me and holding a mascara applicator like an
instrument of torture.

“Look up and then blink. Do it!”

I did it. In the end, I had to
admire her effort. I looked... twenty-five. But when you’re really seventeen,
that doesn’t seem so bad. And I wasn’t wearing a hoop, or polyester, but some
sort of slightly fluffy rayon concoction that cost more than most people made
in a week. It was a bit sophisticated, but I wasn’t in any danger of ending up
a sodden mess in a singles bar, either.

“You look gorgeous,” she said,
standing behind me and handing me my shoes. “These will make you taller.”

I slipped on the shoes and found
myself pitching forward and then settling back on heels smaller than a dime.

“I can’t walk,” I told her.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said
coldly and twitched a ruffle to make it lie still. She was right, of course.
Within five minutes whatever gene it is that controls the feminine ability to
ambulate on the very tips of our toes had kicked in and I was sashaying up and
down the hallway like a pro. “Go show Dad.”

I made it down the stairs without
incident and insinuated myself between my father and the TV.

“So, what do you think?” Lee
asked.

If I had been her, he would have
teared up and talked about my mother. But I don’t look like her, I look like
him and for a moment, I saw that recognition in his eyes. It was enough.

“She’s beautiful,” he said. “But
she looks too...” he sighed and ran a hand through his graying hair. “...Too
old.”

“What?” Lee said, incredulous.
“She does not.”

End of conversation. My father
returned to the TV and Lee dragged me into the bathroom and made me pee to be
sure I could make it until I was somewhere with a decent bathroom.

Jake was on time, which
astonished me. I really hadn’t expected him to show up at all. Lee let him in,
with me peeking down from the second story, where I had been instructed to stay
so I could make “an entrance”. He greeted her with some familiarity, after all,
they had known each other when she was in school, and then headed straight for
my father. They shook hands and talked shop for a minute, all about Jake’s
scholarship to my dad’s university and how they were looking forward to working
together, as if they were investment bankers. Then Lee nodded, and I descended.
She told me to float down shyly, as if I were naked on a cloud. That image made
the whole thing even more traumatizing.

In the end, I simply stepped
down, concentrating on not dying. Jake looked wonderful, for 1981. It was,
after all, still the era of ruffled shirts. He had ignored that trend, however,
and was wearing a classic tux, complete with blue bow tie and cummerbund. Lee
must have tipped him off to the colors in my swirl of a dress, because we
matched perfectly.

“Hey Casey,” he said and handed
my corsage over like a man bartering for his head in a group of cannibals. “You
look great.”

“Thanks,” I managed to whisper.

“So...” he said, as Lee pinned
the wilting orchid to my breast. “You ready?”

“Have her home by midnight,” my
father said.

“Two,” Lee amended, shooting Dad
a look.

“One,” he said and it seemed to
work for everyone, and I was released from the domestic bosom into the arms of
The Dark Prince. Or at least, that was how it felt. I wanted to claw my way
back in through the door to safety. And I also wanted Jake Munsey to kiss me
more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life.

The Camaro was washed and
polished and rumbling with vitality. I felt like letting it sniff me, like I
would a strange Doberman. Jake pulled out of my driveway and immediately had
his hand on my leg. This time, oddly enough, it wasn’t quite as overpowering.

“So,” he said. “I thought we
could go to a little place I know of and talk.”

Huh? I wasn’t sure what that
meant. I had pictured romantic candle-lit dinners in the auditorium, so I had
no idea what he was offering me.

“Ok,” I said, prepared by Lee to
agree to just about anything.

We drove through the liquid
evening, oscillating and rotating and my head was so light I could hardly feel
myself. The night was going to be beautiful, full of stars and little wisps of
powder-gray clouds like ripples on a vast, dark ocean. For a moment, trapped in
the wine-red interior of the Camaro, I wanted nothing more than to step out
into that wet, hot night air and breathe it deeply, as something known, something
familiar.

“You looking forward to
graduation?” he asked suddenly, jerking me back into the car.

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“What are you going to do?” he
asked. Everyone knew what Jake was going to do. Baseball scholarship to State.
Then the Majors. Then a shining career. Then... well, it didn’t matter what
would happen then.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
“I’ve applied to a bunch of places around here but none of them really...”