Authors: Cora Brent
I hadn’t seen him since that distant graduation day
seven years ago. 1982. I was standing in front of my house, cap in hand, posing under the front yard maple tree to appease Grace.
Marco had rolled up on the motorcycle which had been his
constant companion for the last year. He flashed me a grin.
“Want a ride?”
I dropped my tassel right on the freshly cut lawn. Of course I’d grown up seeing Marco all the time but we weren’t friendly. Marco Bendetti could have any Cross Point Village High School female he wanted. All he needed to do was crook a broad finger and they would have come running, panties already in a puddle at their feet. And as Marco sidled there next to my curb with his bike humming between his powerful thighs, I knew I was one of them.
“N-n
ot right now,” I stammered.
Marco gri
nned, shrugging. “I thought as much,” he said and gunned the bike down the street, turning the corner towards town.
But high school was a long time ago.
Marco apparently took off for parts unknown a few days later. From the snippets my mother had gleaned from Mary Bendetti over the years, he was somewhere in the southwest, periodically finding trouble, always breaking his mother’s heart.
My parents kept casting happy glances in my direction and I felt mildly sorry that for a brief moment I
hadn’t even wanted to come. I smiled at my mother. “How about we get started on those pies?”
By the time I retreated to my bedroom I reeked of cinnamon and my hands were raw from rolling pie crusts. It felt good to sink into the narrow bed which had held me through years of dreams and uncertainties. My room was a time capsule, virtually unchanged in the seven years since I’d moved out. As if it were always awaiting my return.
I languidly began to undress in front of a poster of
The Go-Gos
as the events of the day came rushing back. The humiliating recollection of Brian’s copy room infidelity led me to accidentally tear two buttons off my expensive silk blouse. I sat down on the edge of the bed, breathing heavily.
To hell
with Brian. To hell with men.
I pulled my heels off and threw them across the room where they
twisted wildly before managing to knock over a table lamp. I’d be damned if I was going to waste another minute of this short spin around the earth on shitheads like Brian Hannity. Still, the disgrace aspect was beginning to set in. I would not be eager to return to work next week.
“Angela?” My father’s worried voice was right on the other side of the door.
“I’m fine, Dad. Just dropped a book.”
“Must have been quite a book.” He sighed. “Good night, kid.”
I listened to his tired shuffle echo down the hallway and then the heavy tread of his feet thumping up the stairs. As I reached over and began to paw through my duffel bag I felt restless. I was wishing I really had brought a book. Something steamy and bodice-ripping with a lot of taut muscles and hard thrusts. I doubted there was any such thing in my father’s varnished oak bookcase. I was more likely to find such gems as
Notes of Pre-Colonial Yeomen in Western Massachusetts.
And I sure as hell wasn’t going to trouble Grace about whatever might be in her secret stash as it would almost certainly trigger uncomfortable
Fear of Flying
memories.
A flickering light outside caught my att
ention so I wandered across the small room to the single boxy window. I pulled back the delicate eyelet curtains handmade by Grace about a century and a half ago and gazed into the black summer evening.
There was a dark figure standing on the front porch of the
Bendetti house. The flickering was due to the evidently dying porch light. The figure, a man, tapped the base and finally unscrewed the bulb, examining it.
“That boy of hers has been skulking about.”
I felt a little lightheaded as I realized the man had to be Marco Bendetti. There was no moon and with the porch light snuffed out I couldn’t see much of him, other than the outline of his tall, thickly muscled shape and the light of his cigarette as he stood for a moment on the front lawn.
Suddenly I realized that although I could not see him well, the ceiling light was blazing behind me and, if he were facing my direction, he could almost certainly see every inch of me. I further realized that the buttons I had angrily torn a few moments earlier had opened my blouse to the point where the endowments peeking out of my lacy white bra were brazenly visible.
After hastily closing the curtains and backing away from the window I nearly tripped over the bed. I wondered if I could summon the courage to search Grace’s belongings for that clandestine book.
I could use a zipless fuck, even a vicarious one.
Cross Point
Village was one of those quiet throwback hamlets dotting greater New England which didn’t make it on to many maps.
Incorporated: 1761.
Population: Dwindling.
CPV’s greatest historical claim was that a handful of cannons had passed through its bucolic boundaries on the way to Fort Ticonderoga during the Revolutionary War some two hundred and change years ago. It remained a quiet nest of god-fearing farmers until advances of the nineteenth century brought the railroad and a bevy of gilded age capitalist aristocrats eager to escape the industrial choke of the teeming cities. Predictably, as the nation grew more mobile, the wealthy found more glamorous locations to spend their fortunes. On the perimeter of town there remained a handful of Gatsby-
esque broken mansions which attracted colonies of mice. And horny teenagers.
Agrari
an dependency was on the decline and it seemed CPV might fade into the wilderness like the handful of surrounding towns which lost their meaning. Boston might as well have been the surface of the moon for all the distant small town mattered to the moneyed overlords.
My family, the
Durants, had been around since the colonial era when James Durant dragged his limp wife and a bevy of offspring across the Atlantic. My father once drew an exhaustively penciled family tree stretching back to William the Conquerer. But I’ve often stared at that one branch, the point which spoke of caution thrown to the wind, the abandonment of England, of home, for something unknown. I always wondered what James thought he was looking for. I wondered if he found it.
Just as the board of selectmen were beginning to panic over the town’s fading prosperity, someone murdered an archduke on the other side of the world and a deeply pocketed investor decide
d it was a good time to build a weapons armory in the shadow of the Berkshire Mountains.
The factory jobs attracted new blood to the region and old families li
ke the Durants were joined by Francos and McCaffreys, Kaminskis and Bendettis. And so CPV grew and persevered.
The Great Depression s
hook a few leaves but the region managed to stay remarkably untouched through those awful years. The tiny Cross Point Village Museum housed in the basement of the library displayed a few pictures of this era. When large swaths of this immense nation were in a Dorothea Lange state of despair, the CPV townsfolk were apparently picnicking by local streams in merry fashion. My great grandfather abandoned his apple orchards and opened Durant’s Drug Store, a landmark which remained in business on the corner of Main Street and Maple.
When the armory closed in 1975 there was abject panic which I well remember. Town meetings were full of red-faced family men who wondered what the hell they were going to do now that the largest employer within driving distance had shut its doors. Western Massachusetts was renowned for the large number of educational institutions which presumably employed people, but all were too far for a comfortable commute.
My father, a lifelong historian and the current proprietor of Durant’s, had a brilliant idea. The Bicentennial was coming, the two hundred year celebration of whatever made a country into a country. Cross Point Village was a slice of Americana if ever one lived. Of course,
of course
it would appeal to tourists in search of their benighted vision of a patriotic experience.
And so commenced endless Saturdays working with my 4-H club as Main Street was diligently reordered. Those were happy times though, optimistic times. Every tired establishment from Dura
nt’s Drugs to Kaminski’s Hardware received a facelift and a fresh coat of paint. Funds were raised to cement a giant replica cannon on a pedestal in the town square complete with a proud brass plaque which read as follows:
In the year of our lord 1775 the storied Green Mountain Boys under the command of Ethan Allen passed through the center of Cross Point Village in the company of a dozen cannons. These brave patriots were en route to capture Fort Ticonderoga in one of the boldest exploits of the Revolutionary War. God Bless them. And God Bless America.
Thirteen years after the failed Bicentennial revival, the plaque remained but the lettering had mercifully faded. The cannon itself had transformed into a rusting hulk often embellished with obscene graffiti. I knew my father still sighed and headed out there on quiet Sunday mornings to blacken the “Fuck CPV” decorative art. I never had the heart to tell him he was fighting a futile battle.
As fortunes declined and residents moved away, the boutique shops along Maple began to close. It was Mary
Bendetti who reimagined Grandma’s Attic, a slumbering antique store, into the first Maple Street bar. Many of the old timers grumbled but my father was more pragmatic and his opinion carried a lot of weight. And so Grandma’s Attic became The Cave.
Staid old Maple Street was presently home t
o five seedy bars. Passing bikers discovered its appeal and began to descend with regularity. A shopper exiting the neat orderliness of Durant’s Drug Store had only to glance up and see rows of gleaming motorcycles squatting outside the low-roofed buildings nearby. It was rather an uneasy mix between the townies and the bikers but real trouble was infrequent.
Cross Point Village High school, home of the Cannons, was built in the 1950s with a hopeful eye towards the future. The building’s capacity far exceeded its population and even when I graduated seven years earlier there were an awful lot of empty rooms for students to duck into for illicit trysts. Not that such
concerns ever found me. I graduated second in a class of sixty seven and my sole sexual encounter was when Keith French rudely stuck his tongue in my mouth and pinched my nipple when we spent a semester as uncomfortable lab partners.
I was slightly overweight in high school, a fact which I congratulated myself on hiding underneath overlarge LL Bean shirts. I realize
d later that my adopted fashion style only made me look pitifully shapeless despite my generous chest. Plus my older brother Tony had made it known in no uncertain terms that anyone caught touching his sister would get to shake hands with his terrible temper. Funny because Tony bragged to no sordid end about his own conquests. So widespread were my brother’s threats that Keith French nearly cried after I slapped his hand away from my shirt. He begged me not to tell Tony.
In retrospect, my big brother’s brutish manners may have been the only favor he ever did for me.
Saturday dawned green and honeyed, just the sort of invigorating day in which the fresh air of the mountains
filtered down and mingled with the sweet promise of summer. I stretched languidly in bed, feeling nostalgic for the thousand mornings I had awakened to the season’s freedom and possibility.
Grace had to
have been knocking herself out for a while. I smelled bacon and beneath that the yeasty hint of freshly baked bread.
There must be some p
rimordial sense mothers own which advises them when their children open their eyes, no matter how old those children get. Before I’d even fully stood on the worn hardwood, my mother was knocking on my door.
“Angie,” she called. “Breakfast!”
Breakfast indeed. The round polished table which had been handed down from my grandmother was covered with pancakes and eggs, cinnamon rolls and freshly cut fruit. My father sat in his chair quaintly reading the newspaper.
As I munched absently on a slice of bacon I looked out the window. Specifically I looked across the street at the
Bendetti house. What I didn’t notice yesterday was that it had improved from the last time I had paused long enough to take a good look at it. Mary Bendetti had always been married to the bar and without a man around to help certain things had long fallen by the wayside, particularly after she got sick. My father was among the stalwart neighborhood men who used to do what he could but between the store and looking after his own home and family there were only so many hours in the day.
But now, someone had treated the shabby house to a fresh coat of
paint. The shutters, which I recalled as perpetually crooked, had been repaired and rehung. The older Bendetti brother, Damien, used to grace his mother with his finely suited presence for the big holidays before running back to civilization. I could understand that. Damien was five years older than his brother. Thin as a rail, he had always struck me as far too serious.
And Marco? He hadn’t been around in so long
the mention of his name was akin to legend.
My father yawned and turned a page.
I watched him over the rim of my orange juice glass. When I was a kid he’d seemed old, though that was likely my assessment for everyone over the age of thirty. But in the severe light of morning, I sadly realized he really was getting old. Not only the years but the harsh realities of life weighed on him; estranged son, absent daughter, failing business in a waning town. For the first time I thought about how often and how loudly I’d sworn to get the hell out of Cross Point Village. And I felt sorry.
I cleared my throat. “Hey Dad, you put up the cones already?”
It was my father’s annual duty to officially close off Polaris Lane on block party day. It was really more ceremonial than anything else, considering the street concluded in a rounded dead end. But kids came from surrounding neighborhoods anyway, relishing the opportunity to play kickball on a carless street without interruption. The Polaris Lane block party had been a tradition since the mid-sixties, always held the first Saturday of July. In a few hours the air would be thick with the smell of charcoal-crusted red meat and there and again the crackle of early firecrackers.
He didn’t look up from his newspaper. “Hmm? Oh yes, of course.”
My mother’s hands were covered in something that looked like sour cream. She nodded at me. “Krista’s stopping by today. She’s excited to show you the new baby.”
Inwardly I groaned. Krista was my cousin. And she was a pain in the ass. We were the same age and so went through school together in sort of a mixed friends/enemies fashion. I never knew what I did to that girl but she always relished any opportunity to make me feel like shit. Krista was not especially pretty but she had the right body and the right phony attitude and from the age of thirteen always had a boyfriend or three hanging off her arm.
I would watch Krista smear on dusky pink lipstick in the broken-tiled girls’ bathroom at CPV High as s
he waxed poetic about her exciting future. She was going to go to New York, she was going to marry a millionaire, she was going to drive a Lamborghini. Then she would smooth her shiny blonde waves and stand sideways, preening into the cloudy mirror, irreverently pleased with herself.
But, save a few visits to Albany and Boston, Krista
had not left CPV. I’d thought I had one up on her, finally, but then she married Keith Freaking French and starting popping out offspring like the species was endangered.
During my brief visits Krista made it her business to
search out an occasion to deposit a slobbering baby in my arms and ask, “So how’s the boyfriend status?” with fake interest. Then she would smile at my noncommittal response and cluck some variation of “Always a bridesmaid,” as my mother stood nearby and gazed upon Krista’s growing brood wistfully.
I was less than jazzed about havin
g Krista inflicted on my day. But of course I’d expected it so I managed a limp smile as my mother rinsed her hands off in the kitchen sink.
Once I’d showered and pulled on a pretty summer weight dress I paused in front of the rectangular mirror affixed to my closet door. When I was in high school I used to paper that mirror with city postcards and Tiger Beat clippings, partly because I liked the way the Cassidy brothers looked and partly because I didn’t like the way I looked.
I was thankful to have
grown out of that self-doubting teenager. True, I would never be the kind of pencil slim craved by certain guys like Brian Hannity, but I was rather pleased by the womanly curves which stared back at me. Though there really wasn’t much point in flaunting them today. Cross Point Village meant slim pickings; I’d lived here long enough to recognize that every worthwhile man was married (though not every married man was worthwhile) and the only ones left standing were grimly out of shape losers who mooned into their beer six nights a week and wondered what happened to the good old days they’d been promised.
I fixed some dangling turquoise earrings and rolled on some cherry lip gloss. Then I kissed the mirror in Krista-
esque fashion and braced myself for a day of well-mannered interest in friends and relatives.
The block party was in full swing by mid-aft
ernoon. My mother presided over the gigantic potluck table which spanned the length of the Johnson’s curb. A never ending parade of food seemed to land there courtesy of Polaris Lane ladies.
Old Lady Johnson wiped a dribble of blueberry pie from her chin whiskers and gazed at me doubtfully. “You got a fella, Andrea?”
I concentrated on cutting perfectly equal slices of pie. “It’s Angela, Mrs. Johnson. You used to babysit for me and my brother all the time.”
Her desiccated face broke into a frown. “
Your brother. He and that lousy little Bendetti shit popped the tires of my Chevy.”
I pushed a slice of pie from the server with artful
precision. “They popped lot of things, from what I’ve heard,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing, Mrs. Johnson. Here’s another slice of pie. Would you like some Reddi-wip on that?”
After a few hours I was dizzy from greeting people I remembered, people I didn’t remember, and people who I wished I didn’t remember. Although I always made my way back here for Christmas, I hadn’t returned for the b
lock party since college.
Krista floated by long enough to shove her grubby baby into my arms while my mother hovered nearby with shining eyes. Krista’s little rosebud mouth was smugly pursed and I noted with some chagrin that her lithe figure didn’t suffer any from the repetition of breeding.
Aunt Becky was my mother’s younger sister. She’d become pregnant her senior year in high school and dropped out to marry the presumed father. It was something of a scandal as Benjamin Kaminski, owner of Kaminski’s Hardware, was ten years older and already happened to have a wife. Luckily things sorted themselves out when the woman signed some paperwork and departed in humiliation, clearing the way for Becky and Benjamin to marry and produce a houseful of kids. Aunt Becky had an inexplicable year round tan which was rather difficult to come by in a northern climate and she often dispensed thoughtful nuggets like “Black is very slimming, Angela.” I’d never liked Aunt Becky. I especially didn’t like her when she tapped my mother on the arm and spoke in her singsong voice.
“So, when’s it your turn to be a grandma?”
And that’s when I decided to excuse myself. I needed to get away. I needed a beer. I needed to get that damn baby off my hands since he’d crapped himself in his sleep. I handed him back to his mother and wandered in the opposite direction.
As I surveyed the various bobbing heads I felt a little dizzy, as if I were walking through a dream. I’d been in this place before, with these people before, and if I squinted I could make myself believe it was all but unchanged.
“Having fun?” The voice at my back was deep and amused.
I turned around and couldn’t control the theatrical drop of my jaw.
When I’d last seen him he’d been a loutish delinquent, always scamming for sex and alcohol. But the years had been good, broadening his chest and arms, further defining his chiseled jaw. He scanned the varied clots of people and casually lit a cigarette.
“Hi,” he said, turning his attention back to me.
I swallowed. “Hi.”
“You want a beer?”
I did want a beer but my voice wasn’t cooperating with my mouth. “No.”
“Well, I don’t know how you fucking stand i
t then. Takes a keg’s worth to put up with some of these phonies.” He’d been leaning on the edge of a mottled redwood table, a beat up plastic cooler at his feet. As he reached down and began rifling through the ice I saw the stark black tattoos which circled his thick arms like lean snakes.
He noticed me looking. “I knew a guy on the inside.”
I blinked. “Inside of what?”
Marco
Bendetti lit a cigarette. “Lockup.”
“You were in prison?” I was shocked. “I didn’t know that.”
Marco took a drag from his cigarette and looked at me coolly. “Why would you know that?”
I blushed, feeling rather self-conscious and rather like the squirming version of myself which had hidden in the shadows throughout adolescence.
Oddly enough, I wasn’t sure if Marco knew who I was. And I didn’t know whether to take that as a good thing or a bad thing. I cleared my throat. “So what did you do?”
Marco took a long swallow of beer and eyed me up and down. He gave no hint as to whether or not he liked what he saw. Finally
he shrugged. “I was a reckless idiot. Now I’m smarter.”
“Less reckless?”
He smiled thinly. “Still reckless at times. I just don’t get caught.” Marco’s dark eyes rendered a slow burn over my bare legs, rising higher over my hips and lingering on my breasts. “You look different.”
I tried to stay nonchalant but the fact of the matter was he was having a dramatic effect on me. The heat between my legs was unbearable and I was sure if I shifted position
, even slightly, he would know why. And that he’d be entertained by the fact that he’d managed to work me up. “So you do know me.”
Marco smiled and took another swallow of beer. “’Course I know you
, Angela. We were in the same goddamn place from diapers to graduation. You always wore glasses. You’re not wearing glasses now.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. Marco’s deep gaze was making me feel positively unclothed. “Contacts.”
“I like your glasses better.”
“
Well I’ll just go run and put them on then.”
Marco had shifted, moving a few inches closer, so damn close I could easily inhale the heady mix of smoke and alcohol. Once I’d heard Tony brag to his friends t
hat the combo of booze and tobacco was a beeline into any girl’s pants.
“Doesn’t matter wh
o the fuck she is,” he had preached to his captivated minions. “Even the smart ones get unzipped.”
Tony, for once, was dead on right about something.
As Marco cracked open another beer, I noted how his jaw was shadowed with a two day beard. I fought to urge to reach out and stroke his rough cheek. We’d never been buddies and indeed he rarely seemed to even notice my existence. But as we stared at one another in the midst of our reveling neighbors I saw how he took in the way my dress clung to my body and there was no longer any mistaking that look. In fact, there was something vaguely menacing about the crude way he was appraising me. My panties were becoming damper by the second. It wouldn’t have taken much for me to follow him anywhere.
Then a troupe of rowdy boys buzzed past us waving sparklers as if they were
Star Wars light sabers. Whatever spell it was which prompted the fire of lust in his eyes seemed to have broken and he took a step back. In the next moment he only nodded at me mildly and exhaled a plume of smoke. “Tony in town?”
Even though Tony was
two years older, Marco had been cool enough to run with his unruly crowd. They were some pair, committing beer runs at the McCaffrey’s gas station on the edge of town and defiling the CPV High virgins on the track field.