Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (5 page)

The Coin Castle was a video arcade across from the Convenient Mart about a half-mile from her grandparents' house. This answer made her suspicious because Uncle Bobby was terrible at games in general and video games especially. The answer also worried her. She knew that although most of the neighbors loved and looked after Uncle Bobby, who'd passed their papers for years and who raised record levels for the annual American Cancer drive, there had been incidents, always involving teenagers and kids, like the ones who hung out at the Coin Castle. Uncle Bobby giving boys money, no one ever uncovering for what. Uncle Bobby buying beer at the Convenient Mart for underage kids. An episode several years ago when a couple of teenagers had talked Uncle Bobby into buying them an old jeep. After that,
her grandfather, a staunch believer that a man should have at least a little control over the money he earned, had to take away Uncle Bobby's checkbook.

And then there had been an event vaguely sexual, so vaguely sexual that Janie wasn't sure if she'd overheard her parents talking about it or just made it up. Because eavesdropping was how she'd learned all the stories of the taking advantage of Uncle Bobby. They had never been told to her directly. She had overheard them shared among adults, and when she did overhear the stories, she immediately regretted hearing them: a teenage boy again, again, the boy with the upper hand. A fragile place under her heart drew in on itself and pinched, that snarl of emotions, including hurt and helplessness, also defensiveness and shame, those last two the most confusing and complicated of all. It was like her family's privacy and their territory were being trespassed upon. Only family should know Uncle Bobby's vulnerabilities, and if Uncle Bobby was to be teased or told what to do or manipulated, he was theirs to tease and tell and manipulate.

“E.T.! Phone home!” Uncle Bobby tried to change the subject.

“What do you want to go to Coin Castle for?” she asked.

Uncle Bobby snicker-chuckled his you've-caught-me-in-something-but-I'm-trying-to-act-like-it's-nothing laugh. “To see a friend of mine.” He snicker-chuckled again. “Anything wrong with that, Janie? Anything wrong with that?”

AFTER EACH SHOWING
, the popcorn girls had to drag garbage bags into the theaters and pick up under the seats. Spilled pop running from theater top to bottom, dirty Pampers in
Snow White
. The occasional greasy grocery bag from homemade popcorn snuck in. Halfway through the summer,
Psycho II
came to one of the side theaters, and the sorority girls decided to get scared. “I'm not going in there this time, I just
won't do it!” A squeal. “I'm petrified!” “My God, I had to go in there Saturday night after the last show, and, I swear, something moved, I'm not making this up, something moved behind the curtain along the wall.” Once when Janie herself was picking up, she pushed behind that curtain and ran into Kimberly. Kimberly shrieked so loud even Betty came running, then all the sorority girls collapsed into the nearest seats in hysterical laughter until Gus busted in and yelled at them.

Everybody said they felt the hauntiness in the
Psycho
theater, but everyone acted like it was a joke, so Janie did, too. Inside her, though, it didn't seem funny at all. Just stepping into the dim, empty theater, she'd feel the prickle left over from the screen, the pretend horror having somehow leaked off the film and infected the walls and the seats. But far worse than the
Psycho
theater, Janie knew although no one else appeared to, were the bathrooms.

Out in the lobby, Tommie Sue continued to tell. The attempted murder on the sidewalk under the marquee, a jealous husband waiting for his cheating wife to show up with her date. The more recent seizure in the bathroom, a lady's legs thrust rigid out a stall door, her heels tom-tomming the tiles.

“And then that guy who had a stroke during
Porky's
, that was just last year, right, Betty? And it happened during a matinee, that's what the coroner said, and here nobody noticed him until after the last show on a Saturday night. I don't know who was supposed to be picking up that day.”

Betty shook her head. She didn't either.

“But there as we were closing down, that usher—I can't recall his name, I think he was from over in Chesapeake—he tried to shake the guy awake. And a mouse jumped out of his mouth.”

Betty shivered and cupped her cross.

“We never saw that usher again.”

As always, Janie would be standing between Tommie Sue, on the end of the counter nearest ticket sales, and the sorority girls, huddled at the other end past the pop machine. During the stories, Betty would swivel around on her ticket-seller stool and listen without smiling—these were the only times Betty did not smile—and that Betty, practical, even-tempered, cheerful, Christian, never questioned a syllable Tommie Sue spoke and affirmed many with nods made it all triply terrifying.

“And that's not all,” Tommie Sue said, her big, round, darkish glasses amplifying bigger, rounder, darker her cloudy black eyes. Just then Gus barreled around the corner to catch them idle. Tommie Sue didn't blink. “That ain't even counting what all's happened in the old parts.” She said her
ain'ts
with an elegance.

Gus clapped his hands on his hips, the bloated keychain quivering on his belt like a grenade, and glowered at Tommie Sue. He had to lift his chin to do it. Tommie Sue stared back, a nonchalant blankness. “Somebody get down there and check those restrooms!” Gus blared.

Sprawling underneath the ground floor, the Alexander Henry's bathrooms were bigger than many modern theaters altogether. To reach them, you descended a wide staircase covered with a once-red carpet now faded pinkish at its edges and in the middle worn down to mole-colored padding. Despite the clarity of her childhood Alexander Henry memories, Janie could not recall, no matter how hard she tried, ever entering these bathrooms before she became a popcorn girl. Some never-seen janitor cleaned the bathrooms in the mornings before the matinees, but then the popcorn girls were expected to do hourly checks. If you were appointed, you had to go down in the middle of the movies, when the fewest people would be using them. None of the other popcorn girls seemed to mind it. Janie pretended she didn't either.

Each pink-gray step deeper, her shoulders knitted tighter, her head drained lighter. Once you reached the bottom, before you even entered
the rooms with the stalls, you had to pass through odd preliminaries, rooms random and with no apparent purpose, as though they'd been donated from other buildings. A room with nothing but sinks. A room with a gas fireplace and a mantle piled with broken bricks and musty couches that looked upholstered with shorthaired hounds. A tall, narrow, lightless room containing a single empty cot and three locked doors. By the time Janie got to the actual toilets, her panic had spread from her head and shoulders through her whole body, chilling even her fingers, her toes, but she still had the wherewithal to intone to herself, “You're eighteen years old, Janie. Janie, you're eighteen years old.”

Then she was at the threshold of the stalls, stepping into the shock of fluorescent lights. The floor here was a vertiginous checkerboard of disintegrating black-and-white tiles the size of record albums, some chipped, some cracked, some missing completely and in their place what looked like earth coming up. And there wasn't simply one room of stalls. There were three, end to end. The closed stalls ran on and on to Janie's right, their wooden doors freshly painted the color of flesh, and to her left, the infinite mirrors, so many opportunities to find a dead body, everything resplendently lit. Janie quick-clicked down the broken tile floor in her cheap Heck's work loafers as fast as she could without breaking into a full run—because always, in a small corner of her huge vague fear, a specific little fear that she might run into a live person down here and all her infantile fears would be found out—her heart now surging like a body-big bellows, all of her, from guts to throat to ears, gorged with that bellowing heart. She kept her head turned slightly to the right, one eye on the tile, the other on the stall doors, all of her resisting the horrific pull-to of the mirrors. But now and again, in the far corner of her left eye, unavoidable, a flash of her red popcorn girl smock, her black popcorn girl pants, but Janie
resisting, refusing, to look full-on, for fear of . . . what? She thought she knew. For fear of what she might see in the mirror with her.

Until she reached the end, whirled around, and did it all in reverse.

Then she'd burst back up into the relief of the mute lobby lights after the bathroom blare. She'd pause on the top step until her breathing evened. She straightened her smock and ran her fingers through her bangs. Then, when her hands stopped shaking, she'd initial the restroom check-sheet where it hung on a clipboard near the time clock.

It never did occur to her to cheat and not walk the whole thing.

RELAXED, NATHAN ALWAYS
looked sleepy. This contrast made his outbursts even more electrifying, when they weren't directed at Janie, and they rarely were. Even so, now that he and she were a couple, her role in the tantrums changed from those early days in the garage when she and Uncle Bobby could just watch. Now Nathan's upset became in part her responsibility, to placate, to make right, an obligation not exactly imposed by Nathan, and not learned by Janie by having watched Melissa with him, but something Janie knew intuitively herself. Knew it was her job, but had almost no idea how to go about it. So that when he finally did calm, her relief was so profound it was intoxication on its own.

She met Nathan's friends, the languid, belt-thin pothead boys familiar to Janie from home. Nathan the shortest of them all, and it amazed her how he could be so small and at the same time the most cocksure in any group. She'd assumed growing up in the city would have made the friends more sophisticated, but that wasn't the case at all. Like it had with those boys back home, the weed fertilized their indifference and dulled their desires, so that they floated, day in, day out, in a complacent sag. This was another way Nathan stood out. The fuse in his belly, the periodic bombs—they also made him more alive.

Because he still slept in his childhood bed across the hall from his parents, they did it in his Chevrolet Scout. In his father's pickup camper shell. Once standing up along the wall in the clean concrete smell of the basement, his teeth clenching his bottom lip. They did it on the ground wherever the motorcycle stopped, in the blackberried brush between the river road and the Ohio dock, many times on a sheet of plastic in the head-high weeds at the base of one of the old factories, only yards away cars echoing in the metal ravine. Once, after a seven-hour partying marathon that included sneaking into the drive-in, crashing an outdoor party with a band playing some strain of violent country, and buying weed from a pothead friend's father (a man with the oil-slicked hair of the 1950s and who dealt while sitting in a barber chair he kept in his basement like a parodic throne), they ended up at 4
AM
in a dew-soaked field beyond a couple tract homes. Janie without the remotest idea where they were and her obligated to be up, clean, and sober in time for 10
AM
church. Nathan always came quick, she never did at all, and neither expected anything different.

The truth was, for Janie, the bodies were almost incidental. For her, sex enchanted for the same reasons as drugs and alcohol. The quick, easy intimacy, the crumbling of the barrier between herself and other people, the way during sex it was impossible to hold herself apart not only from him, but apart from herself. The mist of transcendence the sex showered over ordinary things, and later, Janie'd remember not the quick, hard thrusts, the skin on skin, but the little fog lifting off that field in the almost-dawn afterwards. She'd remember the scent of sycamores and river from the seat of the bike on the ride home, remember how the act drained both of them like an abscess, from him, his anger, his frustration, from her, her self-consciousness and anxiety. And also afterwards, a tenderness in him she never saw otherwise for
longer than a few seconds, a vulnerability, and she knew it wasn't like that with many boys when they finished, but it was for him.

Once in a while among those pallid, droopy, dope-loving boys, Nathan might make a remark about her. Janie would flinch, and the boys would snicker, but only a little and usually uneasily, and after a few seconds, Janie would think, that wasn't what he meant, was it? Sometimes for a day or two he seemed to ignore her for no reason, then say he hadn't when she got up the nerve to ask him why he had, and then she'd have to replay the whole period in her head—so she'd just imagined it, right? She must have. Sometimes when she and Uncle Bobby hung around watching Nathan work in the basement, Nathan might not even acknowledge them, it all depended on his mood, but she knew he had to concentrate when he was working on the Harley and how exasperated it made him. Besides, his distractedness then and elsewhere meant she, too, could be by herself and with him at the same time. Meant she didn't have to think of things to say. And when he finally did come back, and touched her cheekbone, or sleepy-smiled with his eyes locked onto hers, or patted the back of his bike seat, his attentions radiated all the more brilliantly because of their absence before.

Janie's aunt came down to visit for a weekend. On Sunday afternoon, while Janie was helping her load the car, the aunt stopped Janie by the rosebushes, well out of earshot of Janie's grandmother and grandfather.