Machine Dreams (24 page)

She liked it as a box, as an object, so neat in its leather case with snaps. Brown leather like a woman’s purse, with perforations over the palm-sized speaker and cutouts for the volume and tuning buttons; a rectangular strap that folded one way to hug the body of the radio and another for use as a short handle. Without the case the radio was a simple plastic block, red and white, with the white grill in the front. Rather flat, a compact shape, it sat on a tabletop like any other meaningless thing, but the quick click of one tiny wheel
(OFF-ON)
made it more than itself.
Without a warning you broke my heart
, the sound actually shaking in her hand if she turned it up.
You took it, darling
, tinny, as though trapped in small space but vibrating and pounding. Every sigh, every inflection, echoed a haunting, a push that was sexual and desirous, a promise to
get a little lonely in the middle of the night.
The slow songs, the ones that whimpered and questioned, came across like secrets and confession, the whisper of conscience.
I don’t like you but I love you
, the seduction building to a surrender composed of simple facts:
you do me wrong now.
Noon hours at school, student council boys had played scratchy 45s on a record player, and girls jitterbugged on the basketball court. When a slow song crackled over the speakers and the lights dimmed, Danner had stood frozen in place, ashamed no one asked her to dance, terrified someone would. Now she listened to her transistor: the words were different in the privacy of summer; she didn’t have to wait to be chosen. She turned the radio over in her hand so the words were lost in her palm, or held it to her throat below her ear while it buzzed against her skin, almost alive. She could turn the sound off then and the lines came unbidden, heard in her head with their nuance and growl intact:
my love is strong now
.
^*
She loved the songs especially at night; she wished it were night now, all the words drifting off like air. At night, sounds replaced the words, sounds rose and fell. In bed, she held her knees in her arms, dead man’s float, how it felt in water to sink and tilt while the dark came yawning up like liquid around the solid bed. Her room, solid, and the shelves in the wall with their stacked spaces
linear and deep. The shelves were filled with books and stacked games in cardboard boxes: Chutes and Ladders, Combat!, Candy-land. Below them the trunk dolls were snapped shut in their tumbled wardrobes;
shine on your love light (I wanna know).
Above and below lay cast-off stuffed animals and fan magazines. Mitch had designed the shelves and ordered them made at the local lumber store: they were walnut, stained dark to match the closet. Danner and Billy had watched their father tear a hole in the wall between their rooms; the hole was the size of a door and extended from floor to ceiling. Radabaugh and Pulaski from Mitch Concrete—Danner remembered them—had carried the ten-foot unit into the house: shelves on both sides, built just the thickness of the wall. The space was perfectly filled. Danner still sometimes pressed her ear to the back of the empty shelf near the floor and heard Billy walking in his room: creak of a chair as he sat at his desk building model airplanes, humming to himself. The sound was muffled, soft, inexact. Different from the radio in the dark:
Come on baby, baby please.
She imagined her mother’s room: the big antique bed, the L-shaped bank of windows, the Victorian bureau and its tall mirror bordered with knobs and spires. In Billy’s room, just the other side of the shelves, there were twin beds on opposite walls. Usually Mitch slept in one of them and Danner heard her father’s snoring behind the sound of the radio. His sleep was labored, oblivious. The sounds didn’t seem like her father at all but became instead the rhythmic workings of the house, the blind labor that got them all through the night. He caught his breath and held it, exhaling with a long high sigh that ended in a groan so deep it was nearly a word. In the old photographs at Bess’s house he was a blond heavy-lidded baby in a girl’s white dress: whose baby was he, orphaned, raised by Bess? The high cheekbones; the blue, long-lashed eyes in a graduation picture; the lips sensual, a little hard. The face too beautiful before his nose was broken, broken twice, fighting.
I’m begging you, baby:
often Danner put the radio inside her pillowcase and tried to fall asleep on it, her own breathing nearly silent. Listening, she knew the look of the larger bedroom: Billy turned on his side, legs drawn up, in the bed under the windows. Mitch asleep on his back, big in the other twin bed. Above them both, Billy’s model planes
lined up on the windowsill. He built them behind his closed door in the afternoons, moving the smallest wheels and wing fittings to their proper places with a spot of glue on the end of a toothpick. When he finished a plane, he ceremoniously applied a decal of numbers to the tops of the wings, like a name. He put the planes on his windowsill, which was wide and covered with a patchwork of cotton from Jean’s jewelry boxes: long, narrow cotton from necklace boxes; square cotton from bracelet boxes. Danner is the one listening at night, imagining shapes: each airplane impervious and gray on cotton snow. Some of them have plastic men at the controls—tiny, frozen men with billed caps, looking out through cockpit windows.
Let it shine on me
while Mitch sleeps with the sheets folded down to his waist, arms at his sides; sleep such work that he spends part of each night awake. Smoking a cigarette at the kitchen table in the glow of a night lamp. Even sitting on the porch, smoking, looking at the dark fields. Sitting in the bathroom on the toilet, smoking cigarettes and reading paperbacks. Danner hears him get out of bed, clearing his throat, coughing.
Oh let it shine shine shine:
the whisper of the radio no longer really heard but felt, beating near her hand,
I feel all right I feel all right I feel all right.

Danner and Billy sat in the back seat on the way to the dance; Jean and Gladys sat up front.

“I think it’s nice the Raffertys have made a dance floor at the pool.” Jean stopped for the light on Main Street, her hands dark against the white steering wheel of the Mercury.

“They can well afford a few lights and some poured concrete, the way they’ve bought up all those old houses near the college. Rent them all out to college students who tear them up, and make plenty. Rafferty will keep on until they own the whole town.”

“Got a lot of mouths to feed.” Jean smiled.

“Feed?” Gladys snorted. “They work those kids like slaves.”

Danner wondered about the dance at the pool; she’d never been there at night before. Mayor Rafferty owned the Mobil station and some real estate, and he owned the pool. Over the double doors of the poolhouse hung a long sign with black letters:
S.T. AND VIRGIE, STEVE, SAMMY, SONNY, SUSIE, SALLY, NICK AND
NATHAN.
Nick and Nathan were their cousins who lived with them; Danner supposed that’s why their names were listed last, even though they were older than Susie and Sally, who were just little girls, not in school yet. The boys were always at the pool, running the office or being lifeguards.
You’re benched! Ten minutes!
The shrill of the whistle signaled rest periods, and then the Rafferty boys swam in the empty pool. Steve and Sonny were in high school and they’d teased Danner last summer when she rented her basket from the window on the girls’ side:
You sure you just got out of seventh grade?
they’d said, and,
Where do you live?
Confidential laughter at her answer; then,
They grow them tall out there on Brush Fork.
Danner pushed her wire basket forward on the shelf and took the pin with the number, embarrassed, flushed with pleasure. She wasn’t so sorry then that Jean had sewn a bra into the top of her two-piece bathing suit, though the cups were a hard rubber that pinched, pressing her small breasts to a barely discernible cleavage. Everyone laughed about Brush Fork; boys took girls to the country roads to park. Would the Rafferty boys remember her this summer? Probably not; her hair was longer, and she had a different bathing suit. But she’d watched the Raffertys for years: sweeping up, strutting on the sidewalk that ran around the edge of the pool, sitting in the lifeguard chairs with their long legs hanging down. She’d gone to the pool nearly every afternoon in summer, a quarter to get in, noon to six.

“You noticed they raised the price to fifty cents a kid this summer,” Gladys said.

“Still,” Jean answered, “you can’t get a baby sitter for fifty cents an afternoon.”

The poolhouse was a long low building, cement block, painted pale blue and white, and the dark office was just inside the door. The walls were lined with shelves and baskets, and everyone paid admission at the big window. Boys went to one side and girls to the other; Danner wondered if both sides were the same. The girls’ was always damp, the concrete floor cold, and one of the two shower stalls had no door. The dressing rooms were wooden cubicles with a curtain strung across on string; even inside, you could smell a pungence of chlorine, and the heady scent of the honeysuckle
that grew by the wire fence. The fence was six feet tall and enclosed the property on both sides, all the way back to the bushes and trees that concealed the railroad tracks.

Gladys turned around in the front seat to look at Danner. “You sure look nice. Why are you taking your beach bag?”

“I might go swimming,” Danner said.

“Silly, no one will be swimming at a dance.” The turn signal clicked as Jean made the turn by the post office, down Sedgwick Street to the pool. “Anyway, you’d ruin your braids, and you look so pretty in your dress. Why would you wrinkle it all up in one of those dirty baskets?”

“You couldn’t pay me to swim in that pool,” Gladys said. “All that chlorine.”

“They have to use it,” Billy said helpfully, “because everyone pees in the water.”

“I don’t,” Danner said. But sometimes she did, and it felt wonderful.

“That’s enough, Billy,” Jean said.

There were cars parked on both sides of the street; the dance would be crowded. Would everyone look different at night? Danner glimpsed lights in the back, on the side lawn of the pool, and there was such a crowd! She’d heard the concrete dance floor was in the shape of a heart, then a clover leaf, then someone said it was just round. The band hadn’t started yet. Oh, Danner wanted it to be nice; she’d change her clothes quickly, before any of her friends saw her and she’d have to explain. What would the high school girls wear? Danner had never seen them at a dance. Probably they’d dress just like they did at school, and not wear anything special.

Summer days the older girls wore their two-piece swimsuits and leaned languidly against the wire fence, talking through wire mesh to boys who stood in the alley. The boys had jobs and drove down on lunch break or came for the last hour, from five to six. The girls had lain in the sun all day, talking and eating ice cream from the snack bar, oiling each other and sleeping. They grew darker and smoother, and let a strap fall off one shoulder to show the dead white strip where it had been. The breasts held in their suits were that white, and their stomachs below their navels.
Bonnie Martin was always at the pool, and Ruthie Bennett, the cheerleader, a red-head who wore freckle cream on her face until the boys came. Dawn Marie Kasten, who dated Steve Rafferty, bleached her hair even though her father was a college professor; she was the only girl who had a car and she drove all her friends to the pool. When Danner had walked past their towels last summer with the grade school girls, she’d tried to listen, hear what they talked about. But she could never tell. They turned up their radios or lay speaking secretly, their heads together like lovers. They swam once all afternoon or not at all, only spraying their arms and legs with water from a bottle, the way Danner’s mother dampened clothes before she ironed them on the ironing board. Afternoons they washed their hair under the one outdoor shower, suds streaming down their legs, then sat on their towels to open overnight cases. They took out curlers and pins. The round plastic rollers were bright pink or purple, fastened with long rubber-tipped bobby pins. Some girls didn’t need a mirror and were very fast, sectioning off each little strand of hair with the sharp end of a rat-tail comb. The curlers were arranged in patterns and perfectly placed, as though they were a hairstyle in themselves. Heads bristling with cylinders, the girls lay on their stomachs with their faces to the side, tanning while their curls dried. Later, hoping, they went inside to the dank dressing rooms to comb out and put on lipstick. The ones who were going steady could leave their curlers in all day; they talked to their boyfriends like confident wives, leaning against the fence and rerolling a curler that had come loose. Their simple gestures looked intimate. They touched their heads as they talked, flashing their certainties and their alliances in public. Some of them went all the way. The younger girls wondered which ones and played games of Crazy Eights, keeping score on gum wrappers; they swam all day and did underwater somersaults in the deep end.