On Thursday: “E-J-A-C-U-L-A-T-E.”
Lisa cut biology on Friday, which was disappointing. We were scheduled to dissect Abercrombie’s brain. And teach him to spell “anal beads.”
Skipping class had become a common occurrence for Lisa. Her mother had been battling breast cancer for a few years, and under the not-so-watchful eye of her father, Lisa was living a life apparently devoid of rules and goals. So Lisa became a little bit of a wild child before my eyes, which fascinated the hell out of me. My life was crammed so full of parentally imposed rules and self-imposed goals I could hardly breathe. I didn’t even know there was another way to live.
Sometimes I’d stop by Lisa’s house and stand in awe at the condition of her bedroom: clothes on the floor piled as high as the bed. Half-full mugs on her dresser with little circles of bluish-green mold floating like miniature galaxies in a coffee-beige cosmos. I might spot a month-old newspaper lying next to her pillow or a bikini top hanging from the doorknob in the middle of February.
If my room looked like this, I thought, Mike and Terri would each shit a ten-pound brick. The most nonnegotiable edict in our house was to never, ever, under any circumstances leave it without making your bed. When I would sassily ask what difference it made, Terri would say, “Because I might have someone over while you’re at school,” which of course made me wonder who was visiting my mother during the school day and why the hell was she showing them my bedroom? When I asked, she never answered. Was she showing the house to prospective buyers? (“This room is perfect for a teenage boy with an Olivia Newton-John obsession.”) Was she having an affair? (“I force my children to make their beds. Does that turn you on?”) Was she giving tours to Japanese sightseers? (“In America, we value . . . discipline.”) The whole thing seemed pretty illogical, but she wouldn’t budge.
Thirty years later, bed-making is a popular topic around our Christmas dinner table. My sisters and I laugh at my parents’ obsession and reminisce about our individual ways of coping with it: I used to make my bed the second I arose from it to avoid any confrontation whatsoever. Jodi would leave the house, somehow “forgetting” to make her bed, and return home to an apoplectic Terri nearly every day. And Courtney, the twisted genius she is, would sleep on top of her fully made bed, covering herself with a blanket, then shove that blanket under the bed first thing in the morning.
The only respite I received from the barrage of rules and chores—making my bed, vacuuming the house, doing my own laundry, taking out the trash, being home by ten—was when I went to work. Even more important to my parents than keeping a tidy house was making money, and I had scored a job as a busboy in the nicest restaurant in town, Danfords Inn. While most kids my age were earning minimum wage working at one of the many fast-food chains nearby, I was bringing home a hundred bucks a night in cash tips.
So I was excused from family excursions to the ski slopes of Vermont in the winter and the beaches of Fire Island in the summer. We were living pretty high on the hog at the time, thanks to Mike’s beauty-supply business. Formerly a hairstylist, he made what turned out to be a wise career move, from giving individual women perms to selling salons the chemicals required to create truly huge hair. Considering we lived in the perm capital of the world (Long Island) in the heyday of the perm (the 1980s), I thought we should have been living in a castle instead of a split-level ranch. But I didn’t complain. We had a ski house and a boat, and I had my teenage privacy for most of the weekend while the rest of the family was gone.
During the weekends I had the house to myself, Lisa and I developed a private routine, separate from the weekday customs (mostly of eating fast food) we engaged in with our friend Meredith. The three of us were a trio, brought together by drama club and chorus class. In our firmly middle-class school district, those activities didn’t make us too popular, but we weren’t pariahs either. Mostly we spun in our own clique, a satellite too small to be noticed by the jocks and cheerleaders who lived squarely in the center of the universe. I resented our fringe status more than I dared admit, but not enough to attend even a single football game in four years.
Meredith, Lisa, and I had several nicknames for one another. On any given day, Meredith would be referred to as Bonnie, Snap, or The Superego. I would be Clyde, Crackle, or The Ego. And Lisa would be Baby Face, Pop, or The Id. Lisa always seemed to end up with the punchiest nicknames of the three of us, but neither Meredith nor I seemed to mind because, out of the group, Lisa was the one most likely to flash her tits at a passing car or scream “I just found my G-spot!” in a crowded movie theater. She earned them.
Like any triad, we occasionally split into twos. Sometimes Lisa and Meredith would get together alone and do girl things, like shop for homecoming dresses. (I was uninterested at the time, which seems funny in hindsight.) Sometimes Meredith and I would get together for coffee at the diner and study for a Regent’s exam. (Lisa had zero intention of going to college.) And every Saturday Lisa and I would get together, just the two of us, and memorize porn like a couple of pervert savants.
So, every weekend, I would work in the restaurant on Friday night, the rest of the family having left for a weekend trip around three o’clock, and come home to a house empty except for Noel, our eczematous Lhasa Apso. I’d let the dog out in the backyard to relieve herself, grab a few leftover chicken cutlets from the fridge, and watch TV until I fell asleep on the couch with Noel at my feet. I would sleep until around ten the next morning, feed the dog, and call Lisa. She would always be the one to answer her house phone because she slept with it next to her bed.
“Hello,” she’d growl.
“Did I wake you?”
“Of course you woke me. You ask me that same damn question every Saturday.”
“What time does the video store open?”
She let out an annoyed groan. “Oh my God. Eleven. It opens at eleven, just like every other fucking Saturday.”
“Great. So I’ll pick you up at eleven,” I’d say. “We’ll get there around eleven ten. We don’t want to seem too eager.” She hung up without replying, but I knew she’d be ready on time.