Rhonda the Rubber Woman

by Peterson, Norma;

  I smiled back, a goofy smile, ecstatic at the warm feel of his hands.

  He pulled me closer and gave me a short gentle kiss. “I missed you,” he murmured into my hair.

  “Oh, I missed you, too,” I gushed, and sagged against him, feeling the energy drain out the soles of my feet.

  Just then a sailor and a girl, half dancing, half hugging, whirled into the clearing. The girl giggled. Bobby pulled away from me, frowning as the couple twirled past toward a knot of pine trees nearby. He cleared his throat in an exaggerated way, the same way he had the day he’d brushed me off.

  I remembered why I’d come and cleared my own throat, as if to show him this time I was the one who had an announcement.

  “I … ah … thought I should say goodbye,” I murmured. “You might have heard, my mom got married, and I decided to move to Philadelphia.”

  Bobby’s head jerked. “Philadelphia?” His face looked somber, puzzled with that Buster Keaton expression that made me love him all the more.

  “Yeah, I think I’m ready for the big city.” My voice sounded fuzzy. “I’ve had enough of small towns.”

  Bobby frowned. “What about school? Don’t you have another year?” The faint rings around his eyes made him look so sophisticated, I shivered.

  “Yeah, well, I already skipped one grade and I don’t think I missed anything, so why not just skip another?” My sentence had too many esses in it, like I was hissing at the night.

  Bobby lowered his eyebrows and put on a fatherly expression, or at least what I imagined a fatherly expression would be like. “I don’t think you should quit school. I think you’d regret it later.” I liked him scolding me, as though it showed he cared.

  “Nah. I can type. I always get the highest grades in typing. I’m a real whiz. That’s all a girl needs these days, to be able to type.”

  “You can do a lot more than type.” Bobby’s eyes looked straight at me.

  I shrugged. “Anyway, my mom and Earl don’t want me around.” I tried to sound casual. “They’re a couple of lovebirds. The last thing they want around is an overgrown kid.”

  Bobby moved closer. “Couldn’t you move back with your Aunt Cora? At least you wouldn’t be so far away.”

  My heart leapt. He cared how far away I was.

  “Nah, she’s got her hands full with my uncle. My uncle came back from the war with shell shock. Besides, I thought you were going to college. I thought you were going to move away from Marysville yourself.”

  Bobby sighed. He raised a hand and ran the pads of his fingers across my temples and down my cheeks. “I’m just going to Clinton State. I won’t be moving away. And I’ll still play with the combo. That’s what I really love, you know.” He pulled me to him again, so tight I could feel his heartbeat.

  “Nancy, don’t go,” he groaned.

  “Parting is such sweet sorrow, huh?” I quipped, but the minute I said the words I went limp and moaned, “I don’t want to go. Why do you think I came here? You told me once, ‘It seems like we belong together. You and me.’ It still seems that way to me.”

  Suddenly he stiffened and dropped his arms. “I know I did, but there’s something else.” He looked confused, hunched his shoulders, and turned toward the Palm Gardens. The flashing neon from the door lit his face in quick purple spurts.

  “What? Tell me.”

  “I can’t.”

  I stepped back. “I know what it is. Your mother doesn’t approve of me because I’m Georgia Sayers’ girl. She doesn’t want you running around with the daughter of the town slut.”

  “No.” Bobby looked shocked.

  “Don’t say no.” By now my voice sounded like a wasp caught in a lamp. If that wasn’t it, if it wasn’t his mother turning him against me, that meant he’d decided on his own I wasn’t good enough for him, and I couldn’t bear that.

  “Nancy, it’s not that. Believe me.” His face twisted in the purple flashes of neon.

  “Then what is it?” I kept my eyes on his face, damned if I was going to make it easy for him.

  “Listen…” A drum roll from inside drowned out his sentence. He glanced at the building. “I have to go in. Will you wait for me until I finish playing?”

  I hesitated, but he looked so earnest I couldn’t refuse, so I nodded. He gave me a quick squeeze on the arm and hurried inside. A group of giggling girls with curls piled up on top of their heads edged in beside him, making googoo eyes at him as I ran my fingers over my arm where he’d touched it.

  I stared up at the stars, hoping they might give me a sign whether I should stay or go. The sailor and his girlfriend rustled leaves from behind the cluster of pine trees as the moon clouded over. I went weak, afraid I was setting myself up for another brush-off. “Beetle brain, foggy in the crumpet,” I muttered to myself, wondering if somehow all my mother’s helplessness and neediness and desperation had seeped into me through the air we shared in the apartment. I pressed my lips together. At least I was one step ahead; I was getting out.

  I trudged down the cindered pathway that led up to the Palm Garden from the highway, listening to the stones crackle underneath my feet and feeling the purple neon pulse on my back until I reached the bus stop.

  26

  NANCY, 1946

  “Take care of yourself,” my mother said, walking me to the car, wearing a new champagne colored housecoat, flashing a sunny smile. “Be sure to eat breakfast. And … uh … let’s see … you got your umbrella?”

  “Yeah.”

  Earl was driving me to Philadelphia early on a Saturday morning in his two-tone tan and maroon Pontiac. My mother had backed out at the last minute because she had to go and wait at the apartment they’d rented up on Fourth Street for a bed to be delivered. She lit up whenever she talked about the apartment. “Wait ’til the girls see the Hotpoint stove and the Kelvinator,” she’d brag.

  “Good. Well, don’t forget to write.” She turned to Earl. “And you be sure to drive careful. I don’t want to lose my honey.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, beaming at her concern.

  She looked at me again, started toward me, then stopped. She reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. A bird squawked behind her. “Well … uh … don’t forget to wash behind your ears.” Her blue eyes became serious for a second, or maybe just blank. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

  “Nah.” I reached out to put my hand on her shoulder but she dropped hers at the same time and our arms banged against one another in mid-air.

  My mother bounced. “Well, remember to write us a letter.”

  “Yeah, I’ll remember.”

  It was so early, there was a mist over everything. I couldn’t remember ever seeing the world so gray. Teensy drops of moisture covered the car and the grass and the roofs of the houses. Sheets of mist rose from the ground and puffed out into wet clouds, turning everything a kind of grainy gray—the pavement, the Delaware River, even the cows in the pastures.

  Earl didn’t talk. The quiet made everything seem grayer, and for a while I sat there with the terrible feeling that Earl was the devil in disguise and he was driving me into the valley of death.

  Then Earl burped and said “Ooops, a little extra taste of breakfast there,” and laughed nervously. I realized how silly I’d been. The devil would never disguise himself as Earl. I edged closer to my door.

  I pretended to fall asleep and Earl put on the radio, first to a program called Hymns of All Churches and then the Breakfast Club. After that a man came on telling women who still worked in factories it was time to go home and turn their kitchens into cozy corners of sanity in a crazy world. It seemed like men had an awful lot of advice for women that women didn’t want.

  I stayed cramped in the same position for the whole trip as we rode past misty hills in two-bit towns with windows still dark from the night. A program came on with Eddie Duchin playing the piano with his magic fingers and the music made me think of Bobby. I daydreamed he’d been so brokenhearted not to find me at the Palm Gar
den that night, he’d decided to move to Philly himself and was already wandering the streets searching for me. I pictured myself strolling down Market Street—I knew that was the main street from a map—and suddenly I spotted Bobby running toward me, crying, “I knew you’d come this way. I’ve prayed to God to send you,” and we fell into each other’s arms, kissing and laughing.

  Before I knew it, Earl was driving into Philadelphia. I perked up as he wove through city streets, full of cars honking horns and buses stirring up clouds of blue smoke and people bustling every which way. I still didn’t let on I was awake, but as I peeked out, I felt excitement throb in my fingers. By now the mist was gone and the sun was shining on the cars and buildings bright as butter.

  Earl pulled up outside the Y and helped me in with my bags. His shirt was scrunched up in the back from the long ride so that you could see the pale skin of his back above the baggy trousers. Inside, he put the bags down on the tile floor by the desk. A girl with blood-red fingernails and a velvet hair ribbon to match was handing a key to the clerk, who took it absent-mindedly as he brushed crumbs off a newspaper.

  “So … uh … do you have your money?” Earl asked.

  I nodded. I had cashed in my war bond, and my mother and Aunt Cora had given me going-away money. I had $75 in all.

  “Yeah, it’s in my sock,” I said. My shoe felt tight as I thought about it. The girl with the fingernails ran smiling to a group of sailors huddled by the door.

  Earl gave me a lower case “o.” “Well, don’t take any wooden nickels.”

  “I won’t. And thanks for the ride.”

  “Sure thing. Write to your mom, now.”

  “Yeah.”

  He walked out, his red and black shirt still riding up above his belt. I felt tight around the temples, like once when I had tried on my mother’s chin strap as though it was a head band, like Tonto’s.

  27

  NANCY, 1946

  My room was small. The narrow bed had a white chenille bedspread with a sort of orangey stain on one side that would have driven my mom nuts but didn’t bother me. I just tried not to look at it. There was a cardboard wardrobe painted like wood, a set of drawers, and little table with a swirly yellow Formica top by the window. Some thumbtacks on the wall had bits of paper peeking out from around them like sunbursts. A banner pasted to the wall behind the bed said Khaki Wacky. The room smelled like Lysol.

  I unpacked and went out and bought a Philadelphia Inquirer and a box of Good & Plenties. Back in the room, I sat on the bed, eating the candy and looking through want ads. I circled the typing jobs that sounded good, like at The Merry Go Round Record Store and Woolworth’s, and skipped the ones that sounded boring like at Wyeth Laboratories and I-T-E Circuit Breaker Company.

  Tiptoeing out into the hallway to call some of the places, I went tongue-tied wondering what kinds of questions they’d ask. I found a phone book tucked into a shelf underneath the wall phone and started to look up Yvonne’s name when a girl closed a door down the hall and walked toward me. She had a big head shaped like an eggplant with curly red hair, and a huge belly, as though the bulging belly was supposed to somehow offset the head. I thought what a peculiar place for a pregnant girl, the Y. She smiled and said hello. I said hello back and flipped the phone book closed quick, as though she’d caught me doing something illegal. I pretended to read the newspaper until she got on the elevator, then looked in the telephone book again but Yvonne and Gus weren’t listed.

  In my room I stared out at the city, then opened a drawer, took out a manila envelope full of poems and spread the papers around on the bedspread. The air was so still, it seemed like time was stopping and my arms and legs felt like cement. I got scared, afraid if I didn’t move I’d disappear.

  At the desk downstairs, I picked up a Philadelphia map and started wandering the streets. The air was mild and the sky was a perfect blue. My spirits lifted. I was wearing my loafers with new pennies tucked into them for luck. I’d washed my hair with beer to make it shine, and I felt sophisticated as I watched people scurry to what I was sure must be exotic places. I felt a giddiness I’d never known before. All of a sudden I realized it was because I was free to be anybody in the world. Nobody in Philly had to know I was Georgia Sayers’s daughter. This is what I’ve been waiting for, I thought.

  I passed City Hall and turned left on Market Street toward the Delaware. I knew it was silly to hope Bobby would be waiting for me by the river but a part of me hoped it anyway. As I walked I realized I was also drawn to the river for another reason. The first time I’d seen the Delaware was just after Grandma died. I was six. My mother and I took a bus to Clinton to visit Aunt Cora and Uncle Walt. I remember the bus whizzed by the Rutt Ridge Silk Factory, where my mother worked, then past roadside bars with signs that showed cocktails with cherries on top: Daisy’s Paradise Club, Lizzie’s Tittle Tattle, The Dew Drop Inn. Later there were junkyards and houses with no sidewalks in front, just grass.

  Suddenly we turned a corner, and out of the blue, there was the Delaware. I’d gasped. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I felt my heart beat like a rhumba as we drove for miles and miles past homes made of gray wood with porches built right out over the water and little boats tied up alongside. I’d thought to myself I’d follow the Delaware someday to a place that would be the answer to all my dreams.

  Further along on Market Street, near Independence Square, I stopped at a small park and settled on a bench. A mother lounged on the grass, dipping a tiny spoon into a jar of strained bananas while her baby nestled in her lap, his little mouth opening and closing like a baby bird, his eyes fixed on her face. He was so helpless and dependent on her, tears sprang to my eyes.

  A guy wearing blue jeans and a navy blue turtle neck shirt walked up and sat down on the bench alongside me. His brown hair was shiny and tousled and he wore tortoise shell glasses. Flashing a smile, he looked me up and down.

  I blushed and turned away.

  “So…” he said, jutting his chin at my map, “you leaving home? Or just vacationing in the City of Brotherly Love?” His eyes had a bold look and his smile widened, showing large teeth.

  I felt myself redden even more. How did he know?

  “I … uh … ah … just graduated from high school,” I lied. “I decided it would be interesting to see what life was like in Philly.”

  “Well, you came to the right place.” Another smile. “There’s plenty of life in Philly.” He took a lazy look around the square, as if he owned it, then turned back to me. “Where you from?” he asked.

  I dropped my eyes to my lap, then peeked up and smiled, the way you saw Chinese brides do in newsreels.

  “Uh … from upstate P.A.” I mumbled, nervously. “I just moved here from upstate P.A.”

  “Ah, upstate P.A.” He looked up at the sky and took a slow deep breath.

  “So where you staying?” he asked.

  “At the Y.”

  “Mmm hmmm. The good ol’ Y. The citadel of sad stories.”

  What did he mean? What was the matter with the Y? Then I thought about the girl with the blood-red fingernails and the pregnant girl with the eggplant head.

  “If only the walls could talk, huh?” I quipped.

  He smiled again, sunnier now, as if he meant it this time. “So … I’m Clark. I work just over there.” He waved a hand toward some brick buildings behind us and shifted in his seat to face me. “I’m an artist, a free spirit, a part of the avant garde. You want a personal tour of the city with a bona fide member of the avant garde?”

  I looked him in the face. “Sounds to me more like I should be on my guard.”

  He laughed out loud and said, “Touché.”

  I laughed too. “I’m Nancy, and I’d love a personal tour.”

  I knew it was risky, but a part of me said, go ahead. If they find you somewhere staring up from ragwort weeds, they’ll be sorry. I pictured my mom wringing her hands and whining to Earl, “I should have paid more attention to he
r. I should have cuddled her in my lap and fed her strained bananas. I should have hugged her and promised I’d make sure the reverend kept his filthy mechanical hand off of her.” I envisioned Bobby sobbing, “I shouldn’t have let her go,” the rings around his eyes as black and sad as soot.

  Clark walked me through an alleyway to the back of a small brick building where he said he had a studio. He opened the door to a powder blue Plymouth.

  “I’ll treat you to a picnic lunch in Fairmount Park,” he said as I slipped in.

  We stopped at a delicatessen where Clark bought two corned beef sandwiches and a pack of beer, then drove out to the park and settled on the grass by the Schuylkill River. Fairmount Park was the biggest place I’d ever seen, with enough different kinds of bushes and trees for a forest.

  Clark handed me a beer. “A little drink before lunch,” he explained. “Does wonders for the psyche.”

  Psyche. What a debonair word. Clark was what Aunt Cora would call a real man of the world.

  We sipped beer while Clark told me he was a free-lance commercial artist and he could work whenever he pleased. I said that sounded fantastic. The sun shone in slants through the branches of a tree, making reddish stripes on his hair.

  “So how about you, are you going to get a job or what?” Clark unwrapped his sandwich.

  “I’m going to look for a typing job,” I said as I unwrapped my own fat sandwich and tried to figure out how to eat it. “I’m a demon typist. I was top in my class. My stepfather was saying just this morning driving me down, I’m lucky I’m a demon typist.”

  Clark smiled. “Well, I figured you were a girl with talent,” he said. “So you got recommendations?” He took a huge bite out of his sandwich.

  “Recommendations? No. I never thought of that. I figured they’d just give me a test or something.” I eyed my sandwich again. There was no way I could open my mouth that wide. I started nibbling across it.

  “Well, a smart girl like you, you want a reference, I’ll give you one. What the hell? Just put my name down, say you did some typing for me. I’ll tell them you’re a demon typist.”