All Our Summer Songs
Fiction
By Elizabeth Barker
Published: November 5th, 2004 | 3:05pm
We’re driving home from the beach Sunday night a little after dusk and she’s got her bare feet up on my dashboard like she always does when we’re riding in my car. Her blue toenail polish is mostly chipped off and for some reason that’s all I can think about and it’s making me crazy — I can’t figure out why she couldn’t have painted on another coat before she left her apartment this morning, or at least taken off the old polish. Right now it seems entirely possible that there’s no other girl in the world who could be so careless, and the most irritating part is that she thinks carelessness is so endearing. I want to ask her why she couldn’t take the time to re-paint her toenails, but I don’t want to give in to that mean thing in me that gets some dull pleasure out of making her mad. She’d probably pretend not to be mad anyway. She’d roll her eyes and make a joke about how her boyfriend is so uptight, and then she’d smile over at me like she wasn’t annoyed, and I’d turn back to the road and try not to watch her feet the rest of the way home.
Instead of saying anything I keep my eyes on her messy toes tracing circles in the little pool of sand she dumped on my dashboard at the end of the day. She’s made a miniature beach out of stolen sand and scallop shells and one broken conch, all collected in an old baseball hat she pulled from the backseat of my car. The sand’s already spilled onto the floor but I like the way it looks and I know I’ll probably never vacuum it up. Today she swam in a blue sundress and the cotton’s still damp and the spilled sand sticks to her dress and skin but she doesn’t brush it off. I like the way the sand looks on her legs too, dusty like penny-candy sugar you want to coat your tongue with.
When we arrived at the beach this afternoon we went to a package store on the boardwalk and got a small bottle of rum to spike the pink lemonade we’d bought from the ice cream stand. We spent most of the afternoon walking along the boardwalk and the shore, drinking rummy lemonade through the straws of waxy plastic cups that we kept refilling until the bottle was nearly empty. By the time all the families started to pack up and leave the beach, we were both a little drunk and I wanted to lie down in the sand and close my eyes for a while but I wanted to go home too. She said, “Let’s stay a little longer,” and I shook my head and she didn’t fight it and she didn’t pout like I thought she might. She just smiled and looped her right arm through my left and rested her head on my shoulder like we were some dreamy and sophisticated couple, like we’re probably not going to break up very soon, like it was poetically correct for us to be walking arm-in-arm on the beach at sunset.
Once we got back in the car to drive home to the city, she poured the rest of the rum into her lemonade cup and reclined her seat halfway back and stared away from me and out the window. She’s spent most of the ride biting at the end of her straw and singing along softly to the song on my stereo, the same CD we listened to on the way to the beach, a record that came out at the beginning of the summer. She bought this CD for me and she borrows it all the time but always gives it back when she says she will, unlike all my other CDs and sweaters and books and movies that have disappeared into her cluttered apartment and car over the last 15 months. We’ve brought this album with us every time we’ve gone to the beach this year — at least ten Saturdays and Sundays since June, plus the Thursday in July when we both skipped work and were drunk by two in the afternoon. We like it because it’s summer music and ocean music and because we both know all the songs well enough to make it feel like it’s okay to hardly speak during the hour-long car rides.
Halfway home I pull into a gas station along the highway and she gets out and runs into the convenience store in her drugstore flip-flops and sandy dress. When I’m done filling the tank I get back into the car and suck up the last of the lemonade from her cup and rearrange the scallop shells so they form a circle on my dashboard, the broken conch in the center. I wish we had a few pieces of sea glass or a strand of dried seaweed — I wish it looked like a real beach, maybe with cigarette butts hidden in the sand too. I know I won’t see the ocean again until next summer and I wonder if I’ll be able to keep the sand on my dashboard that long. Just above the circle of shells, through the dirty windshield glass, I can see the sky flash softly with purple lightning and my stomach burns from fear of driving home in bad weather. Electrical storms are one of the few things she and I are both irrationally scared of, and neither of us takes comfort in how everyone says cars are the safest place to be during a storm.
The first night she slept at my place, a Friday last summer, there was a terrible storm and we each confessed to still being as scared of thunder and lightning as we’d been when we were little kids. It was early July, the hottest week of last year, the first time I’d had a girl stay over at the apartment my best friend and I had rented after we graduated college and moved to the city. That night was our second date and we’d gone out for cheap Thai food at a poorly air-conditioned restaurant where she stole two spoons so that later we could get a pint of ice cream to eat down at the harbor. We got chocolate chip and a six-pack of beer from a convenience store and shared both as we walked along the water, passing one beer bottle back and forth instead of opening two at once. By the time the subway brought us to the stop three blocks from my apartment, we were both perfectly drunk and kept pulling over on the walk home to kiss in strangers’ doorways. She was wearing a thin white tank top, her messy blonde hair piled up on top of her head, and as we walked I kept touching her back to trace tiny lines connecting the dozens of freckles splashed between her shoulders.
In my room we stayed up until four in the morning, making out on the mattress I’d thrown down in the middle of the floor because I didn’t have a bed yet. Whenever a CD would end she’d get up from the mattress to put a new record on, even though we could barely hear the music over the loud hum of my window fan. For those few seconds when she was gone from the bed I panicked that she might never come back, maybe because I couldn’t believe that she’d actually been there in the first place. We fell asleep in the middle of the third CD she’d put on, me lying in my boxers on my back and her curled up next to me in her tank top and blue satiny underwear, her legs tangled up in mine and one arm draped across my chest. We were sweating into each other but I wanted the heat from her body; I liked that her rose perfume was starting to fade and the baby-powder deodorant smell had given way to something less clean but still sweet. She fell asleep with her blonde curls all over me and sometimes a few strands of hair would end up in my mouth but I didn’t mind.
The thunder started before the record was over, the first clap loud enough for her whole body to startle at the same time my heart jumped and burned. She laughed and wrapped herself tighter around me and whispered that she was scared. When I said “Me too” she smiled in a way that said she believed me and knew I wasn’t just trying to be sweet. There was some quiet relief in finding out that she was more like me than I’d thought, that she was scared of things too, that she didn’t want us to do something awful and cinematic like run out in the middle of the street in our underwear and kiss in the rain. She kept her smile on as she pressed her face against my chest and kissed her teeth into my shoulder, a gesture I’d soon recognize as her favorite and most carefully reserved display of affection. I slipped my hands into her curls and she kept her head against my chest until the thunder rumbled three more times, then she lifted her face and slid her body onto mine. I guess we were kissing to make the storm disappear, but being so close to her made the thunder feel more dangerous and I could see lightning light up the room even with my eyes closed. I wanted the storm to last all night and all through the next day and the day after that, because that would mean we could never stop kissing and never leave my bed. I wondered if she had some magic power in her that made scary things kind of beautiful, turned them into something you never want to lose because it makes you feel like you’re glowing from the deepest part of yourself. At the worst part of the storm thunder cracked so loud I was sure the house would split in half, and part of me wanted the house to split in half because it would be something catastrophic that happened to us together.
Tonight the thunder’s still soft when she gets back in the car. I don’t look in her direction as I start to pull out of the gas station, heading west, driving into the storm. She says “Hey” and I turn to see that she’s offering me an open package of Oreos, a 20-ounce bottle of Coke held between her knees. I take a handful of cookies and she passes me the soda to wash it down and when I thank her she smiles hugely, as if to show that all it takes to charm her is good manners. Her smile or its origin irritates me at first, but when I smile back it feels natural and I have to lean over and kiss her on the mouth in the middle of pulling onto the highway.
As we near home the lightning turns uglier, coming in jagged bolts instead of the soft flashes that light up the whole sky like the afterglow of fireworks. The thunder gets angrier and part of me hopes for the kind of storm we had on the first night in my apartment, and I hope that she’s hoping for a storm like that too. I want to say something about that night but instead I turn up the stereo, like I’m trying to kill any possibility of us speaking to each other for the remainder of the car ride. I tell myself I’m making the music louder to protect her, to keep the thunder from getting in her ears and scaring her more, but she’s not paying attention to me anyway. She’s sitting up straight and staring out the window, her feet off the dashboard and her chipped-polish toes buried under a Mexican blanket that’s dotted with little circular burns because her last boyfriend was often careless with his cigarettes. As the rain starts to come down harder she leans forward and plays with the dashboard beach, taking off the broken conch and rearranging the scallop shells so that they’re all in a straight line. Without saying anything she slips the conch into the folds of her blanket, her fingers moving quickly and nervously like shoplifter’s hands. I pretend not to notice because now she’s biting her nails and staring hard at the road and I’m worried that she might start crying. The first time she ever cried on me, the first time we had a bad fight, she dried her eyes on my white t-shirt and I’d hoped the black-mascara stain wouldn’t come out in the wash, but it did.
Her body relaxes after a song or two and she leans back again and finishes the Coke and keeps her eyes on her window. The rain softens and the storm slows after I pull off the highway, and all the way to her apartment I try to figure out whether I should ask her to come home with me. By the time I pull into her driveway I still haven’t asked and my mouth is dry from the soda and the alcohol and I can’t tell if I want to sleep alone tonight. We used to spend almost every night in each other’s beds but now it’s down to two or three nights a week, and sometimes even that feels like too much.
I put the car in park and wait for her to talk because I want her to acknowledge the stolen shell she’s got hidden in the cigarette-burnt blanket. But she stays quiet, shoves her flip-flops into her backpack, opens her door and plants her right foot onto the wet pavement. Her body’s halfway out the door when she says “Goodnight,” rain rinsing sand off her legs and soaking into her saltwater-damp dress. When I lean over she kisses my dry mouth for longer than we’ve kissed in weeks, and for a second or two I want to pull her back into the car and shut the door to make her stay and to protect us from the lightning that’s still flashing outside. Lately I hardly ever miss what we were like last summer, but right now I want her mouth to taste like chocolate chip ice cream and beer, not soda and lemonade and rum. I want her to be crawling all over me to try to hide from the storm, not slipping out the door like everything’s better out there. Before I’m done with the kiss she slides away from me and I don’t try to stop her from stepping out of the car; I smile back when she says a second goodbye and scoops up the blanket into her arms like it’s something precious, shuts the door and runs up her driveway in bare, sandy feet.
Elizabeth Barker is a writer and magazine editor who grew up in Massachusetts, attended journalism school in Rhode Island, and now lives in the Echo Park section of Los Angeles. She’s currently working on compiling a collection of stories and essays about music and driving — for more info and submission guidelines, visit bibliographic.net/straypony. Her favorite summer song right now is “Cause = Time” by Broken Social Scene, which inspired this story during a car trip from Boston to Brooklyn in July 2003. She takes her Coca-Cola with Hostess Cup Cakes, not Oreo cookies.
Issue #26
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