Second Interlude Gwen, Under Arrest #2
to hold the glass to her lips. “Sometimes she’s sober and then you can’t get a single civil word out of her.”
“What’s the key for?” Gigi yelled across the table. Gigi didn’t know where to look. A shirtless fat man, belly matted with
hair, was wiggling only a few feet from their table, working his hips like a stripper while he lip-synched to “Vogue.” Gigi
had pinned her gaze on Donna’s face and Donna was chewing the tip of that key she wore around her neck. Gigi was nervous,
maybe even scared, but trying her hardest to be part of the fun. “Is it the key to my brother’s heart?”
Donna let the key drop from her teeth. “No. It’s the key to his cock cage. I lock it up so he can’t get a stiffy without my
permission. He loves it. He—”
“Enough,” Gwen said. “You’re embarrassing me and you’re embarrassing Gregg’s sisters. This might be your special weekend,
but it doesn’t give you license to treat people like shit, Donna.”
Donna flushed, and Gwen wondered if they were going to have a knock-down-drag-out. Then Donna looked out across the floor.
“I’m sorry,” Donna mumbled.
From the outside, it almost didn’t make sense that Gwen and Donna could be friends. But you grew close to the people you killed
with. And Gwen knew Donna would fight wild dogs for any of them, bare-handed. When someone loved you that fiercely, you could
forgive a lot.
“They didn’t hear you,” Gwen said—but kindly.
Donna closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. S’key to the cottage on Martha’s Vineyard. The summer place he bought for us that I’m not
supposed to know about yet. I just—I know you disapprove of me and I’ve spent the last five months scared you’re going to
take him away from me. I keep worrying he’ll come to his senses. Christ, where is my next drink?”
Lulu put her hand on Donna’s.
“I don’t disapprove!” Gigi cried. “Lock his dick right up! Fine by me! It’s the nineties! I think more men should have penis
cages. Is there a term for that?”
“Sure,” Gwen said. “The penal code.”
And they all laughed. Even Donna, although she was glaring at Gwen with a kind of bruised resentment.
Why would you make me apologize to the nuns?
her gaze seemed to ask. Why would you make me apologize to people who want to sabotage me?
Gwen gave a half shrug with one shoulder.
Two nights before, Gwen had not been able to save a man who had been half gutted
with a broken bottle in a drunken scuffle with a mentally disturbed relative. After you had seen a few bloodlettings you lost
your taste for them . . . even metaphorical bloodlettings.
3.
Donna was done with the nuns, but she wasn’t done with the night.
They had all agreed to meet at another bar, at eleven thirty, the boys and the girls together at the famous Extra Life Pub on the outskirts of Gogan, where two walls were lined with pinball machines and classic arcade games.
But no one had checked ahead, and it turned out Extra Life was closed, a plywood sheet nailed over the door and a hand-lettered sign tacked up to it: extra life is powering up with renovations see you in january.
The limo idled in an otherwise empty parking lot, the boys not there yet.
Donna climbed the steps and tore the note off
the plywood and stared at it as if it might read differently on closer inspection.
“Well, that’s fucking bullshit,” Donna said. “I was going to play Joust.”
She lifted her chin and looked around forlornly. Beneath the twenty-foot-high sodium-vapor lights, the parking lot was as
bright as day, although everything had acquired a faintly orange-yellow tint, the color of unhealthy pee. The acres of asphalt
also offered parking for a Dairy Queen (closed at this hour) and an all-night liquor store called Marty’s. Donna crumpled
up the sheet of paper and started walking toward the booze stand.
There were a few cars parked in front of Marty’s, including a Chrysler LeBaron with about four hundred bumper stickers pasted
across the rear end. One in particular, a dark yellow sticker, stood out on the bumper: no free rides—gas, grass, or ass. Gwen saw Donna glance at the LeBaron on her way to the front doors, but if she noticed that particular sticker, she gave
no sign. Not then.
It was busy at nearly midnight on a Friday evening. Gwen stood just inside the doors while Donna picked up a bottle of pink
champagne. The festive mood seemed to have petered out. Donna looked sweaty and bad-tempered, her eyes dull and unfocused.
It came to Gwen, then, that it was probably time to stop the drinking. But she had shamed Donna once and didn’t want to do
it again, couldn’t tell her to put the bottle back. She wished Donna could have some fun on her hen do, but Donna wasn’t good
at having fun, she was good at being angry.
Some kids from the college were horsing around in the back of the liquor store, six stringy, pimply dudes wearing lacrosse jerseys under their coats.
One of them had even come in with his lacrosse stick.
It was the one sport Rackham College really dominated, lacrosse.
Gwen had asked her father once how you won at lacrosse.
You play lacrosse because you’ve already won, he told her. The goal is to have a bigger trust fund than anyone else on the field.
Donna swaggered out onto the blacktop, champagne in a brown paper bag.
“Should we take that back to the hotel and get silly?” asked Gigi in her piping, overly enthusiastic voice.
“Nee-e-eigh,” replied Allie, pawing at the air.
“We can drink here,” Donna said. “Until the guys show up.”
The champagne bottle went off like a .38, cork flying into the night and foam spuming over Donna’s hand. She licked it off,
held out the bottle. Gwen had spent her entire life in Maine and was well acquainted with drinking in parking lots. She helped
herself first, then held the bottle to Allie’s mouth so she could have a sip.
While they were passing the bottle, Donna drifted over to stand behind that Chrysler LeBaron. She studied the bumper stickers,
made a face—and then dug at the no free rides label with her fingernails, trying to pick it off.
“This thing,” she said. “This fucking thing. That’s a rapist bumper sticker.”
“Should she be doing that?” Lulu asked.
“Ne-e-eigh,” Allie said.
Donna found a piece of broken glass on the blacktop and tried to scratch the bumper sticker off. She even got a piece of it—it
came off in a thin ribbon. So did some of the chrome. She scratched ugly lines in the steel of the bumper, working at it in
a sullen fury. The other girls stood watching, unwilling to get between Donna and the object of her rage.
“Nine-year-old girl in Goshen, New York, last month,” Donna said.
“Asked her mom if she could walk down the street. A friend just put up a new birdhouse. She never got there. They found her in a dumpster with her head bashed in. We covered that story every night for two weeks, and I’ll tell you something: it was the uncle.
We can’t prove he did it, but he’s a known sex offender, and he’s got a bumper sticker on the back of his Buick, it says never trust anything that bleeds five days a month and doesn’t die.
They tell you who they are. They always tell. ”
She gave up trying to scratch the sticker off and wandered away—then came back with a piece of brick. She began to whack the
bumper.
“Come on, darlin’,” Gwen said. “Let’s go sit in the limo and finish your champagne.”
Donna ignored her. The brick went clang. Gwen saw a spark fly. Donna lifted it high and brought it down again and the whole
bumper fell off the back of the car with a smash.
“Wow!” cried Gigi.
Donna straightened up, tossed the chunk of brick, and swatted her hands on the ass of her fur bikini to get the dust off them.
It came to Gwen that she should’ve tried harder to keep Donna from getting so drunk.
They were still standing around the LeBaron when Colin Wren’s ’49 Caddy wheeled into the parking lot. The canvas top was up,
but the windows were down, and their men were hanging out of them. Gregg was in the front passenger seat, his whole upper
body stretched into the night. Colin was next to him, one hand on the wheel and the other on Gregg’s belt to keep him from
falling out. Van’s head and one arm hung out a rear window.
“Look at that sweet furry ass!” Gregg cried. “I’m going to marry that!”
Van was screaming too, while the car did donuts. “Allie! Allie baby! Have you ever seen me roller-skate?”
“NE-E-E-E-IGH!” Allie cried, jogging after the Caddy and waving her hooves in celebration.
“Oh, man!” Van yelled. “Let’s go, lover! Wait’ll you see me carve up the goddamn floor! I’m a goddamn angel on wheels! A goddamn
angel!”
Gwen looked past the Caddy, which was whirling around and around in tight circles, tires throwing smoke. Because of course there was one other place open on the strip on a Friday night: Merlin’s Cave Roller Rink, on the far side of the highway. The neon sign
showed a bearded man in a wizard’s hat, holding up the sagging hem of his wizard robe and dashing along on a pair of roller
skates. Gwen hadn’t been there since a friend’s birthday party when she was twelve.
The car stopped. Doors flew open, and Donna was the first one there, tumbling half over Gregg’s lap, legs hanging out. He
clapped one hand on her raised bottom.
“We got what we came for,” he shouted, as drunk as her. “Let’s go, birdman.” His name for Wren.
The girls piled in. Allie sat in Van’s lap. Gwen squeezed in between Van and Arthur and then Gigi plopped down in her lap. Colin got out long enough to let Lulu climb into the front. It was all a lot of work to drive two hundred feet across
the road.
“She hasn’t hurt anyone, has she?” Arthur asked Gwen, softly, his mouth close to her ear.
“Only emotionally,” Gwen said, remembering how nasty Donna had been to Lulu.
As the Caddy pulled out, Gwen looked out the rear window.