But Lucy had other problems with school. I was always a straight-A student—the idea of receiving anything other than an A on my report card literally terrified me—but Lucy struggled with every subject. I remember watching her in Math, where we were allowed to sit next to each other, scowling in frustration for most of the period over a worksheet which I’d finished in less than ten minutes. She would pull on her hair, chew on her pencil, scuffle her feet, sigh, doodle on the paper—it was obvious that she had no idea how to do most of the work, though she tried.
I began to help her. My homework never took me long anyway, so it was easy enough for me to do. I quickly discovered in these after-school sessions that Lucy’s deficiencies were severe: I could hardly believe how little she knew. She was a bright, creative, energetic person, yet she read in the slow, halting monotone of a second-grader. Her grasp of the basics of arithmetic was shaky at best. She couldn’t remember the simplest historical dates. Her essays were disjointed, incoherent; even her handwriting was a wild playpen scrawl (and such a contrast to my own tight, orderly script). I found myself growing angry, not at Lucy—never, never at Lucy—but at the teachers who, I felt, had let her down, had allowed her to drift through with D’s without learning anything.
But Lucy herself was complicit in this lack of learning. She would try to pull us away from schoolwork any way she could. We might be sitting in her room with her Math book before us when she would suddenly get up, giggle, and throw a stuffed animal at my head. Or she would put on a record, saying, “Come on, Franny-Fran, we’ve been doing this for hours,” after five or ten minutes. “Let’s have some fun!”
It was hard to tell her, “No, Lucy, you’ve got to do this, the test is tomorrow,” and in truth I didn’t always succeed. The siren song of goofing off with my friend (My friend! I’d think gleefully, I have a friend, Lucy is my friend!) was just too strong. At times I would try to keep her indoors, at least, with the idea—usually misguided—that after a break she could return to her homework.
Once, as she finished a math problem, she looked over at me and noticed a drawing on which I’d been doodling absently with a felt tip marker: an ouroboros, a mythological creature I’d read about—a dragon devouring its own tail. I’d illustrated it as a perfect circle, adding scales along its body and sharp ripping teeth sinking into itself.
She scowled as she looked at it. “Franny-Fran,” she said, “that’s good. I mean, that’s really good. Wow. You can draw.”
I shrugged, quickly crumpling the paper, but inwardly thrilled.
“Wait,” she said, grabbing my hand. “I want it. If you don’t.”
“Oh, Lucy, I’ll draw you a better one. I can draw a lot better than this.” And it was true. I could. I knew I could draw well: I’d won a prize in fifth grade for my illustrating skills. But I didn’t want to tell this to Lucy, who wasn’t the sort of student to win prizes for anything.
“You should be, like, an artist,” she said, smoothing the paper I’d crushed, looking closely at it.
I shrugged again. “Maybe.”
“Will you really draw me a picture? One just for me?”
“Sure I will.”
She grinned hugely. “Nobody’s ever drawn me a picture before. I mean, a real one.”
Ultimately I drew many pictures for her: angels floating in the sky, sea-serpents, horses, dragons, unicorns. Whatever I thought of, whatever she wanted. She taped them to her walls, which caused me to feel an enormous pride whenever I walked into her room. I did these, I’d think. I did these, and Lucy likes them.
More often, however, when we abandoned our studies we simply ran straight outside. Sometimes we would head across the street, hop over the back fence, and play under the huge leafy pepper tree in my aunt and uncle’s backyard. It was a wonderful place for two girls to hide, the branches strong enough to climb, the ground below softly leaf-carpeted, aromatic, smelling of spicy peppercorns and damp earth. Often my Uncle Frank and Aunt Louise wouldn’t even know we were there, which was just how I wanted it. Together, in the tree or resting on the ground against its trunk, I would realize that nobody in the world knew where I was at that moment: no one but Lucy: we had disappeared, vanished completely, and if anyone wanted us they would have no idea where to look. We were just gone. Sometimes we brought Cokes and cookies from the Sparrows’ refrigerator; sometimes we brought Lucy’s issues of Hit Parader and Tiger Beat and Rona Barrett’s Hollywood which, I came to realize, she got mostly for the pictures: the articles were hard for her, so I would read them aloud—but softly, softly, so that no one would guess we were there.
Sometimes we would hop on her bicycle—it was a rusty old Schwinn, what was known in those days as a “boy’s bike,” with a seat long enough to hold both of us if I wrapped my arms around her from behind—and ride around the neighborhood. However hazardous the arrangement, I felt safe with her in those days when no one had even heard of such a thing as a bicycle helmet. Lucy would share gossip she claimed to have learned about the people inside the houses we passed: “Did you know that Mr. Hubbard humps Mrs. Fitzgerald on Thursday afternoons?” she’d say, or, “Did you know that the Tate kid isn’t Mr. Tate’s real son?” How she knew these things I never asked; I simply believed her, absolutely.
Yet she said things I didn’t believe, too. Once as we glided past Mr. Griffin’s house on Elm Street she pointed at his van parked at the curb—actually a little brown Volkswagen Bus, the kind that once was ubiquitous on American roads—and said, “See that van? I drove it.”
I looked. “Mr. Griffin’s given you driving lessons?”
“No, Ricky Retardo. I mean I drove it. Around the neighborhood. At night.”
“Oh, Lucy, no you didn’t.” I was slightly hurt; Lucy didn’t have to lie to me, not to me.
“Scout’s honor. He leaves his keys in it all the time. I drove it around the block once. He never knew.”
“Oh, Lucy.”
Increasingly we took to spending not just afternoons, but evenings together. I would help her with her homework while completing my own, then run across the street for a bland dinner with Frank and Louise.
“You’re spending too much time with that tomboy,” Louise would say, putting down her fork and lighting one of her endless Marlboro cigarettes.
“She’s my friend, Aunt Louise. And I help her with her school stuff.”
She sighed sourly. “You’re still getting yours done, right?”
“Straight A’s,” I said defiantly. “Do you want to see my Math test? Or my Social Studies quiz? They’re in my room. I’ll show them to you. Hundreds on both. Or I can have my teachers call you.” I was completely confident; I had absolutely nothing to hide. My schoolwork was perfect.
“All right, Frances, don’t get in a huff,” she said. “It’s just…Why can’t you have nicer friends? It’s embarrassing, having you over at that dump across the street all the time. People will start to think—well, they’ll think bad things about you. And about us.”
“Why?” I pushed my plate away. I hated tuna casserole.
“Because they’re trash, Frances.” She said it with an oddly gentle tone, obviously aware that the words would hurt me. “Plain old white trash. I wish they’d never moved in over there. At the rate they’re going, they’ll pull down the property values around here. That house was bad before, but it’s become a wreck since they got here.”
I stared at the table, my face hot. “That’s not Lucy’s fault.”
“Well, her mother.”
“Her mother works all the time. She’s never home.”
“Yes. That’s part of what I mean.”
“I don’t think they have a lot of money, Aunt Louise. That’s why Lucy’s mother isn’t home much. She’s always working. She works as a bartender. I guess they don’t make a lot.”
“Bartender,” Louise muttered with disgust. “Frances, there are such nice, sweet girls who go to that school. If you’d just try to make friends—”
“I made
a friend.”
There was a long pause. Uncle Frank cleared his throat.
“Can I go over there after dinner?” I asked, looking not at Louise but at Frank. “I’m helping her with her English essay.”
This was not strictly true. In fact, by dinner time Lucy and I had generally finished with homework. After dinner was playtime, girl-time.
“You know, Louise,” Frank said, his voice wheezy and whispery from many years of his trademark stubby cigars, “she talked to me the other day. That Sparrow woman. She said her girl’s doing much better in school now, since she’s known Frances.”
I smiled at him, looked triumphantly toward Aunt Louise.
“Be home by nine,” she said, annoyed but, for the moment, defeated.
Evenings were always grand at Lucy’s house, though my aunt’s observations about Lucy’s mother were not really inaccurate. She was hardly ever home, and when she was she was tired and distracted—always very nice to me (I devoured many a Totino’s frozen pizza there), but she struck me as a woman whose attention was always on something else, something I couldn’t quite see. She spent a great deal of time on the phone, often disappearing into the bedroom to pick up the extension there and asking Lucy or me to hang up the main line in the kitchen.
Worse than that—and a fact which I kept carefully hidden from my aunt—was the fact that Ms. Sparrow brought home a lot of men, some of whom spent the night with her in her bedroom. Lucy was always morose at these times, maintaining a minimal politeness with whoever the new male in the house was, but clearly unhappy about it. I was, too: it threw off the balance of the household, having a grown-up man around in this house of females. To her credit I must say that Ms. Sparrow seemed to watch these men carefully; they interacted with Lucy very little, mostly just vanishing into her mother’s bedroom within a minute or two of coming in the door. Some of them I saw several times, some only once. But it did seem to be a constant parade. Yet I liked Ms. Sparrow, very much, and couldn’t find it in myself to judge her. I just wished she would be there more for Lucy.
On the other hand, with her mother usually absent, Lucy and I had the place completely to ourselves. It was exciting to be alone together, at night, utterly without adult supervision. We could play Lucy’s records at any volume we wanted, dance around her room, chase and tackle each other, drink all the soda and eat all the ice cream we could stuff into ourselves; and yet in truth these bacchanalias amounted to little but best-friend girl stuff. My own favorite time was actually not when we were being loud or rowdy, but rather the moment at a little past eight each evening when we would retire to her bedroom, shut off the lights, turn on her radio, and listen to the creaking door which opened the nightly Mystery Theater. Sometimes we simply lay together on her bed, our heads sharing the pillow; other times she sat on the floor with her back against the bed while I, cross-legged on the mattress behind her, spread her wild blonde hair out before me in the dim green light of her radio dial and carefully, methodically smoothed her endless tangles and rats’ nests with her mother’s big silver-handled brush and comb. We tried it the other way—that is, Lucy brushing my hair—but mine was short, and always meticulously groomed anyway. I liked better the sensation of her hair in my hand, flowing through the brush and comb, growing silky in my palms.
It was on the weekends, though, that we were truly free. It’s not an easy thing to ride pressed behind someone on a kid’s bicycle, mostly because there’s no real place to put one’s feet, but we somehow managed it; I was small, and Lucy was very strong. She never seemed to have any difficulty pedaling the both of us, except on the steepest uphills, when I would have to step off and walk while she chided me: “Jesus, Franny-Fran, why don’t you get your own bike? I’m doing all the work here.” Actually, though, while I made the excuse (which was true) that Frank and Louise refused to buy me one, I didn’t really want a bike of my own. Whatever the difficulties, I loved riding with Lucy, my arms wrapped around her, my body pressed against hers, my head resting on her shoulder, my face tickled by her hair.
On Saturday mornings we would jump onto the bike and rush across Riverfield Road, out of the housing tract, onto Bridgewater Avenue and over the long bridge that spanned the riverbed, finally reaching downtown Quiet. In those days the town lived up to its odd name (which I later learned was derived not from its quiet character, but rather from its founder, a farmer with the rather aristocratic name of Quincy Cuthbert Quiet II). Little was there to tempt the interests of a couple of very young girls, but we made do even without such seeming necessities as a movie theater or a proper department store. Main Street held a couple of small clothing shops, a dry cleaner’s, a grocery, barber’s, and a pharmacy; it was the last of these where we spent the greatest amount of time, especially on Saturday mornings when the owner, a heavyset young woman named Mrs. Marks, would stock the wire rotating rack with its Hey Kids! Comics! banner at the top. Few girls read comics, and in fact I didn’t until I knew Lucy; I enjoyed them because she did. Mrs. Marks was nice about letting us just sit on the floor and read them without buying any; I always felt a bit guilty about it, anyway, and invariably purchased some sodas and snacks from her for us to consume as we read. “Just don’t mess them up,” she would say pleasantly. But of course she had nothing to worry about: I would organize the comics before we left, leaving them in a state of virtually military order and perfection, flawlessly alphabetized, pristine.
I would do much the same thing at the library, a big old gloomy-looking building which Lucy and I would also ride to on those Saturday mornings. Initially she was resistant—“What do I want to hang around a bunch of books for?”—but she came to like it, spending her time in the children’s section while I browsed the grown-up paperback novels, paperbacks being a new thing in libraries then. Although I had only a children’s library card, Mrs. Klibo would allow me one adult book at a time based on her own personal approval. I would generally choose an Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes to go along with my steady diet of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, placing the books in a little rucksack my aunt had allowed me to buy for the purpose. Lucy never checked out anything, but she liked whatever had lots of pictures: big splashy tomes about the movies, nature books, National Geographic.
There was a small general clothing store on the corner of Main and Birch Street, and it was there that I allowed Lucy to talk me into wearing jeans. “C’mon, Franny-Fran,” she said, “you look too girlie.” She helped me try on pair after pair until we found the ones that seemed to look best; then, later, I had the job of convincing my uncle (always the looser of the two with regard to the purse strings) to give me the money to buy two or three of them, which he finally did. Soon enough the little-girl dresses were put away at the back of the closet and I wore my jeans daily. The cardigans, too, vanished, along with the dress shoes, replaced with delightfully sloppy-looking pullover sweaters and sneakers. I never changed my obsessively clean and organized ways, not really, but Lucy’s makeover definitely caused me to look like a more normal twelve-year-old girl.
On the outskirts of town were two gas stations, a big shiny Enco and, across the street from it, a dirty and dilapidated Red Ball. It was the Red Ball that attracted Lucy. Its owner was Mr. Farrington, a friendly old man with a big hair-sprouting wart on his nose. He wore filthy coveralls that smelled of gasoline and motor oil and whose hands were permanently blackened from working on cars all his life. Mr. Farrington usually offered Lucy a free piece of candy from his rather meager store behind the cash register—she always took a strip of black licorice—and when she started to bring me by, I got the same offer. We would talk then, on days when he wasn’t busy; he had several rickety old chairs placed near the pumps and he could often be seen there with customers or pals, telling stories of World War II, which he’d fought in, or said he had. Sometimes he took a newspaper and read it aloud, interrupting periodically to comment on “those idiots in Washington” or “those heels on the City Council.” Once, as he read a story about a pr
oposal for a tax increase, I found myself staring with fascination at the front page he held aloft before him: Local Girl Missing, it read. There was a photo beneath the headline: the smiling face of a high school girl.
Mr. Farrington had someone who worked for him by the name of McCoy—“Mike,” as he was called by everyone. He was a tall, reedy man, about fifty, with small black eyes and a confusion of yellow and gray teeth; he had a close-cropped butch haircut and dark beard stubble perpetually sticking out from his face, and he always wore a greasy old baseball cap on his head that said California Angels. Mike seemed to be Mr. Farrington’s all-around helper. In that time when “full service” still existed, he was sometimes out at the pumps, filling gas, checking oil, cleaning windshields; more often he was back in the garage, his legs sticking out from under some car he was repairing. Occasionally he would take customers’ money at the register. His accent was odd, obviously from somewhere else; I thought of it as country, Lucy called it shit-kicker. He smiled a lot and was very nice to the two of us, especially when we happened to show up in Mr. Farrington’s absence. Then he would be much more talkative than otherwise, asking us “What’cha up to?” or “How’s it hangin’, lovely ladies?” while also offering us the free candy, and sodas too. “What’re a couple of beauties like yourselves doin’ on this fine morning? Goin’ to a tea party with the other lovely ladies?”
I didn’t like it when he talked to us like that, but Lucy just laughed. “I’ve never even had tea, Mike,” she said. “Iced tea, yeah. Not hot tea.”
“Well, you oughtta try it,” he said, grinning at her. “Put a little rum in it. Give it some kick. You like rum?”
“Never had that either,” Lucy said, shaking her head and grinning. “Had beer.”
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