#14: Hawkeye Memories
"I mean, come on. He barely knows her. And she barely knows him!”
(Last time, the guys hit the road to Iowa after a tumultuous wedding.)
We arrived at Marnie’s house after the rain had dulled into the evening’s diffuse grayness, when molecule-sized droplets hung invisible in the air. Its peeling yellow paint made the ranch look like a wilted sunflower. Weeds snuck through the snaking canal-cracks of the driveway. Parked in front of the house were a black SUV and a rust-spotted blue sedan, which was one of Danny’s parents’ old cars. I remembered riding in its backseat when Mrs. Goldenfarb would drive us around. Then, the air had swirled with the textured odor of a new car and the scent of Mrs. Goldenfarb’s anti-dandruff shampoo, which was the same kind my grandfather used.
Marnie rushed down the cement stairs with a cry of delight. She looked different—bobbing just below her ears, her hair was shorter. And her cheeks seemed a little bit leaner, like the collagen had deflated just a little. By the time Danny had made it halfway out of the car, she had thrown her arms around him, crying, “Oh Danny, it’s so good to see you!” She even kissed him on the cheek, and my friend’s face flushed. Danny was the kind of guy who would shake his grandmother’s hand if he could get away with it.
Then she hugged me. “Look who it is! I still remember when you were pimply teenagers playing cards at the kitchen table.”
I smiled and remembered those long, lazy nights of poker games for pennies. Looking back gave a glow to the ridged, uneven details: the guzzled soda or lemonade or whatever Mrs. Goldenfarb had for us, the crunch of the pretzels or chips that were always a little stale, the fingerprints of grease on the cards. We’d usually play at the kitchen table. The point of the game wasn’t pennies or cards. It was to pretend and entertain hopes. What could I do if I had a two of diamonds or an eight of clubs—then I’d have a straight flush—then I’d have three of a kind! Feasting on what could be brought its own pleasure, even if you ended up losing.
“I guess we’re back again, Marnie,” I said. “How are you?”
She laughed. “Wonderful, Charlie. Wonderful.” She tilted her head to measure me anew. “You look good. But tired, maybe?”
“It’s been a long few days.”
“It looks like you’ve been dragged over a broken-up highway,” Jason said as he shook my hand. His grip felt like a wrench’s squeeze. He had filled out since I had last seen him. His Motley Crue t-shirt stretched across his great barrel chest, and his arms strained like pistons at its short sleeves. His thick brown stubble seemed a mesh of wires.
“It feels that way,” I said. “Good to see you, Jason.”
“You, too, Charlie.” He then turned to look at Pat and Ralph, who were just now trying to rise from the car. “And these guys look like the highway was lined with glass.”
I said, “Oh, them. They had too much fun.” Grabbing my backpack, I went up the steps to their house. Long story, I heard Danny say behind me.
Marnie insisted that we stay a few days. “You need to recover, especially if you want to have any fun at that music festival.” We were so late that she had to take out of the fridge the dinner she had made for our arrival: roasted chicken and green bean casserole, along with homemade oatnut bread. “I was off work today so I could try the bread machine that Jason’s aunt got us for the wedding. The recipes are kind of crunchy-granola, but what do you think?” Especially after all the rich food yesterday, I thought it tasted pretty good.
As sometimes happens when friends get together who haven’t seen each other for a while, we did spend some time talking about our lives now. Marnie’s job nursing—the rows of hospital beds filled with the injured and dying, the daily confrontations with doctors, the red tape of HMOs. Pat gossiped about Beacon Hill. Jason compared elections to selling a car.
But we were always drawn into the whirlpool of talking about our lives then. We laughed about a senior talent show, when Marnie had lip-synched and danced to a New Kids on the Block song with four of her friends.
That reminded Pat of the skit that he, Melissa Panni, and I had done for the talent show when we were in eighth grade: a farcical and abbreviated version of Romeo & Juliet. “We had just read it in school,” I explained. “Pat thought it was completely ridiculous.” Pat and Melissa had come up with the idea.
“It was.” Pat slipped into a bad Italian accent. “Juliet—I’m a-gonna love you forever! If I can’t a havee you, I’m a-gonna die! Yawn. I mean, come on. He barely knows her. And she barely knows him!”
Jason laughed. “Ouch.”
“It’s true!”
“I always thought the play was beautiful,” Marnie said. “All the passion. I loved it.”
“So did Charlie here.”
Most of our classmates probably saw ridiculousness rather than beauty in it. Their feet had pounded with delight in the rolled-out bleachers, and rubbery laughter had bounced through the gym like a barrage of tennis balls. Melissa’s Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?—like she had a helium balloon wedged up her nose—caused the audience to crack up. Pat, of course, was Romeo, and I played Paris. We dueled with yardsticks, and Pat and I wore wigs like we were from some bad 80s hair band. Cradling the comatose Juliet in his arms, Pat beat his breast with soaring agony and let out a despairing burp after he chugged down the poison. The excess of grief was a comedic triumph.
Of course, they asked about the trip.
“So Mom told me you were on MTV? I wish I had known. I could have programmed the VCR to record it.”
Danny shrugged. “It was kind of an impulse thing.”
“And what about this wedding?” Jason asked. “How did that even happen?”
Pat leaned forward. “It started when we met these cute girls at a fair.”
“Started—how did it end?”
Pat shot a glance at me and then smiled wide for the whole table. “That remains to be seen.” Part of a politician’s job is being an actor.
May
We had taken the train and then a bus to Nahant. The sunlight filled the small island town. The heat of the warm May afternoon seeped into our bare feet through the sand.
“It’s been such a beautiful day,” she said. The wind blew her hair straight out.
“It is. Beautiful.” My lips could taste the ocean—along with the tartar sauce from the clam strips we had for lunch.
With a couple steps, she somehow melted into me. She had that way of just slipping right around my chest. “Everything changes when you’re in love.”
It was like my whole life suddenly diffused in a breath throughout my body. Beams of light shook free their haze. Cotton balls fell from my ears. The shadow of old frozen casts at last dissolved.
“We’re lucky to share this,” I breathed.
Her arms tightened. “I know.”
Charlie—
I’m writing this because I wanted to get the words right. I don’t know if I’m going to but there’s more of a chance this way. There’s kinda a minefield between us, you know?
But there are a lot good memories too. I’ve been thinking about them. I miss your laughter. I miss your seriousness. I always knew that you were trying to be straight with me. And I’ve gotten so sick of the head-games guys out here play. It probably hurt when I said I wanted to go out West by myself, but I needed space. I needed to work on some things for me.
I don’t know what we did to each other back then. Last March all I could think of was the bad things…this giant black hole that sucked up everything else. Now it’s like I see things in perspective and I see that there were a lot of sunny days after all.
You probably don’t remember this. It was just a random night. But do you remember one time in our junior year this really warm day in February—we were at a party and stayed really late and left and were probably kinda drunk. We were walking down the street—you had that puffy blue jacket open, the one that looked so good on you—and someone was just blasting 70s music out their apartment window. So you and I did some silly disco moves to this cheesy disco music.
That’s how it felt like then. Like there was music everywhere. We just had to pick it up.
Maybe we could have that again? Maybe we’ve grown up enough that we can do it better this time. Maybe
Maybe we could make a new start?
Alyssa told me you might be coming out here. My AOL address is still the same. Send me a message.
I’m willing to try again. And anyways I’d love to see you.
Gina
I had found that letter on the floor next to me in the morning. Marnie and Jason had left for work so quietly that I hadn’t heard them. I had turned in my sleeping bag and seen an envelope with Charlie written in purple ink across the front. She always loved that color. Even though Pat was still stretched out on the couch, I had assumed that he had left it, as a kind of apology.
And I did remember that night. I remembered that I had thought that Gina must have been really drunk to want to dance with me in the street like that. Normally, cheesy was the ultimate negation for her, and dancing in the streets to disco was the grand fromage. So doing the Hustle with me that night was a confession that she had become spontaneous and free and completely overcome by alcohol.
Maybe we could make a new start. But could I make a new start with her? Hadn’t there been a new start—a real new start—in Kentucky, at least in those moments before I had flinched? The letter weighed like a plate of lead on my chest. I sighed.
Like a cat that seems to sleep while it lies in wait, Pat rolled over on the couch. “So now you’ve read it.”
“Yes.”
He pivoted up and swung his legs over the couch. “What’d you think of it?”
“I’m still trying to figure that out.”
“Look, about before—I’m…I’m…Charlie, you’re my best friend and I worry about you, okay? I can’t stand to see you waste your whole life feeling bad all the time.”
“I know.”
“Do you know how great it was to see you happy out there? And I don’t mean half-smile happy. I mean full-on beaming. I sometimes feel like I haven’t seen you like that in years. And I’m gonna say this one time and then it disappears into the old lockbox and never comes back: Frankly, even when you were happy with Gina, it seemed like the light was dimmed, like you were trying to squeeze yourself into being something you weren’t.” He stood up, stretched, and scratched his bare leg. “I’ve gotta find something to eat. I’m finally hungry again.”
Dead End
Her eyes widened, like she was taking in a brave new vista, as she marveled at the menu. “This all looks so good, and I’m so hungry. Are you?”
My eyes slid along the columns of dim sum. “I’m supposed to be hungry.”
She laughed. “Pat said you were so funny.”
No mirror—however distorted—could spit back at me the illusionary “Charlie” that Pat had conjured. “One date, Charlie, that’s all I’m asking,” he had insisted, and I had finally agreed.
She was smiling and eager and almost impulsively unguarded. The collar of the soft pink cardigan hung open around her neck.
I remembered the taste of salt on her sweaty neck. My face pressed into her tangled hair. My tongue running along the groove behind her ear.
No. I wasn’t hungry. At all.
Thank you for reading Mixtape Summer! To ensure you don’t miss the next installment, please consider subscribing.
By the way, was this the New Kids on the Block song that Marnie sang at the talent show back in the day?