“All the chicks look like that.” He overdid it on the slang, but that’s hard to tell somebody. He was always a degree or two off, close but no cigar. “Pet looks practically natural compared to the rest of them.” How could he eat so much? We were at the same party last night only he’d been twice as wasted. But, of course, his body was much bigger and absorbed all those poisons. Besides, if he were feeling all that great, he’d have been out surfing at dawn. Or maybe there weren’t any waves.
“What’s up at the beach?” I asked, giving him more of my eggs.
He turned his handsome, plump face toward me. Like his brother, Kirk, Bread had Aunt Edith’s swarthy skin, tanned to an elegant strong tea color, and heavy straight eyebrows that gave him an honest, Gregory Peck look. His bleached hair was combed forward into that amazing cascade I mentioned, a coif possible only through genetic good fortune, great patience, and the wonders of technology. “Glassy as get-all.” So were his eyes, actually. He must have popped one before breakfast.
“Pet, you aren’t going to school until you eat something.” Raisin toast descended before me.
I nibbled and chewed slowly, thinking about prana instead of barfing.
Darlene honked and Bread and I leaped up as if cattle-prodded.
“Have a nice day,” Aunt Edith called after us. “Brad, honey, tuck your shirt tails in!”
Darlene was smoking a cigarette in her red Mustang convertible, short platinum hair gleaming in the sun. “You wore that dress Monday,” she said as I climbed into the backseat. Even though she was my friend, I let Bread have the front so he could stretch out a little.
I put on my sunglasses and lit a cigarette.
Darlene burned rubber.
Bread turned up the radio.
We screeched around the familiar streets of Mission Beach, all the little houses nestled as close together as possible so that as many people as possible could live there. Our place was on the bay side of the skinny peninsula and the bay stretched out, flat and gray. The ocean side was prettier—I preferred the sight and sound of the waves—but more popular with the tourists, so Aunt Edith opted for relative quiet.
“Big party tonight,” Darlene shouted over the music.
One good tsunami and the entire place would be wiped out. One mediocre tsunami, for that matter.
“Wanna go?”
“Sure!” I yelled back. After all, it was practically the weekend, and it was so depressing around the house at night. Aunt Edith watched television all evening while she knitted, and if Kirk and Moni dropped by, it was even worse.
“Count me out,” said Bread. “Surf’s supposed to be up tomorrow.”
Darlene sighed. She never counted him in.
Everybody was hanging out in the parking lot, as per usual. The tough guys smoked by their choppers and the more respectable types lurked in the passageway to the main building. The really respectable ones, of course, were already in front of their homerooms.
“See ya.” Bread hopped out. He always ditched us before we parked the car so he could have that extra minute jawing with his surfing buddies. They huddled to one side of the choppers, peroxided shocks of hair glinting in the sunlight.
I climbed over to the front seat and Darlene and I sat, as we liked to when there was time, at the far end of the lot, listening to the radio and smoking. “This Magic Moment” was on, a song that depressed us because of that guy Scott Darlene’d been so wild about. She’d slept with him a bunch of times and everything and then he up and joined the navy. He was in Vietnam, if you can believe that. She sent him peanut butter fudge once, but I don’t think she was a real whiz at letters.
“You got a date this weekend?” Her pale lavender eyes were rendered eerie by her purple glasses.
“Nope.” Three calls for last Saturday, and this week a big goose egg. “But it’s only Thursday.”
We both sighed. Life was so depressing.
“Maybe Friday—damn!”
Jefferson Airplane’s “I Saw You Coming Back to Me” came on the radio.
“I can switch stations.” Darlene knew how the song affected me, far beyond “This Magic Moment.”
I felt that black melancholy drop over me like a paper bag. My heart ached, my stomach knotted up, and my hands went weird. “No! Leave it on.”
My depressions were sort of famous, but I hadn’t realized that I’d been hovering so close to one, like a hole you fell into. The song brought it all out, though, the whole thing about time passing and somebody’s gone and you can’t go back and all that jazz. Where are the snows of yesteryear? and so on.
The first bell rang and people began to get out of their cars as if they had a real place to go to and that, their destination, meant something.
Inky black trouble, like something from another world come to swallow you up.
“Hey!” Darlene tapped me gently on the wrist.
“You go on,” I said. “I’ll be in in a minute.”
“A bad day to ditch,” she opined, climbing out. “That trig test?”
I produced my best metaphysical shrug.
“Okay for you,” she continued through the window. “You can make it up. But if I don’t have Danny to cheat off of, I might as well start pumping gas tomorrow.”
The second bell rang and Darlene shot me a sympathetic look and hustled off. Then that weird silence, peculiar to the space surrounding a school in session, filled the parking lot. I turned off the radio. Homeroom. Then the first-period bell rang and five minutes of cacophony ensued. When the late bell rang, I accepted the fact that makeup or no, no way was I going inside.
At least I wasn’t letting a new outfit go to waste.
But what to do? The day spread out before me like a new carpet you were afraid to walk on. Scratch going home, where Aunt Edith and her friends were no doubt scarfing down a bunch of coffee cake and gossip. The movies? The mall? The beach? Nothing appealed to me. I felt like the guy in one of those existential novels, I can’t remember which one, who’s repelled by the doorknob. He looks at the doorknob and goes: Blaugh! How can I bear to touch this and what, besides, is the point in going through the door?
I lit another cigarette, slid over to the driver’s seat, and tooled out of the parking lot.
I drove north, along the coast. The immaculate community of La Jolla sped by like an oversized Barbie’s Dream Village. All that artful bougainvillea and red Spanish tile. Next was Del Mar, with the slate-blue sea on one side and the race track on the other. It had been a long time since I’d been up this way—the track was where they held the county fair, and that was where June and I had made Stan spend twenty dollars in quarters, procuring for us Cherie and Mimi, the Original Poodles. They now resided in cardboard box tombs, collars and special toys around them, as if they were Egyptians and needed treats for the Other World.
Past Del Mar was this wonderful white building with a dome painted gold, like a huge gilded onion. There were gardens around it, red begonias and yellow marigolds and blue lobelia and sweet white alyssum. Maybe Paradise looked like that.
North of here, I wondered where there was to go. It crossed my mind to go to Vista and check out where the house had been.
After all, I was getting closer and closer. Once through Cardiff-by-the-Sea, where our beach house had been and where June used to make me glue shells to pieces of cardboard and give them names, all that was left before Oceanside—and Vista was only seven miles inland from there—was a short drive through Leucadia.
This morning it was beautiful! The sea was bright blue to my left with choppy whitecaps, and the hills rolling upward to my right were covered with wild mustard. The breeze felt so good that I almost didn’t mind that my hair was probably ruined for life. Better have it ruined, though, than wear one of those nerdy little scarves.