The Boys of My Youth (6 page)

The Barbies get tired and go lie down on their canopied bed. Ken follows them in and leans at a forty-degree angle against
their cardboard dresser. He’s trying to tell them he’s tired, too.

“You’re going to prison, buddy,” Wendell finally says, exasperated. She heaves him under her bed and we get our Barbies up
and dress them.

“Ken better not try anything like
that
again,” ponytailed Barbie says. She’s wearing a blue brocade evening gown with the white fur coat, and one cracked high-heeled
shoe.

“He thinks he’s funny but he’s not,” my Barbie replies ominously. “He’s in jail and
we’re
the only ones who can bail him out.” She’s got on a yellow satin-and-net dress with a big rip up the back, and the boa is
wrapped tightly around her neck. By the time they get Ken out of jail and into his tuxedo, the whole evening is shot. The
judge has to be bribed with a giant nickel that ponytailed Barbie holds in her outstretched hand.

“Crap,” Wendell says when they holler at us from downstairs. I pack up my carrying case, drag it down the steps and out to
the car. I keep sitting down the whole way because I’m tired.

“Get moving,” my mother tells me. My aunt calls me Jody and gives me a little whack on the behind, but she doesn’t mean anything
by it. I climb in beside my sister and roll down the window.

“Whaaa,” Wendell says to me. This is the sound her Betsy-Wetsy makes when it gets swatted for peeing.

The car pulls out onto the highway and turns toward town.
I left my Barbie’s pizza-party outfit under Wendell’s pillow so she could use it until next time. Too bad, I miss it already.
Red tights and a striped corduroy shirt with tassels that hang down. It goes better with a bubble cut than a ponytail, really.
I should never have left it.

August, early evening. We’re crammed into Uncle Fred’s yellow Caddie, driven by Little Freddy, our cousin. I have on a low-backed,
peach-colored dress with spaghetti straps and a giant, itching wrist corsage made of greenery and tipped carnations. Wendell
is wearing an ivory wedding gown with a scoop neck and a hundred buttons down the back. It’s the dress our grandmother married
our grandfather in and it makes Wendell look like an angel. There are guys present — my boyfriend, a sweet, quiet type named
Eric, and Wendell’s brand-new husband, Mitch, a mild-mannered, blue-eyed farmer who is gazing at the cornfields streaking
by.

Cousin Freddy is in control at this point, possibly a big mistake. One misplaced elbow and all the windows go down at once,
causing hot air to whirl around inside the Caddie, stirring up everyone’s hair and causing a commotion. “Okay, okay,” Freddy
says in a rattled voice. He pushes another button and all the windows go back up, the commotion stops, the air conditioning
comes back into play.

Wendell has a wreath of baby’s breath perched on top of her head like a crown of thorns. A slight crevice has appeared in
the front of her hair, the baby’s breath has lifted with the landscape and sits balanced on two distinct formations. The back
is untouched. She wrestles herself over to the rearview mirror and gets a glimpse.

“Oh my God, it’s the Red Sea,” she says. “You parted my
hair
, Freddy.”

There is an audible combing noise inside the car for a moment
as she tries to impose some discipline on it. Freddy looks at her in the rearview mirror. He’s got Uncle Fred’s five-o’clock
shadow and Aunt Velma’s tiny teeth, he’s wearing a powder blue short-sleeved shirt and a flowery necktie, fashionably wide.
“We can borrow you a rake at one of these farmhouses,” he says, braking. The Caddie, dumb and obedient as a Clydesdale, slows
down, makes a left and then a right, pulls onto a dirt track leading into a cornfield. Freddy gets his wedding present from
under the seat, lights it, and passes it back. We pile out into the evening and stand, smoking, next to the car.

The sky is way up there, a lavender dome. There’s a gorgeous glow of radiation in the spot the sun just vacated, a pale peach
burst of pollution that matches my dress. The corn is waxy and dark green and goes on forever. We’re standing in a postcard.

“This is my big day,” Wendell mentions. The crown of thorns is resting peacefully, swifts are swooping back and forth, drinking
bugs out of the sky. We’re trying to keep the hems of our dresses from dragging in the dirt.

“This corn is
ready
,” Mitch says quietly, to no one in particular. The stalks are taller than us by a foot, a quiet crowd of ten million, all
of them watching us get high and wreck our outfits.

“Don’t lean on the car,” I tell Wendell. She stands in her usual slouch, one arm wrapped around her own waist, the other bringing
the joint to her lips. She squints and breathes in, breathes out. “You look like Lauren Bacall only with different hair,”
I say.

She considers that. “You look like Barbara Hershey only with a different face,” she says kindly. We beam at one another. This
is Wendell’s big day.

“Hey, bats,” Eric says suddenly. He’s looking up into the air where the swifts are plunging around. I’m very fond of him for
a moment, and then I feel a yawn coming on. A breeze has
picked up and the corn is rustling, a low hiss from the crowd. We’re making Wendell late to her own party.

The Caddie takes us out of the cornfield, haunch-first. Freddy steers it up to the highway, sets the cruise, and we all lean
back, stare out the side windows, and watch the landscape go from corn to soybeans to cows to corn. Next thing you know we’re
getting out again, this time at Wendell’s old house, the farm.

The wedding cake is a tiered affair with peach-colored roses and two very short people standing on top. Our mothers made the
mints. This is a big outdoor reception, with a striped awning and a skinned pig. The awning is over a rented dance floor,
the pig is over a bed of coals. There are as many relatives as you’d want to see in one place; the men standing around the
revolving pig, the women putting serving spoons in bowls of baked beans, potato salad, things made with Jell-O, things made
with whipped cream, things made with bacon bits.

Two uncles are tapping the beer keg. They keep drawing up tall glasses of foam and dumping it on the ground.

“I need a beer bad,” Wendell says. She touches her head. “How’s the crown?”

“Firm,” I tell her. We get ourselves two glasses of foam to carry around and wander over to the food tables.

“This has prunes in it, if you can believe that,” an aunt tells us, uncovering a bowl full of something pink that just came
from the trunk of her car. Our mothers are standing at a long table where more women are unwrapping gifts and logging them
in a book. Wendell’s mother is wearing a long dress, gray silk with big peach-colored roses and green leaves down the front.
My mother has on a pantsuit that everyone keeps admiring. They’re both wearing corsages. “Ooh,” my aunt says. A box has just
been opened containing an enormous macramé plant hanger, with big red beads and two feet of thick fringe.

“Holy shit,” Wendell says, taking a drink of foam.

The guests eat salads and chips and pig, the sky turns pewter, deep cobalt, then black. The band strikes up; four guys, two
of them relatives. They play a fast number and everyone under the age of ten gets out there to dance. The littlest kids concentrate
on trying to get it exactly right, swinging their hips and whirling their arms around. After about two songs all of them are
out of control and sweating, hair stuck to their head, girls seeing who can slide the farthest on patent-leather shoes, boys
taking aim and shooting each other with their index fingers without mercy. The parents have to step in, remove a few examples,
and put them in chairs. One gets spanked first for calling his mother a dipshit in front of the whole crowd.

A waltz begins to play and the older couples move out onto the floor, husbands with wives, various uncles with various aunts.
My own dad dances me around a few times, tells me my dress is pretty, and delivers me in front of Eric, who looks stupendously
bored and not quite stoned enough. “Hey, lotta fun,” he says insincerely. I make him go dance with my mom.

Wendell takes a break from talking to people and we pull up lawn chairs next to the dance floor. Her ivory dress shines in
the darkness. “I keep losing my drink,” she says. We share a full, warm beer that’s sitting on the ground between our chairs,
passing it back and forth, watching the fox-trotters.

“I wish I could do the fox-trot,” I say wistfully.

She nods. “We can’t do anything good,” she says wearily.

“We can two-step,” I answer, in our defense.

“Yeah,” she says through a yawn. “But big whoop, the two-step.” Two short great-aunts glide by at a smart clip and wave at
us, the bride and the bridesmaid. Wendell waves back like a beauty queen on a float, I smile and twinkle my fingers. “Yee-haw,”
I say quietly. On the other side of the dance floor Mitch stands listening intently to one of our distant, female relatives.
He winks at us when she isn’t looking and we wink back hugely. “That’s my first husband, Mitch,” Wendell says fondly.

The night air is damp and black against my arms, like mossy sleeves. There are stars by the millions up above our heads. Wendell
and I are sitting directly under Gemini, my birth sign, the oddball twins, the split personality. Part of me wants to get
up and dance, the other part wants to sit with my head tipped back. All of me wants to take off my wrist corsage.

“Nice ragweed corsage,” I tell Wendell. My arm itches like fire, long red hives are marching up to my elbow. I take it off
and put it under my chair.

“Give it a heave,” she suggests, and I do. It lands within twenty feet of our lawn chairs. A giant calico farm cat steps out
from nowhere, sniffs it, then picks it up delicately and fades back into the blackness. Under the awning the air is stained
yellow, the band is playing a disco song. Our mothers are in the midst of a line dance, doing their own version of the Hustle,
out of synch with everyone else. Their work is done, they’ve mingled, they’ve been fairly polite. Now they’ve got about twenty
minutes of careening before they collapse in lawn chairs and ask people to wait on them. They’re out there trying to kick
and clap at the same time, without putting their drinks down. I decide I’d better join them.

My mother’s cheeks are in bloom, from sloe gin and exertion, her lipstick has worn off but her corsage is still going strong,
a flower the size of a punch bowl. She tries for the relaxed shuffle-kick-pause-clap of all the other line dancers but can’t
do it. She sets her drink down at the edge of the dance floor where it’s sure to get knocked over and comes back to the line,
full steam ahead. She starts doing the Bump with Wendell’s mom and another aunt. Before they can get me involved, I dance
myself over to the edge of the floor and step out into the darkness.

“The moms need to be spanked and put in chairs,” I tell Eric,
who hands over his beer without being asked. He looks peaceful and affectionate; his hair is sticking straight up in front
and there’s something pink and crusty all over the front of his shirt.

“One of those kids threw a piece of cake at me,” he says placidly. He’s been smoking pot out in the corn with Freddy, I can
tell. The band pauses between numbers and the mothers keep dancing. In the distance, two uncles stand talking, using the blue
glow of a bug zapper to compare their mangled thumbnails. Up by the band, the bride is getting ready to throw the bouquet.
I’m being summoned to come stand in the group of girl cousins clustered around Wendell. I walk backward until I’m past the
first row of corn, Eric following amiably, pink-eyed and slap-happy. He’s using a swizzle stick for a toothpick.

Inside the corn it is completely dark, the stalks stand silent, the sounds of the party are indistinct. We can hear each other
breathing. There is a muffled cheering as the bouquet gets thrown, and then someone talks loud and long into the microphone,
offering a toast. Eric begins nuzzling my ear and talking baby talk.

“Hey,” I whisper to him.

“Mmmm?” he says.

“Have you ever seen a corn snake?”

He refuses to be intimidated. A waltz begins and we absently take up the one-two-three, one-two-three. Around us the dark
stalks ripple like water, the waves of the blue Danube wash over us. “I can show
you
a corn snake,” he says softly, into my hair.

Here is a scene. Two sisters talk together in low voices, one knits and the other picks lints carefully off a blanket. Their
eyes meet infrequently but the conversation is the same as always.

“He’s too young to retire,” my mother says. “He’ll be stuck to her like a burr, and then that’s all you’ll hear. How she can’t
stand having him underfoot.” One of my uncles wants to retire from selling Motorola televisions and spend the rest of his
years doing woodworking.

“How many pig-shaped cutting boards does anybody need?” my aunt says. She holds her knitting up to the window. “
Goddamn
it. I did it again.” She begins unraveling the last few rows, the yarn falling into a snarl around her feet.

“Here,” my mother says, holding out a hand, “give me that.” She takes the ball of pale yellow yarn and slowly, patiently winds
the kinked part back up. While they work, a nurse enters and reads a chart, takes a needle from a cart in the hall, and injects
it into the tube leading into my mother’s arm. When the door snicks shut behind her, my aunt quits unraveling long enough
to get a cigarette from her purse.

“They better not catch me doing this,” she says, lighting up. She’s using an old pop can for an ashtray. The cigarette trembles
slightly in her long fingers and her eyes find the ceiling, then the floor, then the window. She adjusts the belt on her suit,
a soft green knit tunic over pants, with silver buttons and a patterned scarf at the neck. She’s sitting in an orange plastic
chair.

My mother is wearing a dark blue negligee with a bedjacket and thick cotton socks. She takes a puff from my aunt’s cigarette
and exhales slowly, making professional smoke rings. “Now I’m corrupted,” she says dryly.