Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

Before the eel could finish, Ruth slipped her arm in the crook of Francis’s elbow and pulled him out the front door. His head came last, eyes still locked on the display. She reached into his pocket then and pulled out the keys to the Edsel. He climbed into the passenger seat without a word. Without waiting for him to fully close his door, Ruth squealed out of the parking lot, swerving into the oncoming lane as she entered the road along the southern shore. Francis didn’t ask where they were going, and in fact she didn’t know herself until they got there, to the massive marble fountain about a mile away at the western end of the island. When they arrived, she got out of the car alone and walked briskly toward the fountain. She felt propelled by a great sense of purpose, but what the purpose was, precisely, she couldn’t have said. In defiance of nature, lions and turtles together spouted a froth of water into the already humid air. Ruth stood there in silence, looking past the fountain and out over the river, toward the city. She’d known from the start that her relationship with Francis Statler was not meant to last, but it had only just occurred to her that perhaps this fact had escaped him. It was a troubling realization, but what could she do about it? All she could think was how the other girls would judge her when that time finally came.

And so they stuck together, Ruth and Francis, even after the thrill of driving had worn off, after Ruth found herself more and more often sitting cross-legged in the passenger seat on their weekend drives to Walled Lake.

The night he finally kissed her, they were at the Gratiot Drive-In. It was August, and they were about to enter their last year of high school. A group of them had caravanned up there together, and they were only a short way through Gigi when Francis put his arm around Ruth. Maybe he could sense how bored she was watching Maurice Chevalier do his shuffle in topcoat and tails, thanking heaven for little girls. As Francis leaned in, Ruth was thinking about the irony of watching such silliness in a city that had done so much to destroy the French language, turning Bois Blanc to Bob-Lo and Gratiot into Grash-it, not to mention Detroit itself. And then in a flash, Chevalier’s walking stick was replaced with Francis Statler’s nose, shiny with grease and terror.

She didn’t try to stop him. She was pleased to be done with the horses and carriages and silly parasols. And yet she couldn’t help being aware of the many eyes turned to face her. She and Francis were surrounded on all sides — Donna and Robert to her right, and she didn’t remember who else, but there had been at least five cars. Soon a cheer rose up. That was the moment Ruth pulled back, wiping the damp from her mouth. Taking Francis by the hand, she pulled him out of the car, past the box offices, and a minute later they were alone outside the theater. Alone, but it hardly felt private out there. There was so much light all around them, it felt like midafternoon. The sky pulsed at their backs with every flashing image on the screen. For Ruth, the Gratiot Drive-In wasn’t really about the movie. Especially when the movie was something like Gigi . There were plenty of places closer to home: the Bel-Air, the Eastside, the Ford-Wyoming, the Town. But none of them had what the Gratiot had, the movie screen built onto a one-hundred-fifteen-foot tower, from the top of which, on the highway side, cascaded an actual waterfall — the spray illuminated by a kaleidoscope of colored bulbs. It was both beautiful and absurd, surely the world’s only liquid marquee. It was the spectacle she marveled over, the ambition so peculiarly placed. It was said the construction had cost four hundred thousand dollars. Ridiculous! But could she say the money had been poorly spent? Here she was, after all, gazing up at the red and yellow mist. And as they stood by the railing in front of the pool into which the water fell, Ruth saw that Francis Statler was trembling. At first she thought he’d somehow gotten wet. But that wasn’t it, and it wasn’t just nerves anymore, either. Although it might have flattered her to think so, she understood he wasn’t shaken by an overwhelming passion. He was miserable. Leaning against the rail, she pulled him toward her, and he collapsed onto her shoulder.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “It’s okay.” That was the moment it occurred to her to wonder if perhaps all of this wasn’t complicated for him, too, and in ways she couldn’t imagine.

When they got back to the car, the others were poised for celebration. Good old Francis had finally done it. Even the other girls looked upon Ruth with respectful warmth, as if she’d now proven she would not hurt this gentle boy no one else wanted.

At Ruth’s insistence, Francis Statler took the wheel, and the others marked his triumph by making him lead the way to the Totem Pole, grandmaster of their small parade. Ruth squeezed next to Francis on the bench seat, their bodies combined into one shadow, but down in her lap, where no one else could see, Francis’s hand had gone limp.

At the Totem Pole, Francis ordered a burger, but he seemed distracted, and Ruth had to be the one to remind the waitress to bring his customary extra pickles. As the other boys squeezed his shoulders and mussed his hair and called him Casanova, Francis contorted his bendy straw into unrecognizable shapes. Stuffed beside him in the overcrowded booth, Ruth quietly sucked on a cherry-flavored ginger ale, a drink she loathed but had ordered anyway, feeling somehow it was what she deserved. With every sip, her tongue became more sharply preserved in the cloying, medicinal sweetness. And when the glass was empty, she realized she’d inadvertently erased every trace of Francis Statler’s kiss from her lips.

For the rest of the night, she clung to his side, smiling whenever he looked her way, but there were no more kisses. At eleven, Francis pulled up to the curb in front of Ruth’s house, the Edsel still running. With lowered eyes he wished her goodnight. Francis lived on Balmoral too, the biggest house in the neighborhood, an eight-bedroom colonial with presidential-looking columns and an English garden in the back. Ruth’s father passed the Statler mansion every morning on his way to work, never tiring of the view.

Ruth’s house had a circular drive, but Francis never used it. He seemed to prefer having a buffer of yard between him and her front door, as if he were afraid of falling within her father’s reach. She could have told him there was nothing to fear, that Ruth’s father worshipped the Statlers, that Francis himself could do no wrong. But that was something Francis could never know. Ruth let her fingers linger on the door handle, giving Francis one more chance to take the cherry from her lips, but his gaze would not budge from his lap.

The summer faded into fall, and fall quickly dissolved into winter. All at once, it seemed, the excursions to the club to swim and play tennis were replaced with parades downtown and skating at the pond at Palmer Park. A week before Christmas, Ruth and Donna took a bus downtown to buy presents for Francis and for Richard, Donna’s new boyfriend. The city had painted the bus in white and red stripes, like a candy cane, and the driver wore a matching vest. Ruth knew she was too old for such things, and she made a point of rolling her eyes at Donna as they boarded, but secretly the one time she loved to ride the bus was at Christmas, high above the snow and slush, watching the tinkling lights and laurels strung from all the buildings. Nothing made her more sentimental than Christmas, and Christmas at Hudson’s Department Store most of all.

Every year after Thanksgiving when she was a child, Ruth had gone with her mother to Hudson’s to do the Christmas shopping. At any other time, she would beg and plead to stay home, dreading the boredom and exhaustion, dragging bags up and down twenty-something stuffy floors. But at Christmas everything changed. Hudson’s became a place of infinite possibilities and endless riches magically transformed: a life-size diorama of carolers floating from the ceiling amid a dusting of snow; a frosty Cinderella descending an icy path to a twinkling carriage; holly wreaths and floating angels and chandeliers done up like ornaments. Ruth could remember being eight years old and sitting in her very own chair beside her mother in the Christmas card shop on the ninth floor, flipping through the catalogs, imagining the day when all this would be hers. And now it was. Ruth and Donna were women now. For the very first time, they were here to shop for men.