We spent a lot of time just talking. One night we went to the drive-in for the midnight show. Soon though we were leaning against our doors looking across the car at each other and ignoring the movie. Kids around us shouted or made out or threw popcorn between the cars. We put the windows up and turned the radio down and shut out the outside world. It was an eager kind of talking and everything she said felt like it could have come out of my mouth. We spent the whole night excited and nodding and laughing. After the movie we drove around for a while. We had nowhere to go, but that didn't matter. We didn't want the night to end.
That kind of thing has lost its shine, but it felt good then. We would talk whole nights away, falling asleep as the sun came up. I know now we were trying to figure out who we were. All those thoughts, all those dreams and hopes and truths. They had always been there but hidden and never had the chance to really take shape. Childhood had shown us a lot. How our parents lived and how the world worked, but it hadn't given us a sense of ourselves. All those things we'd been too embarrassed to say or maybe we didn't have the words for, they needed to be taken out and shared with another person. We needed to hear how they sounded and once shared, how they came back to us.
We were so excited to be on our own. Away from the lives we knew, we could finally see who we were without the preconceived notions and expectations that had always been there because of family and friends and all the other people who'd shaped us growing up. It was new and scary. Asking people who didn't know you to accept you.
With Sarah I felt safe. Even when the conversation turned serious.
"You don't talk about your family," she said.
"I don't?"
"Nope."
"What do you want to know?"
"Well, what about your mom?"
"She died of cancer when I was sixteen."
"I'm sorry."
"It's alright. She was sick for a long time and in the end it was better. She was in a lot of pain."
"Do you remember her?"
"I remember things. Like trips we took. Or how we used to have family game nights, just the three of us. It sounds kind of lame now, but then it was fun."
"It doesn't sound lame."
"There were a couple of hard years after she passed. My dad and I always got along, but with her gone, you know, it was totally different. Like we didn't really know how to act around each other anymore. Plus we were in a new house, and I had changed schools when we moved."
"What did she do?"
"I can't remember. It's that kind of stuff that I forget. She got sick when I was twelve and was pretty much home after that. I remember her always being there when I got home from school. She used to get really bored being in the house all day, but the doctors wouldn't let her work. They said it was too stressful. She wasn't really one for housework, but she loved to bake. I'd come home and find she'd made a cake or brownies. My favorites were always her cinnamon buns. She was always trying to send whatever she had made to school with me. She'd tell me to give it to my friends. I was always kind of embarrassed to show up at school with a tray of cookies but my friends loved it. And I think it might be why I passed algebra."
"She sounds great."
"The other thing she'd do is steal my books. Whatever I was reading in English or history she'd take so she'd have something to read during the day. I'd tell her to go to the library and get something interesting, but she'd read whatever I was reading so we could talk about it. That's the thing she missed most, being social. She couldn't really go out because she'd get tired really fast. So she'd make me sit down after dinner and talk about Lord of the Flies or Huckleberry Finn or the Civil War, whatever I was studying at school. My dad isn't much of a reader so I'd have to have these discussions with her every night."
We sat for a while.
"What about you? You don't really talk about your family either," I said.
"You know everything there is to know."
"I don't know anything."
"They're miserable people with too much money who don't love each other."
"That's .... I don't know what that is. Is that true?"
"It's been like that forever. My parents are in Italy for a month. This is the sixth time in four years they've gone away to 'save their marriage.'" She made the quotes in the air. "I don't know what happened. You hear them talk about college and it seems like they really were in love then. Right out of school my dad started his own company and my mom stayed at home to raise my sister and me. At some point they just stopped liking each other and they always used us to get at each other."
"Wow."
"My older sister doesn't talk to them. The minute she graduated college she moved to London with some friends. I still talk to her and she never even asks about them. My parents flew out to see her walk at graduation and she wasn't there. She didn't tell them that she wasn't going to walk. The day before the ceremony she was already on a plane out of the country." She didn't look at me, instead looking down. Her curly red hair hiding her eyes, but I could see her biting her lower lip. "Growing up I called my mom 'Mop.' I didn't want to say 'Mom' because we were always fighting, so I called her 'Mop.' I still do it. She's never noticed."
"What do you call your dad?" I asked
"Nothing. He's never around so I don't really call him anything."
And it went like that. Sometimes serious, the things we didn't share with anyone else and sometimes it was just us, sitting at a red light and making faces at each other trying not to laugh. We wouldn't know the light had changed until people behind us honked.
There was this twenty-four hour grocery store that we sometimes went to. They served ice cream and we'd buy ice-cream cones and sit on the mechanical merry-go-round out front eating them. One night I bought one of those big plastic rings, the kind that are cut to look like a huge diamond but they're shot through with reds and blues. I got it for a quarter from the machine and got down on one knee and made a big production of it, trying not to laugh. She swatted at my head and shrieked and was embarrassed in front of the single checkout clerk and the homeless guy putting empty cans into a plastic bag. She never mentioned that night but for as long as we were together that ring hung from her rear view mirror, next to her tassel from her high school graduation. It was the first thing my eyes would find whenever I got into her car.
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Chapter 6 | Suicide and Keg Stands Index | Chapter 8
Posted by Ben Corman at 10:23 AM