Riding in Cars With Boys: Confessions of a Bad Girl Who Makes Good

by Beverly Donofrio

  The only thing I thought about marriage after that was, Never in a million years, not for a billion dollars, and never again if it kills me.

  Then it was a year since Raymond deserted us, the close of the summer of 1971. Jason was about to be three, and a few days later I’d be twenty-one, drinking age, voting age, and a legal adult. I was at a picnic in Beatrice’s backyard with Jason and Fay, her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Amelia, and a bunch of Beatrice’s friends from work. Fay and I’d had a plan. We’d split a hit of acid, then once we got to Beatrice’s all-girls picnic, all the girls would take care of our two kids. Problem was, we didn’t let Beatrice and her friends in on the plan and they were too dense to pick up on it. First of all, they had no idea we were tripping, because they’d never tripped themselves and wouldn’t know a tripping person from a lunatic, which is probably what they thought we were. And second of all, they just didn’t understand. This was our logic: Fay and I had gotten knocked up, which made us the scapegoats or fall guys. In other words, if it hadn’t been us it would’ve been them, so the least they could do was take up some slack by easing our kids off our backs during one measly picnic. No such luck.

  So I’m lying on my back in Beatrice’s parents’ aluminum pool and I’m tripping peacefully, listening to the trees talk to me in a language I’m sure I’d understand if only I could concentrate harder. But then here comes somebody handing me my son. By the blinding orange of her bikini, I know it’s Beatrice. She says, “Somebody wants to swim with his mommy.”

  Couldn’t she tell somebody didn’t want to swim with her son? But she’s dangling him over the water, so I reach out to get him and he slips through my fingers and underwater. I catch him just after his face goes under, but he starts crying hysterically anyway, spitting and coughing and making me feel awful. Now I understand every word from the trees. They’re saying: You’re a terrible mother. You almost drowned your son. He’ll remember this moment forever.

  I hugged Jason and bounced him around the pool to distract him. When we climbed out, I lay on my back and Jason sat on my stomach. His head was ringed by the sun, and for a minute I thought it was a halo, but then a cloud obscured the vision and I concentrated on his face. He had three freckles on his nose and blue-gray eyes that were shaped like almonds. Did Raymond have eyes shaped like almonds too? I closed my eyes to change the subject, and what I saw was the Blessed Virgin standing on a world with the infant Jesus perched in the crook of her arm, like on a plastic card, and that’s when I remembered about my mother. She said she almost drowned when she was little, even went down for the third time, but then she saw the Virgin Mary holding out her arms, and the next thing she knew she was lying in the sand, saved.

  Jason had had a vision too, of an old lady floating outside his window, trying to get in. He was afraid of her. I told him she was probably a fairy.

  “She’s too old,” he said.

  “Not for a guardian angel. It’s probably my great-grandmother Irene dropping by to give you good luck.”

  “You think so?”

  “Sure.”

  My great-grandmother Irene was on my mind a lot these days, because every time I turned around, my mother was saying, “I don’t know who you take after. Not my family. It must be your father’s grandmother Irene.” Personally, I took this as a compliment, but although my mother liked Irene, she meant it as an insult, because Irene had committed the cardinal sin of Neglecting Her Children. Irene, too, escaped from her house every chance she got. She liked to walk around the neighborhood stopping here for a cup of coffee or there to check out some other Italian immigrant who’d just landed on her block. Her favorite thing in the world was the movies, and she went every chance she got. This made her husband—who traveled around the country shooting off fireworks—furious, especially since she left her house a mess and her kids running wild. So, the story goes, one day he loaded the dirty dishes into his wheelbarrow, then pushed it straight down the center aisle of Wilkinson’s Theater, to shame her. My story goes that when she saw him, she burst out laughing.

  Irene’s story does not have a happy ending, though. By the time I met her, her husband was dead and she’d squandered all her money, had no house, no teeth, and was a pauper. She lived with various nieces and nephews but refused to live with her own kids—maybe because she didn’t like them, maybe because they tried to boss her around and trap her behind four walls. Meanwhile, my father had just become a cop, driving in his cruiser, and never did a week go by without his seeing his grandmother, dressed in black, her white hair darting from her head like dandelion spores, looking like a witch wandering on the edge of town near some cornfield or cow pasture. He’d stop to ask her if she wanted a ride, but she always refused it. Now, this was his grandmother, so he couldn’t order, “Get in,” like he could with me. So what he did instead—the day after he spied her at Woolworth’s trying on glasses and squinting at a popcorn sign—was order a powwow with his mother and his aunts and uncles, who decided the only thing was a nursing home. When they checked her in, she refused to give up her shoes. When she died three months later, they found them hidden beneath her pillow.

  I sometimes wondered, given the authority, if my father would stick me in an institution too. Especially since he’d reverted to his old trick of stalking me. Like I said, this was 1971. I was a hippie. I wore no bra, walked barefoot, had sex indiscriminately, plus I hitchhiked and went shoplifting with Jason. My son was the prefect lure for rides (who could refuse a white-haired three-year-old standing in a gutter next to his mother and sticking out his thumb?) and the best decoy for shoplifting (all I had to do was let him run wild in a store and the ladies were so riveted on his grubby little hands they never even noticed me, except to shoot dirty looks that meant, Will you please control your child, you stupid hippie). Probably, there were times my father and his buddies saw me sitting on the lawn of Robert Early Junior High staring at a fluorescent light thinking it was a television. Certainly, they kept track of the multitude of cars that spent the night in my driveway, not to mention the various men who drove them. I wonder if they could distinguish which guy was for Fay and which for me.

  Fay and I had no problem keeping track, because we had a list stuck behind a picture of an onion skin Fay had painted and hung on the wall. Fay and Amelia had moved in with me and Jase in the springtime, after Fay had found a pair of bikini underpants in the backseat of her car and surmised, correctly, that her husband was an adulterer. So she drove up from Pennsylvania in her yellow Dodge, dragging half her furniture behind her, and moved in. We’d thrown my old Flintstone furniture out and moved her beautiful furniture in before she’d painted the picture of the onion skin. We didn’t know yet that we’d have a list to hang behind it. That started about a month after she’d moved in.

  We’d been driving around town with our kids, really happy. True, we both had failed marriages. True, we were both on welfare. True, we had little kids keeping us from hitchhiking to California or through Europe, joining a commune, and about a million other things we could be doing in the world, but here we were, best girlfriends living together with our kids. It was like a dream come true. One of my fantasies as a kid was that my best friend Donna and I and our Betsy Wetsies were living together because it was wartime and our husands were off fighting. Then we’d get a telegram saying our husbands had been blown to smithereens, which meant the two of us could live together forever if we wanted. Well, that’s what it felt like now. We cruised around town, Jase and Amelia singing the ABC song over and over till we finally yelled, “Shut up, you little rodents!” then they bounced around the car laughing and bumping their heads on the ceiling, until they settled into their customary positions: heads out windows like dogs. Meanwhile, Fay and I hunted for wildflowers, which we picked by the bucketful, and cute guys, mostly in sports cars. When we saw one of them approaching, we’d say, “Wave, kids!” which they did like windup dolls.

  Then it was dusk of a paralyzingly hot day. We’d just gotten
ice cream cones for the kids and were driving around a part of town that was strange to us, the part of town where great aluminum sheds loomed near factories with smokestacks, at ends of streets with old shingled houses and forlorn-looking bushes. And there, in the distance, we saw a cluster of those same sports cars parked by a ballpark.

  We recognized a couple of guys. They were on the Italian Club team, which was playing the Elks team. The Italian Club guys wore jeans. Bandanna headbands dammed the sweat on their foreheads and kept their long hair out of their faces. They smoked cigarettes in the outfield and clenched them between their teeth to make catches. They pranced around the bases instead of running when they hit homers. Some of these guys were the same boys who drove by me and Donna when we had sat under the tree, sticking our chins in the air, waiting for Denny Winters. I knew their names from my brother’s yearbooks. They were older than us by three or four years. They were the type of gone-by hoods who stole hubcaps and had fights with chains and bricks in high school. Only now they were hippies. “Far out,” I said to Fay. “Groovy,” Fay said to me.

  After that, the Italian Club bar was our hangout. It was the same room where Raymond had gotten drunk on Seagram’s 7s at our wedding. The room was big and dark like the belly of a whale. The bar was mahogany, and lined with guys called Rat and Indian, Chip and Skip, Buzzard and Deacon. Half of them were married and thought nothing of the fact that they were drinking at a bar every night. If their wives called looking for them, automatically the bartender said, “Haven’t seen him.” If they talked about their wives at all, it was as though they were aliens, who flushed their pot down toilets and had fits when they showed up drunk at dawn, then wouldn’t talk or have sex for days after.

  “What,” I asked, “do you think gives you the right to drink at bars and have all the fun you want while your wife is stuck home with kids?”

  “Hey, Hank, hit me.”

  “Aren’t you going to answer?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Why don’t you put a bra on? You ever think your tits are going to end up at your waist by the time you’re thirty?”

  “Like your balls’ll end up at your knees?”

  “Hey, you’re all right. I like you.”

  I’d read Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and Si mone de Beauvoir, and I was ready, I was willing, I was chomping at the bit to personally fight for the rights of all women, with the help of my best friend and fellow victim, Fay. Since they wouldn’t listen when we talked, we took action.

  On our list, we made columns headed: name, age, astrological sign, penis size, and performance, rated one to ten. Then we dressed up in our hiphugger jeans and skimpy jerseys that left our belly buttons exposed and strutted into the club to lure men home (never the married ones) to lay, fuck, hump, ball, screw—that’s the way we talked to amuse each other—and dispense with any nuance of love or romance. We got right to the point, which was to say, “Do you want to fuck?” If ever some guy had the audacity to try to light our cigarettes, say, we jumped all over him. “What do we look like, damsels in distress?”

  Which in a way we were, because soon after we’d found the club, Fay’s creep of an ex-husband sneaked up in the night and stole back the yellow Dodge, leaving us carless and furious—because it had been men who’d knocked us up, men who’d left us with kids, and men who got the cars.

  The night of Beatrice’s picnic, Fay and I were hoping we could get our mothers or Trudy our neighbor to take the kids so we could hitch to the club and pick up some guys, or at the very least have some drinks to take the edge off the acid. Which at the moment was making my ears fill with static. Jason had taken to burying me with grass and was almost finished. He was talking to himself in a murmur, “All I have left are her feet,” he said. “The toes are the hardest....” Amelia ran up. “What’re you doing?” she said.

  “Burying my mother.”

  “Can I?”

  “All right. When we’re done, we have to find a flower. We can stick it in her mouth so it’ll stand up.”

  “That’s enough,” I said, sitting up.

  “Maaaa!” Jason yelled.

  “What do you want? You were making me dead.”

  “Let’s do it to my mother,” Amelia suggested.

  “Okay,” Jase said, then he and Amelia ran off

  I felt abandoned, adrift, without Jason’s anchoring me down. I watched him and Amelia run across the lawn to Fay. They bumped shoulders and ran at exactly the same speed. Jason was six months older, but they were constantly mistaken for twins. Jason was the type who liked to go first and win, and Amelia let him. They got along as well as their mothers did. They slept in Jason’s room and got up together every morning before me and Fay, poured each other cereal, and ate it in front of the TV while watching cartoons. Fay and I slept in my room across the hall, but whenever one of us invited a man to sleep over, the other one slept on the couch and told the kids they couldn’t watch television. Then they sat in the kitchen and chatted like chipmunks or went out earlier than usual.

  When I had a guy over and at some point of the morning we appeared in the kitchen, Amelia flirted with him, while Jason suddenly forgot how to do everything, like put on his own sweater or pour his own milk or talk if asked a direct question by anyone but me. As I’d always figured, Fay lucked out having a girl, because girls didn’t have a male territorial thing about boyfriends.

  Jase had laid a bombshell on me the last time I had a guy stay over. The guy had lett and I was talking to Jase in a pretend foreign language to get him mad. I don’t know why—maybe because he was the wrong sex. Finally, he stood up, red in the face, and yelled,· “Stop !” I was shocked. Jason hardly ever lost his temper. I burst out laughing, then he looked like he might cry, so I said, “What’s the matter? I was just asking you what you want to be when you grow up, and you wouldn’t answer.”

  “You were talking stupid.”

  “I know. Sorry. But answer me. What do you want to be?”

  “A cop.”

  “A pig! What do you want to be a pig for?”

  “So I can shoot people.”

  This coming from a kid who never had a toy gun in his life? This coming from a kid who’d been taught, make peace not war? Then the obvious dawned on me. “You want to be one because Pop is.”

  “No sir.”

  “Jason, if you become a cop, I’ll disown you.”

  “What’s disown mean?”

  “It means I’ll never talk to you and you can’t come in my house anymore.”

  “Don’t say that.” Now he looked like he was going to cry again.

  Then I remembered reverse psychology. “Go ahead. I don’t care. If you want to be a cop, be a cop.”

  As I watched him and Amelia at the far end of the lawn reaching into a bag of marshmallows Beatrice was holding, I began to dream, one of my favorites: What would my life be without Jason? I’d be living in New York City, appearing in a play. Probably Hair. One night John Lennon would show up without Yoko and we’d go out for drinks. Then I axed the fantasy. I tried to Be Here Now and think of the good things about being a mother. I couldn’t think of one good thing. Not one. What I thought of was Lenny LaRoyce and his bus. Fay and I’d gone to high school with Lenny, and when he got out of the service, he converted a school bus and drove it across country. When he returned recently, he parked his bus on his friend’s lawn for a couple of months and began dropping by the club. Fay seduced him. Then one night he invited Fay and Amelia and Jase and me to sleep on the bus. Wouldn’t you know the couple in the bunk above Jase and me would have to get hyperactive in the middle of the night and start humping and bumping and moaning and groaning to beat the band? Jason woke up and said, “Ma, what’re they doing?”

  “Having sex,” I said.

  “What’s sex?” he said.

  I’d told Jason the facts of life since the day he was born practically, because I believed sex was a natural part of life and nothing to be ashamed of. But he never remembered. It wasn’t the time
to repeat the whole thing again, so I said, “Sh, go to sleep.”

  When Lenny invited me and Fay to go on his next trip and to bring our kids, I seriously considered it. But then I thought, Oh right, and then I’d have that feeling of guilt, like I was doing the wrong thing, whenever Jase woke up in the night hearing people screwing.

  I watched him sticking up his face and hands with marshmallow and thought I should tell him he’s had enough, but who wanted to listen to him whine? Fay walked over then, sat next to me on the grass, and watched the party from a distance with me: Beatrice and her nine-to-five friends eating hot dogs in bikinis. Finally, she said, “Let’s blow this stupid picnic,” which was exactly my sentiment.

  Of course, Amelia and Jase had a fit because of the marshmallows, but our timing was right, because a minute after we stepped onto the road, we got a ride home.

  We found no one to baby-sit that night, so after the kids fell asleep, we sat on the front stoop and tried to will some guys to our house. I was thinking specifically about Hal, the bartender, who hurt my feelings because he gave me drinks on the house and let himself be seduced but had never once called or even spent the day with me after a night together. The last time he’d dropped me off in the morning, he’d said, “You’re hostile, you know that? You think you’re Janis Joplin. You’d better get it while you can. What do you think’s going to happen when your good looks fade?” Then he’d reached over and opened the door for me to get out. He said, “Better make hay while the sun shines,” as he backed out of the driveway. This struck me as mean, which was probably why I liked the guy to begin with.

  Now Fay said, “The only time they come by is when they know we have drugs.”

  “All we ever do is talk about guys, think about guys, and go to the club to look for guys,” I said. “How can we call ourselves liberated?”

  “We do what we want and we don’t take shit.”

  “We need money,” I said.

  “I’ll be rich one day,” Fay said. “Then I’m coming back in a red Ferrari.”