Janey especially likes her cousin Michael, Aunt Peggy and Uncle Jim’s oldest, and her cousin Richie, who is the oldest of Aunt Ruth and Uncle Henry, who live nearby. Michael is a year older than she, and Richie only three months older, and they both greatly admire the way she can draw. Last time they wanted tanks and airplanes, infantrymen dead on the ground, bullets flying. This time she suspects they’ll want spaceships or beautiful women, amply endowed—this is what the boys in her art class ask her to draw. She can do either.
Her parents will probably deliver Janey to her aunt and uncle late at night, they usually do, and Janey thinks how Aunt Peggy will show her to a bed made up in sweet-smelling linens from the sheets having hung on the line to dry in the wind and the sunshine. She thinks too of how Aunt Peggy—everyone, really—will comment on how much she’s grown. They haven’t seen her for two years—last August, Janey got her tonsils out and they couldn’t take their annual trip to North Dakota. Janey got all the ice cream she wanted in the hospital, but it didn’t make up for the burning pain. Everybody said it would, but it didn’t.
Janey sits up and spreads her map across her lap. Every time her family drives to North Dakota, she follows along on a map, x-ing out the states as they pass through them. This time it will be Texas. Oklahoma. Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota. She already knows that South Dakota will seem the longest because it’s the one before you finally get there.
She yawns, considers car bingo, with its insulting juvenile pictures of cows and railroad crossings, rejects it in favor of watching the telephone poles whip past, birds on the wire occasionally rising up in a great flurry of flapping wings, a choreography of surprise and fear.
At the restaurant where they stop for lunch on the second day, the silverware is in an envelope of waxed paper, and the waitress calls her father “honey.” She doesn’t know not to be so familiar; he’s not in uniform, and he is using his vacation manners: no orders, no yelling, no gruff inquiries as to where he left his burning cigarette. He winks at Janey’s mother, and her mother smiles back. They are always in their own club.
Janey asks if she can have a hamburger, and her mother says of course. “Cheeseburger, I mean,” Janey says, “and can I have French fries, too?”
Her mother ignores her, so she asks again for French fries. “If you want them, get them,” her mother says. Janey holds one hand with the other and squeezes it.
“Get them,” her mother says, more softly now.
Janey shrugs.
“We’ll share,” her mother says. “How about that?”
“Okay.” Janey doesn’t like to share food. It makes her nervous, deciding how much she can take. She’ll let her mother have all the French fries.
While they wait for their food, Janey looks around the room. Big fat guys dressed in bib overalls and plaid shirts, hats on the table beside them with sweat stains on them. Not many women; there’s one woman two tables over sitting with a little girl wearing a blue sundress and red shoes. The girl is cute: curly blond hair, pink cheeks, a hectic kind of energy that has her playing with the salt and pepper shakers, arranging and rearranging her silverware, changing her position from sitting to kneeling to sitting. Janey waves at her, and the little girl stares. “Hi,” Janey says, but the girl says nothing back.
“So,” Janey’s mother says, “are you excited?”
About lunch? Janey wonders. The trip? She nods.
“Me, too,” her mother says, and then turns to her father.
“Hi,” Janey says to the little girl. “Hi, there.” No response. Janey looks out the big plate-glass window in the front. Across the street, a grocery. A dry cleaners. Dust rising up in the street from the occasional truck passing by; there are far more trucks than cars in this town.
And then the cheeseburger comes, and the French fries are good ones, so Janey does have a few. Four. And then when they go back to the car her mother and father both want a slice of the pie, so it’s not so bad for Janey to have one, too.
It is indeed late at night when they finally get to Aunt Peggy and Uncle Jim’s house, and after changing into her pajamas in the bathroom, Janey is shepherded quietly to her cousins Vicky and Doreen’s bedroom, to a cot beneath the window that has been made up in the very way she remembered: the linens are a summer day. Janey holds the fabric against her nose and falls asleep quickly. She dreams of riding in a car. Wheels turning and turning and turning, asphalt humming, radio stations coming in and fading out, the clouds a motion picture playing out for miles across the sky.
In the morning, Janey awakens before Vicky and Doreen. She sees how they have changed: ten-year-old Vicky’s face has lost its baby fat, and her blond hair is very long; eight-year-old Doreen is much taller, and she, too, now has long hair. Janey tiptoes out of the room and heads downstairs; she can hear the voices of the boys in the kitchen, Michael’s in particular (so much lower now!), and she is eager to see him. She wants to ask what they’ll do that day but decides against her own presumptuousness; she’ll let him offer, and whatever he offers, she’ll say she wants to do.
“Good morning!” Aunt Peggy says. She is in her robe, her hair in rollers, standing at the stove, where she is making pancakes. “Look who’s here!” she says to Michael and the six-year-old twins, Ben and Harry. Ben and Harry do not look alike at all, something that confounded Janey until her father explained the difference between fraternal and identical. But they are all nice-looking children, and Janey sees that Michael has grown handsome, even manlike, and it makes her pull down on her pajama top and wish she had brushed her teeth.
Aunt Peggy offers her a plate with three large pancakes stacked up tall. “Hope you’re hungry!” she says, and Janey is. She sits at the table and pours syrup over her pancakes, though the truth is that she prefers jelly on them. But this is travel: you accommodate yourself to others’ preferences.
Michael stares at her, then looks away when she looks over at him. Janey smiles, then asks, “How is your summer going?”
Oh, how the question hangs in the air. Finally, he shrugs and says, “Okay.” And then he smiles, and she feels better. She remembers now this period of awkwardness that she always goes through, her cousins looking at her like she is a rare zoo animal. But it passes quickly. Soon they will be comfortable with one another, and all the cousins will push en masse to be first for one of Uncle Ray’s perfectly burned hot dogs at the family picnic. Janey will spend time with this cousin and that during her visit, but mostly she will be here, and she thinks now that maybe she will say something about the day, claim her place at Michael’s side.
“What are you doing today?” she asks him.
“Swimming!” Ben and Harry say, and Michael says,
“Bampo’s taking us to the lake.”
“All of us?” Janey asks, wondering how they’ll fit in Bampo’s car. They are used to sitting on one another’s laps, but still.
“No, just us and Richie,” Michael says. “Richie always comes. He should just live in this family.”
“Well, I think he’d miss his own, don’t you?” Aunt Peggy asks. She sits at the table with her own pancakes, cuts them into neat squares, and douses them with syrup.
“I wish we weren’t out of bacon,” she says, and then, to Janey, “I’m sorry we’re out of bacon.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Janey says and can feel herself blushing.
“I seem to remember you really like bacon,” Aunt Peggy says, her mouth full. She swallows, then says,
“Don’t you?”
“I do, but…I don’t mind.” She puts her arm up to try to hide her already empty plate.
Michael stands. “I’m going to get ready.”
“Me, too.” Janey rises so hastily she scrapes her leg painfully against the underhang of the table. Important not to show it. “Race you upstairs?” she asks Michael. He snorts, but it’s not derisive; it’s friendly.
They go upstairs, Michael ahead of her, and he turns back to say, “I hear you won some awards for your ar
twork or something?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good.”
At the top of the stairs, he says, “See you.”
Janey tiptoes into the girls’ room, but they are awake now. “Hi, Janey,” Vicky says. She sit up in bed, tosses her hair back over her shoulders. “You’re here again.”
“Want to see my new doll?” Doreen asks. “She’s a fashion doll with blue eye shadow and she has lots and lots of clothes.”
Janey will hurry with Doreen and Vicky; then she will go and find Michael, and she hopes they will wait outside together for Bampo, away from the others. She is glad she’ll not be seeing her parents all day, indeed not for three days, when they will have the family picnic; it was a long drive.
The lake water is a deep green, and Janey can see the seaweed undulating beneath the surface. She doesn’t like seaweed, and she doesn’t like the rocks on the bottom of the lake, even when they are tiny. She has gotten used to swimming in the pool at the Army base, where the bottom is smooth and the water looks turquoise and the diving board sparkles with a rough white surface that looks like diamonds. Janey has learned to do a half gainer, but there are no diving boards here.
She is wearing her swimsuit under her clothes, and the straps are cutting into her shoulders; she will need a new one before the season is out. But for now she is sitting with Bampo at a picnic table while all the others are in the water. He watches them, but he talks to her. She has told him about her favorite and least favorite teachers. She has told him about visiting the Alamo. He has asked if she’s famous yet for her art, if she has a boyfriend who drives a convertible and can crack his knuckles (“No?” he said, when she laughed in response), if she has seen many movies lately, he envies her the cheap cost of movies on the base. He has shown her a card trick using the miniature deck he always carries, and she has agreed with him that it will thrill the little ones.
Janey feels mature, sitting at a picnic table with her hands clasped and talking this way with Bampo, and indeed he has been the first to comment on how she’s grown, calling her a real young lady now. She smiled when he told her this and did not blush, everything that comes from Bampo is easy to hear.
She is about to ask him how his baseball team is doing when he sits back suddenly and says, “Here now, don’t you want to swim? Don’t you want to go into the water?”
She shrugs. “I don’t like the seaweed.”
“Well, I’m going in. It’s hotter than the devil’s pitchfork. Come with me, why don’t you?”
She might as well, what is the alternative but to sit alone and watch, something she is overly familiar with. She takes off her pedal pushers, her short-sleeved blouse and sandals; he takes off only his socks and shoes—for Bampo, swimming means rolling up his pants legs, wading into the water up to his knees, and then staring out at the horizon with his fists on his hips. She walks hand in hand with him to the shoreline, and then they separate. “Bampo!” Ben and Harry call out, and he waves at them. Doreen and Vicky are practicing mermaid dives, and they yell for Bampo to watch; Michael and Richie have swum out to the dock, and they too call out to their grandfather.
Of all the people Janey has seen thus far, she thinks Richie has changed the least since she last saw him. Still on the short side, still innocent-looking, with his big blue eyes and rosy cheeks, still sporting a crew cut, and his voice is still that of a boy. Still giggles when he laughs. Not like Michael, to whom so much has happened. In Bampo’s car on the way over, Janey noticed fuzz on Michael’s upper lip. He was wearing his swim trunks and a T-shirt, and Janey saw the dark hair on his legs, and it revolted and thrilled her. She herself has begun shaving her legs, though her mother got angry about it the first time she did it. Two months ago, Janey came downstairs with little pieces of toilet paper stuck to her ankles, to her knees, and along her shinbones. Her mother was sitting on the sofa reading a magazine, and she looked up and gasped and said, “Don’t you dare do that again, you are too young!” But then, right afterward, she said, “You know, once you start that, you have to keep it up!” so Janey kept it up. She likes the look of shaved legs, though she realized after looking at Michael’s legs that stubble had grown on hers—it has been three days since she’s shaved. She decided that later she would ask Aunt Peggy if she might borrow a razor. Really, she should have her own.
She stands still, a little cold, her arms crossed over her chest. Out on the dock, she can see Michael standing, staring at her. He says something to Richie, and then Richie stares, too.
“I’m going in!” Janey yells and splashes out farther in the water. She swims over to Doreen and Vicky; she knows how to mermaid-dive, and she can teach them about keeping their legs together, their toes pointed. They will be all right to play around with, the girls, but the main thing is this: Michael has noticed her. He is her cousin, but he has noticed her in a new way. Janey feels like she did one time when she was much younger and was outside with a group of kids playing horse. She was the leader, a young stallion, and she was wild and free and beautiful, satiny black with a white star beneath her forelock. She neighed and pawed the earth and flung back her head and ran faster than she ever had before, and her hair streamed in the wind behind her. This moment is like that. She feels it in the same low part of her body, the way she has come suddenly to a place of beauty. Bampo may have seen it as well, for he, too, stares. First at Michael, then at her. Again at Michael, then at her. It’s all right, she wants to tell Bampo. We’re cousins. Nothing will happen. We’ve just grown.
After everyone has come out of the water, they play hide and go seek, all of them together, the bigger kids and the younger ones, and even Bampo, who volunteers to be “it” first. He leans against a tree and covers his eyes and counts aloud, and the cousins spread out to hide. They are still a bit wet, all of them still dressed in only their bathing suits. Bampo has said that, after they’re dry, he’ll take them to Dairy Queen. He had his arm around Janey’s shoulders when he said this, and she dared not move lest he take his arm away. She hoped the others didn’t mind his preference for her, they really shouldn’t, she was there so infrequently.
Now she stands still behind a tree that is very close to Bampo; she learned long ago that the best place to hide is close to home. The person who is it always assumes that people will hide far away and, after counting, moves quickly forward to begin the search. If you hide right behind base, you can quick run over and tag yourself in. Not this time, though, for as soon as Bampo stops counting, he heads directly for Janey’s tree. She can’t run back to base; he’d beat her. So she surrenders even before he finds her; she steps out from behind the tree, giggling, and says, “I give up. I’m it.”
He stares at her, and Janey can’t quite read the look on his face. Disappointment? Anger? “Ah, now, Janey. I hadn’t even seen you. I might have walked right past you!”
She shakes her head. “No, you were headed right for me.” She holds up her hands. “I surrender.” Her bathing suit is really bothering her. It feels too high at the bottom, and again the shoulder straps are cutting into her. She will be glad to get home and change out of it.
“I got caught; I’m it!” Janey yells. “Everybody come out!” She is glad to be it, really; Bampo shouldn’t be running all over. He takes heart medication.
The cousins come out from their hiding places, and Janey leans against the tree to count. After she hits one hundred, she yells, “Ready or not, here I come!” She can’t really remember if she is supposed to do this; she hasn’t played hide and go seek for a long time. Oh, but what difference does it make, it’s such a gay day, her happiness is tight in her throat, she loves being here.
Janey stands still and looks around for a telltale sign: a flash of clothing, movement of some kind, a muffled giggle. And there, in the bushes across the way, she sees a rustling. It’s so obvious she thinks it must be intentional, a ploy to be found so everyone will be that much closer to Dairy Queen. She knows what she’s getting: a Peanut Buster parfait
. Last time she babysat, she used the money to buy herself two.
She walks over to the bushes, laughing. There they all are, every one of them, including Bampo, crouched in the greenery and peering up at her. “I see you,” she said. “Y’all come out of those bushes.”
A kind of guffaw, and then there is the sound of Michael imitating her, saying in a high voice, “Y’all come out of those bushes!” All the cousins laugh. For a moment, she holds the smile on her face, the bright happiness she was enjoying still inside her. But then Michael comes crashing out of the bushes and walks past her with a look of disgust on his face. “Lard ass,” he mutters.
She jerks back a breath. Lard ass. What does it mean? She imagines a person with a big round behind, shiny and metallic like the Crisco can, galumping along and looking sideways at all the people she passes. And then she thinks of the Three Stooges, running into one another and all falling down. Dominoes standing upright in a line, and then one gets pushed. She imagines a net breaking, a bag tearing, the contents falling and falling.
She is not a stallion, wild and free. She is a girl whose bangs were cut crookedly last time and whose mother told her to stop complaining. Her teeth are too big and her eyes are too small. She sleeps with a silk slip stuffed between her mattresses, and in times of need she scratches it and sucks her thumb. She does not have any friends, really. And here, the last, she understands now that she has gotten fat. She understands the reason for the looks that pass between her mother and her father when she asks for pie, for French fries, for more.
The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted Page 6