by Jo Ann Beard
Patti locks the door so the grandmother can’t come down.
“Shitfitteroony,” she bursts out, and then does a series of controlled and graceful cartwheels across the long room, narrowly and expertly avoiding ceiling, coffee table, beanbags, and lamps. The other cheerleaders follow, with mixed results: Cindy Falk perfect, Kathy Liddelmeyer comes perilously close to the hanging globes, Gretchen Quist perfect, Deb Patterson dislodges a ceiling tile, and Cathy Olessen goes off course and lands so close to the fish tank that the molly rushes forward and hangs there, billowing.
While all this is happening with our girls, one of the ones from the other school walks up to the wall and presses the pine paneling, which pops open to reveal a cunning cupboard, stacked with games.
“A secret compartment,” I say.
“We were coming here before this was even a finished basement,” the girl who pushed on the wall informs me. “Her grandmother had the whole thing designed by a man from Chicago. A lot of it is just for Patti, like these games.”
“Wow, lucky you, lucky her,” Deb Patterson says lightly, flushed from her encounter with the ceiling. Her cartwheels are wooden, windmillish, and she knows it. I personally can’t stand her because she once cried, “No boys allowed!” when Dunk walked into the locker room after gym class. We all thought it was embarrassing and out of line, but everyone was forced to laugh, including Dunk.
The girl stares at Patterson for a moment, red faced, and Patterson stares back.
“What are you going to play?” I say finally, and the girl digs around in the cabinet and pulls forth a Ouija board.
“Want to?” she asks me politely as she and her two friends gather around a low white ottoman. At first I thought they were plain, all wearing a variation on the same mix-and-match Bobbie Brooks wool outfits, all with their hair curled like Patti’s, but now I see: they’re really cute.
“I’ll go later,” I say.
Felicia is sitting atop a red beanbag chair, shoulders hunched, pretending to be lost in thought. I feel better now that we’re down here, but I can tell she feels worse. I want to get a beanbag too, but then it’ll be the two of us sitting together like outcasts, so I just stand there.
“Why not grab a beanbag and sit down?” Felicia asks, her face expressionless.
“Okay,” I say, and pull the orange one over. It’s very comfortable, even being vinyl, although you feel a little like your head is sticking up strangely and maybe there’s nowhere for your feet to go.
“Want to get a game and start playing it?” I ask her.
“No,” she says quietly.
“Want to do anything?” I ask her gently. Her weakness is giving me strength.
“No.”
The Bobbie Brooks crew is hunched over their Ouija board—two of them with their eyes closed and the tips of their fingers on the planchette, while the third waits with a pad and pencil in her hand to write down the message. Our girls are in a clump as well, on the other side of the basement, watching one another do splits and backbends while talking in low voices.
Patti is behind the bar, setting out Dixie cups on the counter, eleven of them. She then ducks down and comes back up with three bottles of Coca-Cola, which she opens and then pours into the cups. After this, she comes around from behind the bar, pushes on the paneling, disappears into what turns out to be a bathroom, and reappears with a bottle of aspirin. She opens it with her front teeth, shakes some out onto the bar, and then drops one aspirin into each Dixie cup.
“Want a turn?” one of the Ouija girls asks us.
“Not yet,” I say warmly.
“I will,” Felicia says, crawling out of the beanbag and walking on her knees over to the ottoman. I tug the orange one a few inches over in their direction. There’s silence on the other side of the room as our cheerleaders watch us possibly being absorbed by the other group.
“Are you asking Ouija or calling up spirits?” Felicia asks the girl.
“Right now, spirits. Either this girl’s neighbor lady,” she says, indicating her friend, “or Lee Harvey Oswald.”
“To ask what?” Felicia says.
“The neighbor lady was found in front of her washing machine, just dead, with no warning,” the girl explains. “And so there’s a question of what really happened to her—was it a heart attack or could it have been foul play?”
“She was really old,” the girl whose neighbor it was says, “and I don’t even want to call her up—what would I say? Remember me from when you were alive?”
“You ask her what happened in her last moments. Say that you’re trying to get at the truth.”
“She’s going to know this is a slumber party!”
“I heard they can’t see anything,” Felicia offers. “They can only hear.”
“How can you hear if you’re invisible?” I ask, just for the sake of argument. “If you don’t have an ear bone to pick up the sound waves?”
“Um, I don’t think an ear is a bone,” the Hayley Mills girl says.
“Here,” Patti says, sitting down. “Shut up and ask it a question.”
She and Felicia put their fingers on the planchette and close their eyes. Felicia intones, “Is there such a thing as the curse of the mummy?”
Mummies again! Everybody has had something traumatic happen on a grade school field trip, but she’s never gotten over hers. Patti steers the planchette expertly over the board, visiting several spots before coming to rest over the NO. They open their eyes.
“Whew,” Felicia says.
“You,” Patti says to me.
Felicia gets up and I sit down, place my fingers on the planchette with Patti’s.
The cheerleaders are creeping closer without seeming to do so, still practicing acrobatics but somehow more over here than over there, like the squirrels my father feeds by hand: one minute they’re under the tree, refusing to notice you, and the next minute they’re eating a peanut off your shoe.
We close our eyes. Silence in the room.
“Are boys showing up at this party?” Cindy Falk asks.
The planchette pulls away from the curb and arrives at its destination without me. My fingers are left hovering in midair. I open my eyes.
YES.
Patti gets up from the Ouija board and goes over to the bar. “Everybody drink this pop,” Patti says. “If the aspirin isn’t all the way dissolved, just poke it around until it is. Otherwise you don’t get the effect.”
I’ve done this before and nothing happened, although I’ve heard good rumors about it.
“Eek,” Gretchen Quist, the littlest cheerleader, cries. She’s fluffy and pink cheeked, known for being scatterbrained. She’s always squealing and running behind people for protection. The other cheerleaders, with the possible exception of Patti, adore her. “What if it’s like LSD?”
“I’ve heard it is,” Cindy Falk says, downing hers in a gulp and then shaking what’s left of the aspirin into her mouth. “Some people will probably have a bad trip and some will have a good trip.”
“An acid trip!” Gretchen Quist gasps, running behind me and peeking out over my shoulder. I suddenly see why people love her. “What if I think I can fly, and try to jump out the window?”
I realize who she reminds me of—Amy in Little Women. Impetuous, ringletty, and perhaps not too bright, but a relief after the fervency of her sisters. She was the one I most wanted to be, even though I had the same name as another. Little Amy March grew up while no one was looking, wandered away from wherever it was they lived, and became an artist, while the one named after me had to stay and be in a worse book later.
“What if I jump out the window?” Gretchen insists, her little hands on my shoulder.
“You’re in a basement, dipshit,” Patti answers, crushing her cup.
Deb Patterson and Cathy Olessen go off, whispering, to sort through 45s and put a stack on the record player. First José Feliciano, then Smokey Robinson, then Dusty Springfield. The cheerleaders look like they’re doing ch
eers when they dance, a lot of straight-armed flailing and kicks, while the girls from Patti’s old school have a more plain and studious style, like the glasses-wearing kids sprinkled into the American Bandstand crowd. This is where it turns out Felicia and I shine—we have our own version of the twist, which involves keeping the elbows bent, the wrists slack, and staring upward. The key is to think of oneself as a pencil being slowly worn away to a nub, then back up again.
“Being good isn’t always easy,” Dusty sings.
Maybe it’s just the aspirin, but all the girls seem to be doing whatever I do. I twist down to the floor and fall over on my back and keep twisting; they all follow. I twist back up and then go into a funky chicken; so do they. When “Crystal Blue Persuasion” comes on it sounds more psychedelic than it ever has; waves of music, and we’re swimming to it. Kathy Liddelmeyer stops and stares at the Lava lamp, then starts dancing again, then stops and stares at it some more. Soon we all stop and stare at it.
The lava is slow and momentous, bulging up bluely and then breaking apart into pale, stoned globs that slowly find one another again.
“The lava is like a party of people,” I say as the song ends.
Everyone nods. I feel even more disoriented now; the most popular kids in my school won’t stop following a sidekick. There’s a momentary hiss as the needle glides over to the label, a creak, a click, the clatter of the next record dropping, the sudden hiss of the needle again.
“Me shell, ma bell, soan lay moan key bone tray byen on somm, tray byen on somm,” Paul sings in a clear, boyish tenor.
What if they were the ones coming over right now, the lads from Liverpool, instead of popular ninth-grade boys? My head feels fizzy and light, in a good way, and I get an insight into how much fun I could be having right now if I were someone else.
Gretchen Quist seems to be running through the basement without her pants. “I’m peed on!” she cries, flapping her hands. It looks like she couldn’t get her top unsnapped—a plaid bodysuit, fastened in the crotch—and tried to pee around it, but it didn’t work. “I’m peed on! I’m Mrs. Piedmont!”
Mrs. Piedmont is a large, torpedo-shaped woman at our school who is referred to, officially and unofficially, as the Roving Sub.
“Help, Cathy!” Gretchen falls on the rug and lifts her legs. The sight of our dumbest cheerleader, half-naked with her feet waving in the air like a baby’s, is suddenly, sickeningly hilarious. People are bent over, laughing their guts out.
Cathy Olessen reaches down and unsnaps the bodysuit, gagging with laughter, and then lifts her tainted hand in the air. “Another person’s pee!” she cries, and staggers into the bathroom.
Gretchen stumbles after her, first tagging Patti and crying, “Everyone at your party is pantsed!” At which point Patti starts taking off her pants and then her shirt, and then throwing her bra on the hanging lamps. Deb Patterson and Cindy Falk and Kathy Liddelmeyer and the three girls from the other school take off their bras and toss them on the hanging lamps. Suddenly, around us people are stripping all the way down, throwing clothes at one another, launching underpants by their elastic around the room, and crowding into the bathroom, where Gretchen and Cathy are wallowing around in a blue bathtub.
The bathroom is like something out of a magazine, with mirrored tiles, recessed shelves, stacks of blue towels, two toilets, tall jars of bath salts, a macramé hanger holding an air fern. Why two toilets? I wonder. The mirrored tiles make it seem like there are naked cheerleaders everywhere, arranging and rearranging themselves, like living wallpaper. It turns out Deb Patterson is as flat as a boy.
Felicia and I sit side by side on the hamper.
“You have to strip,” Patti explains to us.
Mrs. Piedmont, the Roving Sub, one time accused me of spitting on the floor outside the music room, a foaming hocker that I couldn’t even look at, let alone produce. She later apologized to me—something a real teacher would never do—when she saw the culprit lay another one on his way out. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said wearily. “You’re not the type at all.”
But she was wrong, I’m the type to do anything—I’ve stolen from stores, I’ve cheated on tests, I’ve lied, I’ve punched my sister in the face, and along with Felicia I’ve vandalized property, most recently the car of a man who called the dog pound on his own dog when it got mange. He lived two doors down from Felicia and actually turned the dog loose and hid its chain and bowl before calling it in as a stray. The dog just stood there at the man’s back door, oozing and miserable. Felicia and I told the guy from the pound while he was loading the dog up—using a pole and a muzzle, although the dog was actually friendly—but the guy didn’t care.
“I get paid either way,” he said.
Felicia spray-painted ASS on the driver’s side of the man’s pickup truck, and I spray-painted HOLE on the passenger’s side. That was in the early fall, back when we did things before thinking about them, but nothing ever happened from it; we never got caught.
So I’ll do just about anything, except spit or strip.
“I have my period,” I explain.
“Me too,” Felicia whispers.
“Hey—how come so many people who invented rag products have names ending in x, I wonder,” Gretchen muses in her little-girl voice. “Mr. Kotex, Mr. Tampax, like that. All ending in x’s.” She looks around slyly.
“Why would men be inventing rag products anyway?” Cindy Falk asks, staring into the medicine cabinet mirror, her eyes wide as she examines her chin. “Wouldn’t that be so embarrassing—to have a whole factory that just makes sanitary napkins? What if instead of making tractors, your whole town worked at a giant rag plant?”
That’s somewhat of a mindblower. They shift around, thinking.
“What if your own dad was a foreman and brought home all the reject rags for you and your sister to use?” Cathy Olessen says.
“And what about the ob ones, where it’s just a bare plug, no tube?” Gretchen pipes up, and they erupt into hysteria, making honking noises, holding on to whatever is nearby—a sink, a faucet, the edge of the tub, a hanging towel.
“It’s not ob, it’s o.b.,” someone tells her finally.
She blinks, thinking that over. “What does o.b. stand for?”
Silence. Felicia looks at me. I actually have a lot of tampon jokes, even though I’ve been on them for only two days.
“Other butt,” I say.
“She’s funny,” Cindy says coolly, still addressing the mirror. “Why didn’t we know her before?”
“I think she’s in my gym class,” Deb Patterson says, sitting on the rim of the tub with her legs crossed, arms folded across her nonexistent chest.
No boys allowed, Patterson.
“At first, people think you’re plain,” Kathy Liddelmeyer explains to me, “but then they realize you’re funny.”
“I don’t think she’s plain,” Felicia says.
“Shut up a second,” Patti says, listening.
Everyone freezes. When the record ends, there it is: tap, tap, tap on the sliding glass door.
What we’ve been dreading!
“Go outside and talk to them,” Patti tells Felicia and me, pushing us out of the bathroom. “You’re wearing clothes.”
“But we don’t even know them!” I say.
“Yes, you do,” Patti answers. “Everybody does.”
But they don’t know me! I’m making Felicia talk. The door is hidden behind a long drape; we slide behind it and duck out into the night air.
Nothing. Just the quiet backyard of her grandmother’s place, a long expanse of grass and patches of snow beyond the brick patio where we’re standing, various pieces of canvas-covered lawn furniture huddled here and there. Jed Jergestaad, Tommy Walton, Galen Pierce, and some other dark figures come around from the side of the house.
“Hey,” Jed says in a whisper.
“Hi,” Felicia answers in a whisper.
“Is Patti here?” he asks.
“Yeah,” she says. “They’ll be done doing something in a minute.”
We all look away from one another. It’s glittering cold out here, but nobody’s coat is buttoned. Clouds of vapor are silently exhaled as we wait. Somebody stomps a foot, like a horse.
“Cold,” Felicia whispers.
Jed Jergestaad smiles down at the ground. He’s known for being nice no matter who he’s talking to.
“What do you think they’re doing?” he whispers finally.
Felicia and I look at each other.
“It’s a witch’s tit out here,” Galen Pierce says in a normal voice, and raps on the glass loudly.
The door slides open and the girls appear, one after another, until there is a big, shadowy group on the patio. It looks like the same number of boys as girls, not counting me. Galen and Patti confer in whispers and then everyone takes off across the lawn, toward the trees that lead to Prospect Point, where there’s a fire pit and picnic tables—in the summer the police patrol it, but in the winter there’s a chain across the road. As people move out, it seems like they’re in pairs already, or maybe I’m just imagining it. Felicia seems to be walking with Jed. It was a game of musical boys and I’m the one left standing.
I don’t know what to do.
“Felicia,” I whisper.
“What?”
“What are we doing?” I ask.
“Going to Prospect,” she whispers impatiently.
“This is hideous!”
“Why?” she whispers, glancing at Jed, who is walking backward, slowly, waiting for her. Jed Jergestaad! The trees are absorbing the rest of them, two by two.
