The Aqua Net Diaries (26 page)

Mom was in my parents' room packing. I lurked about in the doorway, waiting for her to notice me.

She said, “Yes?”

I said, “Are you excited about your trip?”

She said, “I'm looking forward to it.”

I asked her some questions about where she was going and the people she would see so that she knew I was interested and making an effort to be involved, and then she said, “Was there something you wanted to ask me?” My mother had these invisible antennae that could pick up on the littlest thing. It was spooky and unnerving.

“Well, you know how Joey and Laura and I are working on J
udy on Purpose,
and we've already talked to Mr. Sizemore and he said he would consider it for spring production if we can just get it to him on time, but there is never any time to work on it because we are always having to be in school.”

“No,” she said. She was folding up her shirts and pants in neat little rows.

“I haven't even asked you yet.”

“You can't skip school on Friday to work on your play.”

My mother was like an alien being with her ability to read minds. I was suddenly mad at myself for even asking her for permission. Who did that? Who asked their mother for permission to ditch school? I thought I deserved points for this.

“At least I asked you,” I said. “I could have just ditched, but I wanted to do it the right way.”

She stopped folding and looked at me with her most patient impatient look.

My mother left the next day and my dad dropped me off at school. I met Joey and Laura by my locker, which was just inside the back doors by the Orchestra Hall.

Joey said, “Are you ready?”

I said, “I can't.”

He said, “What do you mean ‘you can't'?”

I said, “I asked my mom and she said no.”

Joey and Laura looked at each other. Laura said, “You asked your mom?”

I said, “What?”

Joey said, “Where is your mom?”

I said, “Illinois.”

He said, “Exactly. Let's go. My car's out front.”

I started following them. I didn't have the heart to tell them that my mom's antennae worked long-distance.
She'll never find out about it,
I told myself.
How can she? She's not even here.

We drove out to the library at Indiana University East, the branch campus in Richmond, and took over one of their private rooms. The room was tight like a box and there were no windows—just a long desk and about a hundred chairs and lots of fluorescent lighting. We settled in and began to write, reading scenes aloud, sometimes writing on our own, sometimes arguing over this section or that section. Joey's writing was typically clever, Laura's madcap, mine heart-felt. We propped our feet on the table and leaned back in our chairs. We sprawled out on the table lengthwise. Laura and I sat on the floor under the table eating Oreos while Joey sat at the typewriter and took dictation. At lunchtime, we ordered our favorite food—Noble Roman's breadsticks with extra jalapeño cheese dip. Joey went outside to pay and intercept the delivery guy, and then smuggled the food inside in his backpack.

I called my dad at some point and told him that Joey would be driving me home, and then we stayed even later
than school hours because we were light-headed by that time from no windows and too much artificial light and too many breadsticks and too much caffeine and too much writing. We came up with the silliest ideas and laughed over nothing.

That weekend, I practiced my mom's signature on a piece of her Carl Sandburg Oral History Project stationery because I would need a note. Joey would just make up one of his usual outpatient surgery excuses:
To Whom It May Concern, Joe Kraemer was absent Friday due to an appointment with Dr. Burge for Outpatient surgery. Thank you, E. M. Kraemer.
He was practiced in evil. Laura was experienced, too. She shrugged off danger. I, meanwhile, was a nervous wreck.

We went to the attendance office before school on Monday—each in a different line so as to avoid suspicion—and I held my breath as the lady behind the counter took my note. She looked it over, looked at me, and then smiled. She said, “I hope you're feeling better.” And then I was free to go.

My mom came home days later and asked me how school was on Friday. “Good,” I said, hoping my voice didn't sound too thin, a dead giveaway.

She looked at me calmly. “You didn't go, did you?” she said.

“What?”

“I know you didn't go to school,” she said.

This was one of those superpowers mothers have like X-ray vision into your heart, or being able to humiliate you in public by not touching you or speaking, or knowing just what to say to make the tears go away.

I started to deny it, but then I just sighed and said, “I didn't go.”

She said, “But we talked about this.” I could tell she was
disappointed in me, which was always the very worst thing.

I said, “I know. And I'm sorry. But I wouldn't trade that day for anything.”

There was a French exchange student living with the Lonigros named Sophie Gourdon. She was little and sturdy and had hair like a boy and barely spoke any English. She worshipped Joey. One afternoon Joey, Laura, and I posed for pictures in Laura's upstairs hallway, against the background of a white sheet covering the mirror that lined the wall facing the stairs.

Sophie took shot after shot of the three of us in our most glamorous poses. Jars of Vaseline and crazy hats, Coke bottles, shoes, a red rose, even a mannequin hand were introduced. Clothes were changed, exchanged, and then torn off. We posed for mug shots. We knew by this point that we might never finish
Judy on Purpose.
Our little one-act play was growing longer and longer. Laura's home life was becoming lonelier and harder to bear. She was taking care of herself and Monica, having to be big sister and parent. She threw herself into the play because, she said, she didn't think she would survive without it and us. Joey was struggling with issues he couldn't yet understand or voice. There was pressure from his parents, from the Catholic church he attended every Sunday—everywhere he looked he got the message loud and clear:
Be straight.
Only my home life seemed normal, except that my dad was busy all the time, missing dinners with my mom and me, not making it to school events, staying home during vacations while my mom and I went to North Carolina and New York, becoming more and more absent and distant in a way he hadn't been before.

Joey, Laura, and I were pulled in different directions,
though we still wrote and wrote. It wasn't about Tom Dehner anymore. It hadn't been for a long time. Our one-act play grew past one hundred pages, and overflowed into two hundred. We couldn't seem to stop ourselves.

Joey was working on the yearbook—editing it single-handedly because it had been dropped from the curriculum and he alone was willing to put in the hours needed to save it. So he had access to senior pictures. He blew up a shiny 8x10 of each cast member. The three of us drove to Dayton in Laura's silver Chevette—the one with the holes in the floor and no windshield wipers, Laura driving only in second gear because she'd never learned to drive a stick correctly—and climbed the steps of the Art Institute. We sat up at the top so we could look out over the city, and then we carefully arranged our cast in order of appearance before they blew away in the wind and we had to run chasing after them.

One day after school—sometime after the deadline had passed for Mr. Sizemore, when we now knew we would never see our play performed at Richmond High School—Joey and I sneaked into McGuire Hall. He moved about the stage, from place to place, while I watched him. “Rock will stand here,” he said, “and Mother here. Lolita will be up there on the staircase they build—big and white and spiraling. A grand staircase, grander than the one they built for
Annie.
And Sharon over there. Father Douglas will enter there through the doorway, and here, center stage, is where Michael and Judy will stand.” I took my spot. Joey moved into shadow. “Action,” he said.

I turned to face the imaginary audience. If I squinted, I could just picture everyone—parents, teachers, faculty, and all of our classmates, gathered to watch the play we had worked so hard on.

“Here I am, plain old Judy Diamond from a little nowhere town you've never even heard of. A sister who's crazy, a suicidal brother, and a mother who doesn't understand me. Silly me, I thought things would change when I turned into the ‘new Judy.' The ‘new Judy.' Funny, I feel an awful lot like the old one.”

I looked out over the imaginary heads of my classmates, my teachers, of everyone I knew. “If only Daddy hadn't gone away. Sometimes I wonder what everything would be like if he were still here. I don't think they realize just how much I miss him. And they don't understand. It would help if I could tell someone. If I had someone to talk to. But guess what? There's no one. There's only me.” Sitting side by side, down in the front row, I could just see my parents—my mom
and
my dad—holding hands, happy.

I bowed my head. Then, from somewhere offstage— distant, but still quite audible—there was the sound of Joey singing: “God save our gracious Queen, Long live our noble Queen, God save the Queen: Send her victorious, Happy and glorious, Long to reign over us: God save the Queen!”

The simple art of making a fake ID

After games we could be found doing what students through the years have done—cruisin' East Main, scarfin' on Big Macs at McDonald's, doggin' on some pizza at Noble Roman's, or gathering at someone's house for a party, always a welcome word at RHS. Then there were a few too easily entertained with their good friend “Mary Jane.”

—1985
Pierian

When Tommy Wissel was a senior in high school, he was hired at the County Market, which was a big grocery store on the west side of town. He was supposed to report to work his first day at seven p.m., but for some reason he thought he was supposed to be there at five. When he showed up and they told him he was early, he walked over to
Hook's Drugs next door and stole a fifth of Scotch. He went back behind Hook's and County Market and played hackey sack and drank the entire bottle. Just before seven, he went back to work.

When he got there, he was taken on a tour of the market and shown what to do and given his badge and his apron. Then he was let loose on his own. He walked back to the liquor department and got a case of beer and they found him an hour later, surrounded by cans, having drunk his way through it.

He was brought into the back office. “We're calling your parents,” his boss told him.

“No way,” he said. He wasn't sticking around for that. He took off his apron and walked right out the front door. They called his dad anyway.

Tommy had been out with a girl from County Market a few times. She was pretty and fun and a good sport. Her name was Pam. She covered for him when his dad came to pick him up and he wasn't there. Tommy never went back to County Market, but he kept going out with Pam. As he said, “I knew she either loved me or pitied me and that any girl who would lie for me was a keeper.”

For a long time, the drinking age in nearby Ohio was eighteen, but this changed minutes before the class of 1986 turned eighteen, which, of course, was horribly unfair. Luckily, if you lived in Richmond and went to Richmond High School, there were several options open to you for drinking, no matter your age. These options were:

The Grandfather Clause.
In the 1980s, when the drinking age was raised from eighteen to nineteen and then to twenty-one, those of us (there weren't any in our class) who
were eighteen before the drinking age changed were still allowed to buy alcohol and get served in bars. This meant driving over the state line to Ohio, where the drinking age had been eighteen, and then nineteen (the Grandfather Clause wasn't honored in Indiana because the drinking age had never been anything but twenty-one there).

The Lampost.
This was a little restaurant-bar in New Paris, Ohio, about six miles from Richmond through the dark, open countryside and cornfields. The Lampost had been there since 1945, started by a man named Joe DiFederico, known to regulars as Uncle Joe. It was a place famous for its special spaghetti sauce and 3.2 beer. Generations of eighteen-year-old Hoosiers slipped across the state line to eat dinner and drink that 3.2 beer, which was a little less potent than actual beer but was still beer just the same. It was easy to get served at the Lampost. If all else failed, you knew you could count on 3.2 beer.

Fake IDs.
Because they couldn't always drive to New Paris, some of my classmates took matters into their own hands. The Indiana driver's license had a dot matrix print scheme. Someone discovered that a simple pencil eraser could remove the ink on the surface of the license without creating too much of an obvious background change. It was easy to change a “1968” birth date into a “1965” by using a pencil—and even easier to change a “1967” into a “1963”—making someone twenty-one.