B004XTKFZ4 EBOK

by Conlon, Christopher

Instead there had been the bus one gray Saturday morning, the suitcases, the claims that I would remember Uncle Frank and Aunt Louise as soon as I saw them, the assurances that it’s just for a little while, honey, your dad and I have to work some things out, we’ll see you soon, Mom it’s the middle of the school year, why, what’s happening? Hush, Franny, just hush, have a lovely trip, you’ll hear from us soon.

  I was too stunned even to cry, sitting breathless and wide-eyed on the bus seat for hours, adrift, my moorings gone. Nothing changed when I arrived at the bus station and was greeted by a gray-haired man and woman who, I was quite certain, I had not met before, and driven for what seemed a long time to this small house in the middle of a housing track in this dusty, nondescript town. When do I get to be with my parents again? Soon, soon.

  From then on I hardly spoke, hardly made eye contact with anyone, which made my visit with Lucy Sparrow all the more remarkable. Some part of me knew that I should not risk friendship, not place in jeopardy my safe and orderly self, yet Lucy was so open and giving that I could hardly help looking at her with gratitude and love from that first day, this girl who was loud and smelly and obviously poor, this girl who put the Wings record “My Love” on her little player and said, “C’mon, slow dance with me, I’ll pretend you’re a boy,” and, astonishingly, I did, I stood and allowed her to place her heavy arms around me, allowed her to lead me in slow circles in her bedroom until I finally raised my arms to her shoulders as well. Holding on. Holding on for dear life.

  2

  FROM THEN WE were inseparable. We sat together on the bus, played tetherball and soccer at recess—not real games, just the two of us kicking the ball back and forth, laughing, tumbling hysterically into the grass—and passed notes to each other in Math and Science and English. (What did we write so feverishly about? I can’t imagine, now.) I would stay for hours with her at her house, doing homework—or really, helping her, since Lucy was a weak student. I would be shocked to see an essay she’d written or some Math problems she’d attempted to solve; she was far behind me in ability, despite the fact that she was actually a year older than me, at thirteen officially a teenager (“I was held back one year”). Occasionally, or perhaps more than that, I simply did her work for her, though she never asked me for this service. Partly I was angry—not with her, but with the adults in her life who, I perceived, had been so criminally negligent with her education, with her. But mostly I just wanted to please her, to make her happy, this girl who had chosen me among all the dozens of others she might have chosen, the one and only person who had looked at me and thought, Yes, I find you acceptable, I want you to be my friend.

  “C’mon, Franny-Fran,” she would say. “I can write the stupid essay myself. Though I’ll admit I like the grades you get for me. Except they’re never A’s!”

  “Mrs. Mainer wouldn’t believe it if you turned in an A essay, Lucy,” I said, honestly. “She’d think you copied it.”

  She nodded. “You’re right. I’m not good with essays, am I? Shit, I’m not good with school.”

  “It’s not your fault. Here, let me show you.” And we would pour over the assignment together, with me attempting to encourage Lucy’s participation while still ensuring that the final product would arrive safely in the B range—such a change from her usual D’s and F’s.

  Lucy sometimes visited my house (though I didn’t think of it that way; I thought of it as Frank and Louise’s house), but not as often. It was clear that, for whatever reason, Louise did not like Lucy. She would merely grunt a greeting when we came in, frowning and muttering some instruction to keep it down or not make a mess. As a result, we would stay mostly at Lucy’s. Her mother was almost never there, and this fact, which had once seemed so shocking, began to be attractive. We turned on records as loud as we wanted, dancing and singing along to them. We ate whatever we found in the refrigerator. We played Nerf football in the living room, knocking over vases and pictures. I read stories to her from my favorite books, fantasy tales about unicorns and fairies and angels. We watched TV together, but not much: TV was dulling to the mind, soporific, and what I wanted, needed—we both did—was just the opposite. Instead, Lucy would turn on her radio at seven p.m. and tune in a station from Los Angeles, a fading, wavery but listenable signal, and we would sit together, often in the dark, as the news headlines drifted by and then the creaking door of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater opened. “I love this show,” she would say. “With TV you see things, but with radio you see clear.” We would burrow together under our blanket, hand in hand, munching popcorn or candy, listening raptly. Sometimes I would brush her hair as we listened, carefully untangling it in dozens of places, smoothing it with my palm. The stories—mystery, science fiction, surprisingly grisly horror—sometimes made us squeal with fright, or what we pretended to each other was fright.

  Soon enough—too soon, always too soon!—eight o’clock would arrive, and with it my curfew, my forced return to the exile that was supposed to be my home. In bed I would feel an aching loneliness, an actual physical sensation in the pit of my stomach. Lucy was so close then, only across the street, but as far away as if she’d lived in another galaxy.

  Naturally the popular girls in school looked askance at our friendship. It made no difference to us. Suddenly the taunts that had been so hurtful before seemed only silly, childish. There was never any threat of physical violence—Lucy was by far the biggest and strongest girl in the school, no one would have imagined trying to fight her—and so it never went farther than the occasional muttered “Lezzies” or “Dykes” as we passed by in the hall. We found it fantastically funny. (At her house we would play-act as these girls, pretending to be them and creating riotous send-ups of their personalities and mannerisms.) Once as we wandered along the edge of the football field we heard several girls chanting, “Lucy and Franny sittin’ in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g!” Lucy stopped, glanced back at them, and then grabbed my head and kissed me straight on the lips. It was as un-erotic as a kiss could possibly be, and we dissolved into shrieks of laughter. Those girls never chanted anything at us again.

  I would like to report that we had many deep, soul-sharing conversations, but in truth we did not, at least until the end. I did not ask, did not think to ask, what had become of Lucy’s father; and I have no recollection of ever telling her about my parents. Instead we had fun. In many ways Lucy and I acted younger than we were, silly-girlish, as if together we were discovering the joys of childhood which neither of us had previously known. At that age it’s the friendless who suffer; friendship makes one invincible. For the first time in my life, I found myself strong, confident, untouchable. It made no difference if I rounded a corner to hear, “Hey, it’s Concentration Camp” or “Here comes Bitchy Britches.” I began to think of them as children, as mere naughty kids. I was something else now, something better, something more. I even began getting into trouble at school, like other kids did; very mild trouble, it’s true, but still, tiny flaws appeared in my armor of perfection. Several times teachers would demand to see the notes Lucy and I had been passing; one even made us change our seats so that we were far apart in his classroom. It made no difference. It was all grist for our imaginations later, our sense of mockery and fun, our feeling that the two of us were a single unassailable unit, and would be forever.

  Lucy had an old red Schwinn bicycle, a “boy’s bike,” as they were still known in those not yet entirely enlightened times. Rusted and dented, it was still serviceable, and we would ride together around the neighborhood in the afternoons or at twilight. I sat behind her, pressed up against her body, my chin on her shoulder, arms wrapped around her waist. Once, I remember, she let me in on what she claimed was a secret: “See that old van there?” she said, stopping the bike for a moment.

  “Yes. It’s Mr. Silva’s.”

  She glanced mischievously at me. “I drive it sometimes.”

  “Oh, come on, Lucy, no you don’t.”

  “I swear to God. He leaves his keys in it eve
ry night.”

  “How do you know how to drive?”

  “I don’t. Not really. But my mom showed me how to shift gears once in her car.”

  “Where do you go with it?” I asked, deeply skeptical.

  She shook her head. “Just around the neighborhood. Late at night I sneak out, just drive it around really slow. I always park it right where it was before.”

  I dismissed this as Lucy’s fantasy, and while I said nothing, I felt slightly disappointed with her, that she would feel the need to lie to me, to me. But it was easy enough to let it go, to just enjoy her, to enjoy myself, life.

  On Saturdays we would glide into town, sometimes stopping at the grocery store for an ice cream bar or a big sixteen-ounce bottle of Coke we would share and then immediately return for the deposit. There was little in the town, really, to interest two girls like us: no movie theater, no drug store, no fast food restaurants. So we amused ourselves with the comic books in the grocery store, stocked anew each Thursday afternoon by the owner, a large friendly woman named Estelle (she never minded our loitering, our reading without buying: I suspect she knew Lucy was poor, and anyway, we always bought a snack). We wandered around the few shops, rode by the restaurant where Lucy’s mother worked—and sometimes went in, managing to cadge free appetizers from her. We went to the library, a lovely old Victorian building, and chatted with the librarian, the unbelievably ancient Mrs. Klibo (she was probably sixty); I would get a book, generally a small paperback which I could stuff into the waistline of my pants for the return ride home, while Lucy flipped through big Life and Look picture books. “You’re such a wonderful reader, Fran,” Mrs. Klibo would say to me confidentially, out of Lucy’s hearing. “I hope you can make your poor little friend a reader too. You’ll try, won’t you?”

  We would laze out in the grass of the tiny park, really a rest stop for travelers from the nearby freeway, sometimes tossing a ball between us or climbing the old oak tree which provided the only available shade. We would hang out for a few minutes at the Red Ball gas station, watching the cars pull in and out and talking with Mr. McCoy, the greasy-looking young man working there in the afternoons who would always invite us to his house. “Got hot dogs and soda,” he would say, squinting as he looked at us, grinning, scratching his stomach. “Got games in the basement, too. You girls like ping-pong? How about pool, you like to shoot pool?”

  “Ping-pong’s okay,” Lucy would say casually, chewing on the licorice sticks he always gave us for free from the station’s tiny selection of candy. “Never played pool.”

  “Oughta try. Bet you’d be good at it, big girl like you.”

  “Maybe sometime, Mr. McCoy.”

  We would jump on her bike, pedal away.

  “I like him,” Lucy would say. “He’s nice. Kinda weird, though. Looks at me funny.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  Naturally Mrs. Sparrow liked me. I was a “good influence,” she said. But Aunt Louise, chain-smoking Marlboros and drinking whiskey at three in the afternoon as she watched her game shows, showed nothing but disdain for Lucy. “The Sparrows are trash,” she told me one day after school, staring at the TV screen: Match Game, Gene Rayburn laughing at some witticism just uttered by Richard Dawson. “Fran, those people are goddamn hicks, just off the tomato truck. Look at all the garbage in their yard. Look at the jalopy that woman drives. I wish we could get them out of the neighborhood somehow. Do they even have indoor plumbing?”

  “Yes,” I said, looking down, aware of her biting sarcasm but unable to think of any other response. “It’s not their house. They rent it.”

  “I’ll bet.” She took a drag on her latest cigarette. “You know, Fran, people judge people by the company they keep. I want you to stop hanging around with that Sparrow girl so much. People’ll start to think we’re the same as them.”

  “I like her, Aunt Louise. She’s my friend.”

  “There’s all kinds of girls to be your friend at that school.”

  “Not like Lucy.”

  “Crap. Big butch tomboy, that’s all she is. And I got a call from your teacher, Mrs.—what’s her name? Stansfield?”

  “Stensland.”

  “Stensland, yeah. She says you’re passing notes in class with that girl.”

  “It was just one note, Aunt Louise,” I said, lying.

  “Well, cut it out. I don’t like the way you’re changing, Fran. Ever since you’ve been friends with that Sparrow girl…”

  “It’s not Lucy’s fault. Don’t blame her.”

  “…you’ve been staying out late, your grades are dropping…”

  “I’m only across the street, Aunt Louise. And it was just one test I did bad on.”

  “…and now this, with the notes. I want you to stop hanging around her. No more visits after school. You come straight home.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “And stay away from her at school, if you know what’s good for you. Don’t let somebody like that drag you down, Fran.”

  “She’s not dragging me down! You don’t understand!”

  “Come straight home after school from now on.”

  “That’s not fair.” Breath heavy, pulse pounding behind my eyes. “Who are you, anyway? You’re not my mother!”

  Running to my room, slamming the door, collapsing onto the bed. Weeping: my life, I was sure, all but over.

  Thus it was that I became a rebel.

  A mild-mannered rebel, to be sure; a quiet rebel. But a rebel all the same. For the first time in my life I realized that I did not necessarily have to follow every edict that came down from these anonymous mother- and father-surrogates; I even questioned the authority of my own parents. Who had they been, to send me here? Was it really my fault? Or—and this was an astonishing, a revolutionary thought—was it theirs? Was there, in fact, nothing wrong with me at all? Was it them?

  I took less care with my appearance, let my room grow sloppy—at least, sloppy by my own standards; it remained rather tidy in comparison with Lucy’s. I began to let some homework assignments slide, not enough to get me in any real trouble, but enough to let the teacher and Aunt Louise and the world know that I would no longer blindly kowtow to their every whim—that I was myself, a person. In any event, the anti-Lucy edict had relatively little practical effect. We were still together in school all day, and on Saturday morning it was easy enough to tell my aunt and uncle, absolutely honestly, that I was going to the library—and then meet Lucy there. I knew they would never bother to check up on me; they rarely went anywhere but the local bar, from which Lucy and I would keep our distance. We even went to her house at times, when her mother wasn’t home, simply by coming around the back way, out of the view of our house, climbing the rear fence and coming in through their back door. The seven p.m. Radio Mystery Theater was never more delicious than in those fugitive days, the two of us hunkered under a blanket, giggling, an unstoppable force aligned against a world that was aligned against us.

  And then it ended.

  I woke to a knocking on my bedroom window. Though it had never happened before, I felt no fear at all: I instantly knew it had to be Lucy, as indeed it was. I pulled open the curtain and lifted the window, the screen dividing us. I glanced at my clock: just past two in the morning. Lucy was crying, something I had never seen her do.

  “We’re moving,” she said, without preamble. “My mom and me.”

  I looked at her, a horrified sinking sensation in my heart. For a long time I just looked at her, at the tears glistening on her face.

  “I’ll come out,” I whispered.

  I slipped on jeans and a T-shirt—in fact it was one of Lucy’s, we had quietly traded a few—and crept quietly out in my bare feet. My aunt and uncle were long asleep. The night was warm, nearly humid, with dark clouds obliterating all but a few stars overhead. I had never seen her like this, had always felt that she was my rock, my support, and yet as we stood there in the darkness I felt stronger than I ever had. I felt important. I fel
t loved. After all, she had come to me.

  “Why?” I whispered. “Shh, Lucy, why? Why are you moving?”

  “My goddamn fucking dad,” she said, her voice shaking wildly.

  “What? Lucy, where is your dad? You’ve never told me.”

  “I’m supposed to be with him,” she said, looking out at the darkness. “That’s what the court said when they got the divorce. But my mom took me. We ran off together.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a pervert, that’s why.”

  I was twelve; I knew nothing of such things. “What? What’s that?”

  “A pervert. He—touches me.”

  “What do you mean, touches you?”

  She flashed angry eyes. “In my privates, stupid.”

  “He…? Why would he do that?”

  “Oh, my God!” She turned away. I knew that in some manner I could not fathom I was failing her. “The court didn’t believe me. We’ve been running from him ever since. We make it a year here, six months there. Nothing ever lasts. My mom somehow gets wind that he’s catching up and then we run again. She’s talking about us going to Mexico.”

  I was utterly unmoored. “I don’t get it. Why does he touch you?”

  “Jesus Christ!” She ran off around the side of the house, toward the street. I followed quickly, my feet tingling with the feel of the spiky grass.

  She looked back at me, her eyes hurt, bewildered; and finally it clicked, fell into place in my mind. I understood what she meant, saw shadowy men in my mind looming over young girls, their fingers stroking, probing. I had heard of such things, but only vaguely, impersonally.

  “Lucy, I’m sorry…I’m sorry I’m such an idiot. I get it now. What you mean. It’s dirty.”

  “Yeah, well.” She inhaled, bringing herself under some control. “I don’t want to go to Mexico,” she said quietly, intensely. “I don’t want to run anymore. I want to be on my own. Fuck Mom and Dad. Just go…somewhere.”