Summer of 1986: The House on Chevrolet
On Chevrolet Avenue, which had a grassy median full of dandelions dividing it, my bedroom window faced the street. The dandelions spoke to me of the lies told to little girls. For entertainment purposes—I could only assume—and to release the grip of some strange urge within the pits of their stomachs, Stuart and Nigel scaled the columns supporting the roof of our porch to climb through my window. It satisfied some dramatic urge to subvert routines.The ordinary had to be reinvented. After a while we got used to them tromping down the stairs to our living room, laughing and debating some topic of conversation begun before they’d even parked Stuart’s father’s rusted Chevy Caprice.
“No matter what direction the band might have taken, Ian Curtis wouldn’t have sold out. He didn’t have it in him. He wasn’t some lame ass pussy… Oh, hello, everybody! What’s up?”
At first, the line, “You could’ve just knocked,” became a running gag, but after a while we let it go.
Nigel would be carrying a six-pack of Stroh’s. “We brought beer,” he’d say, as if bringing beer was a legitimate excuse for climbing through my bedroom window. If I had grown up in Flint, I might have mentioned that one of these days they were going to get shot (by a vigilant neighbor), but my suburban childhood hadn’t included guns of any kind. My family didn’t hunt. And they didn’t shoot people. If anything, they believed in minding their own business.
My lovely parents insisted on helping me move out of the dorm. I think the fear was that if they didn’t butt in now, they’d never see the inside of what became known that summer as the house on Chevrolet. After rubbing off dust with a fingertip on a metal bathroom shade and kicking a pile of metal hangers in the corner of an empty bedroom where someone had probably been murdered, they retreated to the furniture which the guys had dumped in the driveway. My mother’s sweat in a pretty summer dress with daisies was very lady-like. My father mopped his forehead with a handkerchief and gulped the open air.
“Is it new?” I asked, point to my mother’s dress.
“Some of your new neighbors really need to mow their lawns, don’t you think?” Dad prided himself on a manicured lawn designed and engineered by one of GM’s finest.
“Sit down a moment,” he said, drawing me down to the couch by my wrist.
I made sure he saw me glaring at his hand as it were the ungodly and alien claw of a sloth.
“This couch has a funny smell,” my mother said.
“It’s vintage.” Fight back, I thought.
“Honey.” As a rule, I could count on my father’s serenity. I could see him peeling a banana on a sinking pontoon on Higgins Lake. “Those guys who dropped off all of this, uh, furniture were three sheets to the wind.”
I glanced at my mother to determine if she would pile on.
“I’d say more like one or two.”
“But my point is, uh, it’s 11:30 in the morning, Karen.”
Mom had wanted to name me Jennifer. Both names made me barf.
“What a beautiful watch.” So she’d noticed. “It looks a lot like your grandmother’s.”
“Does it?” It was.
“Yes, last I checked, it was in my jewelry box.”
The guys were on a beer run. Where was the beer? I needed a beer. The goon boys were probably cornered in a Sunshine Dairy by an old coot with politics similar to my father’s, the victims of a midday citizens arrest.
“You know, I’m not paying a fortune for you to get drunk like some floozy at Michigan State University on Saturday mornings.” I could tell he was dead serious by the set of his jaw and the way his eyes bugged out.
“I thought we were getting your employee discount.”
He waved his hand in the air to indicate everything. “We’re not talking about a brand new Monte Carlo SS. This is your future.”
“Would you like to give me a breathalyzer test, Dad?”
Mother chuckled, tucking her hands between her thighs.
The lawns were shaggy. Most of the homes looked used and abused. A few cars passed by. The sky was Slurpee blue.
When my father brought up the future, specifically my future—and waved his hand at everything—I wanted to puke.
“Where in the hell did they go? They’re not done, are they? I can’t lift this couch.”
“They went on a beer run, Dad. They were out of beer. Apparently, you can’t move furniture without beer. It’s a rule or something here in Flint.”
My mother’s eyes widened ever so slightly. Cars passed on Chevrolet. It was a warm quiet afternoon. The working class was hung over. Flint was green. The crocuses and daffodils had exploded.
“You know, dear. One’s company says a lot about a person. Have you thought of that? Have you met any of your brother’s fraternity brothers?”
“You mean the math and engineering dorks?”
“Yes, the math and engineering dorks. No! Don’t call your brother’s friends dorks.”
“Dufuses?”
“Stop.”
He glared at me.
“I do hope your housemates are more sensible.”
“What does that even mean, Dad?”
“You know, sensible. Like your mother and me. Like your brothers. Like you.”
“You can call me sensible if it makes you feel better.”
“Shush. That’s enough.”
I thought of the time my sensible brother, who had been hot rodding around the village of Flushing, had talked his way out of a ticket.
When the guys returned, Phil patently offered my father a beer, as if they were both grown men who had seen a thing or two.
“Now, wasn’t that sensible? He sees who’s in charge here,” I murmured in my father’s direction, as if exhaling a plume of smoke, sarcastically stroking his feathery ego. The look on his face could have jump-started a dead battery in the middle of January.
“We have reservations at Matilda’s,” my mother observed.
The furniture was trundled into the house. Stuart went out to the back steps to smoke a clove and avoid my parents. Joe smiled at them like a chocolate Lab before following Stuart’s lead. Phil initiated a conversation with my father, bless his goon boy heart.
“I manage the pizza counter at Windmill Place,” he said, making manly small talk. “But where’s the ambition in that, right? That’s why I sell a little Ecstasy on the side at El Oasis, but let’s just keep that between the two of us.”
“Your secret’s safe with me,” my father replied.
“I could tell I could trust you,” Phil said.
My father’s eyes widened. “You don’t say.”
“You should come to El Oasis some night,” Phil continued. “I’ll hook you up.”
“Excuse me? Hook me up? As in prostitution?”
“Prostitution?”
“Are you a drug dealer or a pimp?”
Phil cringed. “I hate that word. That’s a bad word.”
“Pimp?”
“No, drugs. Pimp is fine. I prefer candy. Think cotton candy. I sell cotton candy.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, I’ve stripped the word drugs from my vocabulary.” He cringed again. “The club kids call me the Candy Man.”
“The Candy Man? Does my daughter know this?”
“She’s one of my best customers.”
My father exploded. “What the hell!”
“Relax, I’m just kidding.” Chuckling, Phil bounded up the front porch steps and raced into the house.
My mother was protective of my father. “Karen, do any of these boys go to GMI?”
“All the boys worth being seen with go to GMI,” I said. It was surprising. I had never lied to them. I had never had any reason for lies, living quietly and obediently behind the frosted glass of their disapproval and tacit restrictions.