Elegies for the Brokenhearted (7 page)

“Girls,” said my mother, consulting us in the rearview, “tell him.”

“You wear too many rings,” said Malinda, without looking up from her magazine. She was scrutinizing an advertisement whose heading read:
SKIN AGING BEGINS IN THE LATE TEENS
!

“And your necklace,” she said, referring to the slender gold leg that dangled from Bud's chain, “looks like a nose-picker.”

“Jesus!” he said, and blew air out the side of his mouth. “Now you ruined my necklace! Now I can't look at it the same! Jesus!”

Bud was an ass-slapping type of man who tried to turn every argument into a joke—Hey, baby, you on your period or what?—and so when the nuclear power plant, situated just a few miles from the beach, came into view, he said, “Look out, she's gonna blow!” Not knowing our family, Bud didn't realize that my mother had always subscribed to the theory that one should, when going to the beach, get past the power plant without thinking too much about it. One should hold one's breath to the best of one's ability while passing it and then put it out of one's mind while enjoying oneself for the weekend. And yet for me there was something sickly fascinating about the plant, its fat, pale dome like a ball of risen dough, the activity going on within it—the bombardment and splitting of atoms, the release of neutrons—so unnatural it created within me both a profound nausea and an inability to look away. It was especially hard to look away now, considering what had happened only recently in Chernobyl, considering all the images I'd seen of its aftermath, the doomed city of Pripyat, its tall, slender tenements photographed from such a great height they looked like dominoes, upright but with their eventual falling so certain it made their standing seem strange, sad, like the hopes of foolish people.

“Boom!” Bud said, and turned to my mother expecting some display of amusement. But she only closed her eyes and said, “Jesus Christ.”

When we arrived at the motel Malinda and I scrambled off, leaving Bud and my mother to their fate, which most likely involved, as Malinda put it, their getting drunk and fighting and then fucking each other's brains out. We spent the whole day walking the beach. Malinda was seventeen, and if she could be said to be interested in anything that year it was the study of other people, what they wore and ate and listened to, how they talked and moved. The beach was so packed there was hardly room to set down a blanket, people were lying flat, the women on their stomachs with their bikini tops untied, couples asleep next to each other, families going through their routines, the elder women sitting under umbrellas, mothers rubbing sunscreen onto the kids, distributing sandwiches and drinks from coolers, ex-army grandfathers, their arms tattooed with eagles and anchors and flags, swinging their grandsons in the surf, couples strolling with their arms around each other. One man, shirtless, kept walking up and down the beach with a boa constrictor wrapped around his torso, smiling every time someone jumped at the sight of him. Over the water a single-engine plane circled back and forth, trailing behind it a streamer on which was printed an advertisement for a local psychic, Mademoiselle Rousseau, full life reading, guaranteed accurate, $19.99. I thought of going. I had a pocketful of money I'd been saving for some unknown purpose—I imagined any number of emergencies in which I'd need to hop a bus or rent a room, bail someone out of jail, bribe an official—and it didn't seem unreasonable to part with a few dollars in exchange for a prediction of that emergency, when it would come and what its nature might be. For months I'd been stealing fives and tens from my mother's wallet—very discreetly, I thought—and I had saved almost two hundred dollars.

Malinda kept sweeping across the beach this way and that, like a retiree with a metal detector, though what she was searching for I couldn't say. She hardly spoke to me. If she said anything at all it was only to register an opinion of a bathing suit, a haircut, a laugh, a walk. She passed judgment in the swift, biting manner common to all beautiful people. For it was true that Malinda had recently become very beautiful. She was another version of my mother, dark-haired and blue-eyed, another Elizabeth Taylor. All day I had seen men looking at her, running their eyes up and down the length of her. She wore a yellow bikini with a pair of cutoff jeans over the bottoms. She had oiled her skin with tanning lotion, and she glistened. Men were so blatant in their staring it was like a scene from a nature documentary, the human animal's rituals of attraction and mating, the instinct to perpetuate life on bald, sickening display.

 

I
t wasn't until late in the day that Malinda found what she was looking for. The beach had emptied out and everyone was going up and down the boardwalk, which was so crowded that Malinda and I were often jostled apart. It was as if a great sale were going on and we were all in competition with one another to save money on a valuable item. Along the boardwalk the air smelled of popcorn and fried dough and hot dogs, and underneath all of that something else—an ancient, dark smell, such as one encounters in a tomb. “I don't like it here,” I called to Malinda, for the noise was so loud that we had to shout.

Malinda said, “You don't like it anywhere.”

“But this,” I said, “is worse. I really don't like this.”

“So go back to the beach then,” she called over her shoulder. “I'm sick of you following me around anyways.” She walked on without bothering to check if I was still behind her. But a moment later, when she finally saw what she'd been looking for, she reached back for my hand with every confidence that it would be there. “Look,” she said, stopping short and pulling me toward her. “Look at those guys.”

Walking toward us were three skinny men with long, ravaged hair. They wore black satin jackets and tight black jeans. Under their jackets they were shirtless and you could see their pale, skinny chests, their light pink nipples. The one in the middle wasn't bad-looking—he had dark hair and black eyes, a square jaw—and he wore an expression of boredom. But the others, who might have been twins, looked like greyhounds. Their eyes were brown and wet and searching. They had about them the meanness and desperation of pound dogs.

Malinda watched them coming and then turned to watch them go. Embroidered in red across the backs of their jackets was the name of an English band whose sole hit had topped the charts two years prior. “Hey!” she said, and slapped me like she always did when she was excited. “I knew it. They're in that band. I saw signs for them. They're playing here.” The main attraction of the boardwalk was a small concert hall that tended to attract groups who had risen briefly to fame, then fallen into obscurity. No one actually wanted to see the bands that played there, but then again it was something, people thought, to be able to sit up close to someone who had been famous once, someone who had been on television, it was better than nothing. All along the boardwalk people stopped short as the men walked past, then burst into excited chatter. Girls pressed their fingers to their mouths. I heard the name of the band again and again, and wondered what it would be like to walk through the world and leave a wake behind you, the sound of people speaking your name.

“We have to meet them,” Malinda said. We started walking toward the men, Malinda rising up on her tiptoes, keeping track of them. When they turned into a jewelry store Malinda positioned herself just outside its entrance, where there was a woman selling mood rings at a small table. Malinda examined the rings, slipped them on and off her fingers, and I stood behind her trying to remember the last time I had seen her so excited, the last time she had displayed an emotion besides contempt. Certainly it was before Bud, before my mother broke up with the married man and we moved out of the condo, which Malinda had loved more than anything else in her life. I watched the rings on Malinda's fingers, watched them swirl from blue to green to black, mesmerized.

Then, compelled by some instinct, I looked up, and that's when I saw you and Bill walking toward us. You hadn't noticed us yet, and in the few seconds before you saw us I sensed what would happen next. I sensed that Bill, who had long been in love with Malinda and who was always coming up with excuses to talk to her, offering her gum and cigarettes, who often pretended to need a light just so he could ask her for one, a tactic which eventually backfired (“Jesus Christ,” Malinda had said once, “I'm not like your personal fucking match supplier, you know”), would see her, and approach her, and she would brush him off with some swift cruelty. Which is exactly what happened. When Bill saw Malinda he cried out her name as though in ecstasy. “Malinda! Hey, Malinda!” he said. “Malinda, hey! Whatcha doing?” He was so excited to see her he actually punched her in the arm.

“What's it look like I'm doing?” she said.

“You looking at jewelry?”

“No,” she said, “bathing suits.”

“Oh,” Bill said. He was a nervous kid in the habit of shifting his weight back and forth between his legs, and he stood there fidgeting for a few seconds, trying to think of something to say. “There's a party somewhere,” he said. “I think we're gonna go.”

“Good,” said Malinda. “Don't let me keep you.”

“You wanna come?”

“With you?” she said. “No.”

And then you spoke up, angry, your black eyebrows slanted together:
Why do you have to be such a bitch?

“I don't know,” said Malinda, “why do you have to be such a retard?”

Fuck you,
you said, and walked off. Bill followed you. But behind your back he turned to us and gave Malinda a big smile, a sweeping wave. “Maybe we'll see ya later!” he said.

When the men emerged from the jewelry shop Malinda was poised there, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, rifling through her purse. Just at the right moment she turned to the men, as if looking for help from the first person who came along, and asked the man in the middle for a light.

The man said nothing, but he stopped and reached in his pocket and pulled out a book of matches. He looked Malinda up and down, lit the match and held it out. Malinda bent her head toward him. Then she tilted her head back so he could see the full length of her neck—men were always commenting on her long neck—and released a little cloud of smoke out the side of her mouth.

“What's your name?” he said.

“Marilyn.” This was a name, Malinda believed, that stirred within men certain deeply held longings. When she turned eighteen she planned to go to court to legally adopt it.

“That's a awfully grown-up name,” said the middleman.

She shrugged. “What's yours?”

“Flash.” And without looking at his friends he stated the names of the other two. “These are my brothers Matt and Mike.”

“Hi,” Malinda said. She didn't bother to look at Matt and Mike either. She and the middleman had their eyes locked on each other, and it was all routine from there. Flash bought Malinda an ice cream cone, Malinda walked up and down the boardwalk licking it, twirling her cone against her tongue—she couldn't just eat it like a normal person, it had to be some kind of display—and then, the ice cream gone, Flash offered Malinda a drink from a flask he produced from the inner pocket of his jacket; he put his arm around her, she rested her head against his shoulder; they drank more; he said something and she laughed. It all happened very quickly. When Flash led Malinda down the boardwalk steps, then down the street, then steered her into the entrance of a hotel, it wasn't even fully dark.

In the elevator up to the room, while Flash and his brothers were laughing about something, Malinda whispered to me, “He's the drummer!”

I thought of one of the band's songs—the one that had played all through the previous summer—and could only call to mind the crooning of the lead singer and a muted trumpet. “I didn't think they had a drummer,” I said.

“Well he is. He's from England.”

“How
old
is he?”

Malinda shrugged.

“He looks kind of old.”

“I don't care.”

I shrugged back. “Have fun.”

The hotel room had been done up in some grandmother's idea of sophistication, in shades of silver and mauve. The wallpaper featured a pattern of giant metallic flowers, and they glowed strangely in the dark, like flora dusted with nuclear fallout. It was a large room, a suite, and it was dark but for the light of a single dim lamp. Flash picked a pair of jeans off the floor and rifled through its pockets. “Here they are,” he said, and opened his palm, full of tiny red caplets. He held them out to Malinda and she took one and put it in her mouth, and swallowed. Then took another. “Whoa,” said Flash, “take it easy.”

“My neck hurts,” Malinda said to me. “Flash told me he had some pills.”

“You want one?” Flash said, looking at me for the first time. “They make you relax,” he said. “You Americans could stand to relax some.”

“Especially her,” said Malinda. “She's wound up wicked tight. She never says two words.”

This was hard to argue with. I took a pill and swallowed it. For a long moment after I felt it in my throat.

Soon enough Malinda and Flash went into the bedroom under the pretense of Malinda needing a massage. Matt and Mike and I sat around, stolid and dutiful as Buckingham guards, in the manner of all people who sacrifice themselves to the whims of their betters. We were a class of people so common and so hardworking that we might as well have been unionized. Occasionally we grew tired of our work and we complained, carried out little tantrums, made demands—How come we never do what I want? How come we never talk about me?—but for the most part we simply resigned ourselves to our fate.

“What should we do then?” said one of the brothers. “We can, uh, I don't know,” he said. He patted down his pockets and frowned as though it were only a matter of bad luck that he didn't have something in them with which to entertain a sixteen-year-old. “Christ, I don't know,” he said. He turned on the TV and ran through the channels. He didn't see anything that satisfied him—a couple of black-and-white movies, the news, commercials—and sat there turning the channels. Like most of the men I had met he looked older up close. His lips were pale and badly chapped. His skin was ruddy and a pattern of purple veins stood out at the side of his sharp, bony nose. Here and there in his mess of long, frizzy hair I could see a gleam of gray. Like an old man he was in the habit of sniffing sharply, and when he breathed in there was a slight whistling sound.