Decades Ch 04

"Your fondness for these floral patterns continues to elude me, Doug," Kelly said. Setting down her beer, she took yet another look down at the loud print dress she'd found herself in after playing "Stayin' Alive" on the jukebox. "Feels like acres of fabric here."

"Too much fabric beats too little, doesn't it?" Doug replied. "I feel like somebody must've poured me into these pants."

"But you sure look cute in them," Kelly said with a laugh, shamelessly admiring the taut bulge in his too-tight bellbottoms. "Aw, is that inspired by my dress?"

"That and what's probably under it," Doug whispered with a grin as he glanced around the mostly-empty interior of Bob's by the Bay. To his relief, there was still no one he recognized from three decades later in their own time, or from his two trips to the years and decades before.

"Oh,

that's

why you just had to give the seventies a visit!" Kelly teased. "The seventies porn-star bush, of course. I've got to hand it to you, Doug, that was a nice surprise to learn about you. It'd be so much more convenient if more guys still did like that look." Her own two prior trips had been enough to learn that even the most intimate of grooming styles were accounted for in their travels.

"You can't fool me, Kelly, you don't do anything just to please men," Doug said under his breath. "You shaved your bush because

you

liked the way it looked!"

"Of course I did," Kelly admitted. "But I have to admit, I'm getting to like the natural look now that I've tried it on for size." She smiled at him, enjoying the newfound lack of tension in their growing relationship, and they were both silent for a moment before bursting into laughter over the unlikely turn in the conversation. "Now, really, Doug," Kelly said when the moment had passed, "there must have been another reason to come to the disco era! If it were really just that, you could have chosen any decade before the nineties."

"Morbid curiosity about the clothes," Doug allowed. "I've always heard the seventies were a costume party, and I'm not disappointed in that."

"Come on," Kelly persisted. "Who are we here to save this time? Wait, I know, it's the gal your high school is named for, isn't it? What was her name?"

"Janice Payne," Doug confessed. "Yeah, you got my number."

"Nice idea," Kelly allowed. "Really, Doug, I'm impressed. That's noble of you. But you know, they always say it's 1977 when things started spreading. That's the year when they won't let men give blood if they've had sex with another man since then. So you know, we might already be a year late."

"Damn, hadn't thought of that," Doug said. "What should I have played on the jukebox?"

"For 1977? Some Fleetwood Mac probably would've done the trick," Kelly said. "But honestly, Doug, did you really think we could save this Janice gal? I don't suppose your school ever told you how she got it, did they?"

"Quite the contrary," Doug admitted. "The plaque in the hallway avoided that entirely, but you sure heard a lot of stories. You heard what Aunt Doro said about her, too." Feeling a bit of panic at what he might be implying, he turned to Kelly and added, "I mean, she did make it clear - and I agree - it wasn't a crime to be promiscuous. I'm no slut shamer!"

"I know you're not, Doug!" Kelly put a comforting arm around him.

"Wow, thanks," Doug said. "I don't mind admitting I'm surprised. In any case, it wasn't Janice that Aunt Doro was condemning, it was the school board or whoever was in charge of naming the school, for thinking it was good to pretend she hadn't been having lots of unsafe sex. How did they expect that to scare us into using condoms, if they wouldn't even say how she got AIDS?"

"But you said it did scare you into using condoms," Kelly reminded him.

"Of course it did," Doug said. "Whether she got it through dangerous sex or not, we all knew you

could

get it that way. But it couldn't have hurt that I knew at least part of the truth."

"And that you had two no-nonsense older women to give you the facts of life," Kelly added.

Doug laughed, but he also gazed down into his nearly-empty beer glass, and Kelly was quite sure she detected a sad tinge to the laugh.

After paying for their incredibly cheap beers, Doug suggested a diner across the street for dinner. "I remember Grandma and Aunt Doro taking me there on visits when I was a little kid," he explained. "It was a special treat, only if I'd been on my best behavior."

"Weren't you always well behaved anyway, Doug?" Kelly needled. "You and your evil Y chromosome in the otherwise all-female house?"

"Since I tended to get fingered whether I was guilty or not, not always," Doug recalled. "Why bother behaving if your sister is going to get away with framing you, after all?"

"Oh, Doug, I'm sorry."

"It's okay! You know why? Grandma and Aunt Doro figured it out early on, when I came to live with them and suddenly I was the perfect gentleman. They figured out then that it had been that way all along, and that my mom just couldn't see it."

"No doubt Aunt Doro will back you up on that now." Kelly couldn't help but have a glint of skepticism in her voice.

"I'm pretty sure she will, actually," Doug said. "She had my sister's number, and she'd known my mom all her life, after all."

Kelly slipped her arm through Doug's and gave it an affectionate squeeze as they crossed the street. Doug waited for the inevitable snippy comment, or for her to tear herself away when she realized they were getting close. To his surprise, it didn't happen.

"God, it's like a costume party where we're the only ones who know it!" Kelly exclaimed under her breath as they watched the waitress guide two men - one in a butterfly collar under a tan polyester jacket, the other in a green jumpsuit - to the booth next to theirs.

"Don't I know it," Doug agreed with a grin, admiring the women in their brightly colored pantsuits and full skirts out of the corner of his eye. "I wouldn't want to live like this all the time, but it sure is fun to visit."

"I guess I'd have to agree," Kelly admitted. They both knew this was where she'd have tossed in a judgmental comment in the past, now she reached across the table and clutched his hand. "You know, Doug, the more I think of it, I just don't think we know enough about her story to help. I know you might feel invincible after what you did for Mrs. Kittredge, but remember you couldn't stop her from smoking. And if we don't know anything about the guy Janice got it from, or when..."

"You're probably right," Doug admitted. "But we're here, and maybe we can learn a little more, and you never know."

Kelly wasn't convinced, but she was enjoying the scenery and ambiance of her parents' teenage years, and she resolved to make the best of it. "Fine," she said. "That's true. So tell me, this place, when you were a kid?"

"Well, it had been renovated at least once by then," Doug said. "It wasn't contemporary like this, it was restored to look like an early 20th century ice cream parlor, and the waitresses all wore these frilly white dresses..."

"No wonder you liked it then," Kelly replied with a grin. "But really, I meant

your

memories. I take it when you were still living with your mom and your sister, being on your best behavior was a pretty big deal?"

"Not so much here," Doug said. "Remember, Grandma was Mom's mother, so if Mom was unreasonable, she'd get called on it. For once. My sister tended to follow her lead, too. So all I had to do was mind my own business and I'd be treated like a hero. God, that sounds manipulative, doesn't it? But living with those two, you had to be a little manipulative, I guess. Anyway, coming here for dinner...I remember my favorite was the fish and chips, and my favorite booth was over there behind you where the condiment stand is now..." His voice trailed away and he felt tears welling up, but to his pleasant surprise he wasn't ashamed to let Kelly see him that way.

"Doug?" Kelly squeezed his hand again.

"Grandma," he said. "She saved me from becoming the worst sort of misogynist pig - growing up with my mom and my sister, that could have happened so easily! I miss her, is all."

"I'm sorry I made you come here, if it's that..." Kelly said gently.

Doug shook his head. "It was my idea. And I'm grateful, really, although I wish you could have seen it in my own time. You didn't miss by much, it just closed down when I was about halfway through Columbia. Three years, maybe? That was another reason why I vowed never to come back here, and now look at me..."

"Doug! If you hadn't come back, we never would have met! And what about the jukebox?!"

"Sorry! You're right." Doug smiled again and clutched his other hand over hers. "I guess there are some ghosts of my own past I still need to cope with, as much as the ghosts of Pascatawa."

The waitress - Doug was nearly certain she was his high school buddy Jimmy's mother - arrived before Doug's soul-baring could get any more maudlin, and their attention turned to lunch. Kelly decided to give his old favorite fish and chips a try, while Doug opted for a meatloaf sandwich. "Say," Doug said to her once she'd taken their orders, "Do you know a gal named Janice Payne, by any chance?"

"Who doesn't know Jan?" the waitress asked. "Never knew anyone to use her full name like that, though, except a couple of our teachers back in high school." Lowering her voice a bit, she leaned down and almost whispered to Doug, "That's her at the far end of the counter. Are you that guy she's waiting for?"

"Huh?" Doug dared not look just yet, but he could scarcely believe his luck. "No! No, thanks. I'm just a family friend. Haven't seen her since we were kids, so I probably wouldn't recognize her now."

"I don't know about that," the waitress told him. "She's the same mousy little thing she was then, really."

"What?!" Doug couldn't hide his surprise. "Didn't you say everyone knows her?"

"We all do! As a mousy little thing who thinks she's Farrah Fawcett, as long as I can remember her. Pathetic, really. Ain't nothing wrong with being a shy little bookworm, but why pretend you're not, you know? She always had such an attitude about guys, and the way she flaunted what she didn't even have..."

"Wow." Doug was perplexed and so, recalling all she had heard to date, was Kelly.

"Anyway, if you want to go say hello, you've probably got all afternoon. She always comes here to meet her latest knight in shining armor and they're usually hours late. I don't think they even tell her when they'll roll into town, she just comes here so her mother won't know. Her mom's a real Nazi, always telling her 'good girls don't' and all that baloney."

"Thanks," Doug said. "Maybe later."

"Didn't your Aunt Doro say she was really wild?" Kelly asked as soon as they were alone again.

"Yeah, and so did everyone else I ever met who knew her," Doug said. "But I've got to admit, I don't recall anyone ever quite saying she

looked

the part. Maybe I was just imagining that part."

"I'm just as guilty of that as you are, I guess," Kelly admitted. By then they had both taken a subtle, passing look at the unassuming young woman with bobbed hair in plaid pants and thick glasses, who was absentmindedly stirring a chocolate milkshake with her nose buried in a book whose cover they couldn't make out. She couldn't have looked less the part than Kelly had imagined, and all at once Kelly felt horribly guilty for engaging in the same sort of assuming she was always hassling Doug about. "Maybe it really was a blood transfusion?"

"Now who's being sexist?" Doug couldn't resist asking.

"Both of us, I think."

"Yeah, me too I guess," Doug said. "Until now anyway. At least now we know where to find her."

"I could've sworn, though - "

"Oh my God!" Kelly cut him off. "Doug, don't turn around!"

"What?" Doug remembered to act surprised and concerned.

"It's...Yeah, it is. It's Aunt Doro!"

"Oh, no, is it that day?"

"What day?" Kelly asked.

"Well..." Doug pulled out his wallet as an excuse to shift in his seat, and darted his eyes at the table in the center of the room where Kelly had been trying and failing not to look. Sure enough, there was Aunt Doro, thirty years younger than she'd been that morning and still with some dark hair mixed with the grays that she had divided into two neat plaits, dressed in green slacks and a floral top that was even more garish than Kelly's dress. She looked just as Doug had always imagined her when caught between his mother and grandmother in one of their battles, keeping a poker face and doing her best to pretend she wasn't there. Doug tried his best not to let his eyes stray to the other side of the table, but he couldn't quite avoid seeing his twenty-one year old future mom just as she had always looked in the pictures he'd seen of those days. Younger, but with the same perpetually pissed-off expression that he had always known as her resting face. Last but not least, his heart caught in his throat as he saw his beloved grandmother settling herself next to his mom, trying to keep her cool.

"Yeah, it must be that day," Doug said, turning back to Kelly. "I mean, I wasn't there, obviously, but the way all three of them talked about it years later when I was around, it's got to be."

"What day, Doug?"

"I know it happened here, Mom even used to accuse me of always wanting to eat here only because it hurt her with the memory, and she accused Grandma of always saying yes when I asked for the same reason. You know, like we all had it in for her."

"Doug, what day?!" Kelly didn't want to spoil the agreeable rapport they had managed to sustain all trip, but she was getting annoyed now.

"Sorry!" Doug blinked his eyes hard. "I should've told you we might run into this, but I never imagined we'd land on the exact day." He took a deep breath. "When my mom was twenty-one - that is, now - she came home from college for the summer and announced she wasn't going back. She'd met a guy who was going off to Alaska to work on an oil-rig and she wanted to go off with him and live off the land. I guess they spent the whole summer fighting like cats and dogs about the whole thing, how she only had one year left and if she just had to waste her education, at least finish it first, but that only made her all the more determined to do it."

"After growing up with two teachers for mothers?" Kelly said.

"Grandma and Aunt Doro always said that was probably just why she did it. Something about feeling inadequate next to them when it came to book learning. Anyway, in the end, she did do it: she ran off one night, while Grandma and Aunt Doro were spending the night elsewhere. They didn't see her for a couple of years after that."

"Was the guy your father?"

Doug shook his head as his mouth was full of ice water. After he'd swallowed, he explained, "He didn't come along until after Mom had gone back to college. No, this guy took her as far as somewhere in Canada - Calgary, I think - and he lost all their money in a poker game or something and asked her to get them some more money by, you know, the world's oldest profession."

"Oh my God!"

"Hey, I don't know if it really happened that way or if that's just what Mom wanted Grandma to think once she'd gotten back. In any case, she always said she refused to do it and she left the guy then and there. She hitched a ride back south - you didn't need a passport in those days - and got a job as a waitress at some dive in Montana to earn bus fare home. But she ended up staying there for a while. She always said she liked the mountains and she was too embarrassed to come back."

"Wow," Kelly said. "But what's that got to do with this place?"

"Oh, shit, that reminds me!" Doug said. "Be quiet a second."

As they both listened, Doug's future family's argument stood out easily above the other parties' banter. While they couldn't hear all the details, both Doug and Kelly could tell the argument was over his mother's plans to drop out. "We didn't raise you to be a loser, Donna!" Aunt Doro admonished at one point in an especially stinging tone that resonated throughout the restaurant.

"You didn't raise me, period!" Doug's mother retorted. "You're not my mom."

"She's as much your mother as I am!" Grandma snapped. "And how dare you say that in public? Act your age!"

Doug dared another look around just in time to see the waitress - the same one who had pointed out Janice Payne to him - venture gingerly up to their table. "Ladies, can I start you off with a beverage?" she said in a very wary tone.

"Oh no!" Doug grunted under his breath, and he jumped up.

"I'll have a beer," his mother declared.

"The hell you will, Donna," Grandma was saying just as Doug arrived at the waitress' side.

"I'm twenty-one! I'll drink what I want!"

"Excuse me..." Doug began.

Aunt Doro looked up at him - Kelly was certain she saw a knowing glint in her eye as she watched the scene from the safety of their booth - but the waitress pulled Doug away before he could interfere any further. "Hey, look," she said, pushing him gently but firmly back toward their booth "You do not want to get in the middle of this."

"You don't understand!" Doug protested, trying in vain to step around her.

"Oh, yes I do!" she said. "Those teachers I mentioned before when you were asking about Jan? Those are them, and the girl is their daughter, or Mrs. Collison's daughter at least. They're lovely people but they've had a lot of family problems, and stuff like this happens all the time in public. They're famous for it, I'm afraid. You do not want to get mixed up in it!"

"But-" Doug began, and then saw at once that it was too late anyway. In the scuffle, he had missed seeing his mother throw her glass of ice water in her mother's face. But he could see that it had definitely happened, for Grandma was now soaked and glaring at her daughter, who stood up and gripped at the table with both hands. Doug did not miss the moment when, as the entire restaurant looked on, Donna flipped the table over in both her mothers' laps. As three guys from the next table jumped up to set the table right and see if Grandma and Aunt Doro were all right, Donna stormed out of the restaurant.

"See?" the waitress asked. "You did not want to get mixed up with that."

"If only you knew," Doug said, near tears as he sat back down.

"Don't let it upset you," she told him. "Just be glad it's not your family!"

Doug's dejection turned to morbid amusement, and he burst into laughter.

"Listen," the waitress said, "Your lunch is almost ready. Let me get you a couple of milkshakes, on the house, to make up for that. What's your favorite flavor of ice cream?"

"Doug," Kelly said gently as they munched on their lunch a few minutes later, when the drama was over and Aunt Doro was apologizing to the staff, Grandma having taken off after Donna. "We didn't really come here to save Janice Payne, did we?"

"I figured we could try while we were here," Doug said.

"But you really wanted to come here to stop your mother running off, didn't you?"

"I didn't know today was the exact day that happened," he protested. "I couldn't have known that."

"What does it matter that it was today?" Kelly asked. "She didn't run off from here, did she?"

"Tonight's the night she does," Doug explained. "I've heard it a hundred times from all three of them. Grandma was so upset after this blowup that she and Aunt Doro decided they just had to have a night away from Mom, so they ordered Mom to stay home for the night or else, and got a room at a B-and-B down the beach. When they got home the next day, she was gone."

"Did they really expect your mother to stay home just because they told her to when they weren't there?"

"You're obviously not from a small town, Kelly. If she went out when they'd told her not to, it would have gotten back to them. You've got to remember, everyone in town knew and loved Grandma and Aunt Doro."