Miss Route 66

by Michael Lund

  Randy belonged with me at the second level of popularity, though we were not quite a couple. We were not "going steady" officially, but he wasn't asking anyone else out and I had politely declined the occasional invitation from other boys.

  "Randy, are you working for your father this summer?"

  "My Dad?" He was puzzled and, I think, a bit embarrassed by the degree of his ardor revealed a few moments earlier. "Yeah, I guess so. You know, I go with him on appraisals, drive the car and stuff."

  "Yeah. I was just wondering. I'm going to be kind of busy this summer, extra music lessons."

  "Music?"

  "I've started learning the flute. My Mom's teaching me."

  "That's nice. The flute. You going to be in the band?"

  Randy played football and basketball, though he wasn't a star in either sport. He played enough (tight end and forward) that he enjoyed it, but he also spent time on the bench fraternizing with the pep band that sat right behind the players.

  I hadn't thought that far ahead, really, though, now that he mentioned it, perhaps joining the band would give me a new outlet and a chance to get to know other people.

  "Probably," I said. "We'll see how much I improve, but I plan to work hard."

  "You should try out for the band, though," Randy continued, more interested than I would have expected. "They go on good trips."

  And here he was back at me again, his engine grinding steadily.

  I wondered, then, perhaps for the first time, if Randy was the best I could do in obtaining a companion in this journey of sensations connecting to dating. I'd had offers from a number of my classmates before sliding into this more or less regular relationship with Randy. Should I begin looking again, looking higher?

  And I thought too about my relationship to Sally Winchester, onetime childhood best friend.

  Really, was she that much cuter than I was? I needed to study myself in the full-length mirror on Tricia's closet door again. Was she so much smarter? My grades were probably better overall, but she spoke up so eagerly in class, while I held back shyly, that teachers thought of her as bright.

  Was she so much more profoundly talented? She had gone twice to the Midwest regional baton twirling competition in Kansas City and, according to her reports, failed to win a prize only because the judges favored those girls from big cities--St. Louis, Omaha, Tulsa.

  Stories in the Fairfield Daily Mirror recounted her local successes and her outstanding performances beyond the county. And pictures of any parade included Sally in her short skirt, tasseled jacket, bright smile. So it was assumed she was a superior being, a goddess spending a last few years with us mere mortals before an apotheosis into distant stardom.

  I remembered the two of us contemplating a fantasy world of princes and princesses in her backyard playhouse. Our two Barbies were dressed the same and had the same aspirations. Each was to be found by the Ken of her dreams. What had happened to advance Sally so far beyond me in the fulfillment of such hopes?

  "You should get Sally Winchester to help you with the flute," said Randy out of nowhere.

  "She doesn't, um, play the flute."

  "Oh, I don't know. It's like a baton, though, isn't it. It's how you hold it, I bet, the fingers twirling and all."

  Was it right there that my sublimated resentment of Sally Winchester slid into something closer to rivalry with her? It might have been. It might very well have been.

  4

  Why didn't I know more about my own potential as a musical instrument, that is, as a woman capable of experiencing pleasure? Perhaps because my mother's version of the famous "birds and the bees" talk was really a "birds and bees and pears" talk.

  "I want to explain where pears . . . you know, the kind Mrs. Baker puts up . . . I want to explain where pears come from," she said one dark winter evening.

  The illustration she chose was close to hand, of course, with pear trees in most of the yards of the Circle. And, well, the shape of that fruit reinforced the most important point all mothers in those days wanted daughters to remember: pear shape equals pregnancy, which you do not want.

  Our mothers meant pregnancy before marriage, naturally, but there was an undercurrent in those days too of not wanting pregnancy even in marriage. Motherhood and children were desired, certainly. But pregnancy was an unavoidable nuisance.

  As even the most casual observer knows, the female body's shape changes in the nine months of an embryo's development. But pride in that phase of motherhood itself was only in its infancy in the early 1960s. It would grow large, of course, in later phases of the women's liberation movement, but a Victorian desire to hide or disguise female anatomy lingered in the Midwestern small towns of mid-century.

  "You know that boys and girls are different," began my mother deliberately. My father, of course, was not involved in this discussion. "It's only the girls who have babies."

  Now that I think about it, our father was seldom in the house before supper time, and mother and daughters had plenty of time and space for their activities. After dinner, Dad generally watched TV and dozed, so again we were left in our female places with our feminine projects.

  My father worked for the telephone company, starting out in the field but steadily moving up to the position of branch supervisor. It was all Bell and AT&T in those days, of course, a monopoly sure, but, hey!, the phones always worked. While veteran employees like my father had job security and good long-term benefits, we never considered ourselves particularly well-off.

  "Girls are the flowers," my mother went on. "You bloom on the tree, white and beautiful."

  My memory of this scene places it in the evening, something like 8 o'clock. We're in my parents' bedroom on the main floor (we sisters have rooms and a bath built into two thirds of the former attic). It's a strain for my mother, but I give her credit for committing herself to carry this lesson through to the end.

  "You're like a flower here," she says, gesturing discreetly below her waist. "The petals are . . . well . . . sort of like your legs. And in the deepest part there, you have the . . . the beginnings of a baby."

  I'm sure I must ask some questions in here, though I don't remember precisely. My inquiry and her response make vague pictures in my mind. I sketch out only an approximate scenario of events. Perhaps junior high science helps me understand eggs and fertilization, so, over time, I will be able to fill in (I won't say "flesh out"!) the gaps in my mother's account.

  "And then the man comes, like the bee with his stinger," says my Mom, frowning and waving a hand, one finger extended. She knows it's not a stinger, and she will be more accurate anatomically shortly. But she's sure I should be cautious in this whole business, aware of all potential for harm.

  I don't think of my own parents in this process, of course, my attractive mother, who looks young and still has her figure, and my overweight father. I know from family photographs that my father had been slim when they were first married. But he began a middle-aged spread in his mid-thirties that advanced steadily for a decade. In fact, now that I think about it, at the time I brought home my flute, my father could easily be said to have a pear-shaped body!

  "A man's . . . member . . . ," offers my Mom. She's gone beyond "stinger" but she can't make herself say the word "penis." "His member goes in . . . in the flower."

  While this is certainly not an attractive idea to me, it's not really frightening. Of course, the only "members" I've seen are those of male infants having their diapers changed. Sandy Johnson did, somehow, come across a science textbook from a college anatomy class, and it provided us with the curved outline of relaxed masculinity. That drawing revealed neither firmness nor size.

  "And . . . and . . . once the pollen . . . the, well, the whatever, from the man . . . finds the inside of the flower, the seed sort of, it's started, the fruit."

  Much of this remains academic to me, not pictured clearly, not felt as something that will someday happen to my body. I've seen no pictures of my mother's body as pear-s
haped, and I don't connect my future to the women I've known who were expecting.

  My mother cannot bring herself to explain what happens to male and female organs in sexual excitement or to provide any clue that the event of impregnation is not instantaneous. I don't resent her leaving these holes in her "birds and bees and pears" talk now, but later I realize that knowing all the stages would have been more satisfying to me. I do, after all, like to see things through to the end.

  Right now with my mother talking, I don't even have a refined vision of my own adult body before pregnancy. I'm just entering puberty, carrying the chubbiness of my preteen years toward a slender and taller maturity. While I certainly don't have the pear shape of pregnancy, I also don't enjoy the full hips and breasts of womanhood.

  "And that's where babies come from!" Mother announces with enormous pride and relief. The discussion is over. At no time did the idea that this activity might be pleasurable peek around the corners of my mother's labored (sorry!) presentation.

  So, some years later, when Randy Alexander began his exploration of the land of desire, I expected nothing for myself. Oh, I'd heard from my sister Tricia and from other older girls that necking was exciting, but part of the thrill, as I understood it, was its forbidden nature. You were breaking the rules.

  Movies taught me that kissing is something to make women swoon, that the embrace of two strong arms is a comfort. But the stirring in my groin and the tingling in my nipples that arose when we were parked on Lovers' Lane was puzzling. What is this, I asked, and where exactly does it go?

  My parents, bless them, had given no clue to this pleasure. The peck on the cheek Mother gave Father when he went to work and when he came home each day was regular, friendly, sincere. And I know, years later, that there was genuine love throughout their years of stable union. But I never had a sign that they enjoyed physical intimacy until I was in college and dating the man I myself would marry.

  Maybe it had to do with my father's getting overweight while my mother stayed slim in their forties, the time I was wondering about all this. If I let my memory actually shape an image of that twice-daily exchange of marital affection, the kiss of parting and return, it's not an encouraging picture. I see my slender mother reach up, standing on her toes. My father does not lean over but stands erect, and his protruding belly forces my mother to arch over it to reach his lips.

  It's the cushy job of supervisor, in part. Dad no longer has to lug tools from the service truck and climb poles to repair broken equipment or string new lines. There are no weekend or night calls he must answer. He sits at a desk now, reading reports and studying plans for improvements. His longest walk of the day is to the water cooler, the coffee machine, the meeting room. He enjoys the less strenuous workday even at the expense of jokes from his former co-workers. In time, it's almost a matter of pride to him that he's off the line and out of shape.

  And, of course, his name. It turns him into a stationary target for company humor. No one working for the phone company should have our name unless, a direct descendant of Alexander Graham Bell, he owns the company.

  5

  I have painted Randy in a negative light so far, I know. Now I want to give him more credit.

  After all, when we were parking he was naturally intent on his own goals, and it never occurred to him (nor would it have occurred to any of his fellows) that he had responsibilities to help me reach mine. In this he wasn't untypical. And in always stopping when I asked, he may even have distinguished himself from others of his sex. Although it was inadvertent, Randy also revealed to me what would give me the upper hand in many a relationship of the future.

  I had decided to use our schedules in that summer before our senior year to effect a gradual drifting apart. Again, we had never officially been going steady, so there was no need for a dramatic breakup. Still, we'd fallen into a pattern of going out that would probably have continued unless one of us took action to alter that established course.

  Sandy Johnson, my best friend and a neighbor in the Circle, had been trying on and off for months to get me to go out with Larry Thornton, another guy in our class.

  "You know, he asked about you," she told me around the time of the junior prom. "He wondered if you were going to the dance."

  "Randy's already asked me. And I don't know if I'm interested in Larry. The worm farm, you know." Larry was smart and a good athlete, but he worked afternoons and weekends on a worm farm. Unfortunately, I had allowed unpleasant associations with that operation to color my view of him.

  Nightcrawlers, the local fisherman's favorite bait, were raised in large, shallow wooden boxes filled with sawdust or peat moss or a combination. People would feed, water, and watch them grow. Ultimately they were sorted and counted for sale. Larry had been handling worms since eighth grade.

  "That's just a job," said Sandy. Sandy and Larry had always been friends through church. "You ought to give him a chance."

  "I'm sort of dating Randy, you know, so. . . ."

  "Yeah, but you're not really going with him. And maybe you need to just see what's out there."

  I didn't want to go out with Larry Thornton, but I was affected by Sandy's advice in general. And, maybe, in particular, I was thinking about Larry's older brother, Paul. He was a freshman at South Central Missouri State College in town, but, because very few girls attended there (it was the state's science and engineering campus), Paul and a few others from his set still came to a lot of high school events.

  Paul had dated popular Linda Reynolds in his last two years of high school, but they broke up when he stayed home to go to college and she went off to Mizzou. So he immediately became one of Fairfield High's most sought-after dates. He was out of my reach, I suspected, but still I will have to confess to a little daydreaming about him from time to time that year.

  For anything to happen with any other boy, of course, I had to find a way to phase out my regular date.

  Randy had to work days that summer, so I arranged to be booked solid in baby-sitting--or at least to appear so--evenings and weekends. We each had to take some vacation trips with our families, too, and without the regular meetings provided by school, I found I could minimize contact without seeming to.

  All this time, by the way, I was also practicing the flute. My mother arranged regular sessions in the morning and the afternoon, and I worked on scales and arpeggios on my own. I probably played as much as eight hours some days, if you can believe it. I'd become obsessed, driven to create music, intent on drawing out new parts of myself, finding expression for my latent talents. The first part to take a new shape was my lips.

  "Embouchure"--that's the fancy word for how your lips need to purse when blowing over the mouthpiece of a flute. It directs the column of air in a steady, strong stream, sustaining and filling out any note you play.

  Of course, you don't have much of an embouchure when you're learning, just as the violin beginner has no touch in dragging the bow across the strings, producing that chilling cry of the wounded cat you hear at a children's recital. Developing your embouchure takes time and practice, but, in strengthening your lips and firming certain facial muscles, it can give you a new look. And not just in the face.

  Whenever Randy was kissing my ever-improving lips that summer, he didn't want to let up. I had told him nothing about my new smooch power, but the way he'd get to talking with renewed energy about my playing the mouth organ suggested he was onto this change in me.

  As I've said, he was a steady boy, not destined for greatness but unlikely to go to ruin either. And my parents liked Randy. So he had the right to drop by our house on Oak Street (he lived in a relatively new area east of the high school) to invite me out for ice cream or to suggest that we sit in the lawn chairs out back under the pear tree.

  Through the early weeks of that summer, before he finally took the hint (the hints, I guess), he'd use an afternoon off to show up at the Bell house. We'd chat and he'd eventually propose a date.

  One d
ay he must have knocked, but my mother and I, practicing, didn't hear him. So he probably called, politely, through the screen door of the living room, "Mrs. Bell? Susan? Hello, anyone home?"

  We practiced, by the way, in the dining room, which was separated from the living room by an arched doorway. Generally, we sat side-by-side on chairs pulled away from the table, a single thin metal stand holding the music. Today, however, my mother has insisted that I stand and play as if performing. She has extended the music stand's neck up to its highest point.

  Although it has nothing to do with the flute or music or the mother-daughter relationship, I have to tell you what I am wearing on this particular day: pedal pushers and a halter top.

  In all the recent reevaluation of myself I've been conducting, my body has come under increased scrutiny. Especially in comparison to Sally Winchester, I want to know, do I have firm breasts, swivelly hips, long, shapely legs? To find out, I've been using the full-length mirror on the back of my sister's bedroom door. I try on certain clothes, I pose in my underwear, I even stand nude in the middle of Tricia's room.