by Dawn Dumont
“What would I do there?” she would ask smacking her gum.
“There’s lots to do,” he lied smoothly. I nearly choked on my water.
“I’m not going to have sex with you,” she replied sharply.
“I just want to be near you. To hear every breath you take . . . every move you make . . . I’ll be watching you.”
I made a sound that was a cross between a cough and a snort.
Clark heard this and his tone immediately changed from Sting-inspired wheedling to annoyance. “Who’s there?”
I held my breath and went completely still.
“Get off the phone, you fucking creep, before I kick your ass,” Clark snarled.
I knew he was bluffing; he didn’t know who it was. It could be any kid from any of the ten families on our party line. Still maybe my breath was recognizable! My hand shook as I returned the phone to its cradle. Then I hurried into the living room where I became indistinguishable from my siblings.
While playing with the phone one night, I discovered that if I dialed our number our own phone would ring. Tabitha was having one of her meetings in her bedroom and I decided to bug her. I dialed our number and let the phone ring a couple times. I heard her bedroom door open. She always answered the phone as 90% of the time it was for her. As she hurried down the hall, I answered the phone. “Hello? Oh hi, Mom. Tabitha? Oh she’s busy right now, she has a bunch of friends in her room so we’re looking after ourselves . . . – “
Tabitha wrenched out of my hand. “Hello? Hello?” Her relief immediately turned into annoyance as she realized what I had done.
My brilliance was rewarded with a glare from Tabitha who then dragged the phone all the way into her bedroom where it, too, was locked in. David shook his head at my stupidity. “Clark is calling his girlfriend in ten minutes — tonight he’s trying to talk her into sleeping in his bed — and now we’re going to miss it. Idiot.”
Tabitha and I were further divided by our innate differences. If you put her in a room with a group of people, they would be drawn to her quiet confidence in a matter of minutes. If you put me in a group of people, I would find a book and ignore them, too ashamed of my incredible need to be liked to reach out. If there were no books, I would try to impress them with my knowledge of trivia. Sometimes Tabitha called upon my talents. Once while driving us home from school, she gave a good-looking guy friend a ride home. “Dawn, tell Zach some trivia.”
I pushed my glasses up on my nose and they quickly slid back down. “Well, what kind of trivia? Animal, place or thing?”
“Anything!”
Zach turned to me. He had green eyes, dirty blond hair and a huge head. “C’mon little Einstein, teach me something.”
“The . . . uh . . . the human head weighs 8 lbs.” Though, yours might weigh a lot more I thought to myself.
“That’s funny, little Dude.” Zach answered. “Do another one.”
What was I? A human trivia jukebox? Part of me felt indignant at being displayed for this stoned slacker. The other, more dominant part of me, savoured any attention. I began spitting out facts without pause. “Diamonds can cut glass. The gestation period of an elephant is twenty-two months. The average human eats 100 spiders a year.”
When we finally dropped Zach off, I was shaking and sweating from pure effort. My sister bought me a pop.
The phone rang off the hook day and night for Tabitha. It seemed like she was always on her way out the door to a party, a concert, or god knows what type of tomfoolery. I begged my mom to set down some rules or invest in a cattle prod. I felt that my sister was headed for ruin. I’m not sure what kind of ruin — I was relatively ignorant on that subject. There were a few girls in my sister’s year that had dropped out due to the size of their bellies. There was a listless shadow of a teenager walking the halls, his personality stolen by drugs. When he walked past, other students whispered, “Burn out.” There were students who had run-ins with the law — they got special visits from the police and even free rides up town. There were brutal fights on school property in which girls tore at each other’s faces like wild cats and the loser wore the marks for months. I didn’t understand the reason behind these things but I knew they must be avoided.
Like most parents, mine had no idea what they were doing. Tabitha was the oldest and the first teenager Mom had to deal with so Mom made up irrational rules. While she was outside hanging the laundry, one of these rules popped into her head. She declared it to us as we sat at the dinner table. “From now on, when Tabitha goes out, she will take Dawn with her.”
“And me,” added Celeste stubbornly.
“And me!” chimed in David.
Nobody paid any attention to them. Only ten and eleven, they had recently worked together on the theft of seventy-five dollars from Dad’s wallet. Everyone knew which side of the trouble they worked on.
I don’t know how Mom knew that I was the Jiminy Cricket of no-fun. Perhaps it was the way that I always told on everyone else. Maybe Mom had discovered this fact from viewing the neat placement of all my board games, with all original places still intact, beside my bed. Or maybe it was the time she walked into my room and saw me lecturing to my cousins and younger sister about the proper way to play with Barbie dolls. “Barbie has no desire to kiss Ken. Okay? He and Barbie are just friends. Also, Jolene — this is for you — Barbie does not like walking around wearing only heels, understand? She likes clothes.” Somehow Mom sensed — correctly — that I had a special knack for sucking the enjoyment out of any activity.
Tabitha was working her job at the time — a waitress in a pizza restaurant, a licensed restaurant! We had gone to visit her at work and ordered a large pizza. Mom and Dad introduced themselves to Tabitha’s boss, a hard-looking woman with thin, sharp lips and generous cleavage. She nodded in acknowledgement of our presence and told us our sister was a hard worker. Then she lit a smoke and went back into the kitchen. Though I admired the woman’s glamour, I knew she did not belong within a hundred miles of my sister.
My parents — again — did not know what they were doing. When they looked at my sister, they saw a good teenager, working. Sure the boss woman was a little trashy but she was still white, a business owner, and a respected member of society. Well, maybe not respected, but a business owner. Their daughter had made it over to the other side and that was good enough for my parents.
Tabitha earned enough to buy a car so when she wasn’t working she was driving her friends around. Now her bedroom was empty and the answer to the question, “Where’s your sister?” was always a sad shrug.
While she was gone, I would rifle through her things trying to figure out the secret of who she was. Was Tabitha’s confidence bottled up in the perfume? Was the message in her music? Did it have something to do with the posters on her wall? I would plead with the picture of Prince, “Help me.” He would stare straight ahead, immersed in rocking out in his high-waisted, skintight polka dot pants.
At school my popularity had rocketed from two best friends down to none. I spent my lunch hours standing in the bathroom slicking my hair down with water. Another quality that set us apart — Tabitha had great hair. It was light brown and feathered away from her face in gentle symmetrical waves. My hair refused to do to anything close to feathering. It chose to ramble all over my head in a collection of knots and curls, while spikes of it poked out of my head. We didn’t have cable at our house so I didn’t even know what people meant when they called me Lisa Simpson. “Yeah, right, thanks,” I would say as I headed back to my office in the bathroom.
I was able to control my hair with water — until the water dried and then the problem was even worse when static was added to the mix. By the time I was done drenching my head, everyone would be standing outside the school in the smoking area. All the students would be lighting up their butts from the period before as I wandered past with my wet hair.
“Did you just have a shower?” one of the boys would ask incredulously.
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�Uh huh,” I would answer unintelligibly looking for a friendly place to stand. I could usually depend on Trina, a girl who had once been my best friend, to make room for me. Trina and I had been close until she started going out and now she and I had nothing to talk about. She went to parties and made out with guys; I made popcorn with Celeste and David. Trina pointed at a hickey on her neck. “My boyfriend did this.”
“You have a boyfriend? A real one?”
“Well . . . duh. I like told you that last week.” It was true she had mentioned a story about a twenty-eight year old who had told her she looked sexy. I had stopped listening because the age twenty-eight was reverberating around my head like a gong. I was the most sexually ignorant person within a mile radius of the high school but even I knew there was something wrong with a man dating a thirteen-year-old girl.
Later that recess I brought up the story to Tabitha. “Yeah, I know,” she said, nodding that it was okay for me to leave and go back to my side of the wall.
“What if he — y’know — pressures her to do stuff — like the stuff they told us about in Health class?” My voice dropped to a whisper.
“I know what to do,” Tabitha said and turned her back on me.
“I know.” “Yeah, I know.” “I said, I know.” “I already know that.” Tabitha’s refrains were slowly driving our family insane. “If you know so much, then why am I lending you gas money?” Mom would argue, as she reached into her pocket for another twenty.
“You don’t know everything, you’re only seventeen!” I would yell at her through her bedroom door.
Dad tried a different approach. “Tell me this . . . do you know all the names of the Great Lakes? Do you know who all the Cabinet Ministers are?” Dad lost credibility when we discovered he didn’t know the answers to his own questions.
One night Tabitha shook me awake. It was after midnight and I thought we were running away from Dad. “Dad’s drunk?”
“No. But get up anyway.”
I jumped off the bunk bed and combed my hand through my buffalo hair. “What’s going on?”
“We’re going to the drive-in.”
“Why are we going there?”
“Stop asking questions.”
I pulled on my jeans and tucked in my sleeping T-shirt. The drive-in? I didn’t even know what was playing. And frankly, I was surprised that Tabitha wanted to go; she’d never shown herself to be much of a movie buff, unless the Ramones had a starring role, of course.
Celeste slept on the other side of the room and didn’t wake as I crept out. She rolled over and made a noisy grunt in her sleep. I’m sure she sensed the injustice even in her dreams.
I wandered into the bathroom where Tabitha was using her curling iron to feather her hair outwards when it finally clicked. I was going out! I was going to be around the cool teenagers! I was going to be popular!
Here I had been fruitlessly searching for popularity and it had woken me up in the middle of the night. Screw you, Judy Blume; being a teenager was easy.
I followed my sister out the door to her green Ford and climbed into the passenger seat.
“So who is going to be there? Will there be cute boys?” I asked.
“Sit down. Shut up.” Tabitha lit a cigarette and turned the music up loud.
We arrived at the drive-in. A party was at full tilt by the time we got there. I had naively thought that drive-ins were for movies and that parties could only be held in houses. How wrong I had been! Teenagers moved from car to car to truck carrying bottles of beer as music blared from their stereos. When they needed mix, someone would wander to the concession stand and buy a pop.
We pulled up next to another car and my sister got out. She leaned against the car and began talking to her friends. I wandered over to where she stood and stared at her with a bewildered look on my face.
“What?”
“I just . . . what am I supposed to do?”
Tabitha glared at me. “Just go. Have fun.”
How exactly? How am I supposed to hold my arms? How do I laugh? Which people do I talk to? Should I tell them trivia? Before I could formulate my answer, another teenager wandered over with a twelve of beer under his arm. He handed it out indiscriminately and I was more surprised when my hand found its way around the neck of a bottle. I opened the beer and took a sip. It was bitter and warm. It tasted like apple juice that had been held in someone else’s mouth and then spit back into the bottle and left in the sun for a few hours. There was no sweetness to the drink; I could not see the point at all. I spit out my mouthful and kept the bottle as a prop.
My friend Cara stood by an old pickup truck with some other girls. Her parents let her go out with her older brother. They reasoned that she wouldn’t sneak out and get into trouble if they allowed her to do whatever she liked. Their rationalization was more proof that parents were improvising as they went along.
“Hey, Cara.”
“Hey, Dawn. What are you drinking?”
“Labatts.”
“Oh, cool. I’ve already had two.”
“Yeah, this is my fourth.”
We talked about school and sipped our beers. Suddenly boring life was interesting. The drive-in took on sepia tones and my friends and I became husky-voiced philosophers.
“Yeah, math tests are way too long.”
“If Mrs. King gives me shit one more time, I’m totally gonna walk out.”
Trina stumbled into our conversation. Her eyes were streaked with mascara. “My boyfriend broke up with me.”
“The twenty-eight year old?”
“Yeah, someone told my brother and he told my parents and my parents told the police.”
“Aw, that sucks.”
Our drive-in party was over too soon. It seemed we had just started having fun when the last movie finished. Soon the owner of the drive-in would be walking through the crowd with a flashlight telling everyone to get lost before he called the police.
Someone decided that the party would move to the beach. I was not impressed; didn’t everyone know that the beach was closed at night? That there was no lifeguard on duty and that public drunkenness was a crime?
“Your little sister is such a drag.”
“Get in the car, Dawn.”
“There’s too many people in the car already. How will I put my seat belt on?”
“Get in or I’m leaving you.”
My sister raced down the curvy valley roads. From my seat where I sat pressed up against a window I could see the trees blur into one fat green forest. Tabitha had a lead foot and she needed little encouragement to go even faster. Another teenager-driven car passed us. We passed them back. It was three am and I was in a race. I could hardly contain my delight or the contents of my bowels. I was buried beneath a bunch of bodies and I calmed myself by remembering that I’d be the last one to fly out of the car. The volume on the stereo was maxxed out so nobody heard me ask, “Is no one afraid of dying?”
During the race, Tabitha dropped back behind the front driver and turned off her headlights. The road in front of us went suddenly dark. Then we saw the red brake lights of the front car. We crept along the road, only the moonlight lighting up the pavement. The driver and his passengers stood outside of the car, looking over the edge of the ravine. My sister turned on her lights and beeped her horn. They thought we had died! What fun! What amazing, scary, fun.
“Please take me home now,” I whispered into the upholstery.
The party had barely begun. By the grace of the overworked and under-appreciated angels that protect teenagers, we reached the beach safely. My half a beer had worn off. I felt tired and cranky.
“So what’s the plan?” I said to my sister. Well, that is what I intended to say. Instead it came out as, “I’m tired! I want to go home.” Tabitha rolled her eyes at my petulant tone and moved closer to her friends. I sat on the hood of the car and pouted.
“Stupid teenagers,” I mumbled under my breath. What fun did they derive from the softening darkness a
s morning crept up? What was so great about wading into the water and splashing one another? A girl my sister’s age took off her clothes and was swimming in her bra and panties. “Idiot,” I thought, “she’s going to end up getting polio.”
If this was cool, I wanted no part of it. I wanted my warm bed and Celeste sleeping across the room. I wanted to wake up to the sound of Mom screaming at us to get up for school.
“I’m only thirteen-years-old, for God’s sake. I should not be at a party,” I said to myself.
I began to cry into my hands. This was weird to the teenagers. Tears were saved for break-ups and near-suicides. I was an A student, but I could see in their eyes that I was failing partying. What’s worse, I didn’t care.
My sister walked over to the car. “What’s the problem?”
“I hate it here.”
“Go sleep in the car.”
“I don’t like sleeping in cars. It makes my neck sore.”
“Quit being such a brat.”
“I’m gonna tell Mom.”
I was declared hopeless and she walked away. She stood on the pier with her friends and they laughed and joked around. Others swam in the dark waters. I could hear their laughter coming in over the waves. Their fun made me even unhappier. I decided to remind my sister of our curfew, of our obligations to family, of our happy home.
I glumly made my way to the pier. “Tabitha!”
“What do you want?”
“When are you planning on leaving? Because it is already very late. And I know Mom would like us to go to church tomorrow.”
Tabitha sighed. She was bending. I could feel it. I pressed my case. “I shouldn’t be down here. You know I’m allergic to mosquitoes.”
Someone in that crowd must have had a younger sibling for whom they held some resentment deep in their soul. I do not know. All I know is that one second I was standing in front of my sister and the next I was flying into the water. I landed feet first in waist deep water.