For a while my mother drove a station wagon. I would do whatever I could--lie, cheat, and cry--to get to ride in the back. I wasn't interested in sitting in the front and watching out the windshield: I had lived in that town for years, and I wasn't interested in where we were going. I'd been all those places before. Where I really wanted to get to was wherever it was we'd just been.
Someone gave me a pogo stick once, but I never weighed enough to make it pogo.
A few years later Maria had a slumber party. She had a pogo stick too, and I couldn't make hers do anything bouncy either. The party was for her birthday, and we were going to the drive-in for a double feature of Aladdin and 3 Ninjas. I'd never been to the drive-in before. We all piled in Maria's mom's station wagon and drove to the movie. Just before we got there, she ordered us all to get in the back and hide under a bunch of blankets, because she was sneaking us all in. The drive-in was the most wonderful place I'd ever been to, even though I mostly lay on top of the car and watched the stars.
I used to photograph people's hands, because I believed that they held all a person's secrets.
A few years later he and I went to the drive-in. But when we got there the movie had already started, and although we wanted to feel like the 1950's there were other things on our minds. So instead we drove off in that big white van filled with music gear, his thick hands with their long guitar player fingers alternately laced with mine and tracing the inside of my thigh. Some time later we found ourselves in Sarasota, stumbling on the beach, drunk with each other. He collected empty coquina shells, putting them in my hair and pressing them into my skin--he always made me feel like a princess at night.
They've since torn down that old drive-in.
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