Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

“Uh-oh. What did you tell her?”

“The old standby: Huh? ‘You heard me’, she says. ‘Did you bring her here to fuck, too? I know when you’re with other girls. I can smell them on you. It changes my period. I see what you do in my dreams’. Does that sound a little spooky?” Stosh asked.

“Perfectly normal,” I said, not adding that any number of things about Dahl seemed spooky. She’d once threatened to light herself on fire if they broke up.

“So, trying to salvage Baha‘i, I say, ‘Look, let’s just inhabit the present, drink some vino.’ And she says, ‘Yeah, inhabit the present,’ and when I pass her the vino she takes a long swig, then spits it in my face and clocks me with the bottle. Dahl’s a violent person.”

“Couldn’t convert her to the peaceful Baha’i way: a little unity in oneness and diversity, eh?”

“Not when she’s trying to brain me with a bottle, screaming, ‘I’m not some little twat born yesterday.’”

“You know, that’s got a certain ring to it. Could be a hit.”

“ Little Twat Born Yesterday? ”

“No, Unity in Oneness and Diversity. ”

Sudden swells, perhaps from some enormous freighter that had passed long before and too far out for us to see, were slowly washing us back toward shore. Stosh, floating on his back, was singing in a falsetto voice meant to imitate black girl singers. Gulls yipped. I added a bass line.

Unity and oneness in diversity

dum dum dum dum …

A little twat born yesterday …

I checked the beach for our piled clothes. They were covered by sandpipers.

Baha’i was our final destination on prom night. Laurel and I were supposed to have met up there with Dahl and Stosh after the Blue Note. Stosh and I had loaded towels, blankets, and three bottles of Lancers into the trunk of the Merc. The wine would chill in the lake while we gathered driftwood for a fire on the beach. In the darkness, the illuminated dome would rise over the dune as if the temple housed a moon.

“We can swim, drink wine, dance by the fire,” Stosh said, “stay up all night …”

“Until Gary, Indiana, rises in the east,” I told him.

It sounded perfect, especially since Laurel had said she wouldn’t go to the same old places crowded with promsters. She said the only thing she liked about proms — or funerals or weddings, for that matter — was the flowers. I couldn’t tell if she meant that literally, but I ordered a corsage just in case.

I didn’t mention the beach. I wanted to surprise her the way I’d been surprised with the sight of the glowing temple. If we went for a night swim, I hoped she wouldn’t mind not having a swimsuit.

I spent the entire day of the prom working on my father’s Rambler. First, I removed the customized carriers he’d attached to the roof. He used them to haul scrap from demolition sites to our backyard for possible use later in repairs on the six-flat he owned. It was a standard set of carriers from Sears that he’d strengthened with two-by-fours and secured to the roof with a complex system of duct tape, coat hangers, and ropes that ran up from the bumpers. Removing the carriers exposed a roof covered in black suction marks that were baked into the slime-green paint as if the Rambler had done battle with a giant squid, an impression reinforced by the smell of smoked fish exhaled by the trunk. My father delivered smoked chubs and kielbasa on weekends for my uncle Vincent’s meat market, and I couldn’t eradicate the smell despite applications of undiluted Pine-Sol.

I gave up on the roof and trunk and slid under the car to wire a second coat hanger behind the one my father had already used to secure the dragging muffler. Next, I tried to turn off the heater — my father believed that riding with the heater blasting even in summer saved wear on the engine — but it was stuck. I vacuumed the seats, Windexed, mopped, hosed, and applied numerous coats of Turtle Wax. The cleaner the Rambler got, the worse it looked for trying.

By now I was sweating, not with exertion, but in desperation. I’d lost sight of the image of the beach at Baha’i, and cursed myself for getting into this. I’d never intended to go to the prom. I’d come to hate high school in general and St. Augustine’s in particular, especially after they’d expelled Angel. Instead of spiffing up the Rambler, I should have been spray-painting SAINT A’S SUCKS across the hood. It was only because Laurel had surprised us both by agreeing to be my date that I was going through this agony.

It would have been easier if, instead of meeting later with Stosh and Dahl, we were all going together in the Merc, but I knew that wasn’t an option. There was a powerful aloofness about Dahl. She was tall and athletic looking — lean, not willowy — and the way her long hair fell across her face, as if she was peeking past a blond curtain, gave Dahl the look of one of those Swedish actresses who utter, “I vant to be alone.”

Stosh and Dahl were too unpredictable together. They could be private, almost secretive, her finger hooked through a belt loop of his jeans, their faces close together, partly hidden in her hair, speaking in whispers. Or they could fall silent, pointedly ignoring each other before erupting in an argument. Even when they were getting along, they brought out a craziness in each other; there was a continual sense of dare between them. They’d been arguing, breaking up, and getting back together since freshman year, when Dahl had sent Stosh a letter on a sheet of threering loose-leaf paper she’d decorated along the margins with drawings of vines and flowers.

Oh last night when you held me in your arms your kisses took my soul away and I knew I would love you forever. I want you to hold me like that again, to kiss me, to fuck me.

xxx, Dahlia

Stosh had shown me the letter in the locker room after a boxing practice that had left me with a bloody nose. “What are you going to do?” I asked, astonished.

“Double Trojans and a tube of rubber cement,” he said.

The last time they’d broken up was in winter, on a night, driving around with Angel in the backseat, when Dahl went nuts about being outvoted on the choice of radio stations, smashed her boot heel into the radio, then tried to brand Stosh with the car lighter.

She’d called Stosh out of the blue a couple weeks before the prom, and as always they started up again. Dahl warned him that she wouldn’t be wearing anything under her prom dress, and that after the dance she wanted him, wearing his tuxedo, to screw her on the edge of the roof of St. Augustine High.

“As long as my tux comes with a safety belt,” Stosh told her.

“No safety belt and no net,” she’d answered.

Even at my lowest point with the Rambler, I knew that doubling with Stosh would have been a bad idea.

Instead of renting formal wear, I wore a tux that, along with my tenor saxophone, I’d inherited from Uncle Lefty. He’d once played for weddings in a combo called the Gents. I hadn’t realized until I unfolded it that it wasn’t a tux: It had tails. I tried pinning them up and I tried tucking them into the trousers, but neither worked. By then I was running late. I stopped by the florist and picked up the orchid corsage I’d ordered, then, flooring it, drove, as much like a speed demon as was possible in the Rambler, to Laurel’s neighborhood.

She lived out toward Midway Airport, and I promptly got lost in a maze of side streets. When I finally pulled up beside the bungalow with her address, Laurel, shouting something over her shoulder, slammed out of her front door before I could get out of the car. She looked flushed, and I had the feeling she’d just been arguing. True to her word, she wasn’t wearing a typical prom gown. Her dress was silky black with thin shoulder straps, and it clung to her slim body. She wore a single strand of pearls, and pearls were threaded through her hair, which was up in the way that had thrown me into a trance on the Archer bus before I ever knew her name.