When Britney Spears Comes on the Radio

an excerpt

We are always okay or we say we’re okay and for years we believe this is the same thing.

***

‘I know Cody,’ Mike says. He was one of the baseball players that had come into the bar an hour ago. When I saw him looking over at us, smiling, I smiled back; before long he’d made his way to our table. ‘He’s kind of like, a party guy, you know what I mean?’

‘I don’t really know what you mean,’ I say. We are on the patio, a view of twilight traffic on Tecumseh Road, the batting cages at the end of the parking lot. Nobody plays there anymore. The fence around gone wild with weedy vines; dandelions shine up through the fractured asphalt and for a moment, when the sunset hits our eyes, we can no longer see anything but gold light. Across the parking lot is an expensive furniture store that sells statues of glittery leopards, giant sequinned throw pillows, Italian sofas in teal leather. Next to that, an adult video store whose windows seem perpetually broken and covered in cardboard; the mannequins stand, peering out where the glass remains, listless in their lingerie unchanged since the 80s – high-cut satiny underwear and black lace bodysuits, crimpy wigs and purple eyeshadow.

‘I think you do,’ he says. ‘Come on. Why? How do you know Cody?’

We are wearing the best of our best, which in 2004 means the following: glitter body spray, white eyeshadow, halter tops, low-rise jeans and toe rings with our platform wedges. We get up to dance when Usher’s Yeah! plays at the bar and when Britney Spears comes on the radio we listen. We buy the gleaming supermarket magazines that exploit her pain, analyze her body in bikinis. There is always a doctor they interview, who can guess at her weight like you surmise the number of jellybeans inside a glass jar.