She had never explained to Janet or Maddy or anyone that her preoccupations, what she wanted to write about, well, this girl from her hometown, Lisa Han, had always pointed the way.
“My advice?” said Janet, rapping her knuckles on the table in the coffee shop, clearly buzzing from her daily overload of caffeine. “E-mail her today. Now. The hot ex, I mean, not the mom. The longer you haven’t spoken to her, the more anodyne and undramatic the e-mail. Just a cheery ‘Hey, howzit going, whatcha up to?’ Trust me, it’ll suck the power right out of her.”
“That,” Stacey said, smiling, “seems an unlikely move on my part.”
“We are all travelers, Stacey. The only difference is how much baggage we choose to burden ourselves with.”
“Your aphorisms are always totally useless.”
Janet blasted crazy air through her lips and flapped a hand like a bird caught in a tornado.
“Not only that, but I’ve got three ex-husbands who’d call bullshit on that one. I’m nothing but baggage.”
Though it lay several miles to the west, she felt the high school as she passed by. Without even laying eyes on that place, she could feel it like an ache. Some institutional slab of crap architecture with that sixties-era authoritarian aura to its brick Lego look. She marveled at the power the American high school experience holds on the imagination. She’d always noticed how people tended to view their high school days as foundational even if they didn’t realize it. Get them talking about those years, and they suddenly had all these stories of dread and wonder you could wrap whole novels around.
She followed Zanesville Road to the center of town and was surprised to see what looked like a gleaming, brand-new Walmart bursting like a diamond from coal out of a remote area where before there was nothing but farmland. There had certainly already been a Walmart in New Canaan when she’d lived there, but this new one made the Walmart of her youth look like a sickly mom-and-pop. Even at this relatively late hour the parking lot, only appropriately measured in football fields, held hundreds of cars, and people strolled shopping carts in and out of multiple sliding glass door entrances. It took about three hours to get from Ann Arbor to New Canaan with maybe another hour to reach her parents’ new home in Columbus, and along the way she’d have a choice of how many of these panoptic consumer centers? A dozen? A hundred?
The CD in the stereo, Extraordinary Machine, a college love, began skipping. The passenger seat was a stew of candy wrappers, empty soda bottles, her purse, and the crisp bleach-white envelope. She scraped through the mess until she found Slow River and switched out Fiona for her high school boyfriend’s raspy tenor.
Halfway into the opening song, she pulled into one of the slanted spots in the town square. The mechanical scratch of shutting off the ignition, followed by the thudding silence as the stereo went dead, filled her stomach with the queasiness of a hangover. When Bethany first e-mailed her a few months earlier, she’d read with fury, triumph, pity, more fury. It was all pretty confused. She told Lisa’s mother she had nothing to say to her, but the woman kept writing. All she wanted was to meet, she said. All she wanted was to talk, she claimed. Just a half hour of Stacey’s time. And maybe it was curiosity that led Stacey to agree. She told Bethany she could stop in New Canaan on the way to see her parents.
Her boots—kick-ass, high, and black, with a zipper that nearly reached the knee pit, a ten-buck Salvation Army find—clopped over the street like a horse with two amputations. The square was surprisingly quiet, a few cars hesitating at the yield signs, distant stoplights winking through their programs. A small black purse on a spaghetti strap slung diagonally across her chest bucked rhythmically against her hip. An old man sat on a bench, one arm draped around a pink shopping bag that said BIG SALE, and she felt his eyes on her as she passed. Walking through the heart of town, she wasn’t sure what to expect. She’d let New Canaan take up such gargantuan psychic space that sometimes she forgot it was just a place, and life carried on here as it did anywhere else.
Vicky’s All-Night Diner had been the favored greasy spoon in high school, the place to be after dances. It was blue-neon signage, strange artifacts of Americana affixed to the walls, and your choice of two rows of booths or a bar with stools made of that red sparkly plastic material. The game where you pump in quarters and try to grab a stuffed animal with an impotent mechanical claw still stood in the corner. One night after a basketball game, Ben Harrington tried for half an hour to win her a prize. She recalled him spending nearly eight dollars in quarters going after a pink elephant while the group gathered around the plexiglass cried out each time the toy slipped through the claw’s grasp. When a boy makes up his mind about you there is no challenge too trivial for him to peacock.
A man in a red trucker’s hat and a green plaid shirt sat on a stool, a large expanse of fleshy white lower back and butt crack exposed to the harsh diner lights. An elderly couple occupied a booth near the door, eating in silence, silverware tinkling against a bowl of soup and a salad. A waitress pecked at the cash register. Another stalked back into the kitchen, her yellow sock-hop skirt bouncing behind a generous rear. A chintzy, prototypical hometown diner, decorated with the spare parts of someone’s cleaned-out grandfather’s house after he’s passed. Skis affixed to a wall here, a picture of Marilyn Monroe there, a sign in block letters that read ORANGE 10 CENTS hanging above a World War I–era gas mask. Americana without purpose. Detritus for the critic to sift through and puzzle over the symbolism. There was a young man at the counter, no meal before him, fidgeting with a credit card. He saw Stacey and fixed his eyes the way men do.
She decided to kill time at the game Ben Harrington had tried and failed at so many times for her sake. Better that than waiting while this leering, rude motherfucker drilled eyes at her.
The first haunting piano notes of Slow River’s opening track played on repeat in her head. Between this and Vicky’s claw, Ben’s presence felt nearly material. His sweet grin, his compassionate laugh. In many ways Ben, the only guy she’d ever slept with, had also inadvertently built the road to Lisa.
Until they finally started hitting puberty, she’d been taller than nearly every boy in her class, her father’s hearty Norwegian stock a total liability as an adolescent. She had a deep-seeded understanding of her awkwardness, how long her femur was inside the flesh, how razor sharp her elbows must have looked. It took her the first two years of high school to realize she’d become pretty. She’d carried her gangly, akimbo frame her entire life. Built like a collection of kindling, slim of hip and breast and ass, her figure filled out, and developing even the most passable bosom went a long way with teenage boys. That’s how teenagedness works: everyone lives in a bubble of their own terrifying insecurities oblivious to the possibility that so does everyone else.
It was through volleyball that she fell in with Lisa and her friend of the assonantly awkward name Kaylyn Lynn, who was a grade older. Lisa and Kaylyn dated the crown jewels of the class of ’03, Bill Ashcraft (dark-complected, arrogant, black eyebrows as sharp and dangerous as steak knives) and Rick Brinklan (a football star, he looked like Stacey’s Jeep with fair farm-boy skin stretched around the frame), respectively. Their best friend, Ben Harrington, played on the basketball team with Bill, and they began hanging out by default and dating soon after. She well understood that by any measure Ben was truly gorgeous, a slender but chiseled teenager with a mop of gold hair, that lucky Caucasian skin that goes mocha in the summer, and a grill of teeth so white you had to make sure light didn’t reflect off them and hit you in the eye. Until they started dating the summer before her sophomore year, Stacey had been convinced she wouldn’t have sex before she got married. Sex ed in eighth grade was having couples visit from the high school to talk about what a gift it was to save themselves for marriage. Ninth-grade health class featured a woman who spoke of how deeply she regretted her abortion and the premarital sex that led to it. This assumption—one Stacey never questioned—proved ill preparation for when the smoldering Kurt Cobain equivalent of New Canaan High School suddenly took an interest in her, when he proved surprisingly sweet, and when he touched her in ways she’d not been touched before, around the ear and neck, in that way that tickled and chilled and warmed and made every last hair follicle stand at attention.