Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss by Frances Stroh Page A

building. We threw open the door and raced through to the street.
    We stood panting next to the car.
    “Let’s have a beer,” said Hobey.
    M y father was cutting the lawn when I arrived home, and both my parents’ cars were parked in the driveway. I could see the flashing screen of the TV through the library window. Being around my parents while on acid was an experience I generally tried to avoid, but everyone had bailed early, saying they needed to get home for dinner. Only then had I even remembered it was Tuesday. We had skipped school.
    I entered the house through the side door, went up the back stairs, and slipped into my brother’s bathroom, where I knew no one would find me. The mirror caught my reflection; my eyes were all pupils, lashes grotesquely long. My skin looked orangey red. My geometrical bob was knotted from the wind, except where the hairspray had secured it. Hobeycalled that sprayed bob my Darth Vader helmet. I laughed out loud at the absurdity of this.
    My skin was moving, pulsing uncontrollably, like the walls, the tiled floor, the grain of the beige carpet in the hallway. Atoms, constantly moving.
    I sat on the toilet to steady myself, the wall cool against my neck as I leaned back. The smell of freshly cut grass floated up from the garden through the open window, the sound of the mower as familiar as my mother’s voice. I was home, safe in Grosse Pointe, the wasteland of Detroit some infinite distance away. Our neighbors, the Fruehaufs, were readying their pool for the summer, while the high school tennis team at Liggett was vigorously hitting balls, their courts just on the other side of the fence from us.
    I knew I would go downstairs soon. I would act normal, as if I’d been at Hobey’s house since school had gotten out, listening to his band practice in the basement. I would plant myself in front of the TV, find a movie on HBO, and wait for my mother to announce that dinner was ready.
    But then I heard another familiar sound: my father’s voice. He was shouting over the lawnmower, probably at Whitney. Tuesday, I reminded myself again. My father would have been “at work,” meaning he’d been drinking all afternoon downtown near his office, putting me in grave danger of having a bad trip if I saw him.
    I went down the back stairs and out of the house, and climbed into the front seat of the Ford station wagon. As I turned the key in the ignition, I could still hear my father’s infuriated voice coming from the flagstone path that led to the terrace and lawn.
    O ut on the road I picked up speed. To the right was the country club golf course, a blinding streak of neon green. On the left were storybook estates—replicas of English manor houses, their sweeping lawns studded by towering trees. Twice as tall as the houses, their branches swayed like dancers’ arms to an internal rhythm I couldn’t hear, beckoning me. It was the waning acid talking, I knew, because the houses had invisible force fields keeping me at bay. In all their perfection, the homes looked as lifeless as the Uniroyal outbuildings, only the gardeners visible, in glimpses, to let you know any of it was even remotely real. Our house, a big brick Colonial we’d moved into when I was nine, was matchbox in comparison, if a good deal more inviting.
    I passed the Williamses’ house with the antique-car collection in their twelve-car garage and, with my one-handed steering wheel grip, stubbing out my cigarette in the ashtray, took the curve past Buhl Ford’s house. It seemed every house on Provencal Road had a family just like mine: at least one fanatical, uptight parent, with a host of wayward, rebellious youth. Often enough one of these kids wrapped a sports car around a tree on the golf course, the tire marks on the putting green a haunting reminder in the weeks that followed.
    All the kids on the street, except me, either went to Liggett—the private school right by our house, where I’d gone for grade school and