by Paula McLain
“She planning to go to college?” The machine to his left chirped twice and quieted. “I didn’t go to college. Guess I wasn’t smart enough.”
Part of me wanted to say, “Of course you’re smart enough. You can do anything.” Part of me was having trouble breathing. Under the hospital sheet, Keith’s feet were split and shot, the color of charcoal. (I’m a trampin , trampin , we sang in Granny’s car. Would they take him to heaven now, or anywhere, those feet?)
Penny and I stayed for twenty minutes or so, long enough to tell him how we were doing in school, about our dogs and the big sailboat in the backyard. It must have sounded to Keith like we were doing okay, better than okay, because he broke in, saying, “Swimming pools. Movie stars.”
“What?”
“You know, the Beverly Hillbillies. From the theme song.”
“It’s not like that at all,” I said, my hands in my hair again.
“Yeah, right.”
I spent the next few minutes sputtering, my face hot, trying to tell Keith he’d gotten it all wrong, that we weren’t rich or brainiacs or anything, but it didn’t matter. He was convinced that we thought we were better than our family. That we didn’t have room for them in our new life.
The thing is, he was right.
We said good-bye, patted what seemed to be a safe part of the sheet and got back on the elevator. I pushed Lobby and looked up. We sank like a dirigible.
“Hey,” Penny said, remembering the stupid gurney guy, “did you see how the top of the cart was all smudged, like he’d just gotten rid of a body or something?”
“Yeah. That was weird.”
We clicked through the slide show of gross possibilities in our separate heads, happy to be thinking of anything but our sorry-ass selves and what was left of our Batman up on the sixth floor.
“Yeah. Weird.”
IN JUNE OF 1982, Teresa graduated from high school. Days later, she walked down the driveway and across the street and moved in with the Swensons. She took the room Amber’s brother Ross had had, but since Teresa was so rarely there, the room went unchanged: same lion-print blanket on the waterbed, same lion-print wallpaper. She even left the pyramid of Skoal and Copenhagen cans in the corner, the historical Boone’s Farm bottle full of petrified coffee-colored spit. Sick.
The distance between the Swensons’ door and ours was some two hundred yards, and still, Teresa sightings were rare. She worked shifts at Golden Valley Nursing Home, ran an afternoon register at Carl’s Junior and waitressed late nights at Denny’s. Her work uniforms were all kept folded, if not clean, in the backseat of her car so she could change and keep moving. Penny and Amber convinced each other that she must be taking speed in order to work as much as she did and go out after with whomever she was dating, and so cornered Teresa in the bathroom, on one of the few occasions they found her home, to perform an “intervention.” Teresa stared into the sink as they lectured, said, “You must be fucking nuts” when they were through, and then was gone again.
IN MID-JULY, BUB, Hilde and Tina took off on along vacation, temporarily eclipsing Teresa’s disappearing act. They climbed into the purple Cadillac one fine morning and headed all the way to Oklahoma to visit relatives — their relatives, not ours. Although Bub and Hilde had asked Penny and me to come along, they didn’t seem surprised when we declined. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d taken a trip with them, even to Dos Palos or Turlock. When I was eight, I felt shamed when Aunt Birdie had told Noreen we were “just like family” because I wanted to be the real thing. At sixteen, I was grateful we weren’t, that we didn’t have to lay claim or genetic connection to Uncle Hog, who made his own head cheese inside the upturned skull of a slaughtered pig, to lecherous Uncle Jack, or poor dead Uncle Floyd, or any of a number of large, fussy great aunts whose crochet needles were as fast as their gossipy tongues.
Sometimes I looked at Tina and wanted to say, “Run. Run far, far away.” But it was too late; she was her family. Maybe if she had been as pretty as Krista, or as smart and sassy as Aunt Gloria, she might have found her way free. Maybe if my sisters and I hadn’t kept ourselves so apart, hadn’t pushed Tina away with the same force we used with her parents, she would be standing on the walk with Penny and me, waving happily as the car lurched out of the drive. But we had, and she was stuck — right smack in the middle of Bub and Hilde, right smack in the middle of the backseat with her Seek-a-Word puzzle books and her giant bag of Fritos.
Penny and I watched until the car rounded Bullard, then let out a good loud shriek. Without Bub and Hilde, the house expanded like a lung, rising weightless around us. We drank lemonade so thick with sugar that the granules rained toward the bottom of the jug. We stood with the refrigerator door open, took thirty-minute showers, let the dogs on the carpet. At night I used two fans and took a Popsicle to bed. I strung a dream in which I was a whole family, all by myself: the mother and the father and the baby playing with its toes.
Since Bub and Hilde would be gone for a month, Penny and I decided a little redecorating was more than in order. Into the closet went the Holly Hobby plastic place mats, the skunk figurines, the table lamp in the shape of a rearing horse. We stripped the crocheted toilet-paper-roll holders, the crocheted seat covers, the crocheted toaster cozy. Penny eyed the curtain in Bub and Hilde’s bathroom that was really a terry-cloth towel, faded blue-and-gold tulips with a fringed bottom. It was so obviously a towel. What was Hilde thinking? “Chuck it,” I said to Penny, and she did.
When we felt the house was as presentable as it was going to get, Penny and I hosted a party. We bought pizza and bad beer and let people come right in with their shoes on. I knew Hilde would have kittens if she saw the trail of dirt that was collecting between the entrance hall and the keg, and therefore felt a pure pleasure standing in the doorway, saying, “Come on in.”
“Is it okay to sit up here?” Diane Rodriguez asked from the countertop by the kitchen sink.
“Fine,” I said. “Totally fine.”
I walked from room to room, touching tabletops and chair arms, leaving my prints everywhere.
SOMEONE’S BROTHER BROUGHT PORNOGRAPHY. I came in from the patio, my glass of gin and lime Kool-Aid sweating into my hand, and found the whole room riveted by this image on the TV screen: a woman, naked, riding a contraption like a bike that swept feathers over her clitoris when the wheels spun. She moaned, pedaling faster. Behind her a man walked by on stilts, his stiff penis waving like an arm. It was Caligula. Everyone in the living room was laughing but transfixed, reminding me of the time at the bus stop when the Abels were having their pigs slaughtered. As our bus pulled up, the hog had just been split from neck to crotch. Strung up by her back hooves, she swung like a pendulum. Her entrails swam into a huge barrel. The bus waited, doors open, red lights flashing to stop traffic, but we just stood there. We were frozen with watching. The driver was too. “Ugh, that’s disgusting!” kids cried, craning for a clearer view, pushing at the windows.
The morning after the party, I woke up late. My teeth felt thick and knitted. Walking into Bub and Hilde’s room, I saw the waterbed was rumpled, sheets everywhere. On Hilde’s dresser, the Vaseline jar was open and the shape of a hard dick was pressed into the jelly. Someone had fucked the Vaseline! And then what? I thought of a woman in the movie, on her knees with her butt in the air — the way babies sometimes rock themselves to sleep. Then I thought of our new neighbor, Jacy Curry, sloshing around on my parents’ bed with a boy, any boy, petroleum rubbing off of him onto the blue plastic mattress.
JACY’S LEGS BEGAN AT her ears. They were as pale as her scuffed Keds, but she got away with it. “A tan would age me,” she said, tossing her fine chin. She was fifteen. When I looked at my own legs, skim milk curdling at the knees, I knew I would pay and pay later for thighs tawny or butter-colored now. Now required a currency that mostly vexed me.
Unfortunately Jacy had come to live with the Swenson family for several months — her solution to the problem of her mother’s su
dden transfer to Kansas City — and so I submitted to daily reminders of her desirability. Not only was Jacy beautiful, she got to live at the Swensons’, in her own room, like she belonged there.
Valerie’s husband, Dean, had recently left her for one of the waitresses at the restaurant they co-owned — a shock to everyone but the waitress. Craig and Ross, the two oldest sons, had moved into apartments of their own, and though their rooms were quickly filled with Teresa and Jacy, the house felt, to Valerie, like a drawer upturned and shaken. She was most like herself when it was filled with long legs and voices, and we were only too happy to oblige. Once the newness of being at the Lindberghs’ with Bub, Hilde and Tina gone wore off, we found we were happier spending our nights at the Swensons’. We’d camp on the lawn in sleeping bags until the sun and heavy dew would force us into the living room, where we’d sleep until eleven, our heads under the coffee table.
That was the summer we were obsessed with The Rocky Horror Picture Show album. We wanted to look like Susan Saran-don in white panties but would settle for singing all the songs and learning how to do “The Time Warp” with drag-queen drama. Dressed in her baby-dolls and dancing on her mattress, Amber would sing, “I’ve been making a man with blond hair and a tan.”
“And he’s good for relieving my tension!” I’d belt back, gyrating my skinny hips for all I was worth.
Amber had been wearing the same pink baby-doll nightgown for six years. Rubbed sheer in places, it had turned brownish, the bow at her neck floppy and chewed-looking. When Amber was wearing the nightie, there was no way to avoid her breasts, the physical fact of them. She was enormous, and had been approaching it incrementally since we were nine. There seemed to be no stopping her. All summer she wore tight white saddle-backed shorts with either a half-shirt with Dallas Cowboys bowed across her chest (once a guy said, leeringly, Nice team) or a scoop-neck pink T-shirt with iron-on bunnies and baby ducks.
“Don’t believe a guy when he says he doesn’t like big tits,” Amber counseled. “They all do. They go right for them. Like radar.”
When I insisted my boyfriend, Mark, liked them small, she snorted and sashayed out of the room, her breasts broadcasting their signal to a planet of predictable men.
Truth be told, I wasn’t sure she was wrong. I wasn’t sure of anything where sex was concerned. Mark was my first real boyfriend, and I still wasn’t quite sure how I had secured him — after all, my last memorable physical contact with a boy had been Bill Mosher’s finger in my sweaty armpit. As mysterious as the whole thing was, I was part of a couple now, free to revel in all that it entailed — writing Mark’s name in all my notebooks, on my fingertips, on the knees of my jeans; getting escorted to the door of my U.S. government class after lunch; and the nightly phone calls, which, though we had nearly nothing to say, we couldn’t seem to end (you hang up first; no, you hang up first; no, you).
Mark was gorgeous, with navy-blue eyes, a curly halo of sand-colored hair and lovely runner’s legs. The baffling thing was he thought I was gorgeous too, and told me so. I remember going to the mirror after a date one night to see if it could possibly be true, and it was. I was beautiful, and yet I could still see, in my sixteen-year-old face, the scrawny, needful girl Noreen had turned to one night, saying, “I’ll tell you what, child, you’re the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.” She said it flatly and without malice because she had been thinking it, I suppose, and because it was true. Both were. I was ugly and I was beautiful. Somehow, the two didn’t cross each other out in me. I felt them both, just as I felt, some times in the same instant, that sex was something wonderful and horrific.
I liked tongue-kissing Mark under the Swensons’ willow tree, his silky shorts moving under my hands like blue milk. But light touching invariably moved on to rattled breathing and mysterious dampness. More puzzling were my own responses. My body arched toward his hands and lips on its own, possessed. I felt warm and liquid in an instant. And, just as suddenly and beyond my control, I’d flinch, pulling back.
“Sweetie, sweetie. It’s okay,” Mark would say. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
I knew that. I also knew something different, something older. My body remembered other times and intentions, remembered Mr. Clapp’s planetary forehead and newsprint-stained hands — and it didn’t matter if I could see Mark’s face above me go soft with worry. In my body, I was being stung (icy and hot at the same time). Crushed. I flailed and pushed him away, and he let me, getting up then, confused. Kicking stones, he’d walk back to his car and drive away noisily. I’d cry and stop, cry and stop. I’d call Mark to say I was sorry, but couldn’t explain anything — not to him, not to myself.
ONE AFTERNOON DURING MY senior year, Jacy walked right into the Swensons’ bathroom as I was using it and began pacing in front of the long mirror, considering her javeline. Even on the avocado shag, she walked from her hips, like a dancer. I tried to pee quietly, gracefully.
“Travis is cute,” she said to her reflection. “Sure. But he’s too inexperienced. The one time we did it, he orgasmed in, like, two minutes. And I wasn’t even moving.”
This ticking off of her meager choices is what Jacy seemed to do best, cataloging, adding or subtracting penciled stars for tropical-colored condoms or Old Spice deodorant. She kept a neat record of her conquests in a green spiral notebook: first name, last name — if available — date, location, merit. That summer at the Swensons’, she was on line fifty-nine, the Australian foreign-exchange student she followed to the bathroom at Rhonda Snelling’s yard party. The bathroom was so tiny she had to stand up, her rear pressed to cold porcelain, left knee pinched against the wall.
I was seventeen and not a virgin, having “done it” precisely five times, always with the same boy. I didn’t need a spiral notebook. Mark was fervently Presbyterian, complete with an enormous colored poster of John 3:16 on the closet door opposite his bed. For God so loved the world. We started dating in March of my junior year. The first three months were sweetly repressed: sweaty hand-holding and near-miss kissing. We’d lean into each other at the movies, our breath bitter with Raisinettes. We nuzzled like nervous pigeons until the first full kiss, which was like a revelation. That he gave his only begotten Son. Then we couldn’t stop kissing. We were inventing it.
We squirmed and panted, fully clothed, in the furrows of the orchard near my house. I’d come home smelling of almonds, soft earth burned into the back of my skirt. This went on and on. When we finally did it on the sofa in his family’s living room, I was so surprised to actually find him between my legs, I couldn’t muster the sense not to scream. He pressed a cushion against my mouth, stopping it like a bottle.
From that time on, Mark and I were a sexual catastrophe. If he was ready, I was crying; if I was ready, he was feeling guilty and ashamed, saying, “No, we shouldn’t. It’s not right.”
I knew it happened other ways for other girls. There was a whole continuum, from Amber guarding her cherry like it was gold-plated to Jacy throwing it at anyone in pants, to Tina, who had been trying to woo a boyfriend with sex since eighth grade. There was a lean black boy in Tina’s class at Clark named Stanley Vargas. Stanley had a fantastic orange-tipped Afro that he liked to comb with a giant pick while leaning against the lockers watching the “talent” walk by. He whistled at Tina one day as she headed to our bus, and that was it; she would have Stanley if she had to tackle him first. They were a hot item for exactly four days, wearing each other’s dark hickies like badges, and then Stanley had to be moving on. Nothing Tina could do could change his mind, not wearing a sequined tube top and short shorts, not flirting loudly with his friends, not offering to go “behind the bleachers” with him, which meant various kinds of wrestling on the big blue mats that were stored there, at the back of the gym.
Tina’s virginity seemed not to carry any significance for her. She dispensed with it as quickly as possible and with as little ceremony as possible when she was fourteen, with Pete Berringer, who was twelve at the time. This hap
pened in the back of our camper, headed toward some sailing event while both sets of parents sat up in the cab, singing cheerfully along to Kenny Rogers: Oh, Ru-u-by, don’t take your love to town. Tina didn’t even have a crush on Pete; she just wanted to know what it felt like. And once she knew, she wanted to feel it again, with boys who mattered. This only became difficult when Tina wanted the boys who were beautiful. She was just average, like the rest of us. Thick through the neck and arms, Tina could bench-press a hundred pounds, which impressed the boys in the weight room, but not the way she wanted. Her hair was never right (probably because she let Hilde and Noreen cut and perm it), her eyes were small and squinty, and her lips were so thin she couldn’t wear lip gloss without it crawling toward her nose. I would have been terrified to chase the boys she chased — the pole vaulters and water polo players and defensive linemen — but she wasn’t me.
After Stanley, there was Carlos; after Carlos there was Alan, a diver who wore tight red Speedo swim trunks. Alan had big shoulders, a narrow waist and hips, and was so good-looking he could have had any girl in school, and did, the cheerleaders and pep-squad girls and gymnasts with their pert ponytails. Tina seemed not to know Alan was out of her league and chased and chased him, handing him thick love letters in pink envelopes through the Cyclone fence by the pool — and finally they had a “date,” in someone’s garage during a keg party, which was about as subtle as behind the bleachers. After that, she thought they were steady; he thought nothing at all.
Still, Tina wasn’t giving up, no matter how pointedly Alan ignored her. Once I watched her trail him all the way from the door of the boys’ locker room to the buses. She called his name and said, “Wait up,” but he wouldn’t even turn around. She was like a puppy at his heels, and it reminded me of the way Penny used to fawn over her second-grade teacher, Mrs. Munoz, desperate for one specific smile. They were either very brave or very stupid, I didn’t know which.
