Spin Cycle

by Susan Cameron

Hey, I finally found it! Sorry my post was late -- hope you think it was worth the wait.

* * * * *

"GO! GO! GO!" Brittany screamed into the wind roaring past her ears as she opened the throttle. The boat bounced into the air and splashed, bounced and splashed, leaping through Tomahawk Lake like a skittering, screaming cougar hot on the heels of a deer. The wind, the spray, the roar, the vibration of the wheel jittering through her hands, up her arms, the sting of her long hair whipping her back, thigh muscles trembling as she half-crouched, bracing herself, unwilling to throttle back and slow the beast -- "GO!" -- and Kenny waiting on the other side, Kenny and his slow grin and his slow kisses, long, deep, spearmint-flavored kisses, football-player muscles solid as bedrock under her hands, the very bones of her body melting like warm butter under his hands -- "GO!" -- and she was going, going away from Zombie Mom and Dad the Perv, him checking her out in her bathing suit, my God! -- and Kenny waiting on the other side, with his truck and dog and money from his summer job framing houses and a rented room at his cousin's house just waiting for them -- "GO!" -- and her duffel bag of clothes and her money in her backpack stuffed under the seats, ready for real life to begin! And there, up ahead, there was Kenny on the shore, just like he promised, waving, grinning at her! She throttled back, waved, screamed "I LOVE YOU!" Brittany felt as if her heart would burst open like a ripe, juicy plum. Nobody could have ever felt this way before, this excited, this happy, this much in love; nobody in the world had ever been this ready!

* * * * *

Brittany's father, the richest, most successful Chevy dealer in the state of Wisconsin, began his career in automotive sales by stealing a car from a dead woman in Detroit, Michigan.

Marvin Miller was eighteen, living in a dump on the lower east side. He heard that the nurse who lived down the street had just keeled over with a heart attack. After the ambulance hauled her away, Marvin heard opportunity knocking; he stole her car and sold it. With the profits, he bought a new suit from Sears, a bottle of Mad Dog 20-20, his first whore, and a Cadillac with a transmission that chattered. He packed the tranny with sawdust and banana peels to quiet it down, then sold the Caddy for triple what he'd paid for it to some illiterate ex-cotton picker working the graveyard shift at the Ford plant. Marvin counted the grubby cash, grinned in amazement and realized he had found his true calling.

Thirty years' worth of creative capitalism later, Marvelous Marvin Miller, king of the late-night car commercials, swayed gently at the wet bar in his study as he poured his fourth Glenfiddich on the rocks since lunch. He carefully wrapped the glass in paper napkins so he wouldn't drip scotch on the Aubusson rug and shuffled past the shelves of leather-bound books the interior decorator had installed. She had done a good job. The study looked classy. He had tried to install a little something in the curvy blonde interior decorator, too, but hadn't been able to close the deal.

He paused to look at the huge mahogany and glass display case full of plaques and trophies, sales awards he and his various dealerships had earned over the years. The case was lit up day and night, and it gave him as much pleasure as the wet bar. He checked his reflection in the glass, ran one hand over his thinning hair, sucked in his gut.

The French doors leading to the balcony stuck a bit in the humid summer air of Tomahawk Lake, Wisconsin, but Marvin forced one open without spilling a drop of scotch. He leaned over the railing and took in the view. His bloodshot eyes drifted around the rim of the steep hillside that plunged to the lake, and the nearby houses squatting on the edge -- past Harvey's huge English Tudor next door, and then Elmo's Venetian palazzo, and then the massive tile roof of some radiologist's hacienda -- house after house looming over Tomahawk Lake, sparkling below them like a shattered windshield in the sun.

Marvin grunted as he lowered himself onto a chaise longue and pulled a contraband Cuban cigar out of his pocket. He was focusing his attention on keeping the ash the proper length when the ferocious howl of a boat engine distracted him.

Marvin peered through the railing down toward the water, and he scowled. He watched his daughter Brittany blasting away from his dock in the Boston Whaler he'd bought her for her most recent birthday, her seventeenth. She was wearing that tiny bikini again, the one that matched her golden tan exactly, the one that made her look like a naked Victoria's Secret model. He'd forbidden her to wear it. He didn't want her running around looking like that. But she was headstrong and stubborn and boy-crazy and was probably going off to cock-tease her boyfriend, that big football-playing bastard who lived on the poor side of the lake. What the hell was his wife thinking, letting their daughter run around acting like a little whore?

Come to think of it, where was that fat bitch, anyhow? He checked his Rolex. Not dinnertime yet, so she was probably lumbering around the stores in town, taking his credit cards for a walk. Or down in the laundry room again. What the hell was this mania she had for doing the laundry herself? Why didn't she have the cleaning lady do it? He certainly paid the hired help enough. He shook his head, puffed his cigar. A man in his position, stuck with a wife who looked and acted like some slow-witted big-assed Polack washerwoman. Lucky for him the world was full of attractive cocktail waitresses to keep him distracted, and call girls at sales conventions, women who looked and felt as good as the wife used to when he married her. Divorce would cost him an arm and a leg. If it weren't for that, he'd divorce the wife in a heartbeat.

Or would he? He sipped his scotch and thought about it. Having the wife around kept the golddiggers in their place. Probably saved him trouble in the long run.

* * * * *

Juliana was in the laundry room. She didn't mind doing laundry. She didn't mind much of anything since she'd discovered Prozac. It was a nice addition to her fruit salad, the colorful collection of pills she took before each meal. Lots of doctors, lots of prescriptions, lots of pills, pretty pills, red and green like Christmas, pink and purple like Easter, a holiday in every handful.

Her big hands drifted slowly from laundry basket to folding table, basket to table, floating back and forth like seaweed in the surge. She loved the smell of detergent, fabric softener, soft and clean. She smoothed the wrinkles out of Brittany's size five underpants, tiny as doll clothes. She herself had never been a size five. She stood the same five-foot-seven as her husband, but was wide-shouldered, big-hipped, built for field work and birthing babies. The long, powerful legs she'd once wrapped around the happy, scrawny young man who would become her husband had gained ten pounds each and sprouted ropy varicose veins that spread under her flesh like roots looking for water.

She folded and smoothed, folded and smoothed, hands drifting, watching the big diamond in her wedding ring sparkling even in the dim light of the laundry room, a huge diamond, catching and reflecting the light, winking at her. And she listed to the jingle of her charm bracelet, the present Marvin gave her the first time he won the Salesman of the Year award. She shouldn't wear it while doing laundry, but it was so pretty. A thick golden chain, empty at first, now heavy on her wrist, loaded with golden charms, souvenirs of their life together. The Eiffel Tower; that was from their tenth anniversary celebration in Paris. A tiny Cadillac with diamond headlights. After Brittany was born, Marvin gave her the baby carriage with little gold wire wheels that really turned. He gave her crabs, too, and gonorrhea twice, and it turned out he'd started cheating on her before they were even married -- but no no no, she mustn't think about things like that anymore. One or another of her doctors said it was important she not get upset, and really, she hardly ever got upset these days.

She stacked Brittany's fresh clean folded clothes into the basket and drifted like a rudderless ship toward her daughter's bedroom. She opened the door and floated into a foreign country.

Brittany had annihilated all the interior decorator's good work as soon as the woman left. The tasteful country French furniture was buried somewhere under an explosion of stuff Brittany brought home from the thrift store where she insisted on working. Clothing, junk jewelry, brass incense burners, candles, Navajo fetishes, Chinese good-luck charms, collections of rocks and stones and shells and beads. Not a speck of flowered wallpaper was visible behind the layers of rough cotton Indian and Pakistani bedspreads tacked to the walls, and so many more were layered on the floor that you couldn't see the cornflower blue wall-to-wall carpet at all. The light was blocked by the burgundy velvet drapes Brittany had rescued from their neighbor Harvey's trash, and Marvin would have killed her if he knew where she got them. A blacklight shrine on one wall was filled with images of rebellious rock and roll heroes who died before Brittany was born, and live ones who looked dead. Brittanyland smelled like patchouli and sandalwood, Coppertone and mildew.

Damp bathing suits were festering somewhere -- under the bed? in the closet? The last time she looked for the source of the smell she found two baggies of marijuana. Kids and drugs, oh my God, and she had cried and cried, not knowing what to do. She couldn't tell Marvin, not with his temper. She eventually flushed the marijuana down the toilet, took a couple of pills and went to bed. If Brittany noticed the baggies were missing, she never said a word.

Her daughter didn't say much about anything these days. She was rarely home, always out with her friends somewhere, showing up for meals sometimes but eating in silence, bolting from the dinner table as soon as she was done. Marvin would try to talk to Brittany and ended up yelling at her, saying things he didn't really mean. When she tried to intervene, her words just wouldn't come out right. Her brain and her voice seemed slow and disconnected somehow.

But that was sad, and she didn't want to think of sad things. She sat the yellow plastic laundry basket on top of a pile of magazines with tattooed musicians on the covers, and opened Brittany's underwear drawer. It was completely empty.

This was confusing. She looked at the little pile of clean underwear, looked at the drawer. There should be more in here, she thought.

She opened the next drawer, where Brittany kept her cute little T-shirts. Empty.

And the next. No socks. Empty.

A sunbeam of panic sliced through her brain's gray fog. Check the closet. Half empty. The clothes all over the bed and chair and floor hadn't been dropped there after being worn -- they'd been discarded. The backpack on the closet shelf -- gone. The duffel bag -- gone. Another thought hit her with such force that her knees buckled and she staggered backward, stumbling to the bed. Brittany had turned seventeen.

Emancipated minor. She hadn't thought of the phrase in years.

She herself had once been one, a seventeen-year-old runaway with a minimum-wage job, living in a converted garage, desperately in love with a boy named Marvin who wanted to marry her. The police told her parents they couldn't touch her. She hadn't been afraid of being poor them; she'd been afraid of being trapped.

Juliana sat for a long while, staring vacantly at her right hand twisting the wedding ring on her left, eyes open but not seeing, hearing one word whispering itself in her mind, a soft small wave gently breaking on beached driftwood: Go. Go. Go.

Susan Cameron, copyright 1999

East Side Story

by Susan Cameron

"Dave got really mad at me when I told him he shouldn't smoke dope near the kids any more, but I don't think I'm wrong. A contact high can't be good for little kids," says Elizabeth. Sarah and I nod our agreement, mouths full of Elizabeth's homemade chocolate chip cookies. Little Jimmy had just turned two, and baby Carly's nine months old. We know smoking dope in front of children must be a bad thing; there isn't a mother on TV who'd put up with it.

The three of us are eating cookies, drinking milk, and listening to George Harrison's latest album, the one to benefit Bangladesh. It seems incredible that people are starving to death in the 1970's, as if we were still in the Dark Ages. I feel a little twinge of guilt about eating the cookies, but that doesn't stop me.

The kids are down for their naps, so the music's too quiet to fully appreciate the power of Dave's stereo system, but that's OK with us. The music's not drowning out our talking. We're in the living room of Dave and Elizabeth's HUD house. HUD stands for Housing and Urban Development. It's a government agency that sells dilapidated houses in dangerous neighborhoods to unqualified people who will never pay for them.

Elizabeth married Dave and gave birth to Jimmy six months later, the week she turned seventeen. At eighteen she had Carly, and that's about the time I entered the picture. Dave supplements his boxboy income by dealing on the side; I like kids, and I'm willing to baby-sit for nicely rolled joints instead of money. It works out for everybody.

I like Elizabeth. She's a misplaced earth mother hippie girl -- she struggles to grow vegetables in the dead ghetto dirt in her backyard, she cooks way better than the rest of us, she loves fussing over her kids. We all think Dave is attractive. He is tall and cadaverously thin, with long, dark hair and skin so white it's almost blue, like ice on the Detroit River in February. He looks like he should be the lead guitarist in some famous rock-and-roll band, and he does play guitar, but badly. We decide he looks kind of like James Taylor on the cover of the Mud Slide Slim album, except Dave used to do a lot of speed and is far, far skinnier than James Taylor, who does heroin. And Dave has a couple of bad teeth you can see when he smiles, but you don't see them often.

"The thing is, I know Dave really loves me, and I know he really loves the kids, but sometimes he just doesn't think," says Elizabeth. "He gets mad and says things he doesn't really mean. He says, 'You know smoking weed mellows me out, you know I need it so I can stand to be around these crying rug rats, and you just want to hassle me!' but I'm not trying to hassle him, I just don't want the kids to get high, that's all. And then I get really angry because he calls Jimmy and Carly rug rats, and I yell at him, and then we start really arguing, and he yells and screams and slams the door when he leaves, and the kids are crying, and then I start crying too, and I'm tired of him coming home stoned and sorry sorry sorry all the time, you know?" The last two words come out all quavery, and she grabs the empty cookie plate and heads for the kitchen so we won't see the tears in her eyes, and Sarah and I pretend we don't notice them. Elizabeth comes back with her famous oatmeal raisin cookies this time, but my stomach doesn't feel quite right and I don't want any, although they're my favorites.

Sarah's the one who blurts out the question. "Has Dave tried to hurt Jimmy again?"

A long silence. My stomach is really hurting now. Elizabeth sighs. "No. It was just that one time. He kept all his appointments with the therapist, just like the judge said, and the social worker doesn't have to come around any more. The doctor said Jimmy's fracture healed perfectly, the arm is fine." She takes a deep breath. "But I'm worried. Dave says weed does him more good than therapy ever did, and I know he's getting high at work behind the grocery store with the other guys. What if the boss catches him? What if he loses his job? We're not making payments on this house now as it is, and Dave's spending all the rent money we collect from our tenants downstairs. I don't know where the hell it's all going, and I don't know what the hell I'm going to do," and she loses it.

She's sobbing, and Sarah's holding her, and I'm holding her, making inadequate comforting noises, when Jimmy stumbles out awakened from his nap, sucking his thumb and clutching his blankie, and he sees his mother crying, pulls out his thumb and starts wailing, which wakes up his sister, who starts wailing, and it sounds like the air raid sirens the city of Detroit tests on the first Saturday of the month to give us time to kiss our asses good-bye when the Russians finally nuke us. Loud. It is loud. I wouldn't break my baby's arm for crying, though, and my stomach wrenches again, and I realize what I'm feeling in my guts is rage, and I want to beat Dave unconscious. We all snuggle together on the couch, everybody calmed down and cuddling like a litter of exhausted puppies.

So it's no big surprise when Elizabeth and the kids show up on my doorstep the following week. We make up my ex-roommate's bed in the dining room. It's only a double, but the kids are so small that all three of them can fit. Sarah and Patty and Mary Ann drop by. We pop a half a ton of popcorn and read Cat in the Hat aloud way too many times, and after the kids are asleep we talk about men and life and the future and lots of other things we don't know anything about.

It's also no big surprise when Elizabeth calls Dave a few days later, they make up, and he comes to take her and the kids home. This is the first time they break up and make up, but it's far from the last. The pattern develops: Dave loses his temper, yells, throws things; Elizabeth fears for the safety of the kids and brings them to my place; Dave cools down, apologizes; Elizabeth goes back to him. This cycle repeats itself for almost two years. Our little circle of friends no longer find Dave attractive.

"Thanks for taking care of my family again, Sue," says Dave, his eyes skidding off my face and landing somewhere behind my right shoulder.

"No problem, Dave." I smile, looking straight at the eyes not looking at mine. Punkass.

It's a very steep staircase leading to my second-story walk-up. As he begins his descent I have the urge to give his bony back a hard shove, watch the scrawny rooster try to fly -- "Squawk! Squa..." as he hits bottom and his skinny neck snaps, stringy carcass fit only for a long, slow simmer in a stewpot -- but I don't. Booting his ass is his wife's job, not mine; and after our friend Sarah tells Elizabeth in exasperation to shit or get off the pot, Elizabeth finally succumbs to the inevitable, and the marriage is over.

* * * * *

Things we don't know at the time: Dave will make his court-ordered child support payments until he falls in love with another stoned, skinny boxboy and runs away with him. Elizabeth will take her children and move to a farm in upstate Michigan where welfare payments stretch farther. She will marry a truck driver with two children whose wife abandoned them to run away with a musician, a really bad guitar player. They will have a son together. They will divorce. Time will pass, and I will lose track of everybody.

* * * * *

I went through some old Detroit photographs the other day. There are Jimmy and Carly on their red-and-yellow plastic Big Wheels, huge smiles, showing off, tearing around the cracked asphalt driveway the weeds were destroying. There's Elizabeth smiling at the camera in front of the peeling yellow garage, all that long dark wavy hair, good-natured hippie gypsy in bellbottoms and bare feet. And there's me. I am nineteen years old, about to turn twenty. I recognize the earrings I'm wearing in the photograph; they're at the bottom of my jewelry box now. The gold wore off and they turn my earlobes green, so I don't wear them any more, but I keep them just the same. I am sitting on Elizabeth's rickety back porch steps with that damned broken ripped screen door behind me, the one that always banged shut and startled me no matter how many times I heard it. Carly is sitting on my right knee with my arm wrapped around her. She has one tiny hand on mine, the other on my leg, and her mouth is open, laughing loud. My other arm is around Jimmy on my left, and his around me, and he's smiling. We're all happy, our three blond heads gleaming in the high-noon sunshine of a perfect late spring day. They have my hair. They have my hazel eyes. They have my nose. How can this be? They look like my children, and I stare at the faces that look like mine and wonder if I could have done more to help them. They even have my smile, three identical smiles for Elizabeth, the black swan mother of the golden chicks, behind my camera, taking the picture.

Susan Cameron, copyright 1999

Tea With The Ladies

by Susan Cameron

Jennifer and her husband Sam strolled hand-in-hand down the gently curving streets of Bath. At first, she had the odd sensation of walking through a movie set. It was classic Georgian England as seen in movies and TV shows: tall rows of dignified homes, as genteel and quiet as elderly ladies lined up in church pews, half-dozing through the sermon. And like church ladies, the congregation of houses all looked much the same: pale weathered stone faces in calm repose; all windows identical, neatly aligned, tastefully covered; a perfectly centered front door with polished brass fittings; and spiked black iron fencing emphatically separating all of them from the pavement just a few feet away.

Jennifer and Sam had wandered all afternoon along these old streets, admiring the impressive sweep of the Royal Crescent and the lovely park at Queen Square. As they strolled, Jennifer noticed an odd thing she wouldn’t have seen from a car; every house sat in a one-story-deep hole. Behind its iron fence, every house had a narrow staircase down into a hole almost a full story below street grade that led to another beautiful door. Some of the entries were like claustrophobic little patios, with colorful shade plants in pots and climbing vines stretching toward the light, but what a peculiar way to build houses, she thought.

“Honey, why did all these people put beautiful windows and a door in their basement?” she asked Sam, her authority on all things English. He laughed and squeezed her hand.

“No, my love, that’s not a basement. That’s the ground floor, at street level -- at least it was street level back when these houses were built. You’ve got to remember how long ago that was. When the original road deteriorated, the people just laid another layer over it. They built roads by hand in those days -- too hard to tear up the old road and begin fresh. They kept adding layer after layer to the road over the centuries. So the owners had to build steps to get down to their old front doors, and they had to put new front doors where first-floor windows once were.”

Jennifer leaned on the iron fence and craned her neck, trying to see down in the hole. Would the wall facing the door have layers, like an archeological dig? Could the residents see rock and cobblestone, brick and macadam, like the different-patterned stripes of a Fair Isle sweater?

She imagined these genteel houses over the centuries, watching the street rising just a meter or two away, an eight-foot slow-motion landslide engulfing them to their knees.

“Oh, dear,” murmured one of them as the cobblestones rose above her threshold. “I don’t like this a-tall.”

“Mustn’t grumble, dear,” another chided gently as brick paving reached doorknob-high. “We can’t stop progress.”

“I say,” whispered the first. “I can’t see out my ground-floor windows any longer. There’s no air, there’s no light.”

“It’s the smell of this awful new stuff that bothers me,” sniffed another. “I believe they refer to it as asphalt.”

“Mustn’t fuss,” another sighed. “I’ve a lovely pot of tea and chocolate hobnobs in the withdrawing room. Stiff upper lip, girls.”

Jennifer felt so foreign, so American.

Susan Cameron, copyright 2009