The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (122 page)

He nodded. “You know what I been noticing about you, Birdsey? Whenever you talk about something, you always say ‘we.’ Like you and him are joined at the hip or something.” His eyes looked past me. “Whoa, mama, I’d like to be joined at the hip with
that
one.”

My eyes followed his to a long-haired blonde over by the bar. I scanned the crowd for the little waitress. Found her three tables down.

“I was
into
all that astronaut shit when I was a kid,” Leo said.

“You?”

“Oh, yeah.
Big
time. Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, all those guys. I had this whole astronaut scrapbook. My main ambition in life was to go down to Cape Canaveral and shake hands with John Glenn.”

“Thomas and I had astronaut lunch boxes,” I said.

“Me, too. I had one of those. Thought I was hot stuff.”

I told Leo I wasn’t even sure
how
I felt about our landing on the
moon. “I mean, shit, it
is
kind of a mind-bender—science fiction made real or something. Hooray for the guys with the slide rules. . . . But it seems so pro-Nixon. The triumph of capitalism, victory over the evil Communist empire. So what that we’re napalming a whole fucking country and getting our asses kicked besides. Right?”

“God bless America,” Leo said.

“My stepfather went out and sprung for a TV to celebrate. He’s probably sitting home right now, getting a hard-on watching it.”

“Speaking of which,” Leo said. “Check out the redhead wearing that plaid thing. Table 16. I think I’m in l-o-v-e.”

Just as he picked up the phone to dial, some other guy asked the redhead to dance. “Too bad, Sundance,” I ribbed him. “Guess you’re going to have to jump off the cliff a little faster than that.”

“Jump off
this,
Birdsey,” he said. “Hey, you know what Dell told me? About the astronauts? That it’s all a hoax—that they’re not really up there orbiting the moon. He says they’re hanging out in some top-secret TV studio in New Jersey. Nixon arranged it to take the heat off of the war. Dell says he read all about it in this newspaper he gets.”

“That would be the
New York Times,
right?” I laughed.

“Fucking Dell, man,” Leo laughed. “I don’t know
what
planet that guy’s from.”

A big part of that night is a blur to me. I recall dancing with some blonde in pigtails who reminded me of Ellie May Clampett. I remember the Dial-Tone passing out free champagne after Armstrong and Aldrin’s moon bounce. Remember No Neck throwing a punch at someone and getting escorted out by two bouncers. Somewhere along the way, we changed waitresses.

“I’m going outside,” I told Leo. It was sometime after midnight by then. “Walk the beach or something.”

He had connected with the redhead after all; their slow-dancing was starting to look like foreplay. “Nice knowing you,” Leo said.

Outside, the air was cool and misty and the moon had a hazy glow. Someone at the far end of the parking lot kept trying to start their car, grinding the ignition over and over and over again.

I climbed up the bank and down the other side to the ocean. The tide sounded like a flushing toilet. Clots of seaweed littered the beach.

There was nobody else around. I took off my sandals and flung them back toward the lifeguard stand. Rolled up my jeans and walked down by the water.

The cold sea air sobered me up some—washed away the wooziness and the stink of cigarettes and the strobe light flashes from inside. Meat shows: that’s all these bars were. I could still hear the thump of the music inside, but more and more faintly, the farther I walked. The surf lapping over my feet felt good. I stared back up at the moon.

I must have walked for a mile, mile and a half, just thinking about shit: how it must feel to be way up there, looking down at the earth. Not being a part of it. Taking in the place, whole. That was the thing, man. That’s what was hard: we were all moon walkers, in a way. Me. Leo. Ralph Drinkwater. My brother. Even my stupid stepfather, locked in a three-against-one with Ma and Thomas and me. Even all the clowns back there at the Dial-Tone Lounge, getting loaded so they could get up the nerve to try and fuck some girl—
any
girl—tether themselves to
some
one, even for a couple of minutes in the backseat of someone’s car. For a couple of seconds, everything was all clear. It all made sense. Who was that guy we’d read in my philosophy class last semester? That existentialism guy? He was right. Every one of us was alone. Even if you were someone’s identical twin. I mean, why
had
Thomas gotten up in the middle of the night and run those laps around the dorm?
None
of it made any sense,
man, that was why. Because the whole freaking world was absurd. Because man
was
existentially alone. . . .
Whoa, far out,
I said, teasing myself back to earth again.
Heavy, man.
I’d actually remembered something from school a whole month after the final exam. I was turning into a freaking philosopher
.
I reached down and picked some rocks off the beach. Chucked them, one by one, into the rolling surf. I don’t know how long I stood there, pitching stones.

When I got back and went to get my sandals, I saw a silhouette
up in the lifeguard’s perch. Someone small. “Yoo-hoo,” she called. “Do you have jumper cables?”

I told her I didn’t. “Were you the one I heard a while ago? Sounds like you might have flooded her. If I were you, I’d wait a little while longer, then try again.”

As I approached, I realized who it was: that little waitress from the Dial-Tone. She was sitting with her knees to her chest, wearing a sweatshirt with her hands tucked inside the sleeves.

“Not that I’m trying to rescue you or anything.”

She smiled. “Hey, I really
did
appreciate you trying to get those jerks to back off,” she said. “It was sweet. Thanks.”

“No problem.”

“I just get so tired of it, you know? Guys playing grab-ass all night. Showing their buddies what he-men they are. One of the other waitresses—one of the veterans—taught me to cop an attitude. Snap at them like you’re their mother and if they don’t stop it you’ll send them up to their room. So that’s what I do. It works.”

I nodded. “Sure scared the crap out of me,” I said.

She looked back toward the Dial-Tone. “God, I hate that place,” she said.

“Yeah, well, if it’s true Western civilization’s in decline, I guess we may have hit bottom with the Dial-Tone Lounge.” She laughed that pretty laugh of hers. That night out by the lifeguard stand was the first time I ever heard it.

“So what’d they do, fire you?” I said. “Or did you quit?”

“Neither. My replacement finally showed up. God, I hope I can get that stupid car started. I don’t want to have to sit around until two and wait for my sleazy assistant manager to bring me home.”

“Where do you live?” I said. “Maybe my buddy and I can give you a lift.”

She smiled. “The guy who grades women? Thanks anyway.”

“No problem.”

Neither of us said anything for several seconds. I started to walk away.

“You feel like sitting up here with me?” she said. “Come on up. There’s room.”

“Yeah?”

She said she had a spot all warmed up for me.

I climbed the tower and squeezed in next to her. Saw the book in her lap. She’s always been a big reader—even back then she was.

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to read in the dark?” I said.

“I wasn’t. I was reading by the moonlight.”

“Same difference. What’s so good that you’re wrecking your eyesight over it?”

“Richard Brautigan,” she said, handing me the paperback. “I don’t really get it, but I can’t stop reading it,” she said. “It’s mysterious. . . . It intrigues me.”

I opened it up and squinted. Made out the first paragraph. Read it aloud. “
In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I’ll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.
”

“Look at his picture,” she said. “He has his picture on all his book covers.”

I closed the book, held it up to the moon. “Looks like Mark Twain on acid,” I said. She laughed. Passed her hand through my curly hair, messed it up a little. Am I remembering it right? Was
that
all it took? I know this much: that I fell in love with her right there. Before I even jumped down from that lifeguard tower.

She was easy to talk to—that was the thing. And pretty. And smart. Funny, too. She told me she was twenty-one, a senior at Boston College majoring in early childhood education. Besides waitressing, she worked mornings at a Head Start program. “My father wanted me to work for him again this summer,” she said. “In the bookkeeping department with my uncle Costas. He owns a car dealership. But I’d done that for three summers in a row. I was looking for a little change. And some independence, I guess. Can you believe I actually
wanted
to go through the interview process? Fill out applications to see if anyone besides my family would hire me? Does that make sense?”

“More sense than the fact that your father owns a dealership and you’re riding around in a car that won’t start,” I said.

“Oh, God, Daddy would die if he knew I was out here stranded. He means well, but he’s just so overprotective. What’s your name?”

“
My
name? Dominick.”

“Dominick,” she repeated. “Italian, right?”

“Yup. Well, half.”

“What’s the other half?”

The whack of the funny bone. The unanswerable question. “Oh, little of this, little of that,” I said. “How about you?”

“Greek,” she said. “Both sides. My father’s Greek-American and my mother’s an immigrant. By the way, my name is Dessa.”

“Dessa what?”

“Constantine.”

“Constantine? As in ‘Come see the Dodge boys at Constantine Motors’?” I started singing the radio jingle I’d heard a million times from Ralph Drinkwater’s radio.

She laughed. Swatted me one. “I’ll have to tell my father when he gets back that those ads are starting to pay off.”

“I haven’t bought a car yet, have I?” I said. “Where’s he at?”

“What?”

“Your father. You just said, ‘when he gets back.’”

“Oh. He’s in Greece. He and my mother and my little sister. They go back every year to visit relatives. This is the first year I haven’t gone. Have you ever been?”

Yeah, sure, I thought to myself. The jet-setting Birdseys. “Can’t say that I have.”

“Oh,
go
sometime if you get the chance. The Aegean’s so incredible. The sense of history, the sun—the light there doesn’t look anything like it does around here. And the water! You wouldn’t believe the color of the water.”

We sat there for a minute or so, watching the ocean, saying nothing. Ordinarily, with a girl, I would have panicked at that amount of dead airtime. But with Dessa, the silence felt comfortable.

“How old’s your little sister?” I said.

“Athena? Yuck. She’s seventeen.”

“Athena? As in, the goddess of wisdom?”

She laughed. “More like the goddess of obnoxious behavior. She hates the name. We’re supposed to call her Angie. She’s such a brat! My parents let her get away with murder.”

I told her I had a twin brother.

“You do? Identical or fraternal?”

“Identical.”

“Oh, wow,” she said. “Is that cool? Having a twin?”

I gave her a short snort. “
No.
”

“No? Why not?”

For some reason, I started telling her about our first year at UConn—Thomas keeping himself cooped up in our room, taking his frustration out on our typewriter.

She just listened. Just let me keep talking, which I couldn’t quite believe I was doing so much of.

“I guess it
would
be hard, having someone
that
close to you,” she said. “Especially if he’s so dependent. You must never feel like you have any breathing room.”

I couldn’t believe someone had actually heard me. That someone, on some level, understood. I reached over and kissed her. She kissed me back. “You taste nice,” she said. “Kind of salty.”

Half a dozen kisses later, I was wired up and hungry for her—had gone from zero to sixty in about a minute. “Hey, hold it, cowboy,” she said. She pulled my hands off of her and jumped down from the tower. Looked up at the moon. “It’s strange, isn’t it?” she said. “To think there are actually a couple of earthlings up there, right now, walking around? The men on the moon. It’s surreal, isn’t it?”

She walked slowly to the water’s edge. Waded in.

I am here and you are distant,
I thought, unsure if I meant Dessa, or my brother, or the astronauts up there on the moon. Unsure of what I meant.

“Hey, Dominick, come here!” she called. “
Look!
”

When I reached her, she took my hand. She was staring into the water. “God, I haven’t seen this since I was a kid,” she said.

“Seen what?”

“Phosphorescence. In the water. Right there!”

“Right where?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“Those little twinkles of light along the surface of the water. You have to be quick. They only last about a second.
Look!
There’s another one! See it?”

I saw ocean. Sand. Our feet in the water.

“My sister and I used to call it pixie dust. There’s another one!”

I kept thinking she was pulling my leg. Kept missing it. Then, son of a bitch, there it was. Phosphorescence.

Pixie dust.

Her car started on the first try.

Later on, I rode home half-listening to Leo complain about what cock-teases redheads were. “It’s like a club,” he said. “An unwritten law.” We stopped at the Oh Boy Diner. Drank coffee, ate eggs. I didn’t mention anything about Dessa—didn’t say a thing. I didn’t want to hear any of Leo’s theories about waitresses, or girls with braids, or rich guys’ daughters. On the way back to the car, I reached into my jeans pockets and fingered the Dial-Tone Lounge matchbooks. I’d had Dessa write her number on the inside covers of two of them, not just one. The second was for security, in case I lost the first. I wasn’t taking any chances.

It was after two by the time I got home. My brother and my mother had both gone to bed; Ray lay stretched out on the couch, snoring, alone with his big night in history. The TV was still on, Walter Cronkite keeping watch at mission control. His skin glowed infrared. He babbled on and on about the moon.