Riding In Cars With Boys (14 page)

In any case, there was my older brother, the prince to my father’s king, being Mr. Good Citizen again while I was being a nothing, trapped with a kid. I decided that even if I couldn’t go to college, I would educate myself. I’d pick authors then read every book he or she had written and then I’d read their biographies. I figured maybe I could be a writer too. I still wrote an occasional poem, but now I would switch to prose to make money. That was the real beauty. I wouldn’t need a car or a baby-sitter. I could make money and do it from home. Exactly one year after I got busted, I wrote a story and applied to the Famous Writers School. I tried for irony. It was about a girl in the fifth grade who got the hiccups when she went to confession and they wouldn’t stop. For days, weeks, months, whenever she opened her mouth, she had a hiccup attack. Since they started in confession, of course she thought it was the wrath of God, so she bent over backward acting like a saint. But then one day, out of habit she lies to her mother and the hiccups miraculously stop. They gave me a B and said I had talent but needed instruction—for a price. What a dope. I never considered the cost, or maybe I just thought I’d get an A and they’d beg me to be their student, or maybe I’d get discovered by a famous writer. After the disappointment had time to sink in, I got real and went to an employment agency.

The counselor, Mr. Kelly, told me not to expect much. I had no skills or experience, but he’d see what he could do. He called at the end of the week. He had a job as a clerk for a little over minimum wage at Cyanamid, the plastics plant that fumigated Wallingford with noxious chemical stink. He told me to get a pen and jot down the time, the date, and the office number. Then he said, “There’s just one more thing. I’d like you to wear a bra. It makes a better impression.”

I hung up the phone and heard my ears drumming. I was shocked that I was so shocked. I’d never give that guy the time of day after he’d said that. How could he possibly think it was any of his business whether I wore a bra or not? And if that’s the way jobs were, if you had to wear a bra to get one, I’d rather stay poor, unemployed, and true to my principles, thank you. With no car and no one to care for Jason (my mother worked every night at a factory now and I couldn’t ask her), the job had been a pipe dream anyway. It all boiled down to the same old thing: the trouble I’d gotten myself into having sex with a hood in high school. And the name of the trouble was Jason. My jailer.

I read him stories every night, to encourage a love of reading early on. That way he might go to college and not end up like his mother or, worse, his father. He played mostly with three foul-mouthed sisters from across the road, who bit their mother, Trudy, to get her attention, but luckily they didn’t seem to be rubbing off. His favorite thing in the world was to go to the brook, catch a couple of frogs, then keep them in a coffee can in his room. When he’d do this, I’d hear the thump thump thump of frogs hitting their heads against the plastic lid. This went on all night, until I woke up in the morning screaming, “Let the goddamn frogs out!” He begged me to take him fishing, because he dreamed of catching a good one-footer and keeping it in the bathtub. What was it with boys and the way they liked to imprison other creatures?

Jase was beautiful to look at, knew his please-and-thank yous, liked to kiss and hug and cuddle, but still he was like an alien creature. I still wished he was a girl. Even so—boy, jailer, bane of my life—he was my main companion.

We went to my mother’s nearly every day for dinner. I watched soaps with my sisters when they came home from school while Jase hung out with my mother in the kitchen. He colored and played with Lincoln Logs or his remote-control car, then when dinner was served, if he didn’t like what my mother made for everyone else, she made him something special, treatment that previously only my father had received. Occasionally, I borrowed my mother’s car to ride with Jase around the countryside, which usually ended with a visit to the Friendly Cows. As soon as we pulled up, they came sauntering from their shed to the barbed wire. They slobbered our hands with wet noses. We gave them names and fed them fistfuls of grass. I felt an affinity with the Friendly Cows, and so did Jason. When we left, he always said, “Poor cows.” It killed me they were earmarked for slaughter. Neither Jason nor I liked to eat beef during this period. At night, sometimes I told Jason stories about the Friendly Cows, in which the Cows went through all sorts of hardships and misadventures but ended up happy in India, where they were sacred.

But the monotony of my life was about to end, I thought. It was the fall of 1973 and Jason’s first day of kindergarten. I’d have half of every day free, kidless, by myself, alone—a state I’d been looking forward to since the day he was born. The next year, when he was gone all day, maybe, just maybe, I could get a job and join the world. I dressed him in gray boy pants, the type with a belt instead of a stretchy waistband. Then I pulled a light blue jersey over his head, to bring out the blue in his eyes. He was a beauty. I knew the teacher would love him. Most women did.

I’d borrowed my mother’s car for the occasion. The kindergarten room was plastered with the ABCs, pictures of animals, domestic and wild, and chaotic with mothers and kids. I thought the other mothers were staring at me because I was too young to have a kid in kindergarten, but then I thought people stared at me everywhere I went since the day my name appeared in the paper.

We stood in line for our turn with the teacher, who wore a bright red skirt, a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and had translucent skin like a nun’s. One second, I wished I hadn’t worn my jeans, and the next, I was glad I’d been true to myself and dressed natural. Jason squeezed my hand tighter and leaned his head into my waist. “You scared?” I asked.

He nodded.

“What of?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

Half the time, Jason was afflicted with the Donofrio male habit of noncommunication. So I helped him out. “I was afraid when I went to kindergarten,” I said.

“You were?”

“Everybody is.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess you’re afraid to leave your mother. Afraid of all the strange kids. Just afraid because you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Right?”

He nodded his head and relaxed his grip on my hand. “Well, I’m not going anywhere; some of the kids you’ll like and some you won’t; and school will get to be such a routine so fast you’ll wish you didn’t know what’s happening next.”

“Mm-hm.” Jason believed everything I said, because I always told him the truth. Then he added, “You’ll pick me up, right?” He had to check.

“Right.”

Mrs. Deerie, the teacher, stuck a name tag on Jason—“So I can learn your name, young man”—then pointed him to a chair at a large square table. Jason sat down and stared straight ahead. “Well, Jase,” I said. “I guess I’ll be going.”

He nodded and kept staring.

“Don’t I get a kiss?”

He stood up and kissed me quickly, then sat back down and took the same position.

Back home, I drank a cup of coffee. The birds outside the window seemed louder, seemed to make a hysterical racket, because the neighborhood was so silent. I envied Jason and all the kids. First days of school were exciting. My mind crowded with pictures of Jason’s beginning: playing ring-around-the-rosy, eating a graham cracker and drinking milk through a straw at snack time. The teacher telling some kid, who definitely would not be Jason, to stop blowing bubbles. While I imagined him learning to raise his hand to ask permission to go to the bathroom, I knocked my coffee off the table. It broke, and I cried. And do you know what I thought? Not, What will I do without Jason. Not, I wish I could go to school too. But, I must be getting my period; I can’t wait till menopause.

 

I was depressed that autumn, and it didn’t help that Jason’s teacher thought I was a faulty mother. First, at Halloween, I poured green food dye into white baby shoe polish and painted Jason’s skin to make him a green Martian. I thought it showed imagination. But when he came home, his face was washed clean. He said, “Mrs. Deerie said it was poison.”

Then, at my first parent-teacher conference, she said, “I’m concerned about your son. Whenever there’s a little roughhousing, you know the way boys do, Jason retreats to a puzzle or off with the girls. Is there a man in his life?”

“No,” I said.

“Nobody to throw around a football or play catch?”

“Well, my father, but …”

I could tell she thought me pathetic and Jason’s life impoverished because I couldn’t provide him with the essentials. I figured her assessment of me was on target.

A month later, after Jason had been bugging me and bugging me, “I want a butch, I want a butch” (I guess to look like every other little redneck in town), I took out my electric razor, purchased with S&H green stamps, and buzzed off his beautiful hair. Problem was, it came off in patches that made his skull look like a map of the United States, so I had to shave him bald. The kids called him Bald Eagle at the bus stop. They said, “Snatch a pebble from my hand, Grasshopper,” from a kung fu TV show that featured a bald guy. This never failed to make Jason shoot me a dirty look.

I was standing at the bus stop with him, because I’d volunteered to work in the school library to have something to do. I rode the bus with him two days a week and Jase didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed to sit next to his mother—I guess, because he didn’t think of me so much as a mother as another kid growing up. On the ride, I indicated other kids and asked if he liked them, to which he usually answered yes. At his school, I pretended I was a real librarian as I put books back on the shelves in alphabetical order and recommended
Horton the Elephant or The Phantom Tollbooth
to kids who came in with a pass.

Then one freezing November day, Jason’s teacher was on duty when we disembarked the bus. She took me aside and said in a whisper, “I was wondering. Did Jason have lice?”

“No,” I said. “He wanted a butch and I went too far.”

“I see,” she said, not seeing.

Then she wrapped her arm around Jason’s shoulder, bent to his height, and said, “So, how are you today, my little helper? Do me a favor, dear. Put my pocketbook in my desk, will you? Well, back to work,” she said, dismissing me.

She thought I was a miserable mother and that she cared more for my son than I did. Maybe it was true. I’d been dating a schoolteacher who wouldn’t park his car in my driveway because he said he might end up fired. He pretended I didn’t have a kid. And so did I. So whenever we went out, I never invited Jason. One time, it was a Sunday, we were driving down Main Street and I saw my parents in their car with Jason, coming from the opposite direction. When we passed, I looked out the rear window and saw Jason looking out the rear window too. He kept looking, and then he was too far away for me to tell. I’d felt sad then, and in the library that day, thinking about it, I felt sad again. I couldn’t concentrate. I stamped
received
when I should’ve stamped
date due.
I rested my elbow on the stamp pad and ruined forever my favorite shirt. Then there was the kicker.

The teacher across the hall was a screamer, and today was no exception. She said, “All right, class, attention, pay attention…. What’s a factory?”

No response.

Louder: “What… is … a … factory?”

No response.

Screaming:
“Where do your parents work?”

That did it. I ran into the bathroom to start crying. Factory work was all I could hope for, and maybe it would be all my son would hope for too. I was a white-trash person who shaved my son’s hair. I might as well be living in West Virginia. Who was I kidding, pretending to be a librarian? People like Jason’s teacher thought I was an idiot. I cried so hard the janitor knocked on the door to ask what was the matter. Finally, I controlled myself. When we got home, I called my mother and said I was sick. She volunteered to take Jason overnight and bring him to school the next morning.

As soon as he left, I called the hospital and asked for the emergency room. I said to the man who answered, “If someone took a hundred aspirins, would they die?” He said one hundred aspirins could eat out the wall of his stomach, which would make him hemorrhage and die. He said I should most certainly bring him in. Then he asked who was calling, and I hung up. Next, I carried my bottle of one hundred aspirins along with two glasses of water to my room, emptied the pills onto my bed, and took two and two and two. Probably, it would be my mother and Jase who’d find me. Probably, when she dropped him off after school the next day, they’d call for me, and when I didn’t answer, she’d send Jase up to see if I was sleeping. Maybe I’d leave a note on the table so Jason wouldn’t have to see me dead. But what could I say? Dear Mom and Jason and Rose and Phyllis and Dad and Mike, forgive me for offing myself, Love, Bev?

I took two more, and lines like “It’s always darkest before the dawn” and “When winter comes, can spring be far behind?” came to mind. I didn’t believe them. I took two more.

Pregnant at seventeen Divorced at nineteen. Arrested at twenty-one. Killed myself at twenty-three. There was a beautiful symmetry. I took two more.

I didn’t like my destiny. God had it in for me. I didn’t believe in him anyway, but still I said, “Oh God,” or “Please, dear God,” or “God help me.” I promised myself to never again ever mention his name. But what was I thinking? I’d be dead. I took two more. That made fourteen.

The first time it occurred to me there might not be a God, I was twelve and had just discovered Hamlet’s soliloquy. I couldn’t sleep that night. A mulberry branch beat on my window while Mr. Gerace played “Taps” over and over in his backyard. He must’ve been drunk, because it was late. I had closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself dead—what it would be like, to be dust, no memory, nothing. I’d decided even then it could be bliss. Now, I took two more.