by Paula Bomer
Fall turned to winter and Polly had a friend. The friend didn’t like her very much and wasn’t nice to her, but Polly was so grateful that none of that mattered. Her friend’s name was Breanna and she was from the other side of town, a skinny white girl, much like Polly herself, but one whose parents were divorced and one who was allowed to watch as much television as she wanted and eat sugar cereals for dinner.
Once, during a Saturday night sleepover, while they were watching the dancers gyrate on Solid Gold, Polly said, “Mike Turley says my dad is a fag.”
“Really?” Breanna grinned and looked at her with interest. Generally, anything that caused another person pain or humiliation interested Breanna.
“Yeah. Maybe we should kick his ass.”
“Whose ass? Michael Turley’s or your dad’s?” Breanna nearly fell over laughing.
“Shut up!”
“Maybe your dad is a fag.” Breanna started to guffaw. Then she smacked Polly’s arm.
“How could he be married and have a kid if he’s a faggot?”
“Fuck if I know. I don’t anything about fags.”
When getting ready for bed, in the bathroom at Breanna’s, Polly stared at herself in the mirror. She opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue. She grinned. She had big teeth in a small head. She pulled down her underpants and looked at the dark wisps of hair forming. This was new but not as troublesome as her nipples. It was more hidden, and it didn’t itch quite so much. She touched herself gently, just there where the hair was growing in. Then she looked at her teeth again. When she was a little girl and her teeth were coming out, she could barely stand the feeling. The agony of waiting! It was like her other itches. She would tie dental floss around the tooth and saw, saw away. Back and forth, saliva, then blood, and still the tooth wouldn’t come out. Her mother would say, “It’s barely loose! Wait until it’s looser before you pull it out.” But Polly couldn’t wait. She tried tying the string to a door and slamming it, but that didn’t work. She always moved toward the door inadvertently. So she’d sit back down on the couch, sawing away, cartoons on in front of her that she barely watched because she was so intent on her sawing. And when it came out! Shooting across the room, smacking the TV dead on. The relief of it! The tooth was long and strange looking, because the root was still on it. Blood poured into her mouth, dripping down her chin onto the rug. She could feel her mother’s anger. Looking into the mirror, she’d see the gaping, throbbing hole and it gave her a sort of satisfaction, but it was never long lived.
Over the Christmas break Polly’s mother announced she was taking her bra shopping. They drove out to the mall to the Hudson’s Department Store. The lingerie section was pink-walled and brightly lit. Everywhere stood racks of enormous, stiff bras and panties that were so huge she could have easily stuck both her legs through one of the leg holes. What the hell was she doing here? Her mother hated shopping. It made her sweat, she said, and also dizzy. But here they were.
“Excuse me,” her mother said to a gray-haired saleslady, “I’m looking for a training bra for my daughter.”
“Oh, yes.” The lady smiled at Polly. “Right over here.”
The training bras were white little things with triangle shaped cups on a rack that had a big picture of a girl smiling her ass off. Polly went into the dressing room and put it on. Her pale bubble-gum-sized nipples didn’t come close to filling out the training bra. She understood that wasn’t the point, the point was to hide her shame. Just the name of the bra confounded her. Training for what? Olympic boobs?
“Come out and show us!” the saleslady said.
“No,” said Polly. She heard them whisper, then giggle.
On the car ride home, she asked her mom, “Is Dad a fag?”
“What? Jesus Christ! Where’d you get that?”
“I’m just asking.”
“Your father is not a fag. For God’s sake.”
“Mike Turley says he’s a fag.”
“Mike Turley! That family has no class. All those kids and they’re all wild and stupid. A woman shouldn’t have more kids than she can take care of.” Polly’s mother’s face was red now.
“Well then how come he doesn’t have a job?”
They were at a red light. Her mother turned to her. “Your father is mentally ill. He’s not a fag.”
“Mentally ill?”
“Remember that time we visited him in the hospital? And he was making belts and little stools with stenciled paintings on them?”
Polly remembered. Her father making crafts, like a boy in shop class. She liked the stuff he made. It was nice. But that had been years ago, around the time of her chicken pox. She remembered he seemed quiet, but he was always quiet.
“You said he was sick. He was in the hospital.”
“He was sick. Mentally sick. They gave him electroshock in the hospital, a hospital for mentally ill people.”
The way her mother said mentally ill made Polly angry.
“He’s crazy. Dad’s crazy.”
“Mentally ill!” Her mother screamed. Then the light changed.
When school started up Polly wore her training bra. She put little cotton balls in it to fill it out. But gym class was a problem. What was she going to do? Take off her training bra and let the cotton balls fall out? There she was, in the fluorescent glare of the locker room, stiff with terror. She had to get naked and get in the shower. She had no choice. The raging, lesbian gym teacher who sported a crew cut and weighed a solid two hundred pounds was yelling at everyone, herding them in and out of the cold hard spray of water with a fierce delight noticed by all. The bra came off. The cotton balls fell. Breanna was the first to point it out.
“Look! Polly stuffs her bra! Oh my God! Look!”
Polly ran for the shower, and like all the girls, crossed her arms over her chest. The girls laughed, they pointed, they grabbed her bra and the cotton balls and tossed them back and forth between each other. Someone smacked her arm when she came out of the cold spray, probably Breanna, but Polly was seeing white. The gym teacher hollered, “Everyone in, everyone out!” It was the only thing she ever said in the locker room. Outside of the locker room she had more sentences, like, “Get the ball. What are you doing? Get the ball!”
Polly stopped wearing the training bra. Her mother said nothing and probably didn’t notice. Beer does that to people. Spring came and there was a fair at the Town and Country shopping mall right off the main strip, where teenagers cruised their cars high on dope and booze. The fair consisted of one small ferris wheel; a tilt-a-whirl; the very popular Himalaya, a fast ride that screeched out heavy metal music while it whipped everyone around forward, and then backward; a sawdust pit with a goat, a pig, and a spitting llama; and a food stand that sold corn dogs, soda, and cotton candy.
It was a Friday night.
“Mom, I’m going to the fair with Breanna and then spending the night at her house.”
“Okay,” her mom said, not looking up from the paper.
“I need some money.”
“My wallet’s on the table.”
Polly went over to Breanna’s house. The two of them applied black eyeliner, mascara, and used her mother’s curling iron. After they were all tarted up like miniature hookers, Breanna’s mother drove them to the shopping center and dropped them off.
“Call me when you want me to pick you up.”
“Okay.”
Polly bought tickets for the both of them; Breanna never paid for anything. They rode the tilt-a-whirl twice, then they rode the Himalaya three times.
“She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean,” screeched the sound system. Polly’s ear burned and the bass of the music thumped inside of her chest in an uncomfortable way. She was happy to be there with her friend. At the food stand, Polly ordered them a soda and a cotton candy. Three boys, high school age, with heavy metal T-shirts and mullets, came up to Breanna.
“Aren’t you Angie’s little sister?”
“Yeah, I’m Angie’
s little sister.”
“Want to go for a ride?”
The girls looked at each other like they’d won the lottery.
“Sure,” they said at the same time.
They all walked over to where the cars were parked. It was dark out, around nine thirty, and the air smelled of fumes from the rides and the rich pollen of spring. Lights from the ferris wheel glittered in front of them and crossed and bled into the lights of the cars coming up and down the strip. The smallest of the boys, a sandy blond-haired kid with bad acne, lit a small joint.
“It’s just a pinner,” he said, “but it’s really special.”
The stood in a circle, the five of them, and passed the joint around. At first Polly was intimidated, but she watched Breanna and did like she did. She held the tiny little white joint between her thumb and her forefinger and sucked real hard on it. The tallest of the boys said, “Damn, this is good weed.”
The boy whose joint it was nodded, seeming pleased. The other one, a chubby sort, stayed real quiet and looked at Polly in a funny way. After the joint was smoked the oldest looking boy asked, “Want to go for a ride in my van?”
Suddenly, as if hit with a brick, Polly felt very strange. A fierce, hot energy surged through her body, from her feet to her head and everything went numb. She looked down to see if her feet were on the ground.
“My feet!” she said, “I’m floating.”
Everyone laughed in slow motion. It was like a movie, where a camera slowly pans over a crowd, first Breanna next to her, then the tallest boy, then the quiet boy, his tight Poison T-shirt moving in slow motion over his stomach, then the little one with acne who had the joint, his wiry body bobbling while his feet grounded him. They were laughing so slowly, and now Polly couldn’t hear them either, just see their mouths opening, their heads leaning back. Maybe they weren’t making any noise, thought Polly.
“Let’s cruise the strip,” someone said. Polly wasn’t sure who said it, but she was glad she was able to hear. Somehow she managed to get in the back of the van. Someone had helped her, had lifted one leg and then another, to make them crawl into the back of the van. She lay on her back and Breanna was next to her. The boys were in the front of the van; she couldn’t see them. Occasionally she heard them say something: “Turn on the radio.” “Give me a cigarette.” There was laughter, lots of laughter. From where Polly lay in the back of the van, she could see out the back window, a blur of red and yellow lights. Her feet were not floating anymore. She looked at her arm and tried to lift it, but couldn’t. What happened to her arm? She tried to turn her head to face Breanna, but she couldn’t do that either. Somewhere deep inside her was a core of fear and panic, but it was wrapped tightly with layer after layer of fog and bewilderment. She tried to say, “Breanna,” but nothing came out.
She heard the boys up front. Her ears worked. Her eyes could see. Nothing else worked. She heard one of them close to her now, as if his mouth were right against her ear. He said, “You’ve done been dusted, little girl.”
Then there was quiet for a while. She stared at the lights out the back of the van. Again, she tried to say, “Breanna.” It didn’t work. Then a voice from far away said, “To Eric’s house, motherfucker. It’ll be a lemon pussy night! Drive, motherfucker.”
Polly kept her eyes on the window. She had no choice really. But it soothed her, too, the blurry red lights. Like this, staring out the window, mesmerized, she fell unconscious.
When she came to, the van was backing up from her alley into a grassy part of the field. Polly wanted to say something. This is the field, she wanted to say. This is my alley, she wanted to say.
Then she felt their hands on her. They were rolling her, rolling her out of the back of the van. She fell with a thud in the wet, cold grass. Breanna was next to her, but she wasn’t moving either. She felt Breanna’s cold arm against her own and it felt like the coldest thing in the world. She tried to move away from her friend, but she couldn’t move. Then the van lurched forward, and she watched the red taillights and listened to the crunch of the wheels on the black gravel of the alley.
“Meet me down the alley,” the song came to her, and she saw her father singing it to her, his eyes wet with tears. “Dad,” she had asked, “can I go to the field to play kick the can?” This was before Jefferson, before her nipples burst, but after the chicken pox. “Sure thing, sweetheart,” he said, and then he sang to her, his arms outstretched toward her as she ran out the door to go play. He sang, “Come on and meet me down the alley, one last time … Come on and meet me down the alley, we ain’t too young to die … Come on, meet me down the alley, to say goodbye.” And she’d play and play, damp with salty sweat, running, hiding, kicking the can, relishing the scrape of metal on cement, her heart pumping fast, listening for those words, “Olly Olly Oxen Free!” She was down the alley, she was in her field. But it all felt wrong, because she couldn’t move, she couldn’t climb the boysenberry tree. The lights above her, the stars, pulled her eyes to them. They glittered just like the lights of the ferris wheel, like the coming and going lights of the cars snaking along the strip. She watched them, trying not to think how cold she was. She tried to turn her head to look at her friend, but she couldn’t. And so she did the only thing she could do—stare above at the heavens and pretend they were the taillights on the strip.
• outsiders •
RUTHIE WATERS ENTERED HER DORM ROOM AT LYNDON PREPARATORY ACADEMY WITH A SUITCASE FULL OF WRONG CLOTHES AND HEAVY METAL ALBUMS. She sported thick black eyeliner, a lumpy, obviously padded bra, and perfectly feathered hair. She was fourteen years old, from South Bend, Indiana, and when she spoke, her Midwestern accent marked her out. But all of this had changed by Thanksgiving. The curling iron she’d feathered her hair with was buried in the closet, the albums quietly placed in a Dumpster. She had tried desperately to speak differently, and eventually she had.
In Condon Hall, there were sixty girls: the lower mid class, to which she belonged, and the mid class, which was much larger. Her roommate, Alicia Camp, was the only black girl in the dorm. They were the only two not from Park Avenue or Greenwich. Ruthie’s grandmother from Memphis was paying her tuition while Alicia was full scholarship. In fact, Alicia had grown up oftentimes homeless on the streets of Atlanta, her mother mentally ill, or occasionally taken in by her grandmother. She never knew her father. While Ruthie had very little in common with the Park Avenue girls, she didn’t exactly have much in common with Alicia. And yet, they were both outsiders. Which was something.
That they had both been star students at their respective schools and now struggled at Lyndon was another. Alicia worked very hard and still got poor marks. This crushed her. Ruthie, not accustomed to working hard, fell in with a few girls in the mid class that liked to smoke pot all the time. She worked very little which never had been a problem before, but didn’t do the trick at Lyndon. Nancy White and Melissa Carter, a year older than Ruthie but a lifetime ahead of her, lived across the hall and schooled Ruthie on how to smoke weed in boarding school, which was very different than standing in some alley in South Bend, passing a joint around.
They introduced her to the bong. What a wonderful device! They showed her how to use a hit towel. This involved rolling up a bath or hand towel into a tightly coiled tube, and after sucking down a bong hit, pressing your lips firmly against the towel to exhale. This left a perfect brown impression of lips on the towel, but kept the room free of the aroma of weed, which of course was necessary if one did not want to get expelled. And for all the bitching about Lyndon that went on, no one really wanted to get expelled.
One Friday night, after the hall teacher, a sour middle-aged woman named Miss Cranch, who was both the field hockey coach and a lousy math teacher, had checked all the rooms and turned in, Ruthie, as planned, snuck over to Nancy and Melissa’s room. The bong hits of boarding school! There was nothing like it. The wealthy simply had better drugs. The weed was expensive and beautiful—tightly coiled balls of bright green wit
h tiny threads of red in it. They all got incredibly stoned. Both Nancy, from Park Avenue, and Melissa, from New Canaan, wore Lanz nightgowns. Ruthie was in a pink T-shirt from JC Penney and her white cotton underwear. They all sat cross-legged on the floor in an intimate circle and whispered, just in case, but also because they were high as kites which for some reason made people whisper.
“We need to get you a nightgown,” said Nancy, leaning toward Ruthie, her dark eyes focused but not unfriendly. She had the shiniest, thickest, black hair. Ruthie stared at her hair. She was beginning to understand so much at Lyndon. Like how the thickness of one’s hair was a testament to coming from a “good” family.
“I have a nightgown, I just hate wearing it,” said Ruthie. It was true, she had one. A synthetic fabric, embarrassing, nothing like the thick cotton of the Lanz nightgowns. Also, she always had hated wearing it; she preferred sleeping in T-shirts and underwear. “It gets all tangled up and I don’t sleep well.”
“Well, you could wear it when you come over at night,” whispered Melissa, who then looked at Nancy. They giggled in silence. This involved putting their hands over their mouths and shaking ever so slightly while smiling with their teeth shut. Then they turned their eyes on Ruthie.
“It’s just that we don’t like looking at your underwear,” said Melissa. She had waist-long hair, the color of wheat. It reminded Ruthie of a horse’s mane. Suddenly, Ruthie missed her horse, very un-creatively named Sandy, back in Indiana.
This was one of those situations that Ruthie played one of two ways; one, she could acquiesce, acknowledging the superiority and rightness of her wealthier, more sophisticated friends. Or, she could play the tough girl from the wrong side of the tracks. The latter worked only some of the time. If it did work, she would garner some fear and awe. When it failed, she was met with either pity or repulsion, or some combination of the two.
“Deal with it,” Ruthie said. She didn’t whisper as well as she should. She was naturally a very loud girl, a Midwestern trait, for sure. “It’s not like we don’t all have the same parts. Don’t be such prudes.” Then she pointed at her crotch. “You each have one of these, too. Or at least I hope you do.”