#10: BBQ
"Wake me up with summer in your voice."
(Last time, Charlie and the guys snuck into a wedding ceremony before heading over to the reception.)
The Road Warrior smelled like old plastic and years of body odor, but a chemically pristine pine scent filled the minivan. The floormats had recently been vacuumed, and the maps stood in an overlapping row in a door-pocket. “Everything’s so neat in here,” I said.
Bonnie laughed. “My car isn’t usually like this, but…”
“But I run a tight ship,” Lana finished.
Lana drove like she was testing the limits of the car: how responsive the gas or brakes or steering wheel would be to her whims. She raced toward a stop sign like the car was about to leap over a chasm and then slammed on the brakes with such force that my guts crashed against the skin of my stomach. She accelerated when taking turns. She was testing me as she drove.
“So it’s Charlie—what?”
“Tavares. Charlie Tavares.”
“So, Charlie Tavares, what do you do?”
“Excuse me?” Obtuseness like a shield to deflect a trident in the gladiatorial arena.
“What do you do—like a career or an ambition?”
I wasn’t sure that failed janitor was the answer to give here—or semi-comatose zombie or guy with a Xenophon block. “I’m in between things right now.”
“Lana, you’re being rude,” Bonnie said from the back.
“I’m just making conversation. No harm in that, right, Charlie?”
“Oh, it’s fine,” I said quickly, hoping to encourage her to turn her eyes back to the road.
The questions whizzed through the air like stilettos.
“So I heard you went to some MTV taping. Do you like that—MTV?”
“Well, we more went to see this model.” And then I almost grit my teeth at the opening I had just given her.
“Who?”
“Amelie Darfani.”
“Oooo. She’s pretty hot. Don’t you think so, Charlie?”
“Well, she’s, ah, she’s attractive.”
“No kidding.”
“But it was Pat who really wanted to go.”
“Oh yeah, I’m sure it was all Pat’s idea, wasn’t it?”
“Lana,” Bonnie interjected.
“Bonnie, we’re just having a conversation. So, Charlie, what does your girlfriend think about you taking this road trip?”
“Girlfriend? I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Sure, maybe you don’t want to put a label on it.”
“Label? Nobody. Nothing. That’s what it is. I’m all alone. I don’t have anybody.” And she had just provoked me into confessing my absolute singularity.
Lana smiled.
When Bonnie began to talk about how Jess and Barney had met, Lana turned to the topic of love. “They said that it was love at first sight. Can you believe that, Charlie? I mean, really.”
“Why not?” I replied.
“Love at first sight. It kind of sounds like an excuse to me. Though love as a whole is kind of an excuse. Love is for movies and confused teenagers. As adults, we should be honest—it’s just about sex. Everything else is sentimentality.”
I said, “You make even Pat sound naive.”
“I’m trying to be realistic.”
“What’s unrealistic about love? About something better and higher, something that makes you better?”
“How romantic,” Kristy drawled.
“Or even sentimental,” Lana added as a teasing poke.
I said, “Truth doesn’t care about whether it’s sentimental or not.”
Bonnie’s laughter sailed through the air like the bubbles at the wedding.
That Feeling
—Ralph Cudmore
it begins a whirligig a ferris wheel a kaleidoscope of feeling I don’t know where this will go but somehow I’m inside reeling love starts again
By the end of the fifteen-minute drive, I felt like I had barely survived a tap-dancing marathon.
The reception was at Jess’s father’s farm. A giant tent stretched alongside a sprawling whitewashed farmhouse—a white canvas sky tied down by flowery garlands. Aside from a few plastic walls, the tent was open to the wind and farm air. In front of a makeshift stage, a portable dancing floor had been set up on one end like a rectangular tortoise shell. On the side nearest to us, barbecue’s charred sweetness rose from two giant black barrel-like contraptions. That hint of barbecue painted the sky with accents of rouge. A barn and other outbuildings stood at another side, and beyond them stretched rows of green plants.
As I walked away from the car, I felt a gust of wind like the sudden press of the heart. I turned to face Bonnie. The wind chased through her hair, lifting as it ran. How did it feel for those zephyrous fingers to run through those strands and brush her cheek?
“What?” Bonnie asked.
A smile burned on my cheeks. “It’s the wind. And everything else.”
“Isn’t this a beautiful place?” She stretched out her arms, her hands wide open to the world around us.
“If you’re into carcinogen-producing farms in the middle of nowhere,” Kristy said.
I squinted a query at Bonnie. “Oh,” she said, “Jess’s dad grows tobacco.”
“It’s amazing how casually you say that,” Kristy retorted as she went to talk to one of the bridesmaids, who was getting out of a car driven by a young bearded man in a cream-colored suit.
“Kristy takes some things very seriously,” Bonnie explained. While her friends chatted with others, she leaned closer to me. “I’m sorry about the whole interrogation in the car.”
“Oh, it’s part of the adventure.”
“Lana can just be a little overprotective. She has this big-sister complex with the whole world.”
“And what would she protect them from?”
“Oh, from stalkers who seem suspiciously charming.”
“I’m certainly not charming, so I don’t think she has to worry about me.”
“I just don’t want you to think she’s totally crazy—that’s all.” She paused. “Maybe sort of, but not totally.”
As she said those words, the Road Warrior careened into view. Gravel sprayed as it drove, and the frame almost groaned as the car came to a sudden stop. Pat slammed the driver’s door behind him with a flourish. “Now this is the heartland! My feet cry out for cowboy boots.” Sarah emerged from the passenger side looking even paler than usual.
As sparks explode when two rocks collide, laughter burst out when our gazes met. “Maybe sort of, but not totally,” I said.
Pat swaggered toward us. “You know, Sarah’s very nice but she could use more of a sense of fun.”
Danny said, “Wanting to survive a car ride does not mean that you lack a sense of fun.”
Uncle Billy staggered past our group, hugging the girls and kissing them on their cheeks. “Don’t I know you folks from somewhere?” he asked Danny.
“We met at the wedding.”
We met Pappy George and Granny Mae and Auntie Jean and Cousin Randoph and Jess’s high-school English teacher and Barney’s pop’s business partner. They all just had to meet the quartet. Most people assumed that we were the dates of the quartet, if they said anything about that at all. We never corrected them.
We all applauded when the bride and groom entered. The band—a collection of cousins and uncles—began to play. The players switched on and off during the night. For this song, the singer had long gray hair and a grizzled goatee.
I don’t want no stadium act
Or a million-dollar contract
Baby, if I can’t have you.
Don’t give me no beer or pin-up;
Don’t care much ’bout movin’ it up
Baby, if I can’t have you...Jess clung to Barney as they clung to each other in small, uneven circles. Against her frailness, Barney looked bigger and thicker, his broad shoulders straining against his coat.
The buffet dinner was a gamut of tastes and textures. There were three different kinds of salad, five different kinds of rolls, collard greens with onions and pepper, hominy stew, and green-and-orange pasta. And, of course, there was barbecue. Ribs and chicken had been smoking for hours and hours. The slightest press of my plastic fork caused the meat to drop off the bones. Each bite unlocked the sweet, tangy flavor of the sauce. When I ate the smoked corn, the crystals of red pepper ignited in my mouth.
The eight of us ate together at one of the picnic tables scattered around the tent. Danny praised the chicken, Kristy sniffed at the scarcity of vegetarian options, and Ralph dared to try a slice of Granny Mae’s chicken potpie (which I thought resembled a swamp with crust). Sitting on the edge, Bonnie and I talked.
About her siblings and my brothers. About her aversion to broccoli and her insatiable love of candy corn. About what we both liked about Pulp Fiction. About our favorite books and music.
“Mickey Kent, right?” she asked.
“That’s more Ralph and Pat than me. But he’s pretty good.”
We talked about what I did. “You told Lana you’re between things. What are you between?”
“Between being a boy and a man,” I laughed. “I work part-time at night as a janitor. My dad’s a barber, and I help clean up around the shop and a few other places. But that’s only part-time, and it’s more like a holding pattern, you know?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I mean, it’s nice in its own way. You know what to expect. It’s quiet. There’s plenty of time to think.”
“So you like to think, then?” she said—like a shared in-joke, and not a spear of barbed sarcasm.
I laughed. “Or at least trying to. In college, I worked in the library—that was one of my favorite things about the job—the time to do that. I still have one thing left for college: this senior thesis.”
“On what?”
“You know Xenophon?”
“He’s a philosopher or something, right?”
“Yeah. It’s on Xenophon and—and love.”
“That sounds interesting,” she replied, without a hint of irony or disdain.
“It is. If I can get my head clear on it. And after that—well, then I need to figure things out.”
She smiled. “This is the time in our lives to do that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”
When she searched for a word, her lips stood poised apart like two cherries on the bough. The late-noon sun ran up her throat, tracing it with blooms of gold and rose. I realized how much I liked her smile—the way she would tilt its corners, how it would reveal her teeth in an impulsive burst.
An elderly couple and some kids danced to the trickling notes of an acoustic guitar.
Wake me up with a kiss. Wake me up with summer in your voice. Shake me up with some bliss. Shake me up with starbeams on your lips.
I rose from the table and went to one of the coolers to grab a soda. Bonnie accompanied me, and we looked at the vast fields around the tent. The clouds seemed to thicken in the red-gold air.
“So no girlfriend?” she asked.
“No. Oh, I was with my girlfriend from college for a while. I guess we’ve been broken up for a while, too.”
“So you’re like me, then.”
“What?”
“Why do you think Lana invited you guys to this so suddenly? She’s impulsive, but not a complete maniac.” She laughed—not out of nervousness but more out of what I took to be rueful appreciation. “This guy and I had been together for a couple years. Well, almost a couple. And it got kinda bad.”
“I’m sorry.” And I was, because a sedimentary layer of pain ran underneath that kinda bad.
“That was a while ago, now. It wasn’t like a tragedy or something, even if it sometimes felt that way at the time.”
“Really?”
“Really. If it doesn’t work out, it’s not meant to be. I was so sad for a while.”
“And then?”
“And then I just accepted it. And I thought that I’d be better off growing, even if that meant some kind of unhappiness. I don’t know—I guess pain’s part of being human.”
Her words had the poise of a dancer’s steps in an improvisational ballet—toeing from thought to thought, from one emotional shade to the next. “And maybe,” I said, “if you keep going, there’s some truer happiness to be found. Maybe.”
“Maybe.” She grinned at me. “That’s what’s interesting about you, Charlie. You know how I saw you on the road?”
“Yeah?”
“You were looking out the window like you were trying to see something far, far away. And I thought to myself, who is that guy and what is he looking for?”
Using my laughter as camouflage, I launched an answer: “You.”
Bonnie laughed in response. Then, she paused and looked at me hard—the way you do when you’re trying to see through a veil. “What are you doing here, Charlie Tavares?”
I smiled. “Crashing a wedding on my way to Allegria.”
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This video is like the 1990s distilled: Outback Steakhouse, the Goo Goo Dolls, a 1-800-Collect ad, and VH1 playing music.