I Hate Everyone, Except You(15)
Thirty years later, bed-making is a popular topic around our Christmas dinner table. My sisters and I laugh at my parents’ obsession and reminisce about our individual ways of coping with it: I used to make my bed the second I arose from it to avoid any confrontation whatsoever. Jodi would leave the house, somehow “forgetting” to make her bed, and return home to an apoplectic Terri nearly every day. And Courtney, the twisted genius she is, would sleep on top of her fully made bed, covering herself with a blanket, then shove that blanket under the bed first thing in the morning.
The only respite I received from the barrage of rules and chores—making my bed, vacuuming the house, doing my own laundry, taking out the trash, being home by ten—was when I went to work. Even more important to my parents than keeping a tidy house was making money, and I had scored a job as a busboy in the nicest restaurant in town, Danfords Inn. While most kids my age were earning minimum wage working at one of the many fast-food chains nearby, I was bringing home a hundred bucks a night in cash tips.
So I was excused from family excursions to the ski slopes of Vermont in the winter and the beaches of Fire Island in the summer. We were living pretty high on the hog at the time, thanks to Mike’s beauty-supply business. Formerly a hairstylist, he made what turned out to be a wise career move, from giving individual women perms to selling salons the chemicals required to create truly huge hair. Considering we lived in the perm capital of the world (Long Island) in the heyday of the perm (the 1980s), I thought we should have been living in a castle instead of a split-level ranch. But I didn’t complain. We had a ski house and a boat, and I had my teenage privacy for most of the weekend while the rest of the family was gone.
During the weekends I had the house to myself, Lisa and I developed a private routine, separate from the weekday customs (mostly of eating fast food) we engaged in with our friend Meredith. The three of us were a trio, brought together by drama club and chorus class. In our firmly middle-class school district, those activities didn’t make us too popular, but we weren’t pariahs either. Mostly we spun in our own clique, a satellite too small to be noticed by the jocks and cheerleaders who lived squarely in the center of the universe. I resented our fringe status more than I dared admit, but not enough to attend even a single football game in four years.
Meredith, Lisa, and I had several nicknames for one another. On any given day, Meredith would be referred to as Bonnie, Snap, or The Superego. I would be Clyde, Crackle, or The Ego. And Lisa would be Baby Face, Pop, or The Id. Lisa always seemed to end up with the punchiest nicknames of the three of us, but neither Meredith nor I seemed to mind because, out of the group, Lisa was the one most likely to flash her tits at a passing car or scream “I just found my G-spot!” in a crowded movie theater. She earned them.
Like any triad, we occasionally split into twos. Sometimes Lisa and Meredith would get together alone and do girl things, like shop for homecoming dresses. (I was uninterested at the time, which seems funny in hindsight.) Sometimes Meredith and I would get together for coffee at the diner and study for a Regent’s exam. (Lisa had zero intention of going to college.) And every Saturday Lisa and I would get together, just the two of us, and memorize porn like a couple of pervert savants.
So, every weekend, I would work in the restaurant on Friday night, the rest of the family having left for a weekend trip around three o’clock, and come home to a house empty except for Noel, our eczematous Lhasa Apso. I’d let the dog out in the backyard to relieve herself, grab a few leftover chicken cutlets from the fridge, and watch TV until I fell asleep on the couch with Noel at my feet. I would sleep until around ten the next morning, feed the dog, and call Lisa. She would always be the one to answer her house phone because she slept with it next to her bed.
“Hello,” she’d growl.
“Did I wake you?”
“Of course you woke me. You ask me that same damn question every Saturday.”
“What time does the video store open?”
She let out an annoyed groan. “Oh my God. Eleven. It opens at eleven, just like every other fucking Saturday.”
“Great. So I’ll pick you up at eleven,” I’d say. “We’ll get there around eleven ten. We don’t want to seem too eager.” She hung up without replying, but I knew she’d be ready on time.
At 10:59 I would get in my car, a 1979 Chevy Blazer my parents gave me after they were done with it. The car was basically a tank—an SUV before everyone started driving SUVs—that would break down almost weekly and cost me a full weekend’s worth of tips to repair. Lisa lived around the block, so I could arrive at her house at 11:00 on the dot and honk the horn. A few minutes later, she would emerge from her front door, looking perturbed as usual. She was a little wisp of a thing, five feet tall, probably not even a hundred pounds, with a mane of chestnut hair half-assedly feathered because she just rolled out of bed.
“Hey Clyde,” she said, lifting herself into the passenger seat. Today she wore acid-washed jeans, white sneakers, and an oversized lemon-yellow sweater.
“Good morning, Baby Face,” I replied.
Lisa and I drove to the video store where Lisa’s father had a membership he never used. Located in a strip mall featuring a Carvel and my dentist’s office, it was one of those independently run shops that were eventually crushed by Blockbuster, which was in turn crushed by the Internet.
The store was pretty big as far as stores of its kind went; the space had previously been a bank so it featured a drive-through window, which I always thought was pretty cool. But because the store wasn’t even computerized, the interaction at the window was inevitably more time-consuming than just getting out of your car and walking in. In any case, our video-selection process was more nuanced than asking a dim-witted teller for a recommendation.