Polly

by Amy Bryant

  Mom must have felt this way when she met Dad. It was strange to think of Mom looking forward to seeing Dad the way I looked forward to seeing Jason. My parents met when they were biology lab partners in college, fell in love dissecting frogs and pigs. I wondered if Dad asked Mom for her number, or if he just looked it up and called her. Maybe he made an excuse when he called her, asked her something about biology lab.

  My parents got married in the campus amphitheater. There was a photo album from their wedding that I kept in my closet on the top shelf, under my yearbooks. Mom didn’t know I had it. I found it when we were unpacking when we moved in with William. I worried she would think it was weird if she knew how much I liked to look at the pictures. There were questions I wanted to ask her, like how Dad proposed and how long they were engaged, and where she got her dress and what kind of cake they had. But I didn’t think she would want to talk about it. Or else she would make a big deal over wanting to know how I felt about the photo album.

  My mother wore a peasant dress and no veil. My father wore a white oxford shirt with a wide collar, which he wore unbuttoned at the top. Mom had long hair then, and she wore it loose and wavy against her pale skin. She looked beautiful. My father had long hair too, almost touching his shoulders. But it wasn’t like Jason’s. Dad’s long hair made him look like one of the Bee-Gees.

  Two weeks went by before I broke down at the lunch table and asked Theresa to tell Eric Graham that I liked Jason.

  “Oh God,” Theresa said. “Don’t you want to at least talk to him first, before you get started with liking him?”

  “Please. I’m freaking out,” I said.

  Sunday night he called. I was in the kitchen spooning ice cream into a bowl, and didn’t get to the phone until the third ring.

  “Do you know who this is?” he asked.

  Instead of saying I didn’t know I said “Jason,” in a voice that came out high and thin. I sank down to the linoleum, still holding my ice-cream bowl, embarrassed about how I sounded, grateful that he couldn’t see my grin, and glad I was alone.

  He told me that he got my number from Eric, who got it from Theresa in case I was wondering. I struggled to think of a response.

  “That’s cool,” I said.

  I pushed a spoonful of ice cream into my mouth. There was a sharp click followed by the short, angry beeps of a phone number being punched in from another extension.

  “Oh, honey, I didn’t realize you were on the phone,” my mother said. “Would you mind calling your friend back?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  I scribbled Jason’s number on the back of a notice from the Reston Association about dog leash policy. Mom picked up the receiver again in time to hear Jason tell me that I could call him as late as I wanted.

  I danced through the kitchen and leapt over the vacuum cleaner in the hallway. I trotted upstairs, pausing to smile at the framed black-and-white pictures of my grandparents that hung in the stairwell. When I arrived in Mom and William’s bedroom, Mom was propped up on the bed, holding the phone to her ear. The walls in their bedroom were painted white except for one wall behind the bed, which was deep blue. Mom called it an accent wall.

  “How much is the shipping?” Mom said. She was holding a pad of paper in one hand and a pen in the other. William was stretched out beside her, reading the newspaper. They ignored me as I pranced around the perimeter of the bed.

  “Let me know when I can have the phone back,” I said.

  I skipped across the hall into my room and sat down at my desk. I made a list of things to talk about with Jason: records, bands seen live, going into the city, and people we both know.

  I didn’t need the list. To my great relief Jason was the talkative type. He told me that Marlboros were his favorite brand of cigarettes, that Big Red was his favorite kind of gum (when he wasn’t smoking, he was chewing gum), and that acid was pretty much his favorite drug to do (but lately he was just doing it on special occasions).

  “Like if I’m with somebody I haven’t seen in a long time, I’ll do some acid,” he said. “Like I won’t seek it out, but if someone offers it to me I might do it.”

  I piped up once in a while. I mentioned that I only smoked cigarettes sometimes, that I wasn’t addicted or anything. I told him that I had never done acid, and had only smoked pot one time with Theresa when we went to see Iron Maiden.

  “I was at that concert,” Jason said. I wondered how I could have missed him, even in a crowd of thousands.

  Jason called me every day after school for a week. Each afternoon I raced off the bus and down the street to my house. Reaching my room, I’d drop my books on the floor and throw myself on my bed, ready to snatch up the phone as soon as it rang.

  Once I saw him outside in the parking lot smoking with a couple of surf punks. Jason waved but didn’t come over. I guessed he must be shy in public.

  On the phone we talked about everything. Jason told me stories about his older brother, Todd, who had dropped out of school the year before and was locally famous for punching somebody on the bus for a dollar. He told me where the best places to smoke at school were and where he hid out when he didn’t feel like going to class. I loved listening to Jason talk. His voice was thick and deep, with the faintest trace of a Southern accent.

  We talked about music a lot. We liked the same bands. I had started listening to metal toward the end of junior high, when Quiet Riot was big. After Quiet Riot came Def Leppard, followed by Iron Maiden, which made me stop listening to Quiet Riot and Def Leppard. I liked the fierceness of metal. The speed of the guitars and the jump of the drums, the screaming voice. Jason and I agreed: the faster the band, the better.

  Jason told me about a construction site between the school and his house where he hung out some afternoons. It was a good place to drink beer because it was right near the woods, which made it easy to hide if the police showed up.

  “A couple of weeks ago these fuckin’ cops turned up and I was like, fuck, I’m fucked,” he said. “But I bolted into the woods, and then guess who was fucked.”

  I giggled.

  “Lost my beer though,” he added. “You should come check it out after school tomorrow maybe.”

  When we hung up I pulled my best jeans out of the laundry and sniffed under the armpits of my favorite black wool sweater.

  The site was really just a muddy clearing with a couple of bulldozers, a crane, and concrete blocks here and there. Jason was there when I arrived, sitting on one of the concrete blocks.

  “Welcome to my home away from home,” he said, throwing a hand up.

  “Nice place you got here,” I said.

  It was cold out, but there was no wind and it was sunny enough so you could stand it. Jason climbed up onto one of the bulldozers and I followed him. I put my foot on the tread where he had and accepted a hoist onto the ledge next to the cab, feeling the distinct charge of his grip on my arm. I assumed he would have beer, but there didn’t appear to be any stowed anywhere.

  “It’d be cool to drive one of these sometime,” Jason said, handling one of the gearshifts.

  “Yeah.”

  He put his hands on the bulldozer’s steering wheel and turned it. I looked away, inhaling the strong scent of upturned earth, then stole another glance at him. His face was round and flat as a dinner plate, and he was broken out around his mouth.

  Jason lit two Marlboros and handed me one. We sat quietly, smoking, blinking into the sun. I thought of how we might look from the ground, a couple enjoying a cigarette together. I’d wanted to be a smoker ever since I’d seen Grease when I was eight. When I smoked I didn’t feel like the girl who excelled in math and French, I felt like someone who might dye her hair a strange color or wear black leather pants or run away from home. Jason and I were Sandy and Danny on the bulldozer or, better, Rizzo and Kenickie. We were the rock star and his girlfriend lounging on the tour bus before the show.

  Jason slipped an arm around my shoulders, and my breathing became labor
ed.

  “You have to try acid sometime,” he said.

  “It sort of scares me.”

  He described different things he had hallucinated on acid. A melting car, a dancing beer can, a little man running up and down his arm.

  “I was like, man, there’s a fucking troll on my fucking body! It was fucking freaky, even though he wasn’t any bigger than my thumb.”

  “It sounds like Gulliver’s Travels or something,” I said.

  A puzzled look passed over Jason’s face as he inhaled on his dwindling cigarette.

  “Maybe we could trip together sometime,” he said.

  “Maybe. Okay.”

  He flicked his cigarette over the front of the bulldozer, and I threw mine down after it. A knot had formed in his hair just over his ear, and I scooted over and tugged at it.

  “Yow!” Jason pulled his head away.

  “I’m just trying to fix your knot.”

  “Maybe I should just let it dread.”

  He leaned his head in my direction and I worked my fingers through his hair. My wrist touched his ear and I left it there, enjoying the feel of his skin against mine. He smelled of cigarettes and Tide and something slightly sour.

  The knot came untangled, and I let my fingers go still in his hair. Jason reached a hand up and placed it on the back of my head, pressing our foreheads together. I felt my insides crumple up as Jason put his cold lips on top of mine. His hand moved up and down the back of my head in time with his tongue. I reached an arm around his shoulders. Under his leather jacket he wasn’t that much bigger than me.

  When we stopped kissing Jason stuck two more cigarettes in his mouth and lit them. As he handed me mine he said he guessed we were going out now. I wanted to scream.

  Back at home I lounged on my bed, reading The Scarlet Letter. I had to have the first three chapters down for a quiz in English, but my mind kept wandering back to Jason. How we had kissed. How he was my boyfriend.

  There was a knock on my door. “Enter,” I said.

  William opened the door but didn’t come in. “Your mother’s in the hospital,” he said.

  Tears came to my eyes just like that.

  “She’s fine,” William said. “She’s had a miscarriage.”

  I stood up. “Are we going?” My voice was shaking.

  William nodded.

  The waiting room smelled like Ajax and coffee. There were a few people sitting in yellow plastic chairs. I couldn’t tell if anything was wrong with any of them. Mom was sitting close to the door, her hands folded on top of her purse in her lap. Her lipstick was gone.

  “I thought it would take longer,” William said.

  “Well, it didn’t,” Mom said.

  In the car Mom started to cry. Not big sobs, but little chokes that sounded like she was trying to hold back. William put a hand on her leg and changed lanes. Mom moved her leg away. I couldn’t see her face. I rolled down my window partway, and the sound of the wind filled the car.

  Mom was twenty-two when she married Dad and twenty-three when she had me. Now she was thirty-nine. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might have another baby. William was thirty-seven, two years younger than Mom. He teased her about it sometimes, called her his old lady. When he said it Mom would make a bored face that meant she wasn’t really bored but annoyed.

  When we got home Mom went straight upstairs to their bedroom and shut the door.

  William took off his glasses and looked at them. “Your mother needs to rest,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. After a minute he put his glasses back on and went upstairs after her.

  Mom hadn’t so much as looked at me since I’d gotten to the hospital. I thought maybe she was embarrassed. I was embarrassed, too, but I wanted her to talk to me. I wanted her to tell me why she’d kept her pregnancy a secret from me. A part of me had nursed the childish idea that Mom and I were closer than she and William. But now I could see it wasn’t like that. I knew I was too old to be jealous of William, but I let myself feel it anyway.

  I heated up two hot dogs in the microwave. I cooked them too long, and they split and puckered. I didn’t bother with mustard or a bun. I put them on a plate and ate them with a knife and a fork. I drank orange Kool-Aid instead of milk. While I ate I sat at the counter and watched a M*A*S*H rerun on the small kitchen TV. Frank Burns was trying to get switched into a new tent without Hawkeye finding out.

  William came in, opened the refrigerator, got something out, and shut it again. I kept my eyes on the TV while he carried whatever he had gotten back upstairs to Mom. After M*A*S*H was over I left my dirty dishes on the table and went up to my room to finish the first three chapters of The Scarlet Letter. There wasn’t any noise coming from their bedroom. When the phone rang, I let it ring. We all did.

  Over the next couple of weeks I met Jason regularly at the construction site. I still didn’t see him around much in school, but he left notes in my locker, telling me when to meet him. He wrote Dear Sweaty, but I knew he meant Sweetie. I saved his notes in a folder that I kept in my desk at home.

  Although there weren’t any workers around when we were there, a foundation for something had begun to form at the construction site. A dirt pit with a concrete floor emerged. We walked to 7-Eleven and back when we needed more cigarettes, but mostly we hung out on the bulldozers and made out.

  I told Jason how William was hard on me about stupid shit. It didn’t matter that I got good grades. Nothing was good enough for him.

  “It’s no different than when I was younger,” I told him. “When I was little William would get up and leave the dinner table just to make a point about me not blowing bubbles in my milk with my straw. Now he makes a big show of not leaving the house with me if I’m wearing something he deems unacceptable. He’s always trying to teach me some lesson.”

  Jason grunted.

  “My mother just sits there and watches us like we’re on TV,” I continued. “She doesn’t give a shit. She tells me to ignore William, and she tells William that I’m just going through a phase. That’s her answer for everything. I could start knocking over liquor stores and she’d say it was just a phase.”

  Jason put his arm around me. We kissed, and I stopped thinking about Mom and William.

  “I don’t know how to tell Jason I’m a virgin,” I told Theresa over the phone.

  “So don’t tell him,” Theresa said. She was chewing gum.

  Theresa lost her virginity the summer she was fourteen, when she was visiting her aunt and uncle in Pennsylvania. Paul was a neighbor, two years older with dyed black hair and a great record collection. Now Theresa reminded me that she didn’t tell Paul that she was a virgin.

  “I sort of want Jason to know,” I said. “Besides, it’ll probably be obvious.”

  “Please. Boys don’t know shit.”

  By the beginning of March the skeleton of a house grew at the construction site, and the bulldozers disappeared. I wished Jason were in school more so that we could walk down the hall together or eat lunch like normal couples. Sometimes on the phone I would mention wanting to go into the city on the weekend, and Jason would say that sounded fun, but nothing ever came of it.

  “Theresa calls you the phantom boyfriend,” I said one gray afternoon at the construction site, after we had finished making out. We were sitting on the outer wall of the house, which was about three feet high.

  “Whatever,” Jason said, exhaling cigarette smoke.

  “She says you’re too freaked out to come up to me at school.”

  Jason shrugged. “I’m hardly ever in school.”

  “I know. That’s what I said. But Theresa still thinks it’s weird we’re never, you know, seen together.”

  “Theresa sure spends a lot of fucking time thinking about me,” he said.

  “Not really,” I said. “It’s just like when I bring you up that she talks about you. Like when I told her I was coming here today she told me that if she didn’t know better she’d probably think I was lying a
bout going out with you.”

  “Well, fuck Theresa then,” Jason said. “Why doesn’t she mind her own fucking business? Fucking bitch.” He jumped down to the ground, landing with a thud.

  “God, she’s just joking,” I said. I jumped down after him. “And don’t call her a bitch. She’s my friend.”

  Jason stalked toward a pile of two-by-fours.

  “Why don’t you just break up with me,” he shouted over his shoulder, “and go hang out with that bitch Theresa?”

  “God, what’s your problem? It’s not that big a deal!”

  I spun around and headed toward a group of trees at the edge of the clearing. It was almost time to walk back to school and take the last late bus home.

  I heard Jason’s boots on the dirt behind me. I felt his hands on my shoulders, and the weight of him caused me to stagger forward and nearly fall. He pulled me around to face him, kissing me with a force I wasn’t used to.

  “You’re freaking me out,” I said.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you, too.” His hand felt heavy on the back of my head.

  “I wasn’t sure if you loved me yet,” he said.

  “Me neither.”

  I grinned at him. I wanted to have more misunderstandings so we could make up and say I love you again and have more kisses like these.

  On the night we’d been officially going out for six weeks it snowed five inches. School was canceled for the next day. Jason called and said that I should come over to his house if the public bus was running. His father and stepmother were still planning to go to work, and his brother hadn’t been home in days.