Summer of '69 Read online

  Earlier today I began the journey to my Penelope.

  Now what?

  Beside me on the mattress, the siren Tinsley sighs.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “I should be asking you. I’m so sorry about your bus.”

  The night air is heavy with moisture. Tinsley and I pull the blanket to our chins. It stinks of smoke. I think back to the first time Robin and I shared a mattress. We’d been going together for nearly five months. She was a virgin and insisted it be at my house, not hers. I tried to be gentle, but she was tense and couldn’t relax. The little mewls that left her lips were not of pleasure (sex would improve with practice). I’ve always felt bad that it wasn’t a magical experience for her.

  “Don’t you love looking at the stars?” Tinsley asks. “They make everything in the universe seem closer, you know?”

  “Makes everything seem really far away to me,” I answer. Maybe because right now, everything important seems so far away.

  Tinsley props herself on her elbow. “It’s not about distance, Lucas. It’s a feeling. Being part of everything. You, me, the ground, the sky.” She places her hand on the blanket over my chest. “Breathe in. Feel the air enter your lungs.”

  I take a deep breath and feel the air. I also feel Tinsley’s hand on my chest. She can’t possibly be coming on to me, can she? Not here. Not now. She has to know how completely bummed I am.

  And yet her face moves closer in the dark. “You were amazing tonight. I mean, at the border. I was so certain we were going to get busted. My mother would have gone batshit.”

  I continue to be astonished that my bluff worked. Dumb luck, I suspect.

  “You had such command of the situation.” She brushes some hair away from my face, her fingers grazing my cheek.

  Don’t, Tinsley, I hear myself think. You’ve chosen the wrong guy, wrong place, wrong time. And yet I don’t stop her. Do I like her attentions more than I want to admit?

  “Barry showed his true colors, didn’t he?” Her voice goes hard in a way I haven’t heard from her before. Has, for just an instant, a vestige of her disciplinarian mother slipped through?

  I defend my cousin. “He was freaking. You know, not thinking about the implications.”

  “You really believe that?” Tinsley asks. Clearly she doesn’t, but maybe she doesn’t know my cousin as well as I imagine. Barry wasn’t being rational. He was overcome with fear and panic. Another bust and they were going to lock him away. Behind that groovy exterior, the boy who was once so tough and daring has been reduced to a fragile and frightened casualty. The first couple of years after the beating he hardly left the house. Spent his days in the living room with the lights off and the curtains drawn, a shadow with cigarette smoke slowly spiraling into the air. On the rare occasion when he did go outside, it was usually to fly a kite in the street. He rarely left the block.

  “When the bus caught fire. How calm you were.” In the dark, Tinsley’s caressing fingers rest on my face long past the time required to brush a few more strands away. She leans close, blocking out the stars. The scent of patchouli is in my nostrils, an involuntary stirring in my loins. The siren calls, and I have no sailors to fix me to the mast.

  But I hate the way my father cheats on my mother. . . .

  Tinsley’s lips, parted ever so slightly, are on mine. Why do I so passively accept them, when the lips I yearn to feel are Robin’s? Am I worried about hurting Tinsley’s feelings? Or is it because right now a kiss from Robin is as distant as the stars above?

  Tinsley keeps the kiss short, then whispers, “That’s for saving us.”

  She gently slithers off me, then presses herself against my side, her arm resting on my chest.

  “Zach’ll be here in a couple of hours,” Barry says early the next morning, stepping out of a phone booth beside a Rexall drugstore in Kemptville. Tinsley and I are sitting at a picnic table, our knapsacks, Barry’s duffel bag and camping stove, the butterfly kite, and some of his art supplies on the ground beside us. Last night Barry returned in the dark to say he’d found the town but everything was closed. Half an hour ago, I bade farewell to Odysseus and wished it safe journey to that hallowed junkyard in the sky. Then, carrying what we could, we walked here. The sun is barely above the thick green tree line to the east. The gathering heat is gradually drying the dew that accumulated during the night. A harsh chorus of cicadas has started to rise. Feels like it’s going to be hot today.

  The I Ching coins clatter softly on the road map of southern Ontario that I’ve spread on the table. Tinsley scribbles in her notebook. Barry sits down beside her and lights a Camel.

  “I’m gonna head back.” I hate saying it. I want so badly to forge ahead to my ladylove, but Lake Juliette is at least eighty miles to the north and west, out many narrow roads (not all of them paved, according to the map) in the wilderness. I could try to hitch there, but I doubt I’d make it by five, the time Robin has already warned me that my visit with her will end. And even if I were to miraculously make it to the camp by dark, I’d have nowhere to crash tonight.

  Meanwhile, now that my personal-moral-code conscientious objector application has no chance of succeeding, I need to get back to Long Island in time to meet with Charles on Monday and figure out what the alternatives are.

  The rising chorus of cicadas fills the air. A man in overalls driving a red tractor slowly passes, pulling a wagon stacked high with bales of pale-green hay. Tinsley closes her notebook and gathers her coins. “I’m going back, too.” Her eyes slide toward me. “That okay with you?”

  A pair of blackbirds lands on an overhead electric line. A boxy 1950s Chevy sedan rolls past. The two gray-haired ladies inside stare at us. It can be a long, slow trip for a guy hitching alone. Most people won’t pick you up. But hitching with a petite, sexy-looking blond chick? Like going from a Ford Model T to Craig Breedlove’s Spirit of America.

  But why isn’t Tinsley going to the farm? Why not wait with Barry in Kemptville for Zach? Why risk the unknowns that come with trying to hitch all the way home? But then I think back to last night on the mattress, and to something I’ve felt ever so slightly simmering since she strolled out of Barry’s house yesterday and asked if I’d mind if she came with us to Canada: a gradually growing inclination that — sometime last night or this morning — became a decision.

  I glance curiously at Barry.

  He picks a speck of tobacco off his lip and gazes off. “So be it.”

  An awkward parting. Tinsley gives Barry a hug. When I shake his hand, his eyes don’t meet mine. Has he interpreted Tinsley’s decision to mean she’d rather be with me than him? Are those averted eyes the gesture of someone who thinks he’s been replaced? I feel bad. He’s my cousin, the guy I grew up admiring. The one who has struggled so mightily with his demons for so long. Even though I had nothing to do with Tinsley’s decision, I feel as guilty as if the decision had been mine.

  My hand still clasping Barry’s, a wave of familial affection prompts me to pull him close for a hug. “Have fun up there. Catch you on the flip side, okay?”

  “The music festival,” he reminds me. “Three weeks.”

  Right, right. “For sure, man. See you there. Peace, brother.”

  Full

  Backtal

  Nudity.

  Inside the one-story U.S. Customs and Border Protection building, two uniformed agents march me into a pea-soup-green room with the shades drawn, the sunlight sending bar-like shadows across an American flag and a framed picture of Nixon.

  A few moments ago, Tinsley and I were pulled out of a car at the border. The couple who’d picked us up an hour ago were hungry for conversation after a week of hiking in Gatineau Park. Now they’re waiting outside while their car is searched. Meanwhile, Tinsley and I have been forcibly escorted into this building. (A female agent took Tinsley to another room.)

  I am totally wigging. Nerves lit. Heart flat-out racing as if I’ve just sprinted two hundred yards. Bladder threatening to empty on
the spot. How could I have forgotten about Barry’s two lids?

  No amount of sirring and fakery is going to save my sorry ass this time. My legs feel like rubber bands. I’m trying, and failing, to breathe normally. When an involuntarily moan escapes my lips, both agents jerk their heads up.

  “Something you want to tell us?” one asks.

  “No, sir.” Christ! I might as well have just confessed.

  One of the agents dumps the contents of my knapsack on a table. Three sets of eyes quickly inspect the results. Incredibly, there’s nothing that looks like two lids of grass among the underwear, spare shirts, toiletries, and the blue-and-yellow license plates I took off Odysseus this morning before abandoning it.

  An unintended sigh of relief forces itself out of my lungs. The agents frown. One of them unbuckles the outside pockets of the knapsack. A few eight-track cassettes, a paperback of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, a small robin’s-egg-blue Tiffany box containing a sterling-silver love pendant with Robin’s and my names inscribed.

  Is it stress or relief that makes me go light-headed and bend at the waist to get the blood flowing before I keel over? When I straighten up, both agents are staring again. It’s hard to imagine acting any more guilty, short of signing a written confession.

  “Sure there isn’t something you want to tell us?” asks one.

  “No, sir.” Keep breathing, I tell myself.

  The agents comb through every item on the table, squeezing toothpaste out of the tube, peering at the tape in the eight-tracks. Meanwhile, all I feel is relief and an intense desire to get out of here. Another narrow escape. Move over, Houdini. Make room for Lucasini.

  “Why were you hitchhiking?” one of them asks.

  I gesture to the plates and explain that my VW microbus caught fire last night.

  “You left it?”

  I tell them what I paid for Odysseus and what it would have cost to install a new engine. A long moment passes while neither agent speaks. This has to be the end, right? They didn’t find any drugs. There can’t be any other reason for keeping me here, can there?

  One of the agents starts to pull on a rubber glove. “Strip.”

  “What a fox! You balling her?” It’s around dinnertime. A moment ago, Arno and I dropped Tinsley beside a tall black iron gate at the entrance to a winding, tree-lined driveway in Old Westbury. The house it led to wasn’t visible from the road.

  “No,” I answer. After experiencing our first-ever body cavity searches, Tinsley and I sat on a bench outside the border patrol building while agents asked passing drivers if anyone was willing to give us a ride. (By then, the couple we’d ridden with to the border was long gone.) Tinsley’s thinking of sending an account of her experience to the Ethel Walker School alumnae magazine, which is always looking for newsworthy items from graduates: Muffy Fairchild-Worthington (’68) reports that this year’s International Debutante Ball was a smashing success. Tinsley Stockton (’69) writes that she thoroughly enjoyed her first-ever body cavity search at the U.S.-Canadian border.

  We wound up snagging a ride all the way to Long Island with a salesman from the Hudson’s Bay Company.

  “Man, I was praying she’d invite us into the house,” Arno says in the GTO. “You know she was rich?”

  “That all you can think about?” I ask. It’s been a long, frustrating twenty-four hours, and I am bushed.

  Arno power-shifts into third. “Listen, Karl Marx, not everyone who’s rich got that way by exploiting the proletariat, okay? Or by selling guns and bombs.”

  He’s right. I shouldn’t be giving him grief. Half an hour ago, he came to Little Neck to pick up Tinsley and me at the Scobee Diner, where the salesman had left us. Arno’s got a good heart. He’s always ready to help. When we were younger and some kids called Alan a retard, he never joined in.

  I clap a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry. Thanks for coming to get us. I’m just beat.”

  In the house of dashed dreams, the paterfamilias’s old green navy trunk is inside the front door. The TV is on in the den. Mom’s in the kitchen, making salami-and-Swiss-cheese sandwiches on onion rolls. The only time she makes them is when we’re going on a trip, and we haven’t gone anywhere as a family in years.

  “Robin called this morning. She was quite upset.” Mom doesn’t look up from the wooden cutting board, where half a dozen golden-brown deli onion rolls lie split open, both sides smeared with French’s yellow mustard.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  Thunk . . . thunk. The knife blade slices through salami and strikes the wood.

  “Mom?”

  “Alan’s going to camp.” She places three disks of salami on each roll. I feel my mouth fall open. Mom’s never let Alan go away anywhere alone before. Not even for a sleepover.

  “For how long?”

  She won’t look at me. “Until the end of August.”

  “Why?”

  “We can’t let him sit in front of the television for the whole summer, can we?”

  I don’t get it. “There’s no day camp around here for kids like him?”

  Thunk . . . thunk. The knife blade hits the cutting board. Finally Mom says, “It’s best this way.”

  The house has three phones: one in the paterfamilias’s bedroom, one in Mom’s, and this wall phone in the kitchen. I dial zero and ask for the long-distance operator. At Camp Juliette, the person who answers says that Robin is busy with last-minute alterations to the costumes for The Wizard of Oz. Is this an emergency? I say that it’s an urgent family matter.

  I’m told to hold on. While I wait, Mom asks what happened. I tell her about Odysseus.

  “What about Barry?” she asks.

  I tell her.

  “And his friend?”

  I assume she knows about Tinsley because she speaks to her sister, my aunt Jane, practically every day. “She hitched back with me.”

  Mom’s forehead bunches. She must be wondering why a young woman would go with Barry most of the way to Zach’s farm in Canada, then decide to turn around and hitch all the way back with me. (I’m wondering about that, too. And part of me can’t help thinking that maybe it wasn’t so much that Tinsley wanted to be with me as that she was having second thoughts about taking off without permission. There’s also the possibility that she really does go by the I Ching, though I’m not sure that jibes with the sort of personality who could probably explain in great detail why creating corporate conglomerates maximizes profit and minimizes cyclical risk.)

  After getting only four or five hours of sleep on the mattress in the field last night, we could hardly keep our eyes open on the way home. But the Hudson’s Bay salesman wanted to talk about American politics, and especially what happened last week on Martha’s Vineyard, when Senator Ted Kennedy (brother of JFK and Robert — both assassinated) drove off a bridge, and the woman (not his wife) in the car with him drowned.

  “Want to know why Kennedy waited ten hours to tell the police?” the salesman said. “Because he and his cronies were busy crafting a story to cover it up.”

  (They should have consulted the paterfamilias. He’s an expert in that area.)

  It’s taking forever for them to get Robin. I will definitely catch hell when the phone bill comes with the charges for this call and the one to Rudy in Saskatchewan.

  Finally she gets on, sounding breathless, and asks where I am and if I’m okay. The kitchen phone has a long cord, and I stretch it through the doorway and out into the hall. The theme song from The Dating Game trickles out of the den.

  When I tell Robin where I am, she starts to cry. (Is she sorry that I didn’t make it? Or is she simply crying with relief after spending the day wondering if I’d died in a traffic accident?) I wait until she collects herself and then tell her about the demise of Odysseus and how I couldn’t call sooner because I was hitching back home.

  (But I could have — from the phone booth outside the Rexall in Kemptville, from the Thruway Hot Shoppe when the salesman from the Hudson’s Bay Company s
topped for gas, from a pay phone at the Scobee Diner, where Tinsley and I grabbed a bite while we waited for Arno to pick us up. All I’d needed to do was ask a cashier to change ten dollars into nickels and dimes. So why didn’t I? Was it because Tinsley was there?)

  Robin can’t stay on the phone; she has to get back to Oz. She doesn’t ask if I’ll try to come north again to see her. She’s in the camp office, where others can hear. Feeling a sense of urgency, I pour out a rushed synopsis of what I’d hoped to say face-to-face: I really love her. Never felt like this with anyone before. I’ve changed, cut back on smoking. I was driving up there to show her. She’ll see when she gets home from camp. I just need the chance. That’s all I’m asking.

  Her reply is a loud sniff. In the background, a voice says, “Honey, they need you in the rec hall.”

  “I’ll write to you,” Robin says, and hangs up.

  A terrible sense of apprehension coils itself around me and squeezes. Once again I think back to the day Robin departed for Canada. How she didn’t seem pleased that I’d unexpectedly shown up to bid her adieu. How when I whispered I loved her, she didn’t mouth the same (so her father wouldn’t hear). How she didn’t wave or even look back as they drove away. In every letter I’ve written, I’ve said I love her. She hasn’t written it in any of the three letters she’s sent. Even in the crowded camp office just now, when I said it, she could have said something like, “Me, too.”

  I feel drained. It’s not only due to lack of sleep and residual stress from losing Odysseus and being searched at the border. The dread I feel regarding Robin weighs heavily.

  Back in the kitchen, Mom is wrapping the sandwiches in tinfoil. They’re sending Alan away? It’s the clearest sign yet that life in the house of dashed dreams has entered crisis mode, that it’s gotten to a point where they don’t want Alan to witness whatever’s going on. Despite the fog of fatigue, I think back to a time when there was hope that with special schooling and tutoring, Alan would someday get up to speed. Back before Dad’s faithlessness became a fact of family life. Back when Mom used to love to take us to Jones Beach. When she was sometimes lighthearted and capable of unexpected laughter. When, even on the days she drove Alan to and from the city, she managed to put dinner on the table.