The Boys of My Youth

by Jo Ann Beard

  My mother’s cheeks are in bloom, from sloe gin and exertion, her lipstick has worn off but her corsage is still going strong, a flower the size of a punch bowl. She tries for the relaxed shuffle-kick-pause-clap of all the other line dancers but can’t do it. She sets her drink down at the edge of the dance floor where it’s sure to get knocked over and comes back to the line, full steam ahead. She starts doing the Bump with Wendell’s mom and another aunt. Before they can get me involved, I dance myself over to the edge of the floor and step out into the darkness.

  “The moms need to be spanked and put in chairs,” I tell Eric, who hands over his beer without being asked. He looks peaceful and affectionate; his hair is sticking straight up in front and there’s something pink and crusty all over the front of his shirt.

  “One of those kids threw a piece of cake at me,” he says placidly. He’s been smoking pot out in the corn with Freddy, I can tell. The band pauses between numbers and the mothers keep dancing. In the distance, two uncles stand talking, using the blue glow of a bug zapper to compare their mangled thumbnails. Up by the band, the bride is getting ready to throw the bouquet. I’m being summoned to come stand in the group of girl cousins clustered around Wendell. I walk backward until I’m past the first row of corn, Eric following amiably, pink-eyed and slap-happy. He’s using a swizzle stick for a toothpick.

  Inside the corn it is completely dark, the stalks stand silent, the sounds of the party are indistinct. We can hear each other breathing. There is a muffled cheering as the bouquet gets thrown, and then someone talks loud and long into the microphone, offering a toast. Eric begins nuzzling my ear and talking baby talk.

  “Hey,” I whisper to him.

  “Mmmm?” he says.

  “Have you ever seen a corn snake?”

  He refuses to be intimidated. A waltz begins and we absently take up the one-two-three, one-two-three. Around us the dark stalks ripple like water, the waves of the blue Danube wash over us. “I can show you a corn snake,” he says softly, into my hair.

  Here is a scene. Two sisters talk together in low voices, one knits and the other picks lints carefully off a blanket. Their eyes meet infrequently but the conversation is the same as always.

  “He’s too young to retire,” my mother says. “He’ll be stuck to her like a burr, and then that’s all you’ll hear. How she can’t stand having him underfoot.” One of my uncles wants to retire from selling Motorola televisions and spend the rest of his years doing woodworking.

  “How many pig-shaped cutting boards does anybody need?” my aunt says. She holds her knitting up to the window. “Goddamn it. I did it again.” She begins unraveling the last few rows, the yarn falling into a snarl around her feet.

  “Here,” my mother says, holding out a hand, “give me that.” She takes the ball of pale yellow yarn and slowly, patiently winds the kinked part back up. While they work, a nurse enters and reads a chart, takes a needle from a cart in the hall, and injects it into the tube leading into my mother’s arm. When the door snicks shut behind her, my aunt quits unraveling long enough to get a cigarette from her purse.

  “They better not catch me doing this,” she says, lighting up. She’s using an old pop can for an ashtray. The cigarette trembles slightly in her long fingers and her eyes find the ceiling, then the floor, then the window. She adjusts the belt on her suit, a soft green knit tunic over pants, with silver buttons and a patterned scarf at the neck. She’s sitting in an orange plastic chair.

  My mother is wearing a dark blue negligee with a bedjacket and thick cotton socks. She takes a puff from my aunt’s cigarette and exhales slowly, making professional smoke rings. “Now I’m corrupted,” she says dryly.

  “If any of them walked in right now, they’d have a fit,” my aunt replies uneasily. She’s worried about stern daughters, crabby nurses.

  “Do I give a good goddamn?” my mother asks peacefully. She’s staring at the ceiling. “I don’t think I do.” She’s drifting now, floating upward, her shot is taking effect. She gets a glimpse of something and then loses it, like a fish swimming in and out of view in the darkness under water. She struggles to the surface. “I hope you get a girl,” she says.

  My aunt is knitting again, the long needles moving against each other, tying knots, casting off, creating small rosettes. Wendell is ready to have a baby any day now. “Well, she’s carrying it low,” my aunt answers skeptically. The room is dimming, she turns her chair more toward the window. There is a long pause, with only the needles and the tedious breath, the sterile landscape of cancer country.

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” my mother finally replies. Her father bends over the bed to kiss her, as substantial as air; he’s a ghost, they won’t leave her alone. She moves slowly through the fluid and brings a thought to the surface. “We carried all of ours low, and look what we got.” They swim through her lake, gray-eyed sisters, thin-legged and mouthy. They fight and hold hands, trade shoes and dresses, marry beautiful tall men, and have daughters together, two dark-eyed cousins, thin-legged and mouthy. A fish splashes, a silver arc against the blue sky, its scales like sequins. She startles awake.

  “I hope you get a girl,” she says again. This is all she can think to say. Her sister, in the dimness, sets down her work and comes to the bed. She bends over and pulls the blanket up, straightens it out. She can’t think of what to say either. The face on the pillow is foreign to her suddenly, distant, and the weight of the long afternoon bends her in half. She leans forward wearily, and lets herself grimace.

  “We got our girls we wanted so bad, didn’t we?” my mother whispers to her, eyes still shut. My aunt straightens and fingers a silver button at her throat.

  “Those damn brats,” she comments. She presses both hands against the small of her back and shuts her eyes briefly. For an instant she sees the two original brats — wearing their droopy calico dresses, sassing their mother, carrying water up from the pump at the home place, knocking into each other. “You were always my sister,” she says softly.

  My mother is completely without pain now, the lake is dark, the fish move easily out of her way. Her sister swims by and makes a statement. “I know it,” she answers. She tries to think of a way to express something. Sequins fall through the water, fish scales, and a baby floats past, turned upside-down with a thumb corked in its mouth. The morphine is a thin vapor in her veins. She rouses herself.

  “He did do a nice job on those Christmas trees,” she says. My aunt nods. She’s talking about the woodworking uncle now, who made Christmas trees for all the sisters to put in the middle of their dining-room tables.

  “I told him to make me a couple more for next year,” my aunt says. “My card club went nuts over it.” She lights another cigarette, hating herself for it. My mother is silent, her hands cut the water smoothly, like two long knives. The little gray-eyed girls paddle and laugh. She pushes a spray of water into her sister’s face and her sister pushes one back. Their hair is shining against their heads.

  In the dimness of the hospital room, my aunt smokes and thinks. She doesn’t see their father next to the bed, or old Aunt Grace piddling around with the flower arrangements. She sees only the still form on the bed, the half-open mouth, the coppery wig. She yawns. Wendell’s stomach is out to here, she remembers, any day now. That’s one piece of good news.

  My mother sleeps silently while my aunt thinks. As the invisible hands tend to her, she dives and comes up, breaks free of the water. A few feet over a fish leaps again, high in the air. Her arms move lazily back and forth, holding her up, and as she watches, the fish is transformed. High above the water, it rises like a silver baton, presses itself against the blue August sky, and refuses to drop back down.

  Behind the Screen

  I’m looking at the backs of all their heads. They’re sitting on lawn chairs in the dusk and so am I, only their lawn chairs are on the lawn while mine is on the enclosed back porch. I have to look at the backs of their heads through the screen. We’re waitin
g for the fireworks to begin.

  My sister is wearing shorts, a midriff top, and all manner of jewelry — a pop-bead necklace, a Timex wristwatch, a mood ring, and a charm bracelet that makes a busy metallic rustle every time she moves her arm, which she does frequently. On the charm bracelet, between a high-stepping majorette and a sewing machine with movable parts, is a little silver book that opens like a locket to display The Teen Commandments. Engraved in infinitesimal letters: Don’t let your parents down, they brought you up; Choose a date who would make a good mate; and the famous At the first moment turn away from unclean thinking — at the first moment. It has such an urgent tone it forces you to think uncleanly. Right now my sister is sitting in a lawn chair waiting for it to get dark. Every few minutes she raises and lowers her right arm so the charm bracelet, which I covet, clanks up to her elbow and then slides slowly and sensuously back down to her wrist. She doesn’t bother turning around to see how I take this. She knows it’s killing me.

  They won’t let me off the porch because I’m having an allergy attack. A low whistling sound emanates from my chest whenever I breathe. I can put a little or a lot of force behind it, depending on my mood. I’m allergic to ragweed and thistles and marigolds and dandelions and daisies, so we’re all used to me being stuck on the porch while everyone else is having fun. Also grass; I’m allergic to grass. Right now one nostril is completely plugged up while the other runs in a steady drip.

  My four-year-old brother is wearing cowboy boots and shorty pajamas, a gunbelt minus the guns, and a hat with earflaps. He’s shooting each member of my family in turn with his crayon-size index fingers. He smiles at me, his little teeth glinting in the dusk. “You dead,” he says.

  I press my face up against the screen. It smells like dirt. I put my tongue out tentatively. It tastes like dirt. “Go to H,” I say.

  My mother turns her head halfway around and looks into my father’s ear. “You’re gonna get a whole lot sicker, miss,” she tells me. Stars are beginning to be visible through the cloudy beehive of her teased hair. It’s the Fourth of July 1962, and our city is having a fireworks display in the park. I have my own bowl of popcorn on the porch, and a glass of pop. The fireworks will be visible over the top of the dying elm tree in our backyard. It’s impossible for me to eat the popcorn because I’m wearing a nose tourniquet, an invention I came up with myself: half of a twisted Kleenex, one end stuffed into one nostril, the other end in the other nostril. It has a wicking effect, and saves the effort of swabbing all the time.

  “I can’t even taste this pop,” I say to the screen, after taking a sip. They all ignore me. The family dog, Yimmer, is sitting on my father’s lap, growling quietly each time my brother shoots her.

  My sister takes a loud swig out of a bottle of Pepsi, wipes her mouth elaborately, and says, “Man, was that good.”

  I examine a series of interesting scabs on my right knee. None of them are ready to be removed, although a couple are close. “You should see these scabs,” I say to the backs of their heads.

  My brother marches in place, talking to himself in a stern whisper.

  My mother lights another Salem and positions a beanbag ashtray on the metal arm of her chair.

  My father leans down and gives Yimmer’s head a kiss.

  Suddenly the scruffy edges of the elm tree are illuminated. The night sky turns pale above the garage, staccato gunfire, and a torpedo of light wiggles upward, stops, and fizzles. There is a beat of silence and then a burst of cascading pink and green worms. A long sigh is heard, from my family and the family next door.

  I have my forehead against the screen, breathing in the night air and the heavy, funereal scent of roses, the only flower I’m not allergic to. A noodle skids across the sky, releasing a shower of blue spangles, jewels on a black velvet bodice. Way up there is outer space. I lean back and touch my forehead; an indented grid from the screen has been pressed into it. All these fireworks are somehow scaring me. “You should see my forehead,” I say to my mother’s hair.

  “What’s wrong with it?” she asks patiently. She doesn’t turn around.

  “I keep pressing it on the screen,” I say.

  “Don’t push on that screen,” my father says.

  “I’m not,” I say.

  The sky is full of missiles. All different colors come out this time, falling in slow motion, red and blue turning to orange and green. It’s so beautiful, I have to close my eyes. My family joins the neighbors in oohing. Suddenly, as the delayed booms are heard, I have to lean forward and put my head on my knees, inhaling the scent of Bactine and dirt. Everything is falling away from me. I open my eyes.

  Black sky, dissipating puffs of gray smoke, the barely visible edges of the elm tree. My father’s hand is dark against the white of the dog’s fur. My brother is aiming both forefingers at the sky. A match flares suddenly; my mother touches it to her cigarette and inhales.

  I am stuck somewhere between the Fourth of July and the rest of time, the usual chaos inside my head distilled down into nothing. I put my cheek against the screen, feeling the grid. There is an uproar, gunfire, sounds from the crowd.

  Shooting stars in the cold of outer space; one after another the missiles are launched until the sky is brilliant with activity and smoke. Huge arcs of pink and yellow. Orange things that fizzle for an instant and then send out sonic booms. Long terrible waterfalls of yellow and blue. In the brightness, the backs of all their heads look rapt. My brother has his hands over his ears. My sister’s mouth is open. The dog has her head in my father’s armpit. It goes on for minutes, the booming sounds and the brilliant light. Closing my eyes doesn’t work, it makes me feel like I’m falling backward. Instead I watch their hair, all the different styles right in my own back yard, and say The Teen Commandments quietly to myself: Avoid following the crowd; be an engine, not a caboose. Stop and think before you drink. Gunfire, one last wild spiraling of colors, and it’s over.

  “I’m not going to bed,” my brother says resolutely.

  The dog jumps down and stretches.

  I remain in my lawn chair as they all troop into their house. One of my sister’s better personalities comes out and she stops to comb her fingers through my hair and carries my full popcorn bowl into the house.

  “She can’t eat a thing,” she tells my mother piously.

  “Bath,” my mother says to her. I hear my sister stomp up the stairs and then I hear my brother stomp up behind her, two feet on each stair.

  “I saw a goddamned mosquito in here,” my mother says. There’s some flailing around, the whap of the flyswatter, and then my dad says, “Ick.” The freezer opens, a bowl is clattered out of the cupboard. Ice cream. There’s the unscrewing sound of a jar opening. Marshmallow stuff. My head hurts. I remove my spent nose tourniquet and start twisting a new one. Before I can get it in place there is a damp trickle on my lip.

  “You guys?” I say. Any minute now they’re going to send me upstairs.

  There’s an expectant pause in the kitchen.

  “This lawn chair is stuck to my legs,” I tell them.

  A bottle is opened and an audible swig is taken. The lighter snaps and there’s silence while she exhales.

  Uh-oh.

  “Bath,” she says.

  Coyotes

  A small gesture of movement, a hiss of grass, and he is frozen stone for an instant, yellow eyes pinned on the spot, ears cocked forward. A quick lunge of muscles and paws, a darting switchback, and suddenly a rabbit is beating itself to death inside his mouth, against his tongue. This is lunch, unexpected.

  In the tall papery weeds he pants and heaves and eventually, regretfully, begins licking the red off his paws. This will lead, as always, to the licking of his whole body, the coarse mangy fur like sawgrass against his tongue. He spreads the toes of one back paw and gnaws something hard and spiny away from the pad. He shakes his head fiercely to dislodge it from his teeth and then groans, rolls over flat on his side. He is in a trance now, one lobe of the brain c
ompletely at rest, in a smooth white fog that settles completely, like bedcovers, and doesn’t lift until dark. The other lobe is on edge, senses opened so wide they collect amazing things: the screaming of unseeable insects hopping from one hair follicle to another; the droning currents emanating from power lines a quarter mile away; the throbbing of water deep beneath the ground. In the fog each paw twitches in preparation for the leap, the bite, the flat-out escaping run. Through the mist creeps a glowing, dull-witted bunny, eyes stupid, tail erect. Yellow paws pulse against the dirt as the coyote closes over its belly and suddenly the bunny is a chicken and the prized feel of it — white feathers beating softly against his muzzle — causes him, like a dog being petted, to wag heavily against the grass and bark lightly in sleeping pleasure.

  In my dreams the ground murmurs over and over, until I’m ready to wake up swinging. I am Kansas, it says, I am Kansas I am Kansas I am Kansas. This is a train headed for Arizona and those are other passengers. The guy across from me has on house slippers and a hat because it’s freezing in here. He’s reading a book with a sprawled dead woman on the cover. Beside me, Eric is sleeping with his neck exposed and both hands lying open and empty. God. I put my own hands back into my armpits, bring my knees up, bend my head down, and try to sink back into some kind of blankness. Inside my mind a green and brown landscape appears, a mountain hillside with white-tailed deer arranged here and there, a stump, a path, a clump of rocks. Old slides from past vacations click into place and then disappear, one after another. The wheels drone. A burned forest, the sharp gaze of a fox, a pair of ponies standing at a fence, wildflowers, and broken barns; they each snap into position, linger while I look, and then make way for the next. Beneath me the gravelly ground goes on and on, explaining itself in dull tones: I am Kansas I am Kansas I am Kansas.