When I got home, my dad and my sister were sitting in the kitchen eating brown-sugar sandwiches. I started feeling hungry right away and realised I'd never gotten any supper.
'Where you been, Boss?' Elaine asked, hardly looking up from her 16 or Creem or Tiger Beat or whatever it was. She had been calling me Boss ever since I discovered Bruce Springsteen the year before and became a fanatic. It was supposed to get under my skin.
At fourteen Elaine was beginning to leave her childhood behind and to turn into the full-fledged American beauty that she eventually became - tall, dark-haired, and blue-eyed. But in that late summer of 1978 she was the total teenaged crowd animal. She had begun with Donny and Marie at nine, then had gotten all moony for John Travolta at eleven (I made the mistake of calling him John Revolta one day and she scratched me so badly that I almost needed a stitch in my cheek - I supposed I deserved it, sort of). At twelve she was gone for Shaun. Then it was Andy Gibb. Just lately she had developed more ominous tastes: heavymetal rockers like Deep Purple and a new group, Styx.
'I was helping Arnie get his car squared away, I said, as much to my father as to Ellie. More, really.
'That creep.' Ellie sighed and turned the page of her magazine.
I felt a sudden and amazingly strong urge to rip the magazine out of her hands, tear it in two, and throw the pieces in her face. That went further toward showing me exactly how stressful the day had been than anything else could have done. Elaine doesn't really think Arnie's a creep; she just takes every possible opportunity to get under my skin. But maybe I had heard Arnie called a creep too often over the last few hours. His tears were still drying on the front of my shirt, for Christ's sake, and maybe I felt a little bit creepy myself.
'What's Kiss doing these days, dear?' I asked her sweetly. 'Written any love-letters to Erik Estrada lately? "Oh, Erik, I'd die for you, I go into a total cardiac arrest every time I think of your thick, greasy lips squelching down on mine . . . " '
'You're an animal,' she said coldly. 'Just an animal, that's all you are.'
'And I don't know any better.'
'That's right.' She picked up her magazine and her brown-sugar sandwich and flounced away into the living room.
'Don't you get that stuff on the floor, Ellie,' Dad warned her, spoiling her exit a bit.
I went to the fridge and rummaged out some bologna and a tomato that didn't look as if it was working. There was also half a package of processed cheese, but wild overindulgence in that shit as a grade-schooler had apparently destroyed my craving for it. I settled for a quart of milk to go with my sandwich and opened a can of Campbell's Chunky Beef.
'Did he get it?' Dad asked me. My dad is a tax-consultant for H&R Block. He also does freelance tax work. In the old days he used to be a full-time accountant for the biggest architectural firm in Pittsburgh, but then he had a heart attack and got out. He's a good man.
'Yeah, he got it.'
'Still look as bad to you as it did?'
'Worse. Where's Mom?'
'Her class,' he said.
His eyes met mine, and we both almost got the giggles. We immediately looked away in separate directions, ashamed of ourselves - but even being honestly ashamed didn't seem to help much. My mom is forty-three and works as a dental hygienist. For a long time she didn't work at her trade, but after Dad had his heart attack, she went back.
Four years ago she decided she was an unsung writer. She began to produce poems about flowers and stories about sweet old men in the October of their years. Every now and then she would get grittily realistic and do a story about a young girt who was tempted 'to take a chance' and then decided it would be immeasurably better if she Saved It for the Marriage Bed. This summer she had signed up for a directed writing course at Horlicks - where Michael and Regina Cunningham taught, you will remember - and