The Boys of My Youth (22 page)

Sunday afternoon, family cookout at Blackhawk State Park, Elizabeth and I spend our time looking for boys and trying to act
like we’re not with her parents. Jinn sits at the picnic table reading a magazine from Thailand full of hieroglyphics and
cigarette advertisements. Elizabeth’s stepfather turns pieces of chicken on the grill. He has a friendly disposition, warm
brown eyes, and a slight limp left over from a stroke. Elizabeth’s mother is a little less personable, as are all our friends’
mothers. Everyone I know has a mother who operates on the fringes of what’s appropriate. Elizabeth’s mother, Doris, was especially
excitable, and relied on us to calm her down.

“Shut up, Mother,” Elizabeth would tell her. Most of the time Doris would shut up, but occasionally it struck her the wrong
way and all manner of hell would break loose. One time she chased Elizabeth into the bathtub and then threw a pop bottle at
her. It broke and glass went everywhere except on Elizabeth, who nevertheless screamed bloody murder and threatened to call
the police. I snuck home during that one, and Jinn put a pillow over her head. Afterward Doris took to her bed with a bad
back and had to be waited on for a week. Elizabeth was supposedly grounded, which, in practice, meant she wasn’t.

So, the picnic. Elizabeth and I entertain ourselves by putting Styrofoam cups on the ends of sticks and holding them like
marshmallows over the burning coals. They melt and run fantastically, forming odd arty-looking shapes that impress us. We
give each one a name and make plans to spray-paint them when we get home. A rowboat full of boys goes by out in the water
and we find a reason to wander down there, where we look upriver and downriver but see no other likely suspects. Suddenly
we are being summoned, and quickly, from the picnic area. We head back up at an obedient trot and discover that Jinn has gone
into labor sometime after the meal. She didn’t say anything, but stopped reading her magazine and began holding
her stomach. Pretty soon she was groaning, a big splash occurred, and then everyone was in a hurry.

They made us put our art-cups in the trunk along with all the other crammed-in picnic stuff. Jinn sat in the front seat between
Elizabeth’s parents, and Elizabeth and I had the back seat to ourselves. Her father actually laid rubber leaving the parking
lot but then settled down and drove responsibly through the streets of our city. Most of the way Jinn was silent but every
once in a while she would gasp out a long word in Thai that sounded like swearing because it started with an
f
.

None of us were trying to comfort her. Elizabeth and I were slightly out of control, hanging our heads out the car windows
and silently screaming
We’re having a baby!
to each other. Her dad said, in a cheerful voice, “Make way, we’re coming through,” every time a stoplight appeared up ahead,
while her mom kept murmuring, “How are we doing,” and casting sidelong glances at Jinn, who had her eyes closed and was saying
the Thai swear word quietly over and over. Suddenly she made an
oof
noise, like someone had punched her, and then produced a muffled scream. Doris glanced at us in the back seat, where we had
quieted down and were coming to the mutual, silent conclusion that we’d never have children.

Jinn screamed again, a short burst, and Elizabeth said,
“Mom,”
two syllables, in an accusing voice.

“Were doing the best we can do,”
Doris said in a defensive voice. You could tell she thought this was all her fault, and that Elizabeth agreed. I stared out
my car window and watched houses going by at a steady clip, refusing to let the sound coming from Jinn get from my ears to
my brain. Soon enough we were at the door of the emergency room, and the two females in the front seat got out and went in,
Jinn with one hand on her back and one clamped to her mouth, Doris looking frazzled and unprepared.

I got dropped off at my house and Elizabeth and her stepdad went home to theirs.

“Well, I just saw somebody having a
baby,”
I reported to my mother. “Right at the
picnic.”
She finds this news highly interesting but I don’t have much more to say. My older sister follows me upstairs and I tell
her everything. “The entire back of her dress was
soaked,”
I say. I shudder. “She was in agony,
screaming
, but don’t tell Mom.” Our mother isn’t keen on extremes of any sort, or on foreigners. For that matter, she doesn’t care
much for Elizabeth’s family, because she thinks they’re different from us. The only difference I can see is that the dad isn’t
an alcoholic, but I don’t mention that to her. She’s known for getting in bad moods and grounding people for no reason. In
the particular case of my older sister who has a mouth on her, my mother is prone to face slaps at odd moments. My sister
takes it standing up, sometimes saying
“That
didn’t hurt” before stomping upstairs and throwing my clothes all over the place.

Later in the evening Elizabeth telephones. “I can’t talk,” she says, “because we might get a call from the hospital.” Nevertheless,
we spend forty minutes on a review of the afternoon, the boys in the rowboat getting as much airtime as the pregnant lady
in the car.

The next morning Elizabeth shows up at the usual time to walk to school with me. I see her coming up the back walk with her
head down, yellow hair covering her face. She looks mad.

I ask her if the baby got born. She pushes past me and goes into the living room, sits on the couch and presses her face into
the back of it. She starts crying loudly and can’t stop.

“It
died,”
she says furiously, “and it was a
girl.”
At this she begins afresh, with her hands over her cheeks and her mouth a grimace.

My mother is in the kitchen eating oatmeal before work, my dad is shaving using the mirror hanging on the kitchen door.
He stops whistling and takes himself upstairs, my mother comes in the living room and looks at Elizabeth.

“Oh Liz, that’s awful,” she says. She feels truly bad, I can tell, but she also figures it was to be expected, I can tell
that too. I feel somber and useless, I’ve never seen Elizabeth cry like that, even after the pop-bottle-in-the-tub business.
This is something only the moms can handle; mine calls hers, Elizabeth gets sent back home, and I go off to school alone,
in a stupid dress that doesn’t look right.

Later we talk about it between ourselves, but we don’t say a word to Jinn. She goes on, shell-shocked, her beautiful face
flat as a photograph and expressionless. She continues to watch
Dark Shadows
and listen to “Kowloon Hong Kong,” she continues to doze at the kitchen table and on the couch, she glides through the rooms
of the apartment in her flowered housecoat as she always did, as visible and invisible as one of the cats.

Eighth grade, spring, between classes. The hallway is damp and swampy, loud with clanging lockers and the clamor of overstimulation;
popular kids are being hailed, unpopular ones hooted at. A drinking fountain, a line in front of it, me in an impossibly short
skirt and white knee socks. The dress code has been lifted for three months now, the boys wear pants as tight as long-line
girdles and the girls wear hip-hugger skirts that are less than a foot long. Getting a drink at the fountain involves a cross
between kneeling and squatting. The boy in front of me suddenly steps to the side, turns on the fountain, and with a sweep
of his left hand says, “After you, my dear.” I die, recover, squat/kneel, drink, put my head down, and scuttle away, wiping
my chin.

I have just discovered love. The
real
thing, none of this Dave Anderson crap.

In the stairwell, I notice for the first time that outside the
window the ground is soaked and emerald-colored, jonquils lie supine in the rain, tulips are lolling their fat heads. I take
the stairs three at a time, turning my miniskirt into a wide belt, race down the hall to Elizabeth’s home-ec class and grab
her as she’s going in.

“Get sick,” I tell her.

“We’re making Rice Krispies treats,” she says. “Wait ‘til math.”

“I
can’t
wait, I’m dying,” I say pleadingly, and then, because I know it’s true:
“You’ll
die too.”

Fifteen minutes later we are reclining side by side on two narrow cots in the nurse’s office. Elizabeth has a tremendous headache
that requires a washcloth draped across her forehead, I have a tremendous stomachache that requires a metal bowl balanced
on my chest.

I’m in love, it’s serious, he’s beyond what we’ve encountered before. He is like a
Beatle
, he’s that cute. No kidding, honest to God, et cetera.

“He said ‘my dear’?” she asks in a hoarse whisper. “He sounds like a queeb.”

He’s not a queeb, you had to be there. He made it sound
funny
. Not queebie at
all
, in fact, just the opposite. He’s the opposite.

The nurse pokes her head in and we both groan. “No talking,” she says.

“We weren’t,” we say in unison.

Elizabeth is willing to fall in love with him, too, but she needs to see him first, as a formality. We agree to meet after
class at the fountain, in case he comes back for another drink. We go out and tell the nurse we’re better. She sends Elizabeth
back to home-ec but makes me go lie down again.

“You’re still pale,” she says shortly.

He doesn’t show up at the drinking fountain again, but after
school we go to my house to pore over last year’s yearbook. I have a feeling he’s older than us, and it’s true. We find him
among last year’s eighth-graders.

“Jeff Bach,” I announce, and hand the yearbook over. We’re in my living room eating Fritos and drinking pop. My sister hasn’t
gotten home from high school yet so we’re safe, nobody’s bugging us.

“He’s got blond hair,” she remarks, staring at the picture closely. She takes another handful of Fritos. “I thought you said
he looked like a Beatle.” She puts them in her mouth.

“I said he’s as cute
as
a Beatle,” I reply. “Not that he
was
a Beatle.”

She stares at his face intently as she chews, and then comes to a conclusion. “Let’s face it,” she proclaims, “he’s
cuter
than a Beatle.”

We’re both in love with Jeff Bach, ninth-grader extraordinaire.

The back door slams and my sister appears in the doorway to the living room. She is wearing a granny dress, her thick brown
hair tucked into a crocheted snood at the nape of her neck. She arches her brows. “How’s kindergarten?” she asks. She takes
the bag of Fritos from Elizabeth’s lap and heads upstairs with it. “Clean this house up,” she says as she rounds the curve
at the landing.

We leave and walk over to Elizabeth’s house, where we tell Jinn about our new boyfriend. We get Elizabeth’s yearbook and make
her look at the picture. “Blond,” she says politely, and turns her eyes back to the television. Pretty soon Elizabeth’s stepdad
comes home from work. We show him the picture. “How would you like it if I married
this
guy?” Elizabeth asks him rhetorically. He says he’d like it just fine and asks why the newspaper hasn’t come yet.

“Who knows, that’s why,” Elizabeth replies. I get killed if
I’m not there when my mother gets home from work, so I leave and call up Elizabeth ten minutes later from two blocks over.

“What’re you doing?” I ask.

There are four girls in our group, plus two best friends who hang around with another group approximately half the time. Besides
Elizabeth and me there are Madelyn and Renee, and the two best friends, Carol and Janet. Renee is the oldest of six kids and
we stay overnight at her house a lot because both her parents work nights at the post office and leave Renee in charge. They
live in a big old house with three floors, and it never seems like there is any food except long loaves of sandwich bread,
giant boxes of generic cereal, and powdered milk. If you’re looking for mustard, or a bottle of pop, forget it. Renee is the
only kid in the family with a room of her own and she keeps potato chips and Pop-tarts in her closet, which locks with a skeleton
key. Each bedroom has a fire escape ladder in a metal box underneath the window.

Madelyn is destined to move away unexpectedly when we’re in ninth grade, and all I can remember about her is that she was
funny and mean, and that she threw a half pound of frozen hamburger at her mother once when she was told she couldn’t go to
a movie.

“Plus her dad slept in a coffin,” Elizabeth reminds me. She has called me from her bathtub, the water is still running and
she’s talking loudly to compensate. “I saw him taking a nap in it once; it was a black box without a lid, and the headboard
said
R.I.P.”

“What a sicko,” I say.

“No kidding,” she agrees. The sound of water running stops abruptly, a splash is heard. “Wasn’t there something suspicious
about him?”

“That was Renee’s dad.” Renee’s dad made everyone uncomfortable, he was very young, just like her mom, and he talked to us
like we were adults. He flirted with us, except we didn’t identify it as that, because he was a dad. We took on nervous smiles
and sidled backward whenever he was around.

“There was more to
that
story than met the eye,” she said, then, “hang on,” and the sound of a giant lapping wave comes through the phone. “Jo Ann?”
she says loudly.
“Jo Ann?
I dunked my head; now I’ve got water in my ears.”

I feel cranky suddenly, and want to get off the phone. “Don’t
call
me when you’re in the bathtub,” I say. “I don’t want to listen to your personal hygiene. And I’m late for something.”

“Buh-ruther,” she says sarcastically. “What did I do? I dunked my head, big deal; how’m I supposed to wash my hair?”

“How about on your own time, that ever occur to you?”

“How about if I smack your head off?”
and she slams her phone down with a huge noise.

We are thirty-eight years old. I wait fifteen minutes and call her back.

“Hi,” she says. “Guess what I got in the mail?”