Fingerless Gloves (6 page)

Beth never did drugs and she rarely drank. It was a truly personal choice of hers, as she never judged James and I, no matter how far from sober we were. The whole time we were dating, I could count on one hand how many times I saw her drunk. We’d be at a party in town, and I’d lose her for a half hour, and when I saw her again, she’d be wearing this sly smile. She’d try to lock her fingers in my belt loops and pull me in for makeout sessions in front of everyone. It was uninhibited, dangerous, and it made me feel like I was on some reality TV show. I’m not sure what she thought would happen to her if she smoked. Some people fear this epic freakout, like if they smoke weed, they’ll end up eating one of those two pound bags of salt and vinegar chips and then slip into a coma. Beth watched me get high dozens of times when we were together. She never really said anything when I played
Starfox
on Nintendo 64 for hours on end, or when she had to finish baking “our” Toll House cookies after I got too fucked up to remember to preheat the oven. If anything, she was a total sport about the whole thing. As she stood out there and watched me, seemingly in slow motion, light the one-hitter again, I couldn’t help thinking that as far as girlfriends go, Beth Fallow was pretty much tops, boss, and as good as I could have gotten. My high snapped back into my neck and I felt the cold in my chest, like that moment when a professional wrestling match changes hands from heel to hero. It took six hits off the tiny piece, but I was regaining clarity. I was seeing vividly again.

“Can you call James’ parents or something, Anton?” I reasoned with myself that I was in absolutely no state to talk to Mr. And Mrs. Squire. My “phone call” would turn into a ramble, that would turn into an upset whine, and my condition would be on display like some B-rate theater actor trying to muscle through
The Merchant of Venice
. The urgency in Beth’s voice, while it was difficult to ignore, had to be treated properly in order to salvage whatever bits of good vibes were still left in this night.

I sneezed and stated plainly, “Are you kidding me? Of course I can’t call his parents. I can’t even wipe the crust out from the corners of my mouth. Why are we still at Vin’s house? Can we go?” My cell phone read 11:00pm.

Back inside, we said our goodbyes. I should say, Beth made rounds and gave hugs goodbye while I stood by the door. The whole lot of people sitting in front of the television all looked somewhat ill after viewing
Salo
. Some looked stranger than others, but all had been through an experience. You could plainly tell who had seen the film before because they were snickering and trying to play off their disgust. The few who had just been devirginized to the depravity, filth, and hard-fought insistence on artistry wore an almost-green tint over their faces. I’m sure all the beer that had once been contained within the fortress of empty cans spread across the table and floor didn’t help the scenario one bit.

Vin showed us the door, hugged Beth and gave me a fist bump. “Be good kids” is the bit of wisdom he left us with. I’ve never understood the fist bump, the same way I don’t understand why, at house parties, guys introduce themselves to other guys at least twice, sometimes three times.

This is the bro intro: You walk into a party, filled with people you don’t know, with the one person you do know. Inevitably, that person leaves you on your own to go talk to everyone else. Immediately you panic. You don’t want to barge in on a conversation already happening, and starting one on your own is a daunting project to undertake. Unless you’re some type of social genius or just a nonstop talker, you end up awkwardly standing by the keg, trying to read the magnets on the refrigerator, until some guy comes up to you and gives you a super-complex hand slap and asks what your name is. When you tell him, he introduces himself then says something like, “What did you say your name was again, bro? I didn’t quite catch it.” Then you go through the introduction again, where you tell him your name and he tells you his. In especially loud parties or when dealing with especially vacant bros, this can even happen a third time. So there you are, fist pounding awkwardly and doing Carlton Banks handshakes with some weird guy, in pre-ripped jeans, who just asked for your name multiple times. To be honest, I think about this more when I’m stoned. I could never talk about it with Beth, hell… I kept most of these thoughts to myself or I chalked them up to little nuances of life that I’d never wrap my head around.

Back in Beth’s car, she switched on some really ambient indie rock. Her tastes in music were, to put it lightly, abstract. It sounded like the band in question recorded the album at the base of the Grand Canyon. The large echoes and huge sounds were compounding my high. The music was visual and I began to perceive the speakers vibrating as the side-view and rear-view mirrors pulsed. She asked, “What about James? How do you know it isn’t serious…you know, what happened before?”

To be honest, it took me a minute to process her improper syntax and usage…particularly the mistakes in word order. I started feeling the words as they came out of her mouth - not in any super-artsy sense, but like feeling the individual syllable hits like “IT isn’t SERious.” She hadn’t yet put the car in gear and I could feel the weight of us not moving in my feet, like I should have gotten out and began pushing the car. Everything was heavy, from my sneakers to the conversation. My body was convinced of the moment’s potential for motion. It took me a moment, but I formulated my reply: I told Beth, “I was at the hospital and couldn’t see anything or talk to anyone. It’s after 11 and I’m not going back there or calling. To be perfectly honest, if it was that serious, I wouldn’t even want to know right now. I’m too stoned. I’d rather know tomorrow, or next week, or a year from now…literally any moment except this moment right now, with you, in this car.”
I think that sounded more poetic to me than it did to sober Beth, who promptly ceased to say anything. The music groaned through the silence, out of the stock speakers and filled up the car. While Beth looked at the steering wheel, I looked back into Vin’s house where shadows were passing in front of the hastily closed windows. The television cast blues and purples along the insides of the curtains. People pushed imprints of themselves behind the closed blinds. When I pressed a button on my cheap, free cellular phone, it lit up the glove box of Beth’s car. It was 11:15.

When I looked up, we were driving through our suburbia. There wasn’t a light on as families had long-since put kids to bed. Had being up past 11 on a Friday night turned into such a novelty? I saw driveways that must have held dozens of garage sales and barbeques, SUV’s that must have driven to countless back-to-school nights and Little League games. I saw front steps and front doors where husbands once carried their wives, all those years ago, across a threshold on that first day to kick off the rest of their lives. Maturity always starts when you own something. My mind began to swim in pre-processed molasses as I imagined the wives kicking their legs and laughing/smiling in fake protest as they were brought into their new home, all in slow motion. I saw babies being brought home from hospitals and, in no time at all, those same children learning how to cope with new siblings and family road-trip car vacations because airfare was financially out of the question. In this suburbia, finances always got tighter before they loosened their grip. Marriages were tested and some were worn as thin as the town’s public school system, never to regain any traction. As the ambience built into soft guitar, something split small cracks in Beth’s forced silence. I started to reconstruct these imagined lives as I imagined them. Had I been with James, I would have mused on the trappings of middle-class existence and how much more the world could hold out and offer to us.

I looked over at Beth for a second. She was focused, as much as she’d ever been, on the road. There was a moment, in my altered state, when I imagined what things would have been like if things had all gone right instead of wrong…if I was better instead of worse. That night, I was a slacker who’d done just enough to get a decent job, a hole of an apartment, and some little pieces of freedom that I’d imagine to be larger than they actually were. Beth Fallow had done just enough to be stuck in a distant school district that didn’t want her, in a house where her parents let her come and go like a cleaning lady. All Beth and I had ever done together, from stupid bad movie nights to us at our most intimate, were memories blurred at the edges given the state of my jumbled mind. I recalled sharply some of those moments, decent moments, with as much clarity as I could muster. The road clicked by like a metronome in time. We drove on. I reached into the pocket of my sweatshirt and felt the small metal cigarette. It was still there, quiet and waiting.

I could hear the whine of the car’s power steering as we made our way out of Vin’s part of town and back towards the highway. The off ramp was dark and, as we came around the underpass, we were hit with the bright lights of a motel sign. There was the familiar stretch of fast food and department stores. I knew where we were. When you live the way we live, you have this way of always knowing right where you are. She plowed on forward without saying a word. I heard the cars accelerating as the V6 churned at full blast. The lack of conversation was starting to weird me out. The music took an even more mellow turn as it attempted to fill in the gaps that should have been reserved for decent conversation, witty banter, or awkward story telling. It was a rather sad, quiet state of affairs. Pretty soon, rising out of a random clearing, I saw where we were going. She didn’t have to say anything, because I knew she would stop there. She used to tell me that it was her favorite spot, because of the ornate staircase leading up to the heavy gold and glass doors. She admired the view hinted at from the edge of the parking lot, but only fully experienced in the main dining room. It was the Churchwood Manor, the strangely remote site of our senior prom…the prom I took Beth to not knowing that a mere two years later, I’d be on the receiving end of an emotional wet stomp out. Tonight, there were no parties and the lot was empty save for a few scattered cars no doubt belonging to some overnight cleaning crew.

The Churchwood wasn’t terribly classy. It was one of those places that served fried calamari still half frozen and fishy. The Eggplant Rollatini tasted like the inside of a pizzeria and none of the busboys wore undershirts. It wasn’t upscale but, the night of our prom, it seemed to work. Somehow, on prom night, we failed to notice the dark interior wood paneling and the urinal cake-scented bathrooms with no towels. We didn’t care about the watered-down soda. The food consisted of soggy salad and hard dinner rolls, a half-decent cheese and cracker spread along with Chicken Francese, fried calamari, some smelly salmon steaks, Eggplant Rollatini, and roasted potatoes. I’m pretty sure, given the flask of brandy I drank in the limo, everything just tasted like oregano and red sauce. I remember Beth not wanting me to bring the flask and, when I finally broke it out and polished it off, I had no doubt that I was being as discreet as possible. I caught her disgusted gaze at the same moment the scent of liquor wafted over the inside of the limo. I thought everyone in our prom party was trying to get loose. As it turned out, I was the only one.

The girl James brought, Ashley Ladis, was a weird sort of hot. She wasn’t too popular, but wasn’t considered lame. She was a fixture in the hallways and in yearbooks…the pleasant face by which our class could be remembered. She was in the band, the key club, and was a peer leader to freshmen. Ashley and James were friends with the best kind of benefits. He had everything he wanted and he didn’t even have to commit to dating the girl. He never held her hand in the hall and he displayed no public affection at all. She flirted with James, as she did with some of the guys in key club and the captain of the debate team. Sometimes she did that in front of James just to see his reaction. He never got jealous…never said a word. They looked unbelievably classy in all the prom photos and they upped our limo’s credibility by a serious amount of points. James was the only other guy who brought a flask into the stretch and, although he didn’t finish it in two swigs like a madman, I remember envying him. His date didn’t care whether he was wasted or not. She was minding her business, ignoring the sour, medicinal smell of liquor. After prom, when I was fresh out of good spirits and moved on cheap beer, James was smoking cigarettes and still holding the flask, sipping on his father’s best scotch. He looked like some character out of a Jazz Era novel.

My one real memory of prom is thinking how strange it was to dance on an uneven dance floor. I had to awkwardly bend my knees to compensate for the lumps in the hardwood. That was part of the charm of the Churchwood. None of us knew any steps, fast dancing or slow dancing. Fast dancing was reserved for the elite group of girls who could make hiking up a ballgown and gyrating uncontrollably still look sort of sexy and the guys who, even with their ties off and shirt half unbuttoned, managed to look like they were out of an Enrique Iglesias video. My prom party, sad to admit, was not comprised of those kids. Beth was just as uncoordinated as I was so, when it came time for that last dance, I remember just swaying and trying to not fall over from the booze and the Billy Joel. Her gown felt weird on my hands…I felt the smooth material but, at the same time, the harsh wires and zippers. Her hair was all curled and put up with pins. Her makeup was subtle enough to make her face stand out. The floor rose and fell under my ill-fitting tuxedo shoes. It was the last moments of a senior year that saw my entire class begin to figure out the adults they’d become. Some decided on majors and hobbies, while others knew, even beyond that moment, that they might never make it out of this town to the city’s lap water shore. The DJ gave himself one final promo and the lights came up. Girls tried to find bags and stray shoes. As fast as it all happened, it was over.

There wasn’t a car in sight. There we no private parties, no birthdays, no weddings or proms. Some garbage was left out front and the wind was licking the ties on the tops of the bags. The town newspaper had reported that the Churchwood was set to close down due to the owner committing some pretty serious fraud and a heavy dose of tax evasion. The place was slowly being stripped to its bare bones. The wood columns had gone without touch-up paint. The glass on the front windows was smudged and scratched. There was still some evidence of grandeur, but the place was a far cry from what it once was. Beth’s headlights lit up the front staircase. I used to think those stairs were out of some eloquent period piece film. They had big, ornate banisters with lions and leaves carved into the wood. I imagined an actor on those steps, professing his love for his lady using SAT words and on-point gestures. Now, those steps just looked tacky. They were scuffed from the constant traffic of people disassembling the Churchwood. The front entrance, with its heavy door handles and exquisite glass, was the final façade. The Churchwood would always be all appearance and no real substance.

We were parked right in front of the Churchwood when Beth leaned over to me and said, “You were the absolute worst dancer that night. Our prom song was ‘Here’s to the Night’ …by Eve 6…remember? And you almost fell over during the slow dance.”

My head was still clogged and foggy. I didn’t remember the dance, or my lack of footwork. I guess I had been more hammered than I thought because I could have sworn I was a great dancer. My thoughts began to wander as a transparent spider tiptoed across the windshield of Beth’s car. Behind its delicate body, it dragged a loose spool of silk, carelessly allowing it to flag off into the wind. Spotting it, she put the windshield wiper on a left a huge, chunky smudge across the passenger side window. Legs and body were smattered and all mixed together across five inches of glass. For the first time all night, I was actually thinking about James and the possibility that he was in worse shape than I thought. I slowly turned to Beth and, putting all heavy thoughts aside, made an excuse for my perceived lack of dance skill.

“I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I couldn’t even see you, or the dance floor. You know, for downing a flask in 15 minutes, prom could have ended up much worse.”

There was the Churchwood, and memories of Beth in her dress. It was strapless with the right balance of simplicity and ornate accents. That dress was the first piece of clothing that ever made me appreciate a woman’s shoulders. Before that, I was a classic ass and chest man. After that night, it was about little things like slopes of shoulders, protrusions of lips, smalls of backs. I remember James and Ashley, and how the two of them looked like the teenagers in the movies - the kind being played by 27- and 28-year-old actors. They weren’t the best looking couple, but they were grown up. They understood one another and the expectations the night held. James got exactly 16 votes for prom king, a far cry from claiming victory. Still, there were 16 people who thought he was deserving of the crown. I wonder sometimes, had he done things differently in high school, if maybe he could have won the crown. It was a situational loss.

Beth’s car began to idle. That sound, for Beth and I, meant that our conversation had either hit an all time low for pauses and silence, or was filled with us yelling at one another. We had suffered through many nights, either in the aftermath of an argument or in awkward silence. I remember that quiet idling more vividly than the times we were too tangled up in each other to hear the car make any noise at all. Teenage love has no balance…no benefits of being put together. It’s a product of extremes manifested from Friday night to Friday night. Beth and I were no exception…just swept along through the times we cared about each other enough to pretend we were adults. Tonight, our conversation was no louder than the sound of the engine clicking off. The phone in my front hoodie pocket vibrated but I couldn’t figure out if it was appropriate to answer. It was a single pulse…a text message.

Beth said, “I need to get back. It’s my dad’s sixtieth birthday tomorrow. You need to check on James and, if you hear anything, try to remember to call me.”

Beth’s dad, for 60, didn’t look terrible. He walked a bit slow, but still straight as a board. He didn’t belong to a gym, but I remember being over Beth’s house and walking down to the basement for something, just in time to catch Mr. Fallow doing one-armed Army pushups. He had style that reflected his age: generic shoes, basic shirts and loose-fitting jeans. His hair retained some of its dark color, but not much. I had no idea it was his birthday, and no idea he was getting that old. To me, 60 seemed like this gigantic lifetime of working and paying bills and paying for one vacation a year and feeling your body getting creaky like an old house. It was at least 35 years spent in selfless irony, trying to get ahead in a world designed to keep you paying out for everything. I thought about my dad, and his mortgage and credit score…his car leases and 401k. We are choices, just one after another, that eventually land us, ideally, on a weird rung of the middle class. As thoughts of futures built up in my head, I just nodded at Beth and rolled the one-hitter between my fingers. I patted my front pocket down to make sure the baggie was still accounted for.