Riding In Cars With Boys (3 page)

“I wish he worked at the steel mill.”

“You and me and the man in the moon. Then maybe I could pay the doctor bills. But that’s not your father. He wanted to be a cop and make a difference. He didn’t want to punch a time clock and have a boss looking over his shoulder.”

When I was four, before my father became a cop, he pumped gas at the garage on the corner, and every day I brought him sandwiches in a paper bag. He’d smile like I’d just brightened his day when he saw me, then I sat on his lap while he ate. Sometimes I fell asleep, leaning my head against his chest, lulled by the warmth of his body and the rumble of trucks whoosh ing past. Sometimes I traced the red-and-green American Beauty rose on his forearm. I thought that flower was the most beautiful thing in the world back then. Now it was gray as newsprint, and whenever I caught a glimpse of it, I turned my eyes.

“You should’ve told him not to be a cop,” I said. “It’s ruining my life.”

“It’s not up to the wife to tell the husband what to do,” my mother said.

“He tells you what to do all the time.”

“The man wears the pants in the family.”

“I’m never getting married.”

“You’ll change your tune.”

“And end up like you? Never in a million years.”

“You better not let your father catch you talking to me like that.”

MAYBE it was poetic justice for being so contemptuous of my mother and her position in life—as my father’s servant—that landed me, before I graduated high school, at the altar.

I met Sonny Raymond Bouchard on New Year’s Eve in the eleventh grade. As usual, I didn’t have a date and neither did my best friend, Fay Johnston. Her parents were away for the weekend, so I was sleeping over. We were drinking gin and Fresca in martini glasses and pretending we were rich and famous and living in New York City when her brother Cal showed up with two of his hoody friends, Lizard and Raymond. I’d heard about a friend of Cal’s named Raymond and how his brother was in jail for holding up Cumberland Farms with a gun. Raymond’s hair was black and greased high back. He wore tight black pants and pointy black shoes.

Cal crammed a case of Colt 45 in the refrigerator, then stood in the doorway of the living room and said, “Happy New Year!” as he slammed his heels together and pointed a can of beer in the air like a Nazi salute. Then the three of them came into the living room and started talking about Lizard’s giving a guy at the Farm Shop a bloody nose.

“Why’d you hit him? What did he do?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Lizard said.

“He ranked on Lizard’s sister,” Raymond said, opening a beer.

“Called her a douche bag.” Cal giggled.

I liked that. Hoods had their drawbacks—like using dems and dose when they spoke and wearing their hair like Elvis‘s—but usually they weren’t afraid to fight for a girl’s honor.

Ray took a long drink of beer, and when he put the can down, his eyes landed on me. Then Cal put “Sunny” on the record player. It skipped: “Sunny, thank you for the … Sunny, thank you for the … Sunny, thank you for the …” Cal said, “First one to change the record’s a pussy.”

This went on for ten minutes. I kept an eye on Ray to see how he was taking the torture. That’s when I noticed he smoked Lucky Strikes, like my father. I wondered what he was thinking. He sat still in the chair like the Lincoln Memorial, except every once in a while when he lifted a heel off the floor then put it back down. I wondered if he carried a gun like his brother. I figured he could probably fix cars because that’s why hoods were called greasers.

Cal flung his shoe at the record.

“Eh-heh,” Fay said. “Cal’s a pussy.”

“Shut up, chicken legs.” He swigged his beer.

“Drop dead, raisin nuts.” She threw a pillow at him, knocking his beer in a gush across the carpet.

Fay stood up and dropped into Lizard’s lap. He was called Lizard because he’d eat any kind of insect. Only thing was, it had to be living. Fay didn’t care who she flirted with.

“Do my bones dig into you when I sit on your lap, Liz?” Fay said.

“You’re light as a bird.”

“Do you think I’m too skinny?”

“Nah, you’re just right.”

I knew she was thinking, Well, you’re fat as an ox and ugly as sin or something like that. Fay was always flirting with guys who didn’t have a chance in hell. Usually, I thought it was mean, but this night I thought maybe she had the right idea, so the next time I returned from the kitchen with a gin and Fresca, I coasted into Raymond’s lap and said, “Hi, I’m Beverly.”

“Raymond.” He nodded and shifted his weight. I suggested we move to the sofa.

“I never saw you around school,” I said.

“Quit. ”

“Why?”

“Buy a car.”

“Your parents didn’t care?”

“Nope.” He stretched and laid an arm across my shoulder. I thought of Danny Dempsey and wondered if Raymond carried a knife. I put my head on his shoulder and interrogated him.

“So, you have a job?”

“Yep. ”

“What do you do?”

“Work down Cyanamid. Is your old man the cop?”

“Yes. I hate him. Is your brother really in jail?”

“Yep.”

“For what?”

“Armed robbery.”

“That’s terrible. Did your mother cry when she found out?”

“Yeah.” He kept flicking his thumb with his index finger. I took his hand in my lap to hold it still.

“What about your father?” I asked.

“He don’t know. He ain’t been around for a couple of years.”

“Where is he?”

“Bowery. ”

“In New York?”

“He’s a drunk.”

Raymond was a high school dropout, his brother was a thief in jail, and his father was a Bowery bum. He needed me. More than anything else in the world I wanted Raymond to cry on my shoulder. I kissed his forehead. He pulled his face away and kissed my mouth.

It would be like
On the Waterfront.
He’d be Marlon Brando and I’d be Eva Marie Saint. I’d tutor Raymond for his high school equivalency; he’d listen to me recite Shakespearean soliloquys in my cellar. Pretty soon he’d wear crewneck sweaters and loafers. He was lying on top of me. It was probably too late to turn back now: I had a hood for a boyfriend.

By the time Raymond and I came up for air, the room was deserted. I told Ray I had to go to the bathroom, and as soon as I sat on the toilet, Fay barged in. “What are you doing? You like Sonny?” she said.

“I think so.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Tell me about him.”

“What’s to tell? He was the neighborhood simp. We never let him play baseball and shit because he was such a slug. Used to call him spider after a hairy mole he had growing under his earlobe. Teased him so much he had it removed, surgically.”

“Poor Raymond.” I flushed the toilet.

“Sonny Bouchard is retarded, Beverly.” She sat on the toilet. “I can’t believe you like him. Are you sleeping with him on the couch?”

“I guess so.”

“Have fun.” She flushed the toilet and walked out.

When I went back to Raymond, I looked for the mole scar. It was a silvery patch the size of a quarter beneath his earlobe. I kissed it and we lay down. I told him I hated the name Sonny and would always call him Raymond. Soon he was breathing regularly and I slid off the couch, tiptoed outside, and stood on the carport. There was no moon, but the sky was heavy with stars. My breath puffed white clouds and there was no sound except for 1-91 in the distance. I walked to Fay’s window and tapped it. She got up and opened it. “What’re you, crazy? It’s freezing out.”

“Nice though.” I spread my arms to demonstrate.

In a minute she stood beside me, a blanket around her shoulders. She wrapped me in. “Let’s walk,” I suggested.

The grass cracked under my bare feet. When we stepped onto the main road, a car whizzed by beeping. Soon it would be light out. I spotted a red flag sticking up on a mailbox. I pushed it down, then back up, and without thinking about it, I bent it back and forth until it snapped off in my hand. “Wow,” Fay said. She went across the street and did the same. We hurried around the block breaking off every flag in sight, until we’d circled back to her house. We had about thirty of them wrapped in the pouch of our blanket. “What’ll we do with them?” I said.

“I don’t know.” Fay hugged herself. “I bet we could get arrested.”

“Willful destruction of federal property or some shit.”

“I know,” she said. I followed her into a vacant lot. She knelt down on the ground and banged a flag in with a rock. I hammered in the next one. We made a circle of red flags in the middle of the field, then stood for a long time looking.

“Maybe no one will touch them,” she said.

“Maybe they’ll be here forever.” I shivered.

 

One year later, almost to the day, I was shivering again, this time from nerves. I was in Fay’s bedroom and at one o‘clock on the dot, I dialed the phone to find out if I was pregnant. I dropped the phone and fell face first on the bed.

“Well, what did they say?” Fay asked.

“Positive.”

“Postitive? What does positive mean?”

“Pregnant.”

“But it could mean you’re positively not pregnant, couldn’t it?”

“Could it?”

“Call them back and ask.”

“You call.”

I slid onto the floor and rested my forehead on her knees as she dialed. She hung up and said, “You’re fucked.”

I broke the news to Raymond that night as we sat at the drive-in, the little portable heater between us on the seat, a motorcycle movie called
The Wild Angels
(Raymond’s all-time favorite) on the screen.

“Raymond,” I said. “Our lives are ruined.”

“Don’t you love me?”

“Yes. But still. I mean, why’d this happen to us? Why me? Do you think I have bad luck?”

“You probably got it from me. I told you you shouldn’t love me. I’m trouble.”

Raymond always said things like that. In the beginning, it made me hug him and kiss him. The first time I’d said “I love you” was when he was drunk and crying. It was in response to his saying, “You shouldn’t love me.” Now his self-pity just made me mad. Possibly because I was thinking he was right, I shouldn’t love him, because if I hadn‘t, I wouldn’t be sitting at a stupid motorcycle movie, pregnant.

But what I said was, “Don’t say that,” then changed the subject to other depressing topics. “You’re going to have to work so hard,” I said. “You wanted to quit. Now you can’t.”

“I’ll get another job maybe.”

He didn’t seem nearly upset enough. “We can’t spend any money,” I said. “We have to save everything.”

He nodded his head, then at intermission he bought hot dogs, sodas, and fries, and I got furious at him for spending the money. But I ate my hot dog, my fries, and half his fries anyway. I was starving.

For the next month, behind Raymond’s back, I bumped my ass down stairs, punched myself in the stomach, and threw myself from couch to floor ten times every night before bed. Anything. Anything was better than telling my parents, especially my father, that I’d been screwing Raymond in the basement recreation room while he sat above me watching television in his reclining chair every night. How could I mention the word sex to him when I couldn’t stay in the same room through a Playtex living bra commercial?

It was 1968 and abortion wasn’t legal. If I’d known you could get one in Puerto Rico, I’d have sold my onyx ring, opal necklace, and Raymond’s canary-yellow Bonneville to get there. Fact was, I never really thought about the baby, pictured it or imagined being a mother. I was too worried about telling my parents. And I was depressed, despondent, deeply disappointed. I always thought it was my destiny to become a star. But now I’d be married to Raymond for the rest of my life. I’d be a housewife with no money, a station wagon, and a husband whose intellectual curiosity could be summed up in his favorite expression: How come dat?

It seemed to me that God or the will of the world or fate or whatever it is that determines a person’s life had turned against me. It’s true I’d been the first of my friends to lose my virginity, but within a week of my breaking the news, three of them had followed suit. Now we were trading how-to-have-orgasm tips and none of
them
was pregnant. Fay had even been given a third-of-a-carat diamond and was due to marry a twenty-six-year-old sailor stationed on a nuclear submarine a week after graduation. Why was it my lot in life to be singled out for public humiliation?

Every night for that long month I lay on my stomach on the sofa saying, Next commercial, I’ll tell my parents next commercial, but I never could make the words come out of my mouth. So finally, on my way to school one Monday morning, I left a note in the mailbox saying, “Dear Mom and Dad, I’m really sorry. I know I’ve disappointed you I’m pregnant. Love, your daughter Beverly.

School that day was a nightmare. As if I didn’t have enough on my mind, Mr. O‘Rourke, the history teacher, decided to notice I was alive and pick on me. “Miss Donofrio,” he said.

I didn’t hear him.

“Miss Donofrio, I hate to interrupt whatever you’re doing [I was cleaning out my pocketbook]. We were talking about Andrew Jackson, a president I’m sure in your vast wisdom you have a good deal of respect for.” The class snickered. “I was wondering if you would do us the favor of shedding some light on the subject. Tell us anything, anything at all, about Mr. Jackson.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“What a pity. Then I must assume you didn’t read the assignment. I think you’d better write me two pages on the topic.”

“You want me to tell you anything?”

“That’s what I said.”

“He was a president. He wore a white wig.”

“Not good enough.”

“You said anything.”

“Three pages.”

“That’s not fair.”