by Haven Kimmel
Now all of this was problematic and titillating, but not unbearable. The one detail that none of us could overcome or tear our eyes away from was her miniature, black leather biker jacket, with five zippers. Motorcycles themselves were just a rumor in Mooreland in 1972, but hoodlum dress was out of the question. In addition to the jacket, Dana wore scuffy little Levi’s, and black boots. They were not cowboy boots. She caught me staring at her and tilted her chin up in a defiant and challenging way.
“Children,” Mrs. Caroline began, “I’d like you to welcome our new student, Dana. She has just moved here from Los Angeles, California. Can anyone here show us on the map where we would find California?”
Los Angeles, California. I let a little whistle escape through my teeth, the way my sister had taught me. When it became clear that no one in the room knew how to find L.A., Dana walked over herself and pointed to it on the map.
“This is it, right here,” she said, as confidently as if she were the teacher. She pointed to a large area way over at one edge of the map, and down low.
“Very good, Dana. Is there anything you’d like to tell us about where you came from?” Mrs. Caroline often sounded bored, or drugged, but I guessed she was just exhausted.
“Sure,” Dana said, shrugging her shoulders. “There are more people in the city of Los Angeles than in the whole state of Indiana. We have palm trees and the sun shines all year long and there is no winter and all the famous movie stars in the world live there.”
I looked over at Julie and made a little nyah-nyah-nyah face. I desperately needed moral support. Julie looked as stunned as the rest of us.
Mrs. Caroline exchanged a tired glance with Mr. Moore, and sighed. “Thank you, Dana. You seem to know a lot about California. Why don’t you just take that empty desk right there,” and she put Dana right in front of me.
Sammy Bellings’s bottom never crossed my mind the rest of that day. In fact, I didn’t think about the alphabet, or coloring my dancing bear page, or how on earth I was going to fit my name between the two solid lines and one dotted line that were supplied to me. As my fat pencil hovered above my Goldenrod pad, I could think about only one thing: that shiny brown hair falling over the collar of the leather jacket in front of me. How my life was over. How nothing would ever, ever be the same.
I FOLLOWED DANA HOME from school. She lived, of course, in the only new house in town. It was built at a slanty modern angle, and rather than being sided with either the traditional painted wood or aluminum, it was covered with stained cedar shingles. The house sat on half an acre, and there was a largish barn in the backyard. It had been sitting empty for almost a year; no one had seen Dana’s family move in.
Just as she reached her front porch, Dana wheeled around and yelled, “Are you following me?” Her voice was so deep that it startled me and caused me to jump backward a step. Without looking at her I crossed the street and continued on toward home. In my peripheral vision I could see her standing on her front porch like a traffic cop, with her legs spread and her arms crossed. That leather jacket was so impressive I could smell it and hear it crackling even from a great distance.
THERE WERE IDENTICAL TWINS in my class, Anita and Annette. By any standard, Anita was the sweetest person available, plus she could turn the best cartwheel and bake in an Easy Bake Oven. Annette was quite diverse. She could play any sport and could also draw very handsomely. I sometimes got them as best friends; not together, one at a time, although having one was like having both. I considered them a real best friend coup.
In the third grade, Dana stole them from me. The minute I saw Anita on the teeter-totter with her I knew I was in trouble. I turned to Kirsten, who was a great fall-back best friend, because she had seven brothers and sisters and going to her house was like going to the zoo. Dana stole her from me. I started spending more time with Rose at school, which I didn’t like to do because I spent so much other time with her that we hated each other like sisters. Dana stole her, plus she told Rose all the things I had said about her behind her back, like that I thought it was irritating that she was all the time left-handed. That left only Julie in the first tier of best friends, and Julie could not be monopolized at school. If a good-looking football game formed in an afternoon recess, no way would Julie spend that hour jumping rope with me. Julie had extensive playground duties, most of which revolved around defending her championships in every single sport. The afternoon I walked out and saw Julie and Dana playing H-O-R-S-E, I knew something had to give.
“Hey, Julie,” I said, giving her a little wave as I walked onto the cracked asphalt. She gave me a nod in reply then took her shot, which she sunk from about fifteen feet.
“I don’t remember anyone inviting you over,” Dana said, as if she were genuinely perplexed by my presence. Her voice sounded like she had spent the whole previous evening screaming. Julie passed her the ball and Dana tucked it under her arm while she studied me menacingly for a moment. I said nothing. When she finally turned and shot, from too far away and at a difficult angle, the ball missed the hoop by a good two feet. H.
“Thanks a lot,” she said, with no gratitude. “I missed that shot because of you.”
“Well, I’m glad there was a reason,” I said, watching Julie slide over to take her shot from the same impossible place. Julie walked so smoothly she might have been on skates. She dribbled twice, then shot without setting up, and hit it.
“Did I mention ‘go away’?” Dana asked, cocking her head and looking like Los Angeles. I could see that the situation was escalating, which was good, because as far as my best friendships were concerned, I had hit rock bottom.
“I think it’s your shot again,” I answered, nodding toward Julie, who was holding out the basketball, patiently.
As I watched Dana shoot, I thought of what my brother would have said about her form. She pushed too hard forward, without applying an arc. She didn’t wait for the moment to get itself right before she let the ball leave her hand. There was no follow through in her fingers. Her knees barely bent; her thighs were completely stiff. She would have stood a better chance, even with the unlikely shots, if she had centered her shoulders above her hips. She missed. O.
When Dana bounced the ball angrily back to Julie, I took a few moments to study intently the one boxing lesson I had re-ceived from my father. Actually, I focused only on the section which I called Putting Your Hands Up In Front Of Your Face To Prevent Fractures. She stomped over to me and stood so close I was able to smell her skin, which radiated something between hot and scorched.
“You bug me,” she said, looking me hard in the eye. “You’re interrupting our game and Julie is my best friend now.” I could see that her right hand was itching for some violence.
I tore my eyes away from Dana, leaving myself vulnerable, and looked at Julie, who was heading toward the area that would become the three-point zone. She looked back at me for just a moment, then shot, and hit it.
When I looked back at Dana I saw just a glimmer of alarm pass over her face as she realized the distance she would have to shoot to stay in the game. She had no idea what being best friends with Julie was all about, or how absurd it was to think that she could really come between us. She might as well have announced she was going to steal my spleen.
Dana approached Julie’s position with what was left of her swagger. She wisely concluded that the shot called for some consideration, which she granted the distance and the trajectory, then shot her straight-on shot and missed. R.
“Are you even going to say anything?! Are you going to answer me?” she said, voice raised, as she headed toward me.
“Not yet,” I said, watching Julie prepare for a lay-up, which she breezed through and hit.
Dana turned in time to see the shot fall, then looked back at me. She issued a sound I’d heard dogs make at each other when they really wanted to fight but also had to finish their dinner. Julie tossed her the ball, and Dana walked back past the free-throw line. She dribbled a couple
times while bouncing on the balls of her feet, then took off.
Her shot was a lay-up in name only. Basically the ball just went straight up the backboard to the right of the rim and straight back down again, barely missing Dana, who wasn’t sure where to go after shooting. She finally stepped out of bounds and stood there, dejectedly, while Julie decided where to take her final shot. S.
As she often did when we played, Julie picked the easiest spot on the court, right in front of the foul line, to end the game. It was a shot she could have hit while suffering from malaria.
Dana caught the ball under the basket and walked out slowly to the little jewel of a spot. She dribbled a moment, then looked at the basket hopelessly. Her too-hard shot hit the back of the rim and bounced up hard in the air. Julie watched the ball arc up above the basket, then caught it as it came down. E.
“Did you come over here for a reason?” Dana asked as she walked toward me, with a fair piece of resignation.
“Yes. I wanted to know if you’d like to come over and ride bikes with me after school.”
She gave me a you-must-be-kidding look, then spit on the court and rubbed it in with the toe of her boot. “You live in that ugly mustard-colored house behind the Marathon?”
“Yeah. Julie’s parents own that station,” I said, thinking I might provide her with a little Mooreland information.
“I know that,” she said, sneering. “I guess I could ride bikes with you for a while. I just have to make sure the house is clean before my mom gets home at nine.”
“Nine at night?” I asked, disbelieving. I didn’t know any church that held services that late on a Tuesday.
“Yes, nine at night. That’s when she gets done bowling.”
“Bowling?” I tried, fruitlessly, to imagine a mother in a bowling alley.
“Are you some kinda parrot? Yes. Bowling. She belongs to a league. They all work at Chrysler.”
I bit my tongue to prevent myself from saying a factory? The recess bell rang, and Dana and I headed for the line that formed under the big gym door, girls on one side, boys on the other. I turned and looked back at Julie, who was completely oblivious to the political coup I had just pulled off. She was moving around the court, taking various shots. Always, just before she shot, she let the ball fall gently back into the cradle of her hand, which nearly touched her shoulder. It was a beautiful moment. It seemed that everywhere Julie went, there appeared a horse.
“Good game,” I told Dana, as we approached the school.
“Shut up,” she said, barely nudging me with her stiff shoulder.
DANA AND I BEGAN talking with a speech impediment that caused my mother to wish us both harm. It involved making all of our s-sounds at the very back of our mouths, with copious amounts of spit.
“Mom,” I would say, “I’m heading over to Dana’zsh houzshe.”
“Stop talking that way,” Mom would answer, through clenched teeth. She almost never got mad, although once when I was five I had come barreling down the steps, stomped straight into the den where she was talking on the telephone, and demanded that she hang up and make me a peanut butter sandwich. She ignored me. When I demanded louder, and with a furiously stomped foot, she reached up without looking at me and slapped me in the face.
“Okay, I’ll zshtop,” I’d zshay, heading out the door.
“I’m going to return you to the gypsies,” she’d yell, returning to her book.
“Zshorry, Mom, but it’zsh too late for me and the gypzshiezsh.”
“My mom hatezsh it when we talk like zshish,” I told Dana, while rolling around on her huge bed. Everything in her room was gray, and it was all very spartan, like she didn’t really live there.
“My mom chazshed me with a yardzshtick,” Dana answered.
“Did zshe catzshch you?” I asked, interested.
“No. Zshe only barely made it out the front door before zshe zshtarted wheezshing,” Dana laughed. Ha ha on the smokers.
I HEARD MOM tell my dad that Dana’s parents’ life in Mooreland had all the marks of a second chance gone ugly. And while Lou and Jo associated with no one in Mooreland, preferring the company of the people they worked with in the factory in New Castle, Dana didn’t hesitate to tell her friends at school some of the most intimate details of their life, like: they were atheists. This was crazy and unheard of, and I advised Dana to keep it under wraps. Also, her parents had been married and divorced three times, all to each other. Dana’s oldest brother had once smoked marijuana. While high he fell asleep and into a dream about the Wizard of Oz. Just as he dozed off he heard the beginning of “Hotel California,” and then he was on the Yellow Brick Road, and the dream went on and on and on, and as he started to awaken he guessed he had been asleep and dreaming for about five hours, but in fact, “Hotel California” was just ending. This was another fact I felt it best no one in Mooreland know.
Dana’s mother, Jo, was short and whippet thin with dark hair bleached platinum and the skin of a career smoker. She was very tanned. Dana had inherited her deep, gravelly voice from Jo, and her short temper. I never heard Jo speak to Dana kindly, or maternally, or really in any way at all, except to give housekeeping orders, which Dana performed with a fabulous competence. One afternoon we went to her house after school—there was never anyone there—and Dana noticed that there were dishes to do. Two things stood out for me immediately: one was Dawn dishwashing liquid, which I didn’t know existed. We had only ever used Ivory in my house, which made Dawn seem hopelessly blue and exotic. The other was that Dana knew, somehow, when the dishes were done, to wipe down the counter around the sink. She even moved the canisters and wiped behind them. I watched her, puzzled. How did she know how to do that? Who had taught her? Even her hands, the way she held the sponge, and the turn of her arm as she reached the corner of the counter, were superior to anything I’d seen in a person my own age.
Dana’s father was the kind of man who bragged excessively about breaking the speed limit. He was big in a general way, with a long stride and rather stooped shoulders. Like his wife, he drank heavily and chain-smoked; he carried a whole roadmap of broken capillaries on his face. His eyes were what scared me most: he wore the look men get in their forties when they’ve given up hope and plan to get even. Everywhere he walked a vague sense of violence prevailed, although I was never certain whom he had hurt or if he was just a living threat. After working all day at the Chrysler, he and Jo spent the evening drinking and bowling. I rarely saw them.
If I had been left to my own devices the way Dana was, I would have eventually succumbed to both pestilence and malnutrition. My only comfort would have been to die in front of the television, watching Cowboy Bob and his sidekick, Sourdough the Singing Biscuit. But Dana and her two older brothers did just fine. In fact, she ate better than I did, and was at school every day in clean clothes (which I never had), with her homework done, and every time I walked into her jaunty, modern house, it was spotless, so clean it echoed. The new furniture was treated against stains; the carpets were vacuumed relentlessly, even though there were no pets in the house and no shoes past the doorways; no books or roller skates or dirty laundry menaced from the stairs. Dana’s house could have been cut from a magazine, the kind of home that tells a story, even though no one lives in it.
FROM THAT FIRST DAY I saw her, in the second grade, all the way through our third, fourth, and fifth grades, these were the things that Dana did better than I: math, science, spelling, reading, history, all things domestic and, once she got over her initial basketball hump, all things sports related. I was disliked by all of my teachers for reasons that were completely mysterious to me, but even in that dubious category, Dana excelled. She was disliked more passionately, sometimes even inciting our teachers to violence, which I had yet to do. For instance, our third-grade teacher, driven to a rage by Dana’s wisecracking, shook her until she saw stars. That evening Dana went home and searched through the thousands of magazines her brothers collected until she found
an article about the dangerous effects of shaking children, which she cut out. The next morning, while Mrs. Holiday was taking attendance, Dana marched right up and handed it to her. The whole class watched with a nervous excitement, but Mrs. Holiday, who could not be coerced into increasing her own knowledge, simply threw it in the trashcan without reading it.
When we were all invited to a party at Julie’s house in the fall of our fourth-grade year, I assumed that my naturally superior relationship with animals and farm implements would be revealed, and in the ledger in which our talents were recorded, I would finally have one little tick in my column. I no longer hoped to beat Dana at anything. I just wanted to be able to say that once, in the wretched life that followed her arrival, I had proved good at something.
The party’s beginnings were not auspicious. The Newmans’ pole barn was filled with shelled corn, an overwhelming mountain of it, and someone, probably Julie’s brother David Lee, who wished us all dead, suggested that we climb up in the rafters of the barn and dive into it.
“What a ridiculous idea,” I laughed. “We could suffocate that way—diving into corn is not so different from diving into water, except that it’s harder to get out of cor—” Before I could finish the sentence, the rest of the party was out the door and flying toward their doom.
