Double Take (11 page)

1975

By the time I got home from Lawrence's my father's car was gone, so I pulled my mother's ancient, rattling Volvo into the driveway and let myself into the house. The dog was sleeping in a chair, not moving. I checked to see if he was still breathing. He was.

The house was silent and my footsteps were loud. I went into the bathroom and found some aspirin, then headed into the kitchen, made a cup of decent coffee, and carried it up to my room. I sat on my bed and spilled coffee all over my pillow. I turned the wet pillow over, threw it on top of a dry pillow, and leaned back against them. As I looked up, I found the mural staring back at me. I decided I'd had enough of the fucking mural and was going to buy some paint this very afternoon and obliterate it. There was too much in it I didn't want to see, images that kept coming back to me after all my conversations with Joey. I had the day off, so painting could be my project. I knew my mother would be delighted. She hated the sixties, which she saw as an orgy of self-indulgent, petit-bourgeois personalism, and she would be happy to cover up any psychedelic reminders of the period.

I set my mug on my wicker bedside table. My mother had bought it in a junk shop, and the wicker was unraveling. I scrunched down in bed and wrapped myself in blankets, but I still felt cold; the windows were closed, but the curtains were rustling slightly. I gazed at the faces in the mural, trying to decide what color paint to buy.

Then I closed my eyes and found myself on the corner with Bando. He was wearing his rainbow shirt, the one his mother had tie-dyed for him.

“You can paint over me if you like, Rachel, but you know I'll still be under there,” he said, regarding me with an amused expression that sent waves of pain and loss through me.

“I don't want to forget you,” I said. “But I can't handle it. It hurts too much.”

“Don't be afraid,” he said. “You're braver than you think.”

“No, I'm not,” I said. “I'm not brave at all. I'm scared shitless, and I don't even know why.”

When I woke up, it was dark out, and I could hear my parents downstairs. I could smell the dinner my mother was cooking while my father sat there, I knew, drinking a dry martini. It was too late to go to the hardware store to buy paint.

1975

In the middle of the night, I would wake up and hear conversations in my head between Joey and me. “You never liked me, did you?” Joey had said at Bert's.

“Of course I did. I liked you just fine.”

“No you didn't. You were always giving me these looks like you thought I was an asshole.”

“Did I?”

“It's okay. I
was
an asshole.”

“No you weren't. You were just—”

“What?”

“Sullen.”

“Are you saying you thought I was cool?”

“I'm saying
you
thought you were.”

“Girl, that was cold.”

“You were sooooooo fuuuuucking cooooooooool.”

As I fell back to sleep, I heard him laughing.

1970

Rat was abrupt when he came into Casa. Cookie hated the way he'd sit down and wait for her to bring him a cup of coffee without even asking for it, without saying thanks. Like he was above thanking. She didn't like the way he looked like a classic hoodlum, like someone from
West Side Story
. She expected him to dance into Casa snapping his fingers and singing “When You're A Jet.” He was always in a hurry, bursting through the front door and stomping through the room, then swinging into a chair like a corporate executive late for a business meeting.

One day he was at a corner table in a huddle with two of the other dealers, Fletcher and Brunette, when Pam came in. When he saw her, Rat rushed over and threw his arms around her as if he was drowning and she could save him. It wasn't until later Cookie realized it was the other way around. When he stepped away and led her by the hand to another table (at times he appeared to occupy every table in the room), Cookie saw his face and it fascinated her. He looked suddenly vulnerable, his veneer melted away, his emotions starkly revealed. The visible power of his feelings was frightening, yet there was something almost beautiful about his face for that instant, and Cookie found herself envying Pam for her ability to make someone feel so much. She never really disliked him after that.

One person she truly didn't like was Brunette, and she was almost glad when he got busted, even though his closest friend, Fletcher, told her Brunette had been set up by a police informant, but no one knew who it was. New people were always showing up on
57th Street—runaway rich hippies from the suburbs, tough guys from the slums, farm kids from downstate, greasers looking for a party, bikers on their way somewhere else. According to Fletcher, who talked to her sometimes while he was cooking at Casa Sanchez, of all the people who hung out on 57th Street (Cookie estimated over a hundred), at least one of them was keeping the police abreast of local transactions.

Figuring out who the narc was became a hobby, like a parlor game. Sebastian was always coming up with suspects and then finding out so-and-so had known them for years and they were okay. For a while he kept saying it was Fletcher, but finally Cookie told him that Fletcher was wanted by the police in Canada. Then he thought it was Rebel, a guy from Tennessee who vanished one day as suddenly as he'd arrived. A few nights after his disappearance, the police surrounded Cookie's parents' house because she'd been seen talking to him on the corner. While Rebel's disappearance had deepened Sebastian's suspicions about him, the fact that the police were obviously looking for him allayed them. Being a fugitive was a character reference.

“I think it's that Rat guy,” Sebastian said one day as they stood on 57th Street. “He has shifty eyes.”

“Obviously astigmatism,” Bando said. “You'll be saying it's me next.”

“It can't be Rat,” Cookie said. “He's a dealer.”

“Really?” Sebastian seemed shocked.

“Of course,” Bando said.

“I thought everyone knew,” she said, feeling guilty for her lack of discretion.

“Of course they know,” Bando said. “Everyone but Sebastian. He only knows who the narcs are.”

“Go on, Bandolini, make fun of me.”

“Shifty eyes. Really. You should make a citizen's arrest.”

“Did you really know Rat was a dealer?” she asked Bando.

“Of course.”

She didn't believe him.

Cookie's parents were not happy when the police staked out their house and the search lights and radios woke them. It was late and all the neighbors seemed to be asleep, but Cookie's father was afraid they had seen, though her mother didn't care what the neighbors thought. When the police came to the door and asked if Cookie knew someone named Samuel Jones, Cookie had no idea who they were talking about until they showed her a picture of Rebel.

“What did he do?” she asked one of the cops.

“Armed robbery,” he said.

“That's impossible,” she said. “He's a sweetheart.”

“You actually know this person?” demanded her father, who had overheard.

“I've waited on him at Casa.”

“What kind of people are you hanging around with?” her father had yelled as he stood in his bathrobe and plaid pajamas watching cops scamper through his bushes searching for Rebel, then pile back into their cars and speed away. “What the hell is the matter with you? Has the world gone mad?”

“Go to bed, Charles,” her mother said. “I'm sure Rachel knows what she's doing. We trust her.”

“Yeah, we trust her, we trust her,” muttered her father, going back to bed.

“Did you really know this Samuel person?” her mother asked when her father had gone.

“No, Mom, of course not,” she said.

Cookie didn't like the police. Some were nice enough, like the juvenile officers in gray suits who came into Casa and scrutinized everyone to see if they were runaways. Of course, the first thing a runaway learned was how to recognize an unmarked police car: an olive green sedan parked at an expired meter. The juvy officers would pretend to be your pal and ask you about your life and your friends as if they were really concerned, as if anyone on 57th Street was dumb enough to be tricked into ratting people out that way. But at least they were pleasant; the majority of cops were not. Huge and unsmiling, they watched everyone through slitty eyes like the slots in a tank, enormous billy clubs hanging from their belts, as Cookie poured them free coffee. War had been declared at the Democratic Convention in 1968, and the cops were using drugs as a pretext for subjugating the populace—at least that was what Bando said.

Cookie wasn't sure why she didn't like Brunette. He seemed nice enough, and she had once kissed him at a party when she was drunk and he was high on downers. He had a kind of charm Bando referred to as unctuousness, and he was fairly good-looking, about six feet tall, with long, dark, wavy hair, dark brown eyes, and heavy eyebrows that joined together above his nose. Cookie always thought he looked like a pirate—he even had a pet parrot until it flew away and settled in Jackson Park—and in general, she liked pirates. But there was something unnerving about him and his creepy parrot. His car was an old hearse, and ever since the day Clay got shot Cookie had been scared of him. One
night not long after Clay's death, she'd been sitting in the park with Bando, drinking pink Chablis out of a brown paper bag, when Brunette staggered by. When he saw Cookie and Bando, he began to laugh crazily and point at them. They ignored him until he went away, and the next day Cookie saw him at Casa in a corner, passed out with his head on the table.

1975

I was almost glad to go to work. Although Nicky hissing in my ear every second drove me nuts, at least everything was clear to me there—I had to pour coffee, serve food, refill the ketchups, kiss the cook's ass so he wouldn't screw up my orders, listen to people's stories, and that was basically it. There was nothing complicated about it. Except for the fact that I was avoiding Lawrence the cheeseburger guy—who had tried unsuccessfully to phone me a few times—it was simple. When I waited on people, I became a waitress named Rachel who was always perky and helpful. Being me was beginning to seem self-indulgent and petit-bourgeois, as my mother might have put it, so it was great to be someone else, someone who had no emotions except for cheeriness. Work was a relief because it was nothing personal.

It was important to be upbeat at Diana's, especially when I worked the counter. There were so many people with
real
problems, not just what my mother referred to as “existential angst” in a withering voice, and it was my job to offer them a little haven, an oasis of joy. I was good at this because it was what my mother had taught me to do, always singing that song to me about putting on a happy face. It made me feel better to spread joy throughout the land, at least in the short term, though sometimes I knew I was hiding upsetting things from myself the way I had thrown Michael's letters under the bed, as if that would write him out of my life story.

Only Oscar, my Jell-O-loving customer, seemed to see through me. One day as I was wiping spilled coffee from the white Formica, he sat at the counter, stowing his cane on the stool beside him, and leaned forward. “What's wrong, honey?”

“What do you mean? Nothing's wrong.”

“You got circles under your eyes.”

“I'm not sleeping too well.”

“And you've lost weight. Are you eating right?”

“Sure. Of course.”

“I understand, you don't want to talk about it. Are your parents all right?”

“They're fine.”

“Is it the job?”

“No. Really, it's all good. Life is great.”

“Life's hard, honey, I know that. A lot of days I don't even feel like getting out of bed.”

I was waiting for him to say something about how we just had to do it anyway, even if we didn't feel like it, but he didn't.

“I think if I'd known how hard life would be, I'd have decided to try something else.” He whinnied and patted me on the hand. “What flavor you got today?”

“Orange.”

“Orange is just what I want.”

I stood and watched him as he ate.

“Honey, let me buy you a grilled cheese sandwich.”

“No, thanks, really. I'm not hungry.”

“A person needs to eat.”

“I do eat. It's just that I—” I was about to mention that I threw up all the time, but caught myself. I didn't think that was suitable counter conversation. “I'm not hungry.”

“You need to keep your strength up.”

“Really,” I said, “I'm fine.”

1970

Bando wasn't too thrilled when Rachel and Sebastian became friends. Sebastian had always seemed to dislike Rachel, even though Bando had protested that it wasn't Rachel's fault he was secretly in love with her and that her behavior had been above reproach. Still, Sebastian seemed to feel protective animosity toward her, at least at first. But lately Bando had seen them through the window of Casa Sanchez, having coffee together at the employees' table and laughing. Sebastian had admitted to Bando that he thought Rachel was nice. “Nice?” Bando had said. “Can't you do any better than that?” Sebastian thought for a minute, then said, “Real nice.”

Recently, Bando had been looking in the mirror while shaving (truthfully, there wasn't much to shave), admiring his luxuriant auburn hair, which he was quite vain about, and found himself wondering, “Why aren't I tall and handsome like Sebastian?” He was immediately aghast at himself. Why on earth would he wish to resemble Sebastian, a scrawny elf of a boy? Then he realized that in the past year or so—he wasn't even sure how long it had been—the elf had transmuted into someone who was tall and strong and beginning to resemble a character from Greek mythology, Apollo maybe, or Adonis. Bando recognized this feeling as jealousy, but as he chastised himself for it, he couldn't stop himself from imagining Sebastian and Rachel sitting together in Casa, Rachel throwing back her head to laugh at something Sebastian had said, while Bando stood outside the window, exiled, and he felt his stomach lurch at the sight of her laugh,
the gleam of her teeth, the sudden shock of her smile. It was November and already dark out so they couldn't see him outside the window, all alone.

At first Cookie thought Sebastian was just an egghead, like all those guys at Martin Academy, but this past year he'd grown quite good-looking, and she was always trying to fix him up with her friend Emily, who was totally not interested. Lately he had been coming into Casa, hanging out drinking coffee and talking with her. She suspected he was doing it to annoy Bando, but after a while it was clear they were friends. He was the only person she knew besides Bando who talked about things like whether trees falling alone in the forest made any sound. (He said they lay on the ground singing “Don't Get Around Much Any More.”) These sorts of topics made her parents nervous. When she was little she had asked her father if there was such thing as God. He had told her to go ask her mother, though he knew perfectly well her mother wasn't even home. It became apparent as she got older that her parents had completely opposing views on most subjects and could only negotiate a fragile peace by refusing to discuss any issues on which they might disagree, with the exception of politics, about which they argued incessantly. When she asked Sebastian what he thought about the concept of God, he said he thought God was actually dead but had a son named Biff who was running things now.

Cookie thought of herself, Sebastian, and Bando as members of a secret fraternity. She had mentioned this once to Bando and said she thought that although he often pretended not to be, Sebastian was really smart. Bando had replied that while Sebastian was bright, he was not now, nor had he ever been, a genius. “He'll probably go to college,” he said. “Just like you, Cookie.”

She swore she could hear him gnashing his teeth.