The Boys of My Youth (21 page)

We’re not even boy-crazy, just bored, watching him from Elizabeth’s bedroom window. She has antiqued French Provincial
furniture and a princess telephone. The room is a converted front porch, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a barricaded door
we use as an escape hatch on summer nights.

We’re reclining on the canopied bed, Elizabeth holding back the curtains with her toes so we can watch him without sitting
up. We’re getting ready to dial him again, although we just did this less than an hour ago.

“She won’t call him in,” I predict. Dave’s mother has a good sense of humor but it’s wearing thin.

“This time I’m telling her who it is,” Elizabeth says, dialing with a pencil. There’s a chance she’ll panic and hand the phone
to me so I roll off the bed and stand up for a while, out of range. I have my hair in two pigtails, thin ones, and I try to
fluff them up a little bit.

“You just wrecked them,” Elizabeth informs me, and then suddenly looks alert. “Hello? Is Dave there?” A moment of silence
while she listens. “Could you just tell him it’s Brenda?” Brenda is the name of the most popular ninth-grader. We’re seventh-graders.
Brenda wouldn’t be caught dead doing what we’re doing.

“She’s getting him!” Elizabeth freaks out, tries to force the phone on me. I won’t take it and the receiver lies on the bed
while we gesture to each other silently. Finally I hold it and we both listen, breathing steadily while he says his Hello?
Hello? Just when we think he’s getting ready to hang up he says, in a controlled ninth-grader voice,
“I know who this is
.”

I jam the receiver back on its cradle and we go nuts, leaping off the bed and running into each other. We pull the curtains
shut and overlap them, Elizabeth gets a bobby pin from her dresser and pins them shut. We sit on the floor panting and staring
at each other, wild-eyed and no longer bored.

My best friend Elizabeth is tall, with lanky blond hair that looks like straw, a long thin face, and black-rimmed glasses
in front of green eyes. These are her pre-beautiful days. I’m short and skinny with a pale face and limp brown hair. People
are always asking me if I feel well.

We met in French class, taught by Mrs. McLaughlin, the wife of Mr. McLaughlin, who teaches civics. She’s the cheer-leading
coach, if that gives you any idea, snake-thin with a lantern jaw and hair teased into a brown bubble. She’s a monster, although
her husband is likable enough.

We all had to take French names, chosen from a list that got passed around the first day. We sat in alphabetical order and
my last name starts with a
B
so I got a good one: Colette. Elizabeth, unfortunately, ended up with Georgette, because she comes at the end of the alphabet.
In retrospect, I kind of like the name Georgette, but at the time it was the kiss of death. It sounds like the parents were
hoping for a boy.

First week of junior high, everyone is terrified of their lockers and the hall monitors. It’s the year of the tent dress and
loud prints, so all the girls look like small hot-air balloons. Fishnet stockings are not allowed, and dresses can be no shorter
than two inches above the knee. People are getting busted left and right for that one, sent to the main office where they
have to kneel next to a yardstick. If your dress is too short you get sent home, no discussion.

“What if you just happen to
grow
?” Betsy Thomason asks hotly as she’s sent from the room by Mrs. McLaughlin.

“I’d suggest you not,” Mrs. McLaughlin replies lightly. She rolls her eyes at us in a conspiratorial way, says something in
French, and we all titter uncertainly. She’s wearing a pale green mohair suit, cinnamon hose, and dark green lizard skin high
heels. She weighs about ninety-eight pounds, smells like cigarette smoke, her lipstick goes up above her top lip an eighth
of
an inch. The cheerleaders sit on her desk before class starts and trade jokes with her; they call her Mrs. Mick. Everyone
else is utterly terrified of her. Suddenly she stops horsing around and looks directly at me, Colette.

“
Ou est la bibliothèque
?” she asks. I stare at her blankly, with a roaring in my ears. I’m so thin my nylons collect in pools at the knees and ankles,
I’m wearing a pink plaid dress made out of spongy material, my hair is shoulder-length and supposedly curled into a flip.
It’s so fine that my ears stick out on either side of my head. Everyone is turned toward me.

I tilt my head to the side and pretend I can almost think of it. The roaring is louder, like seashells are clamped to my head,
my heart is clattering.
Ou est la bibliothèque…
I’ve heard that somewhere before. Chances are it was last night, listening to my French dialogue record.

“Colette?” she says.
“Ou est la bibliothèque, s’il vous plait
?”

Now,
s’il vous plait
I’ve heard of. It means either please or thank you. I somehow manage to disengage myself, and join the other students and
Mrs. McLaughlin as they stare at poor Colette, who is thinking with her head tipped to the side, her hair resting on her shoulders
in horizontal sausages.

Mrs. McLaughlin finally makes a French-sounding noise of disgust and moves on. As her eyes scan the crowd, I enter my body
again, and tug on my dress. She fixes her pewter gaze on the girl sitting in the last seat in the last row. This girl has
straw-colored hair falling forward and bangs that come straight down and then swerve to the right. She is looking at the wall
next to her intently.

“Georgette?” Mrs. McLaughlin says.
“Ou est la bibliothèque?”
Georgette continues to watch the wall, but her left cheek, the visible one, slowly turns red beneath its curtain of hair.
Seconds tick past and then she whispers something.

“
Pardon
, Georgette?” Mrs. McLaughlin moves down the aisle to get a better view.

“Près d’ici,”
Georgette says softly. Then a little louder,
“Près d’ici.”

“If you were in France, no one would be able to understand you,” Mrs. McLaughlin says shortly. “Take your hand away from your
mouth and roll your r.” She waits.

“Okay,” Georgette says desperately; she holds her hands away from her mouth but they hover in the air about six inches above
her desk. “Okay,
pway dee-cee.”

Mrs. McLaughlin lets out a genuine laugh, for an instant you can see how Mr. McLaughlin might have ended up marrying her.
Then her eyes crinkle at the corners and she exclaims meanly, “You sound like Porky the Pig!” She laughs again, and then says,
“Pway d’ici,”
in a sputtering fat-cheeked way.

Georgette allows her hands to come back up to her face. She pushes her glasses up and stares once again intently at the wall.
The minute hand crawls around the face of the clock, others are called on, dialogue is read out of the book, words are written
on the board. At some point I look over at Georgette just as she looks at me. I shake my head, almost imperceptibly, in disbelief;
she widens her eyes for an instant, mimicking a look of abject terror.

“That was ninth grade, not seventh,” Elizabeth says. “We were already friends when that happened.” She’s at her office in
downtown Chicago, talking to me on the WATS line. “You wouldn’t believe what my desk looks like right now.”

I would because I’ve witnessed it. She’s an editor, and there are manuscripts stacked everywhere and yellow notes with
Urgent
scrawled across them stuck to the carpet. Her office is a wall that’s a window surrounded by three orange head-high partitions.
The view is of Lake Michigan, and at least in the summer it’s spectacular, white triangles of boat sails and a
stretching blue horizon. Thumbtacked to the partition next to her desk is a photograph of her and me at age twelve, wearing
matching lime green shorts (stretchy) and dark green men’s T-shirts (baggy). We both have our hair in braids, mine as slim
as snakes, hers thick and bushy. We’ve got variegated green yarn tied in bows at the ends. We’re draped across her canopy
bed, listening to records and enjoying our outfits.

“They’re actually making me work,” she says disconsolately. I can hear her rifling through papers. I’m at work, too, and I’m
an editor, too. My office is in a small town in Iowa, and it’s neat and tidy in a very annoying way, according to my co-workers.
There’s a picture on my bulletin board of the two of us when we were in love with Dave Anderson. We are lying backward against
the sloping front terrace of her yard, we have on light blue shorts (stretchy) and dark blue men’s T-shirts (baggy); we’re
using our bodies to form the letter D. I pass this tidbit along to Elizabeth.

“He must’ve thought we were nuts,” she replies. “What did we have on?”

I tell her. “Did we shoplift those shorts?” she asks.

We never shoplifted anything; we were too scared. “I think I did, didn’t I?” she says uncertainly. “Like underpants or something,
and you were chicken?” That rings a bell with me, but I can’t quite place it. So, if we didn’t meet in French class, then
how did we meet?

She thinks for a minute. “I have no idea,” she says. “We just
met
, that’s how we met.” More paper rifling. “I’ll try to remember and then call you after lunch. I have to proofread this thing
this afternoon.” She can proof a manuscript and talk on the phone at the same time; so can I. In school, we had a policy of
never studying unless it was absolutely necessary, and still got high-to-mediocre grades. This convinced us that we were smarter
than the average citizen, and actually, we’re still thinking
that way. It might be one of the reasons our husbands divorced us.

We’re in our late thirties, childless, and were flung at the same time out of our marriages and back into teenagehood. We
spend an hour on the telephone each week talking about boys and clothes. We alternate between hating our exes in a robust,
vociferous style, and lying paralyzed on our living room floors sobbing.

“Of
course
you’re lying on the floor,” I tell her consolingly. It’s a Tuesday morning and I’m ready to leave for work. She just called
me from her house in Chicago; she’s in her underwear, stretched out full length alongside her coffee table. She’s just realized
that the husband who recently left her really
did
recently leave her. “I didn’t believe it was actually happening,” she says into the receiver. She’s completely stuffed up
and having an asthma attack at the same time. I can hear her spraying her inhaler every few minutes. Talking about her divorce
is making me think of my own, and I feel like I suddenly need my inhaler, too. I set the phone down quietly while she’s weeping
and run into the bathroom to retrieve it.

“I’m having an asthma attack,” I tell her.

“Welcome to the
club,”
she replies. “The
divorce
club.” She’s coming out of it a little.

“Can you get up yet?” I ask her. She thinks maybe she can, so I direct her into her bedroom where she starts going through
the clothes in her closet. She’s on the cordless phone and we have to talk around a big annoying hiss in the background. She
picks out something to wear and gets dressed, putting the phone down once to pull a shirt over her head. I keep taking short,
recreational hits from my inhaler as I talk her through it. Faint voices distinguish themselves inside the phone hiss, the
content is blurred but emotion comes through. The voices rise and fall.

“Who
are
those people?” she asks once, cheerfully. The crisis has passed.

Fall of our eighth-grade year, her sister-in-law has come to stay with them for a while. She’s from Thailand, her name is
Jinn, and she has a flat, beautiful face and black hair that reaches to her waist in long oily ropes. She is nine months pregnant
and perpetually drowsy, alternating her time between sleeping on the living room couch, watching television, and cooking outlandish
food that no one else will touch. She eats sitting at the kitchen table with her eyes closed, wielding chopsticks expertly
and humming a song called “Kowloon Hong Kong” that she plays over and over on the hi-fi. The woman on the record jacket looks
like Jinn, with a large paper flower behind one ear and black hair wound up and held in place with pointy sticks. Her voice
is high and lilting, and basically off-key. We know all the words, even though they aren’t in our language. I’m not sure what
Jinn is doing here, I’ve never asked. Elizabeth’s stepbrother is in the service, and stares out at everyone from a lacy metal
frame on top of the television. He’s round-faced and wears a white hat and a navy blue coat with ribbons on the lapel. His
cheeks are pink and airbrushed and the whites of his eyes have been enhanced. If the baby turns out to be a boy it will be
named Hugh, after him; if it’s a girl it will be named Angelique, after a character on
Dark Shadows
, which we all watch religiously each afternoon at three. It comes on right before
The Addams Family
, a show that Jinn dismisses with a grunt and a wave of the hand before turning over on the couch and returning to an unconscious
state. She speaks English just fine, but it hardly ever occurs to us to talk to her. We treat her like one of the cats, minus
the torture. We ignore her unless she can do us a favor.