Trying the Knot Read online

  “It might be we’re still drunk from last night,” Thad rationalized, straddling two limestone boulders. He looked tired and hung over. Chelsea squat next to him, and they watched the blue-green waves beat tirelessly against the rocks.

  “It’s the lull of the waves. Once they lure you in, there’s no escape,” she said cheerily.

  Thad thought it sounded morbid, and asked, “Did you mean what you said earlier, about dropping out of law school?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I can do the work easily enough, even though Torts were a torturous bore, but it doesn’t interest me. Truthfully, there are enough lawyers in the world. The thought of jumping on some Yuppie bandwagon makes me sick.”

  “What’ll you do? You’re so smart, it’s a shame to let all your brain power go to waste.”

  “Now you sound like my mother. She acts as if I’m a genius,” she said uneasily.

  “Well, what do you really want to do with your life?”

  “I don’t know, settle down on the outskirts of town with a farm boy.”

  “Gimme a break,” Thad scoffed. “For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve always wanted to be a full-blown native of this godforsaken no man’s land. Trust me, being white trash isn’t such a romantic notion.”

  “Well, it’s not as if my family came over on the Mayflower,” Chelsea said. “Who’d want to be a descendant of those persecuting Puritans anyhow?”

  “Kate,” Thad answered. “Her mother always aspired to be an upper-crust, pillar of the community. We were always the poor relatives.”

  “Hardly,” Chelsea protested.

  She continued squatting on the rocks and silently wondered what was up with Ben. No one else thought it strange Ben found Vange at six in the morning. There were a lot of unanswered questions floating through her mind, and they required her sole attention. Why didn’t Vange call anyone? Who was the father of her miscarried baby? What was she thinking in those final moments? And, most importantly, what would Kate do when she found out about Vange’s final fling with Nick?

  Thad mistakenly assumed Chelsea’s eyes were transfixed on the cigar-shaped, rickety sailing vessel tossed on the rocky shore. “It’s an old fishing tug.”

  “What?”

  “The boat is a fishing tug,” Thad said. “My grandfather used to sail on it, before working on a freighter.”

  Chelsea said dully, “Oh, I never knew.”

  “My grandma used to smoke some of the fish he caught, and my mom and aunt would peddle it from door to door.”

  Together, they made their way along the lakeshore. As they walked over the wet sand, gentle waves soaked through their shoes and seagulls squawked and screeched overhead. They observed a woman interacting with her child. It was the same snot-nosed kid they’d seen earlier in the morning at the hospital. Thad moved closer to the sleepy looking toddler.

  “Another casualty of PHS’s Sex Ed program,” Chelsea said under her breath.

  “I don’t remember any Sex Ed classes.”

  “Exactly.”

  Yet another Derry Queen who had once been crowned Miss Portnorth. There was a seemingly endless supply. She would have been a member of their graduating class if she had not dropped out of school and gave birth before her tiara had a chance to tarnish.

  “Brittany Morgan, get your ass away from that dead fish,” the queen mother yelled, and swept up the soggy-diapered child into her sunburnt arms.

  “Hey,” Thad called, and she waved at him.

  Derry Cow, as she was now called, wore faded pink sweat pants and a tomato colored T-shirt that stated Spoiled Rotten. Her matted strawberry blond hair hung past her shoulders, but it was ingeniously shorn above her ears in an extreme mullet.

  “Hey, long time no see,” she said, despite their having encountered one another at the hospital that morning.

  “It’s kind of early to be combing the beach,” Thad said.

  “Brittany drags me here at all hours. Thinks she’ll see daddy’s boat. It don’t matter he’s home sitting his big fat ass in front of the TV sucking down beer and bitching about his sore hand.”

  “Don’t you have an older kid, too?”

  “Yeah, little Rocky heads back to Kindergarten next week, still in school only half a day.” She waved a fly away from Brittany’s tangled hair. “Wouldn’t happen to have a light, would’juh?”

  “Sure,” Thad said, and he lit her smashed menthol cigarette. Chelsea stepped away and wrote leisurely with driftwood in the sand. Thad nodded at the toddler and lied, “She’s cute.”

  “She’s got my hair, but she got Rocky’s temper,” Derry Cow said, and she sucked deeply on the cigarette. Her left eye was lightly bruised. “I wish that bastard was back on the boats, instead of dodging trees in the damn woods.”

  “He’s laid off?”

  “Yup, times are tough. At least when he’s sailing the pay check is bigger, and I don’t have to see him for months. That’s always a perk.”

  Thad nodded, and he wondered if the old cliche was true that all sailors were drunks. He blurted impulsively, “I heard he knocked up your sister.”

  “That nasty snatch,” said the washed up queen. She swatted the kid when it kicked and screamed to be let down.

  Thad wrapped the child’s filthy foot in his hand and shook it. Between her simpering whimpers, saliva landed on his wrist.

  “Sorry ‘bout that, it’s like she’s retarded or something. Hey, you hear about Vangie Whiley? Isn’t it sad? I hope she pulls through, even if she is a nut job,” Derry Cow said as she shifted the kid on her hip. Thad wiped his saliva-coated hand on his thigh. “I was going to ask her to sing at my wedding if that dumb Dago ever asked me to tie the knot.”

  “Hell, maybe she could sing at your sister’s wedding, too,” Thad added.

  “Your friend is leaving,” said the former queen, pointing to Chelsea. “I never did like her. Thinks her shit don’t stink, don’t she?”

  Thad shrugged, said good-bye and ran to catch up. By the time he joined her, Chelsea had reached an empty path beyond the baseball field concession stand. As they made their way toward the newspaper building, Chelsea commented on how friendly he had been to the former Derry queen.

  “I heard her boyfriend’s knocked up at least one other girl besides her sister,” Thad said winded. “Her life is messed up enough without my being a jerk to her.”

  Still holding the driftwood, Chelsea pointed it at him and said, “I hope you weren’t too patronizing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re as fake as Kate or Nick.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re a total snob, Thaddeus,” she said, a matter of fact. “And the worst kind of snob.”

  “I’m not a snob.”

  “Oh, please,” she said, laughing. “You act so friendly and interested, when in reality you couldn’t care less how the former queen of Porknorth wastes away her life. It’s so phony.”

  “I am not a snob,” he repeated.

  “Admit it. It’s not as if I’m not one, but I’m honest about it.” Chelsea walked faster, and Thad let her take the lead. “You were only nice to her to find out what her plans are now that her boyfriend knocked up her sister.”

  “Not true.”

  “Don’t deny it. The only difference between us is I don’t care.”

  “Oh, and I do?”

  She smiled to herself, amused by his failing to catch the irony of his statement. “Not in the least. It’s simply another salacious tidbit to distract you from your own pitiful existence.”

  “Oh my God, you’re such a bitch.”

  “Takes one to know one, and I take that as a compliment coming from you.”

  “What did you write in the sand?”

  “Keep your laws off my vagina.”

  With the breeze from the lake pushing against their backsides, they walked past the old museum. Thad, Ben, and occasionally Chelsea, used to hang out there regularly throughout grade school. They all suffer
ed intense prepubescent crushes on the cute girl who worked there. She encouraged them to explore freely, and they took full advantage of her hospitality. When they weren’t listening to ancient records on the Victrola or poring over archaic photographs, they were playing in the simulated general store. On rainy days, the young curator brought her guitar to work and sang to them in the turn-of-the-century parlor. They fought more than once over whom she liked best. That was before junior high, when Thad became a recluse and Ben became friends with Nick, and Chelsea stopped climbing trees.

  As they approached the Portnorth Porthole newspaper building, Thad guessed correctly Chelsea was not ready to go home. “Come upstairs for a while,” he invited. “I’m working on a Back to School insert of all things. We can day-drink.”

  “Sounds fantastic. I’ll need to sneak in a stiff one to face Nick and Kate,” Chelsea said. She followed him past the main desk, where their class salutatorian worked as a receptionist. Chelsea had been valedictorian. She breathed a sigh of relief as they slunk unnoticed through the empty ground floor and ascended the backstairs. Although it ended five years ago, it felt like high school would haunt her forever.

  She propped herself up on Thad’s messy desk and sat crossed-legged. Awaiting a drink, Chelsea appeared to be an excited eight-year-old anticipating getting her ears pierced for the first time or something equally risque. Thad poured two shots of vodka, and she said, “It’s daylight still, but considering the circumstances hitting the bottle seems justified, don’t you think?”

  “Hell, it’s noon somewhere.”

  “I think it’s supposed to be, it’s five o’clock somewhere,” she corrected. “What the hell, this wedding is a fiasco.” She raised her glass to her lips.

  Thad toasted, “To coma victims everywhere.”

  Chelsea choked, and it took her a few seconds to recover. She said severely, “I know you probably don’t care, but I personally think you have an obligation to tell Kate about Nick’s fling with Vange.”

  Thad raised his hands in protest. “You can’t be serious. What good could come out of it?”

  She firmly set her drink down on the cluttered desk. “Don’t even think about withholding this information from Kate, not for one minute. Nick might be the reason why Vange is in the hospital, and if that’s the case, then I don’t see any alternative – you have to tell Kate.”

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “You can’t honestly believe that.”

  He turned away from her and shuffled over paper clippings strewn across the floor. He called over his shoulder, “It seems you really have it in for Nick.”

  “Don’t start acting all fraternal toward Nick. It’s not as if you’ve ever had any loyalty to your fellow man,” Chelsea said.

  “And you do? It seems like you really have it in for him.”

  “For your information, I don’t hold anything against Nick. And even if I did harbor an old vendetta, I’d be more than justified,” she said.

  With his back to her, he eagerly went back to work cutting apart articles and piecing them back together in columns. Dropping the subject, Chelsea settled in on the top of his desk. Surveying the cluttered sprawling room, she sat fiddling with radio knobs. A commentator’s foreboding voice speculated whether or not the upcoming nationwide recession was the result of Fed chairman Alan Greenspan not lowering interest rates enough, or an oblivious President George H.W. Bush’s apparent disinterest in domestic policy.

  “Your job seems tedious. Do you plan to work here forever?” she asked. “What kind of cash do you make?”

  “Don’t laugh, a little more than six bucks an hour.”

  “How do you live? You shouldn’t have quit college,” she marveled.

  “Oh, my God, I didn’t drop out, I finished.”

  “You don’t even have a date for the wedding, do you?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Who would come all the way up here for a hillbilly wedding? Did you ask that girl you were so wrapped up with last year?”

  “No. Because it’s this year, and she’s wrapped up with someone else.”

  “If you loved her, you wouldn’t let anything stop you.” She took a sip of her vodka and flipped through the overflowing Rolodex. “Cowardice isn’t sexy, Thaddeus.”

  “Who says I’m still carrying a torch?” Thad said defensively. “It was probably first-lust syndrome.”

  “You could’ve at least asked her. Just look at you, you’re a Petrarchan mess,” Chelsea said, and he rolled his eyes.

  “Stop pestering me,” Thad pleaded as he glanced at his watch.

  “You have to tell Kate. She has a right to know, that’s all there is to it,” she paused and added, “This whole melodramatic scenario bores me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because their story doesn’t speak to me. Does that make any sense?”

  Thad mumbled from behind his cigarette, “It sounds vaguely pretentious. Who does speak to you?”

  Chelsea thought for a minute and said, “Vange.”

  “Vadge? I knew it.”

  “Make me barf. Gross. Evangelica speaks to me, that’s who.”

  Thad ashed on the floor and said, “Well, let’s hope it’s not from the grave.”

  chapter six

  Inside the split-level home in the cul-de-sac on the outskirts of town, time had come to a standstill during the mid-1970s. Portnorth’s one lame attempt at a suburb amounted to a dead end street near the small airport two miles from downtown.

  A picture of Gerald Ford hung on the paneled living room wall alongside a family portrait, in which the Dooley’s wore embroidered bell-bottoms and matching jackets. Texan tuxedos, as Evangelica referred to their denim outfits. The house was decorated with every macramé, ceramic, and latch-hook creation born to a less than civilized world. Owls, mushrooms and frogs were the general motif. These had been Mrs. Dooley’s hobbies before hitting the road with her painted Mrs. Butterworth bottles and intricate stained glass designs. After becoming a widow, she traded in her all-American housewifery crafting pastimes for a booth in the nomadic flea market circuit.

  It was forever dusk in the depressing colonial home. The wall-to-wall carpeting was an ankle-deep, burnt umber shag to match the fake brick walls. The avocado curtained windows barely let in any light, and every room felt ominously unwelcoming. But Benjamin had lived in this house for most his life, and he thought nothing of the dark, cavernous atmosphere.

  He returned home early that the afternoon expecting to waste a few peaceful hours in solitude before the wedding rehearsal and dinner. Blaring music assaulted his eardrums as he parked his motorcycle on the cracked driveway leading to the dungeon. Squirrel carcasses littered the front yard.

  He found Jack Hesse relaxing on the living room floor. The television was tuned to VH1 while the stereo blared loudly. Ben snapped on several lamps and stepped over a rather large box containing palms. Jack fanned some palms in one hand while cradling a sawed off pellet gun in the other. The plastic handle was wrapped in duct-tape, and Ben correctly assumed it was the weapon responsible for the lethal slaughter of squirrels, or tree rats as Jack called them.

  Jack, with his mopey good looks, sported his blond locks in tangles, and it appeared he had stolen his outfit from Ben’s closet. Wearing boots, ratty jeans, a tattered thermal shirt, and a faded flannel tied around his waist, he was Grunge personified.

  Since Ben’s older brother went off to university to become an engineer and his younger sister joined the Peace Corps, the home was his alone – except for the two stray juvenile delinquents who wandered in and out. Jack had a key, and Alexa knew how to break in. The Dooley siblings were lucky if they came together on Christmas to unwrap their mother’s flea market treasures. Last year, Jack even had a couple trinkets under the tree.

  Ben’s younger sister’s face was less a war zone of Asian and Irish features, and his brother was taller and more muscular. Not only was Ben the least successful and least attractive of his si
blings, but he also most resembled his mother who was whisked to Portnorth to start a new life from war-torn Hanoi.

  Ben’s father became a rabid anti-Catholic when the local church refused to consecrate his marriage to a Buddhist. On his deathbed, Mr. Dooley requested the presence of a priest, and he spat on him before pleading for the Last Rights. Ben thought it odd his father should become a Lutheran because they were merely Catholics without nuns or saints, Protestants with a catholic chip on their shoulder. Ben surmised his father’s motives lay in the latent loathing the two sects felt for one another in the largely Polish and German community.

  The elder Dooley worked every menial job the town had to offer until he landed the position of head janitor at the local hospital. He sat around delegating work until his lungs and liver surrendered their functions due to years of excessive maltreatment from booze and tobacco. Ben’s parents lived a fairly contented life together, and his attentive mother treated her savior well. Although inflicted with perpetual unemployment and raving DTs, the Vietnam Veteran worshipped his wife. In return, she allowed him to parade her around town like a living doll. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Dooley made extensive travel plans to escape the condescending small town that treated her with standoffish reservation. She observed of the townsfolk, “Forget fitting in, you can’t even come to a rolling stop without a comment.”

  Benjamin overcompensated for his obvious physical difference by acting more like a full-fledged redneck than the natives. In his work boots and Carhartt jacket, he was a walking parody of those who called him a Gook, Chink or Jap. Back in high school, however, he refused to pander to the locals’ ignorance. Back then he only wore Polo and other designer brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, and he was categorized as an uppity preppy. In the past, Ben had preferred to think his innate superiority transcended the narrow rigidity of Portnorth, but in the ensuing years since returning to town with his associates degree he resigned himself to an if-you-can’t-beat-‘em-then-join-‘em mentality.

  Picking up one of the strange looking fronds littering the floor, Ben pretended it was a light saber. He was so obsessed with the Star Wars Trilogy his action figures were displayed strategically around the living room. “What is this music, Gangsta Rap?”