"keith laid there, feeling particularly victorious. the girl in front of him was a suitor of many, and who should be so lucky as to land angie dupont?"
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prequel to dead flowers
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mary travelling, 1966
with steel wings and open lace and you ride down upon it back on the doldrums shore in love i stand and let our words sail on the wind again i've been waiting in san francisco to know you still care
Mary's father had been a vet. She could remember standing at the top of the stairs with her brother, watching as a family in distress knocked on their door late at night, and as her father carried their beloved pooch or animal of some sort across the threshold tenderly, medical bag in hand. Her brother, Jonas, would grow bored and go to bed, leaving Mary to sit and watch in intrigue until her mother carefully tucked her back in.
She remembered, as well, the summer of '56. That was the summer when James Newman came to stay.
He was sixteen, therefore eternally cooler, when Mary was only ten. James wore his hair like Elvis Presley and swung his hips suggestively when he danced because he knew the television would never let Elvis do that; Mary thought this put him ten steps ahead of Presley. She then saved her money and peddled to the record store on her bike to bring home Elvis Presley's record and snuck it home, racing up to her room to let it look worn. She played the record hastily while doing her best to scuff up the sleeve; she bent the corner only slightly, rubbed it against the carpet, and even let Jonas scribble in the corners. When he took it to James, he turned his nose up, "Elvis?" He said, "Elvis Presley steals music. But good try kiddo." Like he wasn't envious of him just last week. Mary's cheeks flushed and she stomped to her room, not before hiding the record in Jonas' closet.
For some reason, she thought of him again as she walked through the streets of San Francisco, holding Buddy while he sniffled. Really, she didn't stand out too much; paisley print and long hair lined the streets. But the only shoes she could find in the car were Jerry's work boots, at least a couple sizes too big; they clumped when she walked and acted as the first clear sign of how out of touch Mary's life had been with reality.
Even when she found her and Buddy a hotel room, laying him to rest on the second bed while she perused the phonebooks, huddled on the floor. She felt like a schoolgirl again, sitting carelessly in her dress, a huge book held in her lap as she sat criss-crossed. Her neck even began to get that little pain from holding it down too long as her fingertip, still with dirt inside her fingernails from planting trees with Silas and the children, brushed across the page. She called the first pediatrician she saw, which proved exhausting and difficult and pointless. A health card, they asked for! Well, Buddy hadn't been registered, and May 24th, 1968 had been a painful, unmedicated day for Mary on the commune. Sighing, Mary hung up the phone and began to look for the number of a courthouse.
Meanwhile, Jerry was restless. He watched as that boy, the one with the curly hair who clung to his beloved Mary, instructed a younger girl on how to politely pet a dog. Jerry knew that Mary had grown up on a farm, her father a vet, and her adoration for animals. The boy- Silas, he guessed- was gentle with the little girl and the dog. Mary's grace, wisdom and love showed itself to him in more ways than she would ever know.
Jerry thought of Buddy, and even though they hadn't even been gone a night, looked at his picture as if he had been gone for months. People told him that the baby had his eyes, and he tried to see this especially now, but if it wasn't for the colour, they held all the warmth of his wife's. Jerry skipped going out to the fire tonight, and even skipped dinner- somebody else had cooked it, and he didn't feel like anybody else's food but Mary's. He didn't even feel like seeing anybody but Mary.
She felt the same way about him the next morning, when she managed to wake even before her restless baby, who hadn't slept through the night. Dressing in the plainest dress she could find, she walked across the hallway aimlessly, before a newspaper outside of a hotel room caught her eye, with the frankly invasive headline reading, "HIPPIES KILLED IN PROTEST".
Perfect, she thought sarcastically as she bent down to pick up the newspaper off her neighbour's breakfast tray. She read on, her brows furrowing with every dramatic and gruesome word. Just as she shivered at the young descriptions of the victims, a deep voice came from above, "Anything interested you in there?"
The voice was mundane as Mary instinctively jumped away, frightened at the man who simply bent down and picked up his breakfast tray. He was clearly a businessman, with the way he wore a suit at seven in the morning or the watch more expensive than Mary's entire closet he wore on his wrist.
"Sorry, the headline just caught my eye." Sheepishly, she handed the newspaper back to the man and had every intention to walk away, before the man tsked and made his own comment, "Those hippies, huh?"
"Pardon me?" The defensive, sure side of Mary jumped out before she could stop it. The man looked up then, carelessly looking her up and down, "Those hippies, I said. I don't understand them. Just a bunch of unwashed, misbehaving kids who are lazy and don't want to work."
"No," Mary interjected, with a bit of a laugh, "Well, perhaps! But they're unwashed kids with brains able to think for themselves, and are able to recognize how corrupt the system is and how unfair society is!"
The businessman blinked slowly, almost as if he had never heard her at all. Mary came to the conclusion that he didn't even want to hear her at all. An absent hand thoughtfully stroked his moustache before he separated the business section he was planning on reading from the article Mary was and handed the half to her, "I can see we never will agree. But here, take this. I don't care for the news anyhow." Mary smiled, somewhat appreciative, and turned around to tend to her baby. Though feeling as though she wanted to join society again, there were some people she was going to miss not having to deal with.
