Blue Plate Special (12 page)

When I finished my route and all my baskets were empty, I rode through the bright morning sunlight and the churchgoing traffic over to the McDonald’s on West Bethany Home Road, which was already open, and got myself a chocolate shake. I drank it on my bike as I rode home.

Years later, my mother told me that on a few Sundays, at the beginning of the school year, when I first started my route, she got up at 4:30 along with me, silently, so I wouldn’t know, to make sure I was safe. She got on her own bike right
after I left the house and followed me to the station. Then she waited, hidden from my sight, while I put the papers together and loaded up my bike, and followed at a distance while I wove my way through the wide, sleeping Phoenix streets. I never had any idea she was there.

Every Sunday morning, after my paper route, Susan and I rode our bikes to the Victory Baptist Church on North Twenty-third Avenue. My friend Jennifer Dominguez and her family attended services there every Sunday, and we had wicked crushes on Jennifer’s older and younger brothers, Kevin and Todd. Kevin was in eighth grade, a year ahead of Jennifer and me. He was a dreamy combination of gentle and handsome, with a peachy, freckled face; doelike brown eyes; curly brown hair; and an athletic build. He was dating a girl named Hope, a tall, willowy blonde his own age, but I coveted him from afar. I thought he was perfect. Susan felt the same way about Todd, who could have been Kevin’s younger clone.

When I got back from my paper route, we dolled ourselves up in skirts and blouses while listening to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 countdown on KUPD. It was 1974, so that meant Olivia Newton-John, Chicago, War, Anne Murray, the O’Jays, Paul McCartney and Wings, Elton John, Cat Stevens, and Helen Reddy. My favorite song in those days was “Top of the World” by the Carpenters. (Sometimes, I called the KUPD deejay to request it and tried to keep him on the line by flirting with him.) “Everything I want the world to be,” Susan and I sang in our chirpy girlish voices, “is now comin’ true, especially for me.…”

In church, we sat primly during Brother Gil’s sermon, bowing our heads like good Christians when it was time to pray, then singing earnestly from the hymnals, as we ogled the objects of our desire under our lashes, “Are you washed in the blood, in the soul-cleansing blood of the lamb?”

All my life, I had believed in glorious passion and swooning romance, but my fantasies had been pure and chaste. I’d imagined getting married to my true love and holding my husband’s hand, but nothing beyond that. Now, for the first time, my feelings were carnal and direct. I gazed at Kevin’s lips, fixated on his forearms. During the entire sermon, while Brother Gil intoned in his preacherly way about righteousness and sin, I daydreamed about making out with Kevin Dominguez.

When the service was over, the Dominguez family always went straight home, much to my disappointment. But it meant that Susan and I always made it back to our house in time for pancakes, our Sunday family breakfast. We all took turns making them, according to the roster of chores, from the
Joy of Cooking
recipe, which involved beaten egg whites. They were crisp and thick and fluffy and addictive. I smothered them in margarine and Aunt Jemima’s and generally ate so many I was nearly comatose for the rest of the day—my record was twenty-seven at one sitting.

Brother Gil, the church’s pastor, took Susan’s and my regular attendance at his church very seriously, and so it came to pass that he showed up at our house one day and sat in our living room and asked our mother if Susan and I could be “saved,” which meant having to go up to the front of the church to get our heads dunked in water while everyone—including Kevin and Todd—watched.

To our secret but vast relief, she said an adamant no: we were atheists in our house, and that was that. Brother Gil went away, and when we saw him the following Sunday, he was as cordial and unctuous as ever, but he never asked us to be saved again.

O
ne of the duties on my paper route was doing collection, which meant knocking on every door and asking for that week’s subscription money. I had a two-ring board with a sheet of tickets for each house; I wrote each address and name at the top and tore off tickets to give as receipts. I could always tell how many weeks’ worth of subscription money my customers owed by how many tickets were still attached to their sheet. Sometimes people weren’t home, and sometimes they couldn’t pay that week, so I had customers who were generally behind, which was normal.

But there was one house I was afraid to go to, and so they racked up a staggering debt of $9.45, several weeks’ worth of
Gazettes
. They were a household of several elderly women, mild as nuns, quiet and mousy, all of them gaunt, pale, gray haired. I don’t know why I was afraid of them—they weren’t really scary at all—but I had to talk myself into going up their walk and ringing the bell: I was short that week with my nut, so I needed them to pay up.

Two of them came to the door together, spectral wraiths dressed in cobwebs and ash. Their white, thin faces floated above me like the reflections of crescent moons in a lily pond. “Nine dollars and forty-five cents,” they gasped. “So much at once … where have you been?” The door closed; I waited. The door opened, and one bony hand, trembling, counted out the money from a jar marked Grocery Kitty. The jar contained exactly $9.45. I took it all and gave them their tickets and rode away, wretchedly hoping they wouldn’t have to live on cat food, or starve, until their next Social Security checks arrived.

When I handed my route over to a younger girl in the neighborhood at the end of seventh grade, I had saved $125, enough to buy the red ten-speed I had been coveting and saving up for. Whenever I rode my cool new bike by the old ladies’
house, I averted my eyes, afraid they were at the front window, peeking out from behind their drapes, watching me enjoy the spoils of my plundering of their precious food jar.

The other house I was afraid to collect from was the LeBlancs’, around the corner from our house. Diane LeBlanc was a year ahead of me at Simpson, and we were friends, sort of; my mother hired her to “babysit” us when she and Jim went out, because I didn’t want to take responsibility for my sisters. Diane LeBlanc was fat, and she wet the bed, and when she came over to babysit, she wanted to talk out loud about our sex fantasies in my dark bedroom, on opposite ends of my bed, and then she wanted us to give each other massages. I had no problem with the sex-fantasy part; I had plenty of those, and I wasn’t shy about sharing them (they were far more romantic than sexual, actually; they involved me being a haughty princess adored from afar by a shy woodcutter’s son or humble peasant boy who proved his mettle and won my hand in marriage). But massages? With Diane? That was just oogie and gross.

One day at school, Kevin Dominguez came and sat in the grass next to me at recess and asked me if Diane was really my babysitter. I cringed and admitted that she was, kind of. Then he asked me for my locker combination; in our school, this was tantamount to asking me to go steady. I froze up, and my insides clenched. I blurted, “No way. Anyway, my friend likes you,” and got up and walked away, fast, feeling like a weirdo and an idiot. Later, Jennifer told me that she had set Kevin straight: I liked him, not my friend.

This heralded the first of many such encounters of my spectacularly awkward adolescence, as far as boys I liked were concerned. I froze in their presence, could not speak to them or look them in the eye, pretended I wasn’t interested, treated them with brusque condescension.

Meanwhile, Diane’s brother Bill, who was sixteen and who looked like the older boy version of Diane, fat and doughy,
exposed his penis to poor Susan in some backyard scenario, theirs or ours, I was a bit hazy on the details. Susan was even more creeped out by this, of course, than I had been by Diane’s advances. The LeBlancs were really weird, we decided, and that was all there was to it. But still, they had a strange power over me. One day when I was over at Diane’s, Diane’s much-older sister interrogated me about my parents’ marital status; I lied and told her they were married. Having to lie in order to appease the LeBlancs’ nosy, small-minded, petty-bourgeois Christian curiosity and judgment made me loathe them all. But it also made me furious at my mother for not being married to Jim. I started pestering her about it, asking when they’d get married.

Diane’s father, Mr. LeBlanc, was a fat, red-faced tyrant. Whenever I came by to collect the money he owed me for his newspaper delivery, he almost spat it at me. I suppose having to give a penny to a godless, heathen hippie girl with sinful parents filled him with seething resentment. And so, just as with the old-lady house, I stayed away too long from the LeBlancs’ until, finally, when I realized I would be short that week unless they paid, I slunk up their drive and rang the bell with a hangdog, unhappy dread. Mr. LeBlanc yanked the door open and saw me standing there.

“Well?” he said.

I told him how much he owed me.

“You’re a liar,” he said. “Let me see that book.”

I showed him the tickets, uncollected.

“You must not have given me the tickets last time I paid!” he said. “You’re cheating me!” He was apoplectic, a word I had just learned. I was interested to see it in action, and by interested, I mean outraged.

“I always give tickets when people pay,” I said, a little apoplectic now myself. “I’m telling the truth.”

“You are a liar,” he shouted, and slammed the door in my face.

I went home shaking with anger. With my mother’s help, I wrote Mr. LeBlanc a strongly worded letter that informed him that I was suspending delivery of his paper until he paid me, and furthermore, it was “very rude to slam the door in a young girl’s face when she’s just trying to do her job and collect money that is honestly owed to her.”

Mr. LeBlanc telephoned. He didn’t want his paper suspended. He would pay the money. He never apologized. I continued to deliver his paper, and he never balked again at paying me.

Junior high was, for Susan and me, a time of trying out conventions, of feeling “normal,” and fitting in for the first time. And not just us: we wanted it for our family, too. We put constant pressure on Jim and my mother to get married. They finally did, but not because of us. Our mother wanted us to have a father, and Jim wanted to adopt us. So they had a small wedding ceremony in our backyard with a few friends, a justice of the peace, and a cake. My mother wore a beautiful pale blue lace-trimmed maxidress that showed her cleavage, and flowers in her long hair.

Jim legally adopted us shortly afterward. I had mixed feelings about this. I was very sad to lose any proof of my father’s relationship to me, but he had disappeared. My mother had even hired a detective to track him down in order to get his permission for Jim to assume paternity of us, but he couldn’t turn up any trace of him. If my father ever magically changed his mind and decided he wanted to find us again, how, I worried, would he know where to look, if our last name had been changed?

On the other hand, we already called Jim “Dad,” and he deeply wanted to be our father in a way that our real father never had. He cooked for us; was there after school; drove us places; laughed at our jokes; and, in every other way, had earned the right to make it legal. It was time to finalize it. After the
adoption, my birth certificate was changed: Jim Christensen was listed as my birth father, and my legal name was now Laurie Kate Christensen. All legal evidence of Ralph Johansen’s paternity was erased forever.

O
ne very early morning, near dawn, I woke up and heard strange, sad music on the record player and went out into the living room to see Jim, sitting alone in a chair in the semidark, drinking wine and sobbing and listening to the Schubert C Major Quintet. He had always liked to drink wine and beer. But since he’d been laid off from his job, he had been drinking a lot more, and a lot more regularly.

He didn’t see me; I went back to bed and lay awake with a knot in my stomach, the way I had almost every night at Wildermuth. I knew something was wrong lately. My mother seemed bored and impatient with Jim all the time; and Jim, for his part, seemed more anxious even than he’d been before. Although he never failed in his kindness to us, his patient attention and careful devotion to our homework, our chattering, our questions, there was a strain, a noticeable effort to present a good-humored geniality when before it had been unforced. After the wedding, it was clear, in a subterranean but unmistakable way, this new marriage was in trouble of some kind.