If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (4 page)

“It’s like a Dead concert, man,” Timmy Jones said, ecstatic. He was a real Dead Head and followed them around the country, hitchhiking to wherever they were playing.

“No, man,” Billy said solemnly. “It’s like the concert of life.”

Mrs. Connelly came out of her bungalow next door with a large plastic bag in her hand. She looked over at us, and then shook her head pityingly. “Assholes,” she said. She put the bag in the trash can near the fence, waddled back inside and slammed the door behind her.

We heard the sirens come screaming up the street. Aunt Francie pulled up behind the ambulance in her silver Toyota. She didn’t look at us as she ran into the house behind the ambulance crew. Nanny followed her inside.

Minutes later, everyone emerged. The medics carried Maggie on a stretcher, her eyes closed. Matty and Beth were on either side of her, and Beth was leaning down, whispering. Nanny came behind them, shaking her head. “No show, yet,” she said. Raven and Cha-Cha followed, with Aunt Francie bringing up the rear, beating them around their heads and shoulders with her handbag. “You were breathing with her?” she screamed, swatting at Raven. “What the hell were you going to do if she stopped breathing, stop with her?” She marched to the ambulance and jumped in back with Maggie, then looked out at her sons one last time, shaking her head. “If youse had two brains, you’d both be half-wits,” she said. The medic closed the doors and the ambulance raced up the block.

Everyone on Comanche Street applauded as the ambulance pulled away. Once it turned the corner, we all started drifting toward the lounge
at The Starlight Hotel. I thought of Maggie, so sure she would have a daughter. I thought about Luke, staring out his bedroom window, looking sad enough to cry. You had to be prepared for anything in this life. I wanted him to stay here, but if he couldn’t, then I would go with him. Maybe we would live in the mountains for a while. Maybe our baby would be born in the mountains. The beach had been my life, but I was growing tired of Comanche Street, the drinking, the drugs, everyone falling asleep in the sand with lit cigarettes between their fingers. Waiting for something to happen, night after night.

I decided that if he wanted to, Luke and I would leave Elephant Beach together. We would find a cabin at the foot of a mountain and at night we would sit by the firelight. Our daughter would lie at our feet, swaddled in a brightly colored quilt, and the sound of her laughter would run over us like a clear, bright stream.

sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll

O
n those summer nights, after I finished my shift at the A&P and showered, I would look in the bathroom mirror and it seemed to me that my eyes had never been brighter, my hair never shinier, my tan never more even. My peasant shirts hung perfectly off my shoulders and my jeans settled on my hips as though they lived there. Even my teeth seemed straighter. I looked exactly as I had always wanted to look, and sometimes I’d close my eyes and feel so good about it I knew I could never tell anyone because they’d think I was too crazy to live.

On those nights, while I was getting ready to walk down to Comanche Street, my mother would lean against the doorjamb of the bathroom, watching me put on my mascara, smelling my perfume. Her eyes would narrow and her lips would purse into a thin, pinched line. I wouldn’t say anything, but my hands would start shaking a little, so that the mascara brush would slip and smear my eyelid closer to the brow. I’d reach across the sink to tear off a piece of toilet paper, dab it with cold water, and wipe my eyelid until the black stain disappeared. Then I’d steady my
hand so that the brush washed lightly over my lashes, careful not to leave clumps.

“Again?” my mother would say from the doorway. And then we were off. She always started out as though trying to be reasonable, but once I heard the sharpness edging into her voice, I moved faster and sometimes I wasn’t really listening at all and other times I ran out of the house with her voice chasing me, like a wayward knife, stopping short of the front door only so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. What she said was never the same yet always the same, usually about hanging around street corners, how she’d driven past Comanche Street on her way home from Top Banana, the discount vegetable store, and saw them all standing in front of Eddy’s, my God that hair! Those clothes! They looked like a bunch of circus freaks. No wonder I had failed Regents geometry and now look, I’d gotten accepted only to Carver Community College, how did I expect to get up in the world? Here we lived on a tree-lined street with a lawn instead of farther down the Trunk where there was only sky and concrete and people living lives that were going nowhere. By the end of June, she was lamenting the prom, or the fact that I hadn’t had one. “I always wanted to have a daughter,” she said, “so that on prom night I could watch her walking down the stairs to meet her date and put on her corsage and then wait up so that when she came home, we could have tea together and she’d tell me all about it.” But we didn’t have a staircase, our house was all on one level, and the senior class at Elephant Beach High School had voted not to have a prom; we’d voted instead to have a camping trip at Tully State Park, but in the end nobody signed up because there would be too many chaperones and mosquitoes.

On the Friday night that Luke was finally supposed to come out to the lounge at The Starlight Hotel, my mother never said a word. She just kept watching me until I turned out the light in the bathroom and brushed past her on my way to the front door, mumbling good-bye, waiting for her to say something, to start screaming that I was wasting time, why couldn’t I just give myself a chance, that these years would never
come back, why couldn’t I understand that? It was always hard to tell with my mother. When she wasn’t yelling at me about something, I longed for her touch, for the way she would sit on my bed some nights, holding my hand, talking in the darkness as though we were the closest of friends; telling me how badly she’d wanted a daughter, how thrilled she was when they received the call from the adoption agency, how the day they’d brought me home from St. Joseph’s had been the happiest day of her life. At those times, I thought she loved me more than anyone, even my father and brother. But then it would start all over again, that hectic, hazardous edge in her voice that made my throat tighten, that had me feeling so relieved when I shut the door behind me and walked out into the night, where anything could happen.

On that Thursday night, though, when I reached the door, I heard only silence behind me. My brother was out playing stickball with the neighborhood boys and my father was still at work. I turned back and saw my mother standing in the archway of our living room, watching me leave. Her eyes were smudged with sadness. “You look so pretty,” was all she said, and then she turned away, as if the sight of me was more than she could bear.

•   •   •

I
t was barely July, still the earliest thrush of summer, and ever since graduation, hands had been coming at me like a swarm of three-headed flies; arms hooking around me, tugging at the fringes of my suede belt, trying to lure me for a walk on the beach, or to sit on the abandoned lifeguard chair, where everyone went to ball. Boys I’d gone to school with, known forever, groping, sniffing, sliding around me, everyone high on acid or THC, thinking I was just as stoned as they were and it would be easy. Another time, I might have been more moved by the attention, because it had taken me so long to be accepted, not having gone to St. Timothy’s Grammar like everyone else and my father wasn’t a cop or a
carpenter or a fireman; he wore a suit and tie to work and had gone to college. It had taken ages for me to belong, until shouts of greeting would go up when I approached Comanche Street, until I’d walk into Eddy’s and Desi would point to me and say, “Wait here, Liz and them went up to Coffey’s Drugs and then they’re picking you up to go to the church bazaar.” At night, when I walked down the block of close-knit bungalows, past freckle-faced children playing stickball in the street and mothers standing inside their chain-link fences smoking after-dishes cigarettes, and men sitting on their stoops, scratching, belching, watching the sunset, at the end of the block I’d see the crowd milling around the entrance to the beach, hear the catcalls, the dogs barking, see ten-speeds flying, surfboards leaning against the seawall, cigarettes glowing like fireflies in the dusky heat, and my heart would beat harder, faster inside me, and I’d think to myself:
These are my people
.

But this summer, I didn’t care about any of those boys, even the older ones who tried paying for my egg creams at Eddy’s and buying me whiskey sours at the lounge at The Starlight Hotel. All that mattered was that Luke was home, and after years of watching him from street corners and car windows he was finally going to come to me, and I wanted to be alert, awake when it happened. After all these years of silent worship, I wanted to be
ready
.

On the way, walking down to Comanche Street, I passed the Brennans’ house, where my best friend, Marcel, used to live. Now she was living up on Cape Cod with her husband, James, trying to figure out if she still loved him. I thought about stopping in briefly, asking Claudine, her mother, for a quick reading; nothing dramatic, just a seven-card shuffle, where I’d ask a question, and then Claudine would lay the cards in a semicircle on the kitchen table and tell me what I could expect when I finally saw Luke that night. But there really wasn’t any such thing as a quick visit to the Brennans’, even with Marcel gone, and I was supposed to pick Nanny up at her house by seven o’clock and it was already ten minutes after. So I hurried past, hoping Claudine hadn’t been looking
out the window and seen me hesitate. Part of me didn’t want to know what the cards had to say. Now that Luke was back for real, it was up to me to find my fortune.

•   •   •

N
anny signaled me to step outside. We were in the lounge at The Starlight Hotel and I didn’t want to step outside, because Luke was finally here and I wanted to be wherever he was. When he walked into the lounge with Ray and Raven and Cha-Cha, it was like he was some kind of celebrity. “El Exigente,” Billy said, bowing in front of him, handing him a cold one. Christa Cutler, another of Nanny’s city cousins who no one liked because she thought who the hell she was, shimmied over and threw her arms around Luke, kissed him on the lips.

Luke’s honey-colored hair was longer, shaggier, cut ragged across his forehead. His eyes looked tired and he was thinner than before he’d gone away and had lost his surfing muscles. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt over a white tee shirt and faded jeans and flip-flops. He was wearing what pretty much everyone wore but he looked more beautiful than anyone else. I was wondering whether I should go over and throw my arms around him and kiss him longer than Christa had. I was watching myself in my mind’s eye, wondering if my breath smelled good enough to do it. But right then Nanny came over and tugged at my arm and said, “Katie, man, come on, come out to the alley with me. I have to talk to you. I
need
to talk to you.”

I began walking with her and turned back once to see Luke standing at the end of the bar near the patio, surrounded by people. It would have been easy enough to join the crowd, sidle toward the center at some point and catch his eye. I saw them all raise their mugs of beer and heard Raven say, “Welcome back, man. We missed the shit out of you.” Luke didn’t smile. He seemed wiry and edgy, like he was coiled inside himself, away from everyone. He raised his glass but didn’t drink.

I followed Nanny into the alley between the hotel and the summer apartments on the corner. Over Nanny’s shoulder the moon hung low, slinging a white path across the ocean. Nanny put her hand on my arm and tried looking up at me. Whenever she was fucked up, her eyes looked like crooked stars.

“I have to tell you something and you can’t tell anyone, not even Liz,” she said, her voice soft and slurry. “Especially not Liz.”

“My sisters,” we heard, and there was Ginger, coming out of the alley.

“Shit,” Nanny murmured.

Ginger was wearing cutoffs and a tight tee shirt that hugged the weight she hadn’t lost since the baby. She smelled of stale smoke and Boone’s Farm Apple Wine.

“I missed you guys so much,” she said, putting her arms around us. “Soooo much, man. Missed trucking with yas.” She backed up and looked at us, her eyes woozy. “I really love you guys,” she said. “You know, like when you came and visited me and the baby? That was, that was so far out, man. Like, far fucking out. I mean, I’m just glad it’s over, you know? I mean, dig it, can you picture me with a kid?”

“Love you, too, Ginge,” I said, kissing her cheek, while Nanny swayed on her flip-flops, silent as stone.

“What’s a matter, bitch, you don’t love me anymore?” Ginger turned to Nanny, who she’d known for the longest.

“You know it,” Nanny said. “You know I do, man. I’m just, I’m really stoned, Ginge. Really, really stoned. Even my tongue’s like, tired, man.”

Ginger laughed. “The tired tongue,” she said. “Outasight.” She kissed each of us wetly on the cheek and walked around the corner, into the lounge. We watched the door swing open and then close. I turned back to Nanny.

“So what’s the big secret I can’t tell Liz?” I asked.

“Me and Voodoo did it the other night.”

“Wow,” I said. I meant it; it wasn’t just something to say.

“He saw the hickeys,” she said, her voice dipping. “We were fooling around, you know, bullshitting in the sand, and I turned my head the wrong way. I forgot to put on foundation and he saw them.”

Nanny really liked Voodoo. We all liked Voodoo because he was kind and easygoing and fun and affectionate. His real name was Dennis Kelly, but he was a Jimi Hendrix freak whose favorite song was “Voodoo Chile,” which he listened to every morning before leaving the house and when he smoked a joint before going to bed. He wanted Len, the bartender, to put it in the jukebox, but Len refused; he thought Hendrix was nothing but empty noise. Voodoo wore a blue bandanna around his albino curls, which he’d trained into a white-boy Afro. It was a hard thing to pull off, but somehow he did it. Nanny really liked him, but she was crazy about Tony Furimonte—we called him Tony Fury—who was not kind or easygoing or fun and had a temper that stretched and snapped equally over big and little things. He’d been thrown out of school three weeks before graduation for punching Mr. Diamond, the history teacher, for giving him a failing grade for the quarter, even though he rarely went to class and frankly wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier. To punish him, his parents had sent him to live with his aunt and uncle in Providence, Rhode Island, to work construction and finish his senior year. They thought his chances were better in a place where nobody knew him. The night before Tony left, he and Nanny did everything-but in the attic of his parents’ house, and still he wouldn’t call her his girlfriend. He’d been home the first week in July because his grandmother had died, hence the hickeys on Nanny’s neck. It was like he had to leave his mark on Nanny for Voodoo and everyone to see. Since Tony left, she’d been covering the hickeys with Max Factor makeup.

“So did he, like, freak out?” I asked.

Nanny tried to widen her eyes but her lids were like little logs, rolling downward. She stood there for a minute, nodding, her eyes closed. “No,” she said. Her voice sounded broken. “He just turned my head this way and that, and then he dropped his hand and he looked at me with those
big, droopy eyes. And then he said, ‘You know, you are one sweet little heartbreaker, foxy lady.’ Made me feel like shit.”

I could hear laughter from inside The Starlight Hotel. The jukebox was playing “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos. It was the song I listened to under my headphones late at night when I got home from Comanche Street. It was the song I’d always imagined would be playing while Luke and I made love.

“What was it like?” I asked her. I wanted to know what it was like to make love to someone you weren’t in love with.

Nanny kept swaying. She put a hand on my arm to steady herself. “Katie, man, swear to God, it was about as exciting as drinking an ice-cream soda,” she said. She had always loved kissing Voodoo. She said he was a great kisser. They liked walking with their arms around each other, Voodoo’s arm hooked around Nanny’s neck, hugging her close. They’d be walking down Comanche Street, bumping into people coming from the other direction, because they were too busy laughing into each other’s eyes to notice.