Streaker

Everybody knew the streaker, but he still wore the paper bag over his head. All the cool people, my mother included, were parked in the bowling alley lot, drinking syrupy sodas (this is the version she tells her children) and hanging out in cars. A few girls—my mother, her best friends Hoppy Keenan and Judith Reese—were moving from car to car under the bright parking lot lights, making the rounds, being seen.

They had just gotten to Paul McCann’s souped up Chevy, the one he’d taught my mother to drag race in the summer before, when the red convertible turned into the lot. The girls were all huddled into their sweaters, or maybe their boyfriends’ jackets. It was too cold to have the top down.

The convertible moved slowly into the lane in front of the parked cars. A white figure rose up, standing, in the back seat. The driver started honking, and Judith Reese shrieked in my mother’s ear, which was already burning red from sitting again in Paul McCann’s car, where she’d sat so often, this time under such casual premises, in too large a group. Judith screeched and pointed, and Hoppy laughed out loud as the streaker struck pose after pose, his lanky, pale body a grotesque mimic: a weightlifter or statue or model. My mother pressed both palms over her face, feeling it turn hot with red embarrassment, while Judith and Hoppy high-fived and slugged each other—new, liberated women, with their Marlboros and loud mouths at seventeen. My mother covered her face and Paul looked away, out the driver’s side window, toward the neon bowling alley sign, its pink and blue pins and letters rotating up in the sky.

This is the reaction to public nudity that I imagine for my mother, who wants me to talk like a lady. She went to Paul McCann’s prom at Lake County’s Catholic school, and the nuns watched to make sure no couple danced too closely, went from table to table sniffing students’ breath. She and her teenage friends took the train into Gary sometimes, and came out safe and sound, still innocent. Girls had to wear skirts to school every day. She has shown me the two mile path, through the cemetery, where she walked in knee-deep snow to and from school. She learned to drag race on a road called the Nine-Mile Stretch, which is now lined entirely with subdivisions and apartment complexes, commuters nesting outside the city.

My mother and Judith and Hoppy decided whether or not to date a boy by the condition, make, and model of his car, and particularly by its custom modifications. Joe Parker had holes drilled in the floor of his Chevy, which was supposed to have something to do with weight and aerodynamics, but for the purpose of my mother’s stories, served to drain off her peppermint schnapps vomit the first time she got drunk.

She does not broadly embellish her nostalgia, and I believe that my mother and Hoppy Keenan, wearing bobby socks, pedal pushers, and sweater sets, really did soap car windows in broad daylight. She relays these events, and I make up the details, choose colors for the sweaters. For all I really know (and I could conjure plenty of evidence), my mother was giggling and pointing along with Judith and Hoppy, mocking the streaker’s poses in the hallway at school the next Monday, catcalling and whistling, ladylike as an ape.

There is one story about which my mother is never demure, and there are no details left to fill in, not even the color of the shoes. This is the last drag race story—six teens are killed in a head-on collision, and one of them, a boy, in the back seat, takes the impact so hard that his tan and chocolate brown saddle shoes remained on the floor of the car when they cleaned up the wreckage, though he’d been thrown thirty feet over the front seat and out the windshield. The two cars hit so hard that he was literally knocked out of his shoes. This is a cautionary tale, and the only one that’s wholly complete and true. She tells this one on certain predictable occasions: the newspaper reports the unexpected death of a teenage girl, rumors circulate about someone recklessly bringing on his own bad luck, I get my first speeding ticket.

For all I know, it was Paul McCann’s car they soaped in broad daylight. Maybe he wasn’t even there the night the streaker cruised by. Maybe my mother was bawdy and loud, gin in her Seven-Up, right there in his car; maybe it was she who broke his heart. She told me that she set fire to an enormous angora-haired stuffed bunny he gave her for her birthday, watched it burn, and I think I could never do that, so maybe my mother is not like me at all, maybe she did the hurting, left a trail of sad boys behind her. It is entirely possible that the bowling alley parking lot was peopled by dozens of ex-boyfriends, who would become meek professional men, married to domineering, boisterous women who, in some way, recalled their first love—my mother—and it is entirely possible that those broken hearted boys, in their high-powered, shiny dragsters, didn’t even see the streaker, because they were all watching my mother, my beautiful teenage mother, who was not yet worn out, throw her head back and let out her clear, echoing laugh.