The Disenchantments (2 page)

And then whenever we’re done, whenever we’re ready, we’re going to come home and go to college. I explained this to the college counselor and I explained it to my parents, but I don’t explain it all to Craig. I just nod and say, “To each his own,” and draw the curve of Bev’s neck where it meets her shoulders.

The turquoise VW bus arrives in front of my house at 7:00
A.M
. The rumble of its engine dies down, the front door slams shut, and my mom’s brother shuffles into the kitchen. He’s smiling but bleary-eyed, wearing his usual worn Rolling Stones T-shirt and a bandanna tied around his messy hair.

“Look,” he says, “I dressed for the occasion.”

“Uncle Pete,” I say, “you dress like this every day.”

“True.” He nods solemnly. Then he takes the coffee mug from my hand, sips, places it back in my grasp.

“Any more where that came from?”

I get up and pour coffee into our biggest mug. My uncle sleeps less than anyone I’ve ever met. Whenever someone asks him what keeps him up at night, he leans in close, looks
the person in the eye, and says,
Just can’t get the music out of my mind.

When I asked Pete if I could take the bus on a road trip, I had no idea what he would say. It’s hard for strangers to fully grasp the connection he has with this vehicle. Pete doesn’t have a wife, but if you knew him only casually, you would assume he did. When someone asks him,
Hey, Pete, what did you do this weekend?
He’ll say,
Melinda and I went to the ocean
. Or,
Melinda felt like traveling, so I just let her take me wherever she wanted to go
. By the time he says something like,
Melinda wasn’t feeling so hot, so we laid low and took her for a tune-up
, it dawns on most people that Melinda is the bus, and that my uncle Pete is the kind of person who spends a lot of time alone.

I think if I had asked to borrow Melinda to move a piece of furniture, or to go to the grocery store, or for any other brief and practical reason, Pete would have turned me down. But this was about music, and as soon as I used the word
tour
, Pete’s glassy eyes opened wider and he smiled a nostalgic, faraway smile. I knew then that he would say yes, and for the rest of the night, he and Dad listened to records and talked about the years they spent traveling around the country, living out of the bus, and playing small town shows. This was before Ma showed up at a South of Market bar for a surprise visit to her brother and fell in love with his bandmate who she’d heard about for years but never before met. The story is that Pete was so moved by the love between his
sister and his best friend that when my dad told him they were going to buy a house and have a kid, Pete never said another word about the open life they were supposed to have, nothing about the music or the adventure. Instead, he wrote a song for my parents’ wedding that became a hit on many college radio stations and made him briefly famous among a small circle of tenderhearted young fans.

Flash forward twenty years and Dad and Pete are walking me out to Melinda. I throw my duffel bag into the back and take my seat behind the wheel. Pete reminds me of how everything works—unnecessary, considering that he’s been giving me weekly VW driving lessons for the past couple months—and then closes me in. Through the open window, Dad slips me a wad of cash even though I’ve been saving up for this, and then, ceremoniously, he hands me a credit card.

“Are you kidding?” I ask.

Dad and Pete insisted on living like hippies all through the eighties. Even now, Dad hates to charge anything.

“Your mom wants you to have it,” he explains.

This makes more sense. Ma’s the worrier in the family. Of course she would take a break from studying the subjunctive to make sure I was ready for unplanned expenses.

I look out the window at Dad and Pete, standing happily side by side, and I turn the ignition. Dad whoops. Pete flashes a peace sign.

“See you in a week,” I say, and I pull away from the curb.

My first stop is the Sunset. I turn onto Irving Street and see Bev leaning out of her upstairs window.

“Hold on,” she says when I slip out of the driver’s seat.

She leaves the window. I take a couple steps back and lean against the bus to wait for her, and soon she reappears with a blue pinhole camera. A group of hipsters in skinny jeans and sunglasses makes its way toward me. Their dog strains against its leash, starts sniffing at my Nikes.

A guy with a scruffy beard glances at Bev in the window. “Uh-oh,” he says to the dog. “You’re messing with the photo shoot.”

I pat the dog’s wide, white head and tell him it’s cool.

“This is perfect,” Bev shouts down. “Colby, can you hold the dog’s leash? Like, as if it’s ours?”

The girl holding the leash laughs. I can’t see her eyes from behind the lenses of her sunglasses. She hands me the loop to grab onto.

“Her name’s Daisy,” she says, and the group moves a few steps down, out of the frame of the photograph.

“I thought you were capturing the moment,” I shout up to Bev. “Like, the moment as it really is.”

Daisy gazes at me with mournful eyes, then turns to her owners and whines.

Bev calls down to me to move a little to the left, to walk a few steps, to pet the dog, to lean against the bus. When she tells me to open to the passenger-side door and get in again,
I lock the door instead and return Daisy to her group. They rub her back and scratch behind her ears and tell her how proud they are of her, and then they continue walking up the street.

The downstairs door swings open and Bev’s mom steps out with her bags.

“Hey, Mary,” I say.

“Hi, Colby,” she says. “Hello, Melinda.”

I laugh. “I’ll tell Uncle Pete you said that. He’ll love it.”

She puts Bev’s bags on the floor of the backseat and returns inside for the guitar, but Bev’s walking down the stairs, saying, “Mom, just don’t worry about it, I got it,” in this tense, annoyed way.

Mary looks at me and shrugs. She tries to act light about it, but I can see that she’s hurt, and to be honest I don’t know what Bev’s problem is. Mary’s trying to help. But that’s how Bev always is with her, and I’ve stopped trying to figure out why. I shrug back and give Mary a hug while Bev rearranges the bags that Mary loaded for her, and then they hug, brief and tense, and Mary tells me to drive safe and I tell her that I will.

The front door shuts, and now that it’s just us on the sidewalk, Bev’s whole body relaxes. She smiles.

“Hey, don’t move,” she says.

She reaches toward me, touches my cheekbone.

“Got it,” she says. “Make a wish.”

“Hmm,” I say. “I wish—”

“Shh. Don’t
tell
me.”

She waits, guitar case in one hand, rows of pastel houses behind her, holding my eyelash between her thumb and her forefinger. So much swarms through my head that it’s hard to settle on anything. How can I wish for one thing when everything is beginning? So I just wish for this feeling to last.

I nod at her: finished. She separates her fingers. My eyelash is on her thumb.

“Wish granted,” she says, and blows it away.

Bev’s a sculptor; she’s always touching things. As I steer us across Market Street and onto Valencia, she runs her hands across the dashboard, the vents, the edges of the windows, the cloth-covered ceiling.

“Feel anything good?”

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “Texture city,” and we laugh and make our way through the Mission.

I turn onto 24th Street and pull over in front of the Benson-Flores household. Meg and Alexa sit outside the yellow Victorian with their two dads, Jeffrey and Kevin, boxes stacked all around them. Alexa has a notebook open and her phone to her ear. Meg’s talking to Kevin while Jeffrey tapes up a box.

Bev and I slide out of the bus and greet them. Then we stand, staring at the boxes, the bags, Meg’s bass, and Alexa’s
drum kit. The bus has a lot of space, but by the time we’re done, it will also have four passengers.

“Oh, man,” Meg says. She’s leaning against Kevin’s shoulder, twisting a strand of her pink, wavy hair around her finger. “This is going to be a challenge.”

Jeffrey, stonier-faced and quieter than usual, surveys the back.

“Don’t worry,” Kevin says. “If you forget anything we’ll bring it with us when we visit next month. Or we can mail it if you need it sooner.”

The rest of us will be coming back to the city after the tour, but we’re dropping Meg off in Portland. She’s going to Lewis and Clark, and before the fall semester, attending a summer program for theater majors.

“You’re the one who’s worried,” Meg says, and in response, Kevin playfully pushes her away.

“Go help Jeffrey,” he says.

Alexa snaps her phone shut. “Just got us a gig at a piano bar in Arcata,” she says.

“Where’s Arcata?” Bev asks.

“Ten miles from Eureka.”

Meg sticks her head out of the van, grabs a box from Jeffrey, and says, “Where’s Eureka?”

“On the coast. A little under three hours from Redding.”

“So is it tomorrow?” I ask.

She looks up at me, shields her eyes from the sun. Blue marks are on her hands—her signature peace signs. She
nods, yes. Some kind of headband thing is tied around her forehead.

“Melinda is beautiful,” Alexa says. “I just have to sit here and look at all of you for a second.”

After she’s taken us all in, she stands up and joins us. I can see the headband better now—it’s really just a thin strip of blue fabric tied around her long black hair, with little bells on it that chime when she moves.

Meg and Alexa peer into the bus together like dream girls from different decades: Meg in one of her many kitschy, short vintage dresses, this one brown with a stampede of white horses galloping across it, and Alexa in her flowy, white hippie shirt and tight blue corduroys. It wasn’t hard for Bev and me to figure out who should be in the band. These girls dress every day like they’re going to be onstage.

Jeffrey and Kevin are trying to fit Meg’s stuff onto the floor of the backseat, placing the boxes and bags at different angles with none of the laid-back excitement of Dad and Uncle Pete. When they are finished, Kevin rushes toward Meg and wails, “My little girl is leaving home!”

“I know, Dad,” she says, and for a moment she looks so sad that I have to look away as they hug again and Jeffrey joins them.

Bev and I climb back into the front, followed soon by Alexa. When Meg finally takes her place next to her sister, Jeffrey appears in my window.

“You, young man, had better drive safely.”

“Of course,” I say.

“I want you to drive like a grandpa. Slowly. In the right lane the whole way there and back.”

I laugh. “I don’t think Melinda could go fast even if I wanted her to.”

He nods his approval and steps back, and we all wave good-bye as I pull away.

“This is so pretty,” Alexa says, looking at the diamond pattern on the seat covers as I turn left onto Dolores Street. She pulls out a notebook in which she keeps a running list of jobs she might want to have someday. “I never thought of doing upholstery before, but this is gorgeous. The energy in here is amazing. What was your dad’s band called again?”

“The Rainclouds,” I say.

“The Rainclouds,” she repeats. “I think I’ll write my play about them.”

Each year, our school produces an original play. The kids who want to write it have to apply in their Junior year with a writing sample. Alexa was this year’s winner.

“And they toured all over the country in this?” she asks.

“Yeah, but mostly the West Coast.”

“And they had a lot of fans, right?”

“Not really,” I say. “They never got that big.”

“Okay, so not tons of fans, but the fans they did have really loved them.”

I just shrug, don’t really respond, because she states this as though it’s a fact that doesn’t need confirmation.

“I can feel the love in here.” She nods to herself. “I can feel it in the glass and the stitches. Two best friends, playing music, searching for love.”

“
Okay
, Alexa.”

“What? You can laugh if you want to, but it’s true. Now, you’re going to want to get on Van Ness and take it all the way to Lombard.”

“Oh my God, Lex,” Meg says. “He
knows
how to get to the bridge.”

We go through what we’ve brought for the ride. Meg has devoted hours to making playlists to suit any mood. She plugs her iPod into Uncle Pete’s recently installed, prized stereo system, and soon we’re greeted with the upbeat, flirty sound of The Supremes.

Alexa has a folder containing maps, contacts, and phone numbers. Packed in a small case are an emergency radio, a universal cell-phone charger, and a first-aid kit.

“I also brought a Magic Eight Ball,” she says. “I’m trying to put a little more trust in fate.”

Bev has an ancient, clunky Walkman and her camera.

“That’s the cutest camera I’ve ever seen,” Meg says.

“I’ve been thinking about a project,” Bev says. “We should take a photograph of everyone we meet on the trip so that we remember them. Like, people we meet at gas stations and working at the motels and venues.”

“I love this idea,” I say. “This is so great. It’ll force us to
talk to people. Plus it’s so documentary. It’s like Leon Levinstein.”

“Who?” Meg asks.

“That photographer we studied in class, remember? He photographed almost everyone he passed on the street.”

“Oh, yeah, that guy.”

Alexa says, “We could keep a tour journal and leave spaces for the photos to go.”

“Maybe we should alternate days that we write in it,” I say.

“Who wants today?” Meg asks.

Bev says, “We need a journal first.”

There’s the sound of Meg rifling through her giant bag and then the sound of her saying, “A journal like
this
?” and I glance in the rearview and there’s Meg, waving a large black book to the rhythm of The Supremes fading out.

“I’m a good person to travel with, yo,” she says. “You need something, you come to me.”

It’s still morning but it’s warm already. All of Melinda’s windows are down but the bus still fills with us laughing, and even though I’ve crossed this bridge a thousand times, something feels different. The sky, the water, the people walking along the footpaths, and all the cars ahead of us and behind us—everything is larger and more possible.