The Disenchantments (14 page)

“This is incredible,” she says, and though that might be an overstatement, it did turn out pretty well.

“Look at her little earlobe,” she gasps. “It’s perfect. It’s exactly like her.”

“Here,” I say, tearing the page out of the book. “You keep it.”

“Really?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Of course.”

Her face brightens and she darts up from the couch and over to a chest which she opens and rummages through.

“I got this at a garage sale a few weeks ago.” She lifts out an old frame that’s tarnished in a cool way. “I think it’ll fit.”

She makes me sign the drawing and then she puts it in the frame, and places the frame on a shelf near the signed record.

“I love this,” she says. “
Love
it. How do you draw like that?”

I laugh. “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s what I do.”

I know that I’m good at drawing, but I’ve been doing it for so long that I don’t even think about it that much. But she’s standing here, surveying me like I’ve just performed magic. I start to get uncomfortable, so I laugh and say, “Hey, I thought this was a dance party,” and soon everyone is dancing. Everyone except for Bev, who takes a seat on the beanbag chair and gets out her sculpting tools.

Meg and Sophie take turns at the record player, changing the tracks from one upbeat song to the next. We dance by ourselves, all together, in pairs. I’m tired and the alcohol hits me in waves. One moment I don’t feel anything, and then the next I’m reeling.

A new song starts and Sophie grabs my hand.

“Most guys look so awkward when they dance,” she says. “Not you.”

“There’s a reason for that,” I tell her.

“Oh, yeah?” She arches an eyebrow.

“It’s because I don’t give a shit,” I say. And when I say it, I believe it. Because really, it doesn’t matter: Bev can make out with a girl in a bar, and I can go home and live with my dad, and my mom can live in Paris forever, and we might all still be okay. In just a little while we will forget all the things we used to want and adjust to the lives that we’re given.

But Sophie laughs. She reaches out, grabs me around the waist, pulls me close. I stumble into her soft arms and feel her body against my chest.

“That’s not why,” she says into my ear.

Bev watches me from across the room where she sits, carving a drum kit. When she catches me looking back, she turns to her piece of wood.

I close my eyes.

The room spins and Sophie and I spin with it. Her eyelashes brush my forehead every time she blinks.

“Why is it then?” I ask, my mouth close to her ear this time.

“It’s because you feel it so much,” she says. I smile wide without pulling away because, of course, she’s right. Before the song fades out, Meg starts a new one. Fast, showy piano, drums, and harmonizing women crackle through the speakers, and then a woman sings,
One fine day . . .
She sounds so happy even though she’s singing about being dumped, and I can’t tell if she actually believes that the guy she’s singing to will ever love her, but it hardly matters because Sophie and I are moving faster to keep up with the tempo, and Meg is jumping and spinning around the room, pink hair everywhere, and Alexa dances like a hippie, all blissed out with her arms snaking above her.

I spin Sophie and when she comes back to me, I say, “You’re right. I love this.”

“It’s The Chiffons,” she says. “You have to love it.”

But I don’t just mean the music. I mean all of this, everything, the desperation of the song and the imprints of
our feet on the red shag rug, Sophie’s strawberry-print dress, the record player and every single record. The baby, sleeping through everything, sleeping through us. Meg and Alexa and Bev and Sophie. I’m in love with all of them.

The song ends before Meg has chosen another record, and as the room gets quiet I take a step away from Sophie. The floor tilts; I catch my breath.

“I’m in love with all of you,” I say.

Alexa beams and Meg says, “Love you back.” Sophie steps forward and rumples my hair, and Bev glares at me but the glare hardly matters because all I see are her gorgeous shoulders and her neck and her mouth that I’ve been wanting to kiss forever.

“Don’t look so mad,” I say to her. “Especially you.”

Meg’s slipping a new record out of its sleeve. “But Meg is the first girl I ever saw naked. See, Meg, I didn’t forget.”

“It happened approximately six hours ago. I
hope
you still remember.”

Another song begins and I walk over to Bev. She’s carving the crash cymbal. She doesn’t look up at me.

“That’s the cutest drum kit I’ve ever seen,” I say, softer, just to her.

I extend my arm toward her. She still doesn’t look.

“Dance with me.”

“I’m carving,” she says.

I don’t say anything; I just keep holding my hand out to her.

“I wouldn’t want to keep you from the unwed mother,” she mutters.

“The
unwed mother
?” I say. “You can’t be serious.”

She pretends to carve but I can see that she isn’t really doing anything. Finally, she puts the drum kit and the knife down on the chair and looks up at me. She’s trying not to smile.

She grabs my hand and I hoist her up, and then she’s here, I’m holding her close, and we’re dancing to The Supremes singing “Come See About Me.” Diana Ross croons,
“No matter what you do or say/I’m gonna love you anyway.”

“Do you think Meg chose this song for me?”

Bev manages to dance and shrug at the same time.

I sing louder over the next verse:
“You make out with a girl in a bar/But to me you’re still a superstar.”

Bev blushes and laughs, and I stop dancing and say, “What’s up with that anyway? Why do you always do that in front of me?”

But she shakes her head and grabs my hand and says, “Let’s just not think about anything.”

“That sounds like a good trick,” I say.

“Shh,”
she says.

“Sounds like a good trick!”
I whisper, and she laughs and covers my mouth with her hand.

Her palm is soft and smells like lotion and wood. I breathe her in. Try to think about nothing but right now.

Back at the hotel, after only an hour of sleep, I wake up with a start. Then I can’t fall back. A crack runs from one corner of the ceiling to the other, where it is joined by two other cracks.

I shut my eyes and try counting.

Maybe I should go to art school. Maybe I should drive, alone, across the country. Maybe I should get a job at a restaurant and move into a room in the Mission.

I can hear Meg breathing. Bev has kicked the blanket off; light from a passing car casts over her.

I stop checking the time.

Dust and cobwebs coat the chandelier.

Maybe I should work on a series of drawings and try to get a café show. Maybe my mother will come back home.

Later, the squeak of bedsprings: movement. I sit up and look. Alexa is easing off her bed, stepping carefully across the room, still night-blind.

“Lex,” I say.

She jumps a little.

“Oh, sorry,” she says. “I was trying to be quiet.”

“No, it’s fine, I was up. I was thinking—Do you really think you can find a job in your notebook for me?”

I move to the edge of the couch, closer to her.

She nods. “I have over seven hundred jobs listed.”

“That’s great,” I say. “So what do you think? Do any of them stand out?”

“Yeah, we can find something.”

“Want to go out in the hall and look?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Now?” she finally whispers.

“Yeah.”

“I’m actually really tired right now. I was just getting up to pee.”

“But it could be super fun. There’s tea and hot water down in the lobby. I could go grab us some and we could sit out in the hall and look.”

“I don’t know. I’m really tired,” she says. “I think I need to sleep.”

I check my phone. It’s 5:00
A.M.
Of course she’s tired.

“Okay, yeah, no problem,” I say.

“We can look in the morning,” she says. “You should sleep, too.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”

When she shuts the door to the bathroom, I slip off the couch and go out into the hall. I head toward a window but what I see only makes me feel worse: a few skinny, jumpy people, hunched over together in the park. I lower myself onto the worn carpet, look down the hall at the long rows of doors, and wonder how many of the rooms are occupied, and who is sleeping, and if anyone else is awake.

After a little while, when the first hints of the sun appear in the window, I walk the three flights of stairs down to the lobby. I say good morning to the woman at the hotel desk. I make myself tea.

“Okay, this question is for me,” Meg says. “‘Meg, do you believe that people can stay in love?’ Ooh, good one.”

“Colby?” Bev calls. It’s startling to hear my name following the question I wrote. At first I was going to avoid real questions again, but then I gave in. If we’re going to spend the car ride doing this, I might as well ask about things I want to know.

“Yeah?” I call up to Bev.

Bev is taking her first driving shift of the trip. She drives more smoothly than Meg, who tends to accelerate every time she gets excited about something and slow down every time she spaces out.

“Can I wear these?” She points to my aviator sunglasses,
hanging over the curtains on the window. “Mine are buried in my stuff somewhere.”

When we first got on 101 this morning, we were surrounded by bright mist that wove around the trees and the bus, but now the fog is dispersing and the sunlight is so intense it’s almost painful.

“Sure,” I say, knowing that usually she wouldn’t ask for permission, she would just put them on. She’s been acting polite and careful around me all morning.

“You bought them for me,” I add. “So I think that means you get to wear them whenever you want to.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure.”

Meg gives me an
Oh, please
look before resuming the game.

“My answer is yes,” she says. “Completely. I
so
think that people can stay in love.”

“Our parents are in love,” Alexa says.

“Exactly,” Meg agrees. “And Aunt Reese and Uncle Theo.”

“Oh my gosh, I can’t wait to see them tomorrow night!”

“Me too. You guys are gonna love them. And Colby, your parents are in love, and Bev, yours, too.”

“Staying married is not the same thing as being in love,” Bev says to Meg.

“I never said it was.”

“Yeah, but you just assumed that my parents were in love because they’re married.”

“No. I said they were in love because they always seem happy when I see them together. For a long time, my parents couldn’t even get married. Marriage has nothing to do with it.”

Bev doesn’t respond, just watches the road. I search for her reflection in the windshield but my glasses cover half her face. It’s never crossed my mind that Mary and Gordon might not be happy together, and suddenly, even after Meg’s emphatic yes, doubt creeps in. Maybe Mary and Gordon aren’t in love; maybe my mother isn’t coming home; maybe Bev will never change her mind.

After a few miles, Bev pulls over to a parking lot on the side of the highway so that we can hike down to the river. We wade in the cold water, and I stay a little longer, wander off from the rest of them. I call back all of these memories of my parents and me, taking day trips, cooking dinners, watching movies, making music. Ma laughing, Dad putting his arm around her. We were happy, all three of us.

I am almost sure.

When I get back to the van to take my seat, I see that Alexa has taken all the strips of paper and grouped them by handwriting. There are Bev’s, about specific moments and events; Alexa’s, about experiences and life; Meg’s, about impulses and fantasies.

And then there are mine, glaring up at me. Saying,
You don’t know anything about anyone. Not even yourself.

The Disenchantments’ only afternoon show is in a town called Weaverville, at this bright café on a block of Gold Rush–era buildings. Posters and pamphlets for upcoming events along with community announcements hang in the window: dog walker for hire, meeting about a new traffic light, a show from San Francisco band The Disenchanters.

“Hey,” I say. “Look—they got the name wrong.”

“Oh, no,” Alexa says. “The Disenchant
ers
? That’s not what we are at all.”

“I kinda like it,” Meg says. “We sound like a heavy metal band or something.
All the way from San Francisco, here to crush your hopes and spit on your dreams, I bring you, The Disenchanters! Let’s give them a hand!
”

Bev just laughs. “That’s awesome,” she says. “We should make sure to get a poster to take home with us.”

Inside, the tables and chairs are mismatched and colorful amateur paintings hang on the brick walls. We introduce ourselves to the kids working there—a short round guy named Mark and a girl with a brown ponytail—and Alexa tells them what the band’s actual name is and they apologize over and over. Alexa borrows my Sharpie and crosses out the name on the poster in the window and rewrites it correctly, and then asks for a sheet of paper from
my sketchbook so that she can make the set list even though they only know seven songs and they play them in the same order every time.

Mark and the girl give us free smoothies. They say hi to the customers, call them by their names. Everyone I see seems open and friendly.

Maybe I could live in a town like this.

I imagine myself waking up in a rented room in one of the oldest houses in California, riding my bike to this café, saying hey to the guy and girl working here, and talking about some random event from the night before—in a town this small everyone of a certain age must be friends with one another—and then moving to a table by the window and reading the newspaper. I try to think of what might come next, but I can’t think of anything beyond the morning.

“Colby,” Meg says. “You aren’t listening.”

As soon as I turn back to their faces, the illusion of life here vanishes.

“I was asking if you’d heard from Jasper yet,” Alexa says.