The Worst Years of Your Life (39 page)

I remembered what LeeAnn had said about Merry the majorette, making all the kids march behind her in a parade. I could see there would never be a halt unless I called it. “You're on your own, Aunt Merry.” I hadn't practiced saying this, but it sounded as if I had.

Just then LeeAnn yelled through the open window, “Fried chicken!”

Merry slammed her trunk shut and blew past me into the house. I went in behind her, walking at a leisurely pace.

T
HE FOLLOWING SUMMER
, when I was sixteen, I got a part-time job at the Magruder City Pool. They put me down in the basement of the rec center, next to the locker rooms. I sat on a stool behind a battered wooden counter, collecting admission fees and handing out wire baskets and locker keys attached to large safety pins. Most of my earnings I put in a savings account I'd started with my half of Steve and Cyndi's check. Escape money.

One Saturday afternoon, after a heavy rainfall, when the pool was virtually empty, Lisa and her mother came through. Lisa's hair was cut in a bob and she wore a Speedo bathing suit. Her mother, a beautiful, haggard-looking woman, trailed behind her, wearing thongs with big plastic daisies on them, smoking a cigarette.

“Hello, Lisa,” I said. My face flushed and I wished I'd kept my mouth shut.

Lisa looked up. She didn't recognize me or even seem to wonder how I knew her name. “Hi,” she said. She grabbed her mother's hand and tugged. “I'm going off the high dive. First thing.”

Her mother smiled at me and rolled her eyes. She didn't recognize me either. “We got a show-off here.” She slid some change across the counter. “The diving board at the club isn't as high as this one.”

I held out their baskets and keys, and Mrs. Lazar took them. I had to say something more to Lisa. “I'm the one who held you underwater. Two summers ago.” I smiled idiotically. “Sorry.”

Lisa nodded. “Okay.” She started running down the hall toward the women's dressing room. “Cowabunga!” she yelled.

There was a line forming behind Mrs. Lazar. She glared at me, gearing herself up to give me a piece of her mind, even though, I could tell, she'd rather not be bothered. She took a drag of her cigarette. “I sincerely hope you got rehabilitated up in Des Moines,” she said.

“I did,” I said. “Completely.”

Kids in line were pushing and shoving. Mrs. Lazar kept glaring at me, waiting for me to grovel. The ash on her cigarette was ready to drop onto my counter.

“But then again,” I said, “I might do the same thing anytime. Or worse.”

“I see,” she said. She turned and addressed a suntanned woman behind her. “I guess they let anyone work here. This place used to have some class.”

“Hurry up,” barked the suntanned woman.

Mrs. Lazar shook her head in a world-weary way and flip-flopped off down the hall, flicking her ash on the floor as she went.

The suntanned woman handed me a crumpled dollar bill. “Some folks think they run the world,” she said. “If you know what I mean.”

“I do,” I said. “I certainly do.”

T
HE DAY
M
RS
. L
INKABAUGH MOVED IN NEXT DOOR,
I cracked my pubic bone in two places. It was 97 degrees, according to the giant thermometer Karl Bongaard had hanging on the side of his house. I was swinging at the time, watching the men from the moving company slide pieces of a fuzzy red water bed out of their truck, when my outgrown swing set pitched like a mechanical bull. A fire hydrant loomed, and I touched down somewhere along the curb. Through a small patch of consciousness, I looked up into the faces of four Mayflower movers as the sky ripped open and all of the clouds dropped to earth like wet rags.

At the Veterans Administration Training Hospital, I was in Room 503 with air-conditioning and a man named Victor Samuels, who pulled open the separating curtain every chance he got and started talking. He said he was originally from St. Louis and that last year his prostate had started hardening up into a little missile. My mother, Bobbie, said we had to be polite to Victor Samuels no matter what because he was probably tortured by the Vietnamese.

Dr. Maryland, the orthopedist, liked Bobbie right away. When he pinned up the X-rays and she asked whether smoking was all right if she held it out the window, he said, “Why don't the both of you call me Kevin, okay?”

This kind of thing happens all the time. My father used to say it was because Bobbie could never repulse a man no matter how hard she tried. From the time she was seven to nineteen and a half, my mother, Roberta Marie Peek, was Miss Glendora Heights Southern Division, Miss Teen Hideaway Cove, Miss Young Zuma Beach, Miss Autumn for Sunkist, and third runner-up to Miss La Jolla because she was skinnier then, and nobody could tell she was pregnant.

Even now that she's almost twenty-nine, all the men still like her, and it doesn't matter whether they find out first about the trophies and the train trips and the foot modeling. Jim Juergens, the softball coach from the community center, even came into the girls' locker room when I was changing once and said he had special dreams about making love to Bobbie and getting to be my father. That was the same week Coach Juergens got arrested for walking around the dugout without pants.

Kevin sat in a chair at the foot of my bed and took a long time showing us the X-rays.

“As you can see,” he said, smiling over at Bobbie, “the fractures are on the left side of the bone. To prevent a limp, I had to actually rebreak the pelvis in the center, just to set the whole thing back in balance.”

“This is unbelievable,” Bobbie said, leaning over to hand me her last piece of spearmint gum. “I thought this kind of thing only happened to Denny.”

Kevin looked at the tan line where Bobbie's wedding ring used to be.

“Who's Denny?” he asked, staring at her like she was the first woman he'd ever seen in his whole life.

Usually, we don't mention Denny to new people right away, because he has concentration problems and can't keep his hands off things. The last medical bill we had from Denny was when Bobbie took him to the Rub-a-Dub Automatic Car Wash and let him ride through it in the driver's seat all alone. He got into the glove compartment, where Bobbie left her purse, and swallowed three sleeping pills and a half-pack of wintergreen Certs and had to be rushed straight to the Poison Center.

“Denny's my little brother,” I said, and Kevin looked relieved. He turned back to the X-rays.

“Actually, this was a really easy one,” he said to Bobbie, pointing to the problem area in the center of the screen. “Once I had a clean break, I used stainless steel to stitch up the bone.”

Bobbie held out her hand and I put the gum wrapper in it.

“Metal stitches,” she said, shaking her head at the ceiling. “Holy Christ.”

“It's better than a broken leg, though, isn't it?” Kevin said. “At her age, the bones are so soft, it's like sewing tissue. She doesn't even have to wear a cast.”

Bobbie sighed into her hands, and Kevin looked like he might cry.

“Please don't worry,” he said to her. “The incision will barely leave a scar.”

I asked Kevin if he was married.

“Of course he is,” Bobbie said, sliding the window shut and brushing her cigarette ashes off the sill. “And whoever guesses how much money Kevin makes in a year gets a free Jell-O.”

I guessed a million dollars and Kevin smiled.

“I'm afraid we're only a government hospital around here,” he said. “I guess I get the Jell-O.”

Later, after Victor Samuels came back from his radiation and went to sleep, Bobbie scooted her chair up next to the bed and told me two things: I had to call my father collect right away to tell him I almost died, and that yesterday she had entered me in a preteen beauty contest. I reminded her that my pubic bone was broken, but she said she had already tracked down a sponsor who assured her I would not have to appear in the swimsuit section with any of the other eleven-year-olds or be required to go up or down the auditorium stairs on my crutches.

“They said they'd even put in a ramp if we want,” she said, handing me the telephone before she went off with a nurse to sign more papers. “Isn't that terrific?”

My father was supposed to be living in Coos Bay by the water, and most of the time I was the one in charge of calling him. He wasn't usually at his house very much, but since we were in a hospital, I had the operator ring for as long a time as she could, just in case he picked up.

“How did his voice sound?” Bobbie asked when she got back from her errands.

“Okay,” I said. “It sounded all right.”

On my last day at the Veteran's, Peggy, the physical therapist, taught me how to use the crutches. My job was to practice limping up and down the hallway on alternating legs while she and Bobbie kept the rhythm going with loud claps. In the pharmacy on the first floor, I chose purple armrests for the crutches, and Bobbie bought me flower stickers to paste on the wood. Then, when it was time to go, Kevin walked us over to our car and gave Bobbie his telephone number.

“There are a few choices on here,” he said, ripping her off an extra page from his prescription pad, “so give me a buzz anytime.”

On the drive home, Bobbie told me everything she knew about our new neighbor. Her name was Mrs. Linkabaugh; her ex-husband, Bill Linkabaugh, was not allowed within 1,000 feet of her house by order of the Oregon State Police; and on the day she finally moved in, Mrs. Linkabaugh handed out at least fifty flyers with Bill Linkabaugh's picture on them just to warn everybody.

“And I want you and your brother to be very careful of characters like these,” Bobbie said, cutting off a delivery truck on her way into the carpool lane, “because North Willamette is going downhill.”

North Willamette is our street. When we were with my father, we lived on North Amherst, North Lombard, and North McCrum. Now Bobbie says she'll never move again, not even if North Willamette becomes a slum.

Mrs. Linkabaugh's new house used to belong to Oliver Grevitch, who died trying to put up his storm windows. One Saturday he got out his ladder and climbed all the way up the side of his house and had a thrombosis. Bobbie's boyfriend Dale was in the driveway when it happened, and he says Mr. Grevitch hung on to his ladder the whole time and the two of them fell together, just like a chopped-down tree.

“Light me a cigarette, will you?” said Bobbie. “This bitch in the Gold Duster won't get off my ass.”

When I got it lit, I tapped her, and she held out her hand so I could stick it between the right fingers. The woman in the Gold Duster leaned on the horn, but Bobbie ignored her and smoked with her tip out the window. When the honking got louder, she stuck her middle finger in the rearview mirror.

“This woman can eat me,” she said, punching down the automatic lock button and pulling us back into the exit lane. “Now, roll up your window and hold on, we're taking Killingsworth.”

I turned down the radio and kept my eyes on the floor mats, because Killingsworth and Alberta were bad avenues. The summer lifeguard at Peninsula Park used to tell everybody in the free swim that carloads of men from Killingsworth kidnapped girls like us all the time and did it to them over and over in the double-doggy style.

When we got to Lombard Street and into downtown St. John's, Bobbie drove past the Coronet store, where Dale was the assistant manager.

“Honk and wave!” she said, but I left my hands at my sides. The last time we visited Dale at work, he was refusing to give somebody a refund on a stuffed animal. The man asked for store credit, but Dale pulled a pencil out of his red apron and pointed it at the man's chest.

“That's not our policy at Coronet, buddy,” he said. “No refunds. No exchanges.”

Bobbie leaned across the gear shift, trying to see in through the big double doors. “Wave!” she said. “Why aren't you waving?”

“Because nobody will see me.”

“Well, that is a really nice thing,” she said, jamming down the gas and pulling us back out into the road, “considering Dale paid for your pubic bone.”

“He did not.”

“Oh yes he did.”

I told her he didn't. My fractures were covered by our family health insurance, or paid for by my grandmother Peek.

“Oh, really?” said Bobbie, turning from the wheel and grabbing for another cigarette. “You better have a word with your father about that.”

I didn't know what this meant, but there wasn't time to figure it out, because she was digging through her purse, and something large made of poured concrete seemed to be racing toward the car at a dangerous speed, and I said to watch out, watch out, but it was too late, because by then we were driving onto a parked island.

As the tow truck pulled us into our driveway, I saw Mrs. Linkabaugh for the first time. She was on her front porch in a velour mini-robe, sweeping the Astroturf doormat that used to belong to Oliver Grevitch. I stared at her thigh muscles flexing and her big chest swinging around in a nice sort of rhythm.

“Don't look at her!” Bobbie said. “God.”

But everybody stared as Mrs. Linkabaugh bent over and shook out her mat, because she was a lot bigger than Bobbie. Everywhere.

“Jesus Christ,” the two-truck driver said. “Get a load of that shit.”

“Well, she doesn't seem too concerned about Psycho Bill today,” Bobbie said, waving and smiling at Mrs. Linkabaugh through the tow-truck window. I waved at Mrs. Linkabaugh, too, and she blew me a kiss, shrugging her apologies as the chained Doberman in her yard lunged toward us over and over.

After he got the car unhooked, the tow-truck driver, whose pocket said
I'm Eddie—May I help you?
, didn't even talk to Bobbie. He walked right by the Bill Linkabaugh poster staple-gunned to the telephone pole and straight up onto Mrs. Linkabaugh's parking strip to introduce himself. While they were talking, Mrs. Linkabaugh retied her bathrobe two times, and Eddie kept teasing her Doberman with his elbow, making the dog jump up and down like a seal.

Pretty soon, they went into Mrs. Linkabaugh's house, and I imagined her putting on tea to boil and
I'm Eddie—May I help you?
coming up behind her like my father used to do with Bobbie when he lived with us, and while the kettle was screaming, the kitchen table would be bumping and scooting itself all the way across the floor and into another room. But Mrs. Linkabaugh's windows stayed just as dark as Oliver Grevitch's used to be in the old days, and there was nothing to see except the empty tow truck and the Doberman that kept on whining and throwing itself up against her front door.

Bobbie hung our picture of Bill Linkabaugh on the center of the refrigerator. She told Denny and me to watch for him at all times, and if we saw anybody that looked even a bit like him, we were to dial 911. Denny sat with his cap gun aimed out the window until it was time for dinner, and everybody looked at the Bill Linkabaugh poster while we ate. A refrigerator magnet was between his eyes, which made him seem even more threatening.

“I can't look and I can't look away,” Bobbie said, staring at the poster. “He's got Son of Sam written all over him.”

Denny dipped the tip of his gun in and out of his milk. “Son of who?”

“Sam,” said Bobbie. “Son of Sam. And don't make people repeat themselves.”

When we were done eating, Bobbie propped me on the couch with all six of her pillows and opened the windows and doors as wide as they would go. She paid Denny five dollars to go to bed early, and while she was watching him get ready, to make sure he didn't brush his teeth with just water or put his pajamas on over his regular clothes, I listened to the crickets and the swishing of the automatic sprinklers that Mrs. Linkabaugh had inherited from Oliver Grevitch. There were eight sprinkler heads in all, installed in two perfect rows of four on the front and back lawns and set to a special timing system that watered each section of the grass in wide, revolving fountains every night at nine-thirty. The night was so quiet, I could even hear stray drops of sprinkler splatter against the side of Mrs. Linkabaugh's house if I listened close enough, and I concentrated on the bright yellow light seeping out through her curtains, wishing they would open up and let me see if she and Eddie were inside listening to the sprinklers, too.