Riding in Cars With Boys: Confessions of a Bad Girl Who Makes Good

by Beverly Donofrio

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 15

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  PENGUIN BOOKS RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS

  Beverly Donofrio studied at Wesleyan University, then went on to receive an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Village Voice and New York magazine. She is also the author of Looking for Mary.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Publshed by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

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  Pengum Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

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  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  First published in the United States of America by

  William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990

  Published in Penguin Books 1992

  Copyright © Beverly Donofrio, 1990

  All rights reserved

  Portions of this work have appeared in different form in The Village Voice.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for

  permission to reprint lyrics from the following:

  “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”

  Hal David, Burt Bacharach

  Copyright © 1967 by Blue Seas Music, Inc., & JAC Music Co., Inc.

  All Rights Reserved.

  “All I Want”

  Jont Mitchell

  Copyright © 1971, 1975 by Jom Mitchell Publishing Corp.

  All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  “Love Child”

  R. Dean Taylor, Frank Wilson, Pamela Sawyer, Dennis Lussier

  Copynght © 1968 by Jobete Music Co., Inc., & Stone Agate Music

  eISBN : 978-1-101-12763-6

  I. Title.

  PS3554.0536R5 1990

  813’.54—dc20 89-78126

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To my mother, my father, and my son

  This book would not exist without the help, encouragement, and affection of my teachers Richard Price and Tony Connor; Dr. Joseph Finkle; my agent Gail Hochman; my editors Jim Landis and Jane Meara; and my good friends Robin Tewes, Terry Reed, Sheryl Lukomski, Kirsten Dehner, Trudy Dittmar, Janet Donofrio Rieth, Peter Alson, Alex Kotlowitz, and Thomas deMaar.

  Prologue

  I’ M driving my son to college. It’s dark and pouring rain out. I always imagined it would be sunny, like after a storm, magnificent puffs of clouds moving a hundred miles a minute across an electric blue sky. And there I’d be, hanging out a window, waving my arms and shouting hallelujah as my son disappeared around a comer. I thought it would feel like Bastille Day did for the starving French masses. But instead of a freedom frenzy, I’m having a nervous breakdown.

  A few days ago I saw this kid on the uptown bus. He was dangling a GI Joe from his mouth as he dug in his backpack, then pulled out some drawings to show to his mother. He watched her face as she placed the pictures on her knees, smoothed them with her hands and smiled. The scene made me blubber. I know everybody cries when their kid goes to college. But this was not supposed to happen to me. I was not supposed to be driving in a downpour, mumbling, “Oh God,” and using every molecule of will in my body to keep from crying.

  I was not supposed to have a kid to begin with.

  I try to pass a bully truck. A gust of air pushes me to the edge of a lane and sprays water on our little Honda, so the windshield floods and I can’t see through it for a second. Jason grabs the handle on the dashboard and closes his eyes—not hysterical, but indulgent. He thinks I’m a terrible driver, a notion he picked up when he was seven and eight and nine and I’d fly over bumps to make him scream or slam on the brakes for no reason except I loved to scare him. When he was four, I soaped up my face, then scrinched it into a horrifying grimace and chased him screaming through the house. Lately, I’ve been thinking of the things I did and feeling like a maniac mother. Lately, I’ve been looking at my life like there’s something to learn.

  I look at my son as he pushes buttons on the radio. How could I have raised such a kid? He’s tall and handsome and calm. Mostly calm. That’s what you think when you see him. You think, That kid’s got self-possession. Like Jimmy Stewart or maybe Gary Cooper. People say I’m lucky, but I always thought different.

  I hear Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” I tell Jase to stop there and I think, That’s it. I wasn’t a terrible person. I just did like Frank Sinatra. Then a picture of Sid Vicious singing the same song comes to mind and makes me feel awful all over again.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  TROUBLE began in 1963. I’m not blaming it on President Kennedy’s assassination or its being the beginning of the sixties or the Vietnam War or the Beatles or the make-out parties in the fall-out shelters all over my hometown of Wallingford, Connecticut, or my standing in line with the entire population of Dag Hammarskjold Junior High School and screaming when a plane flew overhead because we thought it was the Russians. These were not easy times, it’s true. But it’s too convenient to pin the trouble that would set me on the path of most resistance on the times.

  The trouble I’m talking about was my first real trouble, the age-old trouble. The getting in trouble as in “Is she in Trouble?” trouble. As in pregnant. As in the girl who got pregnant in high school. In the end that sentence for promiscuous behavior, that penance (to get Catholic here for a minute, which I had the fortune or misfortune of being, depending on the way you look at it)—that kid of mine, to be exact—would turn out to be a blessing instead of a curse. But I had no way of knowing it at the time and, besides, I’m getting ahead of myself.

  By 1963, the fall of the eighth grade, I was ready. I was hot to trot. My hair was teased to basketball dimensions, my 16 oz. can of Miss Clairol hairspray was tucked into my shoulder bag. Dominic Mezzi whistled between his teeth every time I passed him in the hallway, and the girls from the project—the ones with boys’ initials scraped into their forearms, then colored with black ink—smiled and said hi when they saw me. I wore a padded bra that lifted my tits to inches below my chin, and my father communicated to me only through my mother. “Mom,” I said. “Can I go to the dance at the Y on Friday?”

  “It’s all right with me, but you know your father.”

  Yes, I knew my father. Mr. Veto, the Italian cop, who never talked and said every birthday, “So, how old’re you anyway? What grade you in this year?” It was supposed to be a joke, but who could tell if he really knew or was just covering? I mean, the guy stopped looking at me at
the first appearance of my breasts, way back in the fifth grade.

  In the seventh grade, I began to suspect he was spying on me, when I had my run-in with Danny Dempsey at Wilkinson’s Theater. Danny Dempsey was a high school dropout and a hood notorious in town for fighting. I was waiting in the back of the seats after the lights dimmed for my best friend, Donna Wilhousky, to come back with some candy when this Danny Dempsey sidled up to me and leaned his shoulder into mine. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a knife, which he laid in the palm of his hand, giving it a little tilt so it glinted in the screen light. I pressed my back against the wall as far away from the knife as I could, and got goosebumps. Then Donna showed up with a pack of Banana Splits and Mint Juleps, and Danny Dempsey backed away. For weeks, every time the phone rang I prayed it was Danny Dempsey. That was about the time my father started acting suspicious whenever I set foot out of his house. He was probably just smelling the perfume of budding sexuality on me and was acting territorial, like a dog. Either that or maybe his buddy Skip Plotkin, the official cop of Wilkinson’s Theater, had filed a report on me.

  Which wasn’t a bad idea when I think of it, because I was what you call boy crazy. It probably started with Pat Boone when I was four years old. I went to see him in the movie where he sang “Bernadine” with his white bucks thumping and his fingers snapping, and I was in love. From that day on whenever “Bernadine” came on the radio, I swooned, spun around a couple of times, then dropped in a faked-dead faint. I guess my mother thought this was cute because she went out and bought me the forty-five. Then every day after kindergarten, I ran straight to the record player for my dose, rocked my head back and forth, snapped my fingers like Pat Boone, then when I couldn’t stand it another second, I swooned, spun around, and dropped in a faked-dead faint.

  I was never the type of little girl who hated boys. Never. Well, except for my brother. I was just the oldest of three girls, while he was the Oldest, plus the only boy in an Italian family, and you know what that means: golden penis. My father sat at one end of the table and my brother sat at the other, while my mother sat on the sidelines with us girls. You could say I resented him a little. I had one advantage though—the ironclad rule. My brother, because he was a boy, was not allowed to lay one finger on us girls. So when his favorite show came on the TV, I stood in front of it. And when he said, “Move,” I said, “Make me,” which he couldn’t.

  But other boys could chase me around the yard for hours dangling earthworms from their fingers, or call me Blackie at the bus stop when my skin was tanned dirt-brown after the summer, or forbid me to set foot in their tent or play in their soft-, kick-, or dodgeball games. They could chase me away when I tried to follow them into the woods, their bows slung over their shoulders and their hatchets tucked into their belts. And I still liked them, which is not to say I didn’t get back at them. The summer they all decided to ban girls, meaning me and Donna, from their nightly soft-ball games in the field behind our houses, Donna and I posted signs on telephone poles announcing the time of the inoculations they must receive to qualify for teams. On the appointed day they stood in line at Donna’s cellar door. Short ones, tall ones, skinny and fat, they waited their turn, then never even winced when we pricked their skin with a needle fashioned from a pen and a pin.

  By the summer of 1963, my boy craziness had reached such a pitch that I was prepared to sacrifice the entire summer to catch a glimpse of Denny Winters, the love of my and Donna’s life. Donna and I walked two miles to his house every day, then sat under a big oak tree across the street, our transistor radio between us, and stared at his house, waiting for some movement, a sign of life, a blind pulled up or down, a curtain shunted aside, a door opening, a dog barking. Anything. Denny’s sister, who was older and drove a car, sometimes drove off and sometimes returned. But that was it. In an entire summer of vigilance, we never saw Denny Winters arrive or depart. Maybe he had mononucleosis; maybe he was away at camp. We never saw him mow the lawn or throw a ball against the house for practice.

  What we did see was a lot of teenage boys sitting low in cars, cruising by. Once in a while, a carload would whistle, flick a cigarette into the gutter at our feet, and sing, “Hello, girls.” Whenever they did that, Donna and I stuck our chins in the air and turned our heads away. “Stuck up,” they hollered.

  But we knew the cars to watch for: the blue-and-white Chevy with the blond boy driving, the forest-green Pontiac with the dark boy, the white Rambler, the powder-blue Camaro, the yellow Falcon. I decided that when I finally rode in a car with a boy, I wouldn’t sit right next to him like I was stuck with glue to his armpit. I’d sit halfway there—just to the right of the radio, maybe.

  My father, however, had other ideas. My father forbade me to ride in cars with boys until I turned sixteen. That was the beginning.

  “I hate him,” I cried to my mother when my father was out of the house.

  “Well, he thinks he’s doing what’s best for you,” she said.

  “What? Keeping me prisoner?”

  “You know your father. He’s suspicious. He’s afraid you’ll get in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “You’ll ruin your reputation. You’re too young. Boys think they can take advantage. Remember what I told you. If a boy gets fresh, just cross your legs.”

  It was too embarrassing. I changed the subject. “I hate him,” I repeated.

  By the time I turned fourteen, the next year, I was speeding around Wallingford in crowded cars with guys who took comers on two wheels, flew over bumps, and skidded down the road to get me screaming. Whenever I saw a cop car, I lay down on the seat, out of sight.

  While I was still at Dag Hammarskjold Junior High School, I got felt up in the backseat of a car, not because I wanted to exactly, but because I was only fourteen and thought that when everybody else was talking about making out, it meant they got felt up. That was the fault of two girls from the project, Penny Calhoun and Donna DiBase, who were always talking about their periods in front of boys by saying their friend was staying over for a week and how their friend was a bloody mess. They told me that making out had three steps: kissing, getting felt up, and then Doing It. Next thing I knew, I was at the Church of the Resurrection bazaar and this cute little guy with a Beatles haircut sauntered up and said, “I’ve got a sore throat. Want to go for a ride to get some cough drops?” I hesitated. I didn’t even know his name, but then the two girls I was with, both sophomores in high school, said, “Go! Are you crazy? That’s Skylar Barrister, the president of the sophomore class.” We ended up with two other couples parked by the dump. My face was drooly with saliva (step one) when “A Hard Day’s Night” came on the radio and Sky placed a hand on one of my breasts (step two). Someone must’ve switched the station, because “A Hard Day’s Night” was on again when his hand started moving up the inside of my thigh. I crossed my legs like my mother said, but he uncrossed them. Lucky for me, there was another couple in the backseat and Sky Barrister was either too afraid or had good enough manners not to involve them in the loss of my virginity or I really would’ve been labeled a slut. Not that my reputation wasn’t ruined anyway, because sweetheart Sky broadcast the news that Beverly Donofrio’s easy—first to his friends at the country club and then, exponentially, to the entire town. Hordes of boys called me up after that. My father was beside himself. I was grounded. I couldn’t talk on the phone for more than a minute. My mother tried to intervene. “Sonny,” she said. “You have to trust her.”

  “I know what goes on with these kids. I see it every day, and you’re going to tell me?”

  “What’s talking on the phone going to hurt?” my mother asked.

  “You heard what I said. I don’t want to hear another word about it. You finish your phone call in a minute, miss, or I hang it up on you. You hear me?”

  I heard him loud and clear, and it was okay with me—for a while, anyway, because my love of boys had turned sour. Sophomore year in high school, my Engl
ish class was across the hall from Sky Barrister’s and every time I walked by, there was a disturbance—a chitter, a laugh—coming from the guys he stood with. My brother was the captain of the football team and I wished he was the type who’d slam Sky Barrister against a locker, maybe knock a couple of his teeth out, but not my brother. My brother was the type who got a good-citizenship medal for never missing a single day of high school.

  Meanwhile, his sister began to manifest definite signs of being a bad girl. My friends and I prided ourselves on our foul mouths and our stunts, like sitting across from the jocks’ table in the cafeteria and giving the guys crotch shots, then when they started elbowing each other and gawking, we shot them the finger and slammed our knees together. Or we collected gin gerbread from lunch trays and molded them into shapes like turds and distributed them in water fountains.

  The thing was, we were sick to death of boys having all the fun, so we started acting like them: We got drunk in the parking lot before school dances and rode real low in cars, elbows stuck out windows, tossing beer cans, flicking butts, and occasionally pulling down our pants and shaking our fannies at passing vehicles.

  But even though we were very busy showing the world that girls could have fun if only they’d stop acting nice, eventually it troubled us all that the type of boys we liked—collegiate, popular, seniors—wouldn’t touch us with a ten-foot pole.

  One time I asked a guy in the Key Club why no guys liked me. “Am I ugly or stupid or something?”

  “No.” He scratched under his chin. “It’s probably the things you say.”

  “What things?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think it’s because I don’t put out?”