As My Dodge Dart Heads West
It disappears in the rear-view mirror, the street where we learned to disappear behind bathroom doors and in basement corners and even in plain sight, by moving so fast we became a blur, the way the K-Mart and the tank arsenal and the poky brick houses nervously perched on grids of grass and concrete are blurring now, becoming bigger and then receding, like our teenage lives, which looked the same from the outside (volleyball teams, flute duets), except yours included siblings who still wet the beds and a dad who came home slurring drunk in other people’s shoes, and more than one creepy uncle, whereas mine was lined with quiet dread and tightly webbed with rules—and we wore our secrets close, under McDonald’s uniforms, pressed against our chests like two halves of a broken heart, tarnished on their silver plated chains. We overlooked smudged lipstick, ripped parkas, dark circles under eyes. Never spoke of shapeless dreams, just lit Virgina Slims off a citronella candle and drank diet Coke, as thwarted mosquitoes whined overhead.
The road ahead is blurry. You disappeared first (Drano, no note). I’ll disappear best.
Butterfly Kit
And then the Lebowski girl vanished from the 7-Eleven, while her grandmother idled in her rust-pocked Buick, expecting Cherry Slurpees and her change. Andrea was OK. I knew her slightly—like, one time, she loaned me a tampon in the roller-rink bathroom when my quarter jammed the machine. My father said nothing, but when I got home from band practice, he handed me a yellow box. It held a clear plastic cup, with five black dashes lying listless on the bottom. Bleak. But the box promised the caterpillars weren’t dead. Dad set up the mesh tent on the kitchen table, right where we ate our meals. He liked demonstrations, often taking me to work with him to watch crash test dummies reduced to clotted cream because someone was reckless or miscalculated. The caterpillars merged with our routines. While I ironed Dad’s shirts, dreaming about Prince and his little red Corvette, fingers of fuzz crawled over furrows of shed skin and frass. As Dad and I watched M*A*S*H, chrysalides shook like tiny flags in strong wind. One morning, as we ate Cheerios, five painted ladies emerged from their dark sacks to find freshly-cut oranges, sugar-soaked tissues, and wings—while a few miles away, the larval body of Andrea Lebowski floated to the surface of the Detroit River.
