Robin and Ruby (18 page)

She joins the throng filing up a wooden ramp to the wide wooden boardwalk. Flares of color. Strobing surfaces. Bulbs flashing the entrance to the Casino Pier. Barkers in front of wheels of fortune calling out, “Round and round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows.” The buzzing and whirring of games of chance. She sees Whack-A-Mole and Skee-Ball and the one where you squirt water into the open mouth of a clown, which somehow triggers an inflating balloon coming out of the top of the clown’s head. First one to pop the balloon is the winner. The prizes are enormous stuffed animals, blacklight posters, mirrors painted with beer labels and rock album art. There’s the smell of fried food in the air, pizza and hamburgers and Italian sausage smothered in onions. Music and sound effects compete for attention. She hears
“Everybody wants to rule the world”
emanating from a blazing blur in neon pink—an enormous disk, tilted on its side, spinning seated, screaming people high into the sky and back down again.

Past the glowing, screaming arcades she sees the ocean. She sits on a bench and puts her boots back on and looks out over the beach, which is mostly empty now. The water is bisected by a wide white stripe. The black waves are capped in glowing foam.

She looks up—a fat full moon is on the rise, big and nearly as bright as the sun. So beautiful. It gives her a moment’s peace. If only it were a spotlight that could pinpoint Chris in its beam and lead her directly to him.

At first she feels the power of moving solo through a mob. The power of invisibility, of sliding under the radar. Couples, families, groups of friends pass by, absorbed in their own good times. Then she gets slammed by a fast-moving shoulder. She gets jostled again moments later. When she calls out “Watch where you’re going,” a burly guy shouts back, “Eat me.” His girlfriend stops, stares Ruby down. “What did you say, freak?” A menacing girl is worse than a bullying guy, more likely to hit another girl. This one is a terror—enormous mane of hair, weighty gold jewelry, animal-print shirt, and matching leggings. Ruby hates the way girls look these days—garish eye shadow, shoulder pads sewn into flimsy cotton T-shirts, athletic jackets that match the ones their boyfriends wear. Do they know they seem like clowns—goofy from a distance, aggressive and scary close up? She wishes she could squirt water into this girl’s mouth until her head exploded. She can’t shake the feeling that the eighties are turning into a mean decade. People are pushy in a way they didn’t use to be. Or maybe she’s just older, more like an adult than she’s ever been and learning the very adult pressure to take from the world what you want, the hell with everyone else.

It becomes clear that her presence is not going completely unnoticed. There are other solo observers here—all men. They catch sight of her and smile. Unwelcome smiles. One of them, early twenties, sports a white, ribbed “Guinea T-shirt,” a slender gold chain, and the short-on-the-sides-long-in-the-back haircut favored by South Jersey boys. He locks eyes on her and breaks into a toothy grin. When he starts to move toward her, signaling for her attention, she darts away, heading not deeper onto the Casino Pier but parallel to the ocean, along the diagonal wooden slats of the boardwalk. In the middle is a bathroom, a moist, smelly concrete chamber. Sitting on the toilet in a locked stall, waiting him out, she feels for the first time all night the risk of what she’s doing. It’s not like her at all, taking this kind of chance, on her own. She guzzles from her thermos, wanting to regain that fearlessness she felt less than an hour ago, when she set out from the party.

“Women are not meant to be alone,” her mother had said one night, preparing for a date with a man she’d admitted she wasn’t all that fond of. The message seemed to be that any man was better than no man. Dorothy remains unmarried but, not yet fifty, still pursues her prospects. Last week she took a man she hardly knew to her brother’s wedding, mostly, Ruby thinks, because she didn’t want to face Clark without a date. Ruby sees now that only men appear on the boardwalk without company, not women. Certainly not
young
women.

That last chug of booze might have been a mistake. She feels the wobble in her walk as she exits the restroom. She’s had so little to eat today. Breakfast in Manhattan, hours and hours ago with Calvin. A couple mouthfuls of potato salad in the kitchen at Alice’s house, scooped up on a hotdog bun. She needs to eat, feels a craving for something sweet. Cotton candy and a root beer. The airy tastes of a beach vacation.

She enters the glass door of one of the restaurants that run the length of the boardwalk. This one is called Lucky Leo’s, and it’s crowded. Waiting her turn at the end of a long line, she tries not to make eye contact with anyone, but at the same time she needs to look around for Chris. She sees on the menu something she hasn’t had in years: zeppoles, balls of fried dough coated in powdered sugar. She buys a bag, plus the root beer she’d been craving, pays with a couple of singles dredged from the bottom of her purse. She sits at the edge of a table occupied by a harried family—young parents trying to soothe cranky children with French fries.

If she really knew Chris, she could deduce where he’d gone. The boardwalk had seemed the obvious choice, the town’s almighty magnet. Chris might indeed be nearby, drinking a beer under an awning, taking in the swirling decadence. Or he might have known better. Might have understood just how lonely being alone in an amusement park would feel. To
deduce,
she has to work with the little of him she witnessed. He saw her, kissed her, doused her in cryptic comments, then vanished after Calvin appeared. He was trying to lure her out after him, away from Calvin, away from that crowd—she feels certain of that. But how could he know that she would follow? How could he reasonably expect her to find him?

The children at the end of the table are crying and whining. Dad declares the evening over. As soon as they leave, their seats are occupied again. Two girls about her age sit down across from each other. They are dressed in black. The more petite of the two wears a miniskirt like the one Ruby shed earlier at the house. The girl’s long, flat face reminds Ruby of the head of a snake. She is transfixed by her right index finger—its black-painted nail has had a chunk torn from it. “Joanne,” she says to her friend, “should I just bite it off?”

Ruby winces.

Joanne, the larger of the two, rifles methodically through an enormous black vinyl purse, commanding, “Don’t do that! I have an emery board in here.” Her heavy New Jersey accent turns emery into
amree
, board into
bawd
. Her pretty, feline eyes are ringed in dark eye shadow. Her entire face, moon-shaped and powdered, is like that of a white lynx.

“I have a nail file,” Ruby says, and opens her own purse to fish it out. The girls notice her for the first time. She offers them a hopeful smile. They’re the first people she’s seen all day who in any way resemble her, at least in the way they dress—though she realizes, in Dorian’s clothes she doesn’t quite look like herself.

“She tore it on the Himalaya,” Joanne explains, gesturing toward her friend.

The girl with the ripped nail explains, “You know that safety bar that comes down? It had this little
thing
sticking out, and I got caught on it. It hurts like a bastard.” She puts her finger in her mouth for a second, and then flicks it in the air as if to shake the pain away. “I should sue.”

“You can’t sue for a fingernail, Wendy.” Joanne looks to Ruby for confirmation. “Am I right or am I left?”

“Right,” Ruby says, smiling.

“Did you go on the Himalaya?” Wendy asks her. “It’s my favorite.”

“I didn’t go on anything.”

“Nothing?”

“I just play the games,” Joanne says. “Last time I won everything I played. It was crazy! I couldn’t even carry it all. These stuffed animals and things, I gave ’em all to my nephew. But I can’t win
nothin’
today. And tomorrow’s my birthday!”

“Oh!” Ruby says. “Happy birthday.”

“It’s all rigged, Joanne,” says Wendy.

“Then how come last time I won practically every booth?”

Ruby says, “You were on a winning streak.”

“Right?” Joanne slurps from a straw, seeming to disappear into thought. The cup has an illustration of a snowman on it, and the words
RICH AND CREAMY
! Ruby wishes she’d had a milkshake instead of the zeppoles, which already feel like they’re expanding in her stomach, gaining mass. A vanilla milkshake seems in this moment like a great comfort.

The girls begin a conversation that Ruby can’t help but listen in on, even though their attention has returned to each other. They’re headed to a club, a place called Club Excess—Wendy is ready to go now, Joanne hasn’t quite given up on the boardwalk, on wanting to win something for her birthday. “Look. We have to get there before eleven,” Wendy says, flashing her watch, square black face with bright green digits.

Ruby squints to read the time.

“Ten thirty-five,” Wendy tells her. “Have you been to Club Excess?”

“I don’t really know this area,” Ruby says.

“It’s the only club in Seaside that plays new wave.”

Ruby says, “I like new wave,” and Wendy immediately barrages her with the names of bands. “Do you like Siouxsie and the Banshees? Depeche Mode? OMD? The Smiths?” Ruby nods and nods again. They all agree that they liked INXS better before they sold out.

Joanne says, “Tonight is Ladies’ Night. No cover for girls before eleven. Are you here with your girlfriends? Do you want to bring them along?”

“No, I came down here with my boyfriend.” A pinch of guilt catches in Ruby’s throat. She pictures Calvin back at the house, glowering in a corner, while Benjamin gossips that she went out looking for Chris, and Alice says mean things about her. Can she blame them? What kind of girl kisses a guy behind her boyfriend’s back, then disappears without explanation? All along she’s imagined that
Calvin
is wrong for
her
, but maybe it’s the other way around.

Joanne asks, “Are you waiting for him?”

She shakes her head. “I’m going to break up with him.” She hasn’t spoken these words out loud until now, but she finds them very easy to say. She adds, “Actually, I’m trying to find this other guy.” She tells them about seeing Chris at the party, how he kissed her before she remembered who he was, how she set out into the night, tracking him blindly. She describes what he looks like, his clothes, asks if they’ve seen him.

“He sounds cute,” Joanne says.

“Totally,” Wendy adds. “Maybe he went to Excess. You should come!”

“Maybe I should hang out here. What if he shows up?”

Wendy purses her lips, which has the effect of elongating her snake-like face even more. “I wouldn’t stay here by myself. Every summer, like five or six girls get raped.”

She hands the nail file back to Ruby, who imagines stabbing it into the neck of the creepy guy who had sent her fleeing to the ladies’ room. “Watch out, rapists,” she says softly.

“We can help you look for him,” Joanne says. “It’ll be fun.”

Wendy nods along with Joanne. Ruby looks at them and thinks of her mother—of Dorothy’s disapproval at the idea of Ruby tagging along with
Jersey girls
to a bar down the shore to look for a boy she hardly knows.

“Why not?” Ruby says. She pushes her thermos toward them. “Here, help me finish this.”

Ruby’s fake ID makes the claim that she’s twenty-two and a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology. It’s still legal for her to drink in New York, but it’s only a matter of time until the age gets raised there, like it is here, in New Jersey, to twenty-one. All those Mothers Against Drunk Driving are slowly but surely making their case to legislators. She bought the ID last year at a place Robin knew about in Times Square called Playland. When he came home for Thanksgiving, he took her there—a crammed, scuzzy arcade just down from the dirty movie theaters on 42nd Street. He warned her, “Every bartender on the East Coast knows about Playland, but for some of them, it’s good enough. They just want you to show
something.
” She had parroted Robin’s words to Calvin after he mocked the crude, laminated card she showed him. But eventually Calvin went to Times Square for one of his own.

Wendy uses her sister’s cast-off driver’s license. “We look alike, so it works,” she says. Joanne, it turns out, is twenty-four, which is a surprise. She certainly doesn’t act five years older than Ruby.

“You’ll be fine,” Wendy assures her. “Just flirt with the door guy.”

They wait outside of Club XS—not “Excess,” just the letters—behind two fair-haired girls in bikini tops and cut-offs, who are sent away by a bouncer with a ZZ Top beard because they don’t have ID. The bouncer frowns when he sees what Ruby has presented him. He stares her up and down. It’s probably in her favor that she’s wearing Dorian’s clean, preppie clothes—she doesn’t look like someone who’ll cause trouble—and that she’s with an older girl like Joanne, though what seems to tip the balance is Ruby saying, in her sultriest voice, “I had so much fun here last time, I totally had to come back.”

“You better behave yourself,” he says, and lets her past.

She’s only been in one nightclub in Manhattan—the Palladium, a huge place so saturated with attitude and high fashion that she was reduced to slinking around like a child at a grown-ups’ party. Walking into XS isn’t like that at all. The entry, where she pays the price of admission, is dark, and she has to push aside a black curtain, beyond which a big room opens up: two floors, one with a balcony looking down on the other. A DJ hovers over the dance floor from the upper level. She follows Joanne and Wendy into the crowded room thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of spilled beer. The bar is a kind of horseshoe off to one side, surrounded by a field of impatient faces. It’s a mostly new-wave crowd, though she sees plenty of the same people she saw on the boardwalk: the guys with the thick necks, the girls with their boobs pushed up and out. If Chris is here, it won’t take long to find him.

The dance floor is already full. A lighting board on the ceiling spits colored beams across gyrating bodies. The density of the crowd is overwhelming, the vibe not very friendly, but the music is good, and she feels some sense of relief to be with these two girls, who are treating her like someone they’ve known for more than just the last hour.