The Vinyl Princess (12 page)

“Is that it?” demands the smaller of the two men, the one holding the gun. “You’d better not be holding out on me, you little bitch. I don’t like being lied to, ya know?” He waves the gun at her.

Jennifer suddenly looks down. The robbers look down. I look at the desk next to me. The red light is on. Someone’s using the phone. I completely forgot about Aidan in the Cave. He’s still in there. I forgot to look in there. He must be calling the cops. The shorter guy starts toward the back of the store. I close the door of the office and squeeze my eyes shut. I hear the sound of their two voices arguing. I open the door a crack. The tall guy is gesturing at the front door, backing toward it. A siren starts up off in the distance. The short guy changes direction and follows him. I exhale.

The taller guy turns to Jennifer and calls out, “Have a nice evening,” as he pushes open the front door. And that’s when I know. The voice is unmistakable. I look at his feet. He’s wearing brown scuffed work boots. It’s Joel.

Joel is the one who’s been robbing stores up and down Telegraph. Joel is possibly the one who shot that guy at the gas station. He doesn’t care about Joe Strummer. He didn’t post that comment on my blog and he doesn’t care about my hands. He doesn’t care about me. He told me that story about the bowling alley so I’d tell him about the drop safe and that I didn’t have the combination. He used me to help him rob Bob & Bob’s. He’s just a small-time thief. And those two guys in the BMW? They were probably buying plumbing supplies.

T
he yowl of the sirens gets closer and closer. Somehow I’d imagined a bunch of cops on bikes pedaling up the street like mad, rushing to my rescue, but the cops who arrive have serious wheels. A posse of them, circling the wagons with blue and red lights flashing, screech to a halt in front of our door. By that time I’ve called Bob’s cell three times but he’s not picking up. I left a message but I’m not sure what I said. My hands are still shaking when I unlock the door and let the cops in. Jennifer is a puddle. She looks even paler than usual and she’s sitting in a chair in the office mumbling something about quitting this stupid job. I suppose that would be the upside to this whole horrible situation. Aidan has somehow disappeared.

Officer Davis sits down at Bob’s desk and starts writing out a report. He may not always get his man but I don’t think he ever misses a meal. His navy uniform strains at the buttons and Bob’s chair looks like it’s meant for a preschooler under his bulk. Three more cops are doing some serious reconnoitering of the situation. Jennifer and I sit in chairs across from Officer Davis as though we’re the ones on trial. Is it possible that he thinks this was an inside job?

I haven’t had one moment to collect my thoughts. My head is still spinning with the idea that Joel is a criminal. I’m also hurt and embarrassed at the ridiculous fairy tale I’ve concocted, thinking that maybe he was interested in me. What a first-class idiot I was.

Officer Davis has watched a lot of cop TV. He has the facial expressions and the body language nailed. He keeps confusing us with each other, though, which makes answering questions complicated.

“Now, Jennifer.” He looks at me. “You were in the back the whole time, and what exactly did you see from here?”

Jennifer points to me. “She’s Allie. She was in the back. I’m Jennifer.”

“Right, you’re right.” He looks at me. “You were in the back, though, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you are?”

“Allie.” I’m thinking name tags might move this along.

He writes on his clipboard. “Okay, Allie, describe what you saw.”

“Well, not much. I was peeking through a crack in the door. The guy with the gun was stocky and muscular and the other guy was taller, thinner. They both had ski masks on, and gloves.”

“Anything else?” he asks me.

I shake my head. I fully realize that I am now lying to an officer of the law, which is probably a felony. It’s entirely possible that both these guys have police records and there are probably mug shots in a big book somewhere down at the station for me to point at and say,
That’s him. That’s the guy.
But I just can’t do it. Not tonight anyway.

“Okay . . .” Officer Davis looks at Jennifer, trying to remember her name from five seconds ago. He clicks his ballpoint pen and leans in; the chair complains loudly. “Name again?”

“Jennifer,” she says, annoyed.

“Right, Jennifer. Can you tell me anything unusual, anything you noticed that might help us find these guys?”

Jennifer shakes her head.

“Okay, what about clothes? Can you remember what they were wearing?”

“Oh, yeah, they were wearing long-sleeved black sweatshirts, jeans, sneakers . . . or was it boots?” She looks at me.

I shrug. “I don’t remember.”

Jennifer continues, “Well, both of them were wearing ski masks and gloves, and they had guns.”

“Both of them?” he says.

I turn to look at Jennifer.

“No, wait. One gun. The stocky one had a gun. But it was big.”

I imagine the two of them in a bar somewhere, spending Bob’s money, wearing ski masks and gloves with a gun lying on the table between them. Then I imagine them at the same bar, singing karaoke on a stage in ski masks. I must be experiencing some kind of posttraumatic, stress-related hysteria. I start to laugh.

“Something funny?” asks Officer Davis.

I feel scolded. “No, nothing.”

“Okay, so we all agree here? One gun?”

“Look,” says Jennifer, “I’ve just had a gun pointed at my head. Can we move this along? I need to go home . . . like, soon?”

At that moment Bob bursts through the door, looking much worse for wear than Jennifer and I.

“Oh, thank God you’re okay! Are you okay? Is everyone okay?”

“Yeah, Bob, we’re fine,” I say. Jennifer doesn’t respond. I suspect she hasn’t quite decided what sort of an angle she wants to take on all of this. Being the victim of a robbery could work out well for her.

“Jennifer?” asks Bob.

“I had a gun pointed at my head! How do you think I am?”

While Bob gets up to speed, the radio attached to Officer Davis’s belt starts to chirp. He touches the tiny microphone pinned to his lapel and speaks into it in cop codes. Squawks and static follow. Officer Davis hoists himself out of Bob’s chair in slow motion. He puts his hands on his hips, ready for action.

“Well, looks like the perps have struck again—the deli up the street this time. Gotta run. Ladies, here’s my card.” He hands us each a white business card like he’s a used-car salesman. “My direct line is on there. Contact me immediately if anything else comes to you, anything at all; no detail is too small.” He hands Bob a copy of the police report. “That’s your case number in the top right-hand corner. You can refer to that if you call in. You’ll need it for your insurance company too.”

The uniforms disappear as quickly as they arrived. We stand there in the empty store, listening to the sirens blaring and then abruptly stopping. The deli is only three blocks away. The three of us look shell-shocked. Suddenly, it’s dead quiet. The music must have been turned off by me or Jennifer or the cops; I don’t remember. Bob is still holding the pink police report in his hand as though it’s a receipt. Somehow it seems like there should be more. Like, if you survived a robbery there should be a postrobbery cocktail party or something like that.

Jennifer reads my mind. “Well, I’m going to find some alcohol and try to forget that I almost died tonight.” She grabs her stuff from behind the register and walks out the front door to tell the world about her brush with death. Bob and I watch her leave.

“Yeah. I guess I’m going to go too. It’s been a long day.”

Bob looks broken. “Hey, Al, I’m really sorry that I wasn’t here tonight. It was really messed up of me to expect you to close with Jennifer.”

All I want to do is get out of here now. I have an overwhelming desire to go home and crawl underneath my bed and stay there for a few weeks. “Don’t worry about it, Bob. How were you supposed to know we’d get robbed?”

We both practically jump out of our skin as the door to the Cave at the back of the store opens. Aidan walks to the front of the store like nothing’s happened. Like this is a regular day and his shift just ended. Part of me wants to thank him for practically getting me killed, but then I figure, What’s the point? I wonder if Officer Davis realizes that he forgot to interview the employee who actually called 911. I wonder if Aidan would have provided information that I couldn’t.

“See you guys on Monday,” says Aidan, the height of animation for him.

“Yeah, good night,” says Bob.

I grab my backpack and my skateboard and follow Aidan out the front door. A ragtag group of street people has gathered outside and they watch us emerge from the store with interest. Aidan disappears up the street. Shorty and Jam come at me wearing women’s skiwear (it’s seventy degrees outside) that they probably salvaged from the free box around the corner in People’s Park. Shorty’s is a bright floral-patterned two-piece and Jam’s wearing a purple one-piece. Old lift tickets dangle from the zipper.

“Hey, man. I know who did the crime,” says Shorty.

“No, you don’t.” I sigh and drop my board.

“Yeah, man, I do.” He waves his finger at me. “It was the secret service, man. The same people who killed Kurt Cobain, the same people who killed John Lennon. It’s a goddamn conspiracy! They’re sending out hit men all over the country! They’re trying to kill music in this country, man; you’ll see. It’s been happening since the sixties! I’m right about this.”

“We have proof if you wanna see it,” offers Jam earnestly.

I kick off on my board and leave them behind. I can still hear them yelling as I glide up the sidewalk. I can even hear their ski pants swishing as they halfheartedly try to chase me down for a few hundred feet. It’s hard to run in skiwear when you’re drunk.

“Okay, we’ll talk about this later then!” yells Shorty.

I coast home on autopilot. I’m not sure I want to process what just happened. It’s too much to try to sort through. By the time I get home I’m still numb but I feel a terrible urge to sit down on the front steps of my house and sob. As I come up the steps I see Kit dashing from one window to the next, yanking them open and frantically waving smoke out with a newspaper. I pull open the front door and watch her through a haze of smoke. When she sees me she tries to act natural.

“Oh, hi. You’re home.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, well, there was a bit of an incident with the popcorn—you guys should really get a microwave—but don’t worry. It’s out now. Yup, all under control. Hey, have you got any incense or a scented candle?”

I walk into the kitchen. The remains of a charred pot sits on a burner and the walls around the stove are blackened. Some sort of grayish foam is oozing through the burners and down the front of the oven. Suki is standing in the doorway holding a fire extinguisher I’ve never seen before and Pierre is standing next to her, looking up at us accusingly. I look at Kit. Her white T-shirt is smeared with black. So is her face.

“Don’t worry. I’ll clean it up,” she says.

I walk out onto the front steps, sit down, put my head in my hands and start to cry.

F
or postrobbery and post–house fire music, Kit and I choose Gogol Bordello, Flogging Molly, the Dropkick Murphys, and the Talking Heads’
Stop Making Sense
(just so we can hear “Burning Down the House”). We get to work on the mess, scrubbing the walls, wiping down everything in the kitchen, cleaning the stove, airing the place out. I dug around the house and found some scented candles and incense in a drawer by my mom’s bed. Apparently, I’ve stumbled onto her Kama Sutra stash. Also in the drawer are a vibrator and some massage oil (and I really didn’t need to know that). We light enough candles and incense to start our own ashram. Kit thought I was crying about the fire, and I suppose I was in a way. She patted my back and told me to look on the bright side: At least now we know how to get Suki out of her room. When I kept crying she realized that something else must have happened and I unloaded the whole story on her in breathy, hysterical bursts. I even told her the part about Joel being the robber. I hadn’t planned on telling her that, but then it all came pouring out of me like water through a broken dam. I just couldn’t hold it in anymore. I felt a lot better when I was finished. I wiped my face on my T-shirt and took a deep breath.

Kit sat there, stunned. “And I thought
I
had a weird night.”

Then she asked me the obvious question. It was hanging in the air above us like a cartoon bubble; I wasn’t really ready to hear it out loud yet, even though it had been spinning around in my head for hours: “What are you going to do?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

We talk above the raucous pounding music while we clean. It feels good. We’re sweaty and grimy and the music is so loud that I can’t crawl into a cocoon of self-pity and anger, which would be my first instinct. Kit talks me through my dilemma with an amazing sense of calm one might not expect from someone who, earlier in the evening, almost burned down her best friend’s house.

“Well, what if you don’t say anything and someone else gets hurt? Wouldn’t you feel horrible?” she says, squeezing out a blackened sponge into a sink full of gray soapy water.

“Yes, I’d feel horrible. But what if Joel was raised by thieves or crack addicts, or alcoholic psychopaths who didn’t give him any love, people without morals who possibly beat him and burned him with cigarettes and forced him to do horrible things?” I remember the story about the New Jersey bowling alley and how he hinted at a crappy home life. Was that really all a big lie? “What if this is the only life he knows? If I turn him in he’ll go to prison and then what? The very thought of anyone, let alone Joel, sitting in a jail cell because of something I said is too much for me to bear.”

Kit considers this, nodding sympathetically. “You think his name is really Joel?”

In all the confusion I hadn’t considered this. I still don’t even know his real name.

Even if Joel (or whoever) was lying about his childhood, and a big part of me wants to believe he wasn’t, I’m not the kind of person who snitches. I’ve never snitched on anyone in my life. Well, actually, that’s not true. Once, when I was four, I rolled over on Bradley Wosniak for spitting in Caroline Markus’s long brown curls while she slept during naptime in preschool. I wasn’t a napper. I saw everything. It was a curse.

Kit suggests that maybe after some sleep, I’ll know what to do, but I’m doubtful.

We finish cleaning at four a.m. The house doesn’t smell great but it doesn’t smell like we had a bonfire in the living room anymore. The kitchen ends up cleaner than it was before we moved in. Kit and I stand there, exhausted and filthy. We look like chimney sweeps. We get out of our clothes and take turns showering and then we finally pass out on my mom’s bed with wet hair. What seems like minutes later, I hear the front door downstairs swing open.

“Yoo-hoo! Anybody home? What’s burning?” Estelle is making her way quickly up the stairs. She stands in the doorway of my mother’s bedroom.

“Girls! Get up! I think something’s burning.”

I sit up groggily. “Estelle. Relax. There’s no fire.”

Kit mumbles, “No fire. Go ’way,” and rolls over, shutting us out.

“Where’s your mom?” demands Estelle, as though she might be trapped in the part of the house that’s still ablaze.

“She went camping. Didn’t she tell you?” I pull my mom’s silk bathrobe on over my tank top and boxers and close my mom’s bedroom door behind me. I follow Estelle down the stairs into the living room. She’s already pulling containers and bagels out of a bag and looking around suspiciously.

“Something happened here. I’ve never seen this place so clean.”

“Yeah.” I rub my eyes and sit on the sofa cross-legged. “Kit accidentally lit the kitchen on fire making popcorn.”

“Well, I guess if that’s what it takes to get the place cleaned up,” she says matter-of-factly, pulling out of her bag a container of Italian ground espresso that she special-orders from Dean & Deluca in New York. She goes into the kitchen. I can hear her filling the coffeemaker with water.

“This kitchen is blinding me,” she yells. I hear the sizzle and pop of the coffeemaker kicking in and the smell of coffee drifts into the living room. She reappears and starts arranging food on the coffee table. “Now, where was it you said your mom went?”

“Camping . . . with Jack.”

“Camping.” She looks at me dubiously.

“Yes.” I rub my eyes. “She must have told you.”

“There might have been a message on my cell phone. I don’t recall the word
camping,
though. What kind of bagel do you want, honey?”

“Have you got poppy?”

She pulls a poppy bagel out of the bag and slices it open with a large knife she brought from the kitchen.

“Shmear?”

“Sure.”

She pulls the top off a container of cream cheese and slathers my bagel with it. She opens a package of glistening coral-colored lox and artfully arranges several slices on my bagel.

“Onions?” she asks.

“No, thanks.”

She replaces the top half of my bagel and then hands it to me.

“Coffee’s coming up.” She jumps up and energetically disappears into the kitchen again. I’m starting to understand that I’ll be playing the part of my mom this morning. Tradition is important to Estelle but she’s not fussy about the cast. She’s had perfectly great Thanksgivings with families she barely knows. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t been here. Would she have hauled Suki out of her room?

Estelle reappears with two steaming mugs of coffee. Somehow she’s managed to create foamed milk in our kitchen. I sip my coffee while Estelle prepares a bagel for herself. She finally sits back on the sofa with a sigh, bagel in hand, coffee to her left,
New York Times
in her lap, bare feet on the coffee table, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. She flips through the sections, looking for the Arts and Leisure section and then the book reviews. Once everything is in place I cease to exist except for the occasional sharing of a headline or a, “Guess who’s coming to Carnegie Hall?” Or, “Guess who’s showing at MoMA?” Estelle is a modern-art lover. It’s part of the “neonouveau” thing. The old masters hold no interest for her; she’s all about new, new, new. When she lived in New York, she skulked through back alleys in the meatpacking district seeking out emerging artists’ studios, always wanting to be on the cutting edge.

I take my coffee mug and wander out onto the porch. The local paper is sitting on the doormat. Estelle must have stepped over it. As a citizen of the world, Estelle has no use for our local news. She wants the big picture and that can come only from New York. I lean over and pick it up. The headline is brief and to the point:

Telegraph Robbers Strike Again!

I take the paper in with me and unfold it to reveal an old picture of Bob taken back when he was called “the Mayor of Telegraph,” back when there was a pulse on the avenue. The caption underneath it says,
Bob Petrovich, owner of Bob & Bob Records
. The article talks about last night’s robberies and includes a quote from Bob that says:

“Rudolf Stingel’s showing at the Whitney,” says Estelle. “He used to live in my building on the Upper West Side. He always wore fabulous shoes.” She slurps her coffee and puts it back on the coffee table.

I read the whole robbery article carefully to see if they’ve uncovered any more details about the perps. It doesn’t look like it. The deli owner describes them exactly the same way Jennifer did. I’m not exactly sure what I’m hoping for here. Do I want them to get caught? I suppose it would take the pressure off me. Joel would undoubtedly end up behind bars but it wouldn’t be because of me. My head is throbbing. The stress of the last two days is obviously giving me a brain tumor.

I take small bites of my bagel and chew slowly. I decide not to tell Estelle about the robbery right now. It’s not that I think she would react badly. She approaches any situation with her version of calm. I just don’t want to think about it for a while. The whole thing has become a hollow pain in the pit of my stomach (probably an ulcer). It’s hard to go from thinking that a person is somebody you really want to know to finding out that not only do you not want to know them at all, but they’re capable of violence.

Eventually, Kit gets out of bed and joins us in the living room. In our secret sign language she asks me if I’ve told Estelle about the robbery. I shake my head no. Kit pours herself a coffee and sits next to me on the sofa, picking at a plain bagel. The newspaper is sitting in my lap. She reads the headline over my shoulder and looks at me, wide-eyed.

“Gimme that!” She lunges for it.

“Okay, grabby!” I hand it to her.

Estelle looks over her reading glasses at us and then returns to her paper.

Kit reads the article and then kicks the newspaper under the sofa with her bare foot.

Several minutes pass and then, suddenly, Estelle puts her paper in her lap and pulls off her reading glasses. She looks at me accusingly. “Camping. Do you mean like in a tent?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve heard the summer camp story, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Your mother despises camping. Anyone in their right mind despises camping. Do you think the cavemen would have camped if they’d had access to luxury condos?”

“No?”

“Who is this Jack guy, anyway?”

I shrug. “Just a guy.”

“He must be more than ‘just a guy’ if he got your mother to sleep in a tent. Where is she going to the bathroom?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is she so desperate for a man that she’s willing to use moss for toilet paper and eat charred animals?”

“I don’t think she’s doing that.” Estelle seems a little fuzzy on the concept of camping.

Estelle shakes her head and stares into space for a moment. Then she puts her reading glasses back on and picks up her newspaper again. Kit kicks me with her foot.

When Estelle has read every word of the
Times
that she’s interested in, she packs up her food and her Italian coffee and heads back out to the suburbs in her new lime-green Volkswagen. She’s escorting a couple of blue-hairs to an erotic poetry reading in the city this afternoon. God help them. The news of my mother compromising herself to the point of sleeping outdoors has Estelle on a feminist rampage.

Kit has to work at noon and her clothes are all smoky, so she has to stop at home. She gathers up her clothes and her sock monkey and leaves. I’m left alone in the house to contemplate the aftermath of everything. I go upstairs and pick my clothes up off the floor of my mom’s bedroom and check the pockets before I put them in the laundry. I pull out Officer Davis’s business card. I toss it in the garbage can and immediately dig it out again. I take it into my bedroom and put it next to my bed. I flip it over and then I turn it right side up again. I stand there contemplating the little white rectangle for a minute. The phone rings and I practically jump out of my skin. I guess I’m still a little shaken up.

“Hello?”

“Al, it’s me,” says my mom.

“Mom? You sound like you’re in a bottle.”

“I’m in a phone booth. I had to walk a mile in sandals to get to it. I’ve got three blisters. I don’t know how I’m going to make it back to the tent.”

“So, how’s it going?”

“I don’t think I can spend another night out here. The place is surrounded by wild animals. Wait, what am I saying? The campers are wild animals.”

“Where’s Jack?”

“He went to get more firewood. All he does is chop wood. God, I smell like I’ve been barbecued.”

“Well, then you’re really going to like the smell around here.”

“What?”

“We had a small kitchen fire. It’s all under control but there’s a bit of a lingering odor; you’ll feel right at home.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, but Bob’s got robbed last night.”

“What?”

“Yup.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“No, but they pulled a gun on Jennifer.”

“You mean a
gun
gun?”

“It looked pretty real from where I was standing.”

I watch out the window of my bedroom as a large man on a tiny bike pulls a shopping cart full of bulging plastic garbage bags up the street behind him. He moves slowly, like he’s a float in a homeless parade. Cars keep honking at him and passing him.

“Well, that’s it, I’m coming home,” says my mom.

“Okay, but your being here isn’t going to change much. I’m happy to be your excuse, but don’t come rushing home for me.” This is a lie. I want her to come home. I need some adult supervision.

“Are you kidding me? I slept with a rock under my ass last night and I can barely move. I’ve been peeing in the woods because I just can’t face the outhouse. I probably have poison oak. A mosquito bit my eyelid and I look like Quasimodo. We saw a bear yesterday and all the other campers were taking photos, but all I could do was imagine him with my severed arm in his mouth. I’m coming home if I have to hitchhike.”