He yelped. Little drops of blood came up in a half circle from her teeth marks. “You bit me,” he said. He touched the blood. “You bit me.” He sounded so surprised, so hurt. “Why’d you do that?”
“I don’t know,” Bibi said. “I guess I’m just crazy.” And, right then, she remembered how her mother would say to Zenetta, “Life ain’t easy,” and how Zenetta would say back, “Yeah, but it’s all we got.” And how they’d both laugh, so jolly and sad at the same time.
“I don’t know,” she said again. “Life ain’t easy.” And she put her face up against Jimmy’s and laughed and laughed. And, after just a little bit, he got to laughing with her, too.
Summer Girls, Love Boys
The summer she was fifteen, Mary Lewisham (but not in this order) cut her hair, met Bobby Nicholes, and, in a booth in the second-floor lav of the public library, read a lipstick-scrawled injunction: Summer girls, love boys!
“Oh,” Mary wrote underneath, in a handwriting not quite bold, “I want to.”
Mary’s birthday was early in July. Her parents took her out for dinner at their favorite restaurant, the China Doll Inn. They liked the name of the restaurant, they liked the food, and they liked walking from their home on Linden Avenue over to that part of Greene Street that was a little run-down (but still okay), where the restaurant was snuggled between a shambling old house and a bicycle repair shop. Mary’s present was a handmade Kabuki doll for her doll collection, now numbering thirty-nine, and all presents from her parents. Everything Mary owned came from her parents. She, herself, had come to them late in life; and they often told her how long they had waited for her, how fervently they had wished for her, how much they had adored her from the instant of conception.
“So now she’s fifteen and probably thinks that’s the whole enchilada,” Mary’s father said, as they ate their won ton soup. “Probably, she’ll just get too big for her boots now, Mommy.”
“Poppy, you’re terrible. Isn’t he terrible, Mary?” Her mother lightly slapped her father’s hand. In their family playfulness, Mary and her mother were always allied against her father—the two women bravely sticking together.
Mary’s father had a small kindly head set on an enormous bloated body. He was an insurance agent and had once been featured in “Business News of the Week” in the morning newspaper. Her mother, small and round, was “proud to be a housewife.” Her hands, rarely still, were knobby from arthritis, while Mary’s father’s hands, often lying composed in his lap, were plump and soft.
“Probably now that she’s fifteen, she’ll turn into a juvenile delinquent,” Mary’s father went on, “and torment our old age with her shenanigans.” Her father often teased Mary by talking about her as if she weren’t present. He would say slighting things about her character or her appearance because, as her mother had told her, he actually thought Mary was perfect.
Mary always laughed at her father’s teasing, although even when she was small it had faintly humiliated her. To be talked about as if she had no ears, no eyes, no existence in the here-and-now gave rise to odd, ghostlike feelings. And lately Mary often did have strange thoughts. Did she exist? And if so, who was she? To her parents she was certainly someone: their Mary Frances, their only child, born to delight them.
After Mary’s birthday celebration, the long, hot days passed slowly. Mary took a piano lesson once a week, swam in the Greene Street School pool, and sometimes baby-sat for the two Fellman kids. And then, too, she spent hours dreaming, wishing she weren’t fifteen. It seemed to her awful to be fifteen, neither child nor adult.
“Summer girls, love boys,” Mary whispered to herself. There were moments when she sizzled inside, as if she were made not of bones and blood, but a mass of sparking, snapping wires. Moments when she thought she could not bear another instant of the summer to pass in the same, slow, hot, unchanging way.
Mornings, lying in bed, gazing at the shelves of dolls on one wall (United Nations dolls, antique dolls, Shirley Temple and Barbie and Diana Ross dolls), the faces of people she knew, and bits of conversation, and odd phrases passed through Mary’s mind.
It came to her one morning, as she looked at the dolls in their sparkling costumes, that she hated their simpering faces, their stiff arms and legs, and their perfect glossy heads. She sat up with the surprising thought and said into the dimness of the room, “I’ve never liked dolls.”
Another morning, an entire incident from years ago came back to her. She and three girl friends had decided they had to see the breasts on a new girl in school, humble and detestable Ava Schmith. They were ten then, a raunchy, dangerous age. They laid their plans—to capture Ava, to carry her off to the cellar of a deserted house, to pull off her blouse and look. Mary was the one who said, “We have to have flashlights.”
But on the day of the abduction she stayed home from school with a “sore throat.” “I was sick,” she told her friends the next day.
“You missed something,” they said, and they poked each other and smirked in a way that made her unsure if they had gone through with the abduction or were just tormenting her for not having shown up. For having been “sick.”
“Oh,” she cried. “Oh!” As if it were all happening again. She felt with a kind of sick shame the flatness of her life, that she had always been too careful, too good. And one of those odd things she kept on thinking popped into her mind: How to break the enchantment of their love.
It was that day she first thought about cutting her hair. Long, straight, and glossy, it hung below her waist. Every Saturday morning her mother gave Mary an egg shampoo in the kitchen sink, and often said proudly, “Mary’s hair has never been cut.”
At lunch, poking at her cheese sandwich, Mary said, “How do you think I’d look with my hair cut?”
“Cut your hair?” her mother said with so much shock that Mary retreated and said, “Bangs. I was thinking of bangs.”
“Bangs?” Her mother studied Mary. Slowly a mischievous smile appeared. “I guess Poppy would be surprised, all right.”
After lunch, with her mother watching, Mary cut careful bangs straight across her forehead. “Oh, my,” her mother breathed. “Oh, my. It’s so different. I guess it’s beautiful, but I hardly know you! Look at your eyes, Mary. Your eyes!”
Staring at herself in the mirror, Mary saw that she did, indeed, look different, her eyes larger, her whole face somehow transformed, as if by those few scissors strokes she had been turned into someone else. Someone older, someone more mysterious.
“I don’t recognize myself,” she shouted gleefully.
“Mary, the neighbors,” her mother said, standing behind her, and they both giggled as they looked at the new Mary in the mirror.
The next day, on her way to baby-sit for Jeanne and Ted Fellman, Mary saw Bobby Nicholes sitting astride his motorcycle on the corner of South Avenue and Hurley Street, waiting for the light to change. She knew him from school. He was older, a senior, a tall handsome boy with thick, straight blond hair. He glanced at her, a casual dismissing glance, then looked again. “Hi,” he said, taking off his helmet.
She thought of the graffiti in the library, the instruction (or was it an order?)—Summer girls, love boys!—and swung the red plastic bag in which she had a box of crayons and molasses cookies for Jeanne and Ted. “Hi,” she said.
“You go to Jeff High, don’t you? I’ve seen you around. Let’s see, uh, you’re—”
“I’m Mary Lewisham.”
“I’m Bobby Nicholes.”
“I know.”
“Where you going, Mary? Want a ride someplace?”
“Sure,” she said, her heart pounding dangerously.
“Hop on. I guess you’ve been on a cycle before.”
“My first time,” she said to the back of his head.
“Is that right?” Bobby swung around and grinned. “Hold on, you’re in for something great.” He fastened his helmet and kicked off. As they turned the corner, the ground rose toward Mary at a sickening an
gle. Gripping the seat, she kept her eyes open. I might die, she thought coolly, and a wave of exhilaration, what could only be called joy, shot through her.
When Bobby left her off in front of the Fellmans’, he said, “Well, how was that?”
“Very enjoyable.” Mary’s legs wavered, and she clutched the handlebars.
“Enjoyable, huh?” Bobby laughed. “You’re cute.”
A few days later, she and her mother were outside on the stoop when Bobby drove past on his cycle. He U-turned and pulled up. “Hi, Mary! Want to go for a ride?”
“Yes,” she said, standing up.
Her mother pulled at Mary’s jeans. “A motorcycle? Mary. A motorcycle?” And standing up, she whispered, “Who is this boy, Mary?”
“He goes to my school. Bobby Nicholes. His father’s a professor. He’s a friend,” Mary said in a rapid whisper. “He’s a very nice boy.”
“I wish he didn’t have a motorcycle.”
Bobby, sitting astride the cycle, one booted foot on the curb, called politely, “Nice day, isn’t it?”
“You see,” Mary whispered. “He’s nice.”
“I don’t know—”
“Please, Mom, don’t.”
“Don’t what?” her mother said. “Mary—”
But Mary was already at the curb, climbing on behind Bobby and fastening the red and white helmet he handed her. She sat very straight, gripping the seat behind her.
“Hang on to me,” Bobby called as they turned the corner.
Her arms wound around his waist, Mary felt she was flying as they darted in and out of traffic. Wind lashed her face, the pavement churned by beneath her feet, and a jubilant little cheer—or was it a jeer?—rang in her head. Ya! Ya! Ya!
The next time Bobby came for her they left the city, rode out to the suburbs, and buzzed around on the wasteland near a gravel pit. Afterward, sitting outside a diner at a little round concrete table, their striped helmets on the ground next to them, they ate hamburgers and french fries. The sun beat down, they sipped sodas and smiled at each other.
It was, Mary thought, just like a scene from a movie. In a moment Bobby would slip his hand over hers. Mary. Bobby’s voice cracked with emotion. I have something to say.… I’m sure you’ve guessed … Mary … Mary … I’ve never told anyone this before. I love you, Mary. Oh, please. Tell me! Do I have a chance?
“… and I really wanted to pick up a job at that camp,” Bobby was saying. “I mean, seeing as how Corky was working there—it would have been perfect, but I got in too late. So here I am, stuck at home and working as a bag boy at the Big G—”
“Corky?” Mary said.
“That’s what I call her. Her real name is Cornelia. It was either that or Corny. You’d like her, Mary. She’s terrific, she’s just—” Bobby shook his head at the impossibility of describing Corky. “Beautiful, and—I tell her, her one fault is, she doesn’t love my cycle. Wants me to get a car.”
“What does she—” Mary began, then made herself say bravely, “Corky—what does Corky do at the camp?”
“She’s a counselor.”
“That’s wonderful,” Mary said.
“Oh, she’s one of the best. The woman who runs that camp goes ape over her.”
Corky was in a rowboat with two little campers. Suddenly, one of the kids jumped up to look at something in the water. The boat rocked, then it tipped over! They were all in the water. Of course, Corky could swim and was a lifesaver, but when she fell into the water, she hit her head on the side of the boat. She was knocked unconscious. People on shore rescued the two little kids, but Corky’s body wasn’t even found until days later. In his awful grief Bobby turned to Mary. She put her cool hands on his brow and gave him a reason to go on living.…
When Bobby dropped Mary off in front of her house, her mother was sitting in a plastic chair, a book in her lap and knobby hands exposed to the heat of the sun. “Hello, Mrs. Lewisham,” Bobby called, making a little salute.
Mary’s mother gave Bobby a nice smile, but when Mary joined her, she said, “Honey, Poppy and I have talked this over, and we don’t want you going on that motorcycle anymore.”
Mary just looked at her mother.
“It’s dangerous, honey,” her mother said. “Your father is an insurance man. He knows the statistics. It’s a very dangerous way to travel.”
“I always wear the helmet,” Mary said. “And Bobby is careful. He’s such a good driver.”
“Honey,” her mother said, “we’re only thinking of you. We don’t want anything bad to happen to you.” And she looked at Mary so pleadingly that Mary gave her promise she wouldn’t ride the motorcycle again.
The next morning she woke up depressed. Would Bobby want to see her anymore? Even before she knew about Corky, she’d guessed that what he really liked was playing big brother. Powering around the city with her clutching his waist, taking corners fast, showing off his cool dangerous style.
Bobby, my mother says … Bobby, my parents had this talk and … I know you’re here to take me out on the cycle, Bobby, but …
In the end she decided she couldn’t wait for him to show up. She’d go to his house and get it over with. Bobby, guess what! No more motorsickle for me. Make a joke of it. But, later, walking down Mohawk Street, coming closer and closer to the moment when she would have to tell Bobby, the same shame she had experienced when she didn’t help abduct Ava welled into her throat.
At Bobby’s house a man wearing beat-up sneakers and a skimpy pair of cutoffs was mowing the lawn. “Hi. Looking for somebody?”
“Bobby Nicholes?” she said.
“Ole Bobby should be zooming in any sec now. You want to wait?” Mary nodded. “Who are you?” he asked, leaning on the lawn mower. It was the old-fashioned kind you had to push by hand.
“Mary Lewisham,” she said.
“I’m Allan Nicholes.” He held out his hand. “Bobby’s father.” Mr. Nicholes gave Mary a lingering handshake. The whole thing surprised her—the way Mr. Nicholes had introduced himself, the handshake, the frank interested way he was looking at her.
Just then she heard the whining roar of a motorcycle. “Here he is,” Mr. Nicholes said. “The working man.” Bobby parked his cycle in the driveway. “How was work?” his father said. “A drag?”
Bobby gave his father an unfriendly glance. “Nobody says drag anymore. Hi, Mary, what’re you doing here? Come on in.”
The Nicholes house looked as if a wind had blown through it, scattering papers and objects in every direction. There was hardly a bare surface to be seen. Mary knew Mr. Nicholes taught at the community college and his mother had a framing shop in the mall. Everything about the Nicholeses, Mary thought, was more fascinating than her own dull family.
She followed Bobby into the kitchen, where he collected a bowl of grapes, then up the stairs into his bedroom. “Mary, this is really neat, you coming over.” He put a record on his stereo. “I wanted you to hear this. Know this song?” In his funny voice, Arlo Guthrie sang, “I don’ wanna pickle. Just wanna ride my mo-o-ter sickle!”*
Mary shook her head, startled. She’d never heard the song before, but hadn’t she just thought of saying to Bobby, No more motorsickle?
“Sit down, Mary.” He shoved clothes and magazines off the end of the bed.
“I have to tell you something first.” She stood in the middle of the room. “I can’t go on the motorcycle anymore. My parents—” Her face flushed. She couldn’t go on. Why had she agreed? Agreed, agreed, agreed. She agreed to everything! Suddenly she realized that, on that long-ago day when she was supposed to have shown up to abduct Ava, she had told her mother. Or her mother had gotten it out of her. Her mother had known. The conviction swept over her. Had known and kept her home. But, her shame, instead of lessening as she thought this, only deepened.
“Parents,” Bobby was saying. “Don’t they burn you, though?”
She stood straight, one hand at her throat. Her voice revealed nothing of the inner turmoil. No one
, glancing casually at her, would have guessed her pain. That’s life, she said, we simply have to be brave. But Bobby broke down. You’re leaving me, you’re going away? Mary! Oh, Mary!
“So I guess, so I guess we won’t be seeing each other anymore,” she said.
“Don’t be nuts,” Bobby said casually. Straddling a chair, he threw darts at a giant Hitler poster. “Watch this, Mary, I’m going to get Hitler in the right eye.” He held up his hand, dart poised. “You come over and visit anytime you feel like it,” he said, releasing the dart. It landed on Hitler’s nose. “Shoot!”
“It was really close,” Mary said. She picked up a framed picture of a girl astride a horse. “Is this Corky? She’s beautiful.”
“Told you,” Bobby said.
Corky sat straight-backed on the horse, her chin raised. Corky had character, Mary thought. She’d be a wonderful counselor and all her campers would fall in love with her. Mary had fallen in love with her counselor the summer she was eleven and had gone to camp for two weeks.
“Do you think she’d mind me being here in your room?”
Bobby drew back his arm, squinting. “She knows all about you, Mary. We’re practically engaged.” This time the dart landed on Hitler’s chin.
Mary retrieved the dart from Hitler. Corky and I are like this, Mary, Bobby said, holding up intertwined fingers, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have room in my heart for you. You’re actually my best friend. There are things about you—well, you’re so understanding, for instance, so sympathetic. I know I can tell you anything. The truth is I haven’t dared tell Corky about you. I’m afraid she just wouldn’t understand.…
“Besides, you’re only fifteen,” Bobby said.
“What?” Mary said.
“I mean—” Bobby grinned. “Fifteen. I wouldn’t rob the cradle.”
Mr. Nicholes, Bobby’s father, was surely good-looking, Mary thought, frowning at the Hitler poster. She raised her arm, holding the dart between two fingers. Even better-looking than Bobby, when you got right down to it. The dart landed almost perfectly between Hitler’s eyes.
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