4
It’s late spring of my sophomore year. Amy turns seventeen and gets a car, and we start going into the city on weekdays as well as weekends. During the week we are able to find open tables. The bars aren’t packed. We begin to notice a group of regulars who come in every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night. This is especially true at a new bar we discover, Dorrian’s Red Hand, a dark wood and brass bar on the Upper East Side. The regulars are wealthy high school and college students. The girls are beautiful with slick blond hair and tiny waists. They wear red lipstick and cocktail dresses and have names like Blake and Hunter. The boys are also stunning, many of them wearing navy blue sports jackets with gold insignia from their schools, their ties loosened but still on. Most all of them do cocaine in the bathroom stalls. They pull rolled fifty-dollar bills from their breast pockets and, gripping the brass toilet paper-roll holder for support, they lean over the backs of the toilets where they’ve assembled the lines. Amy and I dress accordingly and sit at the same table each night, hoping to fit in, but mostly feeling clunky and unattractive compared to everyone else. Over time, though, a couple of the boys are friendly and sit with us sometimes, and slowly we blend into the culture there. Even though they don’t know us, we come to know who most of the regulars are. A tall, handsome boy named Robert, two blond brothers, Chris and Tony. They glide through the bar like movie stars, stopping at tables of girls they know. Robert is gorgeous and charming. The brothers are fun-loving and smooth. Amy and I watch them, enamored. We are well aware we chose this scene over the others available to us. Some of the kids who mingled at the West End wound up downtown at CBGB’s and the Beacon Theater. They don’t dress like the regulars at Dorrian’s. They wear tight, ripped jeans and Doc Martens, flannel shirts tied around their waists, and rubber bands for bracelets. Most of them come from families as wealthy as the kids’ at Dorrian’s, but they dress as though they live on the streets. They go to the clubs to see up-and- coming bands play, bands who emulate the Ramones and Black Flag. Such a scene might be easier for me to fit into. I know about the pain and rage that threads through that culture. In many ways, though, I don’t want to claim it. I want to be here, in this world of gloss and greed. I don’t want to wallow in my anger. I want the facade. I want to be somewhere where girls can be girls, in high heels and dresses—the costume of male desire. Even if I’m not as stunning as the girls who surround me, I’m used to feeling like I’m not enough. We stay most nights at Dorrian’s until two, sometimes much later, and the next morning we drag ourselves out of bed and into the shower for school. We are often late, and I find myself in the front office, making up some excuse. I stay alert through the morning until Algebra II, which comes right after lunch. My eyes droop, my head feels heavy. I attempt to hide behind my text, full of the variables and equations taught in class, but which I haven’t been awake enough to understand, as I give in and rest my head on the desk. I wake half an hour later, startled, a small pool of saliva near my mouth. Another teacher might not stand for it, but Mr. Hansen doesn’t care about student behavior in his class. He coaches lacrosse and spends his free time with the popular boys in my grade. Everyone knows he has a crush on Lori, one of the blond girls in that group, because he told a fifteen-year-old boy he considers his good friend, and that boy told everyone else. Even if he hadn’t, it is obvious by the way he looks Lori up and down like he owns her whenever she’s near. The tenth grade has two popular groups. One is made up of the blond girls. These are the “good” girls who get superior grades, play sports, and drink wine coolers at parties. They are all indeed blond. Some of them are really brunettes but dye their hair to keep with the reputation. They spend time with the popular boys who play lacrosse and soccer and drink beer. The other in-crowd is made up of the Jennifers. Amy told me that before I transferred to the school, this crowd was bigger, but slowly it whittled down to three girls, all named Jennifer. They are still peripheral friends with a few others, but the Jennifers have a stronger relationship, one that looks tight and exclusive from where I sit. It’s no secret they know about things I know about too, like cocaine and pot, boys, and drinking. At lunch I watch them talking and laughing, and I feel some regret about my friendship with Amy. I allowed her to swoop me up, away from any other possibilities. I would have liked to get to know the Jennifers. Amy, sensing my longing, gets pissed at me often. If I’m late or don’t call when I say I will, she won’t take my calls and will ignore me for a few days. She grabs my hand if I try to change the station on her car radio.
“You don’t touch my car without asking first,” she snaps. Once, she locks me out of her house, and I have to go to her neighbors to ask to use the phone to have my dad come pick me up. Another time she leaves me at a diner with no ride home because I spent too long talking with some classmates in another booth. She tells me her neighbor, who is also her friend, liked me when she met me, but she thought the hairy moles on my arm were gross. I begin to learn there are certain things I shouldn’t tell her. Like when we meet boys at Dorrian’s and I give mine a blow job, or the time I messed around with a boy in the back near the bathrooms. Amy wants to be intimate with boys too, but to her this kind of conduct is slutty. I suppose it is. She, like most girls, including the Jennifers, has a different relationship to boys than I do. She engages in sexual acts with them if she wants, but from my vantage point it looks like she can take them or leave them if they are not just right. She considers whether she actually likes someone before she jumps into bed with him. She isn’t wracked with anxiety when there aren’t any boys around. And she doesn’t need them to live, which is what it feels like for me.
Or at least this is what I assume, that I’m the only girl who feels this way.
I also don’t tell her about my friendship with Mr. Kearney, the new history teacher. He is young, fresh from college, no older than some of the boys Amy and I hang out with at Dorrian’s. He is the faculty advisor for the yearbook, which I have joined in order to have something on my resume for college. At the meetings, he is all business, assigning tasks to each of us. But when I find him in his office, and it is just the two of us, things are different. He becomes relaxed, flirtatious. He compliments my hair or my shirt. He laughs at my jokes. I like his attention. Soon I start going to see him almost every day after school, even when we don’t have yearbook meetings. I tell him about Dorrian’s and some of the boys there. He asks me lots of questions, and after a while our conversations turn to sex. We discuss blow jobs and virginity. We talk in explicit terms, using words like
“cock” and “cum.” When I leave, I feel tingly and light, high on Mr. Kearney’s attention. On weekend days, driving around with Amy or my dad, I try to determine where his house is. He told me the general area, and I fantasize about surprising him there some night, dressed the way I dress for Dorrian’s, in short skirts with no stockings. Perhaps this is why he never tells me exactly where he lives. Perhaps he fantasizes about the same thing.
Many Sundays I’m still asleep when Mom calls. I sleep heavily.
Tyler tells me when I’m up that she came in to wake me for the phone call, but I was so out I didn’t budge. She looks at me suspiciously. I know what she’s thinking. She thinks I’m sleeping off a hangover or I’m stoned. That’s not it at all. It’s just I’d rather sleep through the days so I’ll be awake for the nights, when the boys are out.
“You don’t know what Dad did,” she says to me one of these Sundays. I’ve come down our hallway to use the bathroom after watching TV with Dad. She calls me in to her room.
“What?” I stand at Tyler’s doorway. The Cure croons from her record player, the voice tortured and sad. Her room is baby blue, the color she chose when we first moved in, but someone wrote we are the dead in black marker over and over again around her doorframe. I have to assume it was her. Clothes I know she bought at Fiorucci and Canal Street Jeans litter the floor. She wears her hair short and spiked lately, and she draws black lines around her eyes. She must be a part of that downtown scene, the one where kids jump around in mosh pits, getting out their aggression. I shift uncomfortably. She’s my sister, but I don’t even know her. I don’t know how she really spends her time, locked away in this room.
“Remember Harriet?”
I nod. Mom’s good friend from art school.
“She jerked off Dad. Right in our house when Mom was home so she would find them.”
“Mom told you this?” I say. My voice squeaks when I do. That familiar combination of jealousy and relief that our mother chooses Tyler as her confidante sits just beneath my skin.
“He wanted to be caught, the coward. Rather than just face her and say he wanted a divorce.”
“Shut up.”
“I don’t know how you can hang around him.” Her voice is bitter, full of hate that belongs to Mom, not her.
“I don’t know how you can stand her,” I say. I walk away, annoyed, deeply bothered. I don’t want to have this conversation with Tyler. About how Dad’s terrible and Mom’s great. She can choose to be brainwashed by Mom
