The Boys of My Youth

by Jo Ann Beard

  They made us put our art-cups in the trunk along with all the other crammed-in picnic stuff. Jinn sat in the front seat between Elizabeth’s parents, and Elizabeth and I had the back seat to ourselves. Her father actually laid rubber leaving the parking lot but then settled down and drove responsibly through the streets of our city. Most of the way Jinn was silent but every once in a while she would gasp out a long word in Thai that sounded like swearing because it started with an f.

  None of us were trying to comfort her. Elizabeth and I were slightly out of control, hanging our heads out the car windows and silently screaming We’re having a baby! to each other. Her dad said, in a cheerful voice, “Make way, we’re coming through,” every time a stoplight appeared up ahead, while her mom kept murmuring, “How are we doing,” and casting sidelong glances at Jinn, who had her eyes closed and was saying the Thai swear word quietly over and over. Suddenly she made an oof noise, like someone had punched her, and then produced a muffled scream. Doris glanced at us in the back seat, where we had quieted down and were coming to the mutual, silent conclusion that we’d never have children.

  Jinn screamed again, a short burst, and Elizabeth said, “Mom,” two syllables, in an accusing voice.

  “Were doing the best we can do,” Doris said in a defensive voice. You could tell she thought this was all her fault, and that Elizabeth agreed. I stared out my car window and watched houses going by at a steady clip, refusing to let the sound coming from Jinn get from my ears to my brain. Soon enough we were at the door of the emergency room, and the two females in the front seat got out and went in, Jinn with one hand on her back and one clamped to her mouth, Doris looking frazzled and unprepared.

  I got dropped off at my house and Elizabeth and her stepdad went home to theirs.

  “Well, I just saw somebody having a baby,” I reported to my mother. “Right at the picnic.” She finds this news highly interesting but I don’t have much more to say. My older sister follows me upstairs and I tell her everything. “The entire back of her dress was soaked,” I say. I shudder. “She was in agony, screaming, but don’t tell Mom.” Our mother isn’t keen on extremes of any sort, or on foreigners. For that matter, she doesn’t care much for Elizabeth’s family, because she thinks they’re different from us. The only difference I can see is that the dad isn’t an alcoholic, but I don’t mention that to her. She’s known for getting in bad moods and grounding people for no reason. In the particular case of my older sister who has a mouth on her, my mother is prone to face slaps at odd moments. My sister takes it standing up, sometimes saying “That didn’t hurt” before stomping upstairs and throwing my clothes all over the place.

  Later in the evening Elizabeth telephones. “I can’t talk,” she says, “because we might get a call from the hospital.” Nevertheless, we spend forty minutes on a review of the afternoon, the boys in the rowboat getting as much airtime as the pregnant lady in the car.

  The next morning Elizabeth shows up at the usual time to walk to school with me. I see her coming up the back walk with her head down, yellow hair covering her face. She looks mad.

  I ask her if the baby got born. She pushes past me and goes into the living room, sits on the couch and presses her face into the back of it. She starts crying loudly and can’t stop.

  “It died,” she says furiously, “and it was a girl.” At this she begins afresh, with her hands over her cheeks and her mouth a grimace.

  My mother is in the kitchen eating oatmeal before work, my dad is shaving using the mirror hanging on the kitchen door. He stops whistling and takes himself upstairs, my mother comes in the living room and looks at Elizabeth.

  “Oh Liz, that’s awful,” she says. She feels truly bad, I can tell, but she also figures it was to be expected, I can tell that too. I feel somber and useless, I’ve never seen Elizabeth cry like that, even after the pop-bottle-in-the-tub business. This is something only the moms can handle; mine calls hers, Elizabeth gets sent back home, and I go off to school alone, in a stupid dress that doesn’t look right.

  Later we talk about it between ourselves, but we don’t say a word to Jinn. She goes on, shell-shocked, her beautiful face flat as a photograph and expressionless. She continues to watch Dark Shadows and listen to “Kowloon Hong Kong,” she continues to doze at the kitchen table and on the couch, she glides through the rooms of the apartment in her flowered housecoat as she always did, as visible and invisible as one of the cats.

  Eighth grade, spring, between classes. The hallway is damp and swampy, loud with clanging lockers and the clamor of overstimulation; popular kids are being hailed, unpopular ones hooted at. A drinking fountain, a line in front of it, me in an impossibly short skirt and white knee socks. The dress code has been lifted for three months now, the boys wear pants as tight as long-line girdles and the girls wear hip-hugger skirts that are less than a foot long. Getting a drink at the fountain involves a cross between kneeling and squatting. The boy in front of me suddenly steps to the side, turns on the fountain, and with a sweep of his left hand says, “After you, my dear.” I die, recover, squat/kneel, drink, put my head down, and scuttle away, wiping my chin.

  I have just discovered love. The real thing, none of this Dave Anderson crap.

  In the stairwell, I notice for the first time that outside the window the ground is soaked and emerald-colored, jonquils lie supine in the rain, tulips are lolling their fat heads. I take the stairs three at a time, turning my miniskirt into a wide belt, race down the hall to Elizabeth’s home-ec class and grab her as she’s going in.

  “Get sick,” I tell her.

  “We’re making Rice Krispies treats,” she says. “Wait ‘til math.”

  “I can’t wait, I’m dying,” I say pleadingly, and then, because I know it’s true: “You’ll die too.”

  Fifteen minutes later we are reclining side by side on two narrow cots in the nurse’s office. Elizabeth has a tremendous headache that requires a washcloth draped across her forehead, I have a tremendous stomachache that requires a metal bowl balanced on my chest.

  I’m in love, it’s serious, he’s beyond what we’ve encountered before. He is like a Beatle, he’s that cute. No kidding, honest to God, et cetera.

  “He said ‘my dear’?” she asks in a hoarse whisper. “He sounds like a queeb.”

  He’s not a queeb, you had to be there. He made it sound funny. Not queebie at all, in fact, just the opposite. He’s the opposite.

  The nurse pokes her head in and we both groan. “No talking,” she says.

  “We weren’t,” we say in unison.

  Elizabeth is willing to fall in love with him, too, but she needs to see him first, as a formality. We agree to meet after class at the fountain, in case he comes back for another drink. We go out and tell the nurse we’re better. She sends Elizabeth back to home-ec but makes me go lie down again.

  “You’re still pale,” she says shortly.

  He doesn’t show up at the drinking fountain again, but after school we go to my house to pore over last year’s yearbook. I have a feeling he’s older than us, and it’s true. We find him among last year’s eighth-graders.

  “Jeff Bach,” I announce, and hand the yearbook over. We’re in my living room eating Fritos and drinking pop. My sister hasn’t gotten home from high school yet so we’re safe, nobody’s bugging us.

  “He’s got blond hair,” she remarks, staring at the picture closely. She takes another handful of Fritos. “I thought you said he looked like a Beatle.” She puts them in her mouth.

  “I said he’s as cute as a Beatle,” I reply. “Not that he was a Beatle.”

  She stares at his face intently as she chews, and then comes to a conclusion. “Let’s face it,” she proclaims, “he’s cuter than a Beatle.”

  We’re both in love with Jeff Bach, ninth-grader extraordinaire.

  The back door slams and my sister appears in the doorway to the living room. She is wearing a granny dress, her thick brown hair tucked into a crocheted snood at the nape
of her neck. She arches her brows. “How’s kindergarten?” she asks. She takes the bag of Fritos from Elizabeth’s lap and heads upstairs with it. “Clean this house up,” she says as she rounds the curve at the landing.

  We leave and walk over to Elizabeth’s house, where we tell Jinn about our new boyfriend. We get Elizabeth’s yearbook and make her look at the picture. “Blond,” she says politely, and turns her eyes back to the television. Pretty soon Elizabeth’s stepdad comes home from work. We show him the picture. “How would you like it if I married this guy?” Elizabeth asks him rhetorically. He says he’d like it just fine and asks why the newspaper hasn’t come yet.

  “Who knows, that’s why,” Elizabeth replies. I get killed if I’m not there when my mother gets home from work, so I leave and call up Elizabeth ten minutes later from two blocks over.

  “What’re you doing?” I ask.

  There are four girls in our group, plus two best friends who hang around with another group approximately half the time. Besides Elizabeth and me there are Madelyn and Renee, and the two best friends, Carol and Janet. Renee is the oldest of six kids and we stay overnight at her house a lot because both her parents work nights at the post office and leave Renee in charge. They live in a big old house with three floors, and it never seems like there is any food except long loaves of sandwich bread, giant boxes of generic cereal, and powdered milk. If you’re looking for mustard, or a bottle of pop, forget it. Renee is the only kid in the family with a room of her own and she keeps potato chips and Pop-tarts in her closet, which locks with a skeleton key. Each bedroom has a fire escape ladder in a metal box underneath the window.

  Madelyn is destined to move away unexpectedly when we’re in ninth grade, and all I can remember about her is that she was funny and mean, and that she threw a half pound of frozen hamburger at her mother once when she was told she couldn’t go to a movie.

  “Plus her dad slept in a coffin,” Elizabeth reminds me. She has called me from her bathtub, the water is still running and she’s talking loudly to compensate. “I saw him taking a nap in it once; it was a black box without a lid, and the headboard said R.I.P.”

  “What a sicko,” I say.

  “No kidding,” she agrees. The sound of water running stops abruptly, a splash is heard. “Wasn’t there something suspicious about him?”

  “That was Renee’s dad.” Renee’s dad made everyone uncomfortable, he was very young, just like her mom, and he talked to us like we were adults. He flirted with us, except we didn’t identify it as that, because he was a dad. We took on nervous smiles and sidled backward whenever he was around.

  “There was more to that story than met the eye,” she said, then, “hang on,” and the sound of a giant lapping wave comes through the phone. “Jo Ann?” she says loudly. “Jo Ann? I dunked my head; now I’ve got water in my ears.”

  I feel cranky suddenly, and want to get off the phone. “Don’t call me when you’re in the bathtub,” I say. “I don’t want to listen to your personal hygiene. And I’m late for something.”

  “Buh-ruther,” she says sarcastically. “What did I do? I dunked my head, big deal; how’m I supposed to wash my hair?”

  “How about on your own time, that ever occur to you?”

  “How about if I smack your head off?” and she slams her phone down with a huge noise.

  We are thirty-eight years old. I wait fifteen minutes and call her back.

  “Hi,” she says. “Guess what I got in the mail?”

  Divorce papers, with a smiley face on a Post-it note from her husband. “That was bugging me, you in the bathtub,” I tell her. “Jim’s the one who should get his head smacked off. Or Tina.” Tina is Jim’s receptionist, and the woman he left Elizabeth for.

  “I’m not smacking anybody’s head off,” she replies dreamily. “Because I don’t even care.” When Jim first left her for Tina, Elizabeth made the mistake of asking why, and he told her. In the course of the conversation he mentioned a specific sex act that men tend to like a lot.

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Not only am I not kidding,” she replied. “But the thing is, it’s true. I mean, you hate to simplify these things, but he’s the one who said it.” She sighed hugely. “That’s what they sit around doing.”

  Her voice had the same dreamy quality it has now, but a week later, when it had sunk in, she’d been ready to take out after him with a baseball bat. She’d tried to call him at work to tell him he was a dead man, but Tina wouldn’t put her through. “Uh, I don’t think so, Liz,” she had said smugly, right before disconnecting her.

  So, any idea why Madelyn’s dad slept in a coffin?

  “He thought it was funny, of course,” she said. “Men.”

  Jeff Bach, blond, the fifth Beatle, a student at our school. Lived below the hill and hung around with guys who were Mexican, which made him seem even more blond. Danny Garcia, one of his friends, yanks on my hair in science.

  “Hey,” he whispers. “You and Liz like Jeff.”

  I turn around and roll my eyes, trying for sarcasm. “I’m sure,” I whisper back.

  Forty minutes later, Elizabeth and I are side by side in the nurse’s office. The next cot is occupied by someone who appears to be truly sick, not faking it. The nurse is excited by this and keeps poking her head in and staring at him.

  News has been leaked, if Danny Garcia knows then everyone knows. If everyone knows, then Jeff must know. We think we could actually puke; we groan and stare at the paint on the ceiling. The nurse hears us and thinks she might have an epidemic on her hands.

  “You should’ve said Jeff who,” Elizabeth hisses.

  I never thought of that. I start pretending like I’m beating myself up. We do our silent screaming routine. The guy on the other cot opens one eye. “I’m not really sick,” he says.

  “Us neither,” we whisper back.

  Pretty soon they both go back to class and I get kept for another hour and released at lunch.

  “Eat some meat if you can,” the nurse advises.

  My own husband didn’t have a receptionist, but he had a best friend, and the best friend had a wife. On a bitterly cold Sunday morning he went out to get doughnuts and didn’t return for two hours. I took a bath, using my toes to turn the hot water on and off. Pretty soon my knees were brilliant pink, my forehead was sweating, and it came to me that I’d been in there a while. I wondered how come my doughnuts weren’t back yet and then suddenly the answer hit me, the way a math problem can solve itself when you’re not paying attention. Oh, I thought, he’s having an affair. I stood up immediately, like the tub had ejected me, and began drying off.

  When he came home I was dressed, standing in the middle of the living room with an ashtray in my hand, smoking a stale French cigarette I’d found in my desk. I hadn’t smoked for four years but was quickly getting the hang of it again; only halfway through my first cigarette, and I already wanted another one. He was clattering around in the kitchen, putting breakfast on a blue plate, pouring a cup of coffee. I prepared a smoke ring and launched it in his direction as he walked into the living room.

  He stopped. “What?” he said. His face turned into clay; on the blue plate were giant melting doughnuts, some with multicolored dots on top, some with white cream oozing from their back ends. “What?” he said again.

  I told him and he didn’t disagree. The only thing that happened was his face twitched, like a horse’s hide, when I said the word. Affair. You are. And I am very. Upset. Actually I also wailed, like a baby in its crib. That scared him and he set down the doughnuts and coffee, took a step toward me, a step back, then sat down on the edge of the couch. Unbelievably, he began to cry, which shut me up instantly.

  Do I want to know who?

  This from my husband Eric, who had held my hand when they lowered my mother into the ground, who put me in a bathtub once and poured cold water on me to break a fever, who whispered the names of the constellations again and again because I could never remember
them. I guess I need to know who.

  He tells me the name and the howling baby comes out again before I collect myself. Kim? She’s a passive-aggressive rat, everyone knows that, nobody likes her. You like her?

  Not really, he acknowledges. In some ways she’s pathetic, the way she lets Bruce talk to her. He’s no longer crying, he suddenly looks pious and overburdened. In as flat a voice as I can manage I suggest he go sit around somebody else’s house for a while.

  When the door closes behind him I stand in the center of the room and light another prehistoric cigarette. Off in the distance the phone rings. It’s Bruce, wondering if Eric’s around. I set the receiver back in the cradle without saying a word, and as I do so, the house settles over my shoulders like a stucco cape.

  A spring night, one A.M., we have just escaped through the barricaded door of Elizabeth’s bedroom into the inky darkness. We let our eyes adjust, breathing in the dusty smell of geraniums. A bridal wreath bush stands laden with tiny white bouquets, the sky is velvety beyond the branches of a sycamore, the stars are tiny pinpricks of light. We have six half-rolls of toilet paper borrowed from various gas stations and public toilets. We are on a mission.

  “Let’s go,” I whisper and we move out silently, going from house to house, staying in the black shadows of the flowering bushes. Four blocks from her house we find ourselves trapped up against a garage while a man and a woman have an argument in the driveway. They’ve just pulled in and gotten out of the car, a station wagon with wood on the sides. The concrete driveway is ghostly blue in the moonlight, their faces are doughy.