The Boys of My Youth

by Jo Ann Beard

  “He thinks you’re a chicken,” my mother explains. “You have to show him you won’t put up with it.” She picks up a stick, threatens the rooster with it, and he backs off, pretends to peck the yard. My aunt comes back out.

  The front of her head is in curlers, the brush kind that hurt, and she keeps testing her hair to see if it’s done. She has on a smock with big pockets and pedal pushers. Her feet are bare, one reason why the rooster is scaring her so much. My mother doesn’t wear curlers because her hair is short but she has two clips crisscrossed on either side of her head, making spit curls in front of her ears. Every time a car drives by she reaches up automatically, ready to yank them out. She has on Bermuda shorts and a wide-bottomed plaid blouse with a bow at the neck. They are both pregnant again.

  We’re going to be in a parade at four o’clock, Wendell and I, riding bikes without training wheels, our dolls in the baskets. We asked to have the training wheels put back on for the parade but they said no. Our older sisters are upstairs somewhere, dumping perfume on one another and trying on bracelets. They’ll be in the parade, too, walking behind us and throwing their batons in the air, trying to drop them on our heads.

  Wendell jumps at the rooster suddenly and he rushes us, we go off screaming in different directions while he stands there furious, shifting from one scaly foot to another, slim and tall with greasy black feathers and a yellow ruff like a collie. He can make the dirty feathers around his neck stand up and fall back down whenever he gets mad, just like flexing a muscle. Even his wives give him a wide berth, rolling their seedy eyes and murmuring. They get no rest. I haven’t yet connected the chickens walking around out here with what we had for lunch, chopped up and mixed with mayonnaise.

  The mothers give up and go in the house to smoke cigarettes at the kitchen table and yell at us through the windows. Wendell and I work on decorating our bikes and complaining about no training wheels.

  “What about if there’s a corner?” I say.

  “I know,” says Wendell. “Or if there’s dog poop?” I don’t know exactly how this relates but I shudder anyway. We shake our heads and try twisting the crepe paper into the spokes the way our mothers showed us but it doesn’t work. We end up with gnarled messes and flounce into the house to discipline our dolls.

  Here is the parade. Boys in cowboy getups with cap guns and rubber spurs, hats that hang from shoestrings around their necks. The girls squint against the sun and press their stiff dresses down. This is the year of the can-can slip so we all have on good underpants without holes. Some kids have their ponies there, ornery things with rolling eyes and bared teeth, all decorated up. Two older boys with painted-on mustaches beat wildly on drums until they are stopped. Mothers spit on Kleenexes and go at the boys’ faces while fathers stand around comparing what their watches say to what the sun is doing.

  Two little girls wear matching dresses made from a big linen tablecloth, a white background with blue and red fruit clusters. One has a bushy stand of hair and the other a smooth pixie. Both have large bows, one crunched into the mass and the other practically taped on. The scalloped collars on their dresses are made from the border of the tablecloth, bright red with tiny blue grapes, little green stems. There are sashes tied in perfect bows, and pop-bead bracelets. Our shoes don’t match.

  The dolls rode over to the parade in the trunk of the car so we wouldn’t wreck their outfits. They have the ability to drink water and pee it back out but they’re dry now, our mothers put a stop to that. They have on dresses to match ours, with tiny scalloped collars and ribbon sashes. We set them carefully in our bike baskets with their skirts in full view. Mine’s hair is messed up on one side where I put hairspray on it once. Wendell’s has a chewed-up hand and nobody knows how it got that way. We stand next to our crepe-papered bikes in the sunlight, waiting for them to tell us what to do.

  Our sisters have been forbidden to throw their batons until the parade starts and so they twirl them around and pretend to hurl them up in the air, give a little hop, and pretend to catch them again. They are wearing perfume and fingernail polish with their cowboy boots and shorts. They don’t like us very much but we don’t care.

  My mother tells me to stand up straight and Wendell’s mother tells her to push her hair back down. The baton twirlers get a last minute talking-to with threats. The parade moves out ragged and wobbly, someone immediately starts crying, a pony wanders out of line and looks for some grass to chew. The main street is crowded with bystanders and parked automobiles. It is never clear what this parade is for, except to dress the children up and show them off, get the men to come in from the fields for a while.

  As the parade pulls itself slowly down the street, the mothers stand with wry, proud faces and folded arms while fathers stand smoking, lifting the one-finger farmer’s salute as their sons go by. Wendell and I steer carefully and watch our mothers as they move along the sidewalk, following. Tall, lanky frames and watermelon stomachs, the gray eyes and beautiful hands of the Patterson side of the family. Our dolls are behaving perfectly, staring straight ahead, slumped forward in their baskets. My sash has come untied and Wendell’s underpants are showing. We don’t care, they won’t bother fixing us now; we’re in the parade and they have to stay on the sidewalk.

  The street is brilliant in the sun, and the children move in slow motion, dresses, cowboy hats, tap shoes, the long yellow teeth of the mean ponies. At the count of four, one of our sisters loses control, throws her baton high in the air and stops, one hand out to catch it when it comes back down.

  For a long, gleaming moment it hangs there, a silver hyphen against the hot sky. Over the hectic heads of the children and the smooth blue-and-white blur of crepe-papered spokes and handlebar streamers, above the squinting smiles and upturned eyes, a silver baton rises miraculously, lingers for a moment against the sun, and then drops back down, into the waiting hand.

  Back at the bar, someone has hold of me and I’m on the dance floor. Wendell’s standing just inside the door. I’m going backward swiftly, in a fast two-step, there’s an arm slung across my shoulder. It’s good old Ted, trying to make a girl feel welcome. The bar is as dark as a pocket and my eyes haven’t adjusted yet. Ted runs me into a couple of people and I tell him his arm weighs a ton. He grins but doesn’t move it. He has long legs and a drinking problem. Two ex-wives follow him everywhere, stirring up trouble.

  When the song finally ends, I untangle from Ted and look for Wendell. She’s got us a table back by the wall, beneath the bored head of a deer. As I pass the bar several guys in turn swivel their stools around and catch me. Blue-jeaned legs are parted, I’m pulled in, pressed against a chest, clamped. Hello, hello. I bum a cigarette from the first one and blow smoke in the face of the second when his hand crawls like a bull snake up the back of my shirt. Even way out here I’m known for being not that easy to get along with.

  Wendell takes her feet off my chair and pushes a rum and Pepsi my way. She tries to tell me something over the din.

  “What?” I holler back and turn my ear to her.

  “I said, your buddy’s here,” she yells into my hair. I pull back and look at her. She jerks a thumb upward, to the passive, suspended face of the deer. Someone has stuck a cigarette butt in one of its nostrils. I show her my middle finger and she sits back again, satisfied. Side by side at the spindly table, we drink our drinks for a while and watch the dancers go around.

  Ida’s out there, going to town, seventy-five if she’s a day, with dyed black hair and tall, permanently arched eyebrows. From nine to midnight, even when it’s just the jukebox, she takes herself around the dance floor — fox-trot, swing shuffle, two-step. She comes here every Saturday night to dance by herself while her grandson drinks Mountain Dew and plays pool in the back room. Her tennis shoes look like they’re disconnected from the rest of her body. Every once in a while, she presses one hand against her waist and closes her eyes for an instant, keeping time with her shoulders, all part of some interior dancing-drama, some
memory of Pete and her, before they got old, before she up and got widowed. Apparently, they were quite a deal on the dance floor. Nobody ever bumps into her out there, even the drunkest of the drunk make a space for those shoes and that head of hair. She’s dancing with a memory, putting all the rest of us to shame.

  Here comes our darling Nick. Everyone’s in love with him, blond hair in a ponytail and wire-rims, drives a muddy jeep. Too bad he’s related to us. He sets us up with two more drinks, takes a joint out of his shirt pocket, puts it in my cigarette pack, and lays a big kiss on Wendell, flat on the lips. Right as he leaves, he zooms in on me unexpectedly. I give him one hand to shake and put the other one over my mouth. Wendell takes a drink and leans over.

  “Gross,” she shouts into my ear. I nod. Cousin cooties.

  “I’m telling Aunt Bernie,” I shout back. Aunt Bernie is his mom.

  We’ve been sitting too long. Wendell carries her drink, I light a cigarette, and we move out into the revelers, and lose each other. The rum is a warm, dark curtain in my chest. I suddenly look better than I have in weeks, I can feel geraniums blooming in my cheeks, my mouth is genuinely smiling for once, my hair, fresh from the ironing board, falls like a smooth plank down my back. It’s Saturday night and I’m three rum and Pepsis to the wind. I love this bar, the floor is a velvet trampoline, a mirrored ball revolves above the dance floor, stars move across faces and hands, everyone encountered is a close personal friend. I’m in line for the bathroom, chatting with strangers.

  “I like your shirt.” This from the woman behind me, she may be trying to negotiate her way up the line.

  “Thanks,” I tell her. She’s pretty. “I like yours, too.”

  “Your cousin’s really drunk,” she says, rolling her eyes. I guess she knows me. She means Nick, not Wendell. Women are always striking up conversations about Nick.

  “I know” is what I tell her. I smile when I say it and shrug, trying to indicate that she can come to family dinners with Nick as far as I’m concerned. We lapse back into silence until the door bursts open and three women come out, reeking of reefer and perfume.

  I look at the woman who struck up the conversation with me. We raise our eyebrows.

  “Nice perfume,” she says, wrinkling her nose.

  “Nice reefer,” I say. I let her come in while I go and she checks her makeup and examines her teeth in the mirror. I wait for her, too, bending over at the waist, shaking the hair out, and then flipping it back. It makes it fluffier for a few minutes, before it settles back into the plank again. The bending and flipping sends the room careening for a moment, I’m in a centrifugal tube, then it halts. She wants to know who Nick’s going out with.

  “His dog, I think,” I tell her. I’m politely not noticing her peeing. “He’s got the nicest golden retriever you ever saw.” I love that dog; it refuses to hunt, just walks along and stirs up ducks and pheasants, watches with surprise when they go flapping off. “That’s one thing about Nick. His dog’s nice.” I don’t think Nick ever shoots anything anyway, he just looks good in the boots and the vest.

  Actually, I think Cousin Nick’s going out with everyone, but I don’t tell her that. She looks hopeful and sparkly and she’s not nearly as drunk as me. I give her a swimmy smile on the way out and we part company forever.

  The band rolls into a slow one, with a creaky metallic guitar hook and a lone warbling voice. Someone asks me to dance and we stroll around the floor, amid the stars and the elbows. I close my eyes for a moment and it’s night inside my head, there are strange arms moving me around, this way and that, feet bumping into mine. The steel guitar comes overtop of it all, climbing and dropping, locating everyone’s sadness and yanking on it. In the shuffling crowd the dark curtain of rum parts for an instant, and reveals nothing. I open my eyes and look up at my partner. He’s leading away, a grinning stranger, his hand strolls down and finds my back pocket, warms itself. Christ Almighty.

  Ida swims through, and past, eyes blank as nickels, disembodied feet, arms like floating strings. One song ends and a new one starts up, I shake my head at my partner and he backs off with a sullen shrug. Apparently he likes this song because he begins fast-dancing by himself, looking hopefully around at the other dancers, trying to rope a stray.

  This is Wendell’s favorite song, She’s a good-hearted wo-man, in love with a two-timing man. Here she is, ready to dance. I move with her back into the lumbering crowd on the dance floor, and we carve out a little spot in front of the band. She loves him in spite of his wicked ways she don’t understand. The bar has gone friendly again while I wasn’t looking, the faces of the other dancers are pink with exertion and alcohol, Nick’s dancing with the bathroom girl, Ted’s twirling an ex-wife, the singer in the band knocks the spit out of his harmonica and attaches it to his neck again. Look at Wendell’s face. She’s twenty-one and single; her hair has a story to tell. In the small sticky space in front of the band, we twirl a few times, knuckles and lifted elbows, under and over, until I get stomped on. We’re singing now, recklessly, it’s almost closing time and us girls are getting prettier by the moment. Through teardrops and laughter we pass through this world hand in hand. Of course, both Wendell and I would like to be good-hearted women but we’re from the Patterson clan, and just don’t have the temperament for it.

  The sisters are making deviled eggs. They have on dark blue dresses with aprons and are walking around in nyloned feet. No one can find the red stuff that gets sprinkled on top of the eggs. They’re tearing the cupboards apart right now, swearing to each other and shaking their heads. We all know enough to stay out of the kitchen.

  We’re at my grandma’s house in our best dresses with towels pinned to the collars. Our older sisters are walking around with theatrical, mournful faces, bossing us like crazy, in loud disgusted whispers. They have their pockets loaded with Kleenex in preparation for making a scene. We’re all going to our grandfather’s funeral in fifteen minutes, as soon as the paprika gets found.

  Wendell and I get to go only because we promised to act decent. No more running and sliding on the funeral-home rug. Someone has died, and there’s a time and a place for everything. We’ll both get spanked in front of everyone and put in chairs if we’re not careful. And if we can’t keep our gum in our mouths then we don’t need it: both pieces are deposited in a held-out Kleenex on the ride over. Wendell and I are in disgrace from our behavior last night at the visitation.

  “It wasn’t our fault he moved,” Wendell had explained, right before being swatted in the funeral-home foyer. Our grandfather had looked like a big, dead doll in a satin doll bed. We couldn’t stop staring, and then suddenly, simultaneously, got spooked and ran out of the room, squealing and holding on to each other. We stayed in the foyer for the rest of the night, greeting people and taking turns sliding the rug across the glossy floor. We were a mess by the end of the evening.

  Our dads have to sit in a special row of men. They’re going to carry the casket to the graveyard. We file past them without looking, and the music gets louder. The casket sits like an open suitcase up front. After we sit down in our wooden folding chairs all we can see is a nose and some glasses. That’s our grandpa up there, he won’t be hollering at us ever again for chewing on the collars of our dresses or for throwing hangers out the upstairs window. He won’t be calling us giggleboxes anymore. He doesn’t even know we’re all sitting here, listening to the music and the whispers. He is in our hearts now, which makes us feel uncomfortable. Wendell and I were separated as a precautionary measure; I can just see the tips of her black shoes. They have bows on them and mine have buckles. She is swinging hers a little bit so I start to swing mine a little bit too. This is how you get into trouble, so I quit after a minute and so does she.

  Pretty soon the music stops and my mother starts crying into her Kleenex. My aunt’s chin turns into a walnut, and then she’s crying too. Their dad is dead. Wendell puts her shoe on the back of the chair in front of her and slides it slowly down until it’s
resting on the floor again. I do the same thing. We’re not being ornery, though. A lady starts singing a song and you can hear her breath. I can see only one inch of her face because she’s standing in front of the dads. It’s a song from Sunday school but she’s singing it slower than we do and she’s not making the hand motions. I do the hand motions myself, very small, barely moving, while she sings.

  Wendell’s mom leans over and tells me something. She wants me to sit on her lap. She has a nickname for me that nobody else calls me. She calls me Jody and everyone else calls me Jo. She’s not crying anymore, and her arms are holding me on her lap, against her good blue dress. It’s too tight in the armpits but you can’t tell from looking. My mom’s got Wendell.

  After a while everyone starts crying, except Uncle Evan, my grandma’s brother who always spits into a coffee cup and leaves it on the table for someone else to clean up. My aunt rests her chin on my head and rearranges her Kleenex so there’s a dry spot. I sit very still while the preacher talks and the mothers cry, not moving an inch, even though my arms don’t have anywhere to go. Wendell keeps moving around but I don’t. Actually, I don’t feel very good, my stomach hurts. I’m too big to sit on a lap, my legs are stiff, and now my heart has a grandpa in it.

  The fairgrounds are huge and hot, an expanse of baking bodies and an empty stage. There are guys monkeying around on the lighting scaffold, high in the air. Mostly they’re fat, stoned, and intent on their tasks, but Wendell’s spied one that might be okay. Ponytailed and lean, he has his T-shirt off and stuck in the waistband of his jeans. I can’t look at him because he’s too high up, hanging off of things that don’t look reliable. Wendell trains her binoculars on him, focuses, and then sets them down. “Yuck,” she reports.