pile of books. The physics teacher was late, and I had dumped the books on my desk to go looking for a pen I’d left in one of the drawers of the lab station. As I turned back to my desk, I caught R.J. flipping through one of the books, a copy of archie and mehitabal that I’d found in the library. Poems written by a cockroach, with a refrain—toujours gai, kid, toujours gai—that sounded both exciting and exotic, even in those days.
“One of my teachers last year read them in class,” R.J. said, handing the book back to me. “Pretty cool. Hope you don’t mind if I looked.”
“Oh no,” I said, looking around to see if anybody else had noticed. I didn’t have a reputation for reading a lot, and I didn’t particularly want one. “The librarian downtown suggested it, when I told her I liked that record Word Jazz. You know the one I mean, Mrs. Rutherford played it in English the first day of school.”
We both had her for English, although we weren’t in the same class: I’d seen him going in as I was going out.
He nodded, and might have said more, but the physics teacher had suddenly realized that time was passing and started talking about atomic weights. After that sometimes we showed each other what we were reading, but I still went to the movies with Danny.
Until the spring. Until the weekend before Easter vacation when Gus had a party for his eighteenth birthday. His parents were away, off visiting his grandma in Borrego Springs, and he and his brothers had talked them into letting them have a party while they were gone. The place had to be spotless when they got back, there could be no complaints from the neighbours about noise, no underage drinking: you know, the usual list of conditions that parents put down. But Gus and his older brothers knew how to work things their way, so Gus invited everyone he knew. It was going to be, he said, the party of the year.
I said I might go, I even said that Danny, who was twenty-one and legal, might buy some beer. But even when we left my house that night, I wasn’t sure I would ask Danny because he might not fit in.
Things started out all right, though. Danny felt good at first because he’d just been hired at a garage nearer to downtown than the one my father owned, where he’d worked before. This garage specialized in custom vehicles, which Danny said was a lot more challenging than the maintenance work on Mom- and Popmobiles that he’d been doing for my dad. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll go show you where it is before we do anything else.”
Well, why not, I thought. It would make him happy, and that could set the tone for the evening. Not that I planned on bringing up the party necessarily, but I knew Danny wouldn’t be interested at all if he were feeling put upon.
The garage was still open when we got there—or at least a guy was still at work in one of the bays at the back when we pulled in. Danny turned off the ignition and turned to me. “Want to meet the boss?” he said, sounding more eager than he had for a long time. “He does great work.”
I didn’t really. I had on a short-sleeved dress. During the day, it had been plenty warm, but now that the sun had set, the idea of standing around, watching some guy poke at the insides of a car while Danny offered a running commentary, sounded boring and cold. But here we were, and I didn’t know just how to escape.
“Come on,” Danny said, reaching over in front of me to open the car door on my side. “Don’t just sit there.”
“It’s cold,” I said.
He looked at me as if I’d said something incredibly stupid. Then he turned so he could root around in the back seat. “Here,” he said, pulling a beach towel into the front. “Take this.”
He thrust it at me, but I didn’t want to take it. “It’s all greasy,” I said. “It’ll get me filthy.”
“So then don’t take it,” he said. “Come on, let’s go say hello.”
I balled the towel up and dropped in on the floor, but didn’t move to get out. He opened the door on his side. “Suit yourself,” he said finally. “You can just wait here.”
“I think I will,” I called after him before I shut the door on my side. But he didn’t hear me, or he pretended he didn’t hear me. I watched while Danny tapped at the garage window with his keys, and the other guy looked up, then grinned and came over to open the door.
The sky grew steadily darker and more stars appeared. A half-hour passed, at least, then maybe an hour: I couldn’t tell because I didn’t have a watch. Through the windows in the garage door I could see that Danny was holding a light while the other guy was doing something under the hood. Not once did I see Danny glance back outside. He was making me pay, I decided.
I wanted to leave him there, let him come out and find me missing, listen for the explosion when he found he’d been stood up. I had no wheels, though, and taking the bus home was out of the question. They didn’t run this late, and even if they did, it would take two hours and three changes for sure before I got back to Ocean Beach.
Calling one of my brothers or a girlfriend crossed my mind, but at this hour on a Friday night nobody was going to be home, and I had no idea where to track anyone down except at Gus’s party. I might call there, but who would I ask for? And how could I ask anyone to trek across town to pick me up?
Then I saw a taxi stand with a telephone in the parking lot at the liquor store across the street. I got out of the car and, hugging myself against the cold, walked across to the entrance to garage. Through the window I saw that Danny was still holding the light while his boss was wiping something clean.
All right for him, I thought. I fished in my purse for paper, then scrawled two words—“gone home”—on the only thing I found, a cash register receipt. I went back to stick it under the windshield wiper of Danny’s car.
I didn’t realize just how down-at-the-heel the neighbour-hood was until I got to the corner. Two laughing men burst out of the door to the liquor store, each carrying big paper bags full of something, as I waited to cross the street. They piled into a car in the parking lot, and a third man, who was at the wheel, shoved the car into reverse so that it squealed backwards before turning and heading out into the street.
The men were Negroes, and I was suddenly frightened—the only black folks I knew were the handful at Point Loma, and I didn’t have classes with any of them. There was no taxi at the stand, and what if I called and none could come for a while? And how much would it cost? I had a five-dollar bill, but I’d only been in a taxi twice, once when my mother suddenly took ill at the supermarket and once the day my grandfather died, and both times someone else had paid.
But I was in luck because by the time I’d made it to the stand, a cab pulled up, and the driver opened the door for me and drove away even before I’d told him where I wanted to go. He didn’t know the beaches well, though, so he got lost. By the time we made it to Gus’s neighbourhood the meter registered $5.35.
“This is all I have,” I said to the driver, as I handed over the five-dollar bill. “Wait here and I’ll see if I can borrow the rest.”
“What the hell ...” he began. “I’d never have come all the way over here if I’d thought you didn’t have the fare. No,” he said, “you can’t get out. You’ve got to come up with some more.”
By then I was on the sidewalk, searching the folks gathered outside the house for familiar faces. There had to be someone I knew. Not that I wanted to go begging, particularly not when I was coming empty-handed. I’d forgotten that you were supposed to bring something to drink, somehow that had been buried under all my irritation with Danny. But everybody seemed to have something with them: a six-pack of beer, a bottle in a brown paper bag, a bola bag that probably contained wine, a big Thermos clinking with ice cubes in some sort of punch.
And from what I could see, I was the only girl alone. Oh, there was a group of girls—five or six, who I knew by sight, but not by name—standing next to the Frasers’ little front porch, but they quite clearly had come together, as a group, giving each other protection and courage.
Behind