Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

“Joey Ramone couldn’t lick Kurt Cobain’s shoes.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen him live.”

Her eyes popped. “You saw the Ramones live?”

“What?” I said again, and fought the sudden urge to climb onto my father’s lap, wheeze whiskey breath in his face, force him to see me.

“Saw them?” He gave Lacey a patented Jimmy Dexter smile. “I opened for them.”

“You were in a band?” I said. No one was listening. No one was offering me a gallant hand, either, so I pulled myself upright, and tried not to puke.

“You opened for the Ramones ?” That was Lacey’s Kurt voice; that was awe.

“Well. . not technically.” Another smile, an aw shucks shrug. “We played in the parking lot before the Ravers, and they opened for the Ramones. It got us into the after-party, though. Did a shot with Johnny.”

“Lacey was in a band,” I said. Lacey had told me all about it, the Pussycats, like the cartoon, all girls, guitar straps slung over their shoulders, Lacey tonguing the mic, sweaty hair matted to her face, crowd-surfing on a wave of love. Never again, she’d told me, never here in Battle Creek, never anywhere. “The fact that we’ve even heard of grunge all the way out here in the middle of nowhere?” Lacey had said. “It’s like those stars, the ones that explode so far away that by the time you get the news, they’ve been dead for a million years. We’re too late. We missed it. Only the truly pathetic pretend to be artists by making something that’s already made. And I do not intend to be pathetic.”

I was jealous of Lacey’s band, of those girls who’d been her Pussycats, but glad, too, because I couldn’t be in any band, obviously, and if she’d started a new one it would have carried her away from me.

“Tell him about your band, Lacey.”

But she didn’t want to tell him, or didn’t hear me. “What was he like ?” she said. Breathed the name. “ Johnny Ramone. ”

“Drunk. And he smelled like dog shit, but man, he gave me one of his guitar picks and I thought I’d build a shrine to that thing.”

“Can I see it?” Lacey asked.

My father reddened, slightly. “Lost it on the way home.”

I cleared my throat. “When were you in a band ? And how did I not know this?”

He shrugged. “Long time ago, kid. Different life.”

My mother listened to music only in the car, and then only to Rod Stewart, Michael Bolton, and, if she was feeling frisky, the Eagles. My father, when he drove, alternated between sports radio and silence. We had a stereo no one ever used and a box of records in the basement so warped with damp they’d been deemed unfit for the previous year’s yard sale. For the Dexter family, music was a nonissue. Except that now my father was talking about it the way Lacey did, like music was his religion, and it turned him into a stranger.

“How did a guy like you spawn someone so musically illiterate?” she asked.

“I ask myself that every day,” he said.

“No, I don’t buy it. You see what this means, Dex? It’s in you somewhere. You just needed me to help you get it out.”

It was a generous assessment. Everyone knew I took after my mother: the beige and blotchy coloring, the stick up the ass. But if Lacey saw him in me, there must have been something to see.

“Dex? That supposed to be you, kid?” My father examined me, looking for evidence of her.

“No offense, Mr. Dexter, but Hannah’s a shit name,” Lacey said.

“Call me Jimmy. And no offense taken. It was her mother’s idea. I always thought it sounded like a little old lady.”

Lacey laughed. “Exactly.”

That my father never liked my name: This was another thing I hadn’t known. I’d thought he called me kid because he wanted to claim a piece of me no one else could.

“But Dex? Yeah, I like that,” he said.

Dex was supposed to be our secret, a code name for the thing that was growing between us and the person she was shaping me to be. But if Lacey was ready to introduce her to the world, I thought, she must have her reasons.

“That’s right,” I said. “Dex. Spread the word.”

“Your mother’s going to love this,” he murmured, and it was clear the thought of it pleased him as much as the name itself.

“So, Jimmy, maybe you’d like to hear some real music,” Lacey said. “Dex has a copy of Bleach around here somewhere. At least she’d better.”

He looked at me, clearly trying to read the stay or go in my face, but I couldn’t send a message I didn’t have.

“Another time,” he said finally, slipping his sunglasses back on. “ The Ten Thousand Dollar Pyramid is calling my name.” He paused on his way up the stairs. “Oh, and Dex , you might want to wash out that glass before your mother comes home.”

So he had noticed, after all. And he was still on my side.

“You didn’t tell me your dad was cool ,” Lacey said once he was gone. It was like a benediction, and most of me was proud.

AFTERNOONS AT MY PLACE BECAME, at Lacey’s instigation, a regular thing, and it was only a matter of time before my mother insisted we have “this Lacey” over for dinner, so she could see for herself this miracle worker who had her husband digging through the attic for his guitar and her daughter into what appeared to be a trucker’s castoff wardrobe.

“Mom’s going to be all weird, isn’t she?” I said, as my father and I sorted through the stack of Publishers Clearing House stickers. My father was the family’s designated dreamer, the buyer of lottery tickets and keeper of an ever-growing list of inventions he’d never build. It was, he always said, why he’d never taken what my mother called a real job. Only make-your-own-hours employment — like his current gig managing Battle Creek’s only movie theater — afforded him the free time he needed to fulfill his yen for get-rich-quick scheming.

This particular scheme had been our shared private ritual for years, since the days when I thought carefully licking those stamps and sealing the envelope with a lucky kiss might actually summon the oversized million-dollar check to our doorstep. I’d long since lost the slip of paper carefully inscribed with all the treasures I’d buy when I was rich, but I liked the mint chocolate chip ice cream that came along with the tradition, and the way my mother wasn’t part of it. There was music playing now, which wasn’t part of it, either, but my father said that the Cure was a universal cure for what ailed us. Wait till Lacey gets here, he said. She gets it.

She was due in an hour. My mother had made lasagna, the one thing she knew how to cook.

“Go easy on your mother, kid. I think one thing we can agree she’s not is weird .”

He was right: Normal was her religion. She’d never implied that she wanted me to be popular — the impossibility of that probably spoke for itself — but she encouraged me, at every turn, to fit in, to be careful, to save my mistakes for later. “You’ll have more to lose when you’re older, but at least then you’ll have something left when you lose it,” she told me once while we were flipping through photo albums, old ones that showed her awkwardly jutting into adolescence, bulging in all the wrong places, only a single page turn between apple-cheeked college freshman and bleary-eyed mother with an infant on her caftanned hip, as if all the pages that should have been between had fallen out, and maybe that was how she felt about her life, that something had gone missing. “The younger you are, the easier it is to give everything away.”

Dinner was a fright show. The four of us in the wood-paneled dining room huddled at one lonely corner of the long table we never used, pushing around burnt lasagna on chipped Kmart plates, my mother scowling every time a mist of garlic bread crumbs floated from Lacey’s mouth onto the plastic tablecloth, Lacey pretending not to notice, too busy fielding rapid-fire questions about her mother’s job and her stepfather’s church and her nonexistent college plans, each of them more excruciatingly conventional than the last, all of them humiliating enough — but nothing compared to the withering look on my mother’s face when I volunteered that I’d also been thinking about taking a year off after graduation, because, like Lacey said, college had been co-opted by a capitalist system only invested in producing more drones for its financial machine, and my mother said, “Stop showing off.”