Sting-Ray Afternoons



On an equatorial evening at the end of August, Mom is hosting her bridge club on the screened porch, which is Dad’s cue to evacuate the premises. He informs Tom and me that we’re going back-to-school shopping for new underwear at Korner Plaza, but just before we get there, he abruptly pulls into the parking lot of the Boulevard Theater, which has four blood-red letters on its marquee: JAWS.

It was released two months earlier, sold twenty-five million tickets in its first thirty-eight days, and has prevented me—on the basis of the poster alone—from swimming in Bush Lake.

“There are no sharks in Bush Lake, honey,” Mom insisted. But I wasn’t willing to take her word for it. Nor did I have any interest in seeing Jaws, despite my pleading to the contrary. I would almost rather be shopping for underwear. What is Dad thinking, acceding to our wishes—expressed on a weekly basis since the film opened on June 20—to take us to see Jaws? It is entirely unsuitable. In the opinion of the critic for the Los Angeles Times, “The PG rating is grievously wrong and misleading…Jaws is too gruesome for children and likely to turn the stomach of the impressionable at any age.”

This becomes clear in the opening seconds—naked woman, drunken boyfriend, death by shark—but as the film’s sphincter-clenching music and popcorn-spilling surprises pile up, a strange calm washes over me. I am surviving Jaws and even enjoying it, already composing in my head what I’ll tell my friends when I return to Nativity next week.

“Did you see Jaws?”

“Yeah, I saw Jaws. It wasn’t that scary.”

It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen, even scarier than The Poseidon Adventure, but seated next to Dad, sipping on a Coke, hearing him horselaugh at the scariest parts, I think of the advice I heard on TV that summer, in one of the many stories that aired about what to do in case of a real-life shark attack. “Punch it in the nose,” the reporter said. And this I know Dad will do for me.

After the movie, eating ice cream at Bridgeman’s when we should be in bed, I ask Dad if we’re still getting underwear.

He smiles and says, “Some other time.”





8.





Through the Magic Doorgate




It’s nineteen feet long, weighs five thousand pounds, and gets twelve miles to the gallon, enough to get us from gas station to gas station in comfort if not style, in a giant rectangle made for squares. The Ford LTD Country Squire station wagon is to South Brook parents what the Schwinn Sting-Ray is to their children: not just a mode of conveyance but a symbol of arrival, a suburban icon of American engineering. And there is one sitting in our driveway right now, its wood-grain side panels, trimmed in true blue, blistering in the sun. The empty luggage rack is inviting us to drive to some distant vacation paradise.

The wood panels on the Country Squire are made of vinyl just as our house is covered in mint-green aluminum siding made to look like painted wood. Our basement is paneled in fiberboard printed with a wood-grain design. Every door in our house is made of a similar substrate with a wood-grain pattern of whorls and knots baked onto its surface. If my bifold closet doors weren’t hollow, I’d think they were hewn from a single slab of stained oak. Our steak knives have plastic handles made to look like rutted logs, tiny versions of the flume ride’s fiberglass logs at Valleyfair. We live in a place where real wood is cheap and abundant but not nearly as prized as its aluminum or vinyl analogue. And the Ford Country Squire is the high point of this simulated wood-grain aesthetic.

The car smells like its upholstery—acres of DuraWeave vinyl that radiates the intense heat of summer and the gasp-inducing cold of winter. On every August ride home from Bush Lake—the back of every thigh sizzling like the flame-broiled patty of a Whopper—I think that my thermos must be made of DuraWeave vinyl, so successful is this wonder material at retaining the ambient miseries of a Minnesota season. When I look up “Minnesota” in The Encyclopedia Americana at the library, I see “The winters are often severe; the summers are marked by sudden intense heat waves.” It’s my first inkling that the rest of the world isn’t necessarily like this.

Travel confirms it. Facing backward in the way back of the wagon, I see where we’ve been, not where we’re going. The Country Squire has dual facing rear seats, separated by a foot of carpeting, so that two or four children marooned back there on its bench seats appear to be seated at the world’s smallest restaurant booth, from which the table has been removed. There is a power window in the tailgate door, which swings out instead of folding down—Ford’s Magic Doorgate—offering not one but two easy ways (window, gate) to accidentally tumble onto the interstate at seventy-five miles an hour. The thought preoccupies me on long drives. Falling out the back of the Country Squire would be like falling off the lido deck of an oceangoing cruise liner, so distant is the driver and so swift is our progress. No one would hear me scream. I would simply recede from view in the asphalt wake of the LTD Country Squire.

I ask Dad what the LTD stands for.

“Limited,” he says. “As in limited warranty.”

“What does that mean?”

Dad sighs. He doesn’t love the Country Squire as much as I do. “It just means they’ll only make so many.”

“How many?” I ask.

“As many as they can sell.”

Into this car he will load our matching Samsonite suitcases, each one slightly larger than the next, a series of Russian nesting dolls rendered as lime-green luggage. Packing the Country Squire for vacation is a puzzle to be solved, a three-dimensional Escher drawing, and as Dad stands before the Magic Doorgate, surveying the way back of the wagon with a chin-scratching intensity, I think of the opening words of The Twilight Zone reruns that freak me out on weekend nights: “You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension—a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance…”

Steve Rushin's books