The Boys of My Youth

by Jo Ann Beard

  My lifelong addiction to books wanes, leaving me feeling bored and bereft. Some time later I discover that I’ve left off reading them because I’ve decided to write them instead. He thinks this is a fine idea and supports it unconditionally, but finds that he is unable to read what I write because drowsiness overtakes him. I watch him several nights running as he nods and dozes, tries with an enormous effort to focus, and finally gives up. We agree without much discussion that it isn’t necessary for him to read my writing. His own work is too consuming, he doesn’t need one more task piled on top of the others. The match stops flaring, the bong stops bubbling, the old familiar chords of “Secret Agent Man” no longer bounce like tennis balls around the room. The dogs skulk into their corners.

  His own work. Political organizing that begins on a power-to-the-people grassroots level and gradually works its way up to power-to-the-person. He educates the sheep and then becomes the shepherd. It’s a rush to have them all listening, paying attention, laying down their votes. Another case where reefer has led to the hard stuff.

  We’re on the slippery slope now, it’s only a matter of time. It’s women galore. He begins to look at me with an appraising eye. Familiarity, that good friend of contempt, makes me seem plain as dishwater. Once when we fight over something and apologize later, he admits that he might have been a bit stern with me. For hours the word hangs in the air above my head like a grand piano. Stern. He might have been stern with me. I realize that one of the reasons he doesn’t want children is that he thinks he already has one. I start listening to how he talks to others compared to how he talks to me. In a crowded room one night I catch myself getting ready to take him by the necktie and heave him up against the wall. I feel like a rabid dog, but I smile placidly and make idle chat with the wife of his best friend, the future chiseler. In the car on the way home I say to him in the most dangerous tone I can come up with, “You havegot to treat me like an equal.” The wiper blades clock back and forth, car lights bear down and then pass. He says, looking straight ahead through the glistening windshield, simply and sadly, “I can’t.”

  An update on the Artful Dodger. Turns out he’s our age and has a day job, besides playing the drums.

  “Well, you’ve gotta love a guy in a band,” I say encouragingly.

  “I agree,” she says. “I just wish he played the guitar.”

  A woman walks by the phone booth in a nightgown, carrying a coffee cup and a cigarette. It’s early afternoon. I knock on the glass and wave hello. There are any number of eccentrics around here. She’s a painter.

  Here’s a good one: After the divorce I was on my way somewhere early one morning and saw Eric’s brand-new girlfriend walking from his house to her own, wearing nothing but a pale lavender nightgown and a pair of Birkenstock sandals. Her hair was stuffed into a rubber band and hung down her back like a horse’s tail, she was holding a sheaf of papers and a long leash, at the end of which was her dog, a big black biter. The nightgown was one of those Indian-style jobs, with embroidery along the bodice. It’s the sort of thing you could convince yourself didn’t look totally like a nightgown if you only had three blocks to walk and it was too early for anyone to be out driving around. Except I was. Out driving around. I spent the rest of the morning draped over someone’s couch, sobbing and eating cinnamon toast.

  I tell Elizabeth about this. Yeah, yeah, she remembers. Well, never again, I vow. Thank God that’s in my past. Who needs it. Blah blah blah. The boys of my youth give me the malaise.

  “Oh brother,” she says.

  Don’t oh brother me. And I gotta go, I’m late for my nap.

  The truth is, I’m weary of all that men stuff. It’s either so boring that I’d rather hang around with my girlfriends or it’s like gunfire to the chest. I actually like it inside the bell jar — I don’t have to breathe anyone’s air but my own and I still get a view of the landscape. There’s a woman here at the colony, Stasia, a filmmaker who went to a workshop to learn how to walk over a bed of hot coals. She tells me about it postnap, as we’re waiting for the dinner bell, having drinks on the terrace. The thing is, why would anyone want to walk over a bed of hot coals?

  “I saw a flyer for it on a lamppost,” she explains.

  They spent an afternoon in the presence of a short charismatic man, talking about their feelings and consulting various higher powers. At about four-thirty they took their shoes off and performed the miracle. So, what did it feel like?

  “It felt like hot coals,” she says.

  I knew it would.

  The door to the terrace swings open and out walks our friend Frank. Right behind him is a new guy. Frank immediately starts filling us in on how much work he got done during the day. I feel vaguely guilty about the magnitude of my afternoon nap. Somehow the quality of the light has changed on the terrace, there’s a dangerous peach glow coming over the horizon. The new guy is introducing himself to a group of people. There are handshakes around. Today Frank finished a painting and started two new ones. Stasia says that you don’t burn your feet because the coals are too light. The new guy looks over in this direction. It’s like when you put your hand in a hot oven; the coals are almost light as air, they’re hot but have very made density so they don’t burn you. I can feel the frayed edge of his denim jacket and he’s standing all the way over there. I look at my hand. Frank asks me how the boys of my youth are doing.

  “They’re boring,” I say absently. Here he comes.

  Pertinent details. Blond poet. A slightly jaded and weary air about him. Something recognizable in the sideways glance, the set of the shoulders. He’s sober now, but from what I can tell the former bad boy is buried in a shallow grave. The color of his eyes escapes me but not the quality of the gaze. He appears to be fully and alarmingly present at all times. I have to get out of here.

  He leaves me a note on the mail table, full of charming misspellings. We meet and walk, describe our lives. He puts his hand on my arm as we cross a street and continues listening, offering kindness and advice. I have a sudden overwhelming desire to touch his face. I put my hands in the pockets of my jeans. It feels crowded inside my bell jar; condensation forms and I begin weeping. He watches calmly, one foot on the bumper of a car. At some point he reaches out, lightly touches my face.

  I take to wearing a Walkman and earphones everywhere I go, piping music directly into my head. The phone booth is the only place it doesn’t work.

  “I can only talk for a minute,” I tell her. My days are numbered here; I feel a longing for my empty living room, for the grizzled face of Sheba the dog. The blue enamel breakfast table, the rug with a picture of New Zealand on it, the bird’s nest we found outside the country place years ago, made from hair shed by my old dead heroic-hearted collie. I’m tired of being here. I miss my stuff.

  “I’m sick of my stuff,” she says. “I want all new everything.”

  I want I want I want. I want to go home.

  “What’s going on?” she asks. After a short pause a lightbulb goes on over her head. “Uh-oh,” she says.

  Yeah.

  “Heck,” she says cheerfully. “That’s good. Is he nice?”

  I don’t think I know what nice means these days. “Well, he hasn’t pulled a gun on me,” I tell her. She sighs.

  I’ve spent my whole life in this phone booth. I want my circus footstool, my pink coffee table, my Albert Payson Terhune books. I want my Bruce Springsteen records. The Walkman lies dormant in my lap. I push the On button and the tiny voice of Van Morrison emanates from the earphones. “The thing is,” I tell her, “he already has a brown-eyed girl. Back home.” Thank God.

  “Oh.” She’s thinking this over. “Hmmmm.”

  A pall settles over the conversation. I stare at my reflection, distorted in the chrome of the telephone. “This is still my youth,” I finally tell her.

  “Uh, whatever you say.” She sounds skeptical.

  I peer closer at the chrome mirror. My vertical wrinkle is still visible and it’s
afternoon. It’s usually faded back into my face by mid-morning. Also, I might be getting jowls.

  “I’m looking at my vertical wrinkle in the telephone,” I say.

  “Isn’t it supposed to be gone by now?” she asks. “It’s one o’clock.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but it’s two o’clock here,” I inform her. “I need oil-of-old-ladies.” I can’t even bring myself to mention the jowls, for which there’s no cure anyway. All the women in my family begin to look like bulldogs right around the age of thirty-eight; it’s a legacy.

  The Artful Dodger has taken a turn for the worse. “He’s religious,” Elizabeth says. “And not only that, but he thinks I’m going to church with him this Sunday.” Oh boy. To my way of thinking, the problem isn’t necessarily that he’s religious; it’s more that he doesn’t have anything to counter it with, like a drinking problem or weird sexual tastes. “Well, actually he is a little weird in that category,” she admits. This livens up the conversation for a few minutes.

  Before leaving the phone booth I plug the music back into my head. More hollering from Van. I notice as I set out on my walk that the New York landscape has taken on the blurred and sepia tones of a distant memory. I’m already back in Iowa, waiting for my body to join me.

  Once home, I discover that I’m bored. Outside, long blank fields of corn and the blue midwestern sky. Inside, the same dustballs in the same corners. The cat carries tiny corpses up to the back step and arranges them in rows. The kid next door plays basketball with earphones on in his driveway, mouthing lyrics that would turn your hair white if you could hear them. Squint your eyes and he looks a little bit like Dave Anderson. Close your eyes altogether and the blond poet appears.

  I perfect the art of brooding, gazing for hours at the paint on my living room ceiling, smoking and smoking. Elizabeth comes to visit me one weekend and we try on each other’s clothes and paint our toenails maroon.

  “I’ll say one thing,” she remarks. “I do happen to have decent feet.” And she turns them this way and that, admiring.

  My own feet look like they belong to a stranger with too much time on her hands. I stretch out on the couch and feed myself a potato chip. There is a long hair-sized crack running down the center of the ceiling.

  “Don’t brood in front of me,” she says.

  Mister Spider has built a web right above my giant, dying, phallic-looking cactus. It’s a little trampoline and he’s bouncing around in the center of it right now. Even the spiders are bored.

  “It could be worse,” she mentions. “We could be having to entertain those two mopes.” She means our ex-husbands, the Jim and Eric show.

  If they were here, this is what they’d be doing: nothing, that’s what. They’d be placidly sitting around, waiting for us to make something happen.

  “So we’d still be bored,” she concludes, “and we wouldn’t even be able to paint our toenails, for fear of ridicule.” It’s true. Not only would it be boring but I’d have that old feeling back of constantly imagining myself as a widow wearing a great outfit. The phone rings.

  “Who could be calling me here?” Elizabeth says.

  We let it ring and ring until the answering machine kicks in and then we tiptoe over to listen. “This is what I do when you call,” I tell her.

  My answering machine voice lies about my whereabouts and then the beep comes on. Suddenly I’m standing on my circus footstool like a mouse has been let loose in the room. It’s the guy.

  “Hi, Jo Ann, this is X,” he says and then leaves a long, rambling, totally coherent message and hangs up. Oh man. He’s shimmering in my living room like a genie released from a bottle.

  I don’t know whether to faint or kill myself. Elizabeth laughs unbecomingly. I put both hands around my own neck. We do our silent screaming routine.

  We are no longer bored.

  “Truly extraordinary…. It’s a daring act and also a bit of a magic trick to focus on a scrap of real life — a failed family vacation, a run-in with an irate driver, adolescent ridiculousness, a marriage on the skids—and manage to spin it into something sad and beautiful. Yet that is exactly what Beard does…. It is the simple fact that Beard gives voice to these small moments of sometimes sad, sometimes joyous truths — the all but forgotten time that composes the bulk of real life — that makes her writing so moving…. Beard finds, always and perfectly, the heartbreaking poetry in everyday speech.”

  — LIESEL LITZENBURGER, Detroit Free Press

  “This engaging collection records both wrenching and riotous episodes in the life of a keenly observant character named Jo Ann, whom we follow from babyhood to marriage and beyond…. Humor, terrific insights, and not a little rue make these stories shine, each one a jewel loaded with sparkle and grit.”

  — Elle

  “Beard pulls off a neat trick: She shows tragedy for what it is in life — plain old moment-to-moment misery.”

  — JANET STEEN, Time Out New York

  “Exquisitely crafted autobiographical essays that have the arc and thrust of good fiction…. Beard’s high-wire trick is that despite such grievous subject matter, she hangs on to her squinty, skinny-girl-on-the-sidelines sense of humor and never lapses into mawkishness.”

  —SARAH TOWERS, Mirabella

  “Jo Ann Beard’s work impresses me no end. Funny without being sitcomish, self-aware without being self-absorbed, scrupulous without being fussy, emotional without being sentimental, pointed without being cruel — I could go on and on with these distinctions, all in Beard’s favor, but instead I’ll just say that Jo Ann Beard is a fantastic writer, an Athena born fully formed out of her own painstaking head.”

  — JEFFREY EUGENIDES, author of The Virgin Suicides

  PRAISE FOR Jo ANN BEARD’S

  The Boys of My Youth

  “Reading Jo Ann Beard’s prose feels as comfortable as falling into step beside an old, intimate friend. She’s the sort of writer whose charm lies in the voice — a kitchen-table drawl entirely uncontaminated by sentimentality…. Beard remembers (or imagines) her childhood self with an uncanny lucidity that startles.”

  — LAURA MILLER, New York Times Book Review

  “Utterly compelling… uncommonly beautiful…. The writing lifts the book into the stratosphere…. The key is a voice of equal parts curiosity and vulnerability. Life in these pages is an astonishment…. The Boys of My Youth speaks volumes about growing up female and struggling to remain true to yourself.”

  — DAN CRYER, Newsday

  “Jo Ann Beard sustains an almost miraculous level of detachment as she describes the stuff of nightmares… and how she, and by implication all of us, survive them…. Beard evokes the dizzying sensation of tragedy, but she also provides weird, sparkling moments of grace and stillness. The Boys of My Youth evokes the mundane, the hilarious, the horrific, and the redemptive all taken together, the very rhythm of life.”

  — ELLEN KANNER, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  “Beard remembers with beautiful simplicity the feeling of youthful longing, and combines those memories with the pains that accompany adult life.”

  — Marie Claire

  “These stories do it all. They are smart, funny, and moving. They are personal and unique and also universal…. There is not a false note or wrong word.”

  — BARBARA FISHER, Boston Globe

  “Smart, funny, and moving….A gifted and gutsy writer…. This is what a first collection of stories should be.”

  —Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe

  Cousins, mothers, sisters, dolls, dogs, best friends: these are the fixed points in. Jo Ann Beard’s universe, the constants that remain when the boys of her youth—and the men who replace them—are gone. This widely praised collection of autobiographical essays summons back, with astonishing grace and power, moments of childhood epiphany as well as the cataclysms of adult life: betrayal, divorce, death. It is a book that heralds the arrival of an immensely gifted and original writer.

  JO ANN BEARD receive
d a Whiting Writers’ Award in 1997. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Story, and other magazines. She is a graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and now lives in upstate New York.

  “Extraordinary…. Beard is writing not with the romanticism of a girl looking up at the stars, but with the brilliant cold light of the stars looking down at us.”

  —Ted Anton, Chicago Tribune

  “A luminous, funny, heart-breaking book of essays about life and its defining moments.”

  —Meredith Kahn, Harper’s Bazaar

  “Beard remembers (or imagines) her childhood self with an uncanny lucidity that startles.”

  —Laura Miller, New York Times Book Review