O.C. Writers

// Boy Meets Girl 

The theme for the evening was the Roaring Twenties, although none of them were born then. The women rented flapper attire—glittering headbands, fringed skirts—from the costume supplier they had emailed and texted each other about in the preceding weeks, and some wore bobbed wigs, the bangs razor-cut, severe. Punctuating the sequins and feathers were the men in suits, mostly their own with minor flourishes added.

Glen Hanley thought it strange to celebrate someone’s fiftieth birthday, a personal and consequential milestone, by embracing a distant decade and its symbolism, to adopt this era that had nothing to do with any of them and to have a party in someone’s garage, no matter how expertly finished it was. He sat on a leather barstool at the new mahogany wet bar, thinking these thoughts.

Glen Hanley was a tall man, but the type of tall that sneaks up. From a distance, he had a hunched, small look, which grew and expanded as he approached. A dark shock of hair combed over a broad head, wide shoulders and a stomach flatter than most men his age. In good working order, he felt, an attractive specimen if the reactions from assorted female customers at the bank were any indication.

He ordered a scotch and soda from his wife’s PTA friend and hostess of the party, Susan Gleeson. When she twisted the cap, club soda vapors dotted her face. They both smiled. He had met her several years before, had returned from work to find four women huddled over a mound of papers at his kitchen table, had listened politely through the introductions and explanations about the upcoming fundraiser, all the while wondering what was to be done about his dinner. Both daughters were busy with afterschool activities and his wife Janet had given up the custom of regular dinners. But nothing had changed for him. He still worked at the bank, still played in his tennis group on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He, Glen Hanley, still wanted dinner.

Susan Gleeson slid a sweaty glass across the bar. Her eyes glittered underneath a fringe of dark hair. It was July and hot, despite the central air conditioning vented in from the house. Glen Hanley squinted, trying to remember the color of her actual hair.

She leaned over the bar, her bosom two mounds of dough, reflected in duplicate. “I like your suit,” she breathed into his ear.

Glen Hanley looked down at the pinstripes and white tie, rented, imagining his wife had set him up for ridicule.

“You look dangerous,” Susan Gleeson added.

In the center of the ceiling, a disco ball had been hung under the garage door opener. Late summer, late evening, the sun spilling orange across their meager street. Flecks of colored light radiated weakly from the glass fixture, which turned and turned from its omniscient position, some tacky imitation of the earth. It wasn’t until later, when the recycling bin brimmed with bottles and the brie began to harden and ooze, that the disco ball would be in its full glory. The overhead lights had been dimmed by then and the dance floor got crowded.

Glen Hanley was sitting once again on the stool, having been mildly humiliated by his wife and her wisecrack about the banality of mortgage lending, having been both numbed and incited by his fifth scotch and soda to leave her dancing alone to Night Moves, which had nothing to do with the Twenties either. And once again, Susan Gleeson appeared with her cleavage above red satin. Susan Gleeson with her refreshing beverages. How unbelievably lucky Doug Gleeson was, he thought, to have a finished garage and a terrific fiftieth birthday party when he, Glen Hanley, couldn’t even get a hot dinner most nights.

So when the next song on the Gleesons’ playlist was “Blinded By the Light,” a song he often blared in his childhood bedroom on Santa Marina Street, his mother coughing under an afghan on the living room couch and his twin sisters laughing or fighting nearby (because Glen Hanley had been surrounded by women his entire life), when this song started, making him feel nineteen and not fifty himself in seven months, the rhythmic drumbeat, the expressive guitar like a lone, pleading voice, the electronic sounds altering the insulated garage into something as foreign as a moonscape, Glen grabbed Susan’s hand, pulled her around the bar (his own wife be damned), and brought her to the newly laid dance floor.

// Death Comes for Man

Kizzy Hanley parked her car near the fire hydrant where one summer, her sister Lurie slipped in a puddle and got a concussion. Their mother blamed Kizzy, who was older and therefore in charge. The hydrant had been dripping for several days but the neighborhood kids had sworn a pact of silence, filling cups and bowls for their own purposes, submerging their sweaty heads under the faint stream. Lurie, excitable and absentminded, was destined for accidents. Even now, Kizzy had a text that Lurie’s flight from Denver was snow-delayed. They’d spend the evening worrying and checking the airline’s website, thinking and talking about Lurie.

Slowly, Kizzy retrieved her purse and the take-out bag from the passenger seat. She’d been staying at her parents’ house (her mother’s house she’d have to get used to saying) for three nights. Ever since her father collapsed at his Thursday tennis game. There was no reason for it, no sense to be made. He is, was, fifty-six years old. Kizzy bit her lip, shook the wave off.

Her mother was where she’d left her, cleaning the refrigerator. Her backside in the blue polyester pants protruded from the open freezer door, jiggling as she scrubbed. Boxes of vegetables, cellophane wrapped meat, a ice-covered Ben and Jerry’s, all of it on the marble counter, all of it in individualized tiny puddles.

“Almost finished then, Mom?” Kizzy asked. “The food is melting.”

Her head came out, face shiny from the cold, eyes glassy. “Okay.”

Kizzy helped her load the things back in. She gathered plates, forks and napkins and took it all to the kitchen barstools. They hadn’t eaten in the dining room since she arrived. Already they were starting new ways of being.

“You don’t have to stay,” her mother said for the tenth time. “I know you’ve got your job, your apartment.”

“Mom, it’s three miles away. Everything will stay the same there.”

Her apartment. Draped over the chair in her bedroom, the Japanese silk gown (no one to see it), the toiletries in a straight line across the marble vanity. The quiet and the dark.

She dished Kung Pao chicken for her mother. “I’ll stay with you through the service. I want to see Lurie.” Lurie’s expanding figure, Lurie with her happy marriage and little miracle on the way.

Her mother, resigned but glad: “Alright then, Kizzy.”

The clock in the hallway chimed six o’clock. An heirloom of sorts, purchased by Kizzy’s grandmother when her daughter married Glen Hanley, it rang every half hour. Can’t you change the settings her father would ask. But Janet Hanley insisted she didn’t notice at all, having lived with it for so long.

During the chiming, Kizzy and her mother looked at each other. A brief moment, nothing to say. Marvelous and terrifying, Kizzy thought, how quickly we go, how long we stay.