The Position

  Poor, doomed Adam Selig, that goofy boy from Princeton Court in Wontauket. On a Friday night in May 1977, a year and a half after he had first come over to the Mellows’ house and rolled on top of her and tasted her chocolate breath and pushed his hand down her Looney Tunes underpants, Adam Selig had gone to an amusement park that was set up for one weekend each summer in the parking lot of the JCPenney. Holly had been there that night too, although by then she and Adam Selig no longer spoke. There had been no real breakup, just a general drift and mutual loss of interest. She was with her coterie of dumb mall compatriots, and he was with two boys with whom he rode dirt bikes at a nearby construction site on weekends. Tonight he and the dirt-bike boys went for a ride on the Trabant, an attraction of uncertain lineage. The name made it sound German, or maybe French, and mysterious in its own way—a far cry from the garden-variety roller coaster or the Spider with its eight spiky arms that dangled children and teenagers over the roof of JCPenney and let them look down upon this town in which they lived, and maybe let them realize for the first time that it wasn’t exactly a metropolis.

  But on this particular night, the Trabant came loose from its mooring, reared up into the sky above the makeshift amusement park, and flung the six people on it (it was never a very popular ride) to their instant, juddering deaths. For months the local newspaper referred to the lawsuits, the grief, the Baltimore-based carnival company, Port-a-Carn Entertainments, that was ruined by this tragedy, and, of course, the famous Trabant Six, whose faces would forever form a gallery of lost souls. Side by side they would remain: three teenaged boys, a school janitor, a mildly retarded girl named Candy and her mother. With the exception of Adam Selig and his dirt-bike friends Tony Spee and Chris Canetti, there was nothing to join them all but this slightly embarrassing death.

  Holly Leeming thought of Adam Selig fairly often after all these years. She marveled at how he, the first boy who had touched and aroused her with an almost accidental, intuitive talent, had been killed while she had been spared. By some peculiar stroke of fate, she had poured drugs into her body year after year and still lived. The years had hardened her and leathered her up so that she was practically crocodilian, but to her amazement she found that she was constitutionally sound, and that through some accident of Mellow and Woodman genetics she was able to go on and on.

  In summer 1977, shortly after the carnival tragedy—though not, she was sure, because of it—Holly began her descent. At first she couldn’t sleep at night but simply got up and wandered the Wontauket house. Her parents were sometimes awake, those hipster night owls; her father might be listening to the stereo in the den with enormous headphones clamped to his head and his bare foot tapping on the coffee table. He would pull off the phones and say, “Hey, kid, why are you awake?”

  Or else it might be her mother, sitting in the kitchen and talking quietly into the telephone in the middle of the night. Though her parents were united physically in every one of those drawings in their book, by late summer 1977 they were rarely together at home, and they seemed to operate in entirely different corners of the house.

  Something was up. Something was brewing. Something was terribly wrong and perhaps always had been, but only now, with the startling clarity that late adolescence brings you, she was able to see, or at least to infer, something desperately important.

  Her mother no longer loved her father. Her mother loved someone else.

  One night Holly found Roz Mellow hunched at the kitchen table at 2 A.M., the cord around her arm like a series of bracelets, and she was talking into the receiver with a great sense of urgency, her voice hushed and throaty. Holly heard, “. . . but no . . . I want to . . . I don’t think . . . I do . . . I know . . . I know . . . I know . . .” And then Roz looked up and saw her daughter, and appeared stricken, found out, as though Holly had shined an enormous spotlight on her during a prison break. Roz Mellow, scaling the electric fence, said something into the receiver and then hung up.

  “Who was that?” Holly asked.

  “No one. Just a friend.”

  “Oh, right. Like I’m supposed to fucking believe that?”

  “Please don’t speak that way,” said her mother. “I know you can’t understand this, but my life is complicated. I try to be a good mother, to keep things stable here at home, to give you kids a normal life. I try and try. I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up, Holly, I just don’t know.” That was when Holly realized her father was standing in the kitchen doorway. Husband and wife exchanged looks, then he silently backed away. “I don’t really need this kind of shit,” said Roz Mellow.

  “Please don’t speak that way,” Holly mimicked, and then regretted it, for she saw how upset her mother was. Roz Mellow, whose face was moment by moment being loosed from its beauty even while her daughter’s face signed on to beauty for the long run, began to cry. She cried hard at the kitchen table, all the surfaces gleaming around her, the cabinets and fixtures and the five-speed Sunbeam blender brushed bright in the strange light of the middle of the night and the nearly adult child’s awareness of a mother’s pain.

  “Oh, Mom, don’t cry, please don’t, okay?” Holly asked, and she realized that she couldn’t bear to witness this. It was too fucked up, too inexplicable. Wasn’t it bad enough that her parents had displayed their incredible horniness, their togetherness? Now they had to display, at least for her, in the middle of the night, their separateness. The marriage was going to end, she understood; there was nothing that could keep it together. When your father sat listening to the gloom of Mahler or breakable Billie Holiday in the den, and your mother urgently whispered to someone on the phone in the kitchen, there was no going back. All the sex in the world could not alter this. Love broken stayed broken, unrepaired. Or if someone did try to repair it, you would forever see the spot where the soldering iron had applied its adhesive silver. The weakness. The place that must not be jarred or touched or stirred up again, for if that happened then there would be another break along the exact same fault line. But this time it would be cleaner, irreparable, final.

  Roz Mellow could not stop crying. She would cry and cry, and one day after that marathon of crying, both parents would sit the children down in the den and tell them they were getting a divorce. Michael and Holly were entirely dead-eyed and unresponsive during the talk; this was no surprise to them, obviously, but the younger ones looked as though it were a bolt from the blue. Their mother reassured them that none of them would have to leave the house, because she would keep living there with them and their father would take a place nearby, where they could visit him whenever they wanted to.

  No one asked: Why is this happening?

  Holly, age seventeen, wandered out more and more into the night, seeing it not as a time of day, but as a place. Night was a town, a more exotic version of this for-shit suburb in which she lived. And at night, too, you could meet the kind of people you could never meet during daylight hours. It was night when she met a guy who was called Hojo because of his combination of red hair and perennial turquoise jacket, and he was the first one who ended up staying awake with her into the hours before the sun poked up over the top of the Stride Rite and the town library and the forever-marked JCPenney. She’d met him in a cluster of people at the train station at 1 A.M.

  All of the marginal figures popped out like ghouls after dark. Some, like Holly Mellow, were from the richer part of town, but more likely they were from the tract houses and the garden apartments and even from a town or two away. They were teenaged or in their twenties; occasionally they allowed an older man into the group as a kind of paterfamilias figure, but usually his function was to provide a car and a stream of quality drugs.

  Holly eventually moved out for good, into an apartment in Hoboken at first, and then various other places. But she spent the next year or so coming back and forth to this town, staying up all night with a variety of companions, all of whom had been destructive and inappropriate and essentially awful for her, the kind of cohort y
ou shrug off like bad fashions as the eras collapse and pass, only to replace them with new, equally bad ones.

  Hojo must have had a real name at some point, but if so she never knew it, for he was one of those people who would have liked the idea of wrapping himself in grungy mystery and sitting for hours in the company of a bitter, privileged girl like Holly Mellow, who had gone so far afield of her previous, cushy life that her trajectory didn’t even track. He would have liked the idea of going far afield with her, of pulling her into an alley or a gutter or a literal field for a while, the kind of place where people who called themselves simply “Hojo” and had no employment and no shape to their days tended to congregate. So she had gone there with him and stayed for a period of months, becoming just another apparition, a lost girl in jeans and a running jacket that had once been a vivid salmon color and eventually ended up the color of smoke.

  Over the years she became one of those people whose name is on the short-term lease of an apartment where no one knows their neighbors, where the doors slam and shudder all night long. She never got around to fully furnishing any of the apartments she lived in, for just when she started thinking it was time to get a futon with an actual frame, she would decide to leave. She’d visit friends, dropping in unannounced.

  Once in her mid-twenties she happened to be in New York City, and night came and she realized she had nowhere to go. She was high, and it was raining, so she ducked into a phone booth—back in the time when phone booths existed on corners in New York—and called Information for her brother Michael’s number. He’d just graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and was sharing an apartment on Riverside Drive and 102nd with two friends. It was a Saturday night, and Holly had no reason to think he would be at home, but he was. Soon she was standing in the doorway of his long-halled, dark apartment, and he let her in.

  She was so high, and she sat in his living room and cried about how awful everything was for her, and how badly she’d fucked up her relationships with men, and how sex had held so much early promise, but in the end it was only a disappointment. Didn’t he agree? But Michael hadn’t said too much. He seemed overwhelmed by her. In the background, his roommates came and went, knocking back beers and making evening plans. Finally it was time for bed, and Michael gave her the mattress in his small bedroom while he lay on the floor beside it, wrapped in a green blanket their mother had long ago, and improbably, crocheted. In the morning, Holly awoke with a thudding headache. She felt something heavy and opened her eyes to find herself face-to-face with her brother, who was fast asleep. He was pushed up against the mattress where she lay, his arm flung across her. In his sleep he had instinctively come as close as he could without actually being on the mattress too. Their faces were inches apart, though on different levels, and she looked at him, really looked at him, seeing that his brow had gotten creased over time, and that he was indisputably a man at twenty-two, and that he had a beautiful mouth, and that he was very handsome. She wished she could do something for him, but of course he didn’t need a thing from her, he would be fine, he had graduated “summa,” which apparently was a big deal. Doors would swing wide for him throughout life, and women would drop with a thud beside him in bed. He would be all right, he didn’t need her at all. They had once been twinned, joined together by proximity of age, yet always she had been the suffering one, and he had known that and accepted it; he’d even seemed impressed by it when they were young, as though a beautiful teenage girl’s unhappiness was a thing of awe. He silently admired her, and she accepted this quietly, pleased to have him there. Then, when she waltzed away from home in that haze of rage-at-parents and self-pity, he tolerated her absence. He asked her occasionally, at first, “Why did you have to disappear?” She had no real answer, of course, and both of them understood it was partly in her nature to leave the family, and that really, in the end, it wasn’t such a surprise that she had done this.

  After that night in Michael’s apartment on Riverside Drive, Holly would return to her drifting, directionless life, and they wouldn’t see each other again for more than a year. She’d embarrassed herself, blubbering so hard in front of him and his roommates, snot-nosed, red-eyed, high. It was a good thing she was going.

  Holly carefully lifted her brother’s long arm from around her back and climbed off the mattress. “Think of me, Michael,” she whispered into his ear before she left, but he didn’t stir.

  Over the years, Holly continued to float in and out of apartments, other people’s lives, U.S. cities. She stayed afloat through the money she already had, the money she earned dealing pot, and the occasional day jobs she took. But what kept her alive, she always felt, was some kind of ingenuity on her part, the X-factor that you either had or you didn’t. Maybe its presence was genetic, but no one really understood. Something, though, had made her different from everyone in her family; something had plucked her away from them but had also kept her going over the decades. An engine. An instinct. She’d had long bad stretches from time to time, of course, and when she was younger had been knocked flat from depression and cocaine and a daily influx of pot. But even though she’d gone into recovery, she’d gotten out of it, too. Holly had never collapsed completely, but instead she always kept on traveling, moving, seething, thinking, keeping herself alive, remembering to eat protein and to drink enough water, to pay the electric bill and to have her teeth cleaned every year, and to wear some kind of coat when the weather changed.

  Holly had a perpetual restlessness about her, and once, after reading a magazine article, she became convinced she had adult ADD, though she’d never been diagnosed. “See, what we’re doing is self-medicating,” a friend said one time when they were chopping up some crunchy cocaine into a fine sand, rolling dollar bills into tight tubes, then lowering their heads reverently. “We’re treating our emotional problems ourselves.”

  Sitting in a studio apartment in Waterbury, Connecticut, or Holyoke, Massachusetts, in a room with shag carpeting and maybe a mattress, smoking dope and watching the snow fall or the rain pour or the sun brighten the streaked windows, Holly always made sure to listen to music, for if you were going to sit around and get stoned in an empty apartment, one hand dangling and unmoving in a bag of chips like a fish hook waiting in the water for action, then you were going to need music. Without music, you might have to confront what you’d done to your life, how you’d made a hash of it and essentially ensured that nothing good could come of it as long as you were in charge.

  Late one night when she was still in high school, Holly and Hojo had sat side by side on the green wooden bench of the Wontauket railroad station, and he’d wept against her as he told her about his childhood spent in the St. Anthony’s Boys’ Home of Ronkonkoma. The nuns there had beaten the boys with mops and forced them to drink the mop water. The story was so unbearable that Holly pressed him against her harder and, later that night, hidden behind a row of billboards at the train station advertising A Chorus Line and The Ice Capades, she knelt down and unbuckled his pants. She was happy to do this for him. He was so grateful, and his eyes partly rolled up into his head, which pleased Holly and caused her to feel a swoop of sensation. That swoop would dip down upon her from time to time over the next few years, but she became aware of its incremental lessening. And none of these experiences—not Hojo or any of the men who followed—came close to the sweet depths of sex with Adam Selig in her bedroom. That early, nearly unmanageable excitement was gone, and she wanted it back. How could she get it? Where was the fulfillment? Where was the journey her parents had written about? Over time Holly Mellow looked and looked, like someone frantically searching the globe to find a person who no longer exists. It occurred to her that she’d been sucker-punched, made to believe that such early intensity could be repeated in countless ways as you lived your life. She’d thrown over a chance to be educated and normal, choosing instead the pursuit of rapidly fading sensation. Once you started down that path, it was hard to change. Even if you wanted to, people would always
see you in a certain light.

  At least, along the way, she was almost never alone. There were lovers, friends, people who were simply there. One companion in the early days had been a girl named Joanne Mikulski, a dealer of every drug to come down the pike, and what a pike it was, welcoming the panoply of powders, whippets, capsules, and buds that were so bountiful then. Once, the fall after her parents separated, Holly had been picked up by the police in the band shell of a Huntington park. They had put her in a squad car late at night with her blood saturated in THC and methamphetamine, and for some reason she asked them to take her to her father’s house. They agreed, handing her over to her mournful father, who embraced her, and who seemed that night, with his longish hair and beard in need of a trim, to appear slightly lost himself, as though a willful daughter could deflate even the most powerful and sexual of fathers. But later it occurred to her that he might not have been lost because of her actions at all, but because of his own sorry life: the wife he had loved, who now loved someone else.

  He took his daughter inside that night and looked at her in the light of the front hall. Her pupils were dilated to the size of olives. What a wreck she was! He shook his head and said, “My little girl. Just look at you.”

  It was the opposite of the way he’d always instructed them to look at their mother, and she felt ashamed of herself, for she was a disgrace, an exemplar of adolescent fuck-up. This is who you do not want your child to be. Just look at you, he’d said, but he spoke without love and adoration, and only with a kind of resigned acceptance of the failure that was Holly.

  Neither he nor Roz seemed to have much sway over their older daughter, for the tug toward the world was sharper and stronger in her than they could possibly contend with. Roz, too, had been pulled toward the world. Her marriage hadn’t been enough for her, or it had been too much.