Double Take (4 page)

1975

A few days after my evening with Joey, I was out on a date. I had never been on one before. All through high school and college, no one I knew went on dates; we just drifted together in a magical way, like ballet dancers. I thought of dating as something people in old beach movies did, like Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. You went to the soda fountain and ordered a milkshake with two straws—dating was that corny and camp. But lately I had been noticing that some things that had been positively laughable in the sixties were creeping back into style.

When one of my customers from Diana's asked me out, I put him off at first. I wasn't the least bit attracted to him, but that wasn't the problem; I wasn't attracted to anyone. It wasn't even that I was trying to be faithful to Michael—no, that was finished. I realized that I ought to be making a fresh start, getting on with my life, seeing other people. These were phrases my mother used. “One door closes, another one opens,” she would say obliquely, handing me a salami sandwich I didn't want. “When you fall off a horse, you've got to get back on.” But my reluctance to go out with the customer had nothing to do with my mother's advice, or with Michael. I just didn't see myself as the kind of person who went on dates.

The customer pursued me with relentless charm. He left me a five-dollar tip on a cup of coffee; he drew cute pictures of pigs and bunnies on napkins; he told me every joke he knew, and he knew a lot. I would smile so hard it made my face hurt and I grew to hate smiling. One day he sent me his resume via Special Delivery. He was a graduate
student in business, and his resume was four pages long. Obviously this customer was a great guy, a guy so great that being around him made me feel sick.

Finally one day, I decided I had to get rid of him. When he sat down at the counter and ordered his usual cup of coffee, I told him I'd go out with him if he could name all seven of the dwarves in
Snow White
, and that if he couldn't, he'd have to quit asking me. Happy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Doc, Bashful, Dopey and Sneezy, he said.

We were in a restaurant on the near North Side in an area full of singles bars and night clubs. It was a part of the city I did not usually frequent. The restaurant specialized in seafood, which I normally liked. In the front of the room was a natural wood bar as long as a train car, surrounded by gleaming mirrors and towering ferns. Between the ferns a crowd of trendy-looking people stood laughing.

I was eating oysters on the half shell that my date had ordered for me. I cupped the shells to my mouth and tilted them, and the oysters oozed down my throat. He was telling me his career plans, the gist of which was that he had a brilliant future. I was clearly supposed to be impressed; instead I was depressed. Without asking if I wanted some, he ordered Chardonnay, and the waiter brought two glasses. My date filled my glass, said, “To us,” and clinked his glass against mine. I drank all the wine in one swallow. I hadn't had wine in four years, and it tasted like juice from some kind of metal.

The waiter asked my date what we wanted. “Filet of sole?” my date asked me. I nodded. “We'll have the filet of sole,” he said to the waiter.

“What kind of dressing would you like on your salad?” the waiter asked.

“What kind of dressing would you like?” my date asked me.

“Do they have blue cheese?”

“Yes, we do,” said the waiter.

“Blue cheese it is,” I said, smiling at the waiter as if we had forged a little bond.

I was eating my salad. My date was talking about his classes and how he was breezing through them. His twin loves were marketing and finance, and he was torn between them. He opened his mouth to eat an oyster, and his teeth were white and perfect. I seemed to be obsessed with teeth lately, I thought. I wondered if I should become a dentist.

“You're not saying anything,” he said.

“I'm listening.” This was half true: I was half listening.

“Tell me about you.”

“What would you like to know?”

“What do you do?”

“You know what I do. I'm a waitress.”

“That's just a summer job, right?”

“I think it's autumn now, technically.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well,” I said, thinking. Nothing came to mind. I really had no career plans other than working at Diana's Grotto, or maybe dentistry. It wasn't that I had never thought about it, but when I did, my mind went blank. “I guess I don't really do anything. In college, they never told us we would need to think of something else to do when we finished. Obviously I knew they were going to make me leave at some point, but the specifics never came up.”

He looked at me with incomprehension. “I guess I assumed that you were some kind of artist or something.”

“Nope. Not really. Unless you count my waitressing. Haha,” I added. The waiter brought our filets of sole, and I tore into mine without tasting it. “Mmm, delicious.”

“What was your major?” he asked, trying a different tack.

“I.P.S. Independent Pattern of Study.”

“And that is—”

“A little art, a little music, a little lit, a little history, a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants . . .”

“What had you planned on doing with that?”

“Doing? I'm afraid I don't understand,” I said in a British accent.

He sighed.

“Hey, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be difficult or anything.” I felt suddenly remorseful. “Are you sort of asking me what I'm trained to do?”

“Okay, fine. What are you trained to do?”

“I'm trained to be an Edwardian aristocrat.”

I poured us more wine.

We stood barely moving in the middle of a gleaming white dance floor beneath flickering lights. Dance clubs had recently sprouted up all over due to the suddenly popularity of a repetitive style of music called Disco. Evidently all it took to have a club was a dance floor and a mirror-ball hanging from the ceiling. The room was packed with couples doing what must have been the latest steps. My date and I stood ready to dance in a
position I remembered from the ballroom dancing I had been forced to do in gym class, but our feet just shuffled back and forth. A photographer scampered around the room taking pictures, and the dancers turned their faces away. They had told their spouses they had to work late.

I was hypnotized by the mirror-ball; I had never seen one before. As we shuffled together, avoiding each other's eyes, couples swirled around us in a perfectly synchronized motion I later found out was called the Hustle. It was like being on a raft surrounded by huge waves, and I began to feel seasick. The photographer, a bald guy in a black tuxedo, barged next to us. His flash went off in my face, and for a minute I saw red and blue eggs. Spots of light from the mirror ball whirled around the room like shooting stars. Suddenly, dark blue waves of nausea began to shoot through me.

“Excuse me,” I burbled, and took off in the direction of a sign I had noticed earlier for restrooms. I burst through the door that said Ladies, raced into a stall, leaned over, and puked up everything—wine, oysters, fish, pearls, shooting stars. When I finally finished, I went over to the sink and splashed water on my face. I looked in the mirror. My hair was messy and limp and the ends were wet from vomit. I did not look like a disco person.

The lights were out in my parents' house when my date pulled his car up to the curb. I leaped out, then popped my head back in to thank him. I could tell from his expressionless face that I would not be receiving any more napkin art. For an instant I felt sad thinking about how I should have married him and lived with him and our 2.5 children in a big house in Winnetka. Then I turned around and dashed up the front steps of my parents' house as he sped away.

When I tiptoed into the house, I could hear my parents breathing in sleep. I crept into the living room without turning on the lights and threw myself on the couch. I lay there for a while staring into the darkness, then got up and tiptoed into the front hall, where my mother's purse sat on the table. I groped through it until I found her car keys.

In the back room at Bert's, I sat at the bar, and ordered a bottle of Old Style to settle my stomach. As I took a sip, I heard a voice behind me. “You call this not drinking?”

“Rat,” I said without turning around.

1975

We sat at a small, filthy table. All the tables at Bert's were small and filthy. I was on my third Old Style, Joey was drinking a Scotch. I had always hated the taste of whiskey, which I had frequently chug-a-lugged with Emily in the closet next to her parents' liquor cabinet. Even though she had scrupulously refilled the bottles with water so their levels would remain the same, her parents were not fooled and had ended up padlocking the liquor cabinet. Whenever we needed to, Emily would get a screwdriver and take the cabinet's door off its hinges, leaving the padlock in place. We were under the impression that they never realized we did this, but I think they must have known. I wondered what they must have thought of us as we reeled out the door every Friday night wearing blue Maybelline mascara and long shirts we had made out of Indian bedspreads using McCall's patterns. We would come home late, our breath reeking of cloves to disguise the smell of alcohol, our eyes shining from Visine to make them look less road-mapped from pot, and stagger into Emily's bunk beds. Her sister had slept in the bottom bunk until she died of leukemia, and now I got to sleep in it. As we lay there, I always asked her to tell me a long, boring story, and sometimes she would lull me to sleep with the marvelous adventures of Emily and Cookie in a magical land. The psychedelic Beatles looked down on us like kindly gods.

In the morning, we would tiptoe downstairs and grab two sixteen-ounce bottles of Coke from the fridge. She would pull a large can of Jay's potato chips from a high shelf and we would sit in front of the color TV all morning watching cartoons. Her parents
would pass through the room and gaze at us with studiously bland expressions that were meant to conceal their bewilderment and irritation. When they entered, we would grow silent, and as they left, we would laugh at some secret joke. When they were gone, Emily would take the lid off the potato chips, stick her feet in the can, and stomp on them until they were crushed to a fine powder. She liked them that way.

I took a little sip of Joey's Scotch to see if it would bring all this back to me, and it did.

“How did you meet Bando?” He eased his drink away from my hand.

“How did anybody meet anybody? You just knew them. How did I meet you?”

“I don't know.”

“I don't think we were ever formally introduced. We were just there.”

“True.”

“Like you'd be on the train and you'd see someone with long hair and by the time you got downtown you were old pals with them. It was like some kind of osmosis. In fact, I think that's the only way I know how to meet people. I'm not any good at the new ways.”

“So how did you meet Bando?” he asked again.

“I don't know. Why do you want to know?”

“Just making conversation.”

“Actually, I remember the first time I saw him. I was at a party in a high-rise near the lake. Some rich kid I didn't know. All I remember is seeing this guy passed out on the couch, and the weird thing was he was smiling, like he was having a great dream. Lying there, he looked so beautiful, like a handsome prince. I stood watching him and it was
like looking into his soul. Then a few weeks later, I ran into him outside Casa. You know how people would suddenly appear and start hanging out. He was sitting on the corner, and I went up to him and asked him what he'd been smiling about. Instead of being embarrassed or anything, he said, ‘I was dreaming about you.'”

1969

Bando was standing in front of Casa Sanchez wearing a red and blue striped shirt with white stars, and pressed bell-bottom jeans. Although it was spring it was chilly, and he rubbed his hands together to warm them. His hands were always cold, and someone had told him this was a sign of genius. He was always looking for signs of genius the way some people looked for four-leaf clovers.

He had found out about Casa Sanchez from his friend Sebastian, who lived across the street and had been watching it from his window for years. Hippies stood on the corner or in the alley in all kinds of weather. When it snowed, they'd throw snowballs at passing cars. When it rained, they held umbrellas. When the sun shone, they played transistor radios and pitched pennies. Sometimes they'd pound on the mailbox as if it were a drum.

Bando and Sebastian had recently gone to a party in a high-rise apartment given by a friend from Martin Academy whose parents were in Europe. Most of the students at Martin—all male—were creeps, geeks, and worms. They studied all the time, wore white shirts and black pants, and had carried briefcases since they were ten. Sebastian and Bando took to each other immediately in ninth grade because they had long hair—to the collar, as long as the school would permit. They had both read Goethe, and knew enough not to call him “Go-ee-thee” like the street on the North Side. Their friend George, whose party it was, was the only other person in the school that they could stand. George, a senior, was a drug dealer with a very high IQ whose parents were always in France. He
had a lot of parties, presumably to enhance his drug connections. (George would one day end up making a fortune with a multinational pharmaceutical company.) At the party, Sebastian met some of the people who hung out at Casa Sanchez. One of them had read
Faust
, the other was obviously completely illiterate. These were both Sebastian's kind of people. As he left (he had to practically carry the drunken Bando to a taxi), he said to them, “See you on the street.”

Now Bando was standing alone in front of Casa Sanchez. Sebastian had been forced to go with his mother to a Unitarian meeting against the war. Bando was trying to look as if he belonged, as if this wasn't the first time he had stood there. He strolled over to the curb and sat down gingerly, so as not to get too dirty, next to a rumpled guy in a torn army jacket.

“What's hap,” the guy said to Bando. He had a cloud of dark hair and a friendly face.

“Hello,” Bando said, trying vainly to rid his voice of its incessant formality.

“Jupiter,” the guy said, extending his hand.

One of those dumb hippie monikers, Bando thought. “Bobby, I mean, Bando,” he said. This was Sebastian's nickname for him. He took Jupiter's hand and ended up in an elaborate handshake.

“Haven't seen you around before,” Jupiter said.

“I've been away.”

“Yeah? Me too. Just got back from Cali. A whole bunch of us was gonna go out there on our bikes. But they couldn't get their shit together.”

“Technical difficulties?”

“Really, man. So I said, hey, I'll go by myself. So I went on a Greyhound bus.”

“What's it like out there?”

“Man,” Jupiter said, looking at Bando with red, earnest eyes, “it is so far fucking out.”

“In what way?”

“They got everything out there.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know, everything, palm trees and shit.”

“So why did you come back here?”

“I don't know, man,” Jupiter said. “It was crazy. Like, one minute I was there, and the next minute I was back here.”

“I know what you mean,” Bando said, though he didn't.

“Hey, Jupe,” a female voice said from behind them.

Bando turned and saw a girl about his age, with long peroxide-blonde hair with dark roots; her nose was too long, her mouth was too wide, and her eyes were too close together. She was wearing a navy blue military jacket and denim bell-bottoms that made her thighs look too big. Everything about this girl seemed askew, which was probably why she seemed as beautiful as a goddess.

The goddess sat next to him on the curb, pulled out a pack of Kool cigarettes, and proffered them. Jupiter declined, but Bando drew one from the pack and lit it, somehow managing not to choke on the smoke or set his hair on fire. He didn't like smoking, although he sometimes stole cigarettes from his mother, but he liked the idea of putting his mouth around something that had, however briefly, belonged to this girl.

“What's hap?” she asked.

“Nothing to it,” Jupiter said. “Just shootin' the shit.”

The girl leaned over and looked at Bando. “I know you,” she said. “You were at that party in that big apartment building. I saw you asleep on the couch. You were smiling. Like you were having some kind of amazing dream.”

“I was dreaming about you,” Bando said, almost without thinking, then was instantly flooded with embarrassment. What a completely idiotic thing to say, a nasty little voice in his head chided. He looked up at the girl. She was smiling as if someone had given her a present.

Suddenly in perfect synchrony, she and Jupiter jumped to their feet and moved down the alley, away from 57th Street. Bando, stunned, continued to sit there, wondering if this was something they had rehearsed to unnerve strangers.

“Come on,” the girl shouted over her shoulder to him. He looked down the street and saw a police car headed toward him. He rose and then strolled casually across the street to the lobby of Sebastian's apartment building. He watched through a tiny barred window as the police car rolled slowly down the street and around the corner. He stood there for a while, waiting, but Jupiter and the girl didn't come back.