Welcome to the Winter Club
Let’s say you grow up in Connecticut. On weekends, you and your Dad go fishing in the Long Island Sound. You use sliced-up bunker for bait, forcing the oily pieces of flesh into the silver hooks at the end of your rods. Mom stays home and cooks meatloaf with mashed potatoes, milk gravy and peas. She wears a little yellow apron and puts on pink lipstick and combs her hair just before your father comes home.
You also have a grandmother and she has a house in Madison, Connecticut right there by the ocean. You visit her there every summer, stay through July and August in her house by the beach, swimming and running and flirting with all those pretty prepubescent Madison girls, especially the ones who stay all year long, long after the summer people have abandoned their rentals. No, these girls stay through the ice and snow. They belong to The Madison Winter Club. That’s the club reserved only for the families with the heat and the insulation and the money. You like The Winter Club girls whose daddies own their companies–the Purina Cat Chow Twins, the Gulf & Western Girl. You like the daughter of the man who created The Marlboro Man. You are only fourteen years old, and some days you can’t help but run down the beach, behind these girls and grab at their bathing suit bottoms, pulling them down, laughing and screaming as they fall onto the sand, crying at the indignity of it all, struggling with the wet fabric, while you howl and point at their fine white bottoms quaking, suddenly exposed to the bright heat of the mid-day sun. You cannot help but stop for a fraction of a second to notice how the tan lines clearly delineate what has seen the light and what has been kept hidden in the dark.
Later at night, you lie in your bed at your Grandmother’s house and you dream about all those bottoms on the beach, all white and curved and perfect. Pale moons against the sky, so close you could almost put your hands out and touch them, kiss them, do other things to them that you can’t even begin to explain, except that it involves punishment. You don’t know why they deserve to be punished. All you know is that your mouth grows dry and you feel a deep pull in your groin. Your room with the wallpaper full of pretty pictures of tiny space ships shooting up into the night sky, leaving a trailing burst of red flames as they circle the green and yellow and blue planets of Saturn and Jupiter, Uranus and Mars, is getting awfully hot and humid and sticky. You throw off the sheets and you want to do something. Anything. Spank their rich-girl bottoms. Or tie them up. Or turn those girls over on their backs, five or eight or fifteen of them at a time, pull down their panties, way down around their knees and get them helpless, squealing, crying, giggling, all at once. And the sound is deafening. A great big Madison, Connecticut girl-chorus of laughter and screams, and flailing legs and arms and long straight hair whipping up and about your face, as the screaming get louder and louder and the giggles grow and grow, completely uncontrollable—until you wake up the next morning in a big, messy, sticky puddle.
And then one day, tragedy strikes.
But not quite yet. It’s still the middle of summer and you are just discovering the beauty of fifteen-year-old Amy Whittlemen. Amy of the Madison Country Club. Amy of the Ivory Soap so pure it floats fortune. Amy of St. Michael’s on the Green. The only Catholic church in Madison. Amy of The Five and Dime, buying Lick-a-Maids, Charleston Chews, Tootsie Rolls. Amy licking ice cream off her fingers. Amy’s wet pink tongue swirling down her thumb to her wrist to catch the slender trail of melted strawberry.
You have a job helping out at Jolly’s soda fountain/pharmacy. You are too young to have a real job, so Mr. Jolly (yes, that’s really his name) pays you under the table to scoop out ice cream cones for the summer tourists, the young mothers and their kids, for the girls in the bathing suits with the bottoms you dream about, and to the fathers coming to join their families at the shore for the weekend—dark suit jackets slung over their shoulders, white shirts damp and wrinkled, sweat dripping down their temples, ties loosened, their jaws gone all slack as they walk off the 5:07 New York/New Haven line from Grand Central, arriving two hours later in Madison and finally walking into Jolly’s, drenched in sweat, ordering a single vanilla cone.
But not yet. It is only two p.m. and the idea of crumpled grown-up men with their five o’clock shadows, coming home for the weekend is only a dream. Right now, your father is far, far away in New York City in his office at the Texaco Oil Company. Your father sits behind his big oak desk. He calls his secretary via intercom, asking her to come into his office because he wants to dictate a letter. This is what your father is doing right now. When his whispered voice comes over the intercom, his secretary, a redhead named Susan, just out of Smith, giggles and the other secretaries smile because it’s Susan’s turn to be chosen, requested, selected–to leave the secretarial pool, and go into the private lair of her boss’s office. Susan, the secretary from Smith, stands up and slides the heavy manual Underwood back into the desk, discreetly reaches underneath her skirt and adjusts her garters and stockings, nods to the other secretaries staying behind in the secretarial pool, and brings her Gregg shorthand notebook into the office, where she sits, crosses her legs and bows her head, almost as if she’s in prayer, her number two pencil, freshly sharpened and poised on lined paper, ready to take dictation from your father, who is humming the Texaco theme song, you can trust your car to, the man who wears the star—the big, bright Texaco star.
This means you are alone–the only male in a house full of women. “The Man of the House, while I’m away,” your father tells you. “Watch the women-folk,” he adds as if the two of you are living inside a tiny black and white television set with The Lone Ranger and his faithful companion, Tonto.
The women-folk are all in their proper places, you think. Your mother is sleeping. These days, your mother is always sleeping. She is either sleeping in the bedroom or she is sleeping in the sun, wearing a navy blue and white checkered two-piece that she bought last week at Read’s. She has forgotten how to cook. She has misplaced her apron and lost the recipe for meatloaf. She has taken up smoking, leaving her Winston filtered stubs inside a shotglass she keeps on the bathroom windowsill, which she usually dumps out down the toilet to flush the evidence before your father comes home, but sometimes she forgets. She has taken wearing black high-heeled pumps around the house and a blue silk kimono that doesn’t reach to her knees. Sometimes it falls open and you see her naked white flesh and you think about crawling into the basement where the lawnmower and a can of gasoline is kept and setting fire to the house.
But for now, it is two o’clock and she is upstairs sleeping in her underwear and you are sitting on the duvet in the screened in porch with your grandmother. Your sisters, Sylvia who is ten and Margie who is eight, are playing with their Barbies on the back lawn. The Dream House is split open like a giant pink shell spilling out its shiny contents–plastic high heeled pumps, silk dresses the size of your thumb, a purple rain slicker, miniature white go-go boots. The convertible Barbie-mobile is parked next to the rusting swing set, and waiting for Barbie, who is naked and pink and not thinking about marriage or children or cooking dinner, but only about parties and pretty dresses and boys like Ken, who is presently dressed in Barbie’s white capris pants with no top, his smooth, bare chest exposed. Your sisters are changing Barbie’s clothes in a jungle of high grass that your father may or may not mow this weekend.
You turn away from your sisters, who will not allow you to touch Barbie–not that you have admitted to wanting to touch Barbie–but because you have recently discovered the miracle of numbers. You have discovered infinity. It is very good. This infinity business. Your father has taken you to the astronomy club in Hammanassett, where you stood beside him in the close confines of the observatory and stared up at the night sky through a telescope. He pointed up and named the constellations for you, linking the stars like connect-a-dots in the sky until everything in the universe made perfect sense.
You play solitaire on rainy days and sometimes, like today, when it’s too hot to go to the beach, you play Gin Rummy with your grandmother. Your grandmother owns the house. It has been in her family for generations. She is the house–a Victorian clapboard, freshly painted blue with white trim and huge thick white pillars in the front, with a complicated lattice work circling the entire bottom parameter of the house, covering the secret crawl space beneath the front yard steps.
She is a tall woman and slender. She serves perfect homemade lemon/sugar cookies on Wedgewood china made in England and iced tea that is so sweet it makes your teeth hurt. She holds her cards in front of her face as if they were an expensive silk fan. Her hands are a wrinkled map of purple veins, protruding up from brown weathered flesh. She is the president of The Winter Club, stays there in Madison all year long because she has the heat, the insulation and the money. But, she’s suffered too. Her husband died when she was still a new bride, leaving her alone in this great big beautiful house. It’s good to know someone like your grandmother. You are not just an ordinary summer person. You are practically a member of The Winter Club.
“Your turn,” she tells you.
You wait a moment. A pregnant pause. And then you slap down an overturned card. You look up at your Grandmother. She is not your grandmother in this moment. She is just a woman and you are about to beat her.
You take your time. You may be even smiling when you carefully, thoughtfully place down your cards and pronounce with not one note of irony or pity, “Gin, Grandma. I win.” You have an eight of diamonds, a seven and a six. You have a three of kings. This leaves only a two of spades.
“I win,” you sigh, almost but not quite feeling sorry for her.
Your grandmother nods her head and acquiesces, expressionless, but this is not good enough for you “Show me your cards, Grandma,” you tell her.
She is fingering the cards, folding them, turning them over. “No,” she tells you.
“Come on,” you say, now softer. “I’m sure it’s not that bad. Show me your cards.”
“Why?” she asks you.
“Because,” you say. “I want to see them.”
“You want to see? You won, isn’t that enough?”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” you say again, reaching out, touching her hand. “Please. It can’t be that bad.”
And she shows you. She has four queens and three jacks. She has complete gin. And it dawns on you that you have lost to your grandmother. There is a word sputtering on your lips, bursting to get out, and find some release. The word is bitch. But, it gets stuck on your tongue and all you can do is wipe the spittle from the aborted word and grab the cards. And in doing so, you accidentally, maybe on purpose, turn over the table, spilling the iced tea. You stand up as lemon cookies tip over and fall from their china plate and roll and spin off the porch and onto the green green grass below. And you? You quickly exit the scene.
Later that afternoon, you are at Jolly’s scooping out ice cream, reaching down into the half-filled barrel of butter pecan which is always half melted no matter where you place it in the freezer. It’s a gooey mess and sticks mercilessly to the scooper, but this is what the out-of-towners, the summer people, like to order. It’s getting late and the 5:07 train out of Grand Central Station is rumbling from the City to the Country. It’s somewhere outside of Port Chester and the men have taken off their jackets and loosened their ties and settled into the unairconditioned cars on the New Haven line, reading vertically folded up copies of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, drinking gin and tonics, smoking cigarettes in the bar car, some falling asleep, slumped into the dark burgundy velvet seats, their mouths grown slack, opened, a tiny snake of drool escaping out of one side of their lips, their hands nestled between their legs, holding onto their private parts, as if someone might steal them in their sleep.
There at the shore, the heat has not even begun to subside, and the new air conditioner at Jolly’s is on the fritz and the lines for ice cream are unbearable, filled with little kids with sweaty palms and snotty faces pushing up against the counter. Mothers with saggy brown bellies wearing bikinis when there should be a law against it, and the goons from the local high school, taller than you, already driving cars, their muscled arms resting on their girlfriends’ shoulders as if the bones and curve of flesh are a mantelpieces in their very own living rooms.
So, get this.
It’s hot and you have to wear that goddamned bowtie and the idiot paper hat.
It’s hot and the line is now growing and curving around out the door and people are beginning to complain and the kids are whining.
It’s hot. And then Amy Whittlemen, the Ivory Soap Girl, shows up. She’s at the very back of the line, the very back. And you know she would like to get to the front of the line. She is trying to catch your eye. She is wearing that bathing suit. The new one. The faux leopard print two-piece. It matches her brand new Sting Ray bicycle, the one with the gold paint and the leopard banana seat. She is full of herself this summer. Changed. She’s got a brand new set of tits–round and perfect with little nipples, just like acorns, protruding, pressing out of that bathing suit and she doesn’t pull up the straps. No, in fact she’s bending over now, letting the pair push out further, tumble forward until your head begins to hurt. And she is adjusting something around her feet. Her flip flops? No, that isn’t it. It’s some kind of ankle bracelet. Yeah. Some ankle bracelet that another townie bought for her. Some guys she’s knows from school, who ignored her for years, until this summer, when she suddenly blossomed. Maybe Bob Shea. Bastard. He’s working his way in, you think. Slowly, but surely. So that by the end of summer he’ll have whipped Amy up to a nice frothy mix. She’ll be all breathless and wet, waiting, in love, thinking Bob Shea. Oh, that Bob Shea. What a perfect gentleman. Bob Shea–he actually lives in Madison all year long. His family has been members of The Madison Winter Club for twenty years. A nice Catholic boy. His Daddy owns the Ford Motors Dealership. He drives. He plays football. He takes me out to dinner at the Chowder Pot. He buys me ankle bracelets.
And then, at the end of the season dance at The Madison Country Club, Bob Shea will take Amy Whittlemen out to the beach. It’ll be dark, and the waves will come rolling in, salty and white and wet under the moon. She’ll be giggling, because she’s drunk, not so much from all the sips of Bourbon–stolen from Bob Shea’s daddy’s liquor cabinet and poured into a silver flask he inherited from his Grandfather who practically invented the combustion engine–but rather drunk from the closeness of Bob Shea. Bob Shea pushing his thick body up against her body on the dance floor. Bob Shea pulling her head into his chest, holding it there, touching her cheeks. Bob Shea slowly moving his hardening groin up against pretty Amy Whittlemen. And Amy getting drunk from the heat and closeness of a boy who is rich and tall and full of a kind of confidence that you only get when you’re the first born son of Bob Shea, owner of Shea (We want to put you in a Ford) Motors.
Wafer cones begin breaking, snapping in your hand. Even the sugar cones are crumbling. Ice cream is mysteriously losing its staying power. The hot fudge has gone gooey and cold. You’re out of chocolate shots. The strawberry syrup is running low. No one knows where the bananas are kept anymore. Jolly is screaming at you from the grill, “Pick up! Pick up! Pick up!”
And Amy Whittlemen is at the end of the line. She’s standing up straight now, fingering the little gold sliver of a cross around her neck, licking her pouty cherry-stained lips with that wet pink tongue of her’s, smiling at you with those blue-blue eyes, and rubbing sand off of her left shoulder.
You are not sure whether you want to kiss her or kill her And then suddenly, there she is, standing right before you in the bright light of Jolly’s Soda Fountain. Pure and white and sweet and clean, she practically floats. And the cone suddenly snaps right in your hand. The vanilla scoop violently bursts out, shooting a huge spurt of ice cream onto the floor, leaving you with melted vanilla dribbling haphazardly, embarrassingly down your right wrist.
The little kid with the grubby paws, extended in front of you, waiting for his cone, starts wailing, “Mommy! Mommy!”
And his mother with the sagging brown belly gives you this look. “Can’t you make a decent ice cream cone?” she asks. And you can’t give her any lip, because she’s a friend of your grandmother’s and practically runs the Junior League.
There is laughter at the end of the line, and Bob Shea arrives and you look up and then down at your hand, still wet with ice cream, then up again. And they are gone. Amy Whittlemen is gone.
In the meantime, the 5:07 train is rumbling past the salt marshes outside of Rowayton, Darien, Noroton Heights, Westport. Your father is having trouble breathing. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s something else.
At home, your mother is waking up from her nap. She is smoking a cigarette in the bathroom. She is perched on the windowsill, naked now, arms extended out the open window, a long thin stream of smoke spilling out and disappearing into space. Your grandmother is downstairs making peach cobblers. Your sisters are in the Five and Dime, buying Barbie accessories. Your father is having trouble breathing. He is huffing and puffing. He is unbuttoning buttons. He is taking off his tie. He is unbuckling his belt. Nothing is helping. He cannot breathe.
And Amy is gone. Gone. And Bob Shea is gone. They’re gone together.
No. Amy is back. And she’s alone. She’s standing in front of you. Hair tangled and blonde. Tan. Belly flat. Blue-blue eyes. Gold cross at neck. And breasts. Breasts. Breasts. Two of them. Creamy and brown. Mocha.
She is staring at you. She is spitting out words. What are they?
“Hey, Tommy, what’s the matter with you anyway. Are you like a retard?”
“Wha–what do you mean?” you ask, the vanilla now drying stiffly in the palm of your hand.
“I mean this line–what’s the deal?”
“I’m all alone here,” you say. “I mean, there’s no help today. I’m on my own.”
Amy Whittlemen lowers her eyes, then opens them wide and stares right into you. She puts one hand on her hip and brings the other hand up to her gold cross around her neck. She fingers it and then cocks her head to one side. “Tommy,” she whispers, leaning forward, letting go of the hip and the cross. She places her elbows on the counter and extends her legs straight out behind her, her bottom pushed up, the small of her back curved, her breasts lowered down so far in front of you, as if she were offering them up to you on a communion platter.
A guy with his suit jacket slung over his shoulder and his hat tipped way back on his sweaty forehead, shouts from the end of the line, “hey man, what’s the deal?”
“Come on! Please,” a woman in a faded green bathing suit moans.
“I want ice creeeeeaaaammm!” a toddler screams.
“Tommy,” Amy whispers. “I’ll give you a kiss if you give me a strawberry cone.”
“She cut!” someone shouts.
“Yeah!”
“It’s not fair!”
“Tommy,” she whispers more urgently this time, touching the tips of your fingers with the tips of her fingers, sending an electric current up your hand, your arm, under your chest, down through the right side of your body, into your heart, blood pumping to your groin.
“Tommy,” she whispers again.
“No,” you say. You are holding your ground. You tell yourself this is a matter of principle. What is right and what is wrong. Democracy. The American Way. The rights of the people. You know your Pledge of Allegiance. You’ve asked yourself what you can do for your Country, and not what your Country can do for you.
Amy Whittleman has a pink tongue and she is licking the tip of her two front teeth. And the sight of it, this tongue, those teeth are driving something in you, something pulsating and big and forceful, steady and rumbling straight ahead on a steel track.
And on the 5:07 train out of Grand Central Station, your father is gasping for breath.
But, Amy Whittlemen is leaning forward, her bare thighs pressed up against the counter.
Your mother is pouring herself a glass of 7up.
Amy Whittleman is holding her ground before you.
And your grandmother is standing by the oven. The thick smell of burnt sugar and peaches fills the kitchen.
And Amy Whittlemen will not take no for an answer.
Meanwhile, your sisters are walking home with a box of plastic high heel Barbie pumps in assorted colors, eating penny candy, spoiling their appetite for dinner.
And Amy Whittlemen is kissing you. Hooking you with her slippery mouth, opening to swallow you whole.
Still, despite this and the sugared air all around you, and the smell of salt water clinging to the damp tips of Amy Whittleman’s hair and the slightly yeasty smell of her neck, you say no. Not no to the kiss. You like the kiss, but you say no to the ice cream.
You say no to cutting in front of Mr. Schultz who owns the dry cleaning store, and Suzie Baker who lives two blocks away from your grandmother’s house and is cross-eyed and uglier than sin, and Bob Daniels who once told you to get the hell off his lawn, and Mrs. Simmons, the town Divorcee, who owns a lot scratchy jazz lps with photographs of old black men on the cover. You’ve seen her, sometimes late at night drinking on her porch in the dark. You’ve heard the stories–how she reportedly had to be removed from the A&P’s produce department last summer because she stood in front of the melons for forty-five minutes crying and talking to God, after her husband left her for the babysitter. She is invisible to everyone in the line, in the entire town in fact, but you can see her and she is staring right at you and she is waving her hand. It looks like a small white bird fluttering in the air, and for a second you imagine that a dove has flown into the store.
“You, fucker.” Amy Whittleman whispers this to you so quietly, so softly, that you are not sure you even heard it right. She has just removed her lips from yours and her face is inches away. You can feel the molecules in the air reconfigure themselves as she pulls away from you. A drop of salt water slips from the tip of her hair and drops on the back of your hand. You stare at Amy’s face, her blue-blue eyes, her eyelashes silvery and wet.
“What did you say?”
You heard what she said. You heard exactly what she said, but somewhere in your brain you believe that if she repeats it, it will
come out differently this time. But the word sticks there in the thickened air, into infinity, replicating itself over and over again.
Amy is looking up at the crowd behind her. It’s quiet now, waiting for an Event. Something even better than Mrs. Simmons being forcibly removed from the produce aisle at the A&P. Amy searches the crowd. Looks at the faces staring back at her. Too bad Bob Shea isn’t here at this moment to come forward and beat you up. That’s what you think she’s thinking. But that’s not what she’s thinking. She’s thinking about something else entirely. She’s actually thinking about her rights as an American. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “I hate you, Tommy,” she says. “You’re a regular commie,” she spits out and walks away, her pert little ass swishing as she goes.
The crowd does not cheer. The kids with their grubby paws do not throw spitballs in her direction. Their mothers do not tisk-tisk at the way girls behave today. The men in suits do not whistle low under their breath. The ice cream does not spontaneous freeze into a rock solid crystal. Jupiter does not careen into Mars.
No. Instead, Bob Daniels gives you a look, like maybe you are a commie. And then, life goes on. You serve up ice cream cones. The line grows thin. It gets dark outside.
You are walking home. It’s past eight o’clock. You pass the stores by Jolly’s, closed now, except for the local cafe/bar–Nick’s Place. The door is open and you look inside. It’s smoky in there and there are men in suits, their loosened ties, their legs spread wide and the heels of their shoes hooked into the legs of the barstools. One man has got his tie wrapped around his forehead, like a hippie, although you haven’t heard that word yet. That comes later. For now, you are thinking about Amy Whittlemen and the mysteries of time and space. Amy Whittlemen. Amy Whittlemen of the small pert breasts. Amy Whittlemen of the cross around the neck. Amy Whittlemen of the spit and fire and the Ivory Soap—99.9 percent pure. Only she’s not that pure. No, she’s really a little tramp. And you are going to get back at that Amy Whittleman. You are going to hurt her. You are not sure what you are going to do to her, just something and you find yourself walking fast. Really fast, up The Post Road, past the movie theatre and R.J. Julia Bookstore across the street, where your mother once worked for two days until they fired her for being rude to the customers. You turn the corner at East Wharf Road, making a quick cut through two backyards. You’re starting to sweat as you go toward the beach, toward Amy Whittleman’s house.
But look at this, you find yourself in front of Mrs. Simmon’s house. And Mrs. Simmons is sitting on the front porch. You can’t see her, but you can smell the cigarette smoke in the still night air, and you hear the scratchy record with the voice of an old Black man rasping, “won’t you be my salty dog?” And you hear Mrs. Simmons moaning or perhaps she is just sighing softly. You think about Mrs. Simmons in her yellow dress at the A&P. Mrs. Simmons and the dollar bills falling from her purse at Jolly’s and nobody in town bothering to help her pick them up. Mrs. Simmons of the red lipstick and the daiquiri, getting drunk and laughing too loudly at your parent’s annual barbeque last summer when the entire town of Madison decided to stop talking to her. Mrs. Simmons who finds God among melons. Mrs. Simmons all alone.
You stand there, in the darkness. Your eyes adjust slowly and you can tell she is wearing something white. Off white, really, but it glows in the dark. It is a slip with straps and a little lace running around the hem. She crosses her legs. She reaches for a silver case that rests on top of a wicker table. She flips it open and pulls out a cigarette, lights it, inhales, waits, and exhales a fat curl of blue smoke before she leans back in her chair, resting her head against the white porch column. Now you can see the outline of her breasts–heavy and full. You can see the curve of her belly. You can see her arms, pale and thin. You can see her legs crossing, then uncrossing and crossing again. You can see her bare feet and her red lacquered toenails. You can see her arm, her wrist. You can see the slim silver wristwatch around her right wrist. You can see her neck, long and white. Her hair falling around one shoulder. Auburn. Almost red.
Tommy, you are at a crossroads. You could go directly home right now, get into bed, stare up at the spaceships on the wallpaper until you feel like exploding. Or you could run to Amy Whittlemen’s house, climb into her second story bedroom and slip into her bed, crawl on top of her, pin her wrists down to the bed. Hope she doesn’t scream, and do it to her. It? Something, Tommy. Just something.
Or, here. Right now, you could ask Mrs. Simmons if she’s got the right time. You could ask her for a glass of iced tea. Two nickels and a dime. A beach towel. A shovel. A transistor radio. A pack of playing cards. A box of corn flakes. A glass of lemonade. A game of gin rummy.
But somewhere in your brain, there’s a train rattling down the tracks just outside of Stratford, heading for Milford. Shifting and grinding along the steel. And your father is barely breathing. Sweat is streaming from his forehead. His tie is gone. His shirt is open. A man in a gray suit, who works for Harper and Row, is holding him, calling for the conductor. Your father is turning red, then blue. The conductor is nowhere to be seen. The men in suits are shouting now. No one seems to know what to do.
“Breathe, man.”
“Take it easy.”
“Open the window for godsake!”
Your father’s eyes roll backwards. His legs are splayed. The conductor arrives. Your father is breathing, breathing. Just barely breathing.
And you, Tommy, you are having trouble breathing too and then, Mrs. Simmons calls out into the dark, “is someone there?”
You consider telling her that it’s God. Yes, God is talking to her from the bushes.
But you don’t.
“Yes, it’s me, Mrs. Simmons,” you answer. “It’s Tommy Williams.”
“Tommy?” she whispers, moving out of the shadows, standing between the columns now, her body framed in back light; she looks like a saint, with her arms out, her palms open. “Tommy from Jolly’s?”
“Yes, Mrs. Simmons,” you say, now walking forward, up the path, standing below her at the foot of the stairs. There are four steps altogether. An easy climb. But, you stay there, at the bottom of the steps, because there is something about her beauty, the slip, the pale light, her slender arms, outstretched. The cigarette smoke streaming up from a little dish to her right. The glass with her drink, sweating beads of clear liquid. “I was just walking by–on my way home,” you say. “And I heard the music.”
She smiles. “You like it?”
“Yes,” you say.
She reaches out her hand to you. You walk up the stairs. “Come here,” she says. “I’ll show you the album.”
“I should just get home,” you say.
“Wait. Not yet. Look at this.” She hands you the empty album cover and you stare at the gnarled black face. You understand that she belongs to a world that you have yet to travel. She comes from the future. Or maybe the far distant past. She could have been to Moon and back for all you know. She smells different. She has little cut marks on her calves. She sees you staring. “Cat scratches,” she says. You know this is a lie.
In two years Mrs. Simmons will discover Allen Ginsberg’s book, Howl. She will memorize all of America and then she will sell the house and everything in it. She will move to Taos, New Mexico where she will become a Buddhist and take up yoga and watercolors. And then, she will go off the grid and disappear forever, except in your dreams, in your memory. A vision, something you pray to when you have lost your way. But for now, you have not yet lost your way and you are leaning forward, Tommy. You are touching her legs and you are kissing her on her cheek and moving your lips down to her mouth and she is standing there, motionless, taking in the moment, swallowing air, breathing. And you are breathing in the smell of tobacco and perfume. She smells a little like melons, you think. She smells a little like God, you think.
In the meantime, your father’s heart is cracking open inside his chest. It is splitting and crashing and burning and spinning and he is dying right there on the New York/New Haven line.
But you are kissing Mrs. Simmons. It feels very good. This is what kissing Amy Whittleman would be like you think. Really kissing Amy Whittleman. You and Amy Whittleman—alone together at the Madison beach club, lying on the sand next to Amy Whittleman, looking up into the night sky, watching a star shower with Amy Whittleman, witnessing the miracles of numbers. It would be like infinity, kissing Amy Whittleman, like this. It would be like strawberry ice cream. Like summer, like ivory soap and lemon cookies, like yellow aprons, like salt water, like number two pencils swirling on lined paper, like planets spinning in the night sky, and the moon bursting in your mouth, a whole meteor shower exploding all around you.
Your father is dying, lying on the cushioned seat of the 5:07 train, two and half miles south of New Haven, just past the Milford station. He whispers something—what is it—a word, one word. No, not a word. It’s a name. It’s your name, Tommy. It’s your name. And then he is gone. The conductor, and a man in a grey suit hold your father and speak in hushed tones. Today’s copy of The Daily News falls to the floor. It’s been a while since they lost one of their own on this train. “Goddamn pressure,” one whispers into the air. Another man steps on The Daily News leaving a black footprint over the headline that reads, the Beatles are coming to America. They’re going to play on Ed Sullivan.
Your sisters have put on their pink nighties and gone to bed. Your grandmother is cleaning up the last bits of the dinner you missed. It was meatloaf, your favorite. Your mother is sitting on the couch, watching I Love Lucy. Lucy is playing a little trick on Ricky and your mother is pouring a little gin into her 7Up and she is rubbing her palms against her thighs, laughing loudly, her robe falling open. And Amy Whittleman? Amy Whittleman is kissing Bob Shea. She is kissing him, kissing him, kissing him, swallowing him whole, swimming away, then coming back for more.
And you kiss Mrs. Simmons and she is Amy Whittleman. She is salty and sweet and she melts in your arms and you are taking her right there on the counter at Jolly’s, pulling down her bikini bottoms and exposing her quaking white buttocks to the sugared air and you are spanking her white bottom, hard, and she is squealing to stop stop stop stop and you keep going until she melts away, disappears into the counter and then you open your eyes to find yourself on Mrs. Simmon’s porch, staring at Mrs. Simmons.
The record player skips over won’t-you-be-won’t-you-be-won’t-you-be and Mrs. Simmons doesn’t move, to fix it. Won’t-you-be-won’t-you-be-won’t-you plays over and over.
Mrs. Simmons stands there on the porch before you as if she is about to take flight, turning white in the moonlight, a little speck of a planet, a distant light flickering in the night sky, a star that you will trace in the heavens for the rest of your life, but never quite find again. The music jumps forward and the singer asks won’t you be my salty dog?
“Go home, Tommy,” she suddenly tells you.
“Why?” you ask, your face so close to her face, you can feel her breath on your cheeks.
“It’s getting late.” She points to the night sky. “Look.”
And you look up and it is ablaze with stars that you can trace with your finger–the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the Milky Way, and even the Rings of Saturn.
The stars, the stories, the infinity of numbers and even your father–they are all there. But then they are not there. You squint your eyes and they appear once again. A pattern, a rhythm. Appearing, then disappearing. But here’s the deal, Tommy. Here’s the epiphany: Nothing is one hundred percent pure. Everything is ninety-nine percent, if that. And it will always be that way. This half magic.
This scratchy record.
This salty dog.
This melted ice cream.
This half-finished sky. Now you know and now you belong.
Welcome to the Winter Club.
Bio:
Jamie Cat Callan is the author of the internationally best-selling books French Women Don’t Sleep Alone, Bonjour, Happiness! and Ooh La La! She is also the creator of The Writers Toolbox. Her work has appeared
in the New York Times Modern Love column, Story Magazine and The Missouri Review. She’s received residency fellowships to The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VCCA/France, Ragdale and Djerassi. She received an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College and an MFA in screenwriting from UCLA.
Find our more about her at www.JamieCatCallan.com
