Elena was three years older than me. Growing up, she was our babysitter, buddy, and bully, according to her needs. Tugging us out of traffic, turning the oven on to 350 degrees so that me and Reggie could slide our Swanson's in there side by side, keeping Mondays at 8
PM
in a stranglehold for her beloved
Little House on the Prairie
. Those hard-won frontier lessons. When we destroyed her nerves, she threatened to tell our father, which shut us down like that.
She slimmed down and hipped up when she hit high school, unveiling a cool downtown persona that made the most blasé private-school deb seem like a Kentucky rube. She came home after everyone was in bed and tossed glossy invites from the Peppermint Lounge and Danceteria onto the table in the foyer, where they accumulated like exotic stickers on a steam trunk. At night, strange sounds emanated from her room, bruised melodies wrung from Mission of Burma 45s and ink-black flexis out of British music magazines. There were Friday evenings where she'd psych herself up by playing
Sandinista!
cut for cut, all six sides, and then tromp out of the house in Day-Glo boots to wrestle down the night. Leaving me and Reggie alone in the house with a stack of splatter flicks from Crazy Eddie's, fascinated by ideas of our future, high-school selves. Suckers!
The last few summers, she'd been in charge when our parents were in the city. Now that it was my job, I knew what her expression had meant when our parents' friends asked when our folks were coming out. She was a camp counselor at Boy's Harbor, bossing those kids around all day, which made things easier for us as she was all out of fascist directives by the time she got home. I listened to her sneak out of the house after me and Reggie went to bed. I heard the car door slam as she went off on her secret missions and I put myself in charge of us in the empty house until morning. Her final summer, she was too hip and strange and “white-acting” for the Sag Harbor boys and girls she'd grown up with, and went out to find others like
her, her fellow unlikelies. She never brought them around, but she must have found her tribe.
I only saw her once that summer. The week before I got my braces off. Bobby was still out, and we were driving down Main Street, South Hampton, rushing to catch the 7:20 show of
Beyond Thunderdome
. We'd seen it before, but we had nothing else to do. We were about to turn into the parking lot behind the theater when Bobby said, “Isn't that your sister?”
She was across the street, smoking a cigarette in front of one of the fancy restaurants reserved for grown-ups. If our parents took us out to dinner, it was to the Lobster Inn or the latest one-season home-style fried-chicken joint or takeout place. The grown-ups kept the shiny, written-up restaurants for their nights away from the kids. Or away from the wives. She was talking to a German-looking guy with long blond hair and bright white teeth that gleamed from all the way across the street. He had a Eurotrash demeanor I will forever associate with the high-tech terrorists of
Die Hard
, and yeah, I know the movie didn't come out until three long summers later, but what do you want, the movie made a big impression on me, and it is hard to accept the notion of a pre–
Die Hard
world. The cruel efficiency of those guys. She patted his arm and smiled at some little witticism of his, tracing down to his elbow. They were fucking.
They were still there after we found a parking space. Which was good, because I didn't want to have to go inside the restaurant and tell the garçon or whatever that I wanted to look for someone. Her companion spotted me approaching and watched me over her shoulder. His face had that expression I've seen many times, when I'm walking down the street and there's a white person sitting alone in a car. The look on his face was the one they always get before they lock the car doors. Click, click, click up the street as I pass. We were in South Hampton.
“Elena?”
She gave me her hug—I'd forgotten how good it felt—and introduced me to Derek. He lost his squint and shook my hand with a big big smile.
“What are you doing here? When did you get out?”
“I just popped in for the weekend,” she said. “I'm visiting Derek.”
Bobby checked out her friend, raising a skeptical eyebrow.
I said, “Oh, I didn't know.”
“It was a last-minute thing.”
“When are you coming over? 'Cause I work—” I began to say. Because I didn't want to miss her.
“I'm probably not going to have time to make it over there,” she said. “Probably. It's just a quick visit.”
“Oh.”
The traffic rushed in the street. Bobby told me he was going to buy tickets and that I should meet him over there. Elena nodded her head toward Derek and he slunk into the restaurant. She had a lot of training with delivering nonverbal directives, working on me and Reggie all those years.
Elena took a drag and exhaled through her nose. “Do me a favor and don't tell Mom and Dad you saw me, will you?” she said. “They wouldn't understand.”
“You weren't even going to see us.”
“Don't start pouting. Of course I want to see you and Reggie.” She squeezed my shoulder. “I'm going to try and come out for longer before I have to go back to school. This was a spur-of-the moment thing.” She stamped out her cigarette and said, “You know how it can be in that house.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I'm talking about.”
She looked through the window of the restaurant after Derek. “Just do me a favor, Benji, and get out when you can,” she said. “Work hard and get into a good school. That way you're out of the house and that's it.”
“I don't understand.”
“Yes, you do.”
The next time I saw her was Thanksgiving. She stayed one night and then went to a party in Connecticut some friend of hers from school was having. She was meeting all sorts of new people, she said.
• • •
NO, I DIDN'T HAVE TO WORRY
about running into Elena with that song in my brain. Those cornball words on my lips. I was out in the middle of the street, a few houses up. Far enough away that I didn't have to pretend I didn't live where I lived. It could go on for five minutes or five hours. This time I was going to stay away.
“Ben.” Melanie stood at the corner of Meredith. She was on the grass by the curb, her fingers splayed out on her hips. She wore a white button-down shirt tight enough that it made her look like she'd jumped a cup size. She'd twisted her hair into two long braids that danced on her shoulders when she moved her head. I didn't see Nick.
She prodded something on the ground with her foot. She said, “That's gross.” It was a yellow centipede of plastic, clumped with dirt.
“Yeah, you shouldn't litter,” I said.
“It's a jimmy hat.”
“Right.” I hadn't seen one outside the packaging before. Sometimes guys I knew opened their wallets to show off their expectations, and amateurs like me gawked at the outlines of the ring. Now I realized I had seen them before, out in the woods behind the park or deflated on a sidewalk among the other fucked-up New York confetti.
She scraped it with her sandal up the grass and into the woods.
“Nick's at work?” I said.
“I don't know where Nick is. I'm not his keeper.”
“Okay.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Right,” she said. We took a few steps down Terry.
“I can't believe it's almost September,” I said.
“Yeah.”
I asked her when she was going back. She told me, next week. It was that time of year. At night we started closing the windows. The
breezes woke you in the middle of night or startled you at dusk with their sudden lacerations. You remembered packing at the beginning of the summer and trying to figure out how many long-sleeved shirts and sweaters to bring, and realized you chose the wrong number like you did every year. It was almost over. The city rose higher and higher on the horizon.
“You must be glad to be coming out here again,” I said. I had a roll of non sequiturs in my pockets and I was just tossing them out across the water trying to get a good skip going.
“It's nice out here,” she said, “but it's not all that. Too quiet, you know?” I knew she lived in Queens, and in my provincial head the Outer Boroughs were a hotbed of licentiousness. Sag Harbor people who lived in Queens and Brooklyn were simply cooler. No ifs, ands, or buts. They didn't cage themselves in private school. Their parties ripped the weekend asunder. The standard projections of the repressed. But hearing confirmation from Melanie, who was like a year younger than me, just a freshman, made me feel like more of a stiff than usual.
She kinda squinted at me as we rounded the corner and I remembered the phone call. See, something out of the ordinary had happened the day before. We were at NP's house, me and Marcus and Nick. NP's mother was at a luncheon in the city, so we availed ourselves of his house for a change. We were out on the patio, talking shit, when NP went to answer the phone. He poked his head out of the back door. He looked puzzled. He said, “It's Melanie.”
Nick took his radio off his lap. NP said, “She wants to talk to Benji.”
Now we were all confused. Nick sat back down, not looking at me. NP shrugged.
The phone was shaped like a banana, a sad, bright-yellow relic of early-'7os design whimsy. The coils of the handset cord were so gnarled and incestuous that I had to pull for every inch. “Hello?”
“It's Melanie.”
“Hi.” The handset tried to spring away from me.
“What are you doing?”
“Hanging around with NP and Reggie. What about you?” I don't know why I didn't mention Nick.
“Just watching TV.”
I looked out the window into the backyard, but I could only see the old tire swing. I fell off it when I was little and scraped up my face and still hated it for chumping me out. “Not much happening here.” I cleared my throat.
“It's a boring day.” I heard a voice in the background. Peaches. “I gotta go,” she said. “We're going to Caldor for slippers.”
“Okay.”
I went back outside. NP said, “Oh, Heavenly Dog.”
“She just wanted to see what was up,” I said.
Nick said, “She's all …” swatting his hand at an invisible gnat. He wrinkled his face into a well-known expression of male aggravation at the opposite sex, so instantly recognizable that it could have been an international sign for such a thing, hanging in airports and train stations. He didn't seem pissed with me and, in my way, I forgot about the phone call a minute later. She wanted to say hi. It wasn't that weird.
Except for the reliable haunted houses, Azurest was filled up. Every weekend the new arrivals buzzed their hedges into shape, turned the faucets until the rust ran out, exchanged their old mildewed doormat for the latest offering from the Hardware Store in Town. Cars were bumper to bumper in the driveways and clotted the curbs, the vehicles of spectators assembling for the Main Event. The big fireworks show before they had to head back to the city. I realized I was humming that song again and stopped. How long had I been doing that? Had she heard? I said, “You called me Ben before.”
“I thought that's what you wanted people to call you?”
“That's right.”
“Benji is cute, but I know what you mean. I used to always go, ‘Benji! Benji!’ whenever you came down the beach with Reggie.”
Huh. “When were you last out?” I asked. “I know you used to come out here all the time, but I must have been really little because I can't remember.”
She shook her head and smirked. “Just until I was five. But I remember it all. You used to stay at that red house on Hempstead. We all ran around playing red light, green light in the backyard. And there was that old pump that used to be home base.”
“You remember that?” I saw it, me and the rest of the gang zigzagging across the grass, saw all their faces but did not see hers.
“You remember that time I kissed you?” she asked.
“What?”
“I was like five or something and I told you we should get married.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“What did I do?”
“You ran away screaming.”
“Really?”
“My mom had to apologize to your mom because I kept following you around trying to kiss you all the time.”
“That's weird.” Was she fucking with me? That's all I could think. There was that phone call yesterday, and then her telling me this. This was a plot, a conspiracy of city-style, private-school cruelty. No other explanation.
“I thought you were the cutest boy out here,” she said. She stopped. “What happened to you?”
“What happened?” I cocked my head back because I felt that was the appropriate response to such a statement. Insulted, etc. What a normal person would do.
“No, I don't mean it like that,” she said, chuckling. Her fingers brushing down my arm. “I mean, you just always seemed so happy all the time. You had that
Planet of the Apes
pajama top you liked to wear as a shirt even though it was the daytime, and you were always laughing with Reggie at everything.”
“Now I'm all angry and mad?”
“I didn't say that.” She bumped me with her hip.
Huh.
We were outside Marv's house. It was a rancher with a long flat
roof, painted a robin's-egg color that was what radiation would look like if you could see radiation. Light came from the basement window, through the dirt splashed on by the rain. I thought about Rusty Potz, the WLNG afternoon guy. He coated his voice with so much reverb it sounded like he worked underground, only getting fresh air during one of their remote feeds from the Sag Harbor Masons' Annual Fish Fry. (“Tickets are still available at the Municipal Building on Main Street.”) From his hepcat rock-'n'-roll patois, I pictured him with a white beret and satin baseball jacket, standing in front of a few signed photographs of him shaking hands with Bill Haley and His Comets, the Yardbirds, and sundry crooners dressed in matching cardigans. He worked alone in his dungeon, stirring the cauldron, concocting longing for his listeners.
WLNG didn't play hip-hop, of course, outside the occasional spin of “Rappin' Rodney.” That's where Marv and his underground operation came in, down in his basement. Marv was an in-betweener, a few years older. He was “street-smart,” wielding the latest styles with the unself-consciousness that came from actually being that elusive thing: unimpeachably down. Once he hit high school he stopped coming out, to commit himself to the B-boy lifestyle. He was the first person I met with two turntables. One turntable, you liked music. Two turntables and you were an artist. In the summer of '81, he cut up “Good Times” like a true acolyte of Grandmaster Flash, slashing the fader back and forth in a three-card monte panic, rubbing out a few tentative scratches, zip zip. The famous bass line strutted like a hustler around the room in a beige jeans suit, with an Apple Jack on his head: What can I get up to now? He didn't have that many records in his milk crate, but they all had the name of the song blacked out with Magic Marker. “That's so no one bites me,” he explained. We crowded around, watching his magic. After a while he'd say, “I'll see you later—I gotta practice,” and he was alone again in the cement room, working solo in his bunker like the WLNG guy. You deliver the news and you do it alone.