Virgin Territory (5 page)

“Um,” I say, “I guess it’s—”

“Or maybe Alex. We all have true names. If you don’t like
that one, you pick another. No big deal. As long as you like the name and it feels true to you. This cigarette is stale.”

She throws it down and stamps on it with her sandal. Then she stands up and shakes out her hair.

I’m in love.

“So where are the others?” I ask her, looking around.

What the hell is wrong with me? My whole life, I’ve been praying to end up in a secluded place with a beautiful girl like Angela (or Marta), and then just when it actually happens, all I can think of is
the others
.

“I mean, I heard there were others,” I add, feebly trying to regain my ground as a guy who knows what he’s talking about. “This guy I know, Chad, he told me there were others.”

“Not all of us can get away so easy. You know. The moms. They don’t want us running off and getting into trouble in a town they don’t know too well. But what they don’t understand is that we need private time and we need people our own age. Right?”

“Right.”

“That’s why we started the club. So we have someplace to go, people our own age to talk to.”

“The club?”

She pulls back a bit and gives me a crooked look.

“The Virgin Club,” she blurts out, and then she pushes a fallen mess of hair away from her eyes as if she’s trying to start over. “I mean, isn’t that why you’re here?”

“Um … yeah,” I assure her. “I mean, I guess. Actually, I
didn’t know about … um … the club. But I heard. Naturally.”

We stand there while the sun rises and then sets and then rises and then sets, moons wax and wane, seasons change. A century passes. The world does its thing, the ozone thins, the globe warms, a billion species become extinct, the planet whirls through space, and the whole time the two of us are still staring at each other without knowing what comes next.

“So do you want to join the club?”

“Yeah. I mean, I guess so. I dunno. Sure. Yes,” I say, trying to disguise the unexpected panic that was creeping into my voice. “Oh. But wait. Hold on. Question: do you have to, y’know,
be
a virgin in order to join the club?”

Once again, she throws her head back and laughs. Her hair flies wild, and she grabs her sides as though they actually might split. She doesn’t hit her head on the wall this time.

“What?” I say. “What’d I say? What’s funny?”

Angela and I are touring the grounds of the golf course. She wants to know the ins and outs and ups and downs of my workplace, because as she says, “You never know when useless information will come in handy.” I’m talking like a big know-it-all who owns the place while she gazes out across the long stretches of mowed grass and clipped hedges. I can see her trying to make sense of what I’m saying. At the first green, she
peers over the tops of her sunglasses, points into the near distance, and asks me, “What’s the story with that?” I explain the pin with the fluttering flag, the sloping fairway, and the tricky sand trap. Then just as I’m telling her the difference between a bogey and birdie, she kneels down, brushes the short, spiky grass with her open palm, and says: “This doesn’t feel like grass. What is it?”

I give a short lecture on how the grass was developed by some laboratory about twenty years ago because they needed a more rugged type of grass to survive the hot Florida summers with its searing sunlight and lack of rainfall. I’m making the whole thing up. She listens inattentively, and then when I’m finished, she looks at me again, but it seems as though she’s seeing right through me while straining hard to pick up radio waves from another dimension.

She laughs. I guess she’s surprised by her own ability to remember the words. And then she collapses with her outstretched arms flung to either side of her and her face looking up to the sky. I can’t help noticing that her breasts are perfectly shaped.

“Wow,” is all I can think to say.

“Walt Whitman,” she replies. “Once when my father was in jail, he passed the time by reciting the poems he remembered. The prisoners loved him. So I thought, I’d better learn a few poems. Y’know, just in case.”

“You planning on going to jail?” I ask her, taking my place beside her on the grass.

“Definitely,” she says. “I just haven’t decided what for.”

Angela and I sit for a long time on the grass without saying anything. I can feel “the hopeful green stuff” digging into the undersides of my arms and legs. It hurts, but I don’t care. This is heaven.

“My mother was a poet,” I tell her.

“Lucky you,” she says, and maybe that’s a cue for me to change the subject, but I can’t stop. I want her to know everything about me, and I want to know everything about her.

“Do you know Bob Dylan, the singer?” I ask her.

“No,” she says, shaking her head and giving it a tilt. “Should I?”

“I’m named after him. My mother named me after the guy
because he was such a good poet and all. He wrote a ton of songs. When I was a kid, my mother used to sing his songs to me. Especially one of them. She’d come into my room and I’d be lying on my bed not wanting to wake up. She’d sing right out loud. Just kept going till I gave up, till my eyes were wide open and I was awake.”

“How does it go?” she asks. “Can you sing it?”

Then, without thinking, I say, “Goes like this,” and I sing for her …

She’s nodding her head approvingly, while we both sit there feeling the buzz of the lyrics and letting the melody linger in
the bright morning air. I don’t have much of a voice, but I can carry a tune, and even without the help of my guitar I can stay on pitch. Angela looks out across the grass and smiles; she seems pleased, her eyes opened wide.

“So where’s she now?” she finally asks without looking over at me. “I mean, your mother.”

“Oh,” I reply as though it’s no big deal and I’m totally over it, “she died years ago. When I was a kid. I hardly remember her. I’m only telling you that so you know why my name is Dylan.”

“Dylan,” she says, and it sounds like something I could get used to. “But I can still call you Alex, right?”

I fall back and lie there so that I can fully enjoy this new feeling.
This is great
, I think,
just great. Alex
. I pretend the grass isn’t killing Alex. I decide to forget that Dylan has a job, and I tell myself that his fellow workers aren’t wondering about him back at the clubhouse. But then slowly, very slowly, the guilt creeps in like poison into groundwater, and I start to feel Dylan choking Alex to death.

“I’ve got to get to work,” I say as I get up and brush my pant leg. Even I’m surprised by the announcement, but it’s getting late, and the shadows on the grass are shortening at an alarming rate.

Angela pulls her whole head back and gives me a sharp look. “Just like that?”

“Got to. I’m late. And I can’t lose this job, or my dad will make my life miserable.”

“Give me your number.”

Is it possible that she likes me? I decide to believe it until further notice. I walk backward, calling out my digits. I’m totally cool and completely in control. Almost immediately, I trip on the sprinkler spigot embedded in the grass, go flying, and fall flat on my ass. Despite the fact that I’m back on my feet in a matter of seconds, the harm’s been done. She’ll never call me, I think, not in a million years. Two seconds later, my phone rings.

“Hello?” I say to the person on the other end.

“That was hilarious,” Angela says in between laughs. “Did you do that on purpose? Because if you did, that was genius.”

“I did. I totally did that on purpose.”

Marie disappeared earlier today, so Doug and I are driving around in his dented Explorer, looking for her.

“She runs away one more time, I’m buying her one of those ankle bracelets,” Doug announces. His jaw is tight, and he’s wearing shorts, a button-down shirt, and a beat-up Dolphins cap.

Marie lives in a continuing-care facility known as the Crestview Center for Continuing Care and Senior Living, but for some reason Doug and I never call it by its name. We call it
the place
. Marie has been living there for almost three years, and by now she has become an expert at “slipping the knot.” Early on she complained that the people who were assisting her were always telling her what
not
to do:
“You can
not
go beyond the gate.”
“You are
not
allowed to leave your clothes in the game room.”
“You may
not
have visitors in your room without signing them in at the reception desk.”
So “slipping the knot” is also known as “slipping the
not
.”

“Is that her?” Doug asks.

“That?” I ask, pointing at the mailbox on the corner. “No.”

Doug is hunched over the steering wheel, on the lookout.

“I’ve heard stories about people who are abducted by aliens,” I tell him. “Maybe Marie was abducted by aliens.”

I’m careful to keep my voice flat and even. I don’t want him to think that I’m trying to get his attention by saying stupid stuff like I used to do when I was a kid. I’m just relaying facts as they were reported in a psychology magazine I found in the dentist’s waiting room last month.

“Just keep your eyes open,” he says.

“It can happen,” I reply. “One day a person goes out to buy a quart of milk or something, and
pfft
, they get sucked up into a spaceship for observation. But according to reports, they’re always returned to planet Earth.”

“What is this? Something that happens in one of your online gaming rooms?”

“No,” I tell him. “I’m talking real life. I read it in a magazine.”

“Yeah, well, in real life, Marie doesn’t drink milk,” he reminds me.

Doug doesn’t even look over at me. His eyes are glued to the streets and sidewalks. He’s like some kind of suburb-dwelling animal doomed to search for its lost mother. I feel sorry for him, but it’s once removed, like watching the Discovery Channel without the sound.

“It’s a well-known fact that baby zebras can pick out the
stripes of their own mothers in a herd of a hundred other zebras.”

“You’re full of all kinds of good news today, aren’t you,” he says to me. But this is not really a question, so I choose not to respond.

Marie isn’t in any of her usual spots—the marina, the taxi stand, the bus shelter, the park—but we aren’t that worried because she always turns up—eventually. Most of the time she’s found wandering the halls of Crestview. She never remembers where she’s been.

“I’m thinking that maybe you
know
where she is.”

Doug looks over at me, terrified. His eyes are bugged, and there is a glob of spit gathering in the corner of his mouth; it’s threatening to balloon into something impressive. If only he could see himself. “What?” he asks as though he hasn’t heard me right.

“I mean, maybe you’ve got a hunch, or a feeling where she is. Maybe you should just go with it.”

“Yeah, well, that’s different from being able to pick out her stripes in a crowd.”

“Whatev,” I say, indicating that if he doesn’t want to take my advice, then he’s on his own.

We drive for a while in silence. It’s dinnertime, and the houses shimmer in the early evening light. Except for the grass that is being automatically watered from spigots embedded in every lawn of every house, there are no signs of life. I imagine that
inside each house, a family is sitting down to a meal together, saying grace, and talking about the day. No one has been abducted by aliens, and everyone at the table is recognizing everybody else’s stripes.

About five years ago, the doctor diagnosed Marie with Alzheimer’s. At first, Doug refused to believe that it was true; he maintained that older people are naturally forgetful and that if Marie got lost every once in a while, it was no big deal. If the cops found her down by the marina or sitting alone at the Dairy Queen, they’d try to figure out where she lived, but she never remembered. Instead, she gave them a big speech about how it was a free country, and everyone was entitled to have a bad day. Never mind that she was in her bathing suit and flip-flops; she had a perfectly reasonable explanation for wandering around at two in the morning looking like that—if only she could remember what it was. The cops took her into protective custody, she resisted, there were tears, and eventually Doug came down to the police station to rescue her. That was the drill.