Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  Bonnie’s favorite class was elocution with Miss Gleason, who came on Thursday afternoons and didn’t frown and sigh like the regular teachers. Instead of the necktie the others wore, Miss Gleason pinned a cameo brooch at her throat, and she touched the tips of two fingers to it with an attractive, sorrowful look, whenever a child’s performance especially moved her. Bonnie’s often did, as when she recited “Gertrude, or Fidelity till Death”:

  And bid me not depart,” she cried: “my Rudolph, say not so!

  This is no time to quit thy side; peace—peace: I cannot go.

  Hath the world aught for me to fear, when death is on thy brow?

  The world—what means it?—mine is here; I will not leave thee now!

  “She was marvelous! Such a talent!” Miss Gleason tilted forward, as she expressed her approbation to Emma Parker after one school performance, and Bonnie, beside her, unconsciously mimicked her stance. “Won’t you let me take her home next week after school? You see, I promised her ice cream, if she could do it all the way through without a single mistake and, as you saw…” Miss Gleason lifted her hands, palms upward, while Bonnie clasped hers together—like Gertrude—in the proper elocutionist’s gesture of pleading.

  * * *

  Miss Gleason wasn’t the only one who singled Bonnie out.

  “What I need,” Mr. Godfrey said, “is some of that there charm.”

  Mr. Godfrey was Mabel Jean’s father, and he’d approached Bonnie after another school program. He was running for city council, he explained, and he wanted a girl to ride along with him the next afternoon “and just look cute as a button.”

  “Hadn’t you better take Mabel Jean?” Bonnie asked.

  Mabel Jean stood beside her father, one hand masking her face from nose to chin. Her recitation, though accurate, had been monotonous, and if she resembled a button, it was the dull metal kind that Bonnie’s mother attached to the tops of overalls.

  “I’ve got to save Mabel Jean for the speech,” Mr. Godfrey said in a booming voice that made his daughter wince. “When the family’s up onstage.”

  The upholstery in Mr. Godfrey’s car was a soft, tufted red, and he was a more skillful driver than Miss Gleason. He crooked his elbow around Bonnie’s knees to steady her, while he steered with one hand and held a megaphone to his lips with the other. “Godfrey’s your man! Win with Sam!” he boomed through the neighborhood.

  People stopped and turned to see what the ruckus was about. When Bonnie waved, they waved back and smiled.

  “Thata girl! That’s the way to get ’em!” Mr. Godfrey said. “Blow ’em kisses, why doncha?” So she did that, too, and they cheered and clapped their hands around her kisses and loved her.

  * * *

  Bonnie reached the pinnacle of her public success as the youngest member of the subjunior team representing Cement City in the Dallas County Scholastic Literary Contest. She’d filled three notebooks with words, four columns to a page, by the day of the contest, when the whole family traveled to Fair Park to watch her compete. From the streetcar, she watched the little slipshod, unpainted wooden houses and the dirt streets of West Dallas give way to a stretch of green and brown marshland and then the viaduct, that triumphant monument of cement that she’d learned about in school. Cement City was geographically close to Dallas, but a young girl from that town could have no business in Dallas proper, and this was the first occasion on which Bonnie had crossed the Trinity River.

  On the far side, the sudden rush and crush of buildings seemed to explode at her. Downtown Dallas was too full and too brilliant to take in, with automobiles darting around the streetcar and people streaming past big windows that flashed with colors. Tall, block-long structures, important with columns and fanciful with curlicues, were studded with windows that hinted at hundreds more people behind them. She stored the details to examine later, along with her impressions of the region that lay beyond, where the buildings thinned, and houses, as big as her school, took their place behind neatly shaped trees planted in even rows.

  Waiting for the competition to begin, Bonnie ate cold fried chicken and bread-and-butter pickles from the picnic basket and cuddled and cooed at babies and let a boy buy her a Ward’s Orange Crush. On the stage, she spoke into a microphone, over and over, until she was the very last one standing, and she saw Pop-Pop down below jump to his feet, cheering, and Mama and Grandma hug each other. Then a man whose hair had the oily scent of Brilliantine hung a blue ribbon around her neck and announced her name to the entire world: “Bonnie Parker of Cement City.”

  Despite Bonnie’s victory, when all the events were finished, the Brilliantined man awarded Highland Park, which had gotten firsts in lots of categories, the silver cup. No one questioned the results; after all, Highland Park, newly built “Beyond the City’s Dust and Smoke,” as its developer claimed, was lovely. The children who lived there were obviously winners, Bonnie thought, fingering her ribbon and seeing in a new light those who’d accompanied her from Cement City with their greasy food wrappings and loud voices.

  When they got home, Grandma made Bonnie’s favorite red beans and rice and Pop-Pop was the show-off, taking the grosgrain loop around to all the neighbors.

  “Just think, you’re the best in all of Dallas, Bonnie!” Mama said. “All of Dallas!”

  “Well, the best subjunior speller,” Bonnie said. She could afford to be modest in the face of such praise, but she was also sincere. She knew already that spelling wasn’t everything.

  Nevertheless, it was a great deal to be the best at anything. She was proud. Her daddy, Mama assured her, would have been very proud.

  The next day, the Dallas Morning News announced that Highland Park’s award had been a mistake. In fact, Cement City had the winning seventy-one points, to which Bonnie Parker, first in subjunior spelling, had made a significant contribution. Bonnie clipped the article and slid it into the bottom of her drawer.

  For many nights after that, Bonnie lay in bed with her eyes on the glowing hive of the Lone Star across the fields and dreamed that winning the spelling bee had marked the start of her real life. She reviewed the awkward, triumphant walk across the stage to collect her ribbon, when the tallest buildings of Dallas had been visible in the west and the applause from the crowd rolled out a carpet of sound to carry her forward. She was convinced she’d reached a launching point from which it wasn’t difficult to imagine herself on the far side of the windows set in the green roof of the Adolphus Hotel.

  CHAPTER 9

  As it turned out, however, the glory of the Literary Contest was an apex above which no further handholds were evident. The heat that in previous summers had acted as a sort of engine, driving her and Dutchie over the countryside, oppressed Bonnie that year, while at the same time, she felt distracted, as if the black crickets that were everywhere—glancing with their hard shells against arms and cheeks, gripping at ankles and necks with their hooked feet, and landing with horrid plops on plates of food—were also scrabbling inside her head.

  The household loosened and shifted around her. Wylie and Elvina moved out, and soon after that Grandma woke to find Krause’s body still and cold in its mattress ditch beside her. Aunt Millie and Uncle Dink moved their family to New Mexico from which they sent a postcard of the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns. Strange, spiky plants with huge blossoms like clusters of jewels surrounded a natural fortress of orange rock, which had at its center an open stone mouth, like the cave of Ali Baba. Bonnie pinned the card to the wall beside her bed.

  She had hopes for Cement City High School, and she liked the bustle and scramble of it, the streaming through the halls that was a more grown-up version of the swirl of the playground, but she couldn’t find her footing there. The high school teachers were impatient with her ready emotion. In English, when she interrupted a presentation of meter once too often to express her raptures over some unrelated aspect of the poem under discussion, the teacher shut her up. “I think the class could stand to hear a little less often from Miss Pa
rker,” he said.

  She might have been discouraged had she not been distracted by her own body, which was engaged in a process at once mundane and miraculous. There was nothing vague and insubstantial about becoming a woman. It was an earthy affair that demanded endurance and attention. Monthly, Bonnie rocked over waves of ache while she stared at Aunt Millie’s postcard. Sucked in through the stone mouth, she wandered through dark, subterranean passages, dreading whatever she approached but irresistibly drawn deeper into increasingly narrow spaces.

  “That’s just the way it is,” Mama said, although she promised it wouldn’t be so bad later on. Womanhood, like a colt, apparently required breaking. Grandma clucked, expressing both sympathy and satisfaction that another wayward child had been tamed by initiation. Hers, she confided, had hurt like the dickens, too, and she swelled with advice: a hot water bottle pressed against the abdomen, deep breaths to fill the womb with oxygen, a thick book—the Bible worked well—tucked under the back. But the only real relief, she warned, was a baby. And God knew that brought its own problems.

  * * *

  “It’s just the pink part you want to color,” Dutchie said in the tone in which she’d once instructed Bonnie to hop between jumps as she turned the rope. She conveyed a glistening drop of lacquer onto Bonnie’s fingernail with a brush the size of a toothpick. She’d already filed the five long nails Bonnie currently possessed—three on one hand, two on the other—to form points. “When it’s dry, I’ll put a little white on the moon and the tip.” Dutchie splayed her own fingers to demonstrate. The white bits were uneven, but that had no bearing on the overall effect of feminine allure.

  In school, where nail enamel wasn’t allowed, Bonnie kept her fingers curled and her hands in her lap. At home, she spent far more time examining her pores and rearranging her hair—amazed she’d never noticed these features before—than conjugating verbs and turning numbers inside out. She read less and wrote more, diary entries and fragments of poetry that scratched ineffectively at an overwhelming itch of feelings. Performing well in school seemed a childish exercise when compared with the serious occupation on which she’d now embarked: love.

  CHAPTER 10

  Bonnie tucked herself against Roy Thornton, as they drifted down the halls, so his six feet could pull her above “the madding crowd,” as she put it. She hadn’t read that book, but she liked the sound of the title. Being with Roy made her think of the song: “When I am king, dilly, dilly. You’ll be my queen.” She sang it softly, tipping her head back so she could admire his profile. “Roy means king, you know.”

  He didn’t. French was for girls and sissies.

  While Mr. Ranzo labored at the blackboard, demonstrating how to find the area of a cone, Bonnie bent a corner of her paper, pressed the folds sharp with the back of her shell-pink nail, and tore off a perfect, equilateral triangle.

  “Let’s get married!” she wrote in red ink. She drew a heart around the words, folded the paper, and slipped it to Roy.

  Her mother tried to talk Bonnie into taking time to grow up before becoming a wife, but Emma’s resolve was weak. With her own brief marriage forever bathed in the light of happier days, Emma remained as romantic as her daughter. Besides, caring for a husband and children was a worthy ambition—it had been Emma’s own. Most of all, however, she was somewhat in awe of her bold daughter’s certainty and her determination to snatch what she desired, qualities Emma had never possessed in any great quantity. In a test of wills, Bonnie was the stronger. She would be just like all the others, like Emma herself had been, married the minute she could pass as a woman.

  * * *

  Bonnie wanted a real wedding dress.

  “Just to wear the one time?” her mother said. “When you find the tree the money grows on, let me know.”

  But Emma had been secretly delighted to provide this luxury and bought a pale yellow fabric—more sunrise than lemon pie, she and Bonnie agreed—and sewed a special gown from a McCall’s pattern. A few days shy of her sixteenth birthday, the new Mrs. Thornton was drinking grape juice to toast the church ceremony, keeping her chin well forward to avoid stains.

  While aunts and uncles wished her happiness, she twisted the unfamiliar-feeling ring on her fourth finger. She’d chosen a pink quartz solitaire that caught the light, flanked by gems cut in modern rectangles that could pass as diamonds. Roy had insisted on a tungsten band—“Harder than steel,” he said. “Made to last.”

  Roy extended his part-time job slinging bags of cement into full-time hours, and on the strength of his paycheck, they rented a little house. Bonnie had the fun of furnishing it with wedding gifts—a rag rug from Grandma and a secondhand divan from Roy’s parents; a tablecloth patterned with bluebonnets from Dutchie and a set of glass dessert bowls that her girlfriends had bought at Kress’s. She supplemented these items with jelly jars and a few chipped plates, a mattress purchased on layaway, and the candlewick spread from the bed she’d shared with Billie.

  Once everything was in place, however, she was uneasy. When she was by herself, with nothing to do but chores, the hours dragged, gummy and unsatisfying; she felt colorless and out of focus, like Dallas’s gray-tinted sky. At the end of the day, she perched on the edge of the divan, flipping through magazines she’d looked at so often that she’d worn the ink off the pages, waiting for Roy, but when he finally came in, he smelled not like himself but of the factory and drink. She began to notice the way he bent over his plate to shovel food into his mouth and his habit of laughing through his nose. What had they talked about back at school? She felt trapped in a tiny house with a dull and distasteful stranger, and anxiety turned her saliva acrid and quickened her heartbeat.

  “Let’s go visit my mama,” she’d say, as soon as she’d cleared the supper dishes.

  It was even worse when he stayed out at night doing what all.

  By eight o’clock, she would give up on being a wife and go home to Olive Street, where she helped her sister study for her history test—“ ‘Give me liberty or give me death’ will be on for sure, Billie”—exclaimed over Buster’s new girlfriend’s new shingle, or just visited with her mama about any old thing. There was nothing exciting going on in that house, but at least there were human beings doing something!

  When Roy finally came home at three or four in the morning, he’d throw a wad of bills on the table—fifteen, twenty, once even sixty-eight dollars, as if he were a hunter unshouldering his kill—and the next night he’d squire her out for fried chicken or chicken-fried steak and to see a picture at the Old Mill, and for a few hours she felt proud to be a grown-up married woman. But in bed, she might have been any old mound of flesh; he seemed no longer to care that she was Bonnie. Afterward, alarmed by his sprawling, heavy form, she would panic.

  “Wake up, Roy!” She pushed at him with both hands. Her heart was beating so hard she was surprised that she couldn’t see it pushing at the skin of her chest.

  His eyes opened only a slit.

  “I dreamed my mama died. Go and see if she’s all right. Please!”

  He flung one sleep-heavy arm over her, pinning her to the bed. “She’s all right. It was just a dream.”

  But the fear had her like a runaway horse. “I’ll go myself, then. Let me up!”

  “Now, c’mere, honey,” he mumbled. “I’ll make you feel better.” He wrapped his arms around her and began moving his hips against her, but she thrust him off.

  “No! Roy! I need my mama! Go get her, please!” She was crying now, gasping for breath.

  When she opened the door to the two of them, her relief was instantaneous. “Aw, Mama, I’m sorry. You look so tired. You c’mon into bed with me, now. Roy won’t mind, will you, honey?”

  And he didn’t mind really, just rolled himself into a blanket on the divan and went back to sleep, while the “girls” whispered in the bedroom.

  Bonnie did her best to forestall her anxiety. She’d ask her mother to come over after work, complaining that no one had bothered to teach
her to cook, and Emma sighed, thinking of how often she and her own mother both had tried. Even now, Bonnie was clearly more interested in the company than in the cooking.

  While the tough hocks and shanks were breaking down and the dry beans were softening in the fatback drippings, Bonnie brought out cards, and she and Mama and Roy played rummy on the front room rug and sipped the moonshine Roy brought home. And then, of course, Mama had to stay and eat with them in their tiny kitchen. Bonnie ate her own dinner leaning against the stove because they only had the two chairs and, anyway, they couldn’t fit more than two plates on the little wooden table. When Emma stood to go, Bonnie ran to the bedroom for an extra blanket.

  “Don’t you want to stay, Mama? You don’t want to walk all that way home now.”

  Her mother had to laugh. “All that way home” was only two blocks, but often she stayed anyway, although it meant sleeping in her slip and hurrying home at dawn to fix herself for work. It was hard to refuse Bonnie when she needed you.

  “You two might as well just move on back home,” Emma finally said, after two months of such sleepovers.

  Bonnie and Roy didn’t hesitate. They were both relieved to quit playing house and have a mama again.

  * * *

  Bonnie had intended to have a big family, eight children at least, maybe twelve. She loved babies so much that she and Billie regularly went around the neighborhood collecting them, so they could host baby parties. Babies were so darling, lifting their plump arms to be held, staring at whatever caught their attention, touching things with their clumsy, insistent fingers. Bonnie knew that a baby of her own would be a bundle of love that was all hers and would stay with her always. Not like her husband, whose dalliances stretched to ten days in August and eighteen days in October. He left again in December, and in January, when he still hadn’t returned, she got a job waiting tables at Marco’s Café in downtown Dallas. It wasn’t until the following January that he finally showed up, having given Bonnie plenty of time to rage, stew, grow self-righteous, mourn, and finally shrug. Although his heavy brows accentuated the pleading in his eyes, she couldn’t dredge up an ounce of the feeling that once had propelled her.