The Disenchantments

  A guy with a scruffy beard glances at Bev in the window. “Uh-oh,” he says to the dog. “You’re messing with the photo shoot.”

  I pat the dog’s wide, white head and tell him it’s cool.

  “This is perfect,” Bev shouts down. “Colby, can you hold the dog’s leash? Like, as if it’s ours?”

  The girl holding the leash laughs. I can’t see her eyes from behind the lenses of her sunglasses. She hands me the loop to grab onto.

  “Her name’s Daisy,” she says, and the group moves a few steps down, out of the frame of the photograph.

  “I thought you were capturing the moment,” I shout up to Bev. “Like, the moment as it really is.”

  Daisy gazes at me with mournful eyes, then turns to her owners and whines.

  Bev calls down to me to move a little to the left, to walk a few steps, to pet the dog, to lean against the bus. When she tells me to open to the passenger-side door and get in again, I lock the door instead and return Daisy to her group. They rub her back and scratch behind her ears and tell her how proud they are of her, and then they continue walking up the street.

  The downstairs door swings open and Bev’s mom steps out with her bags.

  “Hey, Mary,” I say.

  “Hi, Colby,” she says. “Hello, Melinda.”

  I laugh. “I’ll tell Uncle Pete you said that. He’ll love it.”

  She puts Bev’s bags on the floor of the backseat and returns inside for the guitar, but Bev’s walking down the stairs, saying, “Mom, just don’t worry about it, I got it,” in this tense, annoyed way.

  Mary looks at me and shrugs. She tries to act light about it, but I can see that she’s hurt, and to be honest I don’t know what Bev’s problem is. Mary’s trying to help. But that’s how Bev always is with her, and I’ve stopped trying to figure out why. I shrug back and give Mary a hug while Bev rearranges the bags that Mary loaded for her, and then they hug, brief and tense, and Mary tells me to drive safe and I tell her that I will.

  The front door shuts, and now that it’s just us on the sidewalk, Bev’s whole body relaxes. She smiles.

  “Hey, don’t move,” she says.

  She reaches toward me, touches my cheekbone.

  “Got it,” she says. “Make a wish.”

  “Hmm,” I say. “I wish—”

  “Shh. Don’t tell me.”

  She waits, guitar case in one hand, rows of pastel houses behind her, holding my eyelash between her thumb and her forefinger. So much swarms through my head that it’s hard to settle on anything. How can I wish for one thing when everything is beginning? So I just wish for this feeling to last.

  I nod at her: finished. She separates her fingers. My eyelash is on her thumb.

  “Wish granted,” she says, and blows it away.

  Bev’s a sculptor; she’s always touching things. As I steer us across Market Street and onto Valencia, she runs her hands across the dashboard, the vents, the edges of the windows, the cloth-covered ceiling.

  “Feel anything good?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she says. “Texture city,” and we laugh and make our way through the Mission.

  I turn onto 24th Street and pull over in front of the Benson-Flores household. Meg and Alexa sit outside the yellow Victorian with their two dads, Jeffrey and Kevin, boxes stacked all around them. Alexa has a notebook open and her phone to her ear. Meg’s talking to Kevin while Jeffrey tapes up a box.

  Bev and I slide out of the bus and greet them. Then we stand, staring at the boxes, the bags, Meg’s bass, and Alexa’s drum kit. The bus has a lot of space, but by the time we’re done, it will also have four passengers.

  “Oh, man,” Meg says. She’s leaning against Kevin’s shoulder, twisting a strand of her pink, wavy hair around her finger. “This is going to be a challenge.”

  Jeffrey, stonier-faced and quieter than usual, surveys the back.

  “Don’t worry,” Kevin says. “If you forget anything we’ll bring it with us when we visit next month. Or we can mail it if you need it sooner.”

  The rest of us will be coming back to the city after the tour, but we’re dropping Meg off in Portland. She’s going to Lewis and Clark, and before the fall semester, attending a summer program for theater majors.

  “You’re the one who’s worried,” Meg says, and in response, Kevin playfully pushes her away.

  “Go help Jeffrey,” he says.

  Alexa snaps her phone shut. “Just got us a gig at a piano bar in Arcata,” she says.

  “Where’s Arcata?” Bev asks.

  “Ten miles from Eureka.”

  Meg sticks her head out of the van, grabs a box from Jeffrey, and says, “Where’s Eureka?”

  “On the coast. A little under three hours from Redding.”

  “So is it tomorrow?” I ask.

  She looks up at me, shields her eyes from the sun. Blue marks are on her hands—her signature peace signs. She nods, yes. Some kind of headband thing is tied around her forehead.

  “Melinda is beautiful,” Alexa says. “I just have to sit here and look at all of you for a second.”

  After she’s taken us all in, she stands up and joins us. I can see the headband better now—it’s really just a thin strip of blue fabric tied around her long black hair, with little bells on it that chime when she moves.

  Meg and Alexa peer into the bus together like dream girls from different decades: Meg in one of her many kitschy, short vintage dresses, this one brown with a stampede of white horses galloping across it, and Alexa in her flowy, white hippie shirt and tight blue corduroys. It wasn’t hard for Bev and me to figure out who should be in the band. These girls dress every day like they’re going to be onstage.

  Jeffrey and Kevin are trying to fit Meg’s stuff onto the floor of the backseat, placing the boxes and bags at different angles with none of the laid-back excitement of Dad and Uncle Pete. When they are finished, Kevin rushes toward Meg and wails, “My little girl is leaving home!”

  “I know, Dad,” she says, and for a moment she looks so sad that I have to look away as they hug again and Jeffrey joins them.

  Bev and I climb back into the front, followed soon by Alexa. When Meg finally takes her place next to her sister, Jeffrey appears in my window.

  “You, young man, had better drive safely.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “I want you to drive like a grandpa. Slowly. In the right lane the whole way there and back.”

  I laugh. “I don’t think Melinda could go fast even if I wanted her to.”

  He nods his approval and steps back, and we all wave good-bye as I pull away.

  “This is so pretty,” Alexa says, looking at the diamond pattern on the seat covers as I turn left onto Dolores Street. She pulls out a notebook in which she keeps a running list of jobs she might want to have someday. “I never thought of doing upholstery before, but this is gorgeous. The energy in here is amazing. What was your dad’s band called again?”

  “The Rainclouds,” I say.

  “The Rainclouds,” she repeats. “I think I’ll write my play about them.”

  Each year, our school produces an original play. The kids who want to write it have to apply in their Junior year with a writing sample. Alexa was this year’s winner.

  “And they toured all over the country in this?” she asks.

  “Yeah, but mostly the West Coast.”

  “And they had a lot of fans, right?”

  “Not really,” I say. “They never got that big.”

  “Okay, so not tons of fans, but the fans they did have really loved them.”

  I just shrug, don’t really respond, because she states this as though it’s a fact that doesn’t need confirmation.

  “I can feel the love in here.” She nods to herself. “I can feel it in the glass and the stitches. Two best friends, playing music, searching for love.”

  “Okay, Alexa.”

  “What? You can laugh if you want to, but it’s true. Now, you’re going to want to get on Van N
ess and take it all the way to Lombard.”

  “Oh my God, Lex,” Meg says. “He knows how to get to the bridge.”

  We go through what we’ve brought for the ride. Meg has devoted hours to making playlists to suit any mood. She plugs her iPod into Uncle Pete’s recently installed, prized stereo system, and soon we’re greeted with the upbeat, flirty sound of The Supremes.

  Alexa has a folder containing maps, contacts, and phone numbers. Packed in a small case are an emergency radio, a universal cell-phone charger, and a first-aid kit.

  “I also brought a Magic Eight Ball,” she says. “I’m trying to put a little more trust in fate.”

  Bev has an ancient, clunky Walkman and her camera.

  “That’s the cutest camera I’ve ever seen,” Meg says.

  “I’ve been thinking about a project,” Bev says. “We should take a photograph of everyone we meet on the trip so that we remember them. Like, people we meet at gas stations and working at the motels and venues.”

  “I love this idea,” I say. “This is so great. It’ll force us to talk to people. Plus it’s so documentary. It’s like Leon Levinstein.”

  “Who?” Meg asks.

  “That photographer we studied in class, remember? He photographed almost everyone he passed on the street.”

  “Oh, yeah, that guy.”

  Alexa says, “We could keep a tour journal and leave spaces for the photos to go.”

  “Maybe we should alternate days that we write in it,” I say.

  “Who wants today?” Meg asks.

  Bev says, “We need a journal first.”

  There’s the sound of Meg rifling through her giant bag and then the sound of her saying, “A journal like this?” and I glance in the rearview and there’s Meg, waving a large black book to the rhythm of The Supremes fading out.

  “I’m a good person to travel with, yo,” she says. “You need something, you come to me.”

  It’s still morning but it’s warm already. All of Melinda’s windows are down but the bus still fills with us laughing, and even though I’ve crossed this bridge a thousand times, something feels different. The sky, the water, the people walking along the footpaths, and all the cars ahead of us and behind us—everything is larger and more possible.

  “Hey,” I say to Bev, “we should do this photo thing in Europe, too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. We’re going to meet so many people. We can keep a log: where we were, who the person was, what we were talking about.”

  “That sounds really good,” she says, but there’s something about the way she says it—like she’s doing her drifting away thing.

  “Okay, let’s think about it more. We can refine it,” I say, using the phrase Bev’s favorite teacher uses instead of saying that something’s a bad idea. Bev smiles her amazing smile—that dimple in her left cheek, her one crooked tooth, from the time we crashed bikes and she went flying—and turns up the volume.

  We’re exiting the bridge, and “Turn It On” by Sleater-Kinney has begun.

  “Nice choice,” Bev tells Meg.

  “I thought I’d give a nod to our origins,” Meg says. “Show the Riot Grrrls a little love.”

  The summer after ninth grade, Bev showed me this book on the Riot Grrrl movement she found at Green Apple and told me, “I’m going for this.” And I think I said something like, “Why go for something that reached its peak the year you were born?” But she rolled her eyes and I ended up admitting that, yes: Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney were so much better than any girl bands around now, and after a laptop screen marathon of mid-nineties concert footage with terrible sound quality but dozens of badass girls jumping around in miniskirts or pounding on drum sets or strumming bass guitars (braless, in thin white shirts), I succumbed.

  Yes, it was time for a resurrection. Yes, even though she had never played music before in her life, Bev could be the one to do it. Because even though some of the Riot Grrrls were awesome musicians, the real criteria were to care about injustice, to be antiestablishment, and to be hot in a way that was raw and authentic.

  A few months later Bev and I saw Sleater-Kinney play at Great American Music Hall. We stood in the crowd, older people all around us, under the ornate ceiling and red balcony. I kept looking over at Bev, who was cocking her head, letting her blond wavy hair fall into her eyes, trying to look like this was nothing new when really all of it was new: standing in this dark room so close to strangers that we seemed to breathe in unison, all waiting for the same moment.

  And then the lights went out and the applause began, and Bev was trying not to smile but I didn’t care about seeming cool. Instead I grabbed her hand and we wove our way through the crowd, getting as close as we could to the stage. Usually I think that’s a jackass move, which is why I always get to shows early and sit down on the floor for an hour before the opening act goes on. I like to be in the front but I don’t believe in cutting. There are a couple loopholes to this etiquette, though. One is if the band you are seeing is your favorite band and you arrive late because you have to finish cleaning your room before you leave the house, and another is if rumors of the band retiring are swarming across music magazines and blogs everywhere and this might be your first and only chance to see them up close and possibly be graced with a drop of hot girl sweat by one of the two singer/guitarists. Both of these were true for Bev that night, so I took her by the hand and said “excuse me” about forty times.

  We ended up right next to a giant speaker, and my ears would be ringing for days but I didn’t know that yet. All I knew was that Bev was also grinning by now, and Corin strummed her pretty gray-and-white guitar and sang these elastic, ecstatic notes, and Janet’s drums sounded like a cross between kids clapping in unison and the best punk drummer there ever was, and right above us, so close that we could have hopped the barrier and touched her, Carrie played her guitar and sang responses to Corin’s phrases, and every now and then she would squint into the lights and do these lazy hops and kicks like she was feeling mellow and dancing in her living room.

  “I have such a crush on her,” Bev said, staring as Carrie stood above us, her hand strumming fiercely, gazing out into nothingness.

  I said, “You’re gonna have to fight me for her,” and we both laughed and looked back to the stage where Carrie was now moving her ankles around in some weird part-march, part-moonwalk way.

  For the rest of the night, Bev hardly looked at the other two, even during Janet’s drum solos, even though Corin had the cutest porcelain doll face and did things with her voice I didn’t know were possible. I watched Carrie sing “Modern Girl,” which was slower and had lyrics I knew by heart because Bev had been listening to it on repeat for months. When “Modern Girl” ended and the raucous, catchy songs resumed, I pulled out the sketchbook I carried and started a list of things we’d need to have so that Bev could start her band. Guitar. Amp. Drum kit. Bass and/or second guitar. Another amp. Songs (four to start). At least two more girls.

  Thirty miles out of San Francisco, I am hit with a realization: “Our tickets!” I say to Bev.

  I started looking at prices and flights a year ago but Bev didn’t want to get them too far in advance. Prices were high and Bev kept talking about her cousin who always gets last-minute flights for cheap, especially when the tickets are only one way, like ours are. We know that we want to leave right after tour, but we don’t know when we’ll want to come home, or even where we’ll be by then. We’ll be gone for at least a year, so maybe we’ll be living somewhere unexpected, like Norway, or, I don’t know, Cyprus or somewhere.

  “I should call my dad right now and have him pay for them,” I say, and I get this rush when I think about him pressing “purchase” on the website for these tickets with Bev’s name and my name on them, tickets that will take us to Paris and leave us to wander Europe by ourselves.

  “Grab my phone?” I say to Bev, and she opens the glove compartment where we had tossed our phones earlier so they could sit wi
th Uncle Pete’s random objects: a pocketknife and several cassette tapes, a blue feather and a gray stone carved with the Chinese character for Patience, his membership cards to the Vintage Volkswagen Club of America and the Sunset Table Tennis Club—an affiliation I’m going to have to ask him about at some point. I’ve never even heard him mention table tennis.

  “No service,” Bev says.

  “Really?”

  She nods and after a minute she says, “I have to pee.”

  I exit the freeway and pull into a McDonald’s lot, and I’m about to check for a signal on my phone when Bev asks me to come inside with her and buy her a shake while she uses the bathroom.

  So I stand in line for a vanilla shake, Bev’s dessert of choice since forever, and she emerges just as I’m collecting the change. I hand her the shake.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  I take a few steps toward the door and turn around. She’s still standing at the counter, watching me.

  “Did you want fries, too?”

  “No,” she says.

  “You did want vanilla, right?”

  She nods.

  “Ready, then?” I ask, and she finally steps forward and follows me out.

  Bev tells me that she’s feeling tired; she needs to sleep before tonight’s show, so she opens the passenger door and takes out her stuff, and then moves to the backseat. Which means that now I’m alone in the front. Alexa offers to come up to copilot, but I tell her that as long as she can keep track of where we are from the middle row she can stay where she is. I’m an only child; I’m used to spending time by myself. And really, pretty much all I want to do is think about Bev and me in Europe right now, so I pull back onto the road and as soon as I have Melinda up to an acceptable speed—something that does not happen quickly—I can relax and space out for a while. We have fifty more miles on 101 before we need to start looking for the next road.

  I drive past telephone wires and Adopt-a-Highway signs and miles and miles of golden hills, and I think about Bev, lying in the back row, and I wonder if she’s sleeping. I imagine her back there, staring at the diamond-patterned fabric of the bus ceiling, not seeing the billboards or the hills or any of what I’m watching out the window.