by Joan Opyr
Ever since I’d gotten my driver’s license, my mother had let me drop her off at work in the morning and take her car to school. It saved her the cost of a parking space downtown and me the shame and horror of riding the bus. I loved driving. Most of my friends were still nervous and tentative behind the wheel, but not me. I’d driven Hunter’s van up and down the dirt road at great-grandma’s farm since I was thirteen. The license examiner who gave me my test told my mother that I was the only sixteen-year-old he’d ever seen who already had bad driving habits.
At dawn, I’d left Susan’s house reluctantly and gone home to shower and change. If her parents hadn’t been due back from the beach, I’d have fabricated an illness and skipped school. My mother didn’t mention the apartment on the ride to town. I hoped it was just a passing fancy. My mother had talked before about moving out of my grandparents’ house, but it never amounted to anything.
I missed my turn on Jones Street and had to weave my way through the traffic on Edenton to get to New Bern Avenue, past the state capital, to drop my mother off at the back door of Olivia Raney. Some afternoons, I went straight downtown after school and waited for my mother to get off work, feeding the birds or just wandering around. Today, I had other plans. I was going to skip softball practice, go home, and finish all of my homework for the entire week. My mother had agreed to take the bus home.
I could have taken New Bern Avenue all the way to school, but I turned left on North Bloodworth, and then right on Oakwood. I liked to drive backstreets whenever I could, taking the true Raleigh resident’s pride in knowing at least five different ways to get anywhere. I especially liked the Oakwood Avenue route to school, which took me past the Oakwood Cemetery and St. Augustine’s College. The proximity of a Confederate graveyard to an excellent black college seemed to sum up what people called the New South. The old white bones buried beneath those enormous leaning monuments couldn’t have imagined a world in which black people were allowed to read, much less get college degrees. I wondered if their spirits were restless and thwarted, or if death really did lead to enlightenment.
I drove past the front gates of St. Augustine’s, turned right onto a small, crowded street, and stopped at a shabby duplex with white paint flecking off its clapboard siding. I parked in front of number twenty-two and waited. I made this stop five days a week and knew better than to blow the horn. The curtains twitched in the front window and a minute later Abby came tripping down the front walk in a starched white blouse and a pair of dark blue jeans with crisp creases ironed down the front of the legs.
Unlike me, Abby never looked like a bum. She always looked like she’d just stepped out of an advertisement for laundry detergent. My shirts were perpetual magnets for pizza sauce; Abby wore white with impunity. It suited her, a dramatic contrast to her warm brown skin. She was extraordinarily pretty. Her hair was combed into a perfect black cap, and she wore some hair care product that smelled like coconuts. I loved that smell. I found myself leaning toward her sometimes, sniffing. Abby thought that was funny. She said my hair smelled like grapefruit.
“You’re early,” she said, slinging an enormous backpack into the front seat and climbing in beside it. “Edna’s having a fit. She wants to know why I’m in such a hurry, am I meeting some boy?”
I laughed. “I’m not early. You’re late. Please note, however, that I didn’t blow the horn. I didn’t even get out and knock.”
“Am I late?” She looked at the enormous watch on her wrist. It had a bright purple band and a barrage of buttons, all calling up useful features like an alarm clock or a calculator that could do square roots. “You lie like a rug. I’m not late. Don’t be tripping me out like that, Poppy.”
“I’m sorry.” I smacked the tan vinyl dashboard of my mother’s ancient Oldsmobile. “You know this piece of shit doesn’t have a clock. I hate just sitting here every morning. People are going to think I’m planting a bomb or something.”
“If you knock on the door when my mother’s home, she’ll blow us both up.”
“Buckle up.” I checked my rearview mirror and pulled out into the road. “She knows I drive you to school every day.”
“That doesn’t mean she wants folks seeing you on the doorstep.”
“Jesus, Abby, we’ve been friends for four years.”
“I know that, but don’t tell Edna. She thinks you’re a recent development.”
“When do I get a chance to tell your mama anything?”
“What did you do this weekend?” she said, and when I didn’t answer, “Girl, what’s your deal? You’re as red as a beet.”
“Nothing. What did you do?”
Abby’s eyes narrowed. I tried to focus on my driving.
“What did I do? I really did do nothing. Let’s get back to you.”
I shrugged. I’d had occasion several times to wonder if Abby could read minds. Now was my chance to find out. “Let’s see. On Friday night, I threw my grandfather through the back door. On Saturday, I threw myself through the front. I also attended an AA meeting, practiced some fire prevention, and walked the dog. How about you?”
She just nodded, choosing for the time being neither to believe nor disbelieve. “I did my homework this weekend. I hope you did yours. They’re going to throw you out of the National Honor Society if you flunk Calculus.”
“No, they won’t. I can flunk this semester and still pass for the year. Besides, N. C. State has already accepted me. I’m just waiting to hear from UNC.”
“You better hope UNC decides before they get your final grades.”
“God, they will, won’t they?”
She patted my arm kindly. “They will. I’m just flipping you shit. Listen up, have you thought any more about, you know, rooming together?”
“If I go to State,” I hedged, “sure. But you know I want to go to UNC.” I told her about my mother’s evil scheme.
Abby was gratifyingly outraged. “There is no way you are going to college and living with your mama. What’s the point of that? If I listened to Edna, I’d be going to St. Augustine’s and sleeping on her sofa for the rest of my life. Girl, you’ve got to get up and get out. You’ve got to make it happen.”
“I don’t want to live with her,” I agreed, “but if I go to State, how am I going to get out of it? And what makes you think Edna is going to let you room with me? She hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you in particular; she just hates white people generally.”
“That’s shocking,” I said. We both laughed.
We found a parking place directly across from the school and made our way over to a group hanging around by the steps at the west end of the building. Five faces, four male and one female, looked up at us. They were all wearing glasses. Kim DiMarco pushed her pink plastic frames up on her nose. She gave us a quick wave but was deep in a tête à tête with Alan Marshall and clearly didn’t want to be interrupted. Alan was the Cary Grant of the geek crowd. Abby said he was kind of cute if you caught him on a good day, meaning a day when he’d remembered to comb his hair and put on a clean T-shirt. She also said it helped if you squinted a lot.
The other three—John Wilder, Joe Chang, and Nick Stybak—were huddled around a Rubik’s Cube, which John was rapidly spinning back into order. The Rubik’s Cube had been all the rage two years before. John was the first person in our class to solve it. Having tasted that glory, he couldn’t let it go. He kept Rubik’s Cubes everywhere, in his backpack, in his locker—he even had one on his key chain.
“If she’s hoping for a prom date, she’s wasting her breath on Alan,” Abby whispered to me. “He doesn’t like girls; he likes cosines and tangents. But look over there. See how Count Stybak is staring at her? I think he wants her. He’s going to take her back to Gdansk and make her eat cabbage.”
I tried not to laugh. Sure enough, Nick was gazing at Kim with puppy dog admiration. He was a small guy with enormous glasses perched on an enormous nose. His black curly hair stood straight up on the top of his h
ead, like Albert Einstein’s. Nick was smart, but the hair and the accent always made people think he was brilliant. I liked him. Kim wouldn’t give him the time of day. She liked to think she wasn’t nearly as big a nerd as the rest of us. She was wrong—she’d already been accepted at MIT and half a dozen other places to study mathematics.
“Not cabbage, surely,” I whispered to Abby.
“Cabbage. He’s the red menace. Don’t look now,” she hissed, grabbing my arm. “Dorky Dave is making his move.”
Dave Wilson was the last person I wanted to see. Nevertheless, I turned around to find him bearing down on me with a smile on his face and two fatal prom tickets in his wallet. He was nice-looking in a bland sort of way. His hair was a coarse sandy brown, with no discernible part in it. He combed it in a swirl with his bangs dropping down low over his left eye. He had the added advantage of being taller than me. As far as I knew, he always wore the same outfit, a gray T-shirt underneath a zippered blue sweatshirt with a hood. There were minor variations—sometimes the T-shirt was blue and the sweatshirt gray. Dave was a creature of habit. In the wider world, he would have blended in with the rest of the young, white, male population; in high school, he was a standout. At eighteen, he had a full mustache, thick and brown and very useful for not getting carded at the liquor store. He wasn’t much of a drinker himself, but he could always be counted on to supply the beer for Kim DiMarco’s parties.
I’d been out with Dave a couple of times. He was a nice guy, sweet-natured and funny, and he didn’t seem to want anything from me. A trip to the movies or out to Pullen Park, with no goodnight kiss at the end. Just the threat of one. He’d leaned toward me once or twice, but I’d always managed to get out of the car before it ever came to the crux. Now that I’d kissed Susan, I couldn’t imagine letting Dave and his mustache get anywhere near me. It would be a kind of sacrilege.
He had been after me for at least a week to go with him to the prom. I didn’t want to. I’d tried to explain it to him. “It’s not you,” I’d said. “It’s the dress. And the heels. And having to dance.”
I didn’t know if Abby was going to the prom or not. Probably not. Her idea of a good time was a sleepover at Kim’s house, just the three of us, watching MTV all night long. I don’t know why Kim was acceptable to Edna and I wasn’t—perhaps it was because Edna had never met Kim.
Kim was definitely going to the prom, but not with poor Nick. She wasn’t going with Alan, either. Kim had a date with a guy named Kevin, who went to another high school across town. God only knew how she met him. Kim wouldn’t say. Looking at Dave’s eager face made me feel guilty. I knew he’d already paid for the tickets. He didn’t say so when he asked me; one of his friends told me later.
“I’ll make myself scarce,” Abby said as he drew near.
“Oh no, you don’t,” I said, holding her in place with the force of my glare.
“Hi, Poppy.” Dave grinned. I noticed that he’d trimmed his mustache too close on one side, emphasizing the crookedness of his smile.
“Hi, Dave. What’s up?”
He was bouncing from foot to foot like a kangaroo. He bounced like that only when he was nervous. It still made me want to shoot him. I thought about Susan and her calm, careful movements. Of course, thinking of Susan made me blush, and this, once again, was not lost on Abby. Despite my glare, she made herself scarce.
“So,” Dave said, looking at the ground, the concrete wall, anywhere but at me. “Have you maybe thought about changing your mind and going to the prom?”
“No,” I said carefully. I’d been thinking for a long time about this, so I wanted to get it exactly right. “It’s not you, or that I don’t want to go with you. I just don’t want to go to the prom. I’ve never wanted to go. Ever.”
“What, have you taken a sacred vow?” He laughed.
“No.” I decided that honesty was the best policy. Or partial honesty, anyway. “Look, Dave, I don’t want to spend a bunch of money on a stupid dress that I’ll only wear once. I hate dresses. I look stupid in them.”
“No, you don’t.”
“How would you know? Have you ever seen me in one?”
He thought for a moment. “I guess not. But you’ll have to wear a dress to graduation.”
“No, I won’t!”
“Yes, you will. You can’t wear jeans, they won’t let you.”
Great, first Lucky Eddie, and now a dress. I began to wonder if it were possible to just skip graduation and go straight on to college.
“I can’t go to the prom,” I said firmly. “I just can’t. I’m really sorry.”
“Okay,” Dave said amiably. “I’ve got another idea. I’ll give the prom tickets to Alan. He can take Kim or whoever. Can I take you out to dinner? Someplace really nice, like a French restaurant. There’s one over in Chapel Hill that my parents go to.”
Chapel Hill. Susan. I was eating dinner with her in a French restaurant. I was wearing a tuxedo; she was wearing a strapless gown. We drank toasts to one another from tall crystal flutes.
“So,” Dave said. “How about it?”
I said yes because I couldn’t think of a graceful way to say no. After all, I’d told him it wasn’t personal, and in a way, it wasn’t. I felt like I’d been torn apart and reassembled. Some of the old pieces were gone forever, and new ones had taken their place. What would it be like, being in love with someone I couldn’t tell anyone about? Not Abby, not Kim. Certainly not Dave.
I felt giddy with the possibilities of tragic romance.
“I can’t believe you’ll let an Avon lady into this house,” I said.
“It’s only Jean,” my mother said. “I like Avon. The company’s not tainted. And I never blamed what’s-her-face for what your father did.”
“Avon’s not tainted? What about Glenda Norris?”
Glenda Norris had been my grandmother’s Avon lady for years. She claimed to be forty-five, but she looked like she’d spent twice that many years as a warden in a women’s prison. Glenda was rough. She chain-smoked filterless Pall Malls and told stories about her husband Jimmy which made me feel grateful to be living with Hunter. Jimmy hadn’t worked since 1975. He had a bad back, a bad temper, and a sebaceous gland problem that made him smell like dead dog. Avon wasn’t a sideline for Glenda. It paid all the bills not covered by social services. On my more generous days, I felt sorry for her. I imagined going door to door, peddling cologne in bottles shaped like eagles or Betsy Ross, all so a stinking mean drunk could lie on a sofa in his underwear and call you a bitch.
Of course, Glenda gave as good as she got. The last time she came over, she had six stitches in her forehead marking the spot where Jimmy had beaned her with a beer bottle. Jimmy had a broken arm because she’d taken her revenge with a two-by-four. Nana, who would’ve bought cutlery from Jack the Ripper, ordered at least forty dollars’worth that day.
Glenda could outmaneuver Jimmy, but there was no escape from the Pall Malls. She’d gone coughing and gasping to her final reward, the heavenly version of World Wide Wrestling, and now Jean was taking her place. It was part of Jean’s occupational therapy—her therapist said she had to find an occupation. Her work history was spotty at best. She showed up at a job, worked like a charm for a month or two, stopped showing up or showed up drunk, and got fired. Sales was the best she could hope for. She was cheerful about it, cheerful and enthusiastic. She’d chosen Avon and Cutco Knives in order to maximize her options. I gave it two weeks.
“Jean is such a sweet woman,” Nana said. “You wouldn’t believe she could act like she does. I’ve heard tell that alcoholism might be an allergy.”
“An allergy to not being the center of attention,” my mother said.
Jean rang the doorbell, and Nana let her in with a flurry of offers—a chair, a glass of iced tea, a Little Debbie’s snack cake. Jean waved away all but the chair.
There was a resemblance between Susan and her mother. Jean, however, was naturally blonde. Her hair was pale yellow, shot through with
streaks of silver gray. She and Susan shared the same slender build, and there was something about the way they carried themselves—they both vibrated with energy, Susan’s quiet and self-contained; Jean’s nervous and bursting. Jean’s hands shook when she talked, and she talked a lot. She aggravated my mother, who said Jean reminded her of a parakeet she’d had as a child. One day, my mother had flung the cover off its cage, said ‘Good morning,’ and the bird had fallen over dead.
Jean always wore brightly colored, wildly patterned clothes. Today, she had on a long, flowing, purple paisley skirt and a yellow peasant blouse. She liked gauzy stuff that billowed out and around her in wispy strips. That was the way she wore her hair as well, in a blonde sweep that flowed over her ears and cascaded down her back.
“That hair’s too long and too wild on a woman her age,” Nana said, her tone suggesting ribald nights of long-haired passion. It was the same tone she and my mother used when they talked about my hippie cousin Sammy, who had dropped out of UNC to live in a commune.
Jean’s shoes were another sore trial for Nana. In the winter, she wore knee-high leather boots that zipped up the inside of the calf. In summer, she wore platform sandals of a kind that hadn’t been fashionable since about 1976. Susan told me that her mother owned five pairs each of those boots and sandals. I wondered what she was going to do when they wore out.
Nana cast a baleful eye at my T-shirt and jeans. I sent a stern glance back: I’m not going to dress up for the Avon lady. I’d reconciled myself to the visits from Glenda by thinking of them as White Trash Theater. I tried to picture sales conventions featuring motivational speeches by Daisy Duke and Billy Carter. There was no way to enjoy this visit. Jean was visibly shaking, whether with excitement or the delirium tremens, I couldn’t say.
“Why don’t you come have a seat, Poppy,” Nana said sweetly, patting the chair beside her. “Jean might have something you’d like.”
“Sorry,” I waved breezily. “I’m on my way to Kim DiMarco’s. I’m spending the night.”
“You need some makeup of your own,” Nana observed. “Time to start doing a little something with yourself.”