Š 2012 Michael D. Brown These pieces first appeared individually on the Six Sentences Social Network.
1 When all the bikinied teenagers went to the beach in that summer of ‘69, they played volleyball, while their boom boxes blared danceable Beach Boys’ tunes (never the Beatles because the Fab Four were having problems staying together, and it was rumored Abbey Road would be their last album) and the kids were trying to recreate the sunny days of Frankie and Annette even though the Brooklyn beaches were a far cry from those of southern California. Andrew shied away from the games, however, as did Stephanie, and as he had eyes for her, and they were the only two not sporting deep golden pre-cancerous suntans, they seemed like they would make a terrific couple, but Stephanie did not respond favorably to any of his few awkward advances, and mostly sat reading The Love Machine and nodding every so often that, yes, she would join in as soon as she finished “this chapter.” She was the one who first noticed the wispy-haired older man who lay tanning himself, on his blanket every afternoon, staring at the kids with what appeared to be envy, though he never spoke to any of them, and then when the other girls mentioned that they thought he was creepy, she said she found it kind of sad that he was always there alone. One day in late August, Stephanie did not show up, and when she didn’t come the
next day, or the day after, Andrew went calling for her, and discovered that she and her mother no longer lived in the twofamily house on Crichton Avenue, that in fact, they had just up and moved away from the neighborhood, telling no one where they were going. Cassie, one of the deep golden girls, who had been observing Andrew’s interest in Stephanie without masking her disappointment, told him not to take it so hard as there were plenty of other fish in the sea, plenty of healthier looking fish if he caught her drift. She was the one who pointed out, with a wink, after several days that the old man, too, had stopped coming to gawk at them, and that was true enough because he never appeared on the beach again during the rest of the season.
2 February, a wet month in 1979, started out with news of the return to Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeini, which looked bad for the United States, and even though the BeeGees were riding the comeback trail to a second string of successes due to their appropriation of the disco sound, the movement itself was said to be dying an inglorious death by rock and rollers everywhere. Andrew, never a serious rock fan, listening to Tragedy on the radio and looking at photos in the news of Alexandria, Virginia in the throes of a blizzard, turned on the television and caught the coverage of the total solar eclipse as it was being broadcast from Montana. Celebrants, including some modern day Druids dancing in front of a replica of Stonehenge, were being interviewed, and Andrew noticed how the shamans seemed to be keeping time to the Gibb Brothers with some moves that would never be demonstrated on a dance floor in any of the clubs he frequented. The one image that raised the small hairs on his arms, however, and brought an unpleasant heat to his cheeks was the hippie throwback that stepped forward to offer a few words on how the eclipse signaled the world’s people to face up to all that was currently wrong with it. Despite her long bedraggled white hair and headband, her blemished cheeks, the drugged look in her eyes,
and the fact that he had not seen her in almost ten years, he immediately recognized Stephanie Lenition, who had sat away from the other kids at beach parties, sat reading popular novels, and then unceremoniously disappeared from his life one late summer day, and he thought to himself, well, there goes another of the world’s great mysteries solved. He had thought of her many times over the years, but Druids had never been part of his imagined scenarios.
3 When his young daughter asked him what a fatwa was, Andrew knew the definition, but was taken aback that such an insidious charge could be issued in the modern world, and taken seriously enough by its proponents and the so-called perpetrator that he felt the need to go into hiding. Up to the moment the child raised the question for a current events project, Andrew had not thought twice about it, as it was something spoken about in other parts of the world, not his world. Then, too, he had been distracted with his reading of Vaclav Havel’s Letters to Olga into thinking there was room for change, and that really, political ideologues and religious zealots did not have much power beyond their regional borders, did they? Madonna on MTV was singing Like a Virgin, writhing and rolling, suggesting that her lyrics belied her innocence, and nineyear-old Angelica, too much under the influence of pop stars for his liking, surprised Andrew every day with her precocious sophistication. If all went the way he had planned, she would be studying at a good university by the turn of the century, and he suddenly pictured an old, world-weary dissatisfied customer with a brilliant mind inhabiting the body of a young woman, and he feared she would find reason to divert his intentions for her future as she
would have every right to. He tried to erase the disappointing vision from his mind, but the only image that came to replace it was that of a disappeared love who had joined a cult, aged unnaturally, and danced on television before his astounded eyes, proclaiming the end of the world so many years earlier than expected.
4 In the weeks after Angelica returned from Woodstock 99, she was different in ways that left her father feeling uncomfortable, but he didn’t say too much about it in front of his ex-wife because Cassie had been against her daughter’s trip upstate from the first time the possibility was mentioned. Andrew was the one who had paid for the trip, reminded Cassie how she had enjoyed her own youth in the sun with music and friends, and convinced her that it would be a learning experience for Angelica during her first summer break from Amherst, with the bonus of expressing her parents’ liberalism, and how they would never try to keep her on a leash. It wasn’t that she returned with rebellious spirits complaining of the crass commercialism that plagued the festival, nor that she was ungrateful or resentful toward them for having sent her into the fire so to speak, and Andrew never saw Angelica’s face in the television reports of the violent, destructive ending to what had promised to be three days of love, peace, and music meant to evoke the original event thirty years earlier, which he and Cassie had been in no way likely to attend, but nevertheless always regretted missing out on. It was something more invidious, and how could it not be when neither parent had ever been deeply involved in any
set form of worship, and did not consider themselves religious in the least? When Angelica showed them mud-scarred photos of the ancient, wispy haired guru and the pale-skinned middle-aged woman who purported to be his acolyte, and told them how she had been profoundly moved by the features of their “program,” which she wanted to research, Andrew felt his heart breaking, found it difficult to maintain his analyst’s suggestion of a healthy silence while the phase passed, and his disappointment overwhelmed his judgment, causing him to utter unretractable accusations. His daughter announced she would not be returning to school in the fall, and Andrew suffered a slight heart attack, from which it took two months to recover, and by that time she had moved out West to a commune in Montana.
5 “You could have salted her tail instead of being so goddamn liberal,� was the last thing Cassie hollered at me before the long silence went into effect. I had had a heart attack at 47, and was in no condition to tie anyone down, least of all, a strong-willed, overeducated young woman I thought had better sense than to turn research into a lifestyle, and become susceptible to brainwashing. Although we rescued her and had her deprogrammed, my ex-wife said I was the irresponsible jerk that had allowed such a thing to happen in the first place. So angry was Cassie over my letting Angelica attend a rock festival and coming into contact with those weirdos that even after she was home safe again and had decided to finish college, at my expense unto near bankruptcy, my ex refused to have anything to do with me, which, truth to say, only bothered me on holidays, when Angelica sometimes begged off on coming to visit. Now, that we stood a chance of losing her again, permanently, Cassie had broken down. At the hospital, she asked me to sit in the waiting room while she went in to speak with Angelica, and promised me in a soft voice that she needed only a few minutes alone with her, so I sat looking
at bad art of the four seasons for almost twenty minutes, wondering why only winter wore a frame and was hung on one wall by itself.
6 I stood in an alcove outside the hospital and watched an arguing couple smoking under their umbrellas, and felt like some kind of druid passing judgment from under my hooded rain gear. When a nurse notified me that my wife was requesting my presence, my wet shoes left footprints as I passed the triage desk, and tsk-tsking, the nurse signaled for an orderly to mop up. Then the orderly glared at me. After greeting Angelica, and checking her prognosis, I learned that the pneumonia was subsiding, and Cassie told me the two of them had talked it over and decided it would be best if Angelica came home to stay with me instead of at her mother’s place. Cassie handed me a brown paper bag, which appeared to be filled with stuffed toys, and said, “I’ll leave you alone for a little bit, so you can make a plan.” As I stood at the foot of the bed and watched my daughter dozing off, I realized we had so little to say to each other, the bag was already wet, and a puddle was forming around my feet.