Riding In Cars With Boys (13 page)

“I don’t know. Sure. I think so.”

Jason would be ten. The fifth grade. Maybe my parents would’ve destroyed my pictures and never mentioned my name. Then, when I surprised him in the playground, he’d look at me as if to say, And who the hell are you? When I said, “I’m your mother,” he’d say, “She’s dead.”

I went home to get arrested.

WHEN I walked into my house, Lieutenant O‘Reilly, my father’s best friend, said, “Have a nice ride with your boyfriend? We figured you’d be back.” He was showing off. This was supposed to make me think he was Svengali.

I sat down at the kitchen table where O‘Reilly indicated as though it were his house. Cops were ripping the purple, blue, and magenta slipcovers off the furniture in the living room; they were flipping through books and throwing them on the floor; they were opening jars in my refrigerator. Then his sidekick, another plainclothesman, Detective Beaumont, started shaking every pill bottle in the house in front of my face. “Sunshine? Windowpane? Speed? THC?” I knew he was trying to impress me with his knowledge of names, which made me think he was a jerk, which made me less afraid. “Vitamins, aspirin, Midol,” I said. It was a good thing I took that last hit of speed for housecleaning.

“You may as well come clean,” O‘Reilly said. “We’re sending them to the lab in the morning anyway.”

“Waste your money,” I shrugged.

“You don’t seem to understand the trouble you’re in. We found eleven pounds of marijuana in your house, miss. That’s intent to sell, a felony. Your father was here. He was very upset. We told him to go home. He took your son with him.”

I looked at my hands on my lap. They were so tanned from hitchhiking in the sun all summer, my nails looked white.

“You got anything to say for yourself?”

I sat on my hands and said nothing.

“All right.” O‘Reilly stood up. “Bring her downtown. We’re gonna book her.”

I saw neighbors in the windows across the street watching as I rode off in the backseat of a police car.

At the station, Beaumont dragged my arms beneath spotlights and said, “No tracks. Must be skin popping, huh?” I took pride in never touching heroin or sticking a needle in my body, and his accusation made me furious. But I figured that’s what he wanted, so I acted nonchalant. He fingerprinted and mug-shot me, then deposited me across a desk from O‘Reilly. I examined the ink on my fingertips while O’Reilly laid into me. “We gave you leeway,” he said. “We gave you a chance, for your father. We’ve had ten loud-music complaints, but we ignored them, hoping you’d straighten your act. You just didn’t know when to give up. Your father says, Throw the book at her. He’s fed up. »

I kept thinking of the time O‘Reilly and his wife had come to pick up my parents to go out dancing. His wife had huge breasts that were barely concealed by her low-cut dress. I was having a pajama party with six of my friends and we all walked into the kitchen one by one to get a glass of water and a gander at Mrs. O’Reilly. The next morning, my mother said, “We knew what you were doing. It wasn’t very nice.”

“Well, miss,” O‘Reilly said. “Your ass is fried now. Next time we see a car parked in your driveway overnight, the door’s coming off and you’re busted for prostitution.”

I should’ve known. It wasn’t the drugs, it was sex.

They locked me in a cell. Fay was in the one next door. “Do you believe this?” she said.

“No,” I said.

She started giggling.

“I can’t laugh,” I said.

“One day you’ll think it’s a riot. I picked my nose and stuck the booger on the wall.”

I wished I had her spirit.

My parents didn’t bail me out. Some of Lenny’s friends did. When Fay got out she went with her mother, who’d bailed her out.

All of the houses were dark on the court, except mine, which was lit like a birthday cake. The doors were flung open, and the inside looked like a hurricane hit it. The cops had left the cushion covers lying on the floor. Every can and pan and vitamin pill was spilled from my cupboards onto my counters and floors. My bedroom was the most upsetting. The contents of the drawers were dumped into a heap on my bed, with my bikini underwear and my diaphragm on top. Our “Love the One You’re With” poster had been torn from the wall and ripped to shreds.

Fay had told me back in jail that my father had gone nuts and torn up the poster. After he did that, his buddies advised him to go home. Which he did, but not before he confiscated Jason.

The next morning, when I walked into my parents’ house to reclaim my son, my father was weeping at the table again. I didn’t sit down. My mother, the lioness when her husband was hurt, stood up. “Well, you’ve had your fun. Now you’re going to pay the price. What’d you think, you could just do whatever you want and get away with it? I thought you were the one who’s supposed to be so smart. You’re killing your father. You put every gray hair on that poor man’s head.”

“Where’s Jason?” I said.

“Never mind where Jason is,” my father said. He blew his nose and looked out the window. “Now you think about him.” He wiped his eyes and stuffed his hankie in his back pocket. Then he looked at me. “You mark my words. You get in trouble again, the first complaint, I’m filing for custody. You’ll lose him. I’ll have you declared an unfit mother. You think I’m kidding? Just try me.”

An unfit mother?
I wanted to scream.
And you call yourself a fit father?
You never even knew how old I was on my birthdays. But I knew from a lifetime of experience that if I uttered one word in response to an accusation leveled by the big man, the boss and the king, I was “answering back,” which was just cause for a slap across the face.

So I stood there and looked contrite. I guess my look made him sick, because he walked out of the room.

Next, I expected my mother to go get the Bible and make me swear on it never to do another bad thing. But she said, “What did you think when you were in jail?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You got a beautiful son. I don’t know why you can’t be happy with that.”

“There are other things in the world, Ma, besides being a mother.”

“Like what? Getting drunk? Having boyfriends?”

“Like fun,” I said. I could’ve said, Like an education, a career, travel, experience, but I would’ve started crying.

My sister Rose, now twelve, walked into the kitchen and smiled at me like she felt sorry. She sat down at the table. Next my other sister, Phyllis, now seventeen, walked in and made her mouth clench and go crooked as if to say, This is so stupid. She sat next to Rose and across from me. Phyllis was running for secretary of the senior class. I wondered if she’d lose if my arrest made the paper.

“Where’s Jason?” I said.

“Watching
Mighty Heroes,”
Phyllis said.

“I wanted to watch Lucy, but I lost the flip,” Rose said.

“Oh, you,” my mother said. “You’re the older. You should tell him. You’re such a softy.”

“Hi, Ma,” Jase said as he turned the corner into the hall from the living room.

“Hi, son,” I said.

He sat on my lap. “Could I get a GI Joe?” he said. In this way, I knew that he’d interpreted getting plucked from his bed and carried through a house of marauding cops as my having done something I should feel sorry for. Because he was trying to get a payment, a reward. And not just any reward. He was asking for something he knew I’d never buy him in a million years. Maybe he thought GI Joe was like his father.

“What do you want one of those stupid things for?” Phyllis said.

“He wants it because everybody else does,” Rose said.

“No sir,” he said.

“Leave the kid alone,” my mother said. “I don’t know why he can’t have a GI Joe.”

“Because toys like that encourage violence,” I said.

“It’s just a doll,” she said, not listening.

“It’s just drugs. It’s just sex,” I said into the table.

“What?” she said.

My sisters giggled.

“Ma!” Jase said, and slapped my hand.

THIS is what I wondered as I waited for my trial date: Why did my parents decide to name their first daughter Beverly Ann Donofrio and forever brand me with the initials B.A.D.? What did they think? I mean, as a kid those initials were a heavy burden. That word carries a lot of weight when you’ve just come off being a baby. “No, no. Bad girl.”

In the second grade, my teacher made us put our initials in bold letters on the face of a folder we’d store our artwork in all year. Every time I pulled that huge manila thing from my cubby, somebody pointed and jeered, “Beverly’s bad.” Then the rest of them chimed in, “Bad Beverly, bad Beverly.” To a normal second grader, it could be rough. To a hypersensitive little girl such as I was, it was devastating. I mean, I was the type of kid who cried every time I saw a kitten without its mother. And I was dainty. I freaked out if I got dirt on my hands or water on my feet. Until I was four, I refused to set foot off the porch without a babushka because I was convinced that birds would dive-bomb me and yank out all my hair. Come to think of it, maybe my parents should’ve named me Catherine Rose Ann Zelda Yolanda.

Now, at the age of twenty-one, with my name spelled out in the newspaper, which called me a member of an alleged drug ring caught with ten thousand dollars’ worth of marijuana (the asking price was actually a thousand dollars), you not only could’ve called me
bad
and
crazy
but notorious.

First thing, the public-housing authority threatened to evict me if I didn’t kick Fay out. So one windy Saturday, I helped her load her stuff into a van and we hugged goodbye in the driveway. She was only going to her mother‘s, but it felt like the other end of the world. When we pulled out of the embrace, her hair was flying all over her face and whipping against mine. Tears came to my eyes, but I don’t think she noticed. She and Amelia climbed into the van. Jason held my hand. Fay rolled down the window and said, “Do you believe this shit?” then started to laugh. As she backed down the drive, she said, “Hey, Bev,” shot the finger to Backes Court, and said, “Fuck’m.” For my part, I have to admit, I didn’t think it was all that funny.

I walked into the house with Jason. It was empty now, except for Jason’s old crib mattress shoved into a comer of the living room and a white-topped table in the kitchen that Fay’s mother had given me out of the goodness of her heart.

I sat on the mattress. Jason sat next to me. “Why do they have to go?” he said.

“Because I got arrested for something I didn’t do.”

“Why
^?
”

“Because life’s not fair.” He was only three and a half but I wanted to give it to him straight, so he wouldn’t be the type of kid I was. We’re talking warped. I used to fling myself on the ground, bury my face in the grass, and kiss dirt because I loved America that much. If some kid told me to get out of his yard, I jammed my hands on my hips and wouldn’t budge an inch. “It’s a free country,” I said. What an idiot.

I still hadn’t changed as much as I thought though, because come the spring of 1972, I expected my trial to be like TV: my lawyer as clever as Perry Mason, as nice as Fred MacMurray. He’d foil the police with a technicality like illegal entry or coercion or inadmissible evidence, and I’d be off scot-free.

But I didn’t get to meet the guy until five minutes before court. He was short, ugly, and a man of few words. Nineteen to be exact: “We can make a deal. I’ll ask for a suspended sentence plus probation.”

“It wasn’t my pot,” I said.

“It’s the best I can do.”

Then the prosecutor said to the judge, “We recommend a six months’ suspended sentence and two years’ probation.”

The judge scowled, ran a hand through his hair, shook his head, and said, “Humph. A mother on welfare, using public funds to buy drugs. I’m not inclined to go easy on you, but there is the child to consider,” and gave me exactly what the lawyers asked for.

Which translated into a visit every Wednesday with Mr. Stanley Stupski, Wallingford’s crack probation officer. I sat on a bench in the town hall while Jason slid around the shiny floor playing with his Matchbox cars. Sometimes my father walked by. Then Jason stood up on his knees and said, “Hi, Pop.” My father mussed his hair and winked at me. Which I appreciated. After all, he was probably embarrassed. I was his daughter and I was sitting on the same bench with every other derelict in town, some of whom he’d no doubt busted.

Sooner or later, Stan the man appeared in his doorway, pointed at me, said, “Bouchard,” then stabbed his thumb at his office. I squeezed past his beer belly, pulling Jason in behind me, then lifted him to my lap like a shield.

“So, been to any pot parties lately? Orgies maybe?” Stan began the session.

“That’s disgusting,” I replied.

“What? I thought that’s what all you hippies are into. You’d tell me if you knew about any, wouldn’t you?”

I rolled my eyes and looked out the window.

“You got anything to say to me?”

“No.”

“You got a bad attitude. That’s your problem. Now, if you came in here and acted civilized, said, ‘Hello, Mr. Stupski, how are you?’ I might treat you better. Maybe you’d come in every other week. Once a month. I’d say, Now, here’s a nice girl. I think I’ll give her a break. But you act like a snot. Didn’t anybody ever teach you you win more friends with sugar than vinegar?”

“No,” I said truthfully.

By the summer, Fay had deserted me to move to Minneapolis with her new boyfriend, who was a graduate student in psychology. After a couple of months, she wrote me that Amelia was in a Head Start program and by the New Year of 1973, she would be enrolled in college, which her older brother was going to pay for. I was jealous. Wallingford had no Head Start, and obviously, college was out of the question for me. My older brother wasn’t going to pay for anything. In fact, my older brother had just made a return appearance in town from four years in the navy, where he’d been in a top-security position, and now would tell no one where he’d been, what he’d done, or where he got what looked like a bullet wound in the muscle behind his left shin. As soon as he got home, the chair at the dinner table, the one at the other head of the table from my father—the chair I’d been sitting in every time I ate over for four years—reverted to him and I retreated to the sidelines with my mother, sisters, and Jason. Come to think of it, I’m surprised Jason, being of the master sex, hadn’t gotten the seat across from my father all those years. And guess what profession my brother chose after the service: cop. He hadn’t been on the force more than a few months before he was written up in the paper as a hero. He’d been on the beat when he spotted a car careening crazily around a comer, then screeching away as fast as the wind. My brother heard a siren in the distance and figured the car was being pursued, so acting on instinct, he dropped onto one knee, aimed his pistol, and shot at the runaway car’s tires, which went flat. It was rumored he would probably get the cop-of-the-year award for his action, while I thought he should’ve been suspended for reckless en dangerment of the citizens who’d been all over the sidewalks, going to the post office or the bank. What if one of those bullets richocheted off the asphalt and into one of them?