Polly

by Amy Bryant

  “That’s a serious load of makeup you’ve got on,” she shouted over the music. “You look like a vampire.”

  I went over to the stereo and turned it down. “What are you doing in here? You’re supposed to knock.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your game, honey. I was just wondering if you had anything for a white load.”

  “It’s not a game. And you’re supposed to knock!”

  “I did knock. You didn’t hear it over that racket.”

  She went over to my laundry basket and dumped my dirty clothes out onto the carpet. I bent down and helped her sift through my clothes for the white things as fast as I could. Other than a few pairs of socks and my underwear, there wasn’t anything white.

  “Your wardrobe is getting blacker and blacker,” Mom said.

  “If it offends you so much I can always do my own laundry.”

  “Why would I be offended? It’s just a phase.”

  I heaved a sigh, willing her out of my room. Mom stood up, leaving the laundry in a pile on the floor.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about my pregnancy,” she said.

  For one stomach-plunging second I thought Mom was pregnant again, but then I realized what she meant. I wanted to ask her why she had wanted a baby in the first place. Instead I said, “Are you feeling okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Mom said.

  “That’s good.” The truth was, her miscarriage seemed like it had happened years ago.

  “I don’t want you to think that William and I were keeping it from you. We’d only just found out when it happened.”

  I hoped she was telling me the truth. “That’s okay.”

  Mom kneeled down and picked the laundry basket up. She held it in front of her and wrapped her arms around it like a barrel. “Is there anything you want to talk about? You can, you know.”

  I let myself ask. “Are you trying to have another baby?”

  Mom looked over my shoulder, toward the window. I’d drawn the blinds so none of the neighbors would see me dancing. She drew her mouth into a thin line before she spoke. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so. Not right now anyway.”

  There were creases on either side of her mouth that hadn’t been there before. Tiny lines at the corners of her eyes and on her forehead. It was faint, but her face was definitely changing.

  “Well, maybe this baby stuff is just a phase,” I said. “Maybe you’ll outgrow it.”

  Mom didn’t laugh. “Is that something you would like?” she asked.

  “For you to have a baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “I haven’t really thought about it,” I lied.

  When she’d gone, I picked up my brush and began working at the sprayed knots in my hair. A small part of me was curious to see what it would be like if Mom had a baby, but most of me hated the idea. I had fantasized about a sibling when she and Dad were getting divorced, and then when it was just the two of us living together. But now it was too late. I was almost grown.

  I wondered if Mom ever thought about what it would be like if she had never married Dad, never had me at all. If instead she had met William five years sooner and had a baby with him. How much better it would have been.

  Everybody heard about the party that was going on the afternoon of the last day of school. Stephanie Kenning’s parents had gone out of town, and she was getting a keg. Theresa and I didn’t really know Stephanie, but everyone was going. Even the people we didn’t associate with, like the bops.

  We got a ride with Sean, who was sulking because Theresa had finally admitted that she didn’t want a boyfriend. We had to park well down the street from Stephanie’s because there were so many cars there. People were spilling out onto the yard and the driveway, all of them holding blue plastic cups.

  “I give this party about an hour before it gets busted,” Sean said as we got out of the car. He bent over and adjusted one of the cuffs of his camouflage pants.

  It had finally gotten warm enough that we didn’t need jackets, and Theresa and I were dressed identically in black T-shirts and black jeans.

  “Here come the dykes,” a jock shouted.

  “Why don’t you go date-rape a cheerleader or something,” Theresa shouted back. “Make yourself useful.”

  We crossed the yard and opened the front door, which was decorated with a wicker wreath with a banner affixed to it that said, MAY ALL WHO ENTER HERE COME IN PEACE.

  “Stephanie must have got that special for the party,” I said.

  Theresa snickered.

  We made our way through throngs of people to the kitchen where the keg was. Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” was blasting throughout the house. In the doorway of the kitchen Theresa struck a Prince pose, thrusting her hip out and turning her head in the opposite direction. Sean shook his head and stepped past her.

  I stopped dead. Jason was sitting on the counter behind the keg, talking to Kurt Ridley. His head was shaved bald, but there was no mistaking his wide face. Dumb, wild panic spread through me, and I snaked a hand toward Theresa’s arm. We backed out of the kitchen.

  “What?” said Theresa. I dragged her past bunches of people until we were in the foyer, next to an empty wooden umbrella stand. The stand was sculpted into the shape of a lion. The umbrellas went into a hole in the top of the lion’s head.

  “He’s here!” I whispered.

  “Who?”

  “Jason! He’s in the kitchen with Kurt.”

  “Where? I didn’t see him.”

  The front door opened and five or six people came in, and I put a finger over my lips. “He better not know about Kurt and me on the golf course,” I whispered.

  “Whatever. It’s not like he can say anything to you about it,” Theresa said. “Kurt probably doesn’t even know you guys ever went out. I mean, God.”

  Theresa stalked off. After a minute I followed her. I hated when Theresa pretended like she didn’t know how important Jason was. I sucked in my breath and stepped back into the packed kitchen. Jason was laughing at something Kurt was saying.

  Theresa was standing by the keg with two cups in her hands. She raised an eyebrow at me and I scowled and looked down at the linoleum floor. The off-white tiles were streaked with dirt and spilled beer.

  Jason tapped me in the side with his boot. I turned around.

  “Oh. Hey,” I said.

  “Hey Polly.” His face had gone red from drinking. Even the top of his head was flushed.

  Kurt hopped down from the counter without acknowledging me and wandered over to the keg.

  “You shaved your head,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He smiled and raised his hand up to touch his scalp. His hands were thick and strong-looking, just like I remembered.

  “It took only about five minutes to get rid of all my hair,” he said. “I got it saved in a plastic bag at home.”

  Theresa came up beside me and handed me a cup of beer. I kept my eyes on Jason.

  “I heard you dropped out of school,” I said.

  “Yup. And I’m moving to Richmond in a month.”

  “What’s in Richmond?” A lump began to form my throat.

  “Not much. I’m gonna live with my mom. Get a job and shit.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t remember if I had known that his mother lived in Richmond. “That’s cool,” I said.

  Jason’s gaze wandered over my shoulder, and I fought the urge to turn around and see what he was looking at. I took a sip of my beer, which was warm and had too much foam in it.

  Kurt came back and said that he heard another keg was coming. Jason leaned over to say something to him and I followed Theresa out of the kitchen. We walked down a narrow carpeted hallway into the living room.

  “I can’t believe he shaved his head,” I said.

  “Yeah, he looks gross like that,” Theresa said.

  I drained my beer. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  When I got to the kitchen Jason and Kurt had disappeared. I refilled m
y beer cup, lit a cigarette, and arranged myself against the counter where Jason had been. After a minute I went back into the living room to find Theresa. She was sitting Indian style on the tan shag rug with Sean and Mark Preston and Billy Henderson. They were passing a bowl around.

  “Want some?” Theresa asked.

  Before I could answer Stephanie ran in and said, “I said no pot and I mean it!”

  Stephanie was wearing a stretchy black tube dress and no shoes, and her voice had the loud, hysterical ring of too much alcohol. It reminded me of something Mom said about my father once. “Alcoholics can hide a lot of things, but never the voice,” she said. I saw my father so rarely I mainly knew him by his voice, and he always sounded the same to me.

  I had only one memory of Dad being drunk. It was an afternoon in the middle of winter. Mom locked Dad in the backyard, and I watched from my bedroom window as he staggered around, waving his arms at the door and saying things I couldn’t make out. After a few minutes, he fell to his knees and vomited. I was scared enough by the sight of him to run downstairs and tell Mom that Daddy was sick.

  Stephanie fixed a glassy eye on me and said, “You have to smoke your cigarette outside.” She pointed at the sliding glass door that led to the backyard.

  Sean stood up. “Come on, I’ll go with you,” he said.

  Jason was standing at the edge of the yard, smoking and talking to Kurt. We walked in the opposite direction while Sean said something about failing his chemistry final. I made a sympathetic noise. When I finished my cigarette I was going to talk to Jason. For real this time.

  “You seem like you’re pretty drunk already,” Sean said. “Like you’re kind of out of it.”

  I started to protest, but then I saw two policemen coming around the side of the house and into the yard where Jason was.

  Sean yelled, “Cops!” and I tossed my beer and my cigarette behind a nearby bush.

  All around us people were running and cars were starting. One of the policemen had Jason by the arm and was dragging him back around the side of the house. Another cop had Kurt. I started after Jason, but then Sean grabbed my hand. He pulled me toward the woods that divided Stephanie’s yard from the next development. I let go of Sean’s hand and we sprinted toward the trees.

  Once we were safely in the woods we sat down, both of us out of breath. Then we were laughing, and Sean said that was scary, and I said I hoped Theresa was okay, and Sean said I shouldn’t worry, that Theresa could figure her way out of anything. Then he kissed me.

  I let Sean lower me all the way to the ground and stretch out on top of me. He kissed me again, and I shut my eyes. I thought of Jason’s head being shaved, his hair falling out of his scalp in pieces, floating toward the floor to rest there, impossibly light against the tile.

  three MIKE

  William adopted me the summer before my senior year, when I was sixteen. It had been in the works for months, but as usual I hadn’t known. It turned out my father had been behind on his child support for years, and it was the only way to keep the state from taking action against him. As of July 1, 1987, I was no longer Polly Elaine Clark. I was Polly Elaine Hessler. William was my legal father.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Mom said. “Bob is still your father.”

  I cried the whole way through it: when Mom told me, in the lawyer’s office, alone in my room. Dad called me every day for two weeks, but I wouldn’t talk to him.

  “Now that he’s not my father I don’t have to do these stupid, obligatory father–daughter phone calls,” I said to Mom. “Tell him I said that.”

  I could hear Mom on the phone telling him that everything would be okay, that I just needed some time to get used to things. But I didn’t want everything to be okay. I wanted Dad to feel bad for once. I wanted him to regret that he didn’t have a daughter anymore.

  Mom let me cancel all my babysitting jobs and take the rest of the summer off. William, my new father, put thirty dollars on my dresser once a week without saying a word. It was like they were afraid of me. I couldn’t stand it.

  I stayed out of the house as much as I could. Theresa and I went to see bands: Seven Seconds, Ignition, UK Subs, Scream, Government Issue, Black Market Baby…I liked some bands better than others, but after a while the shows became a blur.

  I became familiar with the crowd. I was able to distinguish between skinheads, and I’d notice when someone’s hair went from platinum to black. Theresa and I didn’t talk to anybody, though, unless someone from Reston happened to turn up. We kept to ourselves, sitting on the floor smoking cigarettes until the bands started.

  I was still Polly Clark. Mom and William had agreed that it would be easier if I kept Clark until college, so I didn’t tell anybody about my change in dads. Not even Theresa.

  We met Carrie in early August, at a rickety half pipe some skaters had assembled from wood they stole from construction sites. Carrie was friendly and sarcastic. She had olive skin, long dark hair and dark eyes, and wore lots of jewelry, like a teenage Cleopatra. She dressed all in black, smoked Camel Lights, and had a boyfriend named Lyle. Lyle was six feet tall and his legs were covered with scabs from skating. Lyle was funny, and you could tell he was in love with Carrie. Theresa and I agreed that Lyle was unusually cool for his age. Carrie was a year behind us, and Lyle was only a sophomore.

  Now that we were seniors Theresa had sworn off boys, especially high school boys. She had instead devoted herself full-time to “the cause of music” and had accumulated the largest record collection of anyone I knew. She advised me on which bands were worth seeing and which records I should buy, while Carrie took over on topics like boys and clothes. Carrie and Lyle had been going out for six months, which made Carrie an authority on relationships. The first week I knew Carrie I learned that Lyle had told her he loved her after only two weeks of dating, but that she had made him wait another two weeks after that to have sex.

  Carrie was my only friend whose parents were still married. The Thorpes were the most conservative family I knew, Baptists from South Carolina. I felt vaguely ashamed in their presence, like they might quiz me on the Bible or ask me to say grace and find out I didn’t know anything.

  Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe vehemently objected to most of Carrie’s wardrobe. They lectured her on the color black and banned miniskirts all together. She took to hiding clothes in her car and changing into them once she was safely out of her neighborhood. When her clothes got dirty she gave them to me to wash. Mom and William thought it was funny. I think it made them feel superior to know they weren’t the kinds of parents who would forbid clothing outright. Just the occasional item here and there.

  “Teenagers are supposed to express themselves through their outfits,” Mom said when I explained why my laundry had doubled. I hated the way she made me feel like she had me all figured out.

  After Jason, Mike Franklin was the first one who counted. He was a junior, part of a group of skaters I knew from the hallways at school. I got to talking to him over at Keith Toole’s house, where people had been congregating for two weeks while Keith’s parents were in Myrtle Beach. Keith lived a mile away from me, on a street where the houses were so identical that every time I went over there, I worried I would knock on the wrong door.

  Keith’s house hadn’t suffered much damage in his parent’s absence, considering. The kitchen floor was badly in need of mopping, the sink was full of dirty dishes, and a permanent cloud of smoke hung in the air, but the police hadn’t been summoned a single time. Unlike the parties that were thrown during the school year, Keith’s were mellow, with the stereo kept at a neighborly level, and not more than ten or fifteen people present at any one time. It was late August, and there was a bored, languishing quality to everybody, owing to the fact that school was only days away.

  I hadn’t seen Mike all summer, but on the second-to-last day before school there he was, in Keith’s living room, sitting next to Adam Schreiber on the couch. I’d hated Adam Schreiber ever since sophomore year, whe
n he’d called me a poseur for wearing a Metallica shirt to school the day after the show. Theresa said that Adam was the worst kind of music fan. He was angry and contemptuous toward people who liked the same bands he did.

  Mike had a red glass bong clasped between his legs, and his long fingers were curved casually around its neck. His hair had grown out from the skater cut I remembered him having the year before, the one that made all the skaters’ heads look like lightbulbs. It was shaggy now, like he’d stopped caring about how he looked. He’d definitely gotten cuter, even if he was hanging out with Adam.

  “Can I have a bong hit?” I said from across the room.

  “Sure. C’mere.”

  Mike held the bong up. It was tall and decorated with a skeleton sticker. I perched on the edge of the coffee table, lifting the bong from his hands and nestling it between my knees. Someone had put Jimi Hendrix on the stereo instead of the usual hardcore, and MTV was on with the sound off. Adam and Mike’s stoned silence made me feel scrutinized, even though I knew they were staring over my head at the television, at a Squeeze video.

  I found the shotgun hole in the back of the bong and put my finger over it. I had used a bong only once or twice, and I hoped I could remember how to do it. Keeping the rest of his body perfectly still, Adam rolled his head back and forth to the music. Jimi Hendrix made me think of Mom and William. The first couple of years they were together, they spent a lot of evenings in the living room in front of the stereo, drinking wine and listening to Hendrix, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan while they told stories about when they were young. I was allowed to be in the living room with them until my bedtime, but I usually got bored and wandered off.

  “This is a pretty impressive bong,” I said, taking my finger off the shotgun and exhaling.

  “I just bought it,” Mike said, coming out of his stupor. “It’s a Toke-Master.”