Girls on Fire(13)

Dinner was a fright show. The four of us in the wood-paneled dining room huddled at one lonely corner of the long table we never used, pushing around burnt lasagna on chipped Kmart plates, my mother scowling every time a mist of garlic bread crumbs floated from Lacey’s mouth onto the plastic tablecloth, Lacey pretending not to notice, too busy fielding rapid-fire questions about her mother’s job and her stepfather’s church and her nonexistent college plans, each of them more excruciatingly conventional than the last, all of them humiliating enough—but nothing compared to the withering look on my mother’s face when I volunteered that I’d also been thinking about taking a year off after graduation, because, like Lacey said, college had been co-opted by a capitalist system only invested in producing more drones for its financial machine, and my mother said, “Stop showing off.”

I wondered if mortification qualified as an excuse for justifiable homicide.

Lacey said yes and no and please and thanks so much for the delicious and not at all overcooked and underseasoned food. Lacey said that small towns bred small-minded people and she was waging a one-woman war against shrinkage—two-woman now that she’d rallied me to her side. Lacey said she never accompanied her stepfather to church because religion was a destructive influence on impressionable masses and she refused to support any institution with a commitment to intellectual oppression, and when my mother, semiapostate granddaughter of a minister, suggested that it was the arrogant moral cowardice of youth that led us to dismiss things we didn’t understand, Lacey said, And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are, then said that accusing your enemies of ignorance was the coward’s way out of honest argument, which made my father laugh, at which point I began to seriously doubt whether any of us would make it out alive.

“So how did you two crazy kids meet?” Lacey asked. “You seem like the type to have a good story.” Which was how I knew that Lacey, too, sensed things were running off the rails, because if there was anything my mother didn’t seem like, it was the type with a good story.

Except that, of course, she did have one—and it was this one. Love at first sight, a story I’d always loved to hear, less because of the details than because of the way they liked to tell it together, and the way they looked at each other when they did, as if they were suddenly remembering that this was a life they’d chosen

My mother smiled. “It was shortly after college, and I was filling in, temporarily, at a subsidiary of my employer, an auto repair facility in town.”

This was Julia Dexter–speak for dropping out of college when the financial aid ran dry and taking a crap paper-shuffling job that was supposed to last a summer, not a lifetime. My mother applied the same cardinal rule to autobiography she did to interior design: Accentuate the positive and hang a curtain over everything else.

“It had been, to say the least, an unpleasant afternoon. I was looking forward to locking the doors and finishing my book in peace, when in strolls a gang of hooligans, smelling like an ashtray and dressed like they thought they were Bruce Springsteen.” She said it fondly, as she always did. “Your father was wearing this silly grin . . .”

Here, always, she paused, so my father could jump in to say he was wasted, and she would then clarify that he wasn’t driving drunk, of course, his friend Todd was at the wheel, a teetotaler Christian they’d only befriended because he was always willing to drive. This time, though, my father said nothing.

She finished the story herself, more quickly than usual. “They’d gotten a flat tire on their way to a party, and as you can imagine, they were in quite a mood. All of them making stupid jokes, showing off for me, not even because they cared but because I was the only girl in sight and this, apparently, was their biological imperative.”

Let that be a lesson to you, kid, my father usually said, but mercifully not this time.

“All of them but Hannah’s father. He was the quiet one, that’s what I noticed first. That he wasn’t a fool, or at least hadn’t proven himself one yet. Then he noticed I was reading Vonnegut, and he pulled a folded paperback out of his coat pocket. Would you believe what it was?”

“Same book?” Lacey asked.

“Same exact book.”

This was the part of the story I loved best, the part I wanted Lacey to hear: That their meeting had been fated. That there was something special about them after all and, by extension, about me.

“Well, his friends went off to their party, but Jimmy stayed where he was, somehow talked me into closing early. We spent the night on the roof, talking about Vonnegut and showing each other the constellations, neither of us wanting to admit we were just making them up as we went along. And then, at the perfect moment, sun rising over Battle Creek . . .”

“He kissed you?” Lacey guessed.

“You’d think! And, I’ll admit, so did I. But instead he only walked me home, shook my hand, and that was it. I waited two days for him to call. When he didn’t, I took myself over to the bookstore where he worked, and said, ‘You forgot something.’ Then I kissed him.”

“Nice,” Lacey said, then shot me a look saying, Possible your mom is cool, too?

“That was when he started calling me Hot Lips,” she added, a detail I found gruesomely embarrassing, but also perfect. “It took me years to train him out of it.”

“Of course, you can guess why I didn’t call,” my father said, and my ears perked up. This was a coda I’d never heard before.