The Boys of My Youth

by Jo Ann Beard

  Suddenly I have this notion that she needs to wear flannel against her skin. I stop at a department store and join the current of tinkling people, Christmas shoppers. Music rains down and a clerk comes forward to ask if she can help. She has lost the heel to one pump and is trying to compensate by walking on tiptoe with that foot. She leads me to lingerie and begins thumbing patiently through nightgowns on a rack, showing me things. I tell her that it needs to be worn beneath a blouse. This confuses her and she thinks wearily for a second, one finger to her lip, one heel up in thin air. She produces an expensive long-underwear shirt made of raw silk, a tiny pink satin flower on the scooped neckline. I buy it even though I’m not sure anymore why I’m here, what I’m doing. I decide I might as well go back, only two days left.

  I run into Barnelle in the main lobby, he’s got his small son with him. I feel bad that he can’t get any rest, can’t be left alone for five minutes. He speaks frankly to me while his son attempts to tie his shoes together. He says quite honestly that he has gotten very attached to her and I say I have too, actually. He hugs me then, hard, his arms like a big pair of forceps. He lets go and one hand scans his head, searching out the wandering hairs, laying them flat. I’ve seen him on a bench before, reading X rays and shaking his head, biting his nails. He bends down now and unties the laces before he takes a step, his son disappointed but philosophical. There are Christmas presents waiting at home.

  The room is darkening, Linda is asleep in the chair, knees drawn up like a shield, hands circling her stockinged feet. I can’t tell what’s happening on the bed until I turn on the light. Her eyes are opened wide, frightened, helpless. You left me, you girls, and here I am in the dark! Darkness has a personality now, a power. I understand this very well, quilted satin pressing down in the velvet blackness, brushing the nose, the face. I turn on all the lights but Linda continues to sleep soundly until I bump her chair with my foot. She stretches her legs out and groans, gives me a dirty look, and I give her one back. I hold two fingers up to remind her of how much longer she needs to keep this up, to pay attention. She holds up one finger, guess which one, to remind me of who’s the oldest, who’s the boss. I would love more than anything to slap her.

  I go to the cafeteria for a strawberry shake instead, which I can eat in front of her. On the way back up I land in an elevator with ten Christmas carolers. They seem like churchy types, the men are all shaved within an inch of their lives and the women look good-natured and opinionated. Two of them are quietly trying to harmonize on something I’ve never heard before, something Latin-sounding and mournful. A couple others practice scales and end up sounding out of tune. They get out on my floor and consult a list, everyone trying to get his or her head in there and direct the way. They end up following me, trying to stay a few paces behind. They are going where I’m going.

  I close the door behind me and motion my sister over, whisper to her while the eyes on the bed try to make out what I’m saying. Quietly behind me, behind the oak of the door, their voices join together, hesitantly at first and then, gaining momentum, confidently. They are taking care to remember they are in a hospital, there are sick people here, but they love these songs, I can tell. One of the guys has a lilting baritone and one of the women a high vibrato. Linda hesitates and then opens the door, gestures for them to step in. We move to the head of the bed and stand like cops with our arms folded, trying to smile. They finish one song and all look expectantly at the lady with the vibrato. She says, Three, and they begin to sing “White Christmas.” This is our mother’s favorite, she used to put Bing Crosby on the turntable when we all sat down for Christmas Eve dinner. It was part of the feast, like the white candles, the clean linen tablecloth, the gleaming china. As she passed the first bowl and our father stood to carve they would sing it together, one at each end of the table, softly serenading their children. Our father, in fact, had a wonderful strong baritone just like someone in the crowd of carolers. Suddenly regret is swelling in the room like the voices of the choir. As she lies in the bed she weeps, for Bing, for the melting, shimmering candles, the filigree on the holiday tablecloth. She is an unwilling astronaut, bumping against the thick glass of the ship, her line tangling lazily in zero gravity, face mask fogged with fear. My sister reaches across, over the bed, and we both embrace the mother, holding her on earth, pulling her onto the ship, breathing our oxygen into her line. Ten hours later she is dead.

  Oh God, it is bitterly cold. The snow is crusted over into shocked mounds, hard as Styrofoam. My fingers are burning twigs inside my gloves, my toes ache like amputations. The heater fan in Linda’s car screamed until we had to turn it off and give ourselves over to the freezing-freezing cold. Old man Larson is offering something warm in delicate cups. My poor fingers. It is morning now and he is drinking his own cup of something hot. I guess it’s coffee, although I can almost see through to the bottom of the cup. He tips the cup to his little-guy lips but refrains from raising a pinky — he couldn’t care less about cheering me up. He’s in the morning-after mode right now; he’s not looking directly at either of us and he has cleared his throat several hollow times. Linda sits up straighter and visibly tries to pay better attention. She shakes her head and clears her own throat one, two, three times in a row. Now Larson is glaring at her, his eyes vivid blue on a yellow background.

  I look away. I can feel her gazing at my ear. I look back. Then she winks and he sees and now it’s even more tense.

  We have selected the Titanic with ivory satin and the vault with the million-year guarantee of no seepage. He has accepted with grace both the outfit we’ve brought on a wire hanger and the prescription bottle full of safety pins, all sizes, that we think he’ll need to make her clothes fit her now. Linda thought he probably had special clamps for that sort of thing but we decided it would be better if he used the safety pins from her junk drawer. He looked at them for a long second and then set them on the corner of the kidney-shaped desk. I’ve given up on the long-underwear idea. Actually, I’m wearing it myself because of how cold it is outside.

  In a brown paper sack sitting next to my chair, between Linda and me, is her wig. We hate to give it over, both of us have held it in our laps at different times during the last few hours. It is too morbid, though, even for us. She takes it out of the bag quickly and shows it to Larson, puts it back in. She told me in the car she was going to try and scare him with it, but I guess she changed her mind.

  He informs us that the flowers have started to arrive, invites us to come back and see how they have begun to arrange them on stands and in clusters. We rise and leave the pale gray suit on its hanger, the wig crouching in its sack, the bottle of pins from the top left kitchen drawer. My sister touches the mahogany desk like it’s a tree in the forest. As we match his tiny steps down the wainscoted hall we have no idea, at this minute, that he is an artist, a gentleman. We have no idea as we move toward the scent of the flowers and the Christmas greens that he will continue on through his beautiful house, leaving us behind to read cards and talk. He will go through two more rooms, down a set of stairs to a place where she lies. While we linger, rubbing our hands and whispering to each other, the grandson who is minding us watches the wall and chews gum. At this moment we don’t know that downstairs he is working magic, that he will present to us a woman who looks rested.

  That’s how I will get to see her last, in her pale gray wool suit and pink blouse, her glasses resting on her nose as though she’s just dropped off for a minute; her cheeks will be okay again. The clothes will fit perfectly, as though she hadn’t lost a pound. Before the crowd arrives, when it’s just me and my sister and an aunt, he will reach in his pocket and bring forth the bottle of pins, half gone.

  Her hands are the only wrong thing. They look strange to me and I can’t figure out why until Linda picks up my hand and shows me: Her wedding ring is on my finger; I forgot she gave it to me. The hands begin to look more normal to me now, and the silence of the room gives way to the breathing of the si
sters, the coldness of the kissed hands, and the empty air that says You girls, you girls.

  Out There

  It isn’t even eight A.M. and I’m hot. My rear end is welded to the seat just like it was yesterday. I’m fifty miles from the motel and about a thousand and a half from home, in a little white Mazda with 140,000 miles on it and no rust. I’m all alone in Alabama, with only a cooler and a tape deck for company. It’s already in the high 80s. Yesterday, coming up from the keys through Florida, I had a day-long anxiety attack that I decided last night was really heat prostration. I was a cinder with a brain; I was actually whimpering. I kept thinking I saw alligators at the edge of the highway.

  There were about four hundred exploded armadillos, too, but I got used to them. They were real, and real dead. The alligators weren’t real or dead, but they may have been after me. I’m running away from running away from home.

  I bolted four weeks ago, leaving my husband to tend the dogs and tool around town on his bicycle. He doesn’t love me anymore, it’s both trite and true. He does love himself, though. He’s begun wearing cologne and staring into the mirror for long minutes, trying out smiles. He’s become a politician. After thirteen years he came to realize that the more successful he got, the less he loved me. That’s how he put it, late one night. He won that screaming match. He said, gently and sadly, “I feel sort of embarrassed of you.”

  I said, “Of what? The way I look? The way I act?”

  And he said, softly, “Everything, sort of.”

  And it was true. Well, I decided to take a trip to Florida. I sat on my haunches in Key West for four weeks, writing and seething and striking up conversations with strangers. I had my thirty-fifth birthday there, weeping into a basket of shrimp. I drank beer and had long involved dreams about cigarettes, I wrote nearly fifty pages on my novel. It’s in my trunk at this very moment, dead and decomposing. Boy, do I need a cup of coffee.

  There’s not much happening this early in the morning. The highway looks interminable again. So far, no alligators. I have a box of seashells in my back seat and I reach back and get a fluted one, pale gray with a pearly interior, to put on the dashboard. I can do everything while I’m driving. At the end of this trip I will have driven 3,999 miles all alone, me and the windshield, me and the radio, me and the creepy alligators. Don’t ask me why I didn’t get that last mile in, driving around the block a few times or getting a tiny bit lost once. I didn’t though, and there you have it. Four thousand sounds like a lot more than 3,999 does; I feel sort of embarrassed for myself.

  My window is broken, the crank fell off in Tallahassee on the way down. In order to roll it up or down I have to put the crank back on and turn it slowly and carefully, using one hand to push up the glass. So, mostly I leave it down. I baked like a biscuit yesterday, my left arm is so brown it looks like a branch. Today I’m wearing a long-sleeved white shirt to protect myself. I compromised on wearing long sleeves by going naked underneath it. It’s actually cooler this way, compared to yesterday when I drove in my swimming suit top with my hair stuck up like a fountain on top of my head. Plus, I’m having a nervous breakdown. I’ve got that wild-eyed look.

  A little four-lane blacktop running through the Alabama countryside, that’s what I’m on. It’s pretty, too, better than Florida, which was billboards and condos built on old dump sites. This is like driving between rolling emerald carpets. You can’t see the two lanes going in the opposite direction because there’s a screen of trees. I’m starting to get in a good mood again. The best was Georgia, coming down. Willow trees and red dirt and snakes stretched out alongside the road. I kept thinking, That looks like a rope, and then it would be a huge snake. A few miles later I would think, That looks like a snake, and it would be some snarl of something dropped off a truck.

  Little convenience store, stuck out in the middle of nothing, a stain on the carpet. I’m gassing it up, getting some coffee. My white shirt is gaping open and I have nothing on underneath it, but who cares, I’ll never see these people again. What do I care what Alabama thinks about me. This is a new and unusual attitude for me. I’m practicing being snotty, in anticipation of being dumped by my husband when I get back to Iowa.

  I swagger from the gas pump to the store, I don’t even care if my boobs are roaming around inside my shirt, if my hair is a freaky snarl, if I look defiant and uppity. There’s nothing to be embarrassed of. I bring my coffee cup along and fill it at the counter. Various men, oldish and grungy, sit at tables eating eggs with wadded-up toast. They stare at me carefully while they chew. I ignore them and pay the woman at the counter. She’s smoking a cigarette so I envy her.

  “Great day, huh?” I ask her. She counts out my change.

  “It is, honey,” she says. She reaches for her cigarette and takes a puff, blows it up above my head. “Wish I wudn’t in here.”

  “Well, it’s getting hotter by the minute,” I tell her. I’ve adopted an accent in just four weeks, an intermittent drawl that makes me think I’m not who everyone thinks I am.

  “Y’all think this’s hot?” she says idly. “This ain’t hot.”

  When I leave, the men are still staring at me in a sullen way. I get in, rearrange all my junk so I have everything handy that I need, choose a Neil Young tape and pop it in the deck, fasten the belt, and then move back out on the highway. Back to the emerald carpet and the road home. Iowa is creeping toward me like a panther.

  All I do is sing when I drive. Sing and drink: coffee, Coke, water, juice, coffee. And think. I sing and drink and think. On the way down I would sing, drink, think, and weep uncontrollably, but I’m past that now. Now I suffer bouts of free-floating hostility, which is much better. I plan to use it when I get home.

  A car swings up alongside me so I pause in my singing until it goes past. People who sing in their cars always cheer me up, but I’d rather not be caught doing it. On the road, we’re all singing, picking our noses, embarrassing ourselves wildly; it gets tiresome. I pause and hum, but the car sticks alongside me so I glance over. It’s a guy. He grins and makes a lewd gesture with his mouth. I don’t even want to say what it is, it’s that disgusting. Tongue darting in and out, quickly. A python testing its food.

  I hate this kind of thing. Who do they think they are, these men? I’ve had my fill of it. I give him the finger, slowly and deliberately. He picked the wrong day to mess with me, I think to myself. I take a sip of coffee.

  He’s still there.

  I glance over briefly and he’s making the gesture with his tongue again. I can’t believe this. He’s from the convenience store, I realize. He has on a fishing hat with lures stuck in it. I saw him back there, but I can’t remember if he was sitting with the other men or by himself. He’s big, overweight, and dirty, wearing a thin unbuttoned shirt and the terrible fishing hat. His passenger-side window is down. He begins screaming at me.

  He followed me from that convenience store. The road is endless, in front there is nothing, no cars, no anything, behind is the same. Just road and grass and trees. The other two lanes are still invisible behind their screen of trees. I’m all alone out here. With him. He’s screaming and screaming at me, reaching out his right arm like he’s throttling me. I speed up. He speeds up, too, next to me. We’re only a few feet apart, my window won’t roll up.

  He’s got slobber on his face and there’s no one in either direction. I slam on my brakes and for an instant he’s ahead of me, I can breathe, then he slams on his brakes and we’re next to each other again. I can’t even repeat what he’s screaming at me. He’s telling me, amid the hot wind and poor Neil Young, what he wants to do to me. He wants to kill me. He’s screaming and screaming, I can’t look over.

  I stare straight ahead through the windshield, hands at ten and two. The front end of his car is moving into my lane. He’s saying he’ll cut me with a knife, how he’ll do it, all that. I can’t listen. The front end of his Impala is about four inches from my white Mazda, my little car. This is really my husband’s car, my
beloved’s. My Volkswagen died a lingering death a few months ago. There is no husband, there is no Volkswagen, there is nothing. There isn’t even a Jo Ann right now. Whatever I am is sitting here clenched, hands on the wheel, I’ve stopped being her, now I’m something else. I’m absolutely terrified. He won’t stop screaming it, over and over, what he’s going to do.

  I refuse to give him an inch. I will not move one inch over. If I do he’ll have me off the road in an instant. I will not move. I speed up, he speeds up, I slow down, he slows down, I can see him out of the corner of my eye, driving with one hand, reaching like he’s grabbing me with the other. “You whore,” he screams at me. “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you…”

  He’ll kill me.

  If I give him an inch, he’ll shove me off the road and get his hands on me, then the end will begin in some unimaginable, unspeakable style that will be all his. I’ll be an actor in his drama. We’re going too fast, I’ve got the pedal pressed up to 80 and it’s wobbling, his old Impala can probably go 140 on a straightaway like this. There will be blood, he won’t want me to die quickly.

  I will not lose control, I will ride it out, I cannot let him push me over onto the gravel. His car noses less than two inches from mine; I’m getting rattled. My God, he can almost reach me through his window, he’s moved over in his seat, driving just with the left hand, the right is grabbing the hot air. I move over to the edge of my seat, toward the center of the car, carefully, without swerving.

  In the rearview mirror a speck appears. Don’t look, watch your front end. I glance up again; it’s a truck. He can’t get me. It’s a trucker. Without looking at him I jerk my thumb backward to show him. He screams and screams and screams. He’s not leaving. Suddenly a road appears on the right, a dirty and rutted thing leading off into the trees. He hits the brakes, drops behind, and takes it. In my rearview mirror I see that the license plate on the front of his car is buried in dried mud. That road is where he was hoping to push me. He wanted to push my car off the highway and get me on that road. He was hoping to kill me. He was hoping to do what maniacs, furious men, do to women alongside roads, in woods. I can’t stop pressing too hard on the gas pedal. I’m at 85 now, and my leg is shaking uncontrollably, coffee is spilled all over the passenger seat, the atlas is wet, Neil Young is still howling on the tape deck. By force of will, I slow down to 65, eject the tape, and wait for the truck to overtake me. When it does, when it comes up alongside me, I don’t look over at all, I keep my eyes straight ahead. As it moves in front of me I speed up enough to stay two car lengths behind it. It says England on the back, ornate red letters outlined in black. England.