The Vinyl Princess (5 page)

“I don’t know. It was more like moody than shy.”

“Uh-huh. I have days like that, fat days. I didn’t think guys did, though.”

“Unless they’re hiding something,” I suggest.

“Like what?” Kit’s distracted by a whale breaching and slapping its tail on the water, causing a mini tidal wave.

I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t really know anything about this guy. He could be hiding a lot of things, I suppose, or maybe his eyes were tired from partying, or maybe he had a migraine; maybe it’s as simple as that. As a rule, though, people who skulk around indoors wearing sunglasses are generally the same kind of people who will carry on an inane cell phone conversation while you’re ringing them up; they’re generally assholes. But he’s not an asshole. He couldn’t be. Could he?

“You wanna Popsicle?” asks Kit, leaping out of the big chair and heading for the kitchen.

“What flavor?” I ask.

Kit pulls open the freezer compartment of her aunt’s massive refrigerator. “Grape, orange, lemon.”

“Grape, please.”

She returns with two grape Popsicles and hands me one, plopping back into her chair. We watch the whales frolic carefree in the ocean while we lick our Popsicles. The narrator, who sounds suspiciously like Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the
Enterprise
, soberly tells us how grim the future looks for these animals because global warming is killing off the food that they live on. I’m glad the whales can’t hear him. They should enjoy life while they can.

“We should save the whales,” I muse.

“Uh-huh. We should.” Kit has licked her Popsicle down to a nub. She puts it in her mouth and the stick emerges empty except for a purple stain. She swallows and shows me her purple tongue. I show her mine.

“Joey Spinelli,” says Kit. “Man, that guy rocks my world.”

“Yeah, mine too.”

“He only likes dumb chicks with big boobs.”

“Yup.”

“Idiot.”

“Hey, what do you wanna do tonight?” I ask, changing the subject. It’s an unspoken agreement between us that we spend every Saturday night together, because Niles’s band is always playing somewhere and the glamour of being the bass player’s girlfriend wore off a long time ago. Besides, Kit’s sixteen, and most places check ID even if you’re with the band. They never seem to check the band’s ID, though. Niles is eighteen and he’s been playing crappy, hole-in-the-wall clubs since he was sixteen.

“I dunno. There’s that party at Brie’s but it sounds like a total drag. She said something about board games. What are we, senior citizens?” Kit looks at the clock. “I’d better get the vacuum.”

I ease out of my chair. “Call me when you’re done.”

I walk out the front door and drop my skateboard on the sidewalk in the direction of home. I’ve put off going home long enough, I suppose. I really need to work on my fanzine for a while. I know that this “Jack” guy hasn’t even set foot in my house, but somehow I’m already considering his presence in my mom’s life a full-on home invasion, as though I might wake up tomorrow morning and find him making pancakes in our kitchen and cheerfully asking me if I’d like a cup of “joe.” I don’t want that pancake-making home invader anywhere near me on a Sunday morning, or ever, for that matter. He probably even leaves the toilet seat up and beard crumbs in the sink and pubic hair in the shower . . . man dirt. I want him out. God, I need a therapist.

My mom is upstairs working when I arrive home. I can tell because Leonard Cohen’s
Death of a Ladies’ Man
is playing on the stereo and it’s turned way up. She hasn’t listened to this CD since long before my dad left. Should I read this as some sort of a cryptic red flag? Pierre is lounging on the dining table. I bet he’s had a grueling day. He lifts his head slightly as I pass. The cat version of “Oh, it’s just you.” I walk to the kitchen, open the fridge, not expecting much, close it again and walk up the stairs. My mom’s staring at her computer, singing along with Leonard. This would be the perfect opportunity to scare the crap out of her but I decide against it.

“
Mom!
” I yell above the music.

She turns around and smiles at me. Is she glowing? Is it possible that she’s glowing?

“Hi, honey. Can you turn down the music for me?”

I run down the stairs and turn Leonard way down. I run back up again. I need to get a better look at her. I’m still panting from the stairs when she says:

“He called.”

“Who?”

“Jack.”

“Nicholson?”

“Allie, please.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he had a wonderful time last night and he wanted to hear my voice before he boarded his plane.”

“Where’s he going?”

“Um, I don’t know, the Midwest somewhere—one of those M states. Or was it W?” She shrugs and smiles.

And, by the way, she
is
glowing.

I shut the door of my bedroom and start in on today’s blog entry:

There were two comments posted yesterday below my blog about glam rock. One was from Jan in Iceland. He tersely told me that I forgot to mention Elton John, who is often overlooked for his important contribution to the glam movement. I comment on his comment:
Thanks, Jan. You’re absolutely right. Elton deserves his own issue, though. I’ll be sure to devote an entire blog to him in the near future
. The other comment is from Jim in Seattle, who wrote:
Vinyl is dead; downloading is where it’s at. Face it, Princess
.

I
’m sitting cross-legged on the wooden bench at Krishna Copy, listening to the
zip-whirr-sigh
of the massive copying machine as it prints my
Vinyl Princess
fanzine. To print, collate and staple five hundred copies, it’s going to cost me sixty-nine dollars and seventy-two cents, a lot of money for me, but not bad when you consider that I’m looking to start a movement. I wonder what the Black Panthers spent on flyers in the sixties when they got going.

Matt, the clerk who’s helping me at Krishna Copy, is throwing in colored paper for free. He seems to recognize what I’m trying to do here and he’s solemnly sworn not to spill my identity even if he’s tortured or held at gunpoint. It took a long time to settle on a color. I almost went with purple but decided it was too dark. In the end I settled on turquoise, or “pool,” as it’s called on the paper sample.

Across from me, pinned to the wall, is a huge map of the U.S. I stare at it for a moment, musing about M. (That’s right, I’m calling him M now; no more “mystery guy,” just M.) One thing I know for sure about M is that he’s not from around here. My eyes drift to the South on the map and stop on Greenville, South Carolina. Maybe M is from the South. Maybe he has one of those charming southern accents. It occurs to me that I have yet to hear him speak. Maybe, unlike me, he grew up in a rambling house full of love and good smells and lots of brothers and sisters. The kind of family I always secretly envied, where the dinner table is raucous and big plates of food get passed around and everyone talks over one another and dogs sleep under the table. Once I get to know M he’ll fill in all the blanks for me. Then I’ll bring him home and show him my record collection and he’ll be blown away.

I wonder how M got here. I’m always curious about how people just arrive somewhere; maybe it’s because I’ve been here all my life. I wonder what it feels like to drive into a city and get out of the car and say, “Well, this is it. Guess I’ll unpack the car; I’m staying.” I wonder if he left a girl behind, or a dog. (Or is he a cat person? No, he definitely looks like a dog person.) Maybe he calls home once a week to check in with his parents and to make sure his dog is okay.

Matt jolts me out of M’s life by waving my first fanzine in front of my face. I take it and hold it in my hands. It’s fabulous. The cover I designed, a vintage pen-and-ink of an ice princess on skates wearing a tiara, executing an arabesque, using an LP as a skating rink, came out beautifully. I stick my head in the box and breathe in the printer ink smell, destroying about ten thousand brain cells. I pull out my crumpled bills and pay Matt and then I lug the box home. The weight of it feels like a good day’s work.

While I’ve been inventing a fake life for M and attempting to get a real one for myself, my mom has been creating one for
herself
. She’s hell-bent on making us look normal by Thursday, although, frankly, I don’t think “Jack” is going to buy it. The last few days, she’s been coming home with shopping bags filled with cartons of food and scooping it out onto plates as though she cooked it herself and then putting the plates in front of us at the dining table roughly around the time that she thinks normal people eat dinner. Last night we had Dover sole baked in parchment paper with lemon dill sauce, steamed baby carrots and mashed potatoes with truffle oil. It was delicious. The night before that we had grilled jumbo shrimp on a bed of angel hair pasta tossed in pesto sauce. It was also delicious. I’m so onto her, but I’d be an idiot if I said anything. It beats the hell out of chipping a frozen pizza out of the freezer or warming up leftover take-out Chinese noodles and eating them straight from the box. Growing up, I don’t recall one meal that we ate at the table as a family. For one thing, there was no table, and we weren’t that kind of family anyway. We were like wolves, foraging for ourselves and eating when we were hungry; for my dad that usually meant midnight, but my mom likes to snack all day. She has the eating habits of a gerbil. I like to mix it up. Cereal for dinner is fine but so is lasagna; so are doughnuts. Pizza is great for breakfast; so are bananas; so are doughnuts. I usually eat lunch at work and when I’m off I go up the street to the Japanese place on College Avenue and get a bowl of udon noodles in broth for three bucks. It’s the best deal around and the people watching is great. Not as weird as Telegraph—not everyone has abused a controlled substance before ten a.m. It’s more of a pharmaceutical crowd, but interesting enough to watch while I slurp my soup.

The food in front of us tonight smacks of “normal,” but my mom and I haven’t exactly perfected table talk. She reads a big hardcover volume of some dead guy’s poetry as she eats, while I read about Robert Plant in
Rolling Stone
magazine. Joe Cocker sings his shaky heart out on the stereo. Occasionally, one or the other of us will announce something newsworthy.

“The liquor store on Telegraph was robbed last night,” I offer.

She looks up from her book. “Really? What time?”

“Late. One a.m. No one was hurt.” I throw that in for her sake. She hates that I work on Telegraph.

“Did they catch them?” She takes a bite of her maple-glazed salmon.

“Nope, they’re still at large,” I report darkly.

“Hey, have you seen Pierre lately?”

“No, I haven’t. Do you think he did it?” I ask.

“Nah, what would he need money for?”

“Maybe it’s not the money; maybe it’s the thrill of it.” I try to imagine my cat robbing a liquor store. Height would be an issue even if he stood on his back legs. Besides, these guys had a gun. Pierre can’t even open a door with his paws, let alone cock a gun. If he could, he really wouldn’t need us for anything.

After dinner, we clean up, which entails throwing all the neatly labeled boxes into the refrigerator with the others and washing two plates. I go upstairs to take a phone call from Kit, who seems convinced that Niles is messing around on her. I’m lying on my bed, digesting my third “normal” dinner in a row. My jeans feel snug around my waist.

“When he came to get me last night he didn’t even say anything about how I looked.”

“Uh-huh, is that all you got?”

“No. I looked at his cell phone while he was in the bathroom and I saw a number on there I didn’t recognize. A four-one-five area code.”

“That could be anything. You dialed it, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did.”

“Who was it?”

“I got the voice mail of a girl named Chelsea. She sounded pretty.”

“You can tell by someone’s voice mail if they’re pretty?”

“Yes, I can. I can also tell that she has large breasts.”

“Of course you can. You think everyone has bigger breasts than you.”

“Well, they do.”

“You’re petite.”

“I’m breastless.”

“Well, you can’t really ask Niles about this allegedly large-breasted pretty girl named Chelsea, can you?”

“No, but I can catch him in the act. I think he’s a lying shithead, don’t you?”

“I don’t know. I think you might be rushing to judgment. She could be anyone. How are you going to catch him in the act?”

“I’m going to follow him next Saturday night. You have to come with me.”

“No, Kit, you know I hate surveillance. What if he sees us?”

“Don’t worry; he won’t see us.”

“Why not?”

“Because it won’t be us.”

I can’t believe I didn’t see this coming. Kit is very big on disguises. She gets first pick of whatever comes into the vintage-clothing store that she works in and she prides herself on looking like a completely different person every time she leaves the house. She owns a vast selection of wigs, hats, sunglasses, jewelry and shoes. She’d make a great gumshoe. Not including Halloween (which I won’t even get into), I’ve been dressed as a disgruntled shopper (when Kit needed backup on a complaint about a staff member at a boutique), a Girl Scout (when Kit needed a partner to go door-to-door, collecting empty bottles to support her fake troop), a guy (when Kit needed a pretend boyfriend to make her current boyfriend jealous) and a middle-aged woman (when Kit exceeded the one-per-customer on free samples at the Lancôme cosmetics counter).

“So, will you help me?”

As I’m lying there, Pierre appears in my doorway. He strides purposefully past my bedroom without even a glance in my direction. I jump off the bed and tiptoe to my doorway, poking my head out. Pierre stands in front of Suki’s door and meows. The door opens. Pierre disappears inside. The door shuts.

“Allie? Are you there?” asks Kit.

“Aha!” I say into the phone.

“What?”

“Pierre is cheating on me with a Japanese woman.”

“You see what I mean? You can’t even trust a male cat.”

“Okay, sure, I’ll help you. But I’m not wearing a disguise.”

“Yes, you are. Call you tomorrow.” She hangs up before I can respond.

I pull the Beatles’
Rubber Soul
out of its sleeve and place it on the turntable. The needle drops and “Drive My Car” starts up. I lie there and listen to it, looking up at the ceiling. My eyes close. I imagine M lying next to me, listening, our fingertips touching, feeling the music and the heat of our bodies flowing through his fingers to mine and back again. There’s no need for us to talk. That’s what it’s like with us. We talk without speaking.