PHANTOM STRAYS
Lorraine Ray
Copyright 2015 Lorraine Ray
Reader please note: This novel follows A Phantom Herd.
CHAPTER ONE
“Heavens to Betsy!” exclaimed Mother, tooting the horn and stomping the brakes to avoid hitting a boy who leapt out from between parked cars and darted across Franklin Avenue straight into the path of our ‘49 Chevy. Our car stopped inches from this nutty kid, who still ran across the street, and when the boy reached the far side of our hood, he spun around and rapped our front fender with his knuckles. “John, Paul, George and Ringo!” was what he shouted at us, and then he added “Forever!” as an afterthought.
I’m remembering the scene so well because of this running boy’s forever, which I never forgot in the intervening fifteen years and which I may very well remember for all the days of my life, which is as much forever as I will get. And remembering his forever for such a long time, I’ve wrested control of the beginning of that stray story, one story from my ungainly herd of memories, and I can sit with my blue fountain pen and a Big Chief tablet at a table in the Agriculture library across from a shelf of Cotton Pest Quarterlies, and recall for you an even earlier Arizona in which that two-door Chevy of ours didn’t have any seatbelts and the front passenger seatback folded forward with a shove of your hand, or the forward motion of the car if an adult wasn’t in the seat. When Mother trod on the brakes to avoid hitting the nutty boy, the top of my seat did its usual forward flop, delivering a blow to my back and catapulting me into the dashboard where its weight pinned me down.
I always feared that dashboard because it resembled equipment from Dr. Frankenstein’s lab with its huge dials and creepy chrome knobs; somehow though, I never got anything but my feelings hurt by landing there, and my getting trapped under the seat happened so frequently when we drove around town in late 1964 that Mother ignored my predicament or any romantic notions I had about dials and knobs and laboratories, and consequently she launched into another of her strangely beautiful monologues. “I have to wonder,” she began, watching the boy disappear in the crowd, “if these darn kids actually want me to hit them, and if that’s their silly plan in those scrambled brains of theirs? Is that really what they’re gunning for? Well, what else should I think? For heaven’s sake, this is the second darn boy to run out like that, dashing across the street like a crazy jaybird, not a care in the world. Police everywhere and they don’t do a gall-darn thing about these kooky kids playing chicken with cars. I tell you, it’s enough to make me spit real honest-to-goodness spit, and all I can say is they ought to be ashamed of themselves. Brainless gazabos. That’s what they are. And where is that dag-gone sister of yours? I’ve lost a kid, kid. I have to face the fact that I’ve gotten us into a real mess down here and I don’t see a darn thing that would help us get outta this, no matter what I try, no matter which way I turn.”
I lifted the heavy, kapok-filled seatback by straightening my legs on the floorboards and pushing with my back. “Keep searching for her,” ordered Mother as I reemerged, “Get out from under that gall-darn seat and help me look. I’ve got to drive through this mob of nutty kids. Now, will you look at this? More dang police! Standing around doing nothing. I should say they’re doing a very good job of it, by cracky. Why don’t they arrest these kids for running out into the street?”
I spun around in the seat and pulled myself up on my knees in order to lean with all my weight on the back cushion. While I shoved the cushion in place, I looked out the Chevy’s rear windows. The seriousness of downtown, the adult business center of our little desert town near the Mexican border, had been hijacked by roving bands of singing and shouting teens, and dozens of onlookers enjoyed their stupendous stupidity and had come out to see them flowing magnificently by, jamming the sidewalks and flooding the streets. Bemused bankers in the lobby of the Valley National Bank and a few abashed men in white cowboy shirts and Stetson hats smiled shyly as the screaming teens swarmed the sidewalks. An air conditioning and refrigeration repairman chuckled at them from a panel truck which was painted with a large goofy man with a telephone receiver in his hand and the town’s newest, catchiest radio and TV ad, “Call for Wally!” Several secretaries stood in the doorway of a lawyer’s office tugging the hems of their twin sets and grinning. One of them raised her arms and conducted the singing with two index fingers. Under a late summer sky, even a desert mountain, its gray physique seen only as a slice, peeked bashfully around the brick bulk of the Pima Hotel as a suited man, urgently adjusting his tie, came running from an alley with a camera and a tripod. He set up the shot to capture the antics.
Antics. Those were what the teenagers did and I was aghast when two broad-shouldered girls in berets and identical plaid dresses clattered up beside our car. They wobbled in their high heels and shouted “We love Paulo! Paulo forever!” over and over while they waved teeny hand-made flags (possibly cotton handkerchiefs received after graduating catechism class). A younger boy who followed them made a face at me with two of his fingers stretching the sides of his mouth like a frog. “Siempre Los Beatles,” he croaked into my open car window. Then he scrambled ahead; the three of them walked faster than that darn old car of ours could move in the crush!
“Well, I never,” said Mother, blinking back her all-encompassing horror of being spoken to in Spanish by a boy. “And won’t you please sit forward in your seat, young lady? You’re always playing around in that seat of yours. Pulling it down over you so you can hide under it like a ridiculous gazabo. Leaning on it to beat the band. I wish you’d decide to leave it alone. You’re destroying the mechanism. That’s why it’s loose. Heaven only knows why it hasn’t broken completely before now. What are you trying to be, a one-person demolishing crew? Cars cost money, kid. And we’re not made of money. Your father is practically losing his eyesight as an engineer staying up with those architectural plans of his every gall-darn night until ten o’clock. Now what!” she screeched.
The “what” she talked about materialized around us as a teeming river of those kids began flowing, and our Chevy inched forward with them, leading a line of cars around a corner to Church Street, which would send us inexorably toward Pennington Avenue, which would take us to Congress which would lead us finally to the Fox Theater where A Hard Day’s Night had been showing since 6am and would continue past midnight. The shouts on both sides of Church grew louder and came together into one pounding song that went, “We love you, Beatles. Oh yes we do. We love you, Beatles. And we’ll be true. When we’re not with you, we’re blue. Oh Beatles, we love you.” Once it ended it began again, but with the start staggered among all the different singers and the resulting mish-mash of sung words merged into a magnificent chorus to fill the cathedral of abject and prolonged Beatles worship which had formed, spontaneously, there.
Mother, who disapproved of the Beatles, hunched over the big Chevy steering wheel, a goofy wheel of Fortune if ever one existed, the pleated skirt of her cotton paisley dress nearly reaching the floorboards, both feet on the pedals (and this was always the way she drove automatics later) still searching everywhere for her lost daughter, studying the hysterical singing teens packing the sidewalks and the spaces between parked cars in every direction. As we turned left onto Pennington, she launched into another lengthy and complicated conniption.
“I tell you,” she said, “I’ve seen this situation before. This whole darned thing. Where I saw it last was with the Beatniks over there on the coast at Venice Beach. Total madness would just about describe what happened there, kid. I think it was 1959 and your brother had turned four years old and that darn tooth of his had disintegrated in his mouth; broken slivers came out of his gum every hour like the Wreck of the Hesperus and late one Friday afternoon that old Dr. Wint
erhoffen, who drank himself to death, but who was a good dentist at the time, declared that they had to operate or face the risk of septicemia. Afterwards, when we drove to Venice, Jack still had to take penicillin pills and those weren’t easy to get down him, let me tell you, those big old things. I’m embarrassed to say that Jack noticed bearded men kissing other men as big as you please in the sand at Venice beach. Well, I grew up on a farm so I’ve seen plenty of roosters atop roosters. You can’t surprise an Indiana farm girl. No siree, Bob. Why that was nothing to shake a stick at, speaking from the point of view of a girl. From an Indiana farm. Aunt Glenn certainly understood the situation. ‘Par for the course,’ she said. That was because she taught second grade where all the boys are hugging and kissing each other, you know. It’s something chronic with boys. You can’t surprise a second grade teacher from Indiana. But besides men kissing men, those Beatnik fellows were plucking the gall-darned guitar all the live-long day… those Beatnik nuts thought nothing of living day in and day out on the beach. In bathing suits. Anyway, um, that isn’t Meredith, is it? Over there to the right? Oh, no. Another girl. An awfully lot like her, though. As I said those Beatniks, they never changed out of their gall-darn bathing suits. Why, those nuts, they drank beer right out of the can as big as you please at ten o’clock in the morning. And they stood on the sidewalk under palm trees spouting the worst kind of poetry to all the passersby; not Wordsworth, let me tell you, no, no daffodils or clouds or wooly lambs for them. Heavens to Betsy. I won’t tell you what constituted their poetry because it wouldn’t be decent to discuss anywhere with anybody but a trained psychiatrist. And now, now for Heaven’s sake, Meredith is involved in another nutty group... and why can’t she stay loyal with those Beach Boys? What was wrong with them? Just when we bought all those red and white striped shirts for you kids. By cracky, at least those Beach Boys were American—I think. Well, if she imagines she’s going to get involved with this foreign group she’ll have another think coming. We aren’t supporting the Mafia with any gall-darn foreign record purchases.”
The Mafia and record purchases? Well, that vexes me, somehow, bringing forward a scene in the months prior; the writer has to save these things, and not let any stray remarks get lost in the fray. A writer has to mop up the messy bits. Tie up loose threads. Round up the wandering herd or flock down to the last…lamb, I guess.
Mother drove silently for a moment, her eyes darting here and there in a search of the throng for Meredith. “Now, when we reach that store up ahead on the right you look real hard down the alleyway in the direction of the parking garage. She might be standing there, though I can’t imagine why in tarnation she thinks I’d meet her there when we agreed on the corner of Congress and Court.”
Shouting, screaming, an ever widening river of teens formed as we turned onto Court and the teens huddled together in heaps of charm bracelets, anklets and pleated skirts on windowsills and car bumpers in every direction. These teen swarms appeared in the glass of a certain window of Rosefield’s Department Store (and why is that store significant to me for I can’t remember a gall-darn thing about it?), and across the cluttered windows of an Indian trading post to one of a pair of dusty old saloons, and the frontage of the Mexican boxing venue, El Boxeo De Tucson. A few teens, kissing record album covers, squatted together on adobe walls which were casually eroding into an empty lot sprinkled with sparkling broken glass; this vacant lot once formed a square of great import in our increasingly obscure Grand Old Vaquero past.
Drooping over three tiled steps leading into a tortilla factory (workers peeking out the screen door at them), three sobbing girls supported each other with heaving shoulders while behind them a brick wall showered bits of the tattered bullfight posters into a hot breeze. “Why won’t they let us love them?” one of the girls wailed loudly into the wind. “Our love is true!” Then, being found by her alert father, he forcibly frog-marched her away.
“I’ll tell you what these darn kids need and that is good old fashioned church-going, as quickly as possible and the result would be that they would get a little perspective on life,” Mother said, beginning her complaints again, “Just so many silly geese. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Screaming things in public, shouting out their love for foreign musicians. Aren’t our American musicians good enough? I tell you it’s that darned Rudolph Valentino situation all over again. And how. A bunch of hysterical girls dreaming about these men, foreign characters, kid, who speak English with an accent…What a horror. And who was that Valentino character, anyway? An Italian, of highly questionable morals, that’s who he was. And I heard other things, but I don’t repeat rumors. By cracky, I never would have let Meredith go to this movie if I’d known it was going to cause craziness to erupt and we’d be stuck in the middle of it. Why didn’t the newspapers warn us about this nuttiness? This is a colossal waste of my time, also. I’ve got to study my cataloguing and Dewey Decimal System. I’m having a quiz on Tuesday, dagnabbit, my first one, and that old Mrs. Altus is not a person who writes an easy quiz and the midterm should be a nightmare. But does my daughter understand that her mother is trying to get a master’s degree in library science and might, therefore, have something better to do than drive around downtown looking for her silly daughter and her friend? I should say not. I don’t blame Margaret; this is Meredith’s fault. And I have to read that One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding before Tuesday. Well, that’s not my idea of entertainment, though the book has its good qualities, and I won’t say I’m not sympathetic to the author’s general purpose, but I for one don’t like to read that sort of thing with fallen women featured prominently. Why shine a light only to show the bad? A fourteen year old doing those things? A woman would know better than to write down those things.”
Briefly, the street quieted. “This is one ex-Woman Marine who feels that all her training isn’t helping much. What we have here is a lost person. I have tried various things to find her, but I’m about at the end of my rope, kid. We’ve been up and down the same streets over and over again. We’re looking in every direction. I tell you when I get hold of that Meredith character she’ll get a piece of my mind….”
“Kid,” she glanced over sharply at me and noticed that I’d quit searching for Meredith. I’d found the search a bit dull and hopeless and I had started enjoying the look of the beautiful late summer clouds, rather like animals—sheep perhaps—and listening to the dreamy quality of her voice with its amusing curses and idioms, stories and complaints. “You’re not searching like I told you to. Why did you stop? We’ve got to get your sister. Keep an eye out in back of the buildings. She and Margaret have got to be here somewhere. They’ve got to be. They couldn’t have disappeared completely. Downtown Tucson just isn’t that big. Say, I’m pretty sure we’ve been down this same dag gone street at least three times, don’t you think? Doesn’t this one look familiar? What is the name of this street? What’s on the street sign? Alley something? Oh, never mind. You certainly don’t read fast. Reading that slow, you aren’t going to be of much use anywhere, kid. Looks like an alleyway, anyway. Shoot, I can’t go around the corner anymore without drawing the attention of the police. There are enough of them around.”
From the general direction of nowhere, an officer stepped up to our car and tapped the window near Mother’s head.
“Speak of the Devil,” she yelped, cranking her window down farther.
“Lady,” the cop bleated, “you can’t park here. Will you please move this vehicle along?” He had a buzz cut and a fat lower lip. The shouting and screaming of the Beatles pack around us sounded so loud that Mother and I strained to hear what he said, though he leaned into our interior. “Your car is blocking the street.”
“Well, I’m sorry, officer, but you have to understand. My daughter is lost. She came down here to see this dag-gum English band. A movie with her friend Margaret and she keeps getting back in the dag-on line to see it again. We’ve lost contact with her. The fact is she only turned twelve in April??
?”
“Lady,” the policeman drawled with weary impatience, “there’s a hundred kids here in the same situation. You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. What I want you to do is to drive this vehicle of yours around the corner and on toward Congress. Double parking is a violation of the city code. I’ve got to give you a ticket you if you stay here any longer.”
“Yes, officer. Oh golly,” Mother said to me as she swung our grand old Chevy around the next street corner, “Biddle-boddle-biddle-boddle-bo-bo-bo. Why, I do believe as a matter of fact that this situation down here with this Beatles group creating a lot of chaos and confusion is almost worse than the aftermath of those darn rodeo parades that plague us every year, kid. And you know I’m no fan of the rodeos. All I can say is where in tarnation have those darn girls gone and hid themselves? I thought they’d be easy to find. There are swarms of winos down here. Big groups of them. Ruffians and toughs, all of them. Don’t be fooled. Shoot! Right now having all these kids on the street is hiding the winos, but they’re here in our midst, stinking of darn alcohol. Out on the yards near the railcars, too. A hobo jungle, a wino convention. Living in lean-tos, shacks made of cardboard. They’re probably all pickpockets. Mark my words! This is one of the worst years for winos and in the summer, no less. And those seedy men at The Green Door; I don’t know why they haven’t closed down that scandalous place, showing smut movies all the live long day, smut peddling; it’s enough to try the patience of Job. Probably Jesus, too. Maybe put them both together and both of them will be fit to be tied; I’m not too sure about that. Goodness. Surely Margaret and Meredith haven’t been walking around as big as you please looking for trouble with tramps and smut peddlers! Haven’t I taught Meredith better than that?”
At seven, I knew she hadn’t taught me a gall-darn thing about winos (say, hadn’t I approached two of them once earlier that year, and in a place nearby, downtown, where one of them had told Jack to shut up in Spanish?) but I shut up about that.
The vertical portion of the marquee of the Fox towered above our car into the cerulean Arizona sky of the past, a sky bright with possibilities. White lettering climbed a red bar with an F and then an O and finally an X. The Fox had a ticket kiosk in a sea of shiny mustard tile, which now was overwhelmed by teens, screaming, singing, holding hands and dancing. Teens in tight Levi’s jumped and shouted in front of the doors, hair flying in the wind, sunlight everywhere, clouds rolling in a late summer sky, and sunrays glinting off the glasses of pimply boys and girls.
The word Tucson topped the three lighted sections of the marquee which explained that A Hard Day’s Night showed continuously at the theater. We drove one block down, past the Meyer White House Department store and French’s Restaurant, and made a right turn again. Apparently Mother intended to make one more sweep around the back streets behind the theater and up to the place where the policeman had been which lay near our agreed-upon rendezvous with Meredith and Margaret.
Two tight-skirted girls tottered past our car, screaming and clutching each other. Mother strained herself backward to peer in the shadows at other forms lurking, hips in pleated cotton, pancake makeup as thick as Feb desert dust. These flipped-hair girls resembled Meredith and Margaret, but were not. Mother sighed in a peeved and weary fashion once she realized it was not them. “I know I told her to come out with Margaret the instant the show ended and stand at the corner back there where we met the policeman and not to move a muscle. I made myself as clear as a bell. And we were there waiting in the car, and where was she? Those little fools. This just might be the last time she pulls a stunt like this.”
I knew that to be false.
“I never thought the crowds would be so bad down here. How long did it take us to get two measly blocks? Oh Lord. The streets are overflowing with these kooky kids clattering around like a bunch of overdressed gypsies. Just look at the girls running everywhere. Kissing record albums. Things written on their faces with pens. False eyelashes, lipstick, tight sweaters. That’s about the lot of them. I hope you never become like them, kid. Well, I’m coming close to running them over if they keep dashing around the car this way and that. They haven’t any sense around the cars!”
In the river of teens something odd surfaced. Two shabby fellows passing by. With bedrolls. Smiling in the general direction of me. Then they waved and I waved back. These were a pair of the scary winos about whom mother had been complaining. I always noticed shabby fellows, winos I suppose, passing through Southern Arizona. Brown, tough fellows with pale blue or caramel-colored eyes bleached by too much sunlight, too darn much freedom. Grinning, sad, desperate men with beards and attitudes and the stink of alcohol on their breath and bodies. Yes, I’d walked toward a pair of them. And I’d been mad at them then. One of them made—yes, a kissy face at me! Memory will retrieve such hideous things as ancient winos who make kissy faces.
“Mom, I’m so afraid.” I gulped an enormous sob while admitting this. “These big kids are really, really scaring me. I don’t think I can—”
“Well, by cracky,” Mother began, “what do you mean?”
“Even if we see her, I don’t wanna go get her,” I whined.
“Well, what do you think we’re gonna do, Little Miss? Are we gonna stop the story in its tracks here? Are we gonna leave them hanging out in midair, lost downtown like two potatoes that fell off a truck? Does everything come to a halt because you’re afraid? Or are we gonna get your sister and Margaret and bring them out of here and back home? We jolly well are, kid. We’ve got to get them out of here! An hour in the car! That’s how long we’ve been searching. And the police aren’t even interested.”
She studied a few more outrageous teens.
“But what’s that compared with poor Mrs. Kirkup,” she continued, “sitting at home alone in a wheelchair from Rheumatoid Arthritis and she’s watching out her front window anxiously for her only child, her girl Margaret, wringing her arthritic hands…I say, and now am I going to go back there and tell her she has lost her Margaret to a band of trashy Mop Tops, foreigners from England, because my little girl can’t bear to walk past screaming and shouting teenagers? Well, I tell you it isn’t happening. Not on my watch. Mrs. Kirkup took Meredith to pick apples half way to New Mexico, to Wilcox, by cracky, with my blessings and she didn’t lose her! And here I am having to be behind the wheel of this gall-darn car because we can’t get a gall-darn parking space to beat the band. I’m not gonna listen to that nonsense from you about being afraid of a bunch of silly teenage girls. You’ve got to overcome this, kid. Your fear is nothing but stuff and nonsense. A bunch of silly young girls running around and screaming for the effect of screaming doesn’t mean a thing; I tell you it doesn’t mean a gall-darn thing in the scope of human history. To listen to you you’d think they wanted to scalp us. Now…now, pay attention to me and pay attention well. You’re gonna get out of this car when we see her and you’re gonna do what I say or we aren’t getting her out of here for hours and I do not intend to spend my entire Saturday afternoon downtown gallivanting around after a bunch of moony teenagers. When we see them I want you to march right out that door and go get them for me. You’re gonna march right past those big girls and you aren’t gonna let them bother you, not one iota. I’m trusting you to find Meredith and Margaret and tell them they can’t stay for another of these gall-darned shows!”
“Mom!” I yelped, “I think I see her. Back there. She’s standing with Margaret near the end of the line.”
Mother braked, the seatback slapped me, and I hit the dash once again.
“What in tarnation!” Mother spun around. “In that darn line? The line to the darn movie?”
I pushed the seat off me. “I don’t know. It’s just a line.”
Though I told Mother that I didn’t know what line it was, I knew she stood in the line to the movie. And when I searched again there indeed was Meredith—or the strange Meredith she had suddenly become—as big as she pleased in the movie line, her brown hair r
olled the night before on orange juice cans producing a tremendous smooth brown flip, (but the bobby pins always left an odd dent), wearing the same old cat’s eye glasses, but with a blue bow now pinning back her greasy bangs. She wore a pleated orange gingham skirt and a white blouse and she crooned a Beatles song with the rest of the line.
Margaret stood beside her, dressed as a twin, but she sported a blonde flip and appeared remarkably pale. She wore a blue gingham skirt and a white blouse. A blue plastic headband bit furrows into the front of her hair.
There they were in line together for the third time. They had called from a phone booth and begged to see A Hard Day’s Night a second time, but they now stood in the line for a glorious third viewing.
“What! She thinks she’s going to that darn movie AGAIN? Well, she has another think coming,” Mother said.
“Are we going around the block again?” I asked.
“No. Get out right now and tell her to come to the car. Tell her she mustn’t go to the movie again.”
“Mom, I can’t.” I sagged.
“I said get out there and run back and tell your sister what is what,” Mother insisted. “Don’t dawdle.”
“Mom, I don’t want to.”
“Get out. Get right out and get your sister.” Mother reached over across my body and unlatched my door. The massive door swung open slightly. “Do what I say. Tell Meredith and Margaret they do not have permission to sit through that Beatles movie again. Tell Meredith I’m very disappointed with her and she should march herself over here to this corner where the car is. And I mean pronto. Go on!”
I got out half-heartedly and mother, who leaned over across the seat, pulled the door shut when I left.
I crossed the river. I floated across with the horde of teen kooks.
“Paul! Paulo!”
“I love Jorge!”
“El Ringo. Lo Mejor!”
Kissing a record album held to her face, a young girl skipped and crashed into me. “Hey, what?” she said, barely acknowledging my existence. I spun around from the collision.
I had barely recovered when someone else collided with me. “It’s all over,” said a father pounding past me on the sidewalk with a young girl in a position which resembled a head lock. One of her flailing arms had struck my head. “You aren’t going to stick around adoring those English idiots. John, George and Bingo!”
“Dad!” cried the girl in disgust. “It’s Ringo. Ringo. Why can’t you say his name right?”
“Ringo or Bingo, it’s all the same to me.”
“You don’t understand. I love him more than anything. Anything ever.”
And they were gone, with the girl’s declaration remaining in my mind, her love which remained so pure for Ringo.
I stepped up onto the curb and moved through the sidewalk mob tentatively. People swished past me on all sides, running, walking fast. The singing continued coming from different parts of the street and a line of girls who held hands collapsed against an adobe wall, shouting as a rabble of voices to the desert sky and brilliant sun, arms uplifted. “We love them! Oh, leave us alone! Let us be! We just want to be able to love them in peace forever. Just leave us alone.”
“Oh, they’re so beautiful,” wailed one girl. After saying this she slumped against a tile wall. “It’s not fair. They were made too, too beautiful.”
To find Meredith and get her back I knew I would have to approach the long movie line formed of tough teens. Their red lips, sullen faces, high heels, and sharp breasts created a wall of teen terror for me. Among these monsters, I had to locate my big sister. But it is fit and proper that the writer face the angry coldness of the young adult, if she ever wishes to write something about the world. So down the line, enduring their glares and wry smiles at me, moving before them with my gapped front teeth and my perpetually mussed hair, I walked quickly, gawking at each scary teen to see them thoroughly. I struggled to find Meredith amidst this gang of pirate cutthroats.
“Meredith,” I yelped when I finally reached her, “Mom is waiting in the car. She says you can’t stay here any longer. You both have to come to the car.” I yelled this and though my mouth opened and I felt my vocal cords tighten in order to make sounds, I could hear nothing I said.
“We love you Beatles, Oh yes we do!” screamed the teens around me. “When you’re not with us we’re blue! Beatles forever!” Squeals and shouts echoed off the old adobe and brick buildings in every direction. This epitomized the hubbub of the time, the hysteria that a writer needs to witness, and the spot where they need to situate themselves.
“Oh, hi, kid.” I could see that Meredith said this, but I barely heard a murmur. “What does Mom want?” She recognized me as the perpetual parental spokesman.
“She says you can’t stay here any longer. You and Margaret need to come back with me to the car or Mom is going to be really, really mad.” My voice yelled this. The veins in my neck popped; my throat hurt to roar at them like that.
On the far side of Meredith I noticed a frightening teenage girl with blonde hair teased into a tower. Reading my lips, perhaps, she stared at me and smirked. Another teen frowned after I had shouted at Meredith. She turned her back to me and took a long drag on a cigarette which she then held secretly to the side of her poodle skirt.
“We’re staying,” Meredith explained curtly. “We’re already in line for the next show.”
This stopped me. Though I knew I would have to go on, Meredith’s strength impressed me. “Well, Mom says you can’t. You can’t be in line anymore. You gotta stop it.”
“Go back and tell her we’re in the line for the three thirty show,” Meredith ordered. “We still have enough money, but we can use more for popcorn.” She added this popcorn remark fiercely as though Mother should have thought beforehand of them staying for three shows and running out of snack bar money.
Gulping at the immensity of the task ahead, I went on arguing with her at full volume. “You can’t be in line anymore. She told me that. You can’t see that Beatles movie anymore.”
“What?” She assumed an obnoxious stance with her hand on her hip and shot me an evil squint. “What are you even talking about?”
Why did I have to be the bearer of this unwelcomed news? I tried so hard to stay in Meredith’s good graces, an effort which had been failing with a regularity that frightened me ever since Meredith received that girdle (a segmented monstrosity a bit like an albino trilobite wrapped in a flat box with tissue paper and attached snaps for nylons) for her twelve birthday, and it went to her head and six months later turned her into someone who regularly used Dippity-Doo to set her hair on orange juice cans and had left her little sister behind. Why did I have to be the one to confront an angry teenager with a stern message from her mother?
“You can’t see the movie anymore!” I hollered. “You gotta stop seeing it. Mom’s saying that.”
“Oh, all right,” said Meredith in a huff. “Come on, Margaret. We aren’t going to be allowed to do the one thing we really, really want. This is so like my family. I can’t even stand the way I’m treated anymore.”
For a moment, relief swept across Margaret’s face; she must have been ready to go home after two viewings of A Hard Day’s Night; the afternoon had probably been taxing for her. Nodding in assent with Meredith’s decision, she clutched her purse a little closer and followed Meredith like a dull, ghostly apprentice with a hunch. For a few years she had worn a back brace, which hadn’t completely cured her bent spine. She was meek and apathetically kind in every situation, no matter how degrading. She had turned her will over to Meredith, but I sensed her discomfort.
They walked away quickly, Meredith in a rage and Margaret faking it, through the crowd ahead of me and toward our olive green Chevy. I wanted to call out for their help saying, “Save me from these strange crazy teens,” but I knew Meredith and Margaret (crazy teens themselves) weren’t going to help me, and they weren’t going to be good company once I reached the car. Times had changed, an
d I had fallen severely out of favor.
Weaving and bobbing through the wild Beatles fans, I tried to keep up, but couldn’t. I smashed into two tall boys who shouted about the Beatles and they laughed at me ruthlessly.
When I reached the car, Meredith and Margaret were already in the back seat, glaring at me with a cold appraisal, with an evil assessment, as though I were the one who had made them come back from their interlude with celebrity love.
Meredith leaned forward toward the back of my seat and whispered, “Atray inkfay.”
Pig Latin. Not something I could understand easily. It took me five minutes to guess what she had said, and I doubted myself even then. I felt a tear dribble down my cheek once I figured it out for sure.
It’s the rat fink writer’s job to witness the hysteria of the times, to be knocked off their feet by the joyous celebrations, to record the chanting, to document the wildness, to see the wind rip into the latest and greatest of human hairdos. The writer has to be alone, examining the line of hostile teens, and alone in the midst of social upheaval, change, and anger. The writer needs to feel the throb of the multitude and the shoving movement into tomorrow. Though you cannot hear in the hubbub of the times, you may hear again just what you need to hear many years later in the silence of backward contemplation.