Machine Dreams

show.”
    “But the air show isn’t until afternoon,” Billy said, his hands in his pockets.
    “They don’t want kids out there. Reb said they’ve had break-ins at the hangar, and they’ve hired a guard till the festival’s over. You stay away from the airport.”
    Billy looked at the fire a moment, then turned and walked toward the house. Danner and Mitch were silent until he was out of earshot; then Mitch said quietly, “You put the bike away.”
    “Okay.”
    He fastened the grill to the barbecue, turning it with the tines of the fork. “How old will you be at the end of this summer, Miss? Fourteen?”
    Danner stood watching his heavy face through the curtain of heat. “Yes, fourteen.”
    “Don’t seem possible,” he said. “Pretty soon you’ll be fifty-three and won’t know where the time went.”
    “I guess so,” Danner said. She knew he was sorry about getting mad over the dress. She wished Jean had listened to her and taken it back.
    “Well.” He stuck the fork through the rings of the grill so it stayed fast, then bent to close the sack of charcoal. “Tell your mother it’ll be twenty minutes, and Gladys should bring the meat out now.”
    “I will. I’m just going to take the bike, and put my radio in my room.”

    She liked it as a box, as an object, so neat in its leather case with snaps. Brown leather like a woman’s purse, with perforations over the palm-sized speaker and cutouts for the volume and tuning buttons; a rectangular strap that folded one way to hug the body of the radio and another for use as a short handle. Without the case the radio was a simple plastic block, red and white, with the white grill in the front. Rather flat, a compact shape, it sat on a tabletop like any other meaningless thing, but the quick click of one tiny wheel (OFF-ON) made it more than itself.
Without a warning you broke my heart
, the sound actually shaking in her hand if she turned it up.
You took it, darling
, tinny, as though trapped in small space but vibrating and pounding. Every sigh, every inflection, echoed a haunting, a push that was sexual and desirous, a promise to
get a little lonely in the middle of the night.
The slow songs, the ones that whimpered and questioned, came across like secrets and confession, the whisper of conscience.
I don’t like you but I love you
, the seduction building to a surrender composed of simple facts:
you do me wrong now.
Noon hours at school, student council boys had played scratchy 45s on a record player, and girls jitterbugged on the basketball court. When a slow song crackled over the speakers and the lights dimmed, Danner had stood frozen in place, ashamed no one asked her to dance, terrified someone would. Now she listened to her transistor: the words were different in the privacy of summer; she didn’t have to wait to be chosen. She turned the radio over in her hand so the words were lost in her palm, or held it to her throat below her ear while it buzzed against her skin, almost alive. She could turn the sound off then and the lines came unbidden, heard in her head with their nuance and growl intact:
my love is strong now
. * She loved the songs especially at night; she wished it were night now, all the words drifting off like air. At night, sounds replaced the words, sounds rose and fell. In bed, she held her knees in her arms, dead man’s float, how it felt in water to sink and tilt while the dark came yawning up like liquid around the solid bed. Her room, solid, and the shelves in the wall with their stacked spaceslinear and deep. The shelves were filled with books and stacked games in cardboard boxes: Chutes and Ladders, Combat!, Candy-land. Below them the trunk dolls were snapped shut in their tumbled wardrobes;
shine on your love light (I wanna know).
Above and below lay cast-off stuffed animals and fan magazines. Mitch had designed the shelves and ordered them made at the local lumber store: they were walnut, stained dark to match the closet. Danner and Billy had watched their father tear a hole in the wall between their rooms; the hole was the size of a door and extended from floor to ceiling. Radabaugh and Pulaski from Mitch Concrete—Danner remembered them—had carried the ten-foot unit into the house: shelves on both sides, built just the thickness of the wall. The space was perfectly filled. Danner still sometimes pressed her ear to the back of the empty shelf near the floor and heard Billy walking in his room: creak of a chair