Final Vinyl Days (2 page)

“They all act so juvenile,” she said, throwing down one quick glass of champagne and then getting a refill from the swan before moving over to the food. “And did you catch the guy I was standing with? The cousin from hell?” She raised her eyebrow again, let out a heavy sigh. “I told him not to close his eyes during the prayer. I could tell he had that sick as hell look.”

“Best part of the service,” Adam said and motioned her out into what people kept calling the solarium, a jungle of potted ferns swaying over white wicker tables and chairs and a big plateglass window that looked out on the pool and the eighteenth hole. “I particularly liked the way you got out of his hold. You did like this.” He kicked one leg out to the side and held it there, shook it. The great-aunt was frowning at him from across the room where she sat hunched forward in her chair. He stopped a waiter and
grabbed two more glasses of champagne and a handful of diminutive drumsticks. She eagerly accepted the champagne but turned down what she called biddy legs, so he went and found a waiter with caviar and another with fruit. He found a bottle of champagne in the kitchen and brought it to their table. Besides not being carnivorous she was not a fan of the tune selections given to the Casio player (all tunes Adam had heard on the accordian at every bar mitzvah he had ever attended, songs like “Spinning Wheel” and “Will It Go Round in Circles?”). They talked for at least a half an hour about the round/ring/ circle theme in songs sung at weddings. During this time he verified that she was not married but also discovered that she was not
single
. An ideal situation for someone who is not
really
in the market. Back in Atlanta she had a person, friend, lover, significant other, current life partner, spousal equivalent. Again they laughed over all of the stupid names and she changed the subject to some local gossip, one of the old Lilly Pulitzer men, who, she told him, had once been picked up by the side of the interstate wearing nothing but his underwear. “And?” Adam asked, rolling his hand dramatically for the rest of the story. She shrugged. “That's all that anybody ever heard. Obviously you're not a local,” she said. “If you were, you'd be used to half stories and numerous speculations.”

He realized then that he'd given her very little of himself. “I
was
in a lengthy relationship,” he had offered with the news of her significant equivalent so-and-so. What he hadn't told her was that that relationship was when he was a sophomore in college, that he had been a slow healer, that his own parents flipped out in their fifties after thirty-something years of marriage and went through all of the same arguments you'd expect from a much younger divorce. They fought over who should get Barbra Streisand's
Greatest Hits
and the
West Side Story
soundtrack, until Adam went out and bought duplicates; of course then they had to fight over who would get the new versions and the CD player that his/her
nice son
had been forced to buy with his hard-earned money and him not even out of school yet. It was one of those times he caught himself wishing that there was a sibling with whom to divvy up the worries, someone to call just to say, “So, what do you hear from the insane ones?” By then, Alicia was already out of his life, no more than a glimpse of blond hair and add-a-bead necklace in the undergraduate library or at a basketball game. Where he had once pictured her face in the scenarios of his future, there was now an oval blur with a voice all too similar to his mother's and Great-aunt Izzy's, whose claim to fame was that she had once seen a very famous actor (she never revealed who, just that he
was
not
Jewish) buying every kind of laxative that was stocked at her local pharmacy (which of course was
not
“his” local pharmacy). Every family gathering was punctuated by questions like “Was it Cary Grant?”

“Oh no, much sexier.”

“William Holden?”

“Shorter.”

“Frank Sinatra?”

“You think he's sexy? Do you really?” Izzy had the habit of nodding while she talked or chewed. Sometimes she did all three. Alicia had once guessed Marlon Brando, to which Izzy laughed hysterically. “I have never found him to be sexy!” Izzy roared. Not long after this, Alicia broke things off (it was as easy to blame Izzy for the breakup as it was to come up with any other good reason), and when Alicia left, Adam more than ever relied on the eternal brotherhood made available by Pi Kappa Alpha; he drank beer and shot pool, played pinball, threw darts, cochaired the Burnouts.

Now he realized Eve was staring at him. She had refilled both their glasses and was tapping her fingers to the beat of a jazzed-up version of “Mrs. Robinson.” People were trying to dance to it but seemed to be failing miserably. One man in the center resembled a disabled turkey, all movement taking place in the head and upper
torso. “I just moved to DC.” Adam was suddenly determined to give something back to the conversation. “I grew up in New York. My parents are still there.” He didn't offer that his parents didn't speak to each other except through him, that they had succeeded in making his life miserable.

“Atlanta.” She lifted her glass for him to refill it. “I moved there right after college.” She paused and laughed. “No big deal
now
, but back then I had never been anywhere. You know I lived at home all through college, small school close by.” She threw her thumb over her shoulder as if he could look out into the foyer of the country club, the gold-flocked wallpaper and chandelier, and see her school. “I did
not
know anything about anything.” She used her hands dramatically as she enunciated each word. He imagined her standing in front of a mirror as she clipped the slow-motioned syllables, as she avoided contractions like “didn't,” where her native tongue pronounced
t
s for
d
s, “ditten” like “kitten.” Then she brought in the hands, graceful, nubby-nailed hands that moved with great energy as if she might suddenly burst into applause or grab you by the throat. As with her half-baked stories about the people from her town, Adam had no idea where her conversation was going. He wanted to tell her that he liked the stripped-down version of her: that image
of someone about to go somewhere, Little Eve Wallace with the frizzy hair, peeing at the piano recital, growing up to go to what sounded like a community college, growing up to be the first person he had felt any strong interest in since Alicia, but then he remembered that nameless, faceless significant other opening her refrigerator, watching her television, lounging on her bed down in Georgia. What he pictured was the face of Tom Cruise on the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger; as smart as Einstein and as sensitive as Alan Alda.

“Look, it's Adam and Eve,” the goofy-looking little ring bearer said, and several guffaws and titters followed. It was clear he had been put up to it. Apparently, their socializing had sparked quite a few Adam-and-Eve jokes, the punchlines all having something to do with a rib or a snake. Apples. Fig leaves. Then there were jokes about the company, Adam and Eve, that manufactured all kinds of sex toys and devices, the kinds of things the boys gave John Jeffers after his shave and the girls gave Missy Malcolm after her stamping.

“So you grew up here?” he asked. They had moved over to a table near the window—like a wide-screen movie—to escape all the traffic, and now they were watching people walk up from the eighteenth hole, swimmers
pulling themselves up the pool ladder and adjusting body parts. She continued her commentary on people at the reception: the woman in a purple sarong had once chained herself (along with her two dachshunds, Oscar and Meyer) to the door of the local veterinary office to protest pet euthanasia (her husband was an anesthesiologist who was at that time being sued for overgassing someone); the couple making out in the corner had built a relationship and marriage upon dramatic breakups and reconciliations (like the time they were caught having sex behind the shower curtain display in Wal-Mart); the man stuffing chicken livers wrapped in bacon in his mouth had taught her high school geometry class and was the first person in town to come out of the closet. A few people came over to try and get in on the conversation, to ask her to dance, or (she said) to check up on them, but eventually they were left alone. An hour into the reception and people stopped asking.

“They will be saying all sorts of things about us before long,” Eve said. “Here's the half story. We have spent the entire reception all alone drinking champagne: you, the out-of-town stranger, me the local yokel who
supposedly
has a man in
the city
.” She lowered her voice to simulate danger.

“Supposedly?” Adam asked. “Are you asking me to speculate?”

Off to the side, the pool shimmered and children screamed and cannonballed and teenage girls lounged in bikinis catching the late afternoon rays. In the main room the champagne swan had gone empty, and bottles were being brought from the kitchen and passed around. The young black man on the Casio was singing “Sunshine of My Life.” He put on some sunglasses and moved back and forth like Stevie Wonder, which delighted the old people hugging the wall as well as the youngsters who were periodically appearing and then quickly disappearing with shaving cream and soda cans. He sang
you are the apple of my eye
while the parents of the bride twirled and dipped.

Eve talked more freely now, and with that freedom came the accent, the slow drawl familiar to everyone else in the vicinity. “My dad grew tobacco, not much, but enough.” She was home for a long weekend and, in the midst of giving her family history (two younger brothers and a mother who teaches fifth grade), she began describing her room there, the tape marks on the pale yellow walls from where she had hung posters in high school. Posters that said things like “Rain Is a Freedom Song” and “Up with People.” She described her parents: childhood sweethearts who had developed a whole language with eyebrows, winks, and hand gestures. She described the cool, soothing feeling of the central air conditioning and
how she had spent much of her childhood without it. “My brothers and I used to sleep on the screened porch floor in our underwear.” She laughed, staring out at the pool now as if she could see her young brothers standing there in their briefs. “And my dad would take us out to the little local airport on Sunday afternoons to see if a plane came. You know little planes, crop-dusting types.” She talked faster and faster, her neck and chest flushed. “We'd spread a blanket and count jets, which of course did
not
come to our airport. My dad said, ‘Look, they've scarred the sky.' I always liked the sound of that,
scarred the sky
. And sometimes we'd stay until dusk and count the bats that flew out from an old barn nearby.”

The lazy haze of the sun, the alcohol, her voice were getting to him. The smell of chlorine and the slow whirring of the ceiling fans. He was thinking about his room at the Ramada Inn, how dark those heavy, lined drapes could make it, how the unit on the wall could generate the artificial coolness. He couldn't help imagining her there with him, and once he'd let the forbidden idea in he couldn't shake it.

“Who looks stupid, us or them?” she asked, a mere second after ending the airport story (how they always stopped at the Tastee Freez on the way home, and how her youngest brother always asked if you could order a sundae
on any day other than Sunday). For the first time he noticed the slight space between her front teeth, the little whistle sound she emitted with each and every
s
. It made his chest ache just to look at her.

“What do you mean?” He took off his coat and found his arm stretched out behind her, his finger lightly brushing the spaghetti strap of that hideous dress that looked amazingly good on her. He was now of the belief that anything would. She could grab one of those starched old-lady dresses and whirl around a few times, and it would look perfect: soft and easy and lived-in. She could wear the tablecloth, the ivy trailing from the centerpieces. He waited to see if she would move away from his hand, but instead she leaned in closer.

“Well, there they are in bathing suits.” She lifted her hand with the champagne glass, index finger pointing outward. “And here we are in formal wear.” She had kicked off her shoes and had her legs stretched out, ankles crossed on a chair.

He was about to make a flirtatious suggestion, something that she wouldn't necessarily have to take seriously, when there before them stood a plump twelve-year-old, her own spaghetti straps digging creases into her sunburned shoulders, handing out little net sacks of rice. It was clear to Adam, having observed all of the bridesmaids
at the front of the church, that Missy had chosen the dress with Eve in mind; she was the only woman there who could do it justice.

“Believe it or not,” Eve said, shaking her head with a lovely look of pity on her face, “there was a hell of a lot of thought that went into what just happened.” At first Adam thought she had read his mind, and then he followed her gaze to the kid with the rice. “The girl, that basket with the streamers that match our dresses, and the great-aunt's wheelchair,” she laughed a little too loudly and then patted her lips as if to reprimand herself. “The net cut exactly the right shape and sewn up, the Comet rice dyed the right pale shade of pink.”

“They dye the rice?”

“Of course.” She touched his arm, lightly fingered the fabric of his cuff. “What, you've never dyed rice? Lived all these years and you've never dyed rice? It's a big deal, this dyed rice. The only thing hotter is birdseed.” Now her hand was curled up on top of his, and it was perfectly natural for him to turn his wrist and lock fingers with her. She talked faster as this was happening, all about birdseed for the environment, nobody has to come and sweep it up. She had told Missy all about this, all about how every wedding she had gone to in Atlanta had had birdseed, but Missy was just so traditional she had to have rice. “She
even wanted to go to Niagara Falls!” Eve attempted a whisper but failed. “Donna Reed is her idol.” Eve held one of the little napkins that said “Missy and John” up to her mouth, shoulders shaking with laughter as she continued the appraisal of her friend. “She knows how to make seven different meatloafs, loaves, and forty-seven things to do with Jell-O.”