The Boys of My Youth (15 page)

“She asleep?” he whispers.

My mother and I are looking at each other. “You asleep?” she asks.

I shake my head.

She sighs, stands up, goes to the telephone table, dials, and scratches her head with a pencil while she waits. “Wake up and
smell the hysteria,” she says into the receiver, and then carries the phone out to the kitchen. My father switches shoulders
again and we sit down to rock.

When my mother comes back in she’s carrying a bottle of beer. She’s glad we’re sitting down. Bernie and the monsters stopped
at the Dairy Queen out on Route 50 to get ice cream cones on their way home.

“You
bet
they did,” my father says, rocking. His shirt smells good.

There was no reason to cart the d-o-l-l in question all the way home, so he was placed in a t-r-a-s-h b-i-n at said Dairy
Queen. Under the awning, next to the counter. That would have been approximately three o’clock, and it would be now, oh, twelve-thirty.

My father groans. “Shit,” he says.

The chair is rocking and rocking.

My mother lifts her beer bottle by the neck and takes a sip. The chances are slim to none but maybe Roy Rogers should get
on Trigger and ride out there. Dale Evans will stay here with her beer.

Rocking and rocking.

My eyes won’t open, but I’m still wide-awake. I go back up in the air with my eyes closed and then down the hallway and to
the right. My arms flop when he puts me down, but I’m not
asleep. He leaves and comes back with Petie and I try to make the crying noise but nothing comes out.

After he closes the door, I struggle up just long enough to force Petie through the bars and onto the floor where he belongs.

“My pancakes have bonanas in them,” Linda tells me. She’s wearing shorts, a midriff top, and an Easter hat, pointing her fork
at me. I’m sitting in the big-girl chair with a dish towel tied around me so I don’t climb down. My pancakes are clean.

“Jo-Jo can have all the bananas she likes,” my mother says. “But they don’t interest her.” She’s drinking coffee and yawning,
tapping a cigarette against her wrist. She can’t find her lighter this morning.

“That’s because her doll is gone and she misses him,” Linda recites sadly. “Even though our dad went to find him he wasn’t
there because he probably went to the dump which we’re all sad about but there’s nothing we can do.” She forks in a mouthful
of pancake, chews thoughtfully, and swallows. “And now she keeps thinking, ‘Where is my
doll?
Where is my
poor doll?
What will I
do
without my
doll
?”’ She takes a long drink of milk and looks at my mother. “Right?”

“Right,” my mother says dryly. She gets up and lights her cigarette using a burner on the stove. Linda starts to speak again,
fork in the air, but she’s halted with a look and a pointed finger.

I can’t eat pancakes that don’t taste good. I push the plate away and lean over as far as the dish towel will allow, put my
cheek on the tablecloth, and close my eyes. Now they’re gone and it’s pure dark. My thumb tastes like syrup.

She’s talking to her girlfriend on the phone and polishing the spoons at the same time. I’m sitting on the footstool which
I’ve
pushed in front of the picture window. Linda walks by on her way outside, carrying a plastic bowl which she holds way up in
the air as she passes.

“I’ve got a norange,” she tells me.

And I have a pop bead that rolled out from under the footstool. It fits perfectly in my nose but we’re not doing that. I’m
just holding it.

“You didn’t ruin it,” my mother says. “Fill it with water, put in a tablespoon cream of tartar, and then boil the hell out
of it. You’ll take all that black off there.” She listens for a minute, polishing. “Well, you can be the bad housewife and
I’ll be the bad mother.” She listens again. “Sitting at the window, staring out,” she says in a low voice. “I don’t know what
to do next.” More listening and then she laughs. I put my forehead and both my hands against the glass. Behind me is the sound
of snapping fingers. She can snap her fingers so loud it scares you. I climb down off the footstool to get my bead and then
climb back up again. She snaps again, twice, and I have to carry the bead over and deposit it in her hand. She puts it in
the pocket of her pants and we stare at each other. “Maybe he ought to be cooking for
you
, since he’s the big expert,” she says. She feels my forehead, runs one hand quickly down the back of my shorts, turns me
around, and points me at the stool. “I sprinkle potato chips over the top before I put it in,” she says.

The front sidewalk has a hopscotch picture on it but Linda and Pattyann aren’t out there. I don’t know where a dump is, and
I don’t know how long it takes to get back from one. A car pulls up to the curb, stops, and one of my girl cousins gets out
holding a sack. Aunt Bernie and my other cousin stay in the car.

My mother hangs up the phone and goes to the door while Bernice and I watch each other through the glass. “We went to the
store and this is for Jo-Jo,” my cousin says when she hands the sack over. She’s been crying. “
We
didn’t get anything!” she bursts out.

My mother sends her into the kitchen for cookies. “One for you, one for your sister, and none for your mom,” she tells her.
She holds up the sack and calls, “You didn’t have to do this!” to Bernie, who rolls down her window.

“You’re raising a brat!” she hollers.

My mother laughs and shakes her fist in the air. The girl cousin goes back down the sidewalk and triumphantly shows her mother
the cookies before getting in. They pull away from the curb and my mother waves as they head down the street, then says, “I’d
like to slap that mouth right off her face.”

Linda and Pattyann come into view on the other side of the street. They look both ways and then hop across the street on one
foot.

“I can’t
wait
to see what’s in here,” my mother says brightly, setting the sack on the coffee table. She checks all her pockets, looking
for her lighter, then puts a cigarette in her mouth and heads to the kitchen to light it on the stove.

They got that sack at the store. Outside, a lady is walking by with a dog, and Linda and Pattyann pet the dog so fervently
the lady has to pull him away and keep going. The sack is folded over at the top and it’s pretty big but not that big. Linda
and Pattyann start playing hopscotch on the front sidewalk, using soda crackers for markers.

My mother is all excited about the sack. She sits down with her ashtray and pats the couch next to her. I climb up and then
lie down with my eyes closed. She can’t figure out why we aren’t more curious about our new present. It must be something
very special or they wouldn’t have brought it all the way over here. You know, there just might be something inside that will
make Jo-Jo forget her troubles. So. Is somebody ready to go down for her nap, or is she ready to
sit up here right now
and see what’s in the sack?

It’s a box with a picture of girl on it. She’s wearing an apron over her dress and a pearl necklace. Her hair is curled and
she
has lipstick on. Inside the box are a broom, a dustpan, and a vacuum cleaner.

“Christ,” my mother snorts. She puts her cigarette out, pulls me onto her lap, and rests her chin on my head. “Poor Jo-Jo,”
she says quietly.

They are miniature, and the vacuum cleaner has a pretend cord and a pretend knob to turn it on and off. The broom is yellow,
the dustpan is pink, and the vacuum cleaner is orange with a pink-and-yellow-striped handle.

They’re so glamorous I can barely look at them.

“She spent the whole afternoon cleaning under the beds,” my mother tells my father. They’re sharing a beer in the living room.
My hair is wet from the bath and I have my cowgirl jam-mies on. Linda is in the bathtub now, singing a loud, monotonous song
about not getting a new toy.

My mother is sewing a button on my father’s shirt while he’s still wearing it. “I was having this terrible feeling,” she says,
“that she’d be this forty-year-old woman, going around telling people that we took her d-o-l-l away from her.” She leans down
to bite off the thread.

My father tests his new button and it works perfectly. “In three days she won’t remember she even
knew
that d-o-l-l,” he predicts.

They stop talking and, in unison, lift their feet so I can vacuum under them.

I
f she has to come up here we’re
both going to regret it. It’s ten o’clock at night and there has been a territorial dispute over where the line down the
middle of the bed really is. After a short skirmish we have yelled downstairs to the mediator. From the top of the stairs
all we can see is my father’s bare feet crossed on the white divan and a corner of my mother’s newspaper. They’re drinking
beer and eating popcorn. Linda pins my arms behind my back and I bite her. There are screaming noises.

She’s had it. Once more and it’s going to be the belt.

This surprises us and we tiptoe back into the bedroom. My mother’s spanking abilities scare her and so she has a ratio of
about one spank per forty threats. We always know where we happen to be along the spanking continuum. That’s why we can’t
believe she’s going straight for the belt. We’re more afraid
of her hand than the belt, because the belt is a cloth one from a housedress, while her hand is made of granite. But still,
this is erratic behavior on her part, and we don’t care for it.

Once we’re back in the bedroom with the door closed, I say, “I’ll give
her
the belt.” Linda opens the door again and points her face down the hall toward the stairs.

“Mother?” she calls. “Jo Ann just said something you might want to hear.”

There’s a thud from downstairs and the sound of feet stomping. Linda slams the door shut and leaps for the bed; we hide under
the covers, breathing into our nightgowns, but nothing happens. She faked us out.

The border dispute has to be settled with what is known as a foot-feet fight. This is where you lie on your back and put the
soles of your feet against the soles of your sister’s feet and then push with all your weak might until she gets tired of
it and shoves you off the bed. There are rules to foot-feet fighting, but they are frequently defied, and then someone gets
hurt, usually from being rocketed off the bed backward and onto the floor (me). On this occasion what goes wrong is that my
own right foot slips from its station on her left foot and propels itself forward until it is stopped by her eye socket. She
rolls herself up into a ball.

“That didn’t hurt,” I say immediately. She’s got her head under a pillow, crying furiously and trying to kick me. I carefully
get out of the way of her legs until she has me wadded up at the foot of the bed. Her sobs now have an alarming, forlorn quality,
and it isn’t like her to muffle them. I try a different approach: I start crying, too.

Eventually we fall asleep and roll as we always do into the demilitarized zone down the center of the bed. When I wake in
the morning she’s sitting in the rocking chair with her ankles crossed, virtuously reading her science book. I go back under
the covers immediately. She has the most pronounced black eye I’ve ever seen, even on TV. I’m a dead man.

We dress ourselves slowly, not looking at one another; her underwear says Friday, mine says Wednesday, but today it doesn’t
matter who is right. White knee socks, navy blue knee socks, a gray skirt, a plaid one. Blouses. Teeth, faces, hair.

On the third step from the bottom we stop and look at ourselves in the hallway mirror. I’ve got my barrette in wrong. Linda
has her mohair sweater buttoned over her shoulders like a cape, the way the girls in her class do it. Her face is thin on
one side and fat on the other. The fat side is purple. I move slightly so that my own reflection goes into the bevel of the
mirror, distorting my nose and one eye until I look like the monster that I am. It’s time to sit down.

“Oh no you don’t,” she says firmly, lifting me by the collar of my shirt, steering me into the kitchen ahead of her. My mother
is at the table, looking into a magnifying mirror, putting on makeup. A cigarette is going in the ashtray. My father is cracking
our morning eggs into a bowl, dish towel tied around his waist, a spatula in his back pocket. He’s singing the “I’m a Bum”
song that drives my mother nuts. She’s turning the radio up right at the moment we step into her line of view. The announcer
makes a staticky squawk and then disappears into silence. My father sets his spoon down. My mother puts her glasses on.

Linda steps forward, Jo Ann steps backward.

I am immediately dispatched to the living room, where I can hear every word but not defend myself by looking stricken. In
the kitchen my father whistles long and appreciatively until my mother tells him to shut up.
“Look
at this,” she cries. I know just what she’s doing: turning Linda’s face back and forth, back and forth. I pick up some knitting
from its basket and before I realize it I’ve unraveled a row and a half. My heart starts
pounding. I’m a maniac, kicking people in the head and unraveling knitting.