by Julia Watts
“I might as well,” Virgie said with a sigh. “It’ll take him so long to get his nerve up to say anything to you that I reckon I should speed things up a little by telling him. And I’ll tell you something, too. He wants to ask you to that dance they’re having at the teen rec center next month.”
“The March Hare Hop?”
“That’s the one.”
The dances at the rec center were frequented by Kleen Teens in shiny penny loafers and spotless saddle shoes. At school I heard one girl say she always wore galoshes over her saddle shoes to protect them from the mud until she got to the dance. “Virgie, I don’t go to them dances.”
“That’s because you’ve never had a boy to take you.”
“Well, Aaron don’t go either, does he?”
Virgie smiled like she had all the answers to all the questions in the world. “That’s because he ain’t never had a girl to take.” She leaned close and whispered, “Of course, Daddy would have a fit if he knew Aaron was taking a girl to a dance with godless music and godless people. So I’ll think up some way to cover for him. Me and Aaron would never get to do nothing if we hadn’t figured out how to cover for each other with Daddy.”
I could see the movie in Virgie’s mind just like it was being projected on a screen in front of me. Aaron was a Hollywood version of Romeo, and I was a movie star Juliet, and Virgie was one of the sympathetic friends trying to help us get together. Virgie was forgetting that Romeo and Juliet was a tragedy.
February 26, 1945
“After school today, me and you and Aaron are going to the drugstore for a Coke,” Virgie said.
“All right,” I said because I knew it was an order, not an invitation. A heavy weight dropped into my stomach and stayed there all afternoon while I tried to pay attention in my classes. Do most people really feel like they have butterflies in their stomachs when they’re nervous? I felt like I had a lead cannonball in mine.
On the way to the drugstore, Virgie chatted happily about some movie that was coming to town on the weekend, but Aaron and I were both quiet, dragging our feet like we were walking to the gallows. Once we got to the soda fountain, Virgie jabbed Aaron with her elbow, and he said, “Uh…let me buy your Coke, Ruby…on accounta you buying me one that time.”
“All right,” I said.
We sat down with our Cokes, and Virgie kept looking at Aaron, then at me. At first she was smiling, but after a while she started squirming and rolling her eyes. “Aaron,” she said, “wasn’t there something you wanted to ask Ruby?” She spoke in the same tone she’d have used if she’d been asking a two-year-old if he needed to go potty.
Aaron’s face turned so red his freckles disappeared. He looked down and mumbled to his Coke glass something that sounded like “joogo pants.”
“Ask her,” Virgie said. “And loud enough so she can hear you.”
Aaron didn’t look up from his Coke glass, but he did manage to blurt out, “Ruby-you-wanna-go-to-the-dance-with-me?”
“All right,” I said.
He nodded and drained his Coke in one gulp. I’m sure that in the soundtrack to the movie in Virgie’s mind, violins were playing.
But no violins played in my head. No bells rang. I didn’t feel much of anything except nervous and uncomfortable. And part of the reason I was so uncomfortable was because I knew that if Aaron wasn’t Virgie’s brother, I would’ve said no. Not for any personal reason, just because boys aren’t a priority for me right now. But Virgie had gotten it in her head that I was going to the dance with Aaron, and saying no to Aaron would’ve meant saying no to Virgie’s and my friendship. And so to keep from losing a friend, I gained a date.
March 2, 1945
It took me the rest of the week to get my nerve up, but I finally told them. We’d just finished supper, and I figured my chances were best if everybody was full and happy, so I said, “Mama, Daddy, I need to tell you something.”
“All right,” Daddy said, sounding worried.
I looked down at the table while I talked. “This boy asked me to go to a dance at the teen rec center on March seventeenth, and if it’s all right with you, I think I’ll go.”
As soon as I said “boy,” Opal and Garnet started squealing like hogs at killing time. Baby Pearl joined in, too, just to be sociable, I reckon.
“Hush, girls!” Mama said, then she looked at me hard. “Who’s the boy?”
“Aaron West,” I managed to choke out. “Virgie’s brother.”
This set my sisters to squealing again, but Mama’s eyes softened a little. “Oh,” she said, “well, what do you think, Daddy?”
“Aaron’s daddy’s a right good feller,” Daddy said. “I reckon it’d be all right for my little girl to go to a dance with his boy.”
“I think so, too,” Mama said. She laughed. “To tell you the truth, I’m downright relieved. I thought one of them fast-talking boys from Up North might be after you.”
“No, Mama.” Nobody could ever accuse Aaron of being a fast talker. Or a talker, period.
Opal and Garnet had started whispering to each other and were giggling up a storm.
“Now, girls, you know it’s rude to whisper,” Mama said. “Anything you got to say, you can say it to everybody at this table.”
Garnet hollered—at least it sounded like a holler to me—“Opal says Ruby’s gonna have her some red-headed, freckle-faced babies!”
“Nobody around here’s having any babies any time soon. Ruby got asked to a dance, not proposed to,” Mama said. “Do you girls want to give your daddy a heart attack?”
From where I was sitting, it looked more like Daddy was about to bust out laughing than have a heart attack. My heart didn’t feel so good, though.
While we washed the dishes, Opal and Garnet asked me so many questions about Aaron that I felt like I was being interrogated about selling secrets to the Japanese. After I dried and put away the last dish, I waved the dishtowel in the air and said, “That’s it! No more questions! Here’s my white flag! I surrender!”
Mama and Daddy laughed. They were happy, I could tell. Happy that I was finally going out with a boy and happier because it was a nice country boy to boot. For the first time in a long time, I was doing something they thought they understood.
March 6, 1945
The past few times I’ve sat with Sharon, Iris had run to the grocery store or the doctor’s office or the beauty shop, so we didn’t have much of a chance to talk. Today when I got there, though, she said, “All I’ve done the past four days is chase Sharon around the house and make sure she doesn’t crack her head when she pulls herself up on something to stand. She’s so…mobile all of a sudden.”
“Just wait till she’s walking,” I said.
“Knowing Sharon, she’ll skip walking and start off at a dead run,” Iris said. “You know what sounds absolutely delicious to me right now?”
“What’s that?”
“To stretch out on the bed with a Coke and a chocolate bar and a cigarette and read this silly Cosmopolitan magazine. I’ve had it for days, but every time I pick it up to read it, I have to drop it again to rescue Sharon.”
“Go read. I’ll rescue Sharon for a while.”
As soon as Iris left the room, Sharon looked at me, squealed, “Bee!” then took off crawling, hell for leather, toward the kitchen, laughing like a little lunatic. I chased her the same as I reckoned Iris had been doing all day. She scooted over to one of the kitchen cabinets, opened the door, and yanked out a box of baking soda. She inspected it, then held it up to me. “Dis?” she asked.
“This?” I pointed to the box. “This is baking soda.”
My answer seemed to satisfy her. She reached back into the cabinet and pulled out a dark blue container. “Dis?”
“This is salt.”
An hour passed, with Sharon grabbing various household objects, asking “Dis?” and me answering her and trying to clean up after her at the same time. It was like she was giving me some kind of test, grilling me on t
he contents of her home. Sometimes I’m pretty sure she’d trick me to make sure I knew what I was talking about, asking me “dis?” about an object I’d already identified to make sure my answer was the same.
Iris came out of the bedroom, stretched, and said, “That was almost as good as a week-long vacation.”
Sharon had worked her way back to the living room and was grabbing books off the lower shelves of the bookcase. “We’re playing ‘Dis,’” I said.
Iris grinned. “I knew you would be. It’s all she does right now. It wears me out, but at the same time, I love her curiosity and watching her catalog all this information. Sometimes I can almost see the little wheels in her brain turning.”
“She’s a smart baby,” I said. “Of course, she would be since she’s got such a smart mama.”
Iris rolled her eyes and sat down on the couch. “If she’s smart, it’s because of her daddy. I’m just smart enough to know that in the big picture, I’m not that smart at all.” She shrugged. “Of course, that does make me smarter than some people.”
“Than a lot of people,” I said.
Sharon held up a book of Emily Dickinson’s poems. “Book!” she proclaimed.
“Very good, Sharon,” Iris said, and we both applauded her. “Sometimes,” Iris said, looking at her daughter, “I wonder what it would be like for everything to be so new—for every day to seem like this big, exciting surprise.”
Iris’s voice sounded sad, so to distract her, I said, “Speaking of surprises, I found out who my secret admirer is.”
“Really?” She sounded cheerier right away. “Do tell.”
I took the Emily Dickinson book out of Sharon’s hands and mouth and gave her a rattle instead. “It’s Aaron, my friend Virgie’s brother.”
Iris scooted forward on the couch. “So…tell me about him.”
I almost said “there ain’t much to tell,” but that didn’t sound nice, so instead I managed to get out, “Well…he’s a year younger than me and about a foot taller. He’s real quiet…and he’s got red hair.”
“Oh, I like red hair,” Iris said. “Redheads always seem so full of life somehow…vibrant.”
Vibrant wasn’t a word I would’ve thought of to describe Aaron. It did sort of describe Virgie, though.
“So do you like him?” Iris asked, lighting a cigarette.
“I don’t know.” I sighed. “I guess I don’t not like him.”
Iris laughed. “Well, that’s certainly a passionate declaration of feeling.”
I laughed, too. “I know it sounded bad. It’s just…I guess I don’t know Aaron well enough to know how I feel about him. And then…he asked me to go to this dance with him, and I don’t really like dances…”
“Have you been to dances before?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know you don’t like them?”
“I know because I can’t dance. You don’t go to a swimming hole if you can’t swim, and you don’t go to a dance if you can’t dance. The only difference is at one you drown, at the other, you die of embarrassment.”
Iris laughed. “Well, I can prevent one of those catastrophes, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well…when’s the dance?”
“A week from Saturday. Why?”
Iris hugged her knees to her chest. “I was just thinking that between now and then, I could give you a couple of dancing lessons.”
I couldn’t understand why Iris said she wasn’t that smart. It seemed like there was nothing she didn’t know. “You’d do that?”
“Sure. I mean, I’m no Ginger Rogers, but I’m all right. Is Aaron much of a dancer?”
“I’d be surprised if he was. He’s from the country like me, and Virgie says he ain’t never been to a dance before.”
“Okay,” Iris said, stubbing out her cigarette. “So it’s not a matter of turning you into a Ginger to match his Fred. It’s more like teaching you how not to trip over your own feet and knock over the punchbowl.”
“That’s about right,” I said, grinning.
“Well, I think I can handle dance instruction on that level. Let’s see…I have to run errands on Thursday, but when you come over on Tuesday, I’ll put on some records, and we’ll trip the light fantastic.”
“I thought you was gonna teach me how not to trip.”
“I am. ‘Trip the light fantastic’ is just an expression for dancing.”
It was almost suppertime. “Well, I reckon I’d better head on home. Thanks for”—I felt like I had so much to thank Iris for I didn’t know where to begin—“being so good to me.”
“Thank you, too,” Iris said. She scooped up Baby Sharon in her arms and said, “Say bye-bye.”
Baby Sharon said, “Bee” instead.
“Well,” Iris said, seeming almost shy for a second, “remember to bring your dancing shoes next week.”
“Lord, I don’t have any special shoes! Will I need them?”
“That’s just an expression, too, Ruby. You really are a nervous wreck about this dance date, aren’t you?”
She was right. I was. I am.
March 9, 1945
“Ruby, come outside a minute and help me get these clothes off the line,” Mama said.
It was a strange request. Mama had never asked for help getting clothes off the line before, but I did as I was told. And as it turned out, she didn’t need help getting clothes off the line this time either. She’d just wanted to get me away from my sisters.
“I bought you something in town today,” she half-whispered, taking one of Baby Pearl’s dresses off the line. “I thought it might help you get ready for next Saturday night.”
“Well, uh, thank you,” I said, not sure what I was supposed to say.
“I tucked it under your mattress so your sisters wouldn’t see it,” she said. “They’re not old enough for such things.”
It was all I could do not to run straight to my bedroom, but since I didn’t want to arouse suspicion, I walked instead. I felt around underneath the mattress and pulled out a thin book, the cheap paperback kind you can get at the drugstore. It was called How to Get Along with Boys.
Of course, I was curious to start reading it, but I didn’t want my sisters to catch me at it. Their giggling would ring in my ears for weeks. Finally, I got the idea of putting the book inside my history textbook so it would look like I was studying. I’d seen kids in school do the same thing with comic books.
I opened How to Get Along with Boys with no idea what to expect. I wondered if it was a book about the facts of life. My mother had never talked to me about those things, except to explain how to keep clean when my time of the month came around. Other than that, it was just what I could figure out on my own. But between watching the animals and Granny and Papaw’s farm and reading Forever Amber at Iris’s, I had a pretty good idea what went where and how.
As it turned out, How to Get Along with Boys didn’t have anything to do with what might happen in a barnyard or to a saucy wench in eighteenth-century England. I read the whole danged book, and honestly, it made me feel like a visitor to a foreign country trying—and failing—to understand the local customs. Here are some of the things I learned from the book:
Boys don’t like girls who endlessly chatter about clothes and movie stars and parties. Instead, the girl should let the boy take the lead in conversations just as he takes the lead in dancing. If the boy is slow to begin a conversation, the girl should ask him a question about his interests, such as, “Are you fond of football?”
I figure that if I let Aaron take the lead in conversation, it’s going to be a silent night. Unless Virgie comes to the dance with us, which I wish she would. I don’t reckon the author of How to Get Along with Boys would like Virgie much since she never lets anybody but herself take the lead in conversation—or get a word in edgewise.
Boys don’t like girls who insist on having a great deal of money spent on them. Instead of asking to be taken to a fancy restaurant,
the girl should offer to make sandwiches so they can go on a picnic at the park.
When it comes to money, I figure Aaron’s got less than I do, so I’d come closer to being able to take him to a restaurant than he would me. Of course, he didn’t even like me buying him a Coke that time, so I guess a restaurant meal is out of the question.
Different hairstyles are flattering to different face shapes. A girl with a heart-shaped face, for example, should wear bangs; whereas bangs are unflattering to a girl with a square face.
Now this one is just stupid. Who has a heart-shaped face? Or a liver-shaped face or a kidney-shaped face, for that matter? It’s ridiculous, and in my opinion, anybody whose face is in the shape of a heart or a square is going to be so strange-looking that no boys are going to want to date her no matter what she does with her hair.
A girl should never be seen to have a large appetite. Even if she is famished, she should still leave some food on her plate uneaten. Also, asparagus should be picked up with the fingers and eaten. To cut it with a knife looks common.
Honestly, with rationing going on, isn’t it downright unpatriotic to leave food on your plate? Mama may have bought me this book, but I know she’d disagree with this piece of advice. If my sisters and I don’t eat all of our supper, she always says the same thing: “They’s people in this world that’s starving to death who’d be glad to get what you’re letting go to waste.” And when it comes to the part about it being common to eat asparagus with a knife…well, I’ve never eaten asparagus before in my life, so how common does that make me?
I know Mama was trying to help me by buying this book, but honestly, if I acted the way it says to act around Aaron, he’d think I was putting on airs or that I’d gone plumb crazy. And besides, I disagree with the idea that a girl has to act a certain way just because she’s around a boy. I see it with girls at school all the time. They’ll be having a perfectly normal conversation, then a pack of boys will walk by, and all the girls turn into these giggling, eyelash-batting, hair-flipping fools.