Finding My Thunder

by Diane Munier

  She stopped now and set that orange monstrosity down and rubbed over her arms. “What’s your name?”

  “Hillary Grunier,” I said.

  “Where you live?”

  “3139 Willard Street in Ludicrous. I live in back there with my grandma.”

  She nodded, looking me over, up and down. “Army, huh?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “My Bobby was in. Korea. You watch this suitcase for me at the door while I get my truck I’ll give you a ride. But you screw me over and I’m coming to Ludicrous,” she pointed her finger and it was sharp and painted red and there were blue veins standing on the backs of her hands but I knew if I were to touch them they would be rougher than Jergens could fix.

  “Yes ma’am…I mean…no ma’am I wouldn’t screw you over.”

  And that’s how I met Allie Jackson.

  Allie Jackson could not be construed in Naomi’s big book as a cherubim but she was an angel. We exchanged information pretty quick and she owned a welding business and machine shop. I couldn’t believe it. She was on her way home now from a dairy show.

  I about fell out of the truck I was so surprised. “Are you like a woman’s libber?” I asked because even the way she lit her cigarette, and boy did I want to bum one, but the ride was enough. More than.

  She laughed at women libbers, she said. Just shut up and push was her motto. I loved that motto. I really did. I even think Naomi would love it cause the women I knew who were really doing something, and I just knew a handful, Naomi included, they were too busy for a movement. And besides, Allie said, she loved men. Had loved a particular one for twenty-six years, her husband Bobby, who had hair like Elvis, just like him she said, and she dug a picture out of her purse and showed me and he was in a wheel chair, and the hair…well not too much like Elvis, but some Jethro.

  I got a flash of Danny in my mind that first day after I’d cut his hair and him picking me up on the way to work and that ducktail in the back, his face, mouth mostly, and I ached with love.

  He had Cerebral palsy, Bobby did. They used to run the business together. It had been his, but now, him in a chair, she took over.

  She knew how to weld, but she didn’t do that no more. She was management. That meant everyone and his brother were her boss, she said. But the real money, she said was in sales. That’s what she’d discovered. She spent many years drumming up customers going against men giving kick-backs, fending off the advances of male buyers and others selling and the guys in the oily shops who’d never witnessed a woman stepping her high-heels in those places and she’d been built some like me then.

  But now…she had a good name and a reputation for fair pricing and fast delivery. So she wasn’t traveling so much but she was always looking to expand. “You get out of school, give me a call, girl like you, guts enough to go the city without a car…you might just be crazy enough to give me a try.”

  We laughed some and I told her about my situation and she was so mad. “I know Lonnie Grunier!” she realized. “He’s that gypsy outfit,” she said. “He’s underbid me before then he didn’t finish and I had to go in anyway and straighten out his mess! He can’t get the jobs that count. He’ll be fixing someone’s wagon or something like that maybe. What a bastard you got stuck with. Girl like you?”

  Well I didn’t tell her the half, but when she dropped me home I had her card and she told me to come see her anytime and she meant what she said I got out of school.

  Really? There was nothing those girls could do to me. Sukey either. Daddy either. Nothing…nothing at all. I was rich, like Naomi. I was rich.

  Next day school started.

  Finding My Thunder 35

  Naomi was already gone when I got up the next morning, first day of my junior year of high school. But she’d left me a note with a five dollar bill, and two pieces of cinnamon toast under an embroidered cloth napkin. Also a glass of orange juice she had squeezed herself and a One-a-Day vitamin beside it. Very touching but I was too queasy to eat it.

  I had beaten her here yesterday. So there had been no questions. She got home after I was in bed…or pretended to be. I had the road on me, a hum in my ear, the roar of planes, the moving ribbon of asphalt, radio stations I wouldn’t have chosen and good people who had let me into their cars and lives rolling through my head and I hadn’t been able to sleep much…but mostly the feel of Danny, that last kiss, mostly that kept me awake.

  I had a sense of adventure so strong it was as if I’d gone into the army myself, as if I saw beyond this pinprick called Ludicrous and it was hard to fold myself into a small enough piece to fit back into its stifling reality.

  I thought of Peter, Paul and Mary’s song, “The Cruel War,” about following your lover into battle.

  I understood it, how it felt to let Danny go where I couldn’t follow.

  Why did I have to have so many thoughts first thing in the morning? I took one bite of the toast and a sip of the juice. When I got home from school I would drink the rest, my reward for surviving the day. I took the five dollars because it was all I had now.

  For all the angst I felt, I tried to imagine how it was going for Danny. I pictured some sergeant screaming in his face like I’d seen on Gomer Pyle, but Danny wouldn’t be Gomer, he’d excel at everything…just like always. I knew that and I feared where that would lead, but that was him. Every mile between us felt like two but I’d better get used to it. If he wrote me…and he’d have to or I’d be reduced to asking Dickens to smuggle me his address, but if he wrote it would be one way of pushing through the distance.

  I fumbled through my clothes, finding what to wear. I had a mini-dress, striped poor boy top and attached beige denim A-line skirt with a wide belt around my hips. I’d had this dress since the eighth grade but I hardly ever wore it except sometimes to Temple. I paired it with my boots that stopped a few inches below my knees. I liked these, but at school I wasn’t comfortable with the clunky noise they made when I walked down the hall because a shadow shouldn’t make too much noise…but now? They were perfect.

  My hair was long, to my waist, parted in the middle. Often I braided it or wore it tied back, almost afraid to let people see it. I don’t know why. It might have been the best thing about me…or not so great. I didn’t know anything for sure. I thought I changed over the summer…looked older. Maybe it was that…or maybe it was the love…it changed people…songs said so…and I’d seen it in other girls…but…I didn’t know. But the dress looked different, more pokey in some places or fuller but I wasn’t going to keep apologizing to the world. I was a girl. There were a lot of us and I was one. And that was settled because I loved Danny.

  I had myself pretty pumped-up. It was a good walk to school and I’d made it before a hundred plus times so I scrounged enough contents for another purse, one not so big and I set off.

  On the way to school I got offered a ride by some boys I’d known…they said, “Hey…get in here so we can check you out,” and I ignored them and crossed the street and they laid rubber. And an older man honked and another, but I didn’t look. It made me mad but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

  Seeing school, a new wave of jacked-up cars in the lot, the field beyond its own kind of cemetery. I stood there a minute remembering my time with Danny that sad day…that field was his and now…ours. I was here…holding my place…with him.

  Students smoked next to the stairs, the designated smoking area meant to shame us, but it didn’t. But I wouldn’t be using it this year. So I went up those broad cement steps and through the double doors and just that smell of Ludicrous High, just that made me groan.

  I went down the hall, heard Tahlila’s group, always the loudest, taking the most space, the best seats, the center, the elevated places, the lights, the prize. They squealed as they saw each other, as they packed together in school colors.

  I went into the office. I had missed registration. A line, the bell, a chair, talk and talk, pencil held against forms and pointing and argu
ing and reasoning and sighs, and finally it was my turn. Mrs. Callahan faced me.

  The lecture was unspoken but it hung there. She had repeated it all morning. I wasn’t a special case. There had been a place, a time to do this. And now I was here.

  I had a doable schedule, with fine arts and typing and shorthand and French again. She piled books on the counter. I gave her two dollars for my gym uniform. Four dollars for my art fee. “Oh, a size small, please,” I said as she slapped that folded uniform on the desk that I noticed was a large. She clicked her tongue, then whipped it away to exchange it.

  I didn’t need a parking pass, I didn’t need a bus pass, I wasn’t playing sports. And so it went, and finally my locker number. “You’re going to have to have a locker with the seniors,” she said. “There are no more available for the juniors. We had a couple of transfers…you’re our biggest class this year.”

  “Is there a locker anywhere else?” I said. “With the freshmen…or something?”

  She gave me a look then ignored the question. She gave me the locker with the seniors and I told myself…I didn’t have to use it.

  Time I got out of there, first period was half over. Even still I needed to scope out the locker. It was on the end, not in the middle, a full sized one because seniors got the best ones, but this would put me in their den…and I didn’t know who was around me. But I had so many books now, and I lifted the silver handle, that metallic sound, I hated it, what it meant, school in session, locked in. I put some of the books in for my afternoon classes and closed it softly. I hadn’t gotten my combination lock and that meant another trip to the office but I’d have to do it during lunch.

  I ran to what was left of homeroom and stopped outside the door and tried to walk in calm but they were quiet and staring and one of the boys whistled and I knew my cheeks flushed, and the teacher said the cliché thing, “Nice of you to come, Miss Grunier,” and I smiled and a couple of boys in the back of the room said, “Sit here,” but I just stopped at the first empty desk and sat there and felt pretty stupid.

  I thought of Miss Allie going into those places to sell fittings and machinery and what it must have been like for her, under that crude male sizing up, the kind of thing made you feel powerless.

  Naomi said Queen Vashti wouldn’t have it. When King Xerxes sent for her to parade her naked in front of his drunk friends, she refused. That paved the way for Esther to become queen and Esther went on to save the whole Jewish nation. She said, when women did the right thing, the brave thing, everyone got lifted.

  Miss Allie wouldn’t let it stop her when she went in those shops and took it for being female. So that’s what I thought of and it calmed me some, that and picking on the binding of one of my books.

  “Hey Grunier,” one of the boys, a football player, called. We were supposed to be filling out surveys for a variety of clubs. I turned around because ignoring him wasn’t going to make him go away. “You still got your cherry?” he said.

  And the teacher, the habitually frustrated and seemingly worn out even on the first day of school Mr. Boxer said, “Okay Davis, do you want to go to the office on the first day cause I’ll drag you down there, no problem.”

  “No sir, I’d rather go tomorrow,” he said and his buddy laughed like a horse and Boxer came down the aisle in his brown polyester pants and yellow short-sleeved button down and that brown clip on tie and grabbed Davis by the back of his neck, but Davis was bigger but not stronger, so a scuffle broke out and kids were diving out of their desks, including me. Some books flew onto the floor, and Davis, realizing Boxer was too pissed off to let this go surrendered then. Boxer took over big time, head so red it looked ready to pop and he had Davis by the neck and dragged him out.

  There was a second of silence as the students looked at one another. One girl was rubbing her arm where they’d plowed into her, another boy thought there was a scrape on his leg and was trying to get his pant leg high enough to look. I swallowed and picked up my stuff and righted my desk like everyone else.

  “So, Grunier…about that cherry,” Davis’s friend laughed and someone else said, “Shut up asshole,” and I felt better then, I don’t know why.

  So the blow-up in Boxer’s classroom was big news, but it was just the first day. At the assembly to welcome us back Principal Brown addressed us about school violence, telling us that they, the principal and teachers, realized on the nightly news we were seeing Communist sympathizers and misguided young people protest on college campuses and in cities all over this land but things were going forward in Ludicrous as they always had and we were God-fearing Americans and school discipline would be upheld and disregard for school rules would not be tolerated.

  I rubbed my elbow where I’d hit it on the desk when Mr. Boxer had dived for Davis.

  The principal went on to say that we needed to dress like young ladies and gentlemen and he went over the dress code to help us understand what clothing appropriate for learning looked like. I didn’t hear much after that because I pictured each of us walking around naked wearing a big foil thinking cap programmed by Principal Brown from the intercom he loved to drone over.

  He continued about how radical ideas and philosophies were better saved for those in college. It was evident the kinds of discussion they were having there by all the ridiculous displays of anti-American behavior we’d been bombarded with.

  The principal finished and we all clapped, I should say over-clapped, as many of the boys really laid it on and whistled, and that culminated in a loud, “Fuck you,” from a masculine voice and others laughed and clapped some more and the principal came off the stage and other teachers fanned out trying to locate the offender to no avail. However two boys were hauled off and we were dismissed and warned to leave the gym in an orderly fashion.

  That’s when I got shoved from behind. The force of it made me plow into the people in front of me and there was shouting. I dropped my purse and the books I was holding and a group of girls walked over everything. Others protested, so they didn’t get completely away with it, but really…they did.

  This dragged us to third period. I went in the classroom and there was Tahlila taking Chemistry with me. She was one of three seniors in there. I tried to pick a seat as far away as possible. She and Lauren had my purse but in her mind I had her boyfriend. I had no idea what I was going to do about her, but she was already working on me.

  She looked at me and smirked, but her eyes…she was mad. I didn’t take pleasure in it, but there was no way around it. It wasn’t my job to understand her. It was my right to get my purse back. However…I realized whatever she’d wanted to do to me she’d already done to my stuff. I pictured her and Lauren going through everything and strewing the contents all along the highway.

  There hadn’t been anything of value money-wise, but there had been money. Thirty dollars. And To Kill a Mockingbird. I loved to have a great story in my purse, and great music so I’d also had my transistor radio given to me by my dead mother when I turned fifteen. Whatever was in there…it was mine, valuable to me, that was the thing.

  As the teacher droned on I tried not to slice my gaze Tahlila’s way. I sat back some and could see the back of her or in profile. Seems I’d looked at her all through school as she was always up front of us doing something grand. A girl husk. Husk of human. Nothing inside. Just…empty. Yes, I was dehumanizing my enemy. Damn.

  Danny had said she would soon take up with someone else. Guys had scrambled to sit around her and all through class they tried to interact with her husk-self.

  In some ways Danny had used her. He’d been curious about her and she was the one. There was no use hurting myself more with it. That had happened often enough in the past—me hurting myself with it.

  I wondered if she and her friends would keep to those same ways even as adults, that they’d never get tired of it, staying in their circle dating one another, inner-breeding. It was a world I didn’t want to understand.

  Athletic talent had opened th
e door to this world for Danny. And he’d used it to keep Paul happy. Then he’d withdrawn and Paul tried to punish him. Now…I wondered what it would be like at Danny’s house…for Dickens…for Annie. I’d have to reach out to them. I’d have to know they were okay even though Sukey would come home. I wasn’t going to keep living under this fear. By January…Danny would be a world away. I had to figure it out.

  “Miss Grunier?” Mrs. Spencer said and the class laughed because I’d been sitting there not answering.

  “Oh…I…I’m sorry.”

  Mimicry from Tahlila’s corner. Tahlila smiled at the one who’d done it. That’s how it would be, I thought. She would be the sad one controlling her minions but never getting her hands dirty. They’d be only too glad to do anything she asked for a chance to receive one of her smiles.

  “Would you like to explain to the class how you used chemistry in everyday life over the summer?” Mrs. Spencer asked, eyebrow arched.

  “I baked a cake,” I rattled off.

  “Finally…someone with an intelligent answer,” Mrs. Spencer said walking to the front of the room.

  This brought more scoffing from Tahlila’s group but the teacher’s compliment would have to be enough. She wasn’t going to discipline them. She moved on to the next student with the next question, and I heard the same guy call me Hillary Duck. Then Hillary Duck Fucker.

  Mrs. Spencer said, hand on bony hip, “No talking and no profanity.”

  A couple of other people looked offended that the comment wasn’t addressed.

  “Stupid ass jocks,” someone sneered.

  Mrs. Spencer said loudly, “That is enough. I will not tolerate a lack of respect for this classroom.” She stood up nobly for the cinder block walls and the windows and the green chalk boards.

  The minute she turned around to write on the board someone said, “Grunier fucks Danny Boyd.”

  Tahlila looked hurt, and batted her sad eyes toward the boy who’d said it.