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

by Beverly Donofrio

“That’s what you are.”

  “What?”

  “Men call you on the phone and ask you to take your clothes off, don’t they?”

  With the onset of Jason’s puberty, it was beginning to feel like Jason was trying to step into the role of my father. He always wanted to know where I was going, what time I’d be home, and then how much money I’d spent. He told me he was planning on becoming a millionaire and then he’d give me an allowance, but no more than a thousand dollars a month, because I’d just squander it.

  I’d maintained since the sixties that sex was healthy and good and should not be hidden from children, but I was beginning to think twice. Especially after I left my diaphragm out to dry and Jason said, “Ma. Tell me the truth. Don’t you think it’s disgusting to leave that thing out, in the kitchen?” We had no bathroom, only a toilet in a closet. The tub was in the kitchen, as well as our one and only sink, so where else to put a diaphragm to dry after washing but on the shelf above the sink? But that was the last time I did that. I began to sleep with men only on weekends, when Jason went to my parents‘, which he did all the time, taking the two-hour train ride to New Haven, where he was picked up by my father and mother.

  Then one year, Jason was almost fifteen, and he came home from six weeks at camp six inches taller. “I can’t believe it,” Jase said. “Everything looks so small. I’m taller than you. I bet I can lift you up.” Then he did.

  The tables were turned. The balance was tipped. He was taller than me. He became the kid and I the parent.

  Jason made friends with a twenty-one-year-old carpenter and began hanging out at the Polish bar down the avenue playing pool. I had quit nude modeling, was enrolled in graduate school, and spent most of my time at home writing and reading whenever I wasn’t at work. I stopped having sex; Jason started having girlfriends. A whole succession of them. Then one night, when he was a junior in high school, I came home from dinner with a friend and spotted a girl’s green leather jacket on a chair in the living room. The door to Jason’s room was closed. I went to sleep, and in the morning the jacket was still there. I went out to buy the paper and have a cappuccino. When I came back, the jacket was gone and Jase’s door was open. He was reading on his bed. “Who was here last night?” I asked him.

  “Carol,” he said. “She’s cool. She goes to Bard and pays for school by making porn movies. But she’s not really the type. You know what I mean?”

  Christ, I thought to myself, is my kid going to be fascinated with wild girls because his mother was one? This Carol was the second girl who’d slept over and about the fifth girl Jase had gone out with. Was he heading for a fiasco love life like I had? Would he use women to make a demolition derby of his life, like mine? I figured we were past due for a talk.

  “When I was young,” I began, feeling like an idiot, uncomfortable with my new role, like I was in a situation comedy or something, “I romanticized creepy people. I was attracted to the seamy side of life. I was very impatient to have experiences. But you know, Jase, you’re only innocent once, and when you lose it, it’s gone. Gone forever. So don’t be in such a hurry, okay?”

  “I’m not like you,” he said.

  I didn’t have to reflect much on that one. The kid and I were like night and day, starting with our appearance. I was as dark as he was light. Plus, Jase was a loner. He liked to have one friend and not a group like I had. He got all A‘s, worked in a bookstore, and never asked me for money.

  “Sex should be about love.” I changed the subject in order to get to it.

  “I know.”

  “So how can you sleep with all those girls?”

  “Who said I had sex with them?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Ma, why are you so obsessed with this?”

  Was I being obsessed? Did I have a sexual fixation? Was I a maniac about it where my son was concerned, like my father had been with me? This definitely could be a case of generational repeating. This was not the first such conversation I’d had with Jason. I’d told him to always carry rubbers and not to leave it up to the girl to use birth control, because girls had mysterious, unconscious wishes for pregnancy and cannot be trusted. I told him liberated men always shared responsibility. Speaking of which, this would be a good time to put another word in. “I hope you’re using birth control.”

  “Let’s drop it, okay?”

  “What if you got a girl pregnant? That would be just wonderful.”

  “I wouldn’t mind having a baby.”

  “What? Are you trying to make me crazy? I thought you were going to college.”

  “I could go to college with a kid. You did.”

  I felt like grabbing my hair with both hands and pulling, but I got a grip on myself. This called for a modulated voice and sensible words, because obviously, Jason was trying to incite a one-woman riot. “Do you know about the urge to repeat?” I said very slowly and calmly. “People repeat things for generations and generations without being aware. I got pregnant. Mim got pregnant. Grammy got pregnant. Three generations. Don’t make it four.”

  “Grammy was pregnant? Who told you?”

  “Mim. A long time ago. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t think so.”

  “She got pregnant by a German with blue eyes who took off for the war, so Irene, her mother, got big Matt Donofrio to marry her. He was an Italian immigrant, twenty years older, and a jealous maniac. He had a pizza-parlor business on the comer and a taxi-cab business too, but the phone was at their house. If ever he heard somebody had called and Grammy didn’t answer, he’d run home, pull her onto the porch, and smack her. He did it in public, because he thought she was screwing with a neighbor.”

  “Wow,” Jason said.

  “Those old Italians were lunatics. Big Matt used to be a bootlegger too, and more than once he got hauled down to the station for fighting. Pop said it took three cops to pin him down and that the old-timers on the force used to say to Pop, ‘Your old man would turn in his grave if he could see his son in uniform.’ But of course, there’s not much difference between cops and criminals. Come to think of it, that’s three generations, too: Big Matt, Pop, and Uncle Mike.”

  I wondered if there was a precedent in our family for born-again virgins like me. Come to think of it, there were only two other college graduates in my family, both elementary-school teachers, and they didn’t have the most active sex lives. One, my father’s sister, didn’t get married until she was over thirty, and had a nose that twitched like a rabbit or like she’d just been shocked by an overdose of carbonation; and the other, my father’s cousin, never married. She was so wide that whenever she came for a shower or a wedding, she had to sit on two chairs pushed together. Well, I’d never wanted to marry after Raymond, and I supposed I’d had enough sex to last a lifetime, and fact was, I didn’t even miss sex itself that much. Maybe what I missed was love.

  Then out of the blue, like a siren, Olivia, the one remaining Italian, besides me, in our mostly Puerto Rican building decided she wanted to be my friend and began telling me her life story in installments. Olivia was the real thing, an authentic old maid. She was in her sixties, short, and shaped like a block. Her hair was dyed blue-black and on the street she wore a dramatic black cape that reached her ankles and a tartan red beret. She inevitably had two shopping bags hanging from her hands, maybe for balance. It was the summer before Jason’s senior year, when I was about to turn thirty-five, that Olivia decided to open the door to her apartment every time I tried to pass it on the stairs and invite me in for conversation, which meant to tell me the story of her life.

  Her apartment was shiny and white and smelled of gas. She had a plastic ivy creeping up her window and. plastic birds stapled to the vine. The last time, she didn’t even offer me instant coffee before she started talking, kind of breathless like the air was trapped in her chest, and I knew tonight we would get to the point of her story.

  “My life,” she said, “was ruined. See these
ugly black shoes? Orthopedic. Didn’t you ever notice the way I walk? Slow, like the clicking of a clock. The kids teased me on our way to school. I could never keep up. Never got married because of my feet. I know three languages, but I never traveled. I gave up religion because I’m so bitter.”

  I thought this confession would make her start crying, but apparently she’d given that up a long time ago.

  That night in bed, I was awakened by the screech of a bird and the hysterical flapping of wings. A sparrow was flailing around my living room, knocking into walls, whacking its head on the ceiling. I couldn’t watch it, let alone try to catch it. I called to Jason.

  He trapped the bird in the bottom shelf of the book case, then picked it up and held it in his cupped hands. He looked at it for a moment, petted its head with his finger, then put his hand out the window, and the bird flew off.

  When I went back to bed, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about birds leaving nests. Flying and getting trapped. Beliefs that cripple and hands out windows. Then I thought of Olivia and how her feet had hobbled her life. No. She had hobbled her life with her belief about her feet.

  For half of my life, since the day I got pregnant, in fact, I’d thought I’d been stunted by Jason’s birth. But that had only been one way to look at it. Another way to look at it would be that the kid enriched my life, and maybe saved me from getting into even more trouble. With a kid to care for, no matter how haphazardly, I had to keep at least one foot on the ground always. This may have been a good thing. Maybe I never would’ve been given the opportunity to go to college if I hadn’t been a mother on welfare. Maybe I would’ve been feeling much older right now if I hadn’t had a kid, because in the act of being forced to grow up so fast, I rebelled and stayed a kid much longer, which contributed to my bohemian life-style (which was dismally out of sync in the middle of the eighties) and my lack of money (ditto), but it had also kept my perspective fresh, my friends the type of women who decide to buy Harley-Davidsons for themselves at the age of forty-five, and a portion of my interest focused on nothing but joy.

  Jason ruined my life or he enriched it. My choice. You’re just handed some things in life that you have no control over, so you’d better learn from them rather than letting them get you—like Olivia, stewing in bile and bitterness in a stark-white apartment, alone, with birds stapled to her window.

  In the morning, before Jason wakes up, I sit in the kitchen with my parents. My father’s eating Special K, my mother and I, rye toast. “You’re going to miss him,” my mother says.

  “Yes,” I say, not wanting to have this conversation at the same time I’m grateful that somebody’s em pathizing.

  “I remember when your brother went in the service, I cried. Every day. Then when we couldn’t contact him, when he was on that secret mission, remember? And finally I called the Red Cross and he called from a staticky phone on some ship? I thought I’d go out of my mind if I didn’t hear from him. But at least you won’t have to worry about Jason. You know we’ll be here if ever he needs anything. I’ll probably end up doing his laundry. You know me.”

  I wonder, not for the first time, if my wanting Jason to go to Wesleyan so badly had not a little to do with the comfort of knowing my parents would only be miles away. I also wondered if, in a way, I was giving him back to them for a while when he was still almost a kid, because we’d always shared the parenting.

  “Knowing Jason,” my father says, “he’ll be home so often you’ll get sick of him.”

  I honestly didn’t know if I’d be happy or sad to have him home all the time. But I did know my father was trying to ease the pain. We have a good relationship now. When he retired from the force, he confessed that he’d hated his job for years. Now that he’s retired, he builds things: a shed in the backyard, an extra kitchen in the basement; plus, he crochets afghans of clashing colors. He has trouble following directions from the books, so I teach him new stitches when I visit. And we talk about this and that. I realize that some of that time in the years gone by when he was silent, it wasn’t because he was mad at me or critical, it was because he was in a bad mood about the politics in his department or some criminal he’d arrested who’d just gotten off scot-free or his life in general.

  Our relationship began to change before he retired, though. It was the Christmas after I turned thirty, the same month John Lennon died, which, at the time, I interpreted as the end of youth and the demise of innocence. Now that I was a bona fide adult, I was even more sick and tired than I’d always been of the repetitious obligation of holidays with my family, so I’d resolved to make this visit short. I was arriving on Christmas Eve and leaving early the next day, nine o‘clock in the morning, to go back to the city and spend Christmas with a boyfriend. My mother protested. I insisted. My whole family was pissed, because for the first time in history, we would open our gifts on Christmas Eve, to accommodate me.

  My mother woke me up at seven-thirty Christmas morning. I sat in the kitchen with her and my father and spread some cream cheese on a slice of date-nut bread. My mother poured me a cup of coffee and said, “You have a heart of gold.” I was used to her saying I had a big head. This heart-of-gold stuff was new to me and it put me on guard. She was saying it because the night before, I’d given my sister Rose one of my gifts. I’d given it to her because I didn’t like it.

  “No I don‘t,” I said.

  “You’d give anybody the shirt off your back,” she insisted.

  “No I wouldn‘t,” I insisted back.

  “Then you’ve changed,” she said. I could’ve said, No I haven‘t, but decided to end the game.

  My father got up and started putting on his shoes. I told him I didn’t need a ride to the station. I’d rather walk.

  “You sure? It’s cold out,” he said.

  “I’m sure,” I said, looking forward to the solitude.

  I kissed Jase on the forehead without waking him, then I left. At the station, I sat on the bench and smoked a roach I’d found in my pocket. A train flew by in the wrong direction. Then there was no other. It was freezing out and I was beginning to get worried. I sat on my hands and jiggled my body. I moved my feet in circles to get them circulating. I looked up. My father was walking toward me.

  The first thing I thought was, Good thing I finished the roach, and the next thing I thought was, Why’s he spying on me?

  “Thought I’d check to see you got off all right,” he said when he got closer.

  I knew it was the truth. He hadn’t been spying, just concerned. He was a father looking after his daughter. That was the other side of the story. The story of the man worried about the teenage daughter he’d just spotted ducking in the backseat of a passing vehicle full of drunk teenagers. So simple. But to me it was a revelation. Maybe he loved me after all.

  He pulled a schedule from his jacket. There wasn’t a train for two hours. He offered to drive me to New Haven. We’d have just enough time to make the next one. On the ride to the station, I wanted to talk. To let him know in some way I knew how he felt. To let him know how I felt. But never past the age of four had we talked. How could I start now, on Christmas, during a twenty-minute car ride? He turned on the radio. “Silent Night” came on. I sang. He sang the harmony.

  When Jason and I say goodbye to my parents, there are tears in my mother’s eyes and I know they’re for me, because definitely, by the weekend my father will drive her to Jason’s dorm room. She’ll give him a banana bread wrapped in tin foil, remark on what a mess his room is, and start picking up his laundry to take home.

  In the car heading for Wesleyan, I say, “What do you remember most about living there?”

  “The kids,” he said. “They taught me to ride a two-wheeler, remember?”

  “Uh-huh. Are you nervous now? Afraid it won’t be the same as it was?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes I think I should’ve stayed in New York. Gone to Columbia.”

  “No.” I insist, thinking that he’d live in our apartment for four m
ore years, when it was time to make the break. Time to grow up. For both of us. “It’ll be good for you to experience the country. Smell the seasons. Live a different life from subways and bars and traffic fumes for a while.”

  “But people in Connecticut are stupid.”

  “What?”

  “They are.”

  “You’re saying that if we never moved to New York and we stayed in Connecticut we’d be stupid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh God. I never in my life ever dreamed I’d raise a snob. People in New York are maybe more sarcastic and quick, but it doesn’t make them smarter. Don’t kid yourself.” I looked at him then. Black jeans, black T-shirt, sneakers, sunglasses. I wondered if he looked like a city slicker. I wondered how he’d get on. If he’d be expecting it to be one way, the way he remembered, and when he found it different, which he surely would, if he’d hate it. Maybe it had been a mistake to try to go back to utopia, but we’d never questioned it, not for a second. I’d promised him from the day we left for New York, and he’d wanted to stay at Wesleyan, that he could go to school there himself, provided he got all A’s in high school. So he got a ninety-two-point-something average, and then came running home the fall of his senior year in a panic. “Ma!” he said. “The lowest average Wesleyan accepted from Stuyvesant last year was ninety-four. They’ll never give me a scholarship.”

  This news threw me into a panic too. I’d just finished graduate school myself the year before. I’d been proofreading and copyediting, mostly at my kitchen table. We had no money, as usual. The only schools he could “afford” to go to were extraordinarily expensive schools like Wesleyan, because they were the ones with big endowments. If he had to go to a state school, I didn’t know how we’d swing it. But I acted cool. I said, “Well, then we should consider an alternative. Part of the state university system, Cornell, plus another elite school, Yale or Amherst or someplace.”

  “You promised I could go to Wesleyan. If I don’t get in, I’m joining the air force.”