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

by Beverly Donofrio

  But what I said was, “Don’t say that,” then changed the subject to other depressing topics. “You’re going to have to work so hard,” I said. “You wanted to quit. Now you can’t.”

  “I’ll get another job maybe.”

  He didn’t seem nearly upset enough. “We can’t spend any money,” I said. “We have to save everything.”

  He nodded his head, then at intermission he bought hot dogs, sodas, and fries, and I got furious at him for spending the money. But I ate my hot dog, my fries, and half his fries anyway. I was starving.

  For the next month, behind Raymond’s back, I bumped my ass down stairs, punched myself in the stomach, and threw myself from couch to floor ten times every night before bed. Anything. Anything was better than telling my parents, especially my father, that I’d been screwing Raymond in the basement recreation room while he sat above me watching television in his reclining chair every night. How could I mention the word sex to him when I couldn’t stay in the same room through a Playtex living bra commercial?

  It was 1968 and abortion wasn’t legal. If I’d known you could get one in Puerto Rico, I’d have sold my onyx ring, opal necklace, and Raymond’s canary-yellow Bonneville to get there. Fact was, I never really thought about the baby, pictured it or imagined being a mother. I was too worried about telling my parents. And I was depressed, despondent, deeply disappointed. I always thought it was my destiny to become a star. But now I’d be married to Raymond for the rest of my life. I’d be a housewife with no money, a station wagon, and a husband whose intellectual curiosity could be summed up in his favorite expression: How come dat?

  It seemed to me that God or the will of the world or fate or whatever it is that determines a person’s life had turned against me. It’s true I’d been the first of my friends to lose my virginity, but within a week of my breaking the news, three of them had followed suit. Now we were trading how-to-have-orgasm tips and none of them was pregnant. Fay had even been given a third-of-a-carat diamond and was due to marry a twenty-six-year-old sailor stationed on a nuclear submarine a week after graduation. Why was it my lot in life to be singled out for public humiliation?

  Every night for that long month I lay on my stomach on the sofa saying, Next commercial, I’ll tell my parents next commercial, but I never could make the words come out of my mouth. So finally, on my way to school one Monday morning, I left a note in the mailbox saying, “Dear Mom and Dad, I’m really sorry. I know I’ve disappointed you I’m pregnant. Love, your daughter Beverly.

  School that day was a nightmare. As if I didn’t have enough on my mind, Mr. O‘Rourke, the history teacher, decided to notice I was alive and pick on me. “Miss Donofrio,” he said.

  I didn’t hear him.

  “Miss Donofrio, I hate to interrupt whatever you’re doing [I was cleaning out my pocketbook]. We were talking about Andrew Jackson, a president I’m sure in your vast wisdom you have a good deal of respect for.” The class snickered. “I was wondering if you would do us the favor of shedding some light on the subject. Tell us anything, anything at all, about Mr. Jackson.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “What a pity. Then I must assume you didn’t read the assignment. I think you’d better write me two pages on the topic.”

  “You want me to tell you anything?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “He was a president. He wore a white wig.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “You said anything.”

  “Three pages.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Another word and you’ve got detention.”

  I wrote cocksucker in my notebook.

  I had the car that day, and after school I drove my friend Virginia and her boyfriend, Bobby, to Virginia’s house. We ate Mystic Mint cookies and drank Cokes in her kitchen. I kept sighing, and V kept saying, “Poor Bev. I’m glad I’m not you.” When I got up to leave, Bobby dove onto the floor, hugged his stomach, and rolled around laughing until tears fell down his cheeks. When he caught his breath, he said, “Your father’s going to kill you.” Bobby should know. His father was as much of a maniac as mine, only a Baptist. I walked out the door as though to an execution.

  It was a half hour before dinnertime, and my parents were waiting for me at the table. I dropped my books and slumped into a chair. My mother stood up, leaned against the stove, and crossed her arms against her chest. “Well, I hope you’re proud of yourself now,” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Marry Raymond.”

  “It’s that easy. You’re so smart. You know everything.” She always said that. Probably because, since the seventh grade, I’d been rolling my eyes at everything she said and constantly correcting her grammar.

  “No I don’t.”

  My father was leafing through the pages of my notebook.

  “And what about your boyfriend? What does he think about all this?”

  “He’s very happy. We’re getting married.”

  My father tore a handful of pages from my notebook and threw them in front of my mother. On the table lay the pictures I drew in English class that day of balls and cocks erect and coming, with the words suck, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker written in block letters and shaded like titles on a book. “Look, look what your daughter thinks about in school.”

  I ran out of the kitchen, past my sisters in the living room watching the Mike Douglas Show, and thought, Thank God my brother’s not around to hear this—he was in the middle of the ocean somewhere, in the navy. I sat on the top step of the stairs to my room, pinched my face between my knees, and listened to my parents yell at each other in the kitchen.

  “I knew it. I knew it. Trust her, you say. Leave the kid alone? So help me God, Grace, don’t you ever tell me to trust those other two daughters of yours.”

  “Oh no, Sonny, you’re not blaming me for this. She’s your daughter too.”

  “What did I tell you she was doing in the cellar with her boyfriend? What did I tell you?”

  All I could think about was Mindy Harmon. Mindy wasn’t bad like me. Mindy was a cheerleader, never wore makeup, got drunk only rarely, didn’t smoke cigarettes, and still she got pregnant. Her mother dragged her to all the basketball games where she was supposed to be cheerleading, just to shame her. Mindy was pathetic. She had to sit sideways at her desk, and she wore her skirts with the zipper open and the waist fastened with the three-inch safety pin she got from her cheerleading kilt. But whenever anybody asked her if she was pregnant, she’d blink her eyes twice and say no. I’d already told half the town about my condition. I might be pregnant, but I’d rather die than act ashamed like Mindy Harmon.

  “Rose,” my mother called. “Go tell your sister to get back here.”

  My nine-year-old sister stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at me. “Bev?” she whispered.

  I was embarrassed to meet her eyes. She looked like she might start bawling. What was I doing, banished to the stairs like a scarlet woman? What kind of an example was I setting for my sisters? You’d think I’d murdered somebody the way my parents were acting, when all I did was have sexual intercourse—and not even that often.

  My father was sobbing into his hands and my mother was picking crud from the crack down the middle of the table with a bobby pin when I sat back down and dug my heels in.

  “You’re killing your father,” my mother said.

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Your father and I think you should give the baby up for adoption.”

  “No.” I’d already made up my mind about that.

  “Then keep it and live at home.”

  “No!” She had to be out of her mind. The one and only good thing about having a baby was that it would get me out of my parents’ house.

  My father blew his nose.

  “Your father and I have discussed this. If you want, we’ll adopt it. You’re too young to get marr
ied. You’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

  “Adopt it?” I stood up shouting. “You just want to steal my baby. I’m keeping it. I’m getting married. It’s my baby.”

  “All right. All right.” My father wasn’t crying anymore. “You just calm down. You’re underage, smart ass. You need our permission.”

  “I’ll elope.”

  “You think it’s fun? You think it’s easy? You think that boyfriend of yours will be a good provider? You think he can keep a job and support you and a baby?”

  “Mom was pregnant when you got married.” This was my ace in the hole. I’d figured it out by subtraction, years ago. This was the first time I’d mentioned it.

  “That was different,” my mother said. “We were older. We knew what we were doing.”

  “Daddy was unemployed. You didn’t have any money. You told me yourself. You lived in a shack.”

  “That’s enough.” My father stood up.

  At the risk of getting slapped, I said one more thing after my father told me enough. “All I’m saying is it worked for you.”

  “All right. I give up. She knows everything.” My father smacked the back of his chair. “I’m telling you, Beverly. You better be good and goddamn sure, because once you leave this house, you mark my words, you can’t come back. You made your bed, you sleep in it. ”

  I stared at the floor.

  “Go to your room,” he said.

  I ran to my room, threw myself on the bed, and sobbed my heart out in spite of myself.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE weeping segued to the eve of my wedding. Ray was off at his bachelor party and I was sitting in Fay’s kitchen with her mother and her mother’s friend Joyce the manhater. They were drinking gin and Fay and I were drinking coffee. Joyce, who was a staple at Fay’s house, was a vociferous opponent of marriage and a devout deballer of men. She liked nothing better than to drink her second martini and hold me and Fay captive with her invectives and warnings: “They’re all big babies. You’re better off alone, doing for yourself. Who needs them sniveling and complaining and pawing at you.” Mr. Johnston walked in and poured himself a scotch, and Joyce went on like he wasn’t there: “There’s not a woman in the world that doesn’t regret getting married. But they’d rather choke than admit it. I bet your mother just loves being married to a guinea. [Joyce and Fay’s mother were Italian, too.] Does he slap her around if his meat-balls are overdone?”

  I liked that Fay’s mother had a friend like Joyce. Fay’s mother came from the Bronx and wore gaudy plastic jewelry and bright red lipstick and smoked cigarettes in an ivory cigarette holder. She let us smoke and swear in her house. One time she came home from work with a migraine in the middle of the day and found five of us playing hookey and dressed up in her clothes. She didn’t say one word except, “I’m sick. I’m going to bed.” This night she hardly said a word to me either. I thought she didn’t like me anymore because I’d deserted to the enemy’s camp. This made me very sad, and after my second piece of pie, I left Fay and her mother and Joyce to lie on the sofa in the living room, where Mr. Johnston sat doing the crossword puzzle under a lamp and sipping his scotch.

  “So, Beverly,” he said. “Big day tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought you were going to be a great actress.”

  “I was. ”

  “Well, you never know what might happen. I know what you need. What you need’s a stage name, that’ll perk you up.”

  I sat up. “Yeah?”

  “I know, Viela, Viela Scaloppini, how’s that? That’s a good stage name for you.”

  Viela Scaloppini, I repeated the name to myself. It sounded familiar. It would stick in people’s minds. “Hey, Fay,” I called to the kitchen. “Your father made up a stage name for me, Viela Scaloppini.”

  “That’s an Italian dish, Beverly,” she said. “Veal and peppers or something.”

  Her father was laughing so hard the newspaper shook. I felt like bawling right there in front of him, but then I’d really seem a fool, so I waited until I went home shortly after, passed my sisters and parents watching TV in the living room, said good night to the floor and heard my mother say, “Got a big day tomorrow, don’t stay up late,” as I walked up the stairs to my room. I laid on top of my bed and thought, That’s the last time my mother will say those words to me. This is the last time I’ll sleep in my bed, the last time this will be my room. I looked around at the knotty-pine panels my father had hammered up one by one to make my brother, Mike, a bedroom. I’d moved in as soon as Mike left for the navy. I’d rearranged the furniture, but it had never really been my room anyway. I turned off the little lamp hanging by my bed. My mother had bought it on sale at Bradlees, where she worked in the candy and stationery department. It was bulbous and made of milk glass, with little lumps all over. Fay had said it was diseased and that the lumps looked like warts. I should have told her to shut up. I jammed a pillow over my face and cried myself to sleep.

  It worked out for the best that Fay’s father was a cruel man, because by the wedding ceremony the next morning I was all cried out, or maybe I was just so much of a contrary person that I was smiling because 90 percent of everybody else was crying. When I saw Fay and Beatrice, we broke into a giggling fit.

  I avoided looking at Ray until he was five feet away. When I finally tried to meet his eyes, he was looking down at his hands. I remembered about his father. I looked in the front seat of Ray’s side of the aisle. His mother and sister were leaning heads together weeping, and there was no sign of Ray’s father, who had shown up in town fresh from the Bowery a couple of weeks before. We’d sent him an invitation, and then this morning Raymond was supposed to drop by his room with a red carnation in a see-through plastic box and bring him to the wedding.

  At the altar, my father’s eyes looked greener somehow. When he kissed me his cheek felt smooth as silk from shaving and slippery with tears. My mother looked beautiful in her new pink dress but she was practically convulsing with my two little sisters in the seat behind me, and then when Raymond came and took my hand, his mouth started trembling. I got annoyed because I wanted him to act like a man. But then when I took his hand and it was cold and shaking, I felt the way I did whenever I saw a midget or dwarf or a hunchbacked person—tike I wanted to take them home and adopt them or something. So I covered his shaking hand with my hand, looked him in his eyes, and said, “I love you,” even though a minute ago, at the top of the aisle, I wished he’d die before I turned thirty-five. The kid would be eighteen then, a legal adult, and I could start another life while I was still reasonably attractive.

  By the time we’d reached Ray’s sister’s apartment in New York City for our honeymoon weekend, I was tired and grouchy and mad at Raymond for drinking shots of Seagram’s 7 in the bar next to the hall, then for being found puking in the bathroom when it was time to cut the cake. I’d had my first drinks and cigarettes in front of my parents. I’d danced nearly every dance. I’d led the Bunny Hop and laughed and joked and passed out cookies. Now that it was over, I felt like a discarded flower. Ray’s sister had left us a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator and two champagne glasses with our names engraved like frost across them. Ray and I linked arms and took a sip, then slunk into bed. After we fumbled around in the dark for a while, I remembered about Ray’s father. “What happened to your dad?” I said.

  “He didn’t answer the door.”

  “You brought the flower and knocked and he didn’t answer?”

  Ray nodded his head.

  “How do you know he was there?”

  “I could hear cartoons on.”

  “Do you feel bad?”

  “It would’ve been weird if he came.”

  “I wish I could meet him.”

  “No you don’t.”

  I pulled Raymond’s head to my chest. He put his hand on my belly. Dionne Warwick’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” came on the radio. It made me think of dancing with my father at the wedd
ing. I’d looked forward to it for weeks. I pictured us doing the cha cha, the lindy, the fox-trot, a waltz, just like he’d danced with my mother for us kids in the kitchen Saturday nights when they were all dressed up and about to go out. I pictured the whole group of people down in the basement hall of the Italian Club stopping just to watch me gliding across the floor with my handsome father. But my father never asked me to dance again after the first one, when he gave me away. In bed with Raymond, I thought I should’ve been brave enough to ask him.

  After the reception, everyone had gone to my house. Ray and I changed in my bedroom and counted our money. We had eight hundred dollars, which would pay for the hospital. Then we played the Four Tops in the basement with my cousins and friends for an hour or so before Bobby and Virginia drove us to the train. When Bobby peeled out of the driveway, I saw my father look out the window.

  “There must be a dozen cops in that house,” Virginia said.

  “They ain’t going to do nothing to me,” said Bobby. “I’m going to Nam in a couple of months.”

  “A real hero.” Virginia flipped her fall off her shoulder and looked out the window.

  At the stop sign, when Bobby slammed on the brakes and peeled out again, Raymond said, “Hey, we got a pregnant girl here, man.” I don’t know why, but I’d felt like Raymond and Virginia were on one team and Bobby and I were on another.

  “Put a dollar down and buy a car,” Dionne’s song brought me back to my honeymoon and future life—“In a week maybe two they’ll make you a star”—and I felt the tears coming. Raymond put his head on my belly. “I think it’s moving,” he said.

  CHAPTER 4

  FOR most of my life my family and I lived in a little mint-green house that was officially part of the public-housing project but was perched on the very edge of it. Across our back lawn and down a field of weeds sat the rest of the publicly owned homes, tiny Cape Cods on minuscule plots of scorched grass or long brick apartment buildings set at strange angles to the street. Teenagers peeled out from stop sign to stop sign down there and kids ran around in huge stick-wielding packs. But across the road from our front lawn were big privately owned houses, fire-engine-red, snow-white, and forest green, with long lawns, generous trees, and kids who said please and thank you. At the very top of our hill was the country club.