Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

Had I heard this song before? I didn't know. Was that a clarinet, that farting sound? I listened to the words and tried to go back. When was it? The phantom when. No, it was a saxophone. The sax player waltzed through his solo, he was up on a tenement roof at midnight, playing for all the lonely ones, who drifted from their beds and moved to their windowsills to hear this more clearly. They couldn't see him. It was the moon itself playing those luscious notes. In the morning they weren't sure if they'd dreamed it. They tried to remember the melody all day and couldn't for the life of them. By lunch, they were thoroughly ashamed for letting him down.

The song ended and the volume spiked up to showcase a commercial for Allen M. Schneider Real Estate. I heard my parents' car in the driveway and dove for the radio, spinning the dial to my mother's Nothing But the Classics. They came up the stairs, and when they got inside my father resumed. It was an argument from inside the car that they'd paused in between closed spaces. Who knew what started it. By then it was deep into the ancient grudges and unforgivable failures. The usual.

I hadn't made any plans. But I did what I normally did not do. I left the house. It was funny — as soon as the door closed, I couldn't hear it. Maybe the wind carried it in another direction. It got windy at sunset that time of year. I was always tormented by the knowledge that the entire developments must have been listening to us, but the screen door wheezed shut and those sounds were gone.

Walking out of the driveway, I tried to get the song out of my head. It didn't work. What if someone came along and heard me humming it? Picking up a ditty from WLNG was hard to explain, like claiming you got VD off a toilet seat in a bus station. You walked around with it to your shame. There were songs that were guilty pleasures, like “Fernando.” That ABBA shit. Everybody had 'em. Then there were songs that betrayed fundamental ideas you had about yourself. Have I a hope or half a chance . There could be no accommodation for such exposure. My friends wouldn't understand. Reggie would punch me in my face. Certainly my sister wouldn't approve, but I saw her so rarely that I no longer worried about what sarcastic remark she'd throw my way.

I HAVEN'T TALKED ABOUT ELENAmuch because she wasn't there. I haven't talked about her because she went off to college and never came back. I've mentioned the great migration, when you stop coming out to Sag except for the occasional visit. You got a real summer job in the city, or something on campus, or an internship in the office of a family friend. Common rite of passage. Enough of this bourgie shit . You left the place that made you to take your chances in the wide world. But Elena did more than outgrow Sag Harbor. She went off and we saw her on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and sometimes she came back down to New York if she had a longer vacation, but it was never the same. She hasn't been in here much because she'd already moved on.

Elena was three years older than me. Growing up, she was our babysitter, buddy, and bully, according to her needs. Tugging us out of traffic, turning the oven on to 350 degrees so that me and Reggie could slide our Swanson's in there side by side, keeping Mondays at 8 PM in a stranglehold for her beloved Little House on the Prairie . Those hard-won frontier lessons. When we destroyed her nerves, she threatened to tell our father, which shut us down like that.

She slimmed down and hipped up when she hit high school, unveiling a cool downtown persona that made the most blasé private-school deb seem like a Kentucky rube. She came home after everyone was in bed and tossed glossy invites from the Peppermint Lounge and Danceteria onto the table in the foyer, where they accumulated like exotic stickers on a steam trunk. At night, strange sounds emanated from her room, bruised melodies wrung from Mission of Burma 45s and ink-black flexis out of British music magazines. There were Friday evenings where she'd psych herself up by playing Sandinista! cut for cut, all six sides, and then tromp out of the house in Day-Glo boots to wrestle down the night. Leaving me and Reggie alone in the house with a stack of splatter flicks from Crazy Eddie's, fascinated by ideas of our future, high-school selves. Suckers!

The last few summers, she'd been in charge when our parents were in the city. Now that it was my job, I knew what her expression had meant when our parents' friends asked when our folks were coming out. She was a camp counselor at Boy's Harbor, bossing those kids around all day, which made things easier for us as she was all out of fascist directives by the time she got home. I listened to her sneak out of the house after me and Reggie went to bed. I heard the car door slam as she went off on her secret missions and I put myself in charge of us in the empty house until morning. Her final summer, she was too hip and strange and “white-acting” for the Sag Harbor boys and girls she'd grown up with, and went out to find others like her, her fellow unlikelies. She never brought them around, but she must have found her tribe.

I only saw her once that summer. The week before I got my braces off. Bobby was still out, and we were driving down Main Street, South Hampton, rushing to catch the 7:20 show of Beyond Thunderdome . We'd seen it before, but we had nothing else to do. We were about to turn into the parking lot behind the theater when Bobby said, “Isn't that your sister?”

She was across the street, smoking a cigarette in front of one of the fancy restaurants reserved for grown-ups. If our parents took us out to dinner, it was to the Lobster Inn or the latest one-season home-style fried-chicken joint or takeout place. The grown-ups kept the shiny, written-up restaurants for their nights away from the kids. Or away from the wives. She was talking to a German-looking guy with long blond hair and bright white teeth that gleamed from all the way across the street. He had a Eurotrash demeanor I will forever associate with the high-tech terrorists of Die Hard , and yeah, I know the movie didn't come out until three long summers later, but what do you want, the movie made a big impression on me, and it is hard to accept the notion of a pre— Die Hard world. The cruel efficiency of those guys. She patted his arm and smiled at some little witticism of his, tracing down to his elbow. They were fucking.

They were still there after we found a parking space. Which was good, because I didn't want to have to go inside the restaurant and tell the garçon or whatever that I wanted to look for someone. Her companion spotted me approaching and watched me over her shoulder. His face had that expression I've seen many times, when I'm walking down the street and there's a white person sitting alone in a car. The look on his face was the one they always get before they lock the car doors. Click, click, click up the street as I pass. We were in South Hampton.

“Elena?”

She gave me her hug — I'd forgotten how good it felt — and introduced me to Derek. He lost his squint and shook my hand with a big big smile.

“What are you doing here? When did you get out?”

“I just popped in for the weekend,” she said. “I'm visiting Derek.”

Bobby checked out her friend, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

I said, “Oh, I didn't know.”

“It was a last-minute thing.”

“When are you coming over? 'Cause I work—” I began to say. Because I didn't want to miss her.

“I'm probably not going to have time to make it over there,” she said. “Probably. It's just a quick visit.”

“Oh.”

The traffic rushed in the street. Bobby told me he was going to buy tickets and that I should meet him over there. Elena nodded her head toward Derek and he slunk into the restaurant. She had a lot of training with delivering nonverbal directives, working on me and Reggie all those years.