by Terri Cheney
“Did he try to kiss you?” she asked.
My mother was as conservative about sex as she was about national origin. In fact, whenever she was forced to say the word sex or anything pertaining to it, she put it in verbal quotes and wrinkled her nose. It was an easy decision to lie to her.
“He tried, but I wouldn’t let him,” I said.
“Good girl. You know that at your age, boys are interested in only one thing.”
I couldn’t resist one little tweak. “You mean it’s different at your ripe old age?”
“No, come to think of it, it’s not. Men are men, whenever.”
I finished sorting and sniffing the shirts, and went into the den to call Rhonda. I needn’t have phoned—she’d already heard all about last night, except for the part where I’d thrown up.
“Well, you’re lucky,” she said. “Bob is taking a totally different line. He told Frank Hernandez, who told Patty, who told me, that he had a really great time. He said you were ‘good.’”
“What do you suppose he meant by that?”
“Terri, you’re so naïve. It means that you were good in bed.”
I was shocked, angry, and mortified all throughout the rest of our conversation. All throughout the rest of the weekend. All the way up until Monday morning, when I parked the ’Vette in my usual spot in the teachers’ parking lot and found Frank Hernandez and Gary Johnston waiting there for me.
Frank Hernandez was the varsity quarterback; Gary Johnston, the star basketball center. Both of them were way out of my league, but there they were: keying the math teacher’s Volvo and waiting for me. I’d purposefully dressed prim that day, in a pure-as-the-driven-snow white shirt, a plaid pleated skirt, kneesocks, and penny loafers. It was as close as I could get, I suppose, to my old St. Madeleine’s uniform—to those halcyon days when my reputation was still intact.
“Cool car,” Gary said, flashing his famous grin. His perfect teeth were so gleaming white against his coal-black skin, his smile couldn’t help but dazzle.
“Can we walk you to first period?” Frank Hernandez asked, taking my heavy book bag from me and slinging it effortlessly over his shoulder.
“Sure,” I said, a bit nervously. My mother’s paranoia still echoed in my ears. What could they possibly want from me?
As we made our way across the quad, it felt like everyone was watching us. I knew at least one person was: Elisa’s eyes were fixed on me, and she was muttering something that looked a lot like a voodoo curse. Bob Greene was standing next to her, and we both looked away at once. It unnerved me so much, I had trouble paying attention to what Frank and Gary were saying.
“. . . Saturday night,” Frank said. “Everyone will be there. So what do you say we come pick you up around eight?”
“Pick me up for what?” I said.
“The Key Club party. I told you, everyone is going.”
“Here, write down your number,” Gary said, offering me a Magic Marker and his outstretched hand. In front of the eyes of the whole wide world, I scribbled my digits across his palm.
That wasn’t the end of it. For the rest of that week, boys kept coming up to me, chatting about nothing while they checked me out. Elisa and her three closest friends refused to have anything to do with me. Someone scrawled “Slut” across my locker, which took an eternity to scrub off. It was the first time there had ever been a schism in the Mauna Loas, and as president of the club, I felt guilty and responsible—but not so bad that a part of me didn’t secretly enjoy the attention I was suddenly getting from boys. I knew there would be a payday eventually, but “eventually” sounded a long ways away, and for the moment, it was bliss.
Success with the opposite sex meant far more to me than just turning a few boys’ heads; it made a tremendous difference in the way I saw myself. I might not be the prettiest girl on campus, but if boys were making the effort to flirt, it must mean I was pretty enough. “Pretty enough” was a revelation to me, an epiphany, a cosmic shift. All my life I’d hungered for perfection; this wasn’t perfection, but it would suffice. At “pretty enough,” I could legitimately be a member of all my clubs. I didn’t have to constantly worry and wonder why my gorgeous friends had accepted me as one of their own. At “pretty enough,” I belonged.
Every night before I went to bed, I got down on my knees and thanked Frank Hernandez and Gary Johnston for asking me out, whatever their motives might be. So what if they were just after sex; I’d deal with that if and when it came up. Or so I kept telling myself—nervously, no doubt naïvely, but nonetheless with resolution. Just walking into that Key Club party with Gary on one arm and Frank on the other would, I was sure, change my whole life. I couldn’t seem to think beyond that.
My only real worry was that I was steadily depleting my parents’ liquor supply. I took a big drink when I could every morning before school to satisfy the Black Beast’s cravings and give me enough confidence and pizzazz to flirt back with the boys. I still couldn’t figure out how to say nothing, so I just said whatever was on the top of my head: “Do you believe in a penumbra of privacy rights?” “Will there ever be an end to apartheid in our lifetime?” “Do you think Patty Hearst deserves leniency?”
It clearly wasn’t the kind of conversation the boys were used to hearing, but they just laughed and egged me on. “Come on, brainiac,” one of them said. “Tell us the biggest word you know.” My favorite word at the time was onomatopoeia, and the boys got a big kick out of the pee sound in that.
To solve the liquor dilemma, I decided to shadow Zach one evening. I knew he was drinking too, although not every day, like me. But I could smell it on him when he’d come home late at night. Hanging back a block or so, I followed him to the 7-Eleven over on Mountain and Sixth. He wasn’t at all hard to follow. He had a big roaring Pontiac Trans Am by then, and you could hear that engine from miles away.
He got out of his car and walked around the building. Two minutes later, a scruffy old man emerged from the back and went into the 7-Eleven. He came out carrying two six-packs and a bottle of wine, which he then handed to Zach, who sped away.
Problem solved. I was scared, but not enough to keep me from venturing around the building. Lying there in a little fortress of discarded boxes was a smelly old man, singing something softly to himself. It sounded like “God Bless America.”
“Excuse me, sir,” I said tentatively. He didn’t look up. I spoke more loudly, with all the confidence I could muster. “Excuse me, sir, may I ask you a favor?”
“Who’s that? What you want?” the old man said.
I held out a twenty-dollar bill. “I’d like a couple of bottles of wine, please, if you would. Whatever kind you think is the best. And you can keep the change, of course.”
I handed the twenty over from as far away as I could manage. The stench of urine was staggering.
He shambled to his feet and took the twenty. He looked me over. “Stinky Pete knows just the thing for a cute little girl like you. You stay right here and watch for pigs.”
I watched for pigs, marveling that it was me, Miss Goody Two-Shoes, Miss Straight A’s Teacher’s Pet, hanging out in a back alley with Stinky Pete. But he delivered. Within a few minutes, he came back with a bagful of liquor. He handed it to me.
“Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill. You gonna love it. All the little girls do.”
“Thank you, Mr. Pete,” I said.
“Call me Stinky. Everyone do.”
Back at home, I opened the bag and pulled out two large bottles of wine. I couldn’t wait to try it, so I barricaded myself in my walk-in closet and took a sip. It was very sweet and not at all hard to swallow, like some of the alcohol in my parents’ cabinet had been. It went down just like lemonade, and before I realized it, I had swallowed a third of the bottle. There was no other word for it: I felt mellifluous. “God bless America,” I sang softly to myself. “Land that I love . . .”
All the rest of that week, I kept trying to get my parents to go out to the movies and dinner o
n Saturday night, before Frank and Gary came to pick me up.
“You two should spend some alone time together,” I said. “I’ll be gone, and no doubt Zach will be too, so why not take the opportunity?” My mother, quite rightly, smelled a rat.
“Why are you trying to get us out of the house?” she asked me. I hated it when her paranoia turned to perspicacity—in other words, when she was right.
“I’m not,” I said. “I just think you two deserve a good time for once. Can’t a daughter love her parents without getting the third degree?”
“Whose party are you going to?”
“It’s the Key Club—a service organization; very outstanding in the community. It’s an honor to be asked.” (This was a whopper of a lie. The Key Club actually comprised some of the baddest boys in school.)
“Who asked you?”
“Frank, the varsity quarterback, and Gary, the basketball center.” I neglected to mention that Frank was Hispanic and Gary was black. My father wouldn’t care a whit, but my mother . . .
“Do I know them?” she asked.
I scrambled for an answer. “I’m sure you’ve seen their pictures in the paper. They’re always being photographed.” This seemed to mollify her somewhat.
When Gary called up to get my address, I told him not to come to the door; that I would meet them outside by the lamppost at the end of the driveway. He didn’t ask for an explanation.
That Saturday, I sniffed the laundry extra quick and finished up all my other chores and homework in time to fix an early supper for the entire family. Granted, this was highly unusual, as all I typically did in the kitchen was eat, but my mother and father and even Zach seemed pleased by my initiative. “Maybe she’s finally developing a sense of domesticity,” my mother said, sitting down to the table I’d carefully set, with two white roses from the backyard blooming at my mother’s place.
Domesticity be damned. I was desperate. I hadn’t succeeded in getting my parents out of the house, so I was after tryptophan, the amino acid that induces sleep. To that end, I’d fixed some huge turkey sandwiches, along with creamy mashed potatoes and banana milk shakes liberally spiked with rum. I’d doubled up on the vanilla extract to mask the alcohol. I turned the stereo on to the radio station that played soporific elevator music.
“Do we have to keep listening to that crap?” Zach said midway through the meal.
“I find it very soothing,” my mother said, and to my delight, she yawned. It was contagious: Daddy yawned, then Zach, then me, the biggest and loudest of all.
My mother finished her milk shake and said, “That was delicious, Terri Lynn. It’s a real pleasure to be waited on for a change.”
I felt a little guilty at that, but only a teensy little bit. “Why don’t you go in the den and put your feet up for a while?” I said. “I’ll wash the dishes and clean up the kitchen.”
“Thank you, sweetie pie,” she said. The guilt-o-meter spiked again, but I didn’t let it deter me.
After she and my father left, Zach came over to me while I was at the sink. “What are you up to?” he asked.
“None of your goddamned business. Go nap.”
He yawned. “I think I will. But don’t think you’ve got me conned.”
I didn’t—but still, by a quarter to eight, everyone but me was sound asleep. I’d had a snootful of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill by then and was myself a trifle drowsy. I sat on the porch, waiting for Gary and Frank to show up, taking deep breaths of the crisp night air to wake me up. Every inhalation made me feel a little bit drunker.
I was just resting my eyes for a minute when I heard it: three shrieking beep-beep-beeps. Despite my careful instructions for our rendezvous, the idiots were honking. They might as well have struck a gong. Those three earsplitting beeps were a death knell: the demise of all my planning and scheming. The end of my dreams for “pretty enough.”
I knew in a flash what was going to happen, but nonetheless I scrambled to my feet. “Shhh!” I said as loudly as I dared and sprinted to the waiting car. I wasn’t fast enough. Behind me, I could hear the creak of the front door opening. The voice I least wanted to hear at that moment cried out, “Where do you think you’re going?”
The Black Beast wanted to keep on running, but I knew the jig was up. Reluctantly, I turned to face my mother.
“You know, the Key Club party,” I said. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Who are these boys?” she asked. Gary and Frank were getting out of the car and coming up the driveway. Before I could introduce them, my mother ordered me back into the house. “Inside. Go. Now.”
I watched all agog from the kitchen window as she said a few words to Gary and Frank. It was too dark to see the expressions on their faces, but they turned around, got in their car, and drove away. My mother came back inside.
“What did you do? What did you do?” I wailed. I was frantic and tipsy and having one hell of a time controlling the Black Beast, who wanted to rip out her throat. For an instant, the image of blood soaking into that perfectly starched white linen collar overwhelmed me. I had to sit down.
“I told them you couldn’t go out tonight.”
“How could you?” I started to sob.
“What’s all the commotion about?” my father asked, emerging from the den sleepy-eyed.
“They’re two of the most popular boys in school, and she ordered them off the property just because they’re black and Hispanic.” My sobs were uncontrollable now, racking my body like hiccoughs.
“Julia, is this true?”
My mother examined her fingernails carefully. “You should have seen their car,” she said.
True, Frank’s car was a disreputable old Chevy with half the front bumper coming off, but that was a bullshit excuse. I knew it, the Black Beast knew it, and my father knew it too. I held my breath, waiting for justice to rain down from on high.
And waited.
“Remember, you agreed last week that I’d be in charge of her dating,” my mother said.
“Yes, but—” my father said.
“Well, did you mean it, or was it just another one of your lies?”
My father glanced down. His cheeks were red. I put my whole heart into my eyes and silently begged him to do the right thing. He wouldn’t look at me. And he didn’t say a word.
I couldn’t believe it. I ran toward the door. I had to get away from that sight: my mother exultant, my father clearly ashamed, but of what, I wasn’t sure. Her prejudice? Or his passivity? Whatever the reason, I couldn’t bear it one more minute. My hand was on the doorknob when my mother said, “Stop. You’re grounded.”
I was outraged. “For what?”
“I think you know,” she said.
“No, I don’t. Why don’t you spell it out clearly, so all of us can hear?”
“Jack, you tell her she’s not going out tonight.”
“You’re in charge of her dating,” he said, and without another word, without a single glance at me, he went back into the den.
I felt dizzy, like the floor was sliding out from under me. I twisted the knob and flung open the door. I heard my mother shouting behind me, but as I stepped outside, her words were swallowed up by the wind. There was a Santa Ana blowing that night—hot, dry air straight from the desert, practically calling my name. I knew then where I needed to go. I needed the comfort of vast open spaces, far away from anyone, where I could break into little pieces, unseen.
I’d never disobeyed a direct order from my parents before. It was terrifying; for the first couple of blocks, I kept looking in my rearview mirror, expecting to see my mother chasing me down the street. The magnitude of what had happened hadn’t really hit me yet. It took a few more miles before I realized the truth: my father, the only bulwark I had against all harm that might befall me, had not protected me. The man who had taught me about Martin Luther King, Jr., and even made me memorize the first part of his “I Have a Dream” speech, had allowed evil to prosper in his own home. He was
not the man I thought he was, and I—I was suddenly not a child anymore. My parents were wrong, and I was right. Dead right.
There was something dreadfully exciting about being the only enlightened soul in the universe.
I’d instinctively taken the freeway east, heading toward the high desert. There was no other traffic at eight o’clock on a Saturday night on I-15. I had the entire road—the entire world, it seemed—to myself. I turned on the radio, loud. The music exploded into the empty air: “I’m pickin’ up good vibrations / She’s givin’ me excitations . . .”
What flips the switch between mania and just a really great joyride? For me it was the sense of desperation pulsing through my body, like the beat behind the music. I felt as if I were fleeing terrors that became more real, more vivid, with each passing mile. The farther and the faster I drove, the more I felt like something was after me. And yet in spite of the fear, it was thrilling. Mania is always great grand fun, right up until that point when you exceed your limit.
I pulled the ’Vette over, put the top down, then hit the gas. I defy anyone with a drop of red blood in their veins to resist the Beach Boys on a Saturday night, with a Santa Ana wind streaming through your hair and a fuel-injected engine purring at your command. “Good, good, good / Good vibrations . . .” I’d been cruising thus far, but I gunned it up, to spite a passing speed limit sign.
Rules. What was the point of rules if in the end there was no justice? When I graduated from college, I’d go on to law school and become a famous lawyer. A real lawyer, who fought for equality and inalienable rights, like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. I’d make sure that the good rules were enforced, the bad rules were rescinded, and fairness always prevailed.
Then I thought about the lawyers I knew. They always had either a hangdog look or a subtle sneer, as if they had just smelled something bad. No, maybe not a lawyer. I’d be a famous writer instead, exposing the underbelly of discrimination, the corruption of hypocrisy, the cruelty of labels. Writers needed very few rules—just punctuation, grammar, and respect for the truth. In fact, the best ones lived outside the rules.