We’d been dating for a year and living together for two months when I first met Leif’s brother, Erik. Though they had been close as kids, their relationship was strained that year because, at the age of seventeen, Erik had run away from their parents’ house and revealed to Leif that he was gay. Leif had called Erik and asked if they could meet to talk. Erik proposed some seedy bar in Walker’s Point, and Leif said he didn’t want to go alone. I suspected he was using me as a buffer. I wanted a buffer too (though for what, exactly, I wasn’t sure), so I asked Dee to come along. I was relieved when she said Frank was busy.
Leif wasn’t particularly thrilled about Dee coming along, and though he acted like he didn’t care, he told us he had no intention of spending the night babysitting. Dee narrowed her eyes at Leif from the backseat of his car, where she’d pulled her knees tight to her chest. Her shoes were on the seat, which Leif hated, but about which he said nothing.
“Okay, honey,” she said. “We’ll see who needs babysitting at the end of the night.”
Erik was waiting for us outside the bar in Walker’s Point. The highway overpasses bisected Milwaukee in odd ways, cutting off entire neighborhoods from one another. Walker’s Point, for example, was hemmed in by the highway and the confluence of the Menomonee River, the Milwaukee River, and the Kinnickinnic River. This part of the city once was home to heavy industry, but at that time it was full of empty warehouses with their glass windows punched in. Since the sixties, Second Street in particular had become known for its gay bars. Some of the old warehouses were converted into clubs, but others had been torn down, leaving large empty lots full of gravel. The streets were poorly lit except for flashing Schlitz signs and the flickering neon signs for the clubs: La Cage, Club 219, M&M Club. Beautiful boys loitered outside bars they were too young to enter, and groups of men shared cigs on the curbs and blew kisses at honking cars as they passed. The smell of cheap weed hung thickly in the summer air. A boy, a child almost, was trying hard to talk to Erik, who was laughing and shooing the boy away.
“You good?” Leif asked his brother when we got close.
“I’m good,” Erik said. “Go on,” he told the boy, who huffed at us, hunched his shoulders, and walked to the bar across the street. “In your dreams!” Erik shouted to the boy’s back.
“Your loss,” the boy shouted over his shoulder.
Erik laughed and drew me into a tight hug. When he pulled away, he held my shoulders, keeping me at arm’s length as he inspected. “Hello, gorgeous,” he said.
I blushed hard, and I felt the heat of it when I put my hands up to my cheeks
“This is my sister, Dee,” I told Erik. He took up her hand. I’d never seen two people love each other faster. Their gestures, almost instantly, became imbued with the confidence that they should and would love each other absolutely. I was initially a little jealous of their quick bond, and afraid that it diluted my own lifelong bond with Dee. But what they had was too true to resent. Their friendship made me believe that probably, in another life, they had been friends then too, and that maybe (God, how I hoped later that this would be true) they would find each other again in other lives they might lead in the future.
“I love you,” Erik said to her as if saying something much more banal, like Nice to meet you.
Dee laughed and squeezed his hand. “Okay,” she said. She threw her hands up. “I love you too.”
Leif grunted and hugged his brother. He seemed uncomfortable with all the impromptu professions of love.
“I’m glad you made it,” Erik said.
“Yeah, we’ll see,” Leif said.
Inside, there were only two other women, and they were both behind the bar. I felt awkward and anxious until Erik bought us a round of drinks and found a booth for us near a stage at the back of the bar. It was a small place with a lot of heart and a lot of grunge; there were sticky vinyl booths lining the walls, a tiled dance floor in the center, a DJ booth, and a jukebox. It was obvious to me that many drinks had been spilled here. Dancing was a priority. There were fishbowls full of brightly colored condoms on the bar. A fishbowl was also something you could order to drink. The crown jewel of this particular bar was a large horned devil bust that occasionally blew smoke from its nostrils onto the dance floor. This, plus the cigarettes, turned the air thick and cloudy.
“Things should start up soon,” Erik said.
I sipped my PBR; how was it already warm?
Whitney Houston filled the lulls in our conversation, and there were many of them.
“You good?” Leif asked his brother again when we were seated. Leif was shaking his knees like he was on speed. He might have been on speed. I put my hand on his thigh, but he just squeezed it and then nudged it off. He wasn’t the kind of man who liked to hold hands in public.
“I’m good,” Erik said. “Sick of my job already, but c’est la vie.”
Erik had gotten a job as an usher at Uihlein Hall downtown; he said he was mostly in it for the free shows. We didn’t ask where he was living.
“I hear you there,” Leif said. “Ambrosia’s a shit hole.”
“You still doing third shift?”
Leif nodded and sipped his beer.
“Amen,” Erik said. He raised his glass.
“Makes me want to go back to school, you know?” Leif said.
Erik shook his head and tousled my curls. “School’s for fools. What about you, beautiful?” he asked me.
“Just living the dream,” I said.
And wasn’t I? Leif and I had moved in together. School was almost out for the summer, and I’d taken a job at the Milwaukee Public Library erasing patrons’ annotations from the library books. It was easy, mindless work, and I loved reading the sentences that had compelled a borrower to underline, or to add exclamation marks, or to write their own personal grief into the texts. All is lost. Yes! Humanity is doomed. Unbelievable . . . No! Help . . . And there was something satisfying about erasing all of it. Leif slept late into the day, and we spent lazy afternoons drinking pots of coffee and writing and making love and walking around the city aimlessly until our feet hurt. I felt my life peaking.
Erik shook his head at me like he knew. “Poets dating poets,” he said. “I can’t wait to see how this one ends.”
I think I blushed again; I’d had the same thought when Leif and I had started dating.
“How about you, love?” Erik asked Dee. “What do you do?”
“Dee’s a—” I said. She elbowed me in the ribs.
“Wait,” Erik said. “Let me guess . . . you’re a painter.”
We all looked at him, surprised, and he grinned. He leaned across the booth and touched the side of Dee’s neck gently, like he’d done it many times before, where there was a swatch of mint green paint dried on her skin. We all laughed. Erik did a fake flourish of a bow.
“I’d love to see your work,” Erik said.
“I’m hardly a painter,” Dee said. We had been raised to be humble. Even to consider oneself an artist, to our mother, was a kind of embarrassment. That was one reason why, as a young woman, I claimed the title of poet so adamantly and perhaps so prematurely. I wanted to defy that humility.
“She’s really talented,” I said. Dee shook her head, blushing a little.
“I also dabble,” Erik admitted.
“You do not,” Leif said. He laughed at his brother.
Erik frowned at him. “What do you know about me?” he said. He punched Leif in the arm. “You don’t know shit.”
“I’d love to see your work too,” Dee interjected, probably sensing a bad shift in the conversation.
“You’re an angel,” he said. I didn’t disagree.
The lights dimmed, and the devil blew smoke from its nose. Leif looked around. “Seems empty,” he said.
Erik pulled out a copy of a newspaper I’d never seen before called The Wisconsin Light and threw it down on the table. He tapped his finger on the headline: “Slew of Disappearances in Walker’s Point Leaves Community Concerned, Police Apathetic.” He leaned in toward the center of the table and motioned for us to do the same. “People are disappearing. Ask anybody around here.”
Leif snapped to attention; his recent poems were very much interested in conspiracy theories. He’d affected a constant air of paranoia. Although maybe he had always been that way. (When we’d moved in together, he’d wanted to buy a gun. That was our first argument in the apartment. I lost.)
“See that board?” Erik pointed at a corkboard near the entrance of the bar. “Those are all men who’ve gone missing recently.” There were about fifteen faces on the board, each with a list of identity stats: height, weight, eye and hair color, tattoos.
“But the police know about it?” Dee asked.
Erik snorted. “They say we’re a ‘transient’ group of people; we come and go so often that it’s hard to tell the difference between someone who’s gone missing and someone who’s left town. They said there’s no law against picking up and starting a new life somewhere else.”
Leif frowned. “Mom and Dad think you’re missing,” he said.
“Already with that?” Erik looked at an invisible watch on his wrist. “It’s so early,” he whined.
“I’ll get the next round of drinks,” I said.
I went to the bar, put our order in, and then went to look at the pictures on the board. Some of the men were very young, under twenty, maybe; many of them were Black men.
“You missing someone, baby?” the bartender called to me. I turned back to her. She had set our beers in a line at the edge of the bar.
I shook my head. “I was just looking,” I told her. I collected the sweating glasses.
She eyed me and ran her hands through her heavily moussed hair. “Some of those boys . . . those men. You know, they were sick, or are sick. But a lot of times they won’t ask for help, you know, when they need it.”
This felt like an invitation to a longer conversation I didn’t want to have. Instead, I only nodded, tipped her generously, and carried the drinks back to the booth.
“You get lost?” Leif asked me. Erik punched him again.
Onstage, a drag queen in a platinum-blond wig and a red sequined dress was singing. This was a ruse, because soon the song faded into a dance number during which the dancer began to tear off layer after layer of panty hose. This pleased the crowd.
“Dragstrip,” Erik yelled at us over the crowd. “You gotta strip from girl to boy.”
At the end of the performance, there were at least ten pairs of panty hose littered across the stage, and a man danced in a tiny pair of underwear. The crowd cheered. There were probably six or seven different numbers and at least that many rounds of drinks. At one point, Erik took me and Dee backstage, and he put a thick layer of makeup on us. He glued fake eyelashes on top of my real ones, and when I blinked, I felt like a doe. I felt like Dee. I thought maybe we were the same person; maybe we could blend into one, more superior woman. Dee’s eyelashes were so long they fluttered against my face when she kissed me. But when I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t look like anyone I knew. And Leif agreed. When he saw me, he spewed beer across the booth. “Jesus, Peg, if I go home with you looking like that, we’ll both get arrested.”
“Oh, stop,” Erik said. “She looks gorgeous.”
I pursed my lips at Leif. He cupped my face and then withdrew his hand, which was now sticky with foundation and blush.
“Yuck,” he said. He wiped the makeup on the booth. He was flushed, ruddy from his eight beers, and sweating.
Erik got onstage then. He was three sheets to the wind for sure, but who wasn’t? His lips were too close the mike, so there was a lot of feedback. Mostly, people kept dancing.
“I just want to say I’m so happy my big brother is here tonight.” Clapping, cooing, aw-ing. “And his beautiful girlfriend. And Dee, my soul mate. I love you all so much. And Leif? I just want you to know I’m so proud of you, man. So proud. Yeah. You’re following your dreams. I couldn’t be prouder. Guys, my brother’s a poet. And he’s really talented. Leif, would you read us some poems?” I got embarrassed for Leif, because I knew he was just drunk enough to agree. The setting wasn’t right, though, which was putting it mildly. A small chorus started up. Erik and his friends chanted, Poems, poems, poems. The music was still loud, and some people were patiently ignoring Erik. Leif staggered to his feet. I put my head in my heads. Onstage, Leif dug his hands deep into his pockets and pulled out a wad of papers. It was just like him to have a bunch of poems on his body at all times. He said he liked to keep poems in his pockets while he worked at the chocolate factory because they helped him remember he was human. He was swaying, but it wasn’t to the music. Someone turned the music down a notch, and there was some grumbling, but those who wanted to keep dancing did. I suspected everyone was listening at least halfway.
Leif chose to read a poem about my pussy. Although he’d be mad if he knew I said that. There were other aspects to the poem, it’s true, but none so prominent as my pussy. It was a long poem. No one booed or threw anything, but someone turned the music up incrementally, and people began talking quietly over him. The devil blew more smoke from its nose. The clouds of smoke wound around the dancers’ legs and hid their feet. The men were floating. My face was as red as a tomato; I could feel the color. Dee laughed and laughed. I wanted to live and die inside her laugh. I stumbled to the bar and ordered a tequila shot; the bartender looked ready to refuse me. A man approached me while I was buzzing from the tequila and licking lime and salt from the corners of my mouth.
“You’ve got a really nice ass,” he said to me. “Like perfect.” I swayed. The bartender rolled her eyes. I suppose in any other context, I would have been irate. Maybe I was too drunk, or maybe I felt it was more honest or less loaded, because it was coming from a gay man. Was it?
“Thanks,” I said. I leaned in to see him better. He had very long eyelashes; they reminded me of Dee. I put my face next to his, and he didn’t pull away. I brushed his nose with my own, back and forth, and it tickled, and I waited for him to blink, to feel the brush of those lashes against my own, but before he did, I felt a hand on my arm. Leif.
“What the hell’s this?” Leif asked.
The man eyed Leif, up and down, up and down; he grinned a toothy grin. “Your girlfriend’s got a really nice ass,” he said. He craned his neck over Leif’s shoulder. “So do you.”
“I know,” Leif said. I swayed. “I mean, I know about her.”
The bartender had her hand on the phone.
“What’s it to you, anyway?” Leif asked.
“Just making sure she knows,” the man said.
“She knows,” Leif said.
The man turned to me. “Now you know,” he said.
“I knew,” I said.
And then I threw up into one of the fishbowls full of condoms.
Leif and Erik sat me down in one of the booths, and I tried to get less dizzy. The more I thought about it, the dizzier I got. Everywhere I looked, the smoke swirled. Dee plopped down beside me and put a cool, damp piece of paper towel on my forehead.
“I knew I’d be the babysitter,” she said.
I stuck my tongue out at her, and my stomach somersaulted. “Don’t,” I said. “Please.” She shrugged.
Around us, there were men dancing, and men in dresses parading on the stage, and men with their hands deep into other men’s pants. In the booth next to ours, Leif and Erik were having a conversation that sounded like the chorus of a song; they kept saying the same thing over and over.
“I’ve missed Mom,” Erik was saying. “It’s not that. It’s not that.”
“Well, she’s worried. Real worried. I think you oughta see both of them, and I think you oughta explain yourself.”
“Explain myself? They won’t understand. You know that.”
“You told me.”
“Yeah. Do you understand?” Erik’s voice wavered like, even drunk, he was afraid to ask. I imagined a man on a tightrope strung between skyscrapers. Leif said nothing for a long time. I was dizzy, spinning circles in a big green field with my eyes closed.
“No,” he admitted.
The circles stopped. The lights came on. I blinked into the fluorescence. A bar with the lights on is a real sobering sight: the grime, the garbage, the pallid faces, the melting makeup, the sweat on the backs of necks, the stains from decades or more of vomit. Piles of sheer panty hose lay coiled on the stage like soft slippery skin just shed. Bar close. Dee helped me up from the booth and let me wobble into her. I wasn’t the only wobbler. Erik and Leif clung to each other, and the weight each put on the other’s body seemed to destabilize them both. They looked like little boys running a three-legged sack race. The bartender ushered us out; Erik kissed the one I had spoken to earlier in the night. She, like many other people, it seemed, was smitten with him.
When we emerged outside, I wished we hadn’t. Two squad cars had their high-powered spotlights on, and they shone harshly into our eyes. Some of the men cried out and shielded their eyes with jackets or shirts. A hot flash of pain lit up my brain and I threw up on the sidewalk. The cops were shouting at us from their megaphones: Hickory dickory dock, some young blond is sucking my cock. You’re all sick fucking faggots! This inspired laughter from some other men who were leaving an old blue-collar Polish bar at the same time. Down the block, some of these men started throwing small stones and bits of garbage at our backs as we filed away from the bar. The cops kept their lights on our faces. Easy targets. Erik ran down the street and shoved one of these men, who then swung hard at Erik but missed, probably because he was drunk but also because he was out of shape. Leif ran over, and before I could stop her, Dee followed. Where had she gotten this astonishing store of courage? Erik saw Dee charging after Leif. One of her sandals fell off, but she paid no mind. Erik grinned at her. The men noticed Dee too and seemed, momentarily, to lose focus. Leif took the opportunity. He punched the guy who had tried to hit Erik. The whole group mobbed Leif then, and a few more men from the club started to run over to help, so the cops got out of their car and started prodding the groups apart with their billy clubs. Who wants to sober up in holding? Move it! The energy in the air seemed to fizzle. There was some half-hearted spitting. The cops jangled handcuffs at the men who wouldn’t quit, ushering them apart. The sound of old engines turning over and over. Wheels on gravel. For my part, the more I tried to see, the less I could make out; the storefronts began to blur into the streetlamps.
Dee and I sat down on the curb. She combed my hair with her fingers. I shivered, blinked into the loudness of the night, and panicked.
“I can’t see anything,” I told her. “I think I’m blind.”
“You’re perfectly fine,” Dee said. “Look at me.”
She took my face between her hands and pulled my eyes wide like she knew what she was looking for: obvious signs of blindness. Then she gently closed each eye and kissed both eyelids. I imagined her lipstick leaving rose-colored stains. I leaned in to her for a second.
“Everything’s all there,” she said.
“Thanks, Doc.” I shoved her away.
Leif and Erik came to sit down next to us. Leif lit a cigarette that we all shared. Dee coughed her way through it, and we teased her. She was a sport about it. She always was. The crowds were thinning out. Leif once told me he’d loved to carry Erik around as a baby. Leif was eleven when they brought Erik home from the hospital. He toted Erik all around the house, supporting his soft head the way his ma had shown him, and he gave his baby brother the grand tour of their little apartment. Here’s the fish tank; when you’re old enough to pinch, you can feed them. Here’s the kitchen; when you’re old enough to chew, you can eat Cocoa Pebbles. Here’s the living room; when you’re old enough to crawl, you can wrestle me.
Erik’s nose was bloodied. “Sorry,” he said to us. “That’s never happened before.”
I suspected that wasn’t true. I put my hand on his knee. “I’m still glad we came,” I said to him. I hoped Leif would say something that would support this sentiment.
“I wish,” Leif started. He swallowed two times. “I wish you were different.”
Erik put his head between his knees. Dee rubbed the back of his neck.
Sometimes I wished Dee had been different too. She was twelve when she began to grow tiny budlike breasts. She itched them mindlessly when it was just the two of us. My own breasts had come in at thirteen, and by fourteen, they were already about as large as they’d ever get—the girls at school called me a washboard. Dee’s breasts outgrew mine quickly, and this, among other things, was part of the reason people always thought she was older. She also had an air of confidence about her, which, later, older men would like. When I tried to adopt this affect, it seemed to scare them away. Apparently, it was sexy on her.
Once we were waiting for Peter to pick us up from the local pool. We had towels wrapped around our waists, and we were sitting on top of a picnic table with our feet dangling on the bench. I stretched out long on the wood and let the sun warm my stomach. Dee tried to tickle my ribs, but I shoved her hand away. There was a group of boys riding their bikes in circles around the parking lot. It was obvious to me, even from minimal observation, that they were working themselves up to do something stupid. At the time, I figured it was some dumb trick on their bikes that would land at least one of them in the hospital. But when they pulled their bikes up to our picnic table, I knew immediately what they wanted. I had a hard time deciding what age they were—fifteen, maybe sixteen, definitely older than we were. The leader of the group was jostled forward by the others, and he dramatically wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
“Hey,” he said stupidly.
I said nothing, and tried to look everywhere except at the boys, but Dee stuck her neck out as if to say, Go on . . . Where had she learned these postures?
“Oh,” he said. “I just wanted to say I like your boobs.”
Dee rolled her eyes. The boys behind him hooted and whistled. I could tell by his reddening face that he had not executed the original plan. Dee had scared him—caused him to veer from his original course. She turned her head slightly toward me and started twirling my wet hair between her fingers. I shivered. The boys retreated like a losing army. It was as if she did not believe men could hurt her, or maybe she just acted that way. Somehow she made men feel like she was always out of reach, as if she contained many secret parts of herself that no one could control.