The Boys of My Youth
Page 1
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by Jo Ann Beard
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company
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Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, 1998
First eBook Edition: November 2009
Back Bay Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. The Back Bay Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group USA, Inc.
The events described in these stories are real. Some characters are composites and some have been given fictitious names and identifying characteristics in order to protect their anonymity.
“Coyotes” first appeared in Story; “Out There” and “Waiting” appeared in Iowa Woman; “Bonanza” appeared in The Iowa Review; “Cousins” appeared in Prairie Schooner; and “The Fourth State of Matter” appeared in The New Yorker.
The author is grateful for permission to include the following previously copyrighted material: Excerpts from “Over My Head” by Christine McVie. Copyright © 1977 by Fleetwood Mac Music (BMI). Reprinted by permission of NEM Entertainment. Excerpts from “Good Hearted Woman” by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Copyright © 1971 by Full Nelson Music, Inc., and Songs of Polygram International, Inc. All rights on behalf of Full Nelson Music, Inc., administered by Windswept Pacific Entertainment Co. d/b/a Longitude Music Co. Reprinted by permission of Full Nelson Music, Inc., and songs of Polygram International, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-316-09186-2
for BRAD and LINDA
Contents
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Preface
In the Current
Bonanza
Cousins
Behind the Screen
Coyotes
Against the Grain
The Fourth State of Matter
Bulldozing the Baby
The Family Hour
Waiting
Out There
The Boys of My Youth
Praise for Jo Ann Beard’s the Boys of My Youth
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, for their generous gift of time, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in Ithaca, for much-needed financial support. My sincere appreciation to Lizzie Grossman for her sustained belief in my writing, her sanity, and her charming unwillingness to accept rejection when it came our way.
For their friendship, support, and encouragement, I offer profound thanks to Marilyn Abildskov, Mary Allen, Julene Bair, Charlie Buck, Barbara Camillo, Martha Christiansen, Marian Clark, Tory Dent, Sara DiDonato, Ellen Fagg, Gaile Gallatin, Wesley Gibson, Kathy Harris, Tony Hoagland, Will Jennings, Kathy Kiley, Carl Klaus, Edward Lawler, Jane and Michael O’Melia, Maxine Rodburg, Corbin Sexton, Bob Shacochis, Kathy Siebenmann, Jo Southard, David Stern, Patricia Stevens, Shirley Tarbell, and that beloved girl of my youth, Elizabeth White.
Preface
Here’s one of my pre-verbal memories: I’m very little and I’m behind bars, like a baby monkey in a cage. My parents have just put me to bed in a room with bright yellow walls. This is fine with me because in my crib there are various companions — the satin edge of my blue blanket, the chewable plastic circle that hangs down almost to mouth level on a piece of green cord, and a boy doll named Hal with blue eyes and lickable hands and feet made of vinyl. At this point in my life, I love Hal and the satin borders of blankets better than I love any of the humans I know. My mother puts Hal up next to my head as soon as I lie down, which is exactly where I don’t want him. I smack him in the face.
“You don’t want to hurt Hal,” my mother says sadly. “I thought Hal was your friend.”
Hal and I have an agreement that he isn’t supposed to come up by my pillow; if I want him I’ll go down to his end of the crib. My mother snaps off the light and as she does so the night-light is illuminated, a new thing that I’ve never seen before. The door closes.
I can see the night-light through the bars of my crib. It is a garish depiction of Mary and Joseph and Jesus, although I don’t know that then. Jesus is about my age but he looks mean, and the mom and dad are wearing long coats and no shoes. All three of them are staring at me funny. I start crying without taking my eyes off them.
The door opens and when the light goes on the night-light goes off. I stop crying and sit down by Hal while my mother looks at me. She puts the blanket back over me and leaves. Light off, night-light back on. More crying. This time my father comes in and picks me up, walks me around in a circle, puts me back in the crib with Hal, and leaves. When the light goes off and Jesus comes back on I cry again. This time both of them come in to look at me. My mother is smoking a cigarette.
“Don’t ask me,” she tells my father.
About three more times and they give up. I am left to wail loudly, which I do for a while, until I happen to turn on my side, looking for the bottle of water they had tried to bribe me with. As soon as I turn over the night-light miraculously disappears. The water is warm, just how I like it, and Hal’s face is resting against the soles of my feet. I let go of the bottle and wrap the satin border of the blue blanket around my thumb, put the thumb in my mouth, and close my eyes for the night.
I tried to check out that particular memory with my mother when I grew up. I asked her if she remembered a night when I cried and cried, and couldn’t be consoled, and they kept coming in and going back out and nothing they did could help me.
“I don’t remember any that weren’t like that,” she said, smoking the same cigarette she’d been smoking for thirty years.
So. Here’s a recent memory, from two nights ago. I was riding through upstate New York on a dark blue highway, no particular destination. It was cloudy, the air was springy and cool, the dashboard looked like the control panel of a spaceship. Piano music on the tape deck, a charming guy in the driver’s seat. I thought to myself, not for the first time in this life, Everything is perfect; all those things that I always think are so bad really aren’t bad at all. Then I noticed that out my window the clouds had parted, the clear night sky was suddenly visible, and the moon — a garish yellow disk against a dark wall — seemed to be looking at me funny.
In the Current
The family vacation. Heat, flies, sand, and dirt. My mother sweeps and complains, my father forever baits hooks and untangles lines. My younger brother has brought along his imaginary friend, Charcoal, and my older sister has brought along a real-life majorette by the name of Nan. My brother continually practices all-star wrestling moves on poor Charcoal. “I got him in a figure-four leg lock!” he will call from the ground, propped up on one elbow, his legs twisted together. My sister and Nan wear leg makeup, white lipstick, and say things about me in French. A river runs in front of our cabin, the color of bourbon, foamy at the banks, full of water moccasins and doomed fish. I am ten. The only thing to do is sit on the dock and read, drink watered-down Pepsi, and squint. No swimming allowed.
One afternoon three teenagers get caught in the current while I watch. They come sweeping downstream, hollering and gurgling while I stand on the bank, forbidden to step into the water, and stare at them. They are waving their arms.
I am embarrassed because teenagers are yelling at me. Within five seconds men are thro
wing off their shoes and diving from the dock; my own dad gets hold of one girl and swims her back in. Black hair plastered to her neck, she throws up on the mud about eight times before they carry her back to wherever she came from. One teenager is unconscious when they drag him out and a guy pushes on his chest until a low fountain of water springs up out of his mouth and nose. That kid eventually walks away on his own, but he’s crying. The third teenager lands a ways down the bank and comes walking by fifteen minutes later, a grown-up on either side of him and a towel around his waist. His skin looks like Silly Putty.
“Oh man,” he says when he sees me. “I saw her go by about ninety miles an hour!” He stops and points at me. I just stand there, embarrassed to be noticed by a teenager. I hope my shorts aren’t bagging out again. I put one hand in my pocket and slouch sideways a little. “Man, I thought she was gonna be the last thing I ever seen!” he says, shaking his head.
The girl teenager had had on a swimming suit top with a built-in bra. I cross my arms nonchalantly across my chest and smile at the teenage boy. He keeps walking and talking, the grown-ups supporting him and giving each other looks over the top of his head. His legs are shaking like crazy. “I thought, Man oh man, that skinny little chick is gonna be the last thing ever,” he exclaims.
I look down. My shorts are bagging out.
Bonanza
My grandmother married a guy named Ralph, about a year and a half after Pokey, my real grandfather, died of a stroke in the upstairs bedroom of Uncle Rex’s house. At Grandma and Ralph’s wedding ceremony a man sang opera-style, which took the children by surprise and caused an uproar among the grandchildren, who were barely able to sit still as it was. Afterward, there was white cake with white frosting in the church basement, and bowls of peanuts. My mother and my aunts were quite upset about Grandma marrying Ralph barely a year after their dad had died. They sat in clumps in the church basement, a few here, a few there, and ate their cake while giving each other meaningful looks, shaking their heads ominously. My grandmother, a kind woman, was way above reproach. So, it was all Ralph’s fault.
He took her to Florida on a honeymoon, a place where no one in the family had ever been. There was an ocean there. They walked the beach morning and night, and Grandma brought home shells. She divided them up evenly, put them in cigar boxes, and gave them to each of her thirty-five grandchildren. The cigar boxes were painted flat white and glued to the top were pictures cut from greeting cards: a lamb, a big-eyed kitty, a bunch of flowers. On that trip to Florida, I always imagine my grandmother walking in the foamy tide, picking up dead starfish, while Ralph sat silently in a beach chair, not smiling at anyone.
When we’d drive down to Knoxville for a visit, everyone would be hale and hearty, the food eaten, the iced tea drunk, the new rag rugs admired, and then we’d pile back into the car for the hour ride home. Ralph was always grouchy and harsh, with big fingers that he pointed at everyone while he talked. As soon as we pulled out of the driveway, my mother would look at my father and say, “That old sonuvabitch, I’d like to kill him.”
I went to visit Grandma and Ralph for a week right after having learned how to whistle. I whistled at all times, with dedication and complete concentration. When I was asked a question I whistled the answer, I whistled along with people as they talked, I whistled while I worked, I whistled while I played. Eventually they made a rule that whistling was forbidden in their house. I felt bereft and didn’t know what to do with my lips if I couldn’t whistle. I would blow gently, without making a sound, while helping my grandmother get dinner. She must have felt sorry for me because she said once, kindly, “Honey, you can whistle when you’re outside.” But that was no comfort to me. Part of the joy of whistling was knowing that it was always available, you carried the equipment right on your own face. If I couldn’t whistle at all times, then I didn’t care to whistle outdoors. I couldn’t wait to get home, where no one could make me do anything.
Grandma and Ralph both worked, so when I went to visit I had hours and hours each day to occupy myself. Grandma took care of senior citizens, some of them younger than she was, shut-ins and disabled folk who needed company and assistance with some of the necessities — cooking, talking. She was a volunteer. Ralph was a butcher and a sheepshearer. He drove a panel truck out to people’s farms and killed their cattle for them. Eyes like pebbles, tanned face pulled into a knotty smile, bald head glinting in the sun, a foot-long knife blade aimed at unsuspecting furred throats. Afterward he would use a garden hose to spray out the back of his truck. White walls and floor, pools and spatters of brilliant red. I glimpsed it once, without knowing what I was looking at. I remember thinking, “That looks like blood.” It never occurred to me it was blood. The sheep, after being sheared, stood stunned, in masses, their sides heaving, long cuts and gashes on their pink, exposed skin. The wool stank like crazy and lay in mounds everywhere, gray and filthy. I was taken along on his sprees, sent off to play with complete strangers, farm children, while he went to work with his long knife, his buzzing clippers. I was known for being sensitive to the plight of farm animals and bunnies killed on the road, but I steadfastly refused to acknowledge what was taking place on those visits. I never figured out what was going on around me, even when it was written on the walls in red.
I went along with Grandma sometimes, too. I saw a lady who slept in a crib, curled like a four-year-old, so tiny. She stared out from the bars at me with blank blue eyes. My grandma helped her husband turn her over. Their living room smelled like pee and something else. We had a covered dish for the husband in our trunk and I carried it in. The old woman had white hair that stuck up in patches on her head. I couldn’t get over that she slept in a crib, and I couldn’t stop looking at her. My grandma called out to her before we left. “Eva!” she called, “we brung Walter your noodle ring! But it don’t taste nothing like what you made; I didn’t have pumpernickel so I used white!” The words of grown-ups rarely made real sense to me. But Eva understood, and smiled faintly at us, her blue eyes staring through the bars.
“Oh, I got her smilin’,” my grandma crowed. Walter walked us out to the car and stood while we drove away, a wide man in overalls and a pressed shirt. He waved to us by touching his temple gently with two fingers, and then pointing them at us. I waved back at him that way.
But mostly I stayed behind, at their house, and wandered through the rooms, picking things up and putting them back down. There were unimaginable treasures there, old things that you didn’t know the purpose of, beautiful spindly-legged furniture, and things with exotic, lost names. Chifforobes and highboys, antimacassars and lowboys. Every surface of every wall was covered, and nearly every inch of floor space was, too. Only in the middle of each room was a cleared space for living, a more or less empty zone. Jars of buttons, every kind imaginable, homemade ones, bone ones, small pink and white ones (“Them’re for a baby’s dress,” she told me), enormous black ones. They were endlessly fascinating to me, all their colors and textures, the satisfying churrr as they poured out of the jar and onto a table. I didn’t quite know what to do with them then; they seemed to call out for some special kind of play, something that would lend itself to a pile of buttons. But I could never think of what to do with them next, so I would put them back in the jar, put the jar back on the table or shelf or closet that it had come out of, and wander on to the next thing. A small drawer in a small dresser, long thin tools with carved handles, a whole bunch of them rubber-banded together. “Them’re buttonhooks,” she told me, “from when you had buttons on your shoes.” I didn’t know what she was talking about, and set them back in their small drawer, closed it. On almost every surface there was an antique vase with a bouquet of flowers in it, set in the middle of a starched doily. Beautiful, exotic blooms, all plastic, all covered with a heavy layer of dust. “They throw ’em away, just like they didn’t cost money,” my grandma would explain.
I spent long days of blistering, stupefying boredom in that house, opening the refrigera
tor and staring into it forty times in an afternoon. Butter, milk, bowls with clumped food visible through their Saran Wrapped tops. There was stuff to eat to make you go to the bathroom, stuff to drink to make you go to the bathroom, and then several things to make you stop going to the bathroom. Nothing sweet whatsoever. She’d make a batch of cookies before I came and put them in the fat-chef cookie jar. I would eat all the cookies on the first morning, and then hunt relentlessly the rest of the week for something sweet. I would remember the cookies — greasy peanut butter ones with peanuts stuck in them, or chocolate chip ones with oatmeal — with a kind of hysterical longing. I couldn’t believe I had eaten every one of them the first morning. What could I have been thinking?
I ate sugar cubes from the sugar bowl, one every hour or so. They were actually too sugary and each time I ate one I swore I wouldn’t do it again. But another hour later would find me creeping sock-footed out to the kitchen, lifting the plastic lid of the sugar bowl, and selecting another.
Sometimes I would jump energetically on the beds, two twin ones that were in the room where I slept. I’d kung fu all the embroidered throw pillows onto the floor, and then jump and jump and jump, saying a Chinese jump-rope chant: “Chicka-chicka China, sitting on a fence, tried to make a dollar outta fifty-nine cents,” until I was so out of breath I had to collapse on my back and wait for the rotating fan to turn in my direction.
Oh, the rotating fan.
The lovely rotating fan, something that moved of its own accord in the dead house during the long afternoons. I would set the rotating fan on a footstool in the long, narrow bedroom. My job was to feed Kleenexes into it and then pick up the shredded pieces. By the end of one of those stultifying afternoons, I’d have an empty Kleenex box and a whole wastebasket full of soft pink confetti. Nobody ever questioned where the Kleenexes went when I was visiting, but once my grandma gave me another white-painted cigar box that was full of handkerchiefs, neatly pressed and folded. Every kind imaginable: flowered, embroidered, ones with Scottie terriers, ones with lace edges, the whole bit.