The Boys of My Youth

by Jo Ann Beard

  After he closes the door, I struggle up just long enough to force Petie through the bars and onto the floor where he belongs.

  “My pancakes have bonanas in them,” Linda tells me. She’s wearing shorts, a midriff top, and an Easter hat, pointing her fork at me. I’m sitting in the big-girl chair with a dish towel tied around me so I don’t climb down. My pancakes are clean.

  “Jo-Jo can have all the bananas she likes,” my mother says. “But they don’t interest her.” She’s drinking coffee and yawning, tapping a cigarette against her wrist. She can’t find her lighter this morning.

  “That’s because her doll is gone and she misses him,” Linda recites sadly. “Even though our dad went to find him he wasn’t there because he probably went to the dump which we’re all sad about but there’s nothing we can do.” She forks in a mouthful of pancake, chews thoughtfully, and swallows. “And now she keeps thinking, ‘Where is my doll? Where is my poor doll? What will I do without my doll?”’ She takes a long drink of milk and looks at my mother. “Right?”

  “Right,” my mother says dryly. She gets up and lights her cigarette using a burner on the stove. Linda starts to speak again, fork in the air, but she’s halted with a look and a pointed finger.

  I can’t eat pancakes that don’t taste good. I push the plate away and lean over as far as the dish towel will allow, put my cheek on the tablecloth, and close my eyes. Now they’re gone and it’s pure dark. My thumb tastes like syrup.

  She’s talking to her girlfriend on the phone and polishing the spoons at the same time. I’m sitting on the footstool which I’ve pushed in front of the picture window. Linda walks by on her way outside, carrying a plastic bowl which she holds way up in the air as she passes.

  “I’ve got a norange,” she tells me.

  And I have a pop bead that rolled out from under the footstool. It fits perfectly in my nose but we’re not doing that. I’m just holding it.

  “You didn’t ruin it,” my mother says. “Fill it with water, put in a tablespoon cream of tartar, and then boil the hell out of it. You’ll take all that black off there.” She listens for a minute, polishing. “Well, you can be the bad housewife and I’ll be the bad mother.” She listens again. “Sitting at the window, staring out,” she says in a low voice. “I don’t know what to do next.” More listening and then she laughs. I put my forehead and both my hands against the glass. Behind me is the sound of snapping fingers. She can snap her fingers so loud it scares you. I climb down off the footstool to get my bead and then climb back up again. She snaps again, twice, and I have to carry the bead over and deposit it in her hand. She puts it in the pocket of her pants and we stare at each other. “Maybe he ought to be cooking for you, since he’s the big expert,” she says. She feels my forehead, runs one hand quickly down the back of my shorts, turns me around, and points me at the stool. “I sprinkle potato chips over the top before I put it in,” she says.

  The front sidewalk has a hopscotch picture on it but Linda and Pattyann aren’t out there. I don’t know where a dump is, and I don’t know how long it takes to get back from one. A car pulls up to the curb, stops, and one of my girl cousins gets out holding a sack. Aunt Bernie and my other cousin stay in the car.

  My mother hangs up the phone and goes to the door while Bernice and I watch each other through the glass. “We went to the store and this is for Jo-Jo,” my cousin says when she hands the sack over. She’s been crying. “We didn’t get anything!” she bursts out.

  My mother sends her into the kitchen for cookies. “One for you, one for your sister, and none for your mom,” she tells her. She holds up the sack and calls, “You didn’t have to do this!” to Bernie, who rolls down her window.

  “You’re raising a brat!” she hollers.

  My mother laughs and shakes her fist in the air. The girl cousin goes back down the sidewalk and triumphantly shows her mother the cookies before getting in. They pull away from the curb and my mother waves as they head down the street, then says, “I’d like to slap that mouth right off her face.”

  Linda and Pattyann come into view on the other side of the street. They look both ways and then hop across the street on one foot.

  “I can’t wait to see what’s in here,” my mother says brightly, setting the sack on the coffee table. She checks all her pockets, looking for her lighter, then puts a cigarette in her mouth and heads to the kitchen to light it on the stove.

  They got that sack at the store. Outside, a lady is walking by with a dog, and Linda and Pattyann pet the dog so fervently the lady has to pull him away and keep going. The sack is folded over at the top and it’s pretty big but not that big. Linda and Pattyann start playing hopscotch on the front sidewalk, using soda crackers for markers.

  My mother is all excited about the sack. She sits down with her ashtray and pats the couch next to her. I climb up and then lie down with my eyes closed. She can’t figure out why we aren’t more curious about our new present. It must be something very special or they wouldn’t have brought it all the way over here. You know, there just might be something inside that will make Jo-Jo forget her troubles. So. Is somebody ready to go down for her nap, or is she ready to sit up here right now and see what’s in the sack?

  It’s a box with a picture of girl on it. She’s wearing an apron over her dress and a pearl necklace. Her hair is curled and she has lipstick on. Inside the box are a broom, a dustpan, and a vacuum cleaner.

  “Christ,” my mother snorts. She puts her cigarette out, pulls me onto her lap, and rests her chin on my head. “Poor Jo-Jo,” she says quietly.

  They are miniature, and the vacuum cleaner has a pretend cord and a pretend knob to turn it on and off. The broom is yellow, the dustpan is pink, and the vacuum cleaner is orange with a pink-and-yellow-striped handle.

  They’re so glamorous I can barely look at them.

  “She spent the whole afternoon cleaning under the beds,” my mother tells my father. They’re sharing a beer in the living room. My hair is wet from the bath and I have my cowgirl jam-mies on. Linda is in the bathtub now, singing a loud, monotonous song about not getting a new toy.

  My mother is sewing a button on my father’s shirt while he’s still wearing it. “I was having this terrible feeling,” she says, “that she’d be this forty-year-old woman, going around telling people that we took her d-o-l-l away from her.” She leans down to bite off the thread.

  My father tests his new button and it works perfectly. “In three days she won’t remember she even knew that d-o-l-l,” he predicts.

  They stop talking and, in unison, lift their feet so I can vacuum under them.

  The Family Hour

  If she has to come up here we’re both going to regret it. It’s ten o’clock at night and there has been a territorial dispute over where the line down the middle of the bed really is. After a short skirmish we have yelled downstairs to the mediator. From the top of the stairs all we can see is my father’s bare feet crossed on the white divan and a corner of my mother’s newspaper. They’re drinking beer and eating popcorn. Linda pins my arms behind my back and I bite her. There are screaming noises.

  She’s had it. Once more and it’s going to be the belt.

  This surprises us and we tiptoe back into the bedroom. My mother’s spanking abilities scare her and so she has a ratio of about one spank per forty threats. We always know where we happen to be along the spanking continuum. That’s why we can’t believe she’s going straight for the belt. We’re more afraid of her hand than the belt, because the belt is a cloth one from a housedress, while her hand is made of granite. But still, this is erratic behavior on her part, and we don’t care for it.

  Once we’re back in the bedroom with the door closed, I say, “I’ll give her the belt.” Linda opens the door again and points her face down the hall toward the stairs.

  “Mother?” she calls. “Jo Ann just said something you might want to hear.”

  There’s a thud from downstairs and the sound of feet stompi
ng. Linda slams the door shut and leaps for the bed; we hide under the covers, breathing into our nightgowns, but nothing happens. She faked us out.

  The border dispute has to be settled with what is known as a foot-feet fight. This is where you lie on your back and put the soles of your feet against the soles of your sister’s feet and then push with all your weak might until she gets tired of it and shoves you off the bed. There are rules to foot-feet fighting, but they are frequently defied, and then someone gets hurt, usually from being rocketed off the bed backward and onto the floor (me). On this occasion what goes wrong is that my own right foot slips from its station on her left foot and propels itself forward until it is stopped by her eye socket. She rolls herself up into a ball.

  “That didn’t hurt,” I say immediately. She’s got her head under a pillow, crying furiously and trying to kick me. I carefully get out of the way of her legs until she has me wadded up at the foot of the bed. Her sobs now have an alarming, forlorn quality, and it isn’t like her to muffle them. I try a different approach: I start crying, too.

  Eventually we fall asleep and roll as we always do into the demilitarized zone down the center of the bed. When I wake in the morning she’s sitting in the rocking chair with her ankles crossed, virtuously reading her science book. I go back under the covers immediately. She has the most pronounced black eye I’ve ever seen, even on TV. I’m a dead man.

  We dress ourselves slowly, not looking at one another; her underwear says Friday, mine says Wednesday, but today it doesn’t matter who is right. White knee socks, navy blue knee socks, a gray skirt, a plaid one. Blouses. Teeth, faces, hair.

  On the third step from the bottom we stop and look at ourselves in the hallway mirror. I’ve got my barrette in wrong. Linda has her mohair sweater buttoned over her shoulders like a cape, the way the girls in her class do it. Her face is thin on one side and fat on the other. The fat side is purple. I move slightly so that my own reflection goes into the bevel of the mirror, distorting my nose and one eye until I look like the monster that I am. It’s time to sit down.

  “Oh no you don’t,” she says firmly, lifting me by the collar of my shirt, steering me into the kitchen ahead of her. My mother is at the table, looking into a magnifying mirror, putting on makeup. A cigarette is going in the ashtray. My father is cracking our morning eggs into a bowl, dish towel tied around his waist, a spatula in his back pocket. He’s singing the “I’m a Bum” song that drives my mother nuts. She’s turning the radio up right at the moment we step into her line of view. The announcer makes a staticky squawk and then disappears into silence. My father sets his spoon down. My mother puts her glasses on.

  Linda steps forward, Jo Ann steps backward.

  I am immediately dispatched to the living room, where I can hear every word but not defend myself by looking stricken. In the kitchen my father whistles long and appreciatively until my mother tells him to shut up. “Look at this,” she cries. I know just what she’s doing: turning Linda’s face back and forth, back and forth. I pick up some knitting from its basket and before I realize it I’ve unraveled a row and a half. My heart starts pounding. I’m a maniac, kicking people in the head and unraveling knitting.

  “We want the truth,” my mother says, in a voice that ensures she will never get it. A pause, an inhalation, an exhalation, and then the story unfolds. It has a complicated plot that is difficult but not impossible to follow, and several very dramatic things occur, but the gist is this: the bathroom doorknob poked her in the eye. It’s a play with several acts but only one actress; my name is never mentioned. I hope he puts the eggs on pretty soon because I’m suddenly hungry. I begin fiddling with my barrette, trying to fix it.

  “The doorknob would come up to about here,” my mother says. I imagine she’s pointing to my sister’s stomach.

  “Well, it didn’t,” Linda responds flatly. “It came up to here, as a matter of fact.”

  There is a long, stand-off silence in which all you can hear is Linda thinking.

  “I had to pee so bad I was bending over,” she says firmly. Brilliant. This is why she’s the older sister and I’m the younger one.

  Snap. Crack. My mother’s lighter and my father’s eggs. I don’t see why I’m quarantined in the living room when I didn’t do anything.

  “Can someone please fix my barrette?” I call out.

  Right before we file out the door for school, my mother calls me over. She takes off her glasses to get a better bead on me. “Do you have any idea why your sister has a black eye?” she asks.

  I hesitate. You hate to say it, but when it’s the truth, it’s the truth. She never looks where she’s going.

  In addition to Linda and me, there’s a brother, a strange little guy named Bradley, obsessed with his own cowboy boots. He paces around and around the house, staring at his feet and humming the G.I. Joe song from the television commercial. He is the ringleader of a neighborhood gang of tiny boys, four-year-olds, who throw dirt and beat each other with sticks all day long. In the evenings he comes to dinner with an imaginary friend named Charcoal.

  “Charcoal really needs a bath,” my mother says, spooning Spaghettios onto his plate. His hands are perfectly clean right up to the wrists and the center of his face is cleared so we can see what he looks like. The rest of him is dirt.

  “Charcoal was locked in the garage all day,” he replies. My mother made fried chicken for dinner, but Brad will only eat food prepared by Chef Boyardee.

  Across the table from me, Linda pushes a mouthful of potatoes past her teeth and lips until it’s hanging there, making me sick. I will only eat potatoes in the form of french fries, and that’s because I don’t know that french fries are potatoes. I have a weak stomach. The second I open my mouth to complain, she sucks it back in and swallows, touches a napkin to her lips, and goes for a preemptive strike.

  “Jo Ann is making me sick,” she tells my mother. Everyone stops eating and looks at me. I’m searching my chicken leg for the big rubbery string. If I get that string in my mouth, dinner is over.

  “I can’t find it,” I say. The fork won’t do what I want it to, and chicken juice is getting on my hands. Quit looking at me. My mother reaches over and takes the chicken leg, drops it on my father’s plate.

  “Find the string for her,” she tells him shortly. He looks at her, looks at the leg, and finally picks it up. He begins hacking at it amiably, gazing around the table in benign spirits. He’s not paying attention to what he’s supposed to be doing; the leg slips suddenly out of his grasp and, in the ensuing clatter, milk is dumped over and my father’s plate is flooded.

  “Well, I’ll be,” he says slowly, watching with surprise as his beans and potatoes become islands. A full minute passes while we wait for my mother to do something about it. Eventually she gets up from the table, takes his plate, scrapes it into the dog’s bowl, gets another plate from the cupboard and hurls some food onto it. While she’s doing all this, my father is sitting with his elbows on the table and his face in his hands.

  By the time she puts the new plate of food down in front of him, he’s asleep. She shoves him and he comes to with a snort. He no longer has the amiable slap-happy look that offends her; now he looks belligerent. She tells him he’s a sorry excuse for a man, which causes him to shrug.

  “Who do you think you are?” she asks him. She has her face right up in his. “Dean Martin? Because he’s nothing but a lush, too.”

  My father not only drinks like Dean Martin, but he actually looks like him. They sing alike, too, Dean on TV, and my father when he’s shaving. He can’t help but like Dean Martin, because they have so much in common. Somehow, though, the word lush hits him the wrong way and he guffaws instead of fighting back. My mother quickly corrects herself.

  “He’s a drunk,” she says.

  My father doesn’t like that one bit. He tries to counter it by insulting Carol Burnett but my mother cuts him off. You don’t see Carol Burnett standing there with a drink in her hand; she actuall
y puts on a show. Usually I try to think of other things when they fight like this at the dinner table, like how to swallow. But by using television personalities, they’re holding my interest. My favorite show is That Girl, but I’m one hundred percent sure they aren’t going to mention her.

  Linda ignores them completely, staring instead at me, willing me to look. I can see out of the corner of my eye what appears to be a Ping-Pong ball coming out of her mouth. Next to me, Brad is a country unto himself, quietly stirring his Spaghettios and taking occasional peeks under the table at his cowboy boots. His mouth is orange.

  Dinner ends when my father gets indignant and tries to stand up. He falls backward into the wall and the big ceramic salad fork drops from its hook and shatters. My mother can’t have anything nice; the minute she gets something decent, it’s ruined. She works all day and then comes home and makes a beautiful meal like this, and the dog is the only one who will eat it.

  Soon there are distant unrestful snores coming from upstairs; from the sewing room the furious, intermittent buzz of the Singer 9000. In the living room, Brad and Charcoal play a friendly game of cards. “When I go like this, it means you lose,” the visible one tells the invisible one.

  This is our house in Moline, Illinois, a big white clapboard that needs new gutters. There’s a little garage out back, and in the corner of the garage is an old cupboard. Inside it are cans of paint, folded rags, tools for cleaning fish, an old dog brush, and a bottle of vodka in a brown paper sack.

  Here in the kitchen, African violets bloom wildly on the windowsill, hopped-up with fertilizer. The radio on the counter plays a new Beatles song and the girls take a break from clearing the table to clutch their hearts and listen. Tuesday night at the Beard household, and it’s business as usual: Linda washes, Jo Ann dries.