The Disenchantments (13 page)

She nods. “Yeah. It’s why I got the job here. I needed the store discount. Plus sometimes it’s hard to track down the rare recordings, so it helps to know all the distributors.”

“So do you keep your collection at your house?” Meg asks.

“Yeah.”

“Do you live close?” Meg tries to act casual, but it’s clear she’s looking for an invitation.

“Yeah,” the girl says again. “Just a few blocks away. Are you sticking around for a couple days?”

Meg and I shake our heads. “We have a gig tomorrow,” I say. “In Weaverville. An afternoon show.”

I choose a postcard to send to Dad and Uncle Pete, a photo montage comprised of a bald eagle, an American flag, and a forest. It’s so random and dramatic—I know they’ll love it. I get out my wallet but the girl tells me not to worry about it, so I slip it in my backpack.

“God, I would love to see those records,” Meg says. “They’re, like, the original albums? From the sixties? Do you have
Meet the Supremes
?”

“Yeah, I have all of them.”

“Where Did Our Love Go?”

She nods. “I have two. One of them is autographed.”

Meg’s eyes get wide. “Who signed it?”

The girl smiles.

“Florence?”

She shakes her head, no.

“Mary?”

No, again.

Meg looks like she’s about to pass out. She opens her mouth, but it’s like she can’t even bring herself to say the name.

I help her out: “Diana?”

“Yeah,” the girl says. “I had to save for months. Here you go.”

She holds Meg’s record out to her, now packaged in a flat, square paper bag. Meg says thanks and reaches for it, and for a moment they are both holding the record at the same time without letting go.

Then the girl releases the bag and steps back.

She nods and her eyes get far away. I can tell she’s considering something, probably counting hours and reviewing her work schedule and wondering if she really wants to have us over.

Finally, she says, “It’s great to meet someone else who loves The Supremes. Don’t forget to look up The Chiffons, too. They’re a really good group.”

“Okay,” Meg says. In spite of her attempts at nonchalance, she shrugs like she’s a little pissed off. She manages a smile, and pauses in the doorway.

“‘Come See About Me’ is my favorite.”

“Really?” the girl asks. “It’s mine, too.”

Meg waves good-bye, and we walk out into the late afternoon sunshine. Alexa has joined Bev already, so we go sit with them on the grass. Meg tells them the whole story.

“It’s so disappointing,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I mean, how often do you meet someone who not only has the exact same favorite group as you but also the exact same favorite song by that group?”

“Yeah.”

“And it was so obvious that she wanted to invite us over and I clearly wanted to see her record collection. I’ve never met anyone, except your parents and their weird friends—”

“What are you talking about? Our friends are great.”

“—who even has a record collection at all. I even bought this record from her and I don’t have a record player.”

“It seems like it was almost a spiritual connection,” Alexa says.

Meg scowls. “I don’t know if I’d go
that
far.”

Bev takes a break from carving to look up and ask, “Why’d you buy a record if you don’t have any way to play it?”

“Because,”
Meg says, “that’s what you do when someone tells you something is great. You take that risk.”

“And at least now you’ll have something to put on if you do get a record player someday,” I add.

Bev nods like I’ve made a valid point, and turns back to her work. Her hand is covering most of the figure, but the size and wild hair makes me pretty sure it’s Walt.

The show is in a bar called The Alibi, which is next door to another bar, The Serenader, and next door to that is our hotel. We check in, carry our bags up three fights of wide, red-carpeted stairs, and then try to enter the bar. Alexa explains to the bouncer that we are the band. She’s already told us that, according to California law, you have to be eighteen or older to perform in a bar that does not also serve food, so we pull out our IDs. Mine, Bev’s, and Meg’s are real. Alexa’s once belonged to Jessica Perez, who graduated a year ahead of us.

He lets us in and we carry all of the equipment past a group of guys and girls who barely look older than us, dressed in corduroys and flowy skirts and sandals, and then past older people with bad teeth and loud voices, until we reach the stage in back.

For a while, the girls just move around on the stage, taking instruments out of cases, plugging things in. I take a seat at the bar and Meg strums a low note; Alexa pounds a beat on her drums. Bev sings a phrase into the microphone, then steps back, picks up her guitar, and tunes it with her ear to the wood. A huge, porcelain mermaid looks over the stage
with seaweed hair and a gold tail and glossy, white skin. I start to sketch the stage and the mermaid, but before long I’m just sketching Bev as she leans against a wall and waits for the rest of them to finish setting up. All the men in the bar are watching the three of them move. There is the promise of something good.

They start to play, and the bartender remains impassive.

Bev shouts the opening lines to their first song. A balding guy with a ponytail thrashes his head to what should be a beat. “Yeah!” he yells with what I think is complete sincerity. He continues to thrash for so long that I wonder if he might be hard of hearing, but a little after the second song begins—
“Silence on my mind, silence on my mind/You interrupt me, all the time, all the time”
—he gives up and returns to his drink.

We stay at the bar for a while after the show. I sit with Alexa and watch Bev from across the room as she talks to a girl with long red hair. The redhead throws back her head when she laughs, and she laughs often. She is the kind of girl that I would think was hot if she weren’t hanging on Bev like an accessory. If the sight of her hand on Bev’s waist didn’t make my stomach hurt. Bev leans over the pool table and moves the cue back and forth between her fingers. I think of this song they keep playing in the car about a girl who
watches constellations change with the pool balls, and the redhead leans over to whisper something in Bev’s ear, and I feel so ready for something new.

So I leave Alexa and sit up at the bar and talk shit with the bartender. I’m such a cliché except for the fact that he’s pouring me soda waters instead of shots and doesn’t seem all that sympathetic to what I’m going through.

“Just one drink,” I plead.

“The only drink you’re getting from me is one I’d give to my five-year-old.” He slices a lime and sticks it on the lip of my glass. A consolation prize.

“You’re with the band?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“Just you and those girls?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d you score that?”

“I wouldn’t say any scoring took place.”

I squeeze the lime into my drink. Sip. It does nothing for me.

“Just one,” I say again. “Then I’ll leave you alone, I swear.”

He leans on the counter, close to me.

“Compel me.”

This guy has huge shoulders and arms and a tight motorcycle shirt. His thick neck is covered in skull tattoos, but there is something in his face. Openness, maybe. Or just
something kind. So I lean forward on the bar stool until our faces are close and I don’t have to shout, and I say, “I just graduated from high school. I don’t have a job or a car or an apartment. I’m not going to college. And I have no idea what I’m doing with my life.”

He shakes his head with sympathy.

“That’s part of it,” I say.

“What’s the other part?”

I turn to look for Bev, who is now making out with the redhead in the corner, point, and say, “I’m in love with that girl.”

He squints to see better.

“Shit,” he says.

I nod.

The bartender shakes his head again, says, “Kid, you’re killing me,” and pours me the biggest shot of whiskey I’ve seen in my eighteen years on Earth.

I drink my shot fast enough that he must feel confident in the fact that I have already been corrupted, because a few minutes later when he’s finished with some customers at the other end of the bar, he comes back and, without a word, refills my glass.

He leans over the counter and scans the crowd.

“You guys know Sophie?” he asks.

“What?”

He points and I turn to see the girl from the record shop
talking to Meg. They are both beaming, and then Meg starts jumping up and down.

“We met her earlier,” I say. “We invited her to the show.”

Soon Meg has pried Bev from her redhead and rescued Alexa from a group of college guys, and she’s up at the bar telling me that we have places to go.

“And by places,” she says, “I mean Sophie’s apartment. We are going to have a dance party.”

“A dance party? Are you joking?”

“I wouldn’t joke about something like this,” Meg says, so excited that she looks almost deranged. She grabs me around the waist and pulls me off the bar stool. When I unfold my wallet the bartender shakes his head.

“I don’t take money from children,” he says.

“Do you mind taking your shoes off?” Sophie says at the door. “My baby just started crawling, so I want to keep the carpet clean for her.”

The carpet is bright red shag. It matches the pattern of her dress so perfectly that I wonder if it came that way or if she chose the color. The girls all kick off their sandals, and I bend over to untie my laces. Blood rushes to my head; I almost stumble over. I catch myself, though, and soon I’m following the rest of them into Sophie’s living room, which is decorated all retro with a yellow sofa and a beanbag chair,
and tin signs decorating the walls, and a small, banged-up, but still cool, dinette set in the corner with red-and-white striped vinyl chairs.

A woman turns off the television and gets up from the couch. She smiles a simultaneous hello and good-bye, and slips out.

Meg is already across the room, gazing at the framed Supremes album cover. I make my way over to her.

Scrawled in black pen over the olive-green background is,
Dear Steve. With love, Diana.

“Who’s Steve?” Meg asks.

“I have no idea,” Sophie answers.

Meg reaches out and traces
Diana
with her finger, and Sophie crosses the carpet to the record player. She finds a record, puts it on.

“This is the album I sold you earlier,” she says. The record crackles and then the simple guitar chords and piano begin, and a woman sings, honestly, plainly, giving someone permission to break her heart.

“This is so good,” I say.

But old songs are so short, and it’s over almost immediately. When Meg manages to part from the framed record, Sophie asks us, “Do you want to see my baby?”

We all nod, even Bev, and Sophie makes us promise to be silent as the five of us tiptoe, barefoot, down the carpeted hallway. Sophie twists the knob and pushes open the door. We follow her in.

The crib is in the center of the room, with padding on the sides so we can’t see through the wooden bars. We gather around it.

There she is.

One foot sticks out of the blanket, covered by little pink footie pajamas. Sophie covers the foot with the lightweight yellow blanket and the baby breathes in and then sighs. Sophie smiles and rests her hand on the baby’s belly and we stand for a moment like this, together, watching her hand rise and fall with each breath.

“Sometimes,” Sophie whispers, “I wake her up just to hold her. I can’t help myself.”

I look up at Sophie’s face and watch as she watches the baby. Sophie’s so young, it’s crazy. I can’t even fathom it—being responsible for a tiny person’s life in just a couple of years. Paying rent not just for a room in a shared apartment, but for the entire apartment. In a way, though, it might ease the burden of decision making. The future wouldn’t be so open; the list of possibilities would shorten. All the vast and terrifying questions—
Where should I go? Who should I be?
—would be replaced with absolutes. Rent an apartment. Find a job. Be a parent. Soon I’m seeing it. Bev and me back in the city, moving into a tiny two-bedroom. I’m working in an art supply store and she’s waitressing at some cool new neighborhood restaurant, and we’re tied to each other not only by love but also by this baby who we have to feed and dress and rock to sleep. And okay, maybe the whiskey is fucking with
my head, but thinking about it fills me with longing for Bev again. Not anger, not even confusion. Just love. And hope. That one day we might have something like that.

“She’s so tiny,” Alexa whispers.

“Can I draw her?” I ask, before even thinking about asking.

Sophie cocks her head, looks at me curiously, but says, “Sure,” and I’m relieved because I have to do something with this feeling.

So I go back out to the living room and grab my stetchbook and pencil, and then I return to the side of the crib and start to lay it out on the page. Soon Bev leaves, followed by Alexa. Then it’s just Sophie and Meg and the baby and me.

“What happened with her dad?” Meg asks.

“We were never that serious.”

“So he left?”

“Not exactly,” Sophie says. “He offered to stay. I decided that I’d rather do it on my own. It’s difficult, but it’s better this way. To be just two.”

“Was he a crappy guy?”

“No,” she says. “But I didn’t love him.”

They stand with me for a while longer. I’m working on the folds of the blanket, the shape of the baby’s body beneath it. Soon I get to her face. Her eyelashes, her full cheeks, her tiny, pouty lips, and her little chin, and Meg declares it time to get back to the records and Sophie tells me to take my time. She leaves the door open and light floods in from the
hall. I sketch the baby’s delicate fingers, her thin curls. Then her eyelids flicker and she sighs and moves a little bit, and I’m afraid that she’s going to wake up. I put my hand down on her belly, the way Sophie did, and she breathes deep again and then quiets. She is so small and so warm.

Back out in the living room, the record louder now, an upbeat song playing, Sophie asks to see my drawing. I show her.