Joyland (19 page)

There was a moment, standing with uncertainty in the front alcove, watching Mr. Sparks progress down the hall, past mirrored wall tiles, that Tammy saw him as two people.
Like the episode of
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
where Ardala returns, captures Buck and clones him,
Tammy thought. Four duplicates of Buck were manufactured, each assigned a different aspect of his personality. Ardala’s drive to take over the Earth using Buck continued to fascinate Tammy. Regardless of her motives, how well would she have to know someone, Tammy wondered, to be able to divide their personality so succinctly into parts?

Mr. Sparks was divided in two. He spun at the end of the hallway, and both Mr. Sparks smiled. One was the Mr. Sparks she always knew — broad-shouldered, kind, funny. The other had serpentine squiggles cast over his face — the ornamental gold strands that ran through the mirror tiles — covering one of his dark eyes. He was the one Tammy was unsure of, the one with outdated decor, and a possible murkiness to him that she couldn’t quite name. Tammy followed the real Mr. Sparks, and the other disappeared where the mirrors abruptly ended at the far end of the hall.

The room turned out to be a kitchen/dining room. Dishes threatened to jump from the sink on top of the trio as soon as they entered, but aside from that, there was no danger. Jenny and Tammy stood, turning. They looked at everything, as if examining the possessions of a bachelor would give them clues for what to expect later in life. Until this point, they had known Mr. Sparks only as the guy on the next block with the cool car. Now they knew he had a glossy black dining table and tall skinny chairs that flocked around it. At the other end of the room, life went on rather less elegantly, as the dirty dishes could testify.

Everything in the room was black, white, or gold. White and gold linoleum in the kitchen met white carpet in the dining area. Gold filigree crept up, dividing the kitchen counter from the dining room, a plastic partition of swirling vines. A framed black-and-white poster of Elvis hung on the wall at the head of the table. On another wall hung a mirror, the image of a woman in silhouette painted over it. She wore an old-fashioned hat. Her face was turned away from the viewer, as if she too was looking into the mirror, possibly making adjustments. The two items didn’t seem to go together, and Tammy wondered if Mr. Sparks had chosen these things himself, or if they had been gifts, possibly from a past girlfriend. With the exception of the dirty dishes, a haphazard stack of
Sports Illustrated,
and some pencils next to the phone, the room was crisp as a motor inn. The girls could still see the vacuum grooves in the rug from the last time it had been done. The plush pushed this way and that in symmetrical stripes, like a freshly mown lawn; the carpeted side hadn’t been walked on in some time. It was as if it had been prepared for them, for all of them, waiting for the moment they gained access.

“How long have you lived here?” Jenny asked, reading Tammy’s mind. Mr. Sparks had lived there as long as Tammy could remember, but standing among his things it occurred to her that might not actually be very long in adult years. It occurred to her that adults were like dogs; time was different for them. For every one year of Tammy’s, the Stanleys’ dog experienced seven. If the size of any given animal determined its experience, the adult would perceive only one-quarter or one-eighth the time that she did.

As unthinkable as it was, one day Tammy would morph, begin to run on their time. She would cease to say, “Are we there yet?” She would simply drive the car silently until she arrived. She would stay up late and watch news reports, talk only of the seasons, the weather, shake her head and say how much neighbourhood children had grown. Her time would come to mean less. She pulled herself back from this bizarre daydream. It really was unthinkable.

With the exception of the kitchen counter, Mr. Sparks’ house looked like no one had lived in it yet. It could easily have been furnished on whims from the pages of a catalogue, the way that Tammy and Chris sometimes flipped through, picking one hypothetical item per page they would like to someday own.

“Four years.” Mr. Sparks set down his keys on the counter next to a pan that contained a bowl, and a mug stacked sideways inside the bowl. On the Formica counter, the individual keys on the ring fell together with a solid
clunk
.

“Yep,” he smiled. He held his arms out wide. His fingertips brushed the maple-coloured cupboards on one side and the gaudy divider on the other. “This is it, the man’s castle.” Tammy had seen her father make this same expression when boasting, and she realized for the first time that this wide open grin was one of absolute pain.

Mr. Sparks turned away and began to rummage in the refrigerator.

“Mind if we sit down?” Tammy asked.

“Go for it.”

“This is a really cool table,” Tammy said. “Way cooler than anything out of the catalogue.”

“Thanks,” Mr. Sparks said. His head popped up from behind the fridge door. “I like it.” Tammy saw him now through the holes of gold that separated the two areas. “The kitchen I’m less fond of. It was like this when I bought the house and I haven’t gotten around to ripping it out. I work a lot,” he said, apologetically, as he appeared on the other side of the counter.

Tammy had a sense these were the exact things he would say if she were his date instead of a not quite twelve-year-old swinging her feet so that they kicked her best friend under the table.

“As it turns out, I don’t have any mangoes. Not a one,” Mr. Sparks said. He crossed his arms over his chest. “In fact, I don’t seem to have too much of anything. If you girls think you can stick around, I’ll order pizza. What’dya say? I hate to eat alone.”

Orange grease-spotted napkins —
serviettes
, Mr. Sparks called them, though they were only paper towels. Paper towels instead of plates. They sat at the dining room table with Mr. Sparks — Ronnie — between them, parked right under the framed Elvis, so that with every bite, the King looked down on them with hound-dog eyes begging for a bite.

“It’s funny, usually I just eat standing up at the kitchen counter. Isn’t that funny, after spending all that money on this table?”

They nodded their heads and agreed that it was funny.

For the most part, they ate in silence, until Tammy asked Mr. Sparks if he was really old enough to like Elvis. He laughed a little too long and admitted he supposed he was. Jenny kicked Tammy under the table like she’d said something rude. Tammy quickly amended by confessing she liked the Beatles, so maybe age didn’t have anything to do with it. In painstaking detail she explained how one could either like the Beatles or the Stones, according to her brother, and that he liked the Stones, whereas she was a John Lennon fan, tried and true. She could even remember when he was shot, although that was before she had “discovered” the Beatles. She wanted to know where Elvis fit in. Could a person like Elvis if she was a Beatles fan?

“I don’t see why not,” Mr. Sparks said. He let out a heavy sigh, rubbed his napkin forcefully across his mouth, crumpled it up and threw it into the pizza box. A decidedly masculine gesture. Tammy vowed to remember it.

It was not beyond her understanding that she could never date Mr. Sparks. He was, she knew, old enough to own a house and listen to Elvis. The gift she had been given was that of memory, and she committed everything to it. An hour with Mr. Sparks was an eon for her imagination. So when he said, “Would you like to see the rest of the house?” how could she refuse?

The house was a diminutive version of most of the others in the neighbourhood. Helping Chris deliver newspapers, Tammy had been inside most of them on collection day, at least as far as the hallways. Sometimes farther. From the outside, Mr. Sparks’ house had a porch, front and centre. It jutted out like a pouty bottom lip. The door indented. Windows like eyes were placed on either side. Some houses on the street were shuttered. Mr. Sparks’ were fitted with sleepy-lidded awnings. Brick or siding, it made no difference, the shape was always the same: square. Tammy had realized early that if she could turn their neighbourhood into a black-and-white movie, there would be nothing to separate them from their neighbours. Atari on a black-and-white TV, the switch on the console flipped from colour to grey, grey to colour, colour to grey — so were divisions easily lost between a player and an opponent, a player and the objects surrounding it. Size was the only distinguisher. Houses with basements always seemed to stand on tiptoe above the others on the block. The foundations were built up in some other colour, blue or grey, like wool skirts. Always, 1950s structure met 1970s interior. Even in the mid-’80s, some things remained the same.

Mr. Sparks’ house bordered the area of town known as the VLA, and he had obviously purchased his little square of paradise when its previous owner — a WWII vet — died. The interior consisted of four rooms. The kitchen the girls had already seen. The living room. The bathroom. The bedroom. The living room was similar to the Lanes’. A large window peered into the street. Built-in shelves cloaked one wall. Their painted wood held a couple of bowling trophies. Dust greyed the arms of little bent bronze men. There was a complete stereo system and a black velvet painting of elks. Unlike the Lanes’, all the furniture was new.

“What do you do for a living?”

“Ahhh.” His brown eyes turned liquid with enthusiasm. He clapped his hands together solidly. “Let me show you.”

Into Tammy’s head crept all kinds of ideas, none of which came close to reality. Mr. Sparks went into the hall, past the wall of mirrors. The girls followed, and he opened a door.

Jenny and Tammy edged toward the doorway. The room was dark, and Mr. Sparks’ back blocked their view. He moved ahead and they hesitated, still in the hallway. They could hear him fumbling. In another moment, the room was illuminated by a small brass lamp. The walls were beige, the carpet was beige, the heavy drapes were beige, and taking up the rest of the space was a gigantic waterbed. Concealed to some extent beneath a beige bedspread, brown leatherette framed the smooth bubble. It might have passed for space-age, with its convex surface, its perfect smoothness, its pregnant shape, its ability to quiver to life. If Tammy hadn’t been expecting something entirely less ordinary.

He held out his hands, as if to say
Ta-da!
As if the girls could possibly miss it.

“I sell them,” he said proudly. Tammy would never be able to think of him on par with Buck Rogers again.

They lay upon the waterbed for some time. The light leaked in like melted maple walnut ice cream through the beige curtains. Beneath them, the bed wavered with the slightest move. If they lay perfectly still, Tammy told herself, she could suspend this moment. She would leave her body and float upward toward the ceiling. The only thing that would bring her back down would be her commander, saying, “Return to ship, read me.”

Jenny and Tammy had performed the perfunctory response to Mr. Sparks’ enthusiastic unveiling of his occupation.
His real occupation
, Tammy told herself,
not a side project or cover-up identity.
He sat now, in the living room. She could see him through the door. He was flipping through a magazine. A pair of horn-rims had materialized from nowhere. He was definitely more Clark Kent than Buck Rogers now. Christopher Reeve, though not as Superman. Tammy sighed and the bed shivered. The perfunctory response, in this case, had been to request to sit on the bed, and then to bounce on the bed, and then to get up and jump and somersault on the bed. All of these things the girls had done, and Mr. Sparks had seemed quite fooled by them, enamoured of their affection for the beautiful object he had shown them. He had laughed and looked on bemused for a few minutes before leaving them to it.

Now they lay, digesting pepperoni and the wedge of history surrounding their fallen hero. Through the doorway, across the hall, through the living room arch, Tammy could see him sitting alone, as if in a picture frame. He looked bored now rather than lonely. He was an adult, another species. Like in Venture, the video game set in a dungeon of perilous chambers, she realized that once she had cleared a room of its treasure, she couldn’t go back in.

PLAYER 1

Another round of beers was opened. Cindy and Adam left to make out in Marc’s workout room at the other end of the basement.

“Don’t drink all my beer,” Adam said over his shoulder as he lumbered from the room.

“Hey.” David swaggered over from the air hockey table, Kenny trailing, bobbing like a red buoy on a string in his wake. Between his index finger and thumb, David held a tightly rolled joint. “You want to smoke this with us?”

J.P. spun quickly from the turntable, nearly dropping the albums he was in the process of lovingly selecting. Judas Priest’s
Screaming for Vengeance
landed on the floor, hellion cover face up: red sun in a yellow sky, large robotic bird mid-swoop, talons extended. J.P. clutched the Scorpions, Journey, and Quiet Riot quickly to his legs before they could slide to the floor. “Not in here, man,” he said. “If my dad smells that shit, he’ll kill me.”

“‘That
shit’
? It’s
goo-oood shit,
man. Fucken A.” David held the joint aloft. He peered at it as if its very being was proof of its goodness.