Sting-Ray Afternoons

We retreat to the basement during my parents’ parties and can do whatever we please down there without fear—or hope—of intervention. We can pee in the drain in the floor on the unfinished side of the basement rather than go all the way upstairs to the bathroom, which has been stage-dressed with a burning candle, milled hand soaps, and towels I’ve never seen before. The buzz from overhead—and the hard-soled shoes clomping across the kitchen linoleum—ensure no adults will hear our screams when Jim administers a 99 Bump or a Knuckle Floater. No referee will descend the stairs to stop our boxing matches. We can whip each other with an orange length of Hot Wheels track until one of us cries “Uncle” or “Mercy” or “I give.” The safe word is constantly changing and is often known only to Jim.

Long after our regular bedtimes, we’re summoned upstairs as an afterthought. Before we’re exiled to our bedrooms, however, we’re paraded in our pajamas in front of company, like the Von Trapp kids but without the voices. The formal living room, with its curio cabinet, crushed-velvet couch, and carpeting as soft and white and muting as fresh snow, is ordinarily off-limits to us. It’s reserved “for company,” as Mom often reminds us whenever she catches Tom or me spinning endless circuits in the upholstered swivel chair or finds our footprints after the fact in the fresh Hoover tracks on the carpet.

Seeing the living room lit up like this, filled with men and women drinking and smoking, cocktail wieners impaled on toothpicks, ashtrays scattered everywhere, matchbooks bearing the logos of the kind of restaurants Mom and Dad don’t take us to—Camelot, Lord Fletcher’s, Rudolph’s—is to see a stage set come to life on opening night.

In the morning, I’ll rifle the cushions for the change that fell from all the Farah slacks the night before. The ashtrays will still be full of crushed-out cigarettes with lipsticked filters. On every end table, empty beer cans will hold down cork coasters. I’ll pick up a can of Hamm’s Preferred Stock, smell the rim, shake it. A pull tab will rattle at the bottom like a nickel in a tin cup. I’ll swig the dregs. They’ll taste warm and gritty, with a texture like pulped orange juice. Someone will have ashed her cigarette in my beer.

But that’s in the morning. Tonight, I lie awake and listen to the chatter, the too-loud laughter coming up the stairs and under the door like a vapor. I hear it through the floor, muffled, a hum, a buzz, a rumble, frequently pierced by a howl of laughter. I walk to the top of the stairs and lie down on the carpet. Christ above the credenza looks down in rebuke. Downstairs, Dad is telling a story.

“I became an area manager in 1965,” he says. “We were living in Chicago, but part of my sales territory was Detroit. I met a couple of my Mickey Mining friends there one night for dinner, after a long day of sales calls.”

In the glass fronts of our framed photographs on the staircase, I can see Dad reflected back, talking to Mr. Cannady.

“At dinner, we had a few drinks,” Dad says. “We had a zillion drinks. And a colleague who lived in Detroit suggested we go to this little ski hill that he knew. It was just like Hyland Hills.” Hyland Hills is Bloomington’s own little alpine resort: half a dozen slopes, a chairlift, and a warm chalet with hot cocoa and Hostess apple pies.

“We decided we would share one lift ticket to save money,” Dad goes on. “We hadn’t thought this through thoroughly, but we had some kind of competition in mind. There may have been a bet involved. I may have challenged the other two guys to a downhill ski race at dinner. Anyway, I decided that I would be the first to ski.”

“Are you a good skier?” Mr. Cannady asks.

“I have never skied in my life,” Dad replies. “In 1965, I had never even seen a ski hill in person.”

“And yet you challenged these men to a race?”

“Exactly.”

“Go on,” says Mr. Cannady.

“So I went to this little shack where they sold lift tickets and rented skis,” Dad says. “And the guy behind the little counter there said to me, ‘Do you always dress like that to go skiing?’”

“Always dress like what?” says Mrs. Deasey. A few more grown-ups have gathered around Dad.

“This was at the end of a day of sales calls,” Dad says. “I was in a blue suit, black polished wingtips, a white shirt, a tie, a wool topcoat, a snap-brim hat, and kid gloves.”

The guests are laughing in anticipation. Everyone’s listening to Dad’s story. I imagine him on The Tonight Show, sitting on the couch, telling the story to Johnny.

“Anyway,” he says, “the guy gave me the skis and boots, the poles, and stapled a lift ticket to the front of my topcoat, and I skied over to the three hills.

“The first was a bunny hill,” Dad says. “The second hill was intermediate. The third hill was clearly for advanced skiers. And I decided—though I’d never worn skis or even seen a ski slope—that I had to be better than that bunny hill. I went to the intermediate one.”

Downstairs, the party has gone quiet, everyone hanging on Dad’s story. The raised right hand of Christ above the credenza seems to be telling me, “Keep it down. I want to hear this.”

“I had no idea there would be a rope tow, or any idea how to use it,” Dad says. “It never crossed my gin-soaked mind to line my skis up parallel. I just walked up and grabbed on as tightly as I could. And the rope threw me over”—he demonstrates with a violent jerk—“headfirst into a snowbank.”

The other twenty people in the room are laughing, but Dad is serious as can be. He hates exaggeration and doesn’t abide self-aggrandizement. This is what he prefers—objective self-ridicule. “It knocked the skis and boots off me, broke my glasses, and bent one of the rented ski poles in half.”

“What did you do?” someone asks.

“I picked up all this stuff, walked back to the little rental shack, and—not five minutes after renting everything—said to the guy there, ‘Hey, I just had a little accident.’ The guy looked at me like ‘What the hell?’”

My parents’ friends are howling. There’s no music playing, only the music of Dad’s story, but it feels as if a beat and a rhythm are coming up the stairs.

“He gave me a new pole,” Dad says. “Someone showed me how to grab the rope tow the right way. The palms were ripped out of my kid gloves, but I made it to the top of the bunny hill and even managed to get down. But at the bottom of the hill, there was a little warning bump. It warned you that the next bump was the parking lot. And it was then that I realized I hadn’t the vaguest idea how to stop these damn things. I was later told you point ’em together like a V, but I hadn’t heard that before, so I thought I’d just ski into the parking lot and run into a car. And that’s exactly what I did.”

I don’t see Mom’s face reflected in the Sears portrait-studio pictures on the stairs. Perhaps she’s busy in the kitchen, rinsing glasses and crumbing trays. If she’s listening to Dad, I can’t pick out her laugh in the crowd. But more often on nights like these, during a party such as this, she’ll leave the cleanup until the next morning and allow herself to be swept away on the tide of conversation and laughter.

Steve Rushin's books