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

by Beverly Donofrio

  “I won’t lie, Bev. I promise.”

  “Promise on Jason’s life.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “No it’s not. Promise on Jason’s life that you will never lie again.”

  “Okay, I promise.”

  “Say it.”

  “I promise on Jason’s life I won’t lie.”

  Raymond hadn’t been a junkie long enough to need a padded cell like in the movies. But the next day he had the chills and a runny nose. I made Lipton soup and dropped an egg in it. Ray shivered under a blanket and took tiny sips from a cup. When Beatrice called to come over, I told her we were sick. Ray put his feet in my lap and I rubbed them.

  I figured the first couple of weeks would be the hardest, so I stayed with him twenty-four hours a day. I played martyr, which isn’t hard when you’ve been raised by an Italian mother. I stopped smoking pot and drinking, too. I even let Raymond watch his TV shows without arguing. We sat Jase in the car seat between us and rode around town picking out our favorite houses, pointing out moo cows and horses to Jason. Then Ray found a job landscaping for two brothers. I dropped him off every morning, then at noon I drove back to where he was clipping hedges or mowing a lawn or digging a hole in the sun. We sat under a tree on the grass and ate the sandwiches I’d made. We didn’t say much, just watched the cars go past and Jason pick dandelions.

  After a couple of weeks, Ray said, “Bev, no offense, but the guys are calling me pussy-whipped. Maybe you shouldn’t bring me lunch anymore.” Two weeks later, Ray didn’t bring money home on pay day. He said the brothers hadn’t been paid so they couldn’t pay him.

  The next week it was the same story.

  The following week, I was lying on the grass while Jase filled up cups and emptied them in his plastic pool when the phone rang. It was Virginia. She said, “Bev, I know it’s none of my business, but I don’t think Ray has that job anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His car’s at the Crystal Spa. It was there yesterday too. Did he tell you he was working?”

  There wasn’t enough time to answer between breaths.

  “I got to go, V,” I said.

  I collapsed onto the couch and sobbed. Then I remembered Jase in the pool and stopped crying as suddenly as I’d begun. After all, I’d be better off without Raymond. Who wanted to marry him to begin with? Really, it was a godsend. I could divorce him and be exonerated. No one would blame me. If I were still a Catholic, I could probably get an annulment.

  I went outside and turned the hose on. I ran cold water over my face, then walked back to Jason. Jase splashed his hands on top of the water in his pool. “I’m going to kick your father out,” I said.

  Jase stood up and splashed back down, laughing.

  “You won’t have a father. You’ll have divorced parents.”

  Jason picked up a red cup and threw it out of the pool, then looked at me. I squirted water at a cat, which fluffed out its tail and darted under the dead bush.

  “We won’t have any money,” I said, and moved my face closer to Jason’s. “We won’t have any food.” I moved my face closer and crinkled my nose like a witch’s. “We’ll starve to death.”

  “No,” Jason said, turning his back and trying to climb out. He slipped back in and started crying. I started crying. I sat in the pool with my clothes on. Jason sat on my lap.

  “It’ll be just you and me,” I said.

  CHAPTER 7

  “THIS is unfortunate.” The young social worker with thick glasses and chubby cheeks bounced his pencil on my application and smiled. “But you won’t be on welfare long. When your son’s old enough, you’ll get a job. I’m sure of it. Unfortunately, some people come to view welfare as a, well, a crutch.” Then for some reason—he was bored, he liked me, he liked to hear himself talk—he took an hour to describe his caseload and the problems he faced: the utter impossibility of getting these people’s feet off the ground. The majority, he said, were either former citizens of Agua, Puerto Rico, who settled near their families in Meriden and spoke no English, had no skills and no interest in working, or the wives of formerly unemployed men, who’d traveled south from Maine to find work in factories. Once they got their jobs, they had more money than they knew what to do with, so they spent it drinking in bars, eventually becoming hopeless alcoholics who were known to beat their wives. Then, for one reason or another, the men deserted and their wives stayed and, I guess, had to come listen to this guy too. I wondered what he talked about to them. When he finished his talk, he said, “But obviously, you’re different.” He smiled again and winked at me. Then I signed some papers and was told I could expect enough money for rent, utilities, food stamps, plus what averaged out to be about five dollars’ spending money each week.

  I appreciated the guy’s vote of confidence, but when I was a kid and pictured myself being interviewed, it was by Johnny Carson or Merv Griffin, not a social worker. I was disappointed in myself, but I wasn’t complaining. One week before, I’d thought I might be forced to ask my parents if Jase and I could live with them, when number one, there wasn’t enough room, and number two, my father had said, “Once you leave this house, you’re not coming back,” and number three, I’d rather die than be reduced to living by my parents’ rules again.

  Ray, however, had no qualms about moving in with his mother. After I told him to get out, he stuffed his clothes into two pillowcases, said, “It’s better this way. I’m glad it’s over,” then let the door slam behind him on his way to his mother’s. Soon the credit union repossessed his car, which was formerly our car, and Ray landed on the town green nodding out and crying to anyone who’d listen, “I lost my car. I lost my son. I lost my wife,” in exactly that order.

  The guy was falling apart. It hurt my eyes to look at him. Whenever he managed to keep a date and pick up Jason for an outing, he’d stand on the other side of the screen door, his pants falling from his hips and his neck like a skinned chicken’s. He hid his eyes behind mirrored sunglasses. His voice was thick with drugs. He nodded his head and said one word—“Bev.”

  Meanwhile Jason, who was twenty months old now, would be running from the door to me as soon as he saw him, saying, “Daddy’s here. Daddy’s here.” Then I watched from the window as Ray tilted Jason into the car and next to whatever Animal he’d recruited to drive him and Jason to the community pool or Dairy Queen or Hubbard Park to feed the ducks.

  The first time we said more than two words to each other was in public, a month after we’d split up. It was at Big Top Hamburgers, a hood hangout, where my girlfriends and I used to cruise Friday nights after we got bored with the collegiates at the Farm Shop.

  I practically had to fall down on my knees to get my mother to baby-sit for me. “Men see a divorced woman and they’re out for one thing,” she said.

  “For Christ’s sake, Ma. I’m going to the movies with Beatrice.”

  “They figure once a woman’s had it,” she kept going.

  “Had what?” I wanted her to come out and say it.

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “Once a woman knows what it’s like, she wants it. Men can sense it.”

  “Like dogs in heat?”

  “Don’t be disgusting.”

  Look who’s talking about being disgusting. “Ma,” I said, as calmly as I could, then waited a beat between each word. “Just say yes.”

  After she said she’d have to think about it, which meant ask my father, she agreed to take Jason overnight on Wednesday. A weekend night was out of the question.

  Beatrice and I went to see M.A.S.H. at the new movie theater forty minutes away, then smoked pot as we drove and listened to all of Tommy, which a radio station was playing uninterrupted. The air hit my face from the open window. I got a whiff of spring, damp and potent, and thought, I’m free. Right now, Beatrice and I could go to Big Top Hamburgers and hang out all night. I have no husband, and my parents would never know it. I co
uld have a rare charcoal-broiled burger. I could actually flirt with some guys in the parking lot. Which was exactly what we did: order a charcoal-broiled burger, rare. But I never got the chance to flirt, because Raymond, the newborn derelict, showed up, weaved into the building, and said without stopping for air, “Where’s my son?”

  I saw red. What nerve. Raymond probably went to Big Top Hamburgers every night of the week, and now he was insinuating I wasn’t taking good care of his son? “In the trunk of the car. Where do you think?” I felt people turn on their stools to look at me.

  “I’m serious,” he demanded.

  “It’s none of your business,” I said.

  “I’m his old man.”

  “Father. Say father.” I knew I should shut up, but I couldn’t stop. “If you’re such a good father, tell me what your son’s new word is? You don’t even know. Where the fuck were you Sunday? What makes you think you’re entitled to know anything about him?”

  “He better have a baby-sitter.”

  “Bev,” Beatrice said, and opened her eyes wide as if to say, Let’s get the hell out of here.

  I brushed past Raymond, got into Beatrice’s car, and she drove out of the parking lot so fast my grape soda tipped in my lap.

  So much for hanging out at Raymond’s spots.

  Eventually, though, we cooled down enough to make small talk whenever he dropped by, mostly about Jason and people we both knew. Then one night late in August, almost three months after Ray and I’d split up, I heard a light knocking at my front door. I’d fallen asleep reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and got up to look out the window. I could see Raymond from above. He was standing on the front stoop looking at his feet. When I answered the door, I realized I should’ve put something over my nightgown, because I saw Raymond’s eyes drift over my breasts from the other side of the screen.

  “I have to talk to you,” he said.

  I opened the door, and crossed my arms on my chest as I sat on the sofa and he sat on the chair across from me, his knees wide open. He took a pack of Luckies from his shirt pocket, shook out a cigarette, and lit it. The way his wrist and fingers moved, where he put the cigarette between his lips, and the way he pulled the cigarette away so his lips kind of stuck to the filter were so familiar, I hugged my heart to protect myself from getting reinvolved.

  “Bev,” he repeated. “I got something I have to talk to you about.”

  I nodded.

  “I volunteered for Nam. The 101st Airborne Division. I’ll be a paratrooper.”

  “What! Why?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged and looked away. “I don’t know. Bobby died over there, and I don’t know. I got nothing going for me here. I figured I should defend my country.”

  “But you don’t believe in the war.”

  “I figure, my country’s in it, I should fight. And besides, I don’t have you no more, or Jason.”

  “You have Jason. He’s your son.”

  He stared at his hands and shook his head.

  I resisted the urge to pull his head to my chest and rock him.

  That night I stared at the ceiling in the dark. When I first knew Raymond, he drove a yellow Bonneville with a black roof and had plenty of money for beer and pizza, the outdoor movies, or Riverside Amusement Park. He was living with his mother then, too. He was planning to maybe join the navy to get his high school equivalency and a skill like electronics. Then I got pregnant and his life was ruined. I wept imagining Raymond thousands of miles from home, scrunched down in some rice paddy to avoid the bombs raining shrapnel over his head. I wept harder when I thought of Bobby’s wake. The coffin was closed because Bobby’s body had been too old. His family had placed his graduation picture on a little shelf above, so we could all remember what he looked like. Raymond wouldn’t have a graduation picture to put above his coffin.

  In the morning I woke up as usual to Jason calling, “Mommy.” I lifted him out and changed his diaper. I hugged him and smelled the Johnson No More Tears baby shampoo in his hair as I carried him down the stairs. I put him down in the kitchen and he walked straight to the cupboard, put his hand on the knob, and looked at me to check if I would say no or not. Then he began emptying the pans out for the first time of the day. I made us some cinnamon toast, then cut his into strips and put him in his high chair. He said, “Mmmm good,” as he daintily picked up the first strip and took a bite. “Good?” he said, prompting me to say my line.

  “Mmmm, good,” I said, biting my toast and realizing I had no appetite. I had a picture in my mind of Raymond standing in the hospital room looking afraid, holding the ceramic rabbit. The ivy plant had died almost immediately. I had no idea what I’d done with the bunny vase. Then I had another picture of Jason the week before, standing on the rocker in front of the window looking down the street for his father, who never showed. Jason’s father was a liar and a junkie.

  I handed Jason his plastic cup of juice. He took a sip, his eyes watering, and handed the cup back. It became crystal clear. Raymond was going to Vietnam for the heroin, the abundant, pure, and cheap heroin. He wasn’t going to Vietnam to defend his country and avenge Bobby’s death. He was going there because it was easier than staying here. Besides, who knew with Raymond. It could’ve all been a ploy to get me feeling sorry for him, to get me to open my arms and say, Don’t go. Come back. I called Raymond up.

  “Raymond,” I said. “I’ve been thinking. If you go to Vietnam, Jason’ll be almost three when you return. He won’t remember you.”

  “That’s true.”

  “What if I said to you I decided to go live in California for a year and a half, and just assumed you’d take care of Jason?”

  “That’s different.”

  “No it’s not. You can’t just leave him for me to take care of.”

  “I’m going to defend my country.”

  “Bullshit. You’re going so you can afford to be a junkie.”

  There was silence on the line.

  Jason crammed the last strip of toast in his mouth and said, “More.” I gave him mine. “Raymond, you have a son. I’ve been thinking. Either you stay and make up your mind that you’re taking responsibility for Jason, or you give him up. Don’t come back after Vietnam.”

  “He’d probably be better off.”

  I didn’t disagree.

  “You know me. I’m a fuck-up. I’m as bad as my old man.”

  “So you’re giving him up.”

  “He’ll be better off.”

  “I got to go.”

  I wiped Jason’s face and his sticky fingers with a washcloth, then released him from the high chair. He went to the cardboard box filled with toys in the living room. I watched him as he dug through the box and came up with a golf ball, which he rolled to me.

  I’d read up on kids of divorced parents and how they tended to think they drove the deserting parent away. I would be sure to tell Jason it wasn’t his fault. I’d tell him his father and I had fights and didn’t get along. I would not make Raymond into a bad person. I’d tell Jason his father wanted to go fight for his country. I’d tell him his father was brave. I could even tell him his father died and that’s why he never came back. But that would definitely be a mistake. Jason may have inherited his father’s lying genes, and I’d better set a good example. Raymond’s mother had told me that Raymond’s father was the same as Raymond, lying for the pleasure of it. I’d rather have Jason turn into a drooling idiot. I’d tell Jason the truth about all things. I’d tell Jason his father was a drug addict who couldn’t help himself. I’d tell Jason the way things really are, so life wouldn’t slap him in the face when he grew up. At that moment, I wasn’t sure if I’d even let him believe in Santa Claus.

  Jason was quiet by the toy box for a minute, then I got a whiff and knew it was time to change his diaper. That made me picture a scene. It was from when Jason was an infant. Every evening when Raymond came home, the three of us would eat dinner, then Raymond would take off Jason’s clothes and dip him in
the kitchen sink for a bath. Sometimes I’d sit at the table, smoke a cigarette, and watch. I was mesmerized by the gentleness of Raymond’s hands as they cupped water and released it over Jason’s shining wet body. Sometimes I’d wonder what it must be like for Jason to feel the largeness of his father’s hands and the sureness as they supported his back.

  My mother walked in then. I hadn’t even heard her car pull up. “P.U.,” she said. “Somebody stinks.”

  Jason laughed and made a game of running away.

  “Oh no you don‘t,” she said, dropping her pocketbook onto the couch and grabbing him. She rinsed out the washcloth, with Jason on her hip, soaped it up, then laid Jason down on the floor for a diaper change.

  “So, what were you doing?” my mother said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just thinking.”

  “Better not think too much,” she said. “Your hair’ll turn gray.”

  CHAPTER 8

  RAYMOND wrote me letters that I threw away without reading, until the one that made an even dozen. In it he’d enclosed a snapshot of himself passed out on a bed, with a hundred beer cans and empty liquor bottles jumbled on the shelves above him. His shirt was bunched up at his armpits, and his arm, displaying a tattoo of a devil holding a pitchfork, was draped across his bare belly. I guess this was his idea of sexy. He wrote, “I just saw Love Story. I am Oliver and you are my Jenny. I’ve lost you.” Did he think we had this great love fit for books and movies, a tragedy to make millions weep, when I, the heroine, hadn’t shed a tear since the night I pictured him floun dering in a rice paddy? I ended his illusion by writing to him a few hateful words: “I don’t now, never did, and never could love you, so do me a favor and forget I ever existed.” Then I marched to the middle of the driveway and in a gouge in the asphalt made a pyre of his picture and letter.