A Penny a Kiss

by Judy McConnell

  Once Luanne invited a girl from the beauty school over on her Sunday off, and I sat in the maid’s room with them until they took off on a downtown bus to see a movie. I watched them as they climbed the hill to the bus stop. I was hooked. I became her shadow.

  One night after dinner when I was helping Luanne dry dishes, she invited me to visit her family farm. My parents agreed—they saw her as a treasure, a saint—and so it was arranged. Dad drove us to the Grey­hound bus depot downtown and off we went. I carried a tote bag holding a Kleenex packet, a book, a hard-back glass case, a Fuller brush, and six packs of Juicy Fruit gum. Mother gave me a small bunch of nosegays for Mrs. Johnson.

  I peered excitedly out the bus window as we drove into the thinning landscape—I was off on an adventure with Luanne! I almost put my hand through her arm, but instead leaned ever so slightly against her shoulder. The fact that she had a fifteen-year-old brother at home intrigued me—but not for long. What interest had I in boys? All they could do was throw balls to each other and stare at you from a distance.

  The bus streaked deeper into the country, racing by boxy houses, billboards flashing Hamm’s Beer and Rolaids, and filling stations with two pumps. Gradually we saw nothing but massive fields of black farmland and stretches of pine woods.

  Luanne’s brother Calvin spent summers working the farm but was bent on becoming a surveyor. I had never heard of anyone named Calvin; the name must have come from the Bible, like those other strange names, Caleb, Cain, and Noah, names I didn’t think existed in real life. I wondered if Calvin would be wearing a stiff, white priest’s collar. A boy. Hmm. I nestled my head against Luanne’s coat. It was hard to think about anything in the proximity of Luanne’s smile.

  Mr. And Mrs. Johnson gave me a warm welcome. Mrs. Johnson, a slender woman in a calico skirt and long, water-soaked fingers, led me to a room in the back of the house that Luanne’s oldest brother Jeremiah had occupied until he left for a job at the iron-ore mine in Duluth. At supper Mr. Johnson sat at the head of the table, eating silently. When I asked if they had any dogs, he explained that the dogs they kept were not pets. They were never let into the house. Their job was to keep out the coyotes, and when a dog got sick he took it behind the barn and shot it. When I suggested contacting the vet he just laughed—such an expense was out of the question for creatures more prolific than rats.

  Calvin sat across from me, listening. He wore a brown t-shirt and sat up straight, like someone who was used to upright, weight-lifting work, instead of slumping over books all the time like me. I snuck a look at his thin arms lying casually on the table and his hands bronzed from the sun. Strands of straight black hair drooped over his forehead and his ears were shaped like mushrooms, but his face was darkly handsome and he held a serious look older than his years, along with an impish laugh and sparkling brown eyes. He looked at me a lot and asked me if I had a dog, as Luanne had told him I was dog crazy. I told him about Debby and described our games of hide and seek in the woods and how I’d run off and she ran around excitedly looking for my hideout.

  My ideas about boys were contradictory. On one hand they did all the fun things and inhabited a world I clamored to share. I saw them as creatures apart, doing things that were rougher and harder, like flying airplanes, shooting guns, and leaping on an adversary. On the other hand, they thought only of themselves and rarely looked at girls, as if girls weren’t worth noticing. They weren’t even nice. I couldn’t see much point in boys. Well, Timmy was a boy and he was all right, I had to admit. Once, a strange boy looked straight at me, keeping his eyes glued on mine, and I’d felt a piercing twinge of pleasure. I decided to keep an open mind.

  At the crack of dawn, I found myself seated at the breakfast table with Luanne and Calvin, while their mother served us fried eggs, thick slabs of bacon, and grease-soaked potatoes. “Eat up. It’ll put spin on your bones,” she said. Mr. Johnson was already out in the shed repairing the tractor.

  While Luanne took up household duties, I was sent to explore the barn, where I sighted a score of bedraggled cats sweeping around corners and disappearing. The odor of dank stalls, animal sweat and hay was everywhere, imparting a non-unpleasant earthy richness. When I stepped outside, pulling the heavy barn door closed, I was met with the pungent odor of fresh hay mixed with whiffs of manure.

  The farm was fresh with life. Fields of corn stretched to the horizon. At the far edge of the wind-swept woods, a cluster of black-and-white cows rotated their mouths as they basked in the early morning sun. Mr. Johnson showed me how to reach under fat chicken bottoms for eggs, and Luanne gave me a ride on the tractor. We threw sticks for the mutts that lived behind the tool shed. Life here was natural and outdoorsy, and I was entranced with the novelty of it all. The odors were intoxicating, the scrambling of life at all sides invigorating, and the sight of Calvin’s thin form bent over a backhoe sent a flutter down my back.

  That night Calvin volunteered to show me the farm after dark. He couldn’t believe I had never been in a barn before or seen a live mouse and laughed when I worried the cats hadn’t been fed. The cats kept the mouse population down, he explained. They were not interested in humans and went their own way.

  After supper we explored the barn. Calvin’s flashlight caught a mouse darting across the floor, the beam highlighting its uplifted rump and toothpick tail. As we inched across the floor my bare arm brushed Calvin’s.

  “I don’t guess there are any animals about, maybe it’s too early,” I whispered idly, intensely aware of the figure next to me.

  “They’re here, for sure. We have to be quiet.”

  We stopped. I heard a flitter of movement from the rafters and the sound of Calvin’s breathing. “Come on, there’s something else.” He led the way to the barn door.

  I followed him across the bumpy ground towards an enormous silo, so tall I couldn’t see the top. Inside we were hit by the sharp smell of fermenting grain. I clamped my hand over my nose.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Calvin laughed. We followed the path of his flashlight over to a wall ladder that stretched up the side of the curved wall and straight up into an endless darkness. He turned towards me.

  “We’ll go to the upper platform,” he said in a low, soft voice into my ear. I moved closer. With the flashlight off, his low voice was my only point of contact. I liked the feel of his breath against my ear and decided to stay next to him. Sensing my apprehension he indicated that he would stay by me no matter what unknowns were lurking in the dark. Despite the fact that he was not much older than I was and that I hardly knew him, for some reason I trusted him completely. I turned and looked straight into his soft blue shirt illuminated behind the flashlight. His shadowed face smiled down at me and a strange stirring crept into my chest and filtered into my fingertips. I straightened up with a new alertness.

  I was also aware of a delicious sense of daring.

  “You first. I’ll be right behind,” he said.

  Up I went. The flare of the flashlight slashed through the dark like a knife as it bobbed up and down in Calvin’s hand. The rungs of the ladder felt slippery, and I hung on to each rung tightly. There was no trace of life as we know it, only the tall outline of the silo reaching stories high into the sky. Down below, getting further and further away, a vast nothingness. I was suddenly frightened.

  “Keep going,” he prompted from beneath me.

  We must have been higher than the Empire State Building when we finally reached the top. I could smell the odor of sour hay rising from the pit below. Calvin asked if I want to sit on the edge of the platform and dangle my feet over the side. I looked down into the black bottomless pit from which I was sure no creature would ever return. I didn’t think so. He laughed—he was always laughing at me—and we sat back on the floor, encircled by the damp walls, until finally he said his mother would worry and we’d better go back.

  The Johnsons saw Luanne an
d me off at the bus stop. They had treated me as an honored guest. To Calvin, I guess I was the big city girl. He asked if he could write to me. I said yes. Why would he want to write to me, I wondered? But the idea seemed jolly and I waited for his letters. Calvin was not such a bad name—had an exotic ring, much more interesting than, say, Timmy. He signed his letters, “Your faithful Calvin,” and I signed mine, “With friendly regards, Judy.”

  The boys in school were old hat, boring, and preoccupied with roughhousing. But Calvin was different. He liked the fact that I was a girl, he even liked me. I tore open his letters, then hid them from Mother and her condescending laugh. It was delicious to have a secret involving a boy and to be venturing into unknown territory.

  A year later, Luanne had completed beautician training, found a job as a hair dresser in Minneapolis, and obtained a room of her own. The following year she married her long-time boyfriend and moved back to her home town and she and Calvin dissolved into a forgotten dreamland of the past.

  Chapter 6: Boys and Shadow Nights

  It was the beginning of June 1948, and the entire school was gathered at Meadowbrook for the big event—our eighth grade graduation. For eight years I had worked my way from classroom to classroom, first across the hall, then up the wide cross-back stairway to the second floor containing the fifth/sixth and the seventh/eighth grade rooms. Now I waited in the basement sitting in a line of folding chairs with my nine classmates. Around the room flowers burst from bowls and chartreuse vases and parents flowed in through the door and slowly filled the folding chairs.

  Mr. Williams, standing by the door in a charcoal gabardine jacket and tie, looked strange without his usual white collar shirt and grey slacks. Mr. Williams, a tall man in his forties with rumpled hair and a smooth tan, taught seventh and eighth grade and doubled as the school principal. Mr. Williams ran the classroom with an unassuming nonchalance. The anticipation of his speech, which we knew would be loaded with respectable words—be good, be grateful, be prudent—kept us lined up neatly in our seats. An excitement ran down our row of ten targeted students. We were finished with one phase, moving on to something bigger, better, older. We’d used up the space here. I couldn’t wait to get out.

  I glanced at my fellow eighth graders lined up next to me: Snookie and Jean, then Nancy Krech, Betty Farendorff, Bob White, Colin Campbell, Ken Woodburn, Timmy Olson and a recent transfer named Joyce. Most of us had been together for years. Betty was quiet and withdrawn. Nancy, the fat one, was so hang-dog and supplicating that everyone avoided her. Snookie, small and perky, joined Jean and me during recess periods, but she lived out on Olson Highway, too far to hang out with on weekends. As for the boys—aside from Timmy I hardly spoke to them. Despite the close day-by-day proximity, I didn’t know much about any of them except Jean and Timmy. Even Timmy and I hadn’t spent much time together in recent years. Except for a hayride party his mother hosted for his thirteenth birthday, I didn’t see him outside of school. At the end of the day, we all piled in buses, dispersed across the wide reaches of Golden Valley, and disappeared into our separate houses. The only person I saw on weekends was Jean. I was at her house constantly.

  Besides, I was shy. Those embarrassing or awkward episodes that accompany the growing-up process crumpled me, the details haunting my thoughts for months. One day I forgot to get off the school bus at my stop and flew up the aisle, blubbering indecipherable nonsense at the bus driver, then tumbled down the steps and ran. Behind me I heard the bus explode into hysterical laughter. For months my mind replayed this episode in a loop of shame that began its frightful roll whenever my guard was down.

  I caught Timmy’s eye but quickly remembered I was mad at him and turned my head. No way would I forgive him. He had ruined the plan of a lifetime. When the lilacs were starting to show a flash of purple, Timmy and I decided we were fed up with parents and rules and school. The sole purpose of parents was to keep us penned in. School was just as bad. The classrooms were so close together and the rooms so small we couldn’t get away with anything—adult eyes were every­where. In the classroom we behaved with modest and obedient decorum—to challenge authority head-on would have been unthinkable—and we longed to try something new, something fascinating and out of bounds.

  Here was the plan.

  We would run away together. We would leave it all behind. We knew all the popular songs of the day and would become singers . . . or something. Plans were vague. Our first step was to get safely away and things would fall into place from there. Friday after school we would skip the bus and link up after the grounds had cleared and the building was deserted. We worked out alibis. (I was going to Jean’s; Timmy’s was going to his aunt’s.) We would not be missed until we were safely away and out of reach. Each of us would bring one small suitcase and five dollars. We would hitch-hike. People were sure to pick up two innocent-looking kids. We were brother and sister, going to visit our grandmother who lived wherever the car was going. It was foolproof.

  Our plan was in order, but first we had to learn “Besame Mucho” by heart. For days we practiced, cloistered in the copy room at the end of the hall. Finally we set up a time and place to meet for the big day of departure.

  At the last minute Timmy backed out. On Friday afternoon, just as the yellow bus pulled up in front of school, he informed me it was off. He couldn’t do it. Why not? He wasn’t ready. What? I was furious. That was the end of Timmy. He was not to be trusted. I wouldn’t be speaking to him any time soon.

  Drawing my patent leather shoes under the chair, I looked around the large basement room, the all-purpose setting for meetings, assem­blies, and entertainment. For years, Friday night bean suppers had been served here, presided over by the four Meadowbrook teachers. We showed up with our parents and sat around long lunch tables spread with white paper tablecloths. Bulging women in print wrap-around aprons handed out hamburgers and dipped ladles of small brown beans spiked with ham onto the plates, along with warm butter-soaked white bread that melted in your mouth. Supper was followed by sing-a-longs, performances of student musical talent, or an excerpt from a play.

  At one of these suppers, our class performed a skit that revolved around a popular song of the day called “Pass That Peace Pipe,” a ditty about Indians that spoke of burying the hatchet, punctuated with “Ugh, ugh, ugh.” The boys were dressed in feather headdresses and Indian leather, while the girls pranced around playing young Indian maidens. While singing we marched in a circle, bobbing our heads up and down in floppy imitation of an Indian campfire dance.

  When you quarrel it’s grand to patch it

  Pass that peace pipe and bury the hatchet

  If your temper is getting a top hand

  All you have to do is stop and

  Pass that peace pipe and bury that hatchet

  Like the Chocataws, Chickasaws, Chattahoochees, Chippewas do.

  Since everyone in the audience knew the song, we didn’t have to be polished. Those were the days when “cowboys and Indians” was a popular kid’s game. The good-guys—the cowboys—chased the murderous Indians with bows and arrows while yipping and flapping their hands over their mouths in loud whoops. There was something wild and dominating about the process and the conquering of righteousness over the evil enemy. No one gave the racial implications a second thought.

  The auditorium grew hushed as Mr. Williams walked up to the podium. Today was the big day. Today the eighth graders were to be honored. It was over. Mr. Williams was about to tell us what it meant.

  “Boys and girls,” began Mr. Williams, his eyes scanning the front row of listeners. “You are to be congratulated. You have completed your first eight years of school. You will be launched out into the world, a world of challenge and reward. You will be faced with opportunities. You must take them.” Mr. Williams cleared his throat. “You are leaving the safe shelter of your young years. From now on more will be expected of you. If you
apply yourselves at St. Louis Park High School your years will be fruitful, and like a small fish in a big bowl, you will learn to swim in a swifter current.” We listened obediently, the odor of glazed sugar and sponge cake wafting by our faces. To us the future meant only one thing: high school and the coveted world of football teams and dances.

  After the ceremony we grabbed plates of food and passed around autograph books. Mine, which I still possess, ratty and faded, contains verses like, “You might be on end, but I want to be your friend” and “Roses are red, violets are blue, skunks stink and so do you.”

  And so ended my days at the little red-brick school house. There would be no more watching the Lilac Day queen receive her crown on the hill behind Meadowbrook. No more sneaking copies of National Geographic from the hall bookcase. No more production sessions in the upstairs copy room where Timmy and I wrote the one-page school newspaper. No more dropping spit balls on Mr. Williams’s head from the upstairs lavatory. It was time to leave and I was ready.

  Exit pranks. Make way for a new inspiration—boys!

  * * *

  In the middle of ninth grade, Dad moved us to a larger prairie style-house on Lowry Hill in Minneapolis. We could look out the front windows rising above Groveland Terrace and see the dome of the Basilica on Hennepin Avenue beyond the parade grounds. The front entrance led through a second door into a central hall that branched to other sections of the house. A wide stairway ascended halfway up to a landing and then made a U-turn to the second floor. A push-button intercom system was linked to wooden wall phones that hung in each floor, but it was no longer in operating condition.

  We now had four bedrooms. My room cornered on Groveland and Dupont avenues and Susan’s room was behind mine. Harold occupied the former maid’s room in the back, which boasted windows on three sides and had its own bath and stairway descending to the kitchen. Dad fitted the amusement room in the basement with a pinball machine, a record player, and a dry bar with three stools and stocked the separate kitchenette with cokes, ginger ale, and bottles of Miller Highlight beer. A long driveway entering from Dupont Avenue ran behind the house and down the hill to Groveland Terrace on the other side. Beyond two stone pillars framing the driveway stood a detached, three-car garage. An elderly couple, George and Pearl, lived in the apartment above. George mowed the yard, did odd jobs, and tended the pee-own-ees, as he called them, which lined either side of the driveway. Pearl cleaned the big house.