Dori’s house smelled like pizza bagels in the morning, just like it always had in the afternoon, but the upholstered sectional shimmered differently when blanketed by the morning light. They moved in four years earlier, but apart from Dori’s room, it felt unlived in, like a model home with its pallet of light browns and pinks, its absence of clutter, all its surfaces, shiny.
“What happens if your mother comes home?” I asked.
“How many times have you seen her here?” Dori said.
She was right, I’d only seen her mother a few times in four years. A personable shoulder-pad professional with a short angular haircut and blue eyeshadow. She could easily go from day to night with just a touch-up in the ladies’ room at The Stock Exchange Lounge, the upscale bar
on A1A with a telephone at each table.
Like many things, what I knew about The Stock Exchange Lounge, I learned on TV. It was one of several local businesses that advertised on cable with poorly produced, filmed-on-video commercials. Two women with crimped hair giggled as they spoke via telephone to a suited man at a nearby table. “Do you like to party?” they asked in unison, both monotone. One broke the fourth wall with a wink as a ticker tape advertised ladies’ night, two-for-one every Monday. At commercial’s end, the trio danced on a small but crowded dance floor. It wouldn’t steal any Clio awards from the overproduced primetime Riunite commercials, with their hot tubs filled with smiling singles, but it was equally as successful at forming my understanding of adult leisure — alcohol and sex.
Our mothers went to The Stock Exchange Lounge on the regular, but other mothers would never step foot in it. Other mothers happily collected their kids from school, bringing them to golf lessons, or surfing, or to the mall. They laughed with fellow other mothers and patted their kids on their backs before packing them in the car and driving away. Our mothers left us notes, asking us to defrost the chicken or, if they were going to get home late, left us money with instructions to order pizza. My elementary school friend Jacob had an other mother with grey streaks in her hair, neatly pressed casual wear, and a permanent smile. They sometimes invited me to join him for his after-school activities, but with her watchful eye, I worried she’d pounce on me for being a bad influence. I preferred our mothers to other mothers.
Other mothers stopped calling mine several years earlier after the divorce settled. She no longer had time for PTA bake sales, chaperoning field trips to the Pioneer Settlement and the Kennedy Space Center, or gossiping over afternoon coffee and Entenmann’s crumb cake. Now she closed business deals, earned promotions, and became acquainted with local nightlife, a necessity if she wanted to woo the most important clients. She had little interaction with mothers like Dori’s while an other mother, but now, together, they networked at chamber of commerce events and socialized with other singles.
Our latch-key kid status was one of many things Dori and I had in common. It, along with two Christmases and birthdays, was a great benefit for us children of divorce – free reign from 3:00pm until 6:00pm, and sometimes on nights and weekends too. While still in elementary school, our friends with other mothers spent their free hours congregated at either Dori’s house or mine. Dori’s red-tinged hair and Kelly LeBrock lips interested Jacob and the other boys, but she impressed me by shouting “Little Pink Houses” and “Drive” the quickest when we played Name that Tune in my garage, by speaking with words most of us had to look up in the dictionary, and by remaining stone faced, like me, while our peers laughed at unfunny things.
Soon after our migration to junior high, Jacob and the other boys donned crisp Polo shirts and mixed with kids named Nathan and Chad from other elementary schools. I didn’t want to be the kid with no friends, so I spent mornings at the bike racks with them, remaining quiet throughout their conversations about Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and girls in tight Guess jeans. At lunch, I often dragged over an extra chair to fit at the end of their table where loud kids elbowed me while passing by with their trays.
Dori quickly befriended the kids who embraced trends other mothers forbade. In the morning, they gathered at the large rocks across the street from school, looking like a funeral party, waiting for a loved one to be lowered into their final resting place. I could see their puffs of cigarette smoke from where I stood at the bike racks, but they were safe, out of the range of disciplinarians. At lunch, they filled the picnic tables outside the lunchroom, reading, listening to Walkmen, and avoiding the echoed chatter inside that, after reaching too high a volume, died a sudden yet violent death by shriek of a lunch lady’s whistle.
We shared no classes that first year, only sometimes waving at each other in the hallway, so I was excited when I saw Dori upon my entrance into French class on the first day of eighth grade.
“Look who it is!” she said as I sat down next to her, “Mon Homme Préféré.”
I laughed, hoping our classmates overheard. “Finally, we have…”
Mr. Henry entered the room, shutting me up with a “C’est l’heure du cours” and a loud clap.
After French, our last class of the day, Dori usually left campus in the opposite direction with her funeral friends. I left through the small opening cut in the chain link fence on the far side of the track. Hidden behind a clump of palm fronds and small trees, it felt like a secret, and it shortened my walk by ten minutes. On a rare day when we left in the same direction, I introduced Dori to my shortcut, hoping to impress her.
“Look like you live here,” I said, increasing my speed and keeping my gaze straight ahead as we trespassed between two houses.
Dori lagged, finally catching up to me on the street, laughing too loudly. “Living life on the edge!” she teased.
As we walked home, I silently rated the store-bought Halloween décor, oversized Jack-o-lantern lawn bags, illuminated plastic ghosts, black cats with arched backs, while Dori animatedly waved her smoking hand and talked about going to The Cure concert with funeral friends Brenda Acker and Scottie Miller and how last month they skipped gym class and took the Votran, our city bus, to the Taco Bell on A1A.
“You didn’t get caught?” I asked.
“Ha, by who, the cops?”
As we approached her house, minimally decorated with a single cardboard witch hanging on the front door, she said, “Let’s do it tomorrow!” Stepping on her cigarette butt, she added, “The entire day! I don’t have any tests. Do you?”
I didn’t.
I imagined still smelling like Pico sauce while being handcuffed by police at a Votran stop on Granada Boulevard, the main east-west strip of our growing coastal town. Unsure if playing hooky was a good idea, I asked, “Where?”
“Here,” she motioned toward her house. “Or yours? It’ll be fun!”
I then imagined the alternative: listening to the bike rack conversations while wishing I was with the funeral friends at the rocks, struggling with the passé compose without Dori’s help, waiting impatiently to be home with no supervision.
I decided on Dori’s house because had we been caught, I figured I could manipulate my way to a lighter sentence. When I arrived, we flopped down on the shimmering sectional, where only a few years earlier we watched The Brady Bunch daily at 4:30pm, competing to correctly guess which episode it was first. Too early for the Bradys, we opted for Sally, whose popularity among other mothers pushed many to adopt her trademark red glasses as their own. It was makeover day: a seemingly other mother’s wish came true when Sally’s stylists transformed her twentysomething son from shaggy-haired rocker to khaki-clad eligible bachelor; A teenage daughter cried when her mother finally agreed to update her Farrah Fawcett feathers for a voluminous perm.
“My mom would bring me with a yearbook photo of Crystal Clark,” Dori said.
“No!” I gasped before breaking into laughter at the thought of it.
Crystal, our blonde renaissance-teen classmate appeared to have a brand new off the rack outfit daily, each bright and devoid of personality. Au Cotton and L.A. Gear, County Seat and Reebok — Dori would never.
After watching Sally, we sat on the rusting swing set in the fenced in back yard. Dori fought the October breeze, burning through three matches, singing the tip of her thumb, and screeching “ouch,” before successfully lighting a cigarette. Her black hair, recently dyed, remained still, immune to the force of the wind after several coatings of hairspray.
“Scottie took my lighter,” she said, putting the pack of Camel Lights and the matchbook in her little black pouch.
The cigarette filter became discolored with traces of dark red lipstick as she slid it out of her lips and passed it to me. I held it between my fingers like a French woman, then a cowboy, and then decided I’d rather look like a French woman. I inhaled, coughing immediately.
“It’s your first time,” she said with a smile, “try this.”
She held the cigarette like a French cowboy, nestled closer to the web between her slightly bent middle and pointer fingers. She inhaled, quick and short. It worked when I did it her way.
“Better, right?” she said before taking a drag. “Brenda taught me.”
Brenda had a stellar reputation for academics, but unadvertised by the school administration was her advancement in other areas, which I learned about during Nathan’s bike-rack rant about the funeral friends.
“She’s easy when she drinks. I’d feel her up if she didn’t dress like a freak,” he said with a tinge of resentment. “They’re all weirdos. I heard Scottie’s AC/DC,” he leaned close to my face shouting, “a fudge packer.”
Some of the others, including Jacob, laughed. All of them stared, waiting for me to respond. I didn’t.
Following our smoke break, we went to Dori’s bedroom. Only a few spots of white wall peeked out from behind band posters and torn magazine pages. She copied The Jesus and Mary Chain and Peter Murphy cassettes for me as we listened to them on her portable double cassette player. We sat on her floor, flipping through music magazines.
“Daniel Ash,” she said, flashing his picture, “he’s so hot.”
I shrugged, hoping to quickly change the topic.
“No?” she looked at me before tearing out the page and adding it to her stack.
I wondered if Dori knew about me too, but before I could dwell on the subject like I usually did, she leaned forward and touched my hair. I flinched.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said with a laugh. “Hold on.” She disappeared for a moment, returning with a bottle of Studio Line mousse.
She filled her palm with a whipped-cream-like mound, rubbed it between her hands, and reached for my head again. I squinted as she got to work, fluffing the left side, pausing for a look, patting the right side, pausing for another look.
She smiled. “You should wear it like this.”
I peeked in the full-length mirror hanging on the back of the door. “Maybe,” I said.
Time moved quicker when playing hooky, and the air felt fresher, but overall, it seemed anticlimactic. School would be letting out soon, and we ate fun packs of peanut M&Ms and boxes of Milk Duds meant for the following week’s trick or treaters. Handcuffs on Granada Boulevard weren’t in my future, but I wondered if we would get called to the principal’s office tomorrow. Maybe get detention.
I hoped Jacob and the others would see me walking out of the office dressed in black with mousse in my hair. I hoped my mother would ask me why I did it instead of just yelling and grounding me for the weekend. I hoped my every-other-weekend father would discipline me instead of telling me about the time he skipped school with Victoria Principal and how if I only did it occasionally it was fine. I hoped I would be invited to stand at the rocks with the funeral friends now that I was a smoker who skipped school.
“Brenda’s brother gave me this,” Dori said while pulling a pack of wine coolers from her closet.
She said Brenda’s parents often went away on the weekends leaving her under the care of her brother Aaron, a senior at Seabreeze High School. Most weekends, Aaron and his bandmates bought boxes of Bartle’s and James’ wine coolers and cases of Bud Light from the Shell station next to the Fantasy Shoppe. They played acoustic sets in their backyard by the river for a select group of friends, and last time, Brenda made out with a sophomore and Dori got drunk and passed out on Brenda’s trundle bed. Aaron let her take home a leftover six pack of wine coolers if she swore to keep it a secret.
“So don’t tell anyone,” Dori said with a laugh while twisting off a cap and handing me a bottle.
This wasn’t the first time I had alcohol. Sometimes I drank beer out of frozen mugs with my father, but never enough to get drunk.
“Drink here. With me. Got it?” he said on several occasions. “I don’t want you flyin’ out a goddamned windshield on the Granada Bridge.”
I suppose this was good advice, but I didn’t like taking advice from him, and I wanted to get drunk, just not with him.
We finished our second wine coolers and I turned up the volume on the cassette player when Peter Murphy’s “Cuts You Up” came on. I knew the song from late night MTV and loved it, but I hadn’t heard other songs from the album until that day. I hated dancing but now I wanted to, so I followed Dori’s lead. Her hair bounced, slowly breaking free of its hair-product prison. I closed my eyes, shook my arms, my legs, my head.
“That’s good,” she shouted while grabbing my hands.
This is probably where a normal boy my age would lean in for a kiss, I thought, but I wasn’t a normal boy, and I knew Dori didn’t want me to be. My distraction caused our dancing to become unsynchronized, and our feet tangled. We fell onto her bed laughing, safe without expectations.
We stayed there, quiet and still, listening to the music until Dori shouted, “It’s after four thirty.” She rolled off the bed, grabbed the remaining wine coolers, and hurried out of her room.
Startled, I took a moment to recall the significance of 4:30 before joining her on the sectional. On TV, Jan Brady rode her bicycle toward the garage.
“The broken anniversary portrait!” I shouted.
“You brat,” Dori said and handed me the last wine cooler.