Summer of Love, a Time Travel (4 page)

He
is nothing like her father.

She
drinks the juice. Yum. She loves orange juice. It tastes a little strange, but she’s
parched and she gulps the whole cup. “May I have some more, please?”

“You
can have anything you want, Starbright,” Stan says.

Professor
Zoom ladles out bright juice, the soupspoon spilling. Bees buzz, free sweets.
Yum. Susan toasts a dew-stained boy in blue, a cute college couple all in denim,
a fat girl in a gauzy pink gown. She toasts a towering barbarian in a fur hat
and a vest that says “Hells Angels” on the back, a dainty fellow in a scarlet
wig and a ballerina’s tutu, a black guy in a beret and a leather jacket. Buzz,
buzz.

Another
cup to Starbright with a smile.

A
cup with a smile.

A
cup
does
smile, if you hold it just so. A cup has a mouth. Why shouldn’t
it smile?

The
band is wailing, the day is sailing, but her throat is getting gulpy. Is she
catching something? Maybe the flu?

Then
she’s sick, sick, her stomach pitching, rolling around. Stan the Man bends over
her, his hand on her throat, and presses his thumb in the soft spot between her
collarbones.

Sitting.
Suddenly. Rank dandelion smell, mud like dog waste. Monkey hands rest on her
thighs. Thighs like sausages, stuffed skin over bones breathing like alien
things. The monkey hands are
her
hands, hands just like the monkey in
her biology textbook with electrodes stuck in its poor little skull. She had wept
when she saw that monkey. She weeps now.
She
is a trapped little monkey
.
She
is.

She
feels her heart thundering, squeezing blood into her head. Her breath wheezes
through her mouth. What about the girl with her face, only it’s all wrong? What
if the girl comes now on the wings of a bat, sparks crackling off her fingertips?
A rushing noise deafens Susan’s ears. Is she falling off the hillside? Falling
for sure, this time?

There
are no bats,
the man’s voice reassures her.
There is no
hillside, Starbright.

Another
wave of emotion crashes over her.

Sobs
tear from her throat.
Granma!
Granma who loved her, the only one who
ever had. Her eyes that had twinkled just for Susan. Granma with tubes up her
nose, tubes in her arms, impossibly thin. Her frightened eyes, her fear
terrifying. The awful smell, the light too bright. And there was nothing Susan
could do. Granma, this cannot be happening to you. Granma, don’t leave me,
please, please.

Is
she screaming?

She
hears singing. People are singing. The stickman in the purple shirt is singing.
The barbarian with Hells Angels on his vest is singing. The mountain man,
he’s
singing. He beams at her, beaming right into her soul. He smiles and smiles and
sings and sings like he knows she cannot hear him until she
hears
him:

First
there is a Starbright,

Then
there is no Starbright,

Then
there is.

Suddenly
it’s so. . . .
silly
! It’s so. . . .
funny
! The stickman is
singing, the barbarian is singing, the mountain man is singing, the beautiful
girls are singing. The Double Barrel Boogie Band—it’s really
them
—
they’re
singing, “First there is a Starbright, then there is no Starbright, then there
is.”

She
laughs and laughs. The trees sway to the beat and clap their leaves. Clouds in
the sky rearrange themselves into lizards, butterflies, sea dragons. A
multicolored checkerboard erupts across the grass and arabesques sprout in the
dandelions.

Ecstasy!
Everything is connected to her, she to everything, and it is so beautiful. The
trees, the clouds, the singing people are so beautiful. She feels so much love
for the world, for all these wonderful people, for the Summer of Love that she
starts to cry again.

Stan
says, “Don’t cry, Starbright. Stop it right now.”

Stop
it, yes! Stop it right now. No more pain, no more sadness, no more anger, no
more fear. She will celebrate! Celebrate the Solstice! She is bold now, filled
with wild abandon. She flails her arms, shakes her hips. She swoops, she dives.
She can have anything she wants!

She
is laughing, leaping, free.

Dance,
Starbright, dance.

*  
*   *

The
first star of the evening winks on the east, and night stains the sky. Susan is
chilled again, very chilled. A lifetime seems to have passed in this day. She
has realized something totally amazing. She tries to remember what it is,
exactly, this amazing thing, but she can’t quite put her finger on it. Her
thoughts are tumbling, tumbling.

The
awesome explosion of consciousness is gone, but the world is still luminous,
numinous, streaked with mystery. Afterimages dance in the movements of objects.
Professor Zoom hands her his corncob pipe. She takes it, examining the knobby stem
curiously. He guides the stem to her lips. She opens her mouth and inhales.
What else is there to do?

The
night ripples with shapes, with feelings. Nothing is real? Reality is nothing?

Everyone
drifts away from the meadow. Kids jam onto flatbed trucks, others crowd into
vans or buses bound for Stinson Beach. They want to see the sunset. “Come on,
Starbright,” someone calls. “You’re either on the bus or off the bus.”

Yes.
You’re on the bus. You’ve been initiated. You’ve seen trees sway to the music, arabesques
sprout in the dandelions. You’ve stripped the plastic face off civilization and
glimpsed Truth.

But
Susan is not on their bus, not this time. She waves bye-bye and watches the
kids go. Night lights flash. The world is humming in a different way. The
excitement of nocturnal things. Of darkness. Of the hunt.

The
bands are breaking down, packing up to go.

Where
will
she
go?

People
gather up blankets and picnic baskets and wander off into the dusk. Children
grumble sleepily and tug on their mothers’ sleeves. They all have some place to
go to sleep.

Where
will
she
sleep?

So
many things that were a unity are separating now. With her new awareness, Susan
understands this, the constant process of unity and separation. She and Granma,
she and Nance, she and Mom and Daddy. So many painful separations. But where
are the unities?

How she
longs for a new unity.

Plus
she’s really, really hungry. Where will she eat?

The
city has become a citadel, gleaming with electric jewels. In the dawn before,
Susan saw only empty streets, tired shopfronts, trash-strewn sidewalks. Now
it’s the Scene. On a Wednesday night in June, people mill around, so many!
Bongo drums quicken Susan’s pulse. Plum incense mingles with the stench of car
exhaust.

The
big city at night makes her so lonely.

Nance,
oh Nance, where are you?

*  
*   *

In
May, Nance Payne ran away from her home in Euclid Heights. She didn’t have the
decency to wait until she graduated from the eighth grade. Since Nance and
Susan had been best friends for years before Dr. Bell moved his family to a
tonier neighborhood in Shaker Heights, Nance’s mother and stepfather came
looking for Susan to see what she knew about it.

Susan’s
father turned Nance’s parents away at the front door. “That girl is a bad
influence,” Susan heard him telling them as she crouched at the top of the
second-story stairs. He was using That Tone. Susan knew he’d been listening in
on her conversations with Nance. He was no good at picking up the phone in the
den without making a click.

Nance’s
parents said something about
Susan
being the bad influence. Then her
father said, “Since we’ve moved, I’ve kept my daughter away from that no-good
girl. Susan doesn’t know a thing about where she went.” More words, loud words.
God, Daddy! Susan ran to her bedroom, embarrassed, and slammed the door.

Then,
a week ago, she collected the mail from the chute at the front door. Her mother
was walking in from the garage to the kitchen with grocery bags. She managed to
slip the postcard down the front of her jeans. Later, locked behind her bedroom
door, she studied it.

The
postcard was addressed to “Starbright.” On the front, a Technicolor Golden Gate
Bridge stood against a turquoise sea and sky. “Monterey popped! Meet me, meet
me, meet me! And be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.” She’d signed it,
“Haight Is Love, Penny Lane.”

Susan
called Pan Am and counted out her secret bank account hidden in the bottom of
her toy chest. But it was a fantasy, running away to San Francisco to meet
Nance. Only a fantasy, however thrilling. She didn’t decide to go for real
until her mother found the postcard in her underwear drawer beneath the Tampax.

They
summoned her to the kitchen. It was like going to an inquisition. She began
twirling a hank of hair around her finger, biting the split ends, and spitting
them out.

“Get
me some scissors,” her mother said. “I’m cutting her hair off right now.”

Daddy
had That Look. “What the hell is
this
?” He shook the Golden Gate Bridge
in front of her nose.

Bad
news. She was grounded for the summer, her telephone privileges were taken
away, and she was forbidden to
ever
speak with Nance again. There was
serious doubt about new clothes for the ninth grade. Her mother sat beside her
father on the other side of the table, grim satisfaction on her face. Two
against one.

She
defended herself, defended her friend. “Nance is cool. She never puts me down.
She’s like my sister. She’s my best friend!”

“You
have new friends at school.”

“No,
I don’t. They’re all stuck up.”

Her
mother started saying, “You haven’t even tried. . . .” when her father cut in,
“You are
stupid
, Susan. You are wasting your time with that little
tramp.”

He
said more horrible things, but she didn’t hear them. All she heard was the one word
her father had never applied to her before. A violation of the one thing she
thought he respected her for. The foundation of the fragile trust she possesses
with him—that he knows she’s smart.

Now
she’s
stupid?

He
tore the postcard into scraps, dumped the scraps in an ashtray, and lit them
with a match. He ordered Susan to sit and stir the scraps until nothing but
ashes was left.

She packed
her overnight bag left that night. When Mom and Daddy went out, Susan booked
Pan Am flight 153 and called a cab. They would return home from dinner and the
theater an hour after she lifted off. She didn’t leave a note.

It
felt like the time when she and Nance climbed the old oak tree in Cheryl Long’s
front yard. On a dare from Cheryl—who they thought was
very
stuck
up—they leapt off the big branch fifteen feet up. It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t
hard at all until Susan hit the ground.

*  
*   *

“Starbright,”
Stan the Man says. “Got a place to stay?”

If
she’s stupid, she may as well be
really
stupid. Does he guess she’s fourteen?
Who cares?

“No,
Stan,” she says. “I’ve got nowhere to go.”

“Come
with me, flower child.”

He
takes her to a three-story Victorian with peeling paint where the Double Barrel
Boogie Band and their entourage camp out in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury. The
house must be about a thousand years old. A steep stairway angles up from the
street to the porch and front door. A crumbling fireplace and scuffed wood
floors lend some charm to a living room furnished with hand-me-down chairs and a
swayback sofa. The place smells of wood rot, burnt chocolate, and sandalwood
incense.

Professor
Zoom cuts chunks from a brick of vegetable matter on the coffee table. Grease-lipped
beer mugs, rotten apple cores, a kazoo, a brass pipe, and a can of half-eaten
SpaghettiOs with the lid bent back decorate the table. The floor is thick with
more of the same.

Susan
recalls her mother’s precise living room. The curving peach couch with its plastic
slipcover she only takes off for company. The white wall-to-wall carpet. Mom
would faint dead away at the sight of this pigsty.

The
stereo blasts, and people mill around. So many!

One
of the caterpillar-eyed girls who stood behind the stage approaches her. Sarah turns
out to be a sweet, fine-boned blond with freckles and bloodshot blue eyes
beneath her false eyelashes. Sarah leads Susan to the bedroom she shares with
Mickey and shows Susan her swirling psychedelic drawings. It’s sad. Sarah is
not a very good artist.

Susan
can draw. She’s doodled hours away at Mr. G’s art supply store. She takes
Sarah’s scarlet chalk and sketches a bold eye with a star for the pupil. Her
mother always says her drawings are not proportional, but Susan has to wonder.
Her mother is not a very good artist, either.