Riding In Cars With Boys (5 page)

FOR most of my life my family and I lived in a little mint-green house that was officially part of the public-housing project but was perched on the very edge of it. Across our back lawn and down a field of weeds sat the rest of the publicly owned homes, tiny Cape Cods on minuscule plots of scorched grass or long brick apartment buildings set at strange angles to the street. Teenagers peeled out from stop sign to stop sign down there and kids ran around in huge stick-wielding packs. But across the road from our front lawn were big privately owned houses, fire-engine-red, snow-white, and forest green, with long lawns, generous trees, and kids who said please and thank you. At the very top of our hill was the country club.

Whenever I told anyone I lived on Long Hill, they assumed it was in one of the big houses and I didn’t correct them. There’d been a time when I hung out at the project by a chain-link fence, French-inhaling cigarettes and flirting with boys who said
pussy
and
twat.
My best friend Donna broke up with me over my attraction to the project. But that was a long time ago, back during the fall when everyone at Dag Hammarskjold Junior High School mistook that plane for the Russians. Since then I’d come to think that most of the people from the project were two things: poor and weird. Like Susan Gerace and her father, Anthony, whose backyard I could see from my bedroom window. Anthony dressed up in his World War II uniform to play his bugle every chance he got—like on Memorial Day, at high school graduations, assemblies after assassinations, and every other evening after dinner. He stood with Susan in their backyard and made her play “Taps,” too. If she got even one note wrong he slapped her on the ear and made her do it over until she got it right. Only then would Anthony answer her with his sad, clear high-pitched horn, putting her playing to shame no matter how perfect her notes. It seems that every night of my life I’d digested dinner to “Taps.” For this I blamed my parents. I looked down on them for landing us in the project, for not owning their own home, for not graduating high school—so they could get good jobs and afford their own home—and for never having enough money for anything, like dancing lessons or enough expensive clothes.

So I took it as yet another kind of poetic justice, or should I say just punishment, that I ended up leaving school before I graduated and being grateful to my father for pulling some strings and jumping Raymond and me to the top of the public-housing-authority waiting list. We got an apartment in a peeling mint-green duplex house on a dead-end street called Backes Court, which, luckily, was separated from the rest of the project by about a mile. On the first floor we had a kitchen with an emerald-green floor, blue brick contact paper behind the stove, and a living room with a picture window. On the second floor were two small bedrooms, ours and Baby‘s, and a bathroom at the top of the stairs, with a Chiquita banana sticker on the door-knob. In our yard we had one dead bush and no trees.

On our new road, kids rumbled on Big Wheels all day, dug holes in yards, which they filled with water to make mud balls to throw at each other. The mothers shook blankets from upstairs windows and sat in the sun on front stoops, their hair rolled up and drying. The few remaining fathers drove off in cars and returned once a day, which was what Raymond did, while I plopped around the house like a fat tomato. Most of my time was spent at the window, watching and wishing I’d have the nerve to ask one of those women over for tea and cinnamon sticks or something—when I wasn’t stuck doing schoolwork, that is.

It had been arranged for me to be tutored so I could graduate high school. That meant I had to invite every teacher I’d formerly sassed into my impoverished teenage home decorated in cast-off furniture that had made a detour to my house on its way to the dump. In other words, I ate crow as my teachers wiped their feet on my welcome mat and sat in my Flintstone furniture—old stuff that belonged to an aunt and had been re-upholstered hard as rock. When I handed them my meticulously done homework assignments, not one of them, not even O‘Rourke, who chain-smoked and smelled vaguely of booze, ever made a crack, which made me feel pitied instead of relieved. I never had to hear I told you so, but I did have to put up with my home economics teacher’s conversation—like when Bobby Kennedy got shot and she objected to there being no day off from work like there’d been for Martin Luther King. She said it was “just because Martin Luther King’s black.” I figured that was a good enough reason, when you considered how many black leaders we had in the country, but I kept my mouth shut because she was the teacher and I was the pregnant teenager making a pink dress with five seams so I could let one out every time my stomach grew another inch.

Then came graduation, which I couldn’t attend because of my big belly, not to mention that I wasn’t invited. My friends called me the next day to give me the details. They told me the principal had stood at the podium after handing out the diplomas and said, “And congratulations to Beverly Donofrio, who couldn’t join us today.” My friends swore to me that nobody, not one person, snickered or yelled out a joke, and I was so grateful, I felt love for every single classmate I had formerly called a jerk or moron or imbecile.

I wasn’t so in love with my friends, though, because they’d deserted me to go have the best time of their lives at a cottage they’d rented by a lake an hour away. So all summer long my main companions besides Raymond were Bam Bam, a retarded three-year-old, and my mother, who stopped by every morning and every afternoon too, since my house was on her way to everywhere and since she figured I was lonely and needed her.

One morning she came in the back door and called, “Yooo hooo.”

I’ was still in bed. It was ten-thirty.

“You up?”

“Yeah.”

I heard her banging around in the kitchen, and pulled on my jeans with the stretchy stomach pouch, which my mother had bought me on one of our afternoon jaunts to Barkers, Stars, or Caldor. I padded down the stairs and into the kitchen.

“It’s gonna be a scorcher,” she said, placing two coffee cups on the table.

“I don’t want any.”

“What do you want, juice?”

I nodded.

“I brought you some leftover stew. ” She pointed to a plastic container in the refrigerator. “And there’s some of those stuffed peppers, too.”

“They give me heartburn.”

“That’s one thing I never got. But I held my water, especially with you. My legs swelled up like balloons. And the poison ivy that year? I thought I’d die. Ray likes peppers. Warm them up for him.”

She sat down, lit another cigarette, and took a sip of coffee. “When’d you do the wash last?”

The last time I did the wash was when she’d done it. “I don’t know,” I said.

“You got to keep on top of it. Do you want to do a load now?”

“No, Ma, it’s too hot.” She was beginning to piss me off.

“You can do it tonight, you know. I used to do that. Once it cools down, throw a load in, then hang them out, they’ll be dry before noon.”

“I’m so bored I can’t stand it.”

“It’s not like you don’t have plenty to do—you just don’t do it. When did you mop the floor last?”

“I don’t want to talk about housework.”

“I’m just telling you for your own good. You get into a routine, then it’s easy.”

“Ma!” I yelled. “I don’t want to talk about housework, okay?” She got up and started sponging off the counters. I looked at the clock. I still had an hour before my first soap opera.

“Tell me how you and Daddy met.” I said it to change the subject and keep her around, even though I’d heard the story a hundred times, like I’d heard all her stories a hundred times—because I’d been her main confidante since the day I was born, only back then she was fun. She used to sing in the kitchen, tap-dance down the hallway, and sometimes do back bends on the lawn.

She sat down and lit another cigarette. “We were at a dance at Rockaway Park. All the big bands came there. Your father was with his buddies and they were teasing him in front of me, saying, ‘Why don’t you jitterbug with Grace?’ He wasn’t asking me because he had the piles and they knew it.”

“He couldn’t dance because he had piles?”

“Well, you know, they were uncomfortable. He was shy. The next Saturday I asked him to dance. You know your father, he’s a good dancer. And then we started dating, and six months later we married.” I figured my mother must’ve been a hot number because she didn’t hold sex off very long. “My family disowned me. They never liked Daddy, said he was a bum. I don’t think your father ever forgot that.”

“Do you wish you never got married?”

“Oh, you know. When I was single, I had a job, I had money, I bought nice clothes, went on vacations. I did what I pleased. Then when you marry, you go where the man wants. I moved to Wallingford. I hated it. I didn’t know nobody. Then you kids came. I don’t know. If you want to be happy, you stay single.”

“But you love Daddy?”

“Oh yeah. But I cried in the beginning. I was so homesick. I missed my friends. I missed my job. And your father never wanted me to work. A man has his pride. But once I got my license—you were, what were you, fifteen?—I said, the hell with this. We needed money. That’s when I started down Bradlees. Now, my legs, standing on those concrete floors. And taking care of two houses. I’m not getting any younger, you know.” My mother could only talk for so long before she started complaining.

“Ma, you don’t have to clean my house.” I tried to nip it in the bud.

“Yeah, well, once you have the baby, I won‘t, believe me.” Just then Bam Bam knocked on the door with his head. Bam Bam never said a word except “Bam Bam” and he only said that when he knocked on your door with his head.

“Are you going to let him in?” my mother said.

“Yes.” I got up and opened the door.

“What you let him in for?”

“I like him.”

Bam Bam sat at the table between us.

“Honest to God, Beverly, I can’t believe you’re having a baby in a couple of months. You better grow up.” This was her favorite and most irritating thing to say. “Have you met any neighbors yet?”

“No.”

She raised her eyebrows.

I should want to talk to Bam Bam’s aunt—the woman he and his sisters lived with? She ignored her children, looked like a walrus, and lived with a guy who had no teeth. Or the lady across the street, who polished her red GTO as often as she changed her clothes? It was true sometimes I wished I could invite one or two of the prettier ones over, but the one time I did talk to neighbors it had been a big mistake. They were Stu and Marsha Heckle, who lived on the other side of my house. I called them the Uglies because he had big angry pimples and a pin head while she was shaped like a mushroom and you could see her pink scalp through her hair. As if being so ugly weren’t enough, they were also Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was sitting on the front steps, while Raymond watched a baseball game inside, and Mr. Ugly came out and offered me a brownie “the Mrs.” had made for a meeting they were having that night of the Parents Against Sex Education in Schools Committee. “You really think sex education’s wrong?” I ventured.

“Darned right,” said Mr. Ugly. “Some stranger telling our kids about the birds and the bees? What gives them the right to take prayers out of the classroom and replace them with sex?”

This made me want to barf, since I figured if somebody had given me the scoop on birth control, I might not be stuck, a pregnant teenager on a front stoop in the public-housing project listening to a perverted Christian confuse prayers and sex.

“Like the Uglies?” I said to my mother. “I’m supposed to talk to people who don’t believe in sex education?”

“Everybody’s entitled to their opinions.”

“And so am I. I
like
Bam Bam. And I wish you’d butt out. It’s my business who I talk to.”

“I better go.”

I immediately felt bad for yelling. “What’re you cooking tonight?”

“I don’t know. It’s so hot, I thought I’d just have kielbasa and potato salad. And you?”

“Sloppy joes.”

“Why don’t you have the stew? I don’t know how you kids can eat that stuff.”

“Ma.”

“All right, all right. I got to go pick up a few things at Jeannie’s. You want to come, you need anything?” Jeannie’s was my father’s cousin Jeannie’s store, and every time I went there, she threw a box of goodies in my bag, like Ring Dings or Drake’s Coffee Cakes or a gallon of ice cream.

“No,” I said.

She opened the refrigerator and lifted the quart of milk. “You need more milk.” She opened the freezer. “That was the last can of juice? I’ll pick some up.”

She washed the cups and left.

I turned on the TV and watched my soaps with Bam Bam; then at around five I told the Bammer to go home for dinner. I opened up a can of sloppy joe mix, put two hamburger buns on each of our plates, and warmed some Green Giant corn. Sometimes Ray and I sat in front of the TV and ate off snack trays, but tonight I thought we’d sit on the back stoop, where it was cooler.

When Ray hadn’t shown up by five-thirty, I sat on the stoop with my plate balanced on my knees and tried not to get too worried. The first few times Ray was late I let my imagination run away, picturing him in his car wrapped around a tree or swallowed by a machine at work or simply driving and driving away from me and out of sight. But this time I figured he was probably just getting shitfaced as usual in a bar with some guy from work I’d never met.

After I finished dinner, I switched to the front stoop to watch for Ray’s car. I hoped Bam Bam and Berta and Betty, his two beautiful five- and six-year-old sisters, would show. Berta and Betty had bright red hair and startling blue eyes, but they were always filthy dirty and ragged just like their little brother. I almost felt as sorry for Berta and Betty as I did for Bam Bam, because sometimes I’d look out at night and there the two of them would be—their curly heads in the dark—walking in the gutter, Berta in front, Betty in back, just walking up and down the street looking at their feet.