Did you go to your prom? Meredith asks. No, I say. Wish I did. I was too chunky, too awkward, too strange, too something. It would have been something.
Here it is: I always wanted to see me doing it while I did it, always had to envelop whatever I was doing with another layer of awareness. Always had to refer to myself. It was a stutter. It is a stutter. I have one now, I mean a real one. My mouth locks up. It's because I'm fully aware of the oddity now. I wasn't then, I could deceive myself.
There was a big living room (it seemed big at the time) with a gold brocade sofa at one end, really a loveseat. It was covered with a fabric that featured a vegetal motif in a satin gold thread on a background of matte gold, with a kind of slight burr. Rectangles of the same fabric guarded the arms, kept in place by little decorative pins, with plastic heads made to look like cut glass. The pin was curved like a corkscrew so that it would bed in the fabric and stuffing and wouldn't poke you when you were shampooing the couch or daubing at your spilled old fashioned or whatever it was that you did on the arm. If you faced the couch, turned left and followed the wall behind, past the aluminum windows at the ceiling and the simulated walnut grain panelling with black grooves, you would come to the head of the stairs. You had to watch your head because the edge of the opening was a little too close to the step under it.
In the stairwell the wall was cinderblock covered with light green paint. The steps were covered with a soft carpet made of loops of orange, brown and white fabric, so worn that the individual loops were beaten down into a kind of mat. At the bottom of the stairs you would smell sea air, sand, a little dirt maybe, and the high, tart smell of beach grass, especially if it was summer. The floor would be cool. It was a concrete slab covered with linoleum molded in a thatch design, great shapes of tan grooved with black, so that the whole floor looked like a flattened, two-dimensional grass mat. On the wall at the foot of the stairs was a grey Square D circuit box with carefully hand-lettered labels to show you where to turn on the water heater, upstairs outlets, baseboard heaters. On your right was the front door, solid core wood, flat, with a brass knob and deadbolt that always stuck a little, a casualty of the salt air. It was light green like the wall. Ahead was the bathroom, closed by a passage door, mahogany, hollow core, and ranged below the window dead ahead the toilet, sink with white formica and gold and silver flecks over a dark wood cabinet and on the right the shower stall, covered with white and pale green 3/4-inch tiles in a random pattern. On the outside of the sink/shower partition, over the sink, were clear glass ornaments shaped like sea horses, with bright orange color inside the glass and bits of gold and silver mica.
Left of the bathroom was another door, a bedroom with a creaking steel bed that was covered with a white bedspread decorated with a large design made of tiny balls of thread. Underneath were army blankets and old, supremely soft sheets. At the foot of the bed was a closet stocked with a few old slickers, once bright yellow, now a dustier version. At the head of the bed was a low nightstand and a floor lamp with a brush gold finish and rocket-shaped shades that sprouted from the top. Opposite the bed, on the same wall as that behind the bathroom sink, were a pair of high windows.
If you walked out the bedroom and turned to your right you would pass a row of coat hooks and find another hollow core door, this one to a slightly larger bedroom with a wood frame bed whose head incorporated a boxed-in book shelf. The shelf would have been loaded with two or three bulky James Michener novels. On top the shelf, in a place of honor, a thin mock-up of a wooden tombstone with the legend: "Here he lay all cold and hard, the last damn dog that pooped in my yard".
Outside, on the wall you faced when you climbed the stairs again, another pair of windows.
Climb the stairs (watch your head). Turn left and look out the wall that meets the wall behind the loveseat. This wall is mostly glass, like the wall on your right, and beyond is a wide deck that looks over a broad strip of beach grass and foredune that slopes down to a beach covered with light, fine grey sand. Beyond that, the grey/blue/green desert of the North Pacific. Turn to the right to see the deck wrap around that side and the roof of the boat garage, the tops of the shorepines that inhabit the yard and line the driveways.
Inside, in front of these windows, a long rectangular table topped with a rectangle of salmon-orange linoleum set in an oak frame, all covered with a vinyl table cloth with flocked backing and decorated with blue and green flowers. At the end of the table, on your left, a black and white television. When it was switched on you would likely see Bonanza or Rockford Files reruns; sometimes the Saturday matinee: True Grit; Chato's Land; Midway.
On your right is a broad fireplace with sandstone mantelpiece and a decorative grating, all built of brick, the chimney almost the same width as the firebox. A tile threshold. On the right side a recliner. You could sit there with a rum and coke in one of the plastic fluorescent orange cups from the kitchen cupboard. To the right of the fireplace, between it and the stairs, was a set of folding closet doors, opening on another bedroom, almost filled by a creaking marshmallow of a bed, covered by a worn salmon-orange bedspread. The room was made warm, stuffy even, by the intense heat of the chimney, which almost totally occupied one wall. On the wall opposite was cut in a redundant Markel heater, an improbable relic cased in a chrome faceplate and open wire cage like a catcher's mask, all shielding the user from two great rods, ribbed with what looked like fine threads and about 3/4 inches through, that glowed orange when power was supplied. On dark winter days the metal would click and ping like some animal talking to itself.
The kitchen ranged to the right of the glass wall and dining table, left to right: a row of hanging cabinets over a stainless steel stovetop; a stainless steel kitchen sink, under a pair of windows screened by yellow-green mesh curtains; a countertop under more cabinets. At the end of those cabinets, on the wall to your right and left of another window, a placard with an image of a ship on the ocean and the old Breton fisherman's prayer "O God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small." To the right of that window, another wall, counter and row of cabinets, up and down.
Ready?
Pack your sky blue leatherette overnight bag. Don't forget the grooved white cylinder that holds your toothbrush. Also bring a change of socks and some old Keds. We may go walking up the beach to the jetty. Check around. Check the bathroom.
We'll stop and fill up the Skylark. See the droplets on the windshield, disappearing behind the dark blue tinting stripe at the top. Turn up the tape deck when "Bo Bo" starts playing.
Look at all those fields off Sunset. This was all farmland once. Now look at all the brown squares of future shopping malls, the backhoes, the rebar forests. Once in a while you see a stand of firs, a stand of oaks. Sometimes there's an old farmhouse in the oaks. Crack the window a little if it's stuffy.
The woods are pretty now. Green, lots of green. Up the mountainsides you can see the light green daubs of alder and maple in the firs. Keep your eyes open for deer and elk. If you're hungry we'll stop in at Oney's for a bite.
River's high. It was a wet spring.
We got lucky again. It's beautiful.
