Hi sisters ... here's more from me. But only to fill in until Erin gets over her mountain of work and can rejoin us (hopefully soon!). And please, anyone else who feels like chiming in with her own girlhood, please do.
Here it is ... a musical interlude. The names may be strange to many, but it may take some of you back (think 1949).
Love, Robyn Katie
***
Songs! My head is full of songs I’ve been learning to sing. I never felt this way about songs before.
I am curled up, careless of my skirt, on the seamy worn black-stained oak floor at the dusty old Victrola that’s mounted in what used to be a woodbox for firewood, digging down into my parents’ stack of 78 rpm records. They’re by all sorts of people, pop singers and bands like Glen Gray and the Casa Loma orchestra, Bennie Goodman and so on, but I skip over those. One of my favorites is this album by the Ink Spots. Starting the turntable, I put the heavy arm down in the groove of We Three (My Echo, My Shadow and Me). Then Whispering Grass, and I’ll Never Smile again, working up to my favorite, Java Jive.
I love coffee, I love tea,
I love the java jive and it loves me …
Cab Calloway is another favorite, I already learned Minnie the Moocher, Saint James Infirmary and St. Louis Blues, but even better I like Kicking the Gong Around and I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You. I shuffle through the miscellaneous single records to find my favorite silly song, Fred and Adele Astaire's We Play Hoops.
Mama, she scold, she say Na, na, na,
You mustn’t run over the gentleman with the whiskers,
We play hoops,
In the park all day.
And we write words upon the fence,
Honi soit qui mal y pense,
We play hoops
In the park all day.
But the albums I can’t stop listening to over and over (until Mom makes me stop) are the Folk Songs and Ballads ones by Susan Reed, she’s so pretty in her pictures and has such a beautiful voice, it sounds like love. She is famous, she even got a story in Life Magazine in 1945. We heard her on the radio too, from New York. She plays Irish harp and zither and oh! golly! if I could only sing like her!
I’ve already learned Barbara Allen from her, and Lord Randall, and Greensleeves, plus Seventeen Come Sunday and I Know My Love, it’s Irish.
And still he cries, I love her the best,
But a troubled mind sure can know no rest,
And still he cries, bonnie girls are few,
And if my love leaves me, what will I do?
There are lots more Susan Reed songs I’m planning to learn, Golden Vanity is a long one and I haven’t memorized all the verses yet, also If I Had a Ribbon Bow, I’m Sad and I’m Lonely, Pretty Little Turtle Dove, Jenny Jenkins and Molly Malone. I listen on and on, so absorbed that I don’t realize my leg is going to sleep from being sat on.
She sits and holds her Irish harp on her skirt lap and her smile in the picture is beautiful with lipstick, its beauty is very disturbing, I feel I need to be like that, immediately.
I asked my parents how I could get an Irish harp. But no one seems to know what one is or how to find any. Luckily, though, Mom and Daddy have a friend, Harrison Tyler (she's not a man, despite the name), a tall lean woman, quiet and broody, with darkish hair. Mom and Daddy met her on ski trips together. She plays guitar and sings folksongs like I Gave My Love a Cherry, Go Tell Aunt Rhody, The Foggy Foggy Dew, The Fox, The Blue Tail Fly, even Billy Boy, which my babysitter sang me when I was little! And this one:
Mother I would marry, I long to be a bride,
I long to be with that young man forever by his side,
Forever by his side, oh, how happy I would be,
For I’m young and merry and oh! so weary of my virginity.
It put a startle right through me the first time I heard her sing the word “virginity,” it made me think of things I don’t understand very well. I got the heeby-jeebies and twisted around on my bottom, not that this helped any.
The guitar, though—that I love. Harrison let me hold hers and showed me how to put my fingers on the frets, as they’re called. (I think they call them that because of how I fretted with my fingers sore from trying to push down the strings.) I wanted a guitar in the worst way! I pestered Mom and Daddy till they bought me a guitar for my birthday. It is a Harmony and it cost eighty-five dollars. I will be expected to be the world's most grateful girl for months at the very least.
Harrison told me she learned her songs from Burl Ives records. So I went to Pearlman’s, the music store in Dolestown, and got one of his albums. More songs! I have already copied down On Top of Old Smoky, Foggy Foggy Dew, Lolly Too Dum, Eddystone Light and Old Blue, among others, in a notebook so I can learn to play them.
These songs I am learning are called folk songs. I like that kind best, they seem to suit me so much more perfectly than the pop music off the radio.
To accompany myself I am learning guitar chords—Harrison says that’s the best way to learn to play. But when I had a guitar lesson from the man upstairs over the music store and showed him my chords, he said to go home and learn scales, so I never went back. I'll teach myself.
I met an actual professional folk singer, her name is Jill Barrows. The Welches had her come and entertain at their Christmas party in the big barn.
How enchanted I was to see an actual person playing guitar and singing right in front of me! She was so nice too, she even came to our house afterwards, gave me all sorts of tips, told me I ought to put nylon strings on the guitar instead of steel, and encouraged me in every way. She also sent me a letter afterward from New York. I'm overwhelmed; I didn’t know a perfect stranger could be so kind and generous and such a good friend.
So now, this morning, in my room with the door closed, I fold myself around the guitar, holding it to my skinny chest, trying valiantly not to let it slip away on my skirt’s skiddy Miracle Fabric. The guitar is huger than the ukulele and mandolin I was trying to play. My fingers hurt but I can’t bear to stop. I play hour after hour. I’m getting better, I can play and sing eighteen of the thirty-one songs in my notebook, and I’m learning more every day.
Now I know what I want to be when I grow up. A folk singer. Just like Jill.
Our "Girl Autobiographies"
Moderators: KimberlyS, CathyAnn
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Erin L
- Miss Emerald Goddess
- Posts: 244
- Joined: Thu Oct 30, 2008 11:38 am
- Location: Queens, NY
In the summer of 1966, we moved to a small village where my mother and father had both grown up in the 1940s. It was only three miles from where I had called home for my first 13 years, but in many ways, it was light years away. We had the upstairs apartment in a large two family house, and the owners, Tony and Rosa, and their 15 year-old daughter, Janice, lived downstairs; they would become very good friends.
I have long believed that moving that year was the single worst decision my parents ever made regarding me, and not only because we became part of the infamous “white flight” (that just made it worse): at 13, I was painfully vulnerable and insecure, and the last thing I needed was to move into a new town and a new school, where everyone had found their comfort zone but me. For many reasons, I have always regarded the school year of 1966-67 as the worst of my life, although, as you will see, the next two gave it a run for its money.
This section is the only one in which I present Erin in a superior light to what I actually went through. My reasons for doing so are embedded in the story, and in looking back on it, I am comfortable with the assumption
Thank you all for your continued support. Love ya Robyn!
The uniforms at the new school were a real letdown compared to what we’d worn the year before. The boys wore no blazer, and they wore a white shirt with the worst tie I ever saw – a light blue tie with the letters of the school emblazoned in white down the front. We girls wore a plain white blouse and a blue plaid skirt; I felt like I was back in sixth grade.
There was one saving grace – eighth grade girls had the option of wearing knee socks or stockings. Mom groaned when we read that, because she felt she could no longer deny me permission to wear stockings to school: how could she say stockings were bad if the nuns said they were okay? I was thrilled when my back-to-school shopping included lots of pairs of stockings.
It felt like a hollow victory, though, as I got ready for school that first morning. I was about to get my period, and felt so bloated and cramped that I had no patience for stockings that first morning. Mom was sympathetic when I showed up at the breakfast table wearing knee socks and struggling to get breakfast down.
By the time I got to the schoolyard, I had no desire at all to be outgoing and sociable, and apparently my new classmates had no desire to give me the benefit of the doubt. Wherever I turned, I could feel the baleful stares boring into me, and with my raging hormones I was in a really rotten mood.
I did find one friendly face. Tom Barrett, who was my cousin’s cousin (his mother was my uncle’s sister-in-law), was in my class. We’ve always gotten along okay, but I guess that peer pressure can be really intense, because he didn’t look all that glad to see me.
When we got upstairs, I found that my teacher, Sr. Clara, was new to the school, as well. She seemed even more nervous than me, and when a few of the boys started cutting up, she landed on them pretty hard. All I could think was, “Nice first day.”
The rest of the week was no better. It didn’t help that I felt miserable most of the time, with cramps and bloating. I was beginning to think each period was going to be worse than the last one, although Mom kept telling me that they would become more regular, which usually made them more bearable.
I was becoming aware of a certain amount of sniggering directed toward me by what I had come to realize was the “in” crowd – a group of both boys and girls who sat atop our class’ social ladder. The queen of the group was a girl named Irina, better known to her friends as Cookie. Virtually every boy in the class was crazy about her, mostly because of her boobs, which were by far the biggest in the entire eighth grade.
Irina was quite aware of the stir she caused, and in fact seemed to do her utmost to encourage it. What was really strange was the fact that she seemed to enjoy a certain notoriety with the girls as well as the boys. It was almost as though her bust made her a legend among the less well-endowed. Wherever she went, she ate up the attention and always made sure everyone knew she was the queen bee.
It didn’t take me long to develop an intense dislike of her. What I objected to most of all was the way she would brazenly tease some of the boys – not the members of the “in” group, but the quieter, shy boys who made the mistake of being caught ogling her. In just that first week, I heard her humiliate three different boys in the schoolyard, and it wasn’t long before she and I were more or less snarling at one another.
By the second week of school, my period had ended and I felt a lot better. I started wearing stockings to school, along with a really cute pair of mary janes – they were coming into fashion for teens and women – with a double t-strap. My sense of fashion didn’t last long, however, because Irina and two other girls showed up that day wearing the exact same style of shoe, and the glances I got from the girls suggested that they regarded me as a pathetic copycat.
I desperately needed someone to talk to about all this, and one afternoon as I was coming in from school, I ran into Janice in the hallway. She was padding around in her nightgown, robe and slippers. She looked awful.
“Oh,” she said with a weak smile when I asked. “I had to stay home because of really bad cramps.”
“Oh, God!” I blurted. “You mean I’m still going to have to deal with them at 15?!”
She laughed heartily at that.
“I doubt it,” she said. “When I was your age, I hardly had any shape at all – flat as a piece of paper. I only got my period last year. It was nothing at first; it’s only been the past couple of months that have been really bad for me.”
I told her what my experiences had been so far, and she said not to worry about it, that everyone was different.
“Hey,” she said. “You want to come in? I’d love the company, and you look like you could use some yourself.”
Remembering how I’d felt the week before, I accepted. Once again, I was struck by her sweetness. She poured me a glass of iced tea, and we went into her room to listen to music and chat.
We talked for a while, and I told her what I had been going through.
“But this nun I have…I don’t know. She’s friendly enough with the girls, and in fact makes it pretty obvious that she dislikes the boys almost on principle. She’s also real demanding of the girls, and she loses patience if we answer in a way she doesn’t expect. And she seems cold to me, personally, and I think it’s because she’s uncomfortable being so new, and so she’s following the crowd in making me an outcast.”
“Eewww!” Janice said.
“It wouldn’t be so bad if I at least had a couple of friends in class. But I don’t, and even my cousin’s cousin doesn’t want to know me.”
Janice was sympathetic, and it felt good to get all that off my chest. She had no advice other than to hang in there and not let it bother me, but I appreciated it. Finally, I thanked her, gave her a hug, and went upstairs.
There was one nun whom I did like a lot, and that was Sr. Joseph, our reading teacher. She was an older nun, but she was quite young at heart. She loved Simon and Garfunkel, and during the year, we actually studied the lyrics of some of their songs as poetry.
I had grown up with my parents listening to folk music, and so I had a natural affinity for this music. I even got my old acoustic guitar out and played it from time to time. I bought the album “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme” and listened to it endlessly, loving songs like “Dangling Conversation”, “At the Zoo” and “For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her”.
Over the Columbus Day holiday, Sr. Joseph gave us an interesting assignment – to write a poem of our own. With no school, the leading clique in the class decided to organize a kind of class outing at the Floral Park Playground, with a trip to a pizza place to follow. Knowing I was not welcome, I stayed home and worked on my poem.
Our class was beginning to experience a certain amount of coupling up. And the leading couple was Irina and the guy who was considered the coolest of the cool, Mark Dillon. He was foul-mouthed and crude, and one of his favorite things to do was wait until one of the quieter boys was ogling Irina, then go over and start to pick a fight with him. She seemed to enjoy this as well.
But the morning after Columbus Day, Mark wasn’t picking a fight with anyone. Instead, he was regaling us with excerpts from the “poem” he claimed he was going to turn in. It was nothing more than a bunch of nonsensical, filthy couplets, such as “I’m gonna get a match, and light it up her ******.” Irina and some of the other girls stood there giggling, much to my disgust.
“Awww!” he said, suddenly turning in my direction. “Look, I’ve offended poor Erin!”
I could feel my blood beginning to boil, but then I caught myself. No, I thought, I am not going to be drawn into this.
“Mark,” I said sweetly, “You don’t matter enough to offend me.”
Just then the bell rang, and we formed up into a line as silence fell. I’d just insulted the leader of the boys, who also was the heartthrob of the girls, and as we marched inside I realized I’d just dug myself in even deeper.
“I just have to get through this year and make it into high school,” I said to myself as we climbed the stairs to our classroom.
Not long after the schoolyard incident, I started taking long walks in the afternoon. When staying at home and playing guitar started to feel too closed in, it felt good to get out. It was a pretty town, when I was honest about it, and under other circumstances, I might have liked it there.
I had turned down a side street almost at random when I saw a familiar figure walking toward me. It was Laura Bartoli, and she was pushing a stroller. Laura was a very pretty girl in a very sweet way. She had fair complexion and straight black hair that fell well below her shoulders; she was not quite as tall as I was, and she was slim, with eyes that were large brown pools.
I had talked a little with her in the schoolyard, but not much. She seemed to be very friendly with Irina, though, which left me very cautious.
“Hi,” I said as we got close to one another. In the stroller was a little girl of about two, with hair not nearly as dark as Laura’s and as curly as Laura’s was straight. But her face was very much like Laura, the resemblance unmistakable.
I hadn’t gotten too many babysitting jobs since moving here, and I missed being with young children. This little angel smiled back at me as I knelt down to say hello.
“And what’s your name, sweetheart?” I asked, and got a giggle in return.
“She’s my niece,” Laura said. “Her name is April.”
“Hi, April!” I said. I got another giggle.
“Wow,” Laura said. “She really likes you. It usually takes her a while to warm up to someone new.”
“Yeah?” I said, talking to April more than Laura. “That true? You take your time?”
She was grinning at me. “She’s adorable!” I said as I stood up. “How old is she?”
“Nineteen months.”
“Well,” I said to April, “You sure are a sweetie!”
“My sister and her husband live in the apartments right by the post office, so she comes by two or three days a week,” Laura said as I stood up. We started walking. “When the weather is nice, I usually take April out. It gives Julie, my sister, a break, and I find I like getting the exercise.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Sometimes I walk over to my grandparents’ house, but usually I just walk for the pleasure of it.”
“Oh, where do your grandparents live? Are they here in town?”
“Uh huh. On Cherry Street, between Hemlock and Bellmore.”
“Oh, wow!” she said with a smile. “Right near me." She told me where she lived. "And Cookie is just down the street from school.”
I frowned automatically at the mention of Cookie. Laura caught it.
“Sorry,” she said. “I guess you and she don’t exactly get along.”
“You could say that.”
“Well,” she said with a sigh, “I don’t understand it.”
“We’re just different, I guess.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean, you just seem to kind of look down on everyone, keep us all at a distance. And now that we’re talking, I can see that you’re a nice person. You have a real knack with kids, and you seem to be a really warm person. I like that.”
“Laura, I didn’t exactly find a welcoming committee here. It’s like everyone was looking for something to jump on the minute I showed up.”
She thought about that for a minute.
“I just don’t think you gave anyone a chance, that’s all. I know I wanted to say something to you that first day, but you just had the most forbidding look on your face. Everything about you seemed to say, ‘go away’.”
I groaned.
“That whole first week, I had my period, and it was terrible. I felt awful.”
She stopped and stared at me.
“Really?! Oh, Erin, I’m so sorry. I haven’t had my first one, yet, but Julie says it should be any day. And I remember what Cookie went through last year when she had hers; even now, she still has some bad months. I guess that was really bad timing.”
I agreed with that. Then I asked a question that had been gnawing at me.
“What kind of name is ‘Cookie’, anyway?”
“It’s just a pet name her mom gave her when she was little. A few kids from our class live on her block – Don lives right next door, and Joe lives across the street. When they all played together when they were little, Cookie’s mom would always call her to come in using that name, and the kids picked up on it and it just stuck. Lately, it’s become a way for her to let you know you’re her friend, if you can call her that.”
“Status,” I said darkly. Laura looked really upset.
“You don’t understand,” she said softly.
“I guess I don’t. You’re a really nice girl, Laura. You’ve got a really sweet personality, you’re thoughtful, and I can see how you are with April. I just don’t see you and Cookie in the same circle.”
“You don’t understand. There’s a side of her you haven’t seen.”
“Try me.”
Laura had a slight speech impediment, what I would later in life learn was called a lateral lisp. It had gotten a lot better as she had gotten older, but as a young child, it had been really bad. And some of the kids in school had called her names. By third grade, the teasing had reached intolerable levels, as some of the boys would chase her around the schoolyard yelling and spraying spittle. Her teacher had seen this and had warned the entire class not to tease Laura any more, or there would be serious punishments meted out. The teasing only got worse, only it now took place on her way home from school.
One morning, right after the class had gotten settled in, the teacher came in and called out the names of nine boys, all of whom had been brutally teasing and harassing Laura. She made them stand at their places and proceeded to recite everything they had done to Laura since the teacher had given her warning. One boy, Gerry, who was still in the class, was at the time the ringleader, a bully and the most defiant.
“Says who?” he shrugged. He then turned and glared at anyone who looked like they might say something. The whole class sat silently. Then Cookie stood up and walked to the front of the room and turned and faced them all.
“I saw it, and it was disgusting!” she said. “Everything Sister said you did, you did, and I know because I’m the one who told her. And if any of you ever bother Laura again, I’ll tell Sister again and you’ll get expelled. Now, go ahead, Gerry, and tell everyone how you’re going to beat me up after school!”
Gerry got suspended from school for a week, the other boys for two days, and no one ever bothered Laura again. Laura was brushing away tears as she finished the story. So was I.
“Wow,” was all I could say.
“That’s kind of how I feel about it,” she said with a smile. “So, you see why I’m so loyal to Cookie. And I think if you get to know her better, you would like her, too. Besides, I think if you come to school with a fresh perspective, maybe the others will have one, too. They really don’t understand why you’ve been so hostile, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.”
I thought about that.
“Maybe,” I said. “Why don’t we just take things a day at a time? Right now, I’m just glad that you and I can be friends.”
The next day, when I got to school, Laura just smiled and said hi, and I did the same. We chatted a little. A couple of other girls came by, and they seemed friendly enough; Cookie came over, and I just said, “Hi.”
“Hi.”
I watched her as she chatted with the other girls, and as she flirted with the boys. Flirting was an instinct with her, and over time I became convinced that she often wasn’t even aware she was doing it. I also noticed how the boys couldn’t seem to help staring at her bust; well, I could kind of sympathize with that, since I’d had something of the same experience in seventh grade, although nothing like Cookie.
Suddenly, Sr. Clara appeared, and none-too-gently yanked Cookie off the line.
“Uh oh,” said Cathy, one of the other girls. “I think I know what that’s about.”
“I told her not to wear makeup to school,” Laura sighed. “But she wouldn’t listen.”
As I thought about it, I realized that something about her had been different. She’d been wearing just a little lipstick and blush, and maybe some mascara. When she came back to the line, it had all been washed off.
“Oh, well,” I said. “Nice try.”
At first, she wasn’t sure how to take it. Was I making fun of her? But then I guess she saw my expression.
“You think so?” she asked.
“Yeah. Your eyes might not be the feature the boys focus on, but they’re your best.”
It was true. Cookie had really big, blue eyes that were very pretty. They twinkled a little now.
“Thanks,” she said.
Just then the bell rang, cutting off any further conversation. But we picked it up at recess, when Cookie joined Laura and me to chat.
“That woman’s a witch,” Cookie snarled. “She told me that I could wash it off this time, but if I ever wore makeup to school again, she’d be the one to wash it off, and she’d probably be sloppy and smear it all over my face, and I’d have to sit there like that all day.”
“Don’t push it, Cookie,” Laura said. The pleading in her voice was obvious, and Cookie looked annoyed. Then Laura surprised me. “What do you think, Erin?”
Cookie turned to look at me, and it wasn’t quite a glare. She clearly hadn’t made up her mind about me, and I couldn’t blame her for that.
“I’m not sure you really want my opinion,” I said. We looked into each other’s eyes, and I could see the defiance in hers. This was about more than just makeup, I knew that.
“You think Laura’s right.”
It was a statement, not a question. I nodded toward one of the boys, who’d been battling with Sr. Clara since the school year had started, and losing every round.
“I think you need to be smart about this, and don’t do it the way Ricky’s been doing it.”
Laura looked at me in alarm.
“I think Laura is right about not wearing makeup to school or in school, where she can take action that humiliates you. That’s the way Ricky would do it, and look how happy he is!”
“So, that’s it,” Cookie said.
“Not necessarily. Let me ask you something – does your mom know you wear makeup?”
“Sure. She thinks girls our age should wear makeup, and learn to use it properly. She considers it a normal part of growing up.”
I could see Laura nodding, as if to assure me it was true. I was glad Cookie didn’t see that.
“Well, then, the thing to do is to come out of school at dismissal, walk just beyond the school’s property, and coolly and calmly do your makeup, using your compact. Then, Sr. Psycho can fulminate all she wants, but she can’t do anything about it, least of all smear it all over your face because when you’re in school, you’ll never be wearing any.”
Laura looked doubtful, but Cookie’s eyes lit up.
“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I still get cheated out of wearing it in school…”
“But you can’t win that one,” I said. “Unfortunately, she makes the rules. You have to let her know that her rules have no effect on you as a person.”
“Thanks, Erin. Really. I was wrong about you, and I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay, Cookie. I was wrong about you, too.”
That afternoon, we came out of school, and while Sr. Regina stood on the front steps with her hands on her hips, watching the crowds of children disperse, Cookie walked to the edge of school property and took one step past it, calmly handed me her books, opened her shoulder bag, took out a compact and lipstick, and very slowly turned her lips a bright pink. I could see Sr. Regina watching and fuming.
“Why, thank you, Erin,” Cookie said as I gave her back her books.
“Oh, it was my pleasure, Cookie,” I replied, as the three of us giggled all the way down to Cookie’s house. Sister glared at us hard the next day in school, but never did anything else.
Cookie had a number of pieces of advice to offer me, but none were better than when she urged me to join in with the class for another holiday outing, this one set for Veteran’s Day. The boys organized a basketball game, and we cheered them on. Then we went over to a pizza place and had a little party.
Mark and Cookie seemed to be an item, and he certainly acted like she was his girlfriend, but she managed to remain aloof enough so that the rest of the boys were not so sure. As we sat at a large table in the back, the boys mostly stayed together and so did we girls. But the air was soon crackling with flirting between the two groups.
Tom Barrett was suddenly more friendly, although he clearly was uncomfortable at any mention of a family connection. At first I was puzzled by it, but as we sat in the pizza parlour on that chilly, gray afternoon, I realized why. He was, in his own rather shy way, flirting with me.
I came home from that outing feeling really good. I still missed Terri and my other friends, but I didn’t feel so desperately alone and at odds with everyone. And I was coming to terms with the fact that my continued membership in the drum corps wasn’t really possible. I’d been missing more and more rehearsals because it was hard for me to get there.
Dad was sitting in his easy chair in the living room when I came home, which was strange because I knew he’d gone to work that morning, and it was only a little after three in the afternoon. He had kind of a stunned look on his face, and he was, as usual, drinking a beer. Usually, as he finished one can and opened another, he disposed of the empties, but now the end table was cluttered with three or four empty cans.
Mom was in the kitchen, making dinner, as she’d had the day off.
“Dad lost his job,” she said. “They sold the hotel, and the new owner wants to bring in someone new.”
She didn’t sound any happier than I felt, so I didn’t ask any of the questions that were bothering me. The new owners were a major hotel chain, and they’d been in place for some time. I didn’t have to ask; we both knew pretty much what had happened.
Still, it was a shock. Things had seemed to be going along well for us. Tony downstairs had invited Dad to join the Knights of Columbus, and he’d done it. He’d had to go back to the church in order to do it, and had gone to confession and mass for the first time in my memory.
Then again, being a member of the K of C meant privileges at the clubhouse, which was within walking distance from our house. Among those privileges were bar privileges, and drinking was certainly a normal part of the social interaction.
The next few weeks were tense around the house as he looked for work, but I sensed something else in the air, as well. One Friday afternoon, when I came home from school, Dad was waiting for me. He wanted to talk to me, and he sat me down at the dining room table, which was a pleasant change from his usual habit over the years of dragging me to a bar any time he wanted to talk to me.
“Erin, there is something I have to tell you,” he said. “I’m an alcoholic.”
He paused to let the impact sink in.
“I don’t know if you knew that, or not, but I thought I should tell you.”
“Dad, I’ve known for a few years that you drank too much. But I didn’t know if you were actually an alcoholic.”
“Anyone who has to drink is an alcoholic,” he said. It was only then that I noticed he was shaking slightly. “The thing is, they have to admit it. I’ve admitted it. I haven’t been very fair to you and to Mom, and I have to make changes now.
“I’ve tried to quit drinking before, a couple of years ago, when Mom and I used to go out every Thursday night. We were going to AA meetings. Mom has joined a group called Al-Anon, and you might very well want to join Al-a-Teen.”
He went on to tell me about how he had started drinking, how it had been somehow connected to him going for an army physical when he tried to enlist near the end of World War II. He’d been found to have a mild form of gyneconmastia, a disorder in men in which they begin to develop breasts. They hadn’t rejected him because of that, per se, but rather because of how violently he’d reacted when they’d mentioned it.
“I went right to a bar on Whitehall Street and announced that I’d just been accepted, and I got drunk,” he said.
So now, he was making a concerted effort to quit drinking, and he’d been dry for a couple of days. He was starting to go through withdrawal, much as a drug addict would. He was drinking endless amounts of fruit juices, and smoking almost constantly. In the ensuing days, he would sit for hours in his chair in the living room, wrapped in a blanket as he fought the chills and delirium tremors.
“What do you need me to do?” I asked.
“Two things,” he said as he was wracked by sudden shivering. “Please don’t play your electric guitar for a while, or any loud music; I can’t take any loud noises, especially sudden ones. And please don’t hate me.”
“I don’t hate you, Dad. I love you, and I know you’re going to make it.”
And then, as if to emphasize his point about sudden noises, someone outside set off a firecracker, and started so badly he almost came completely out of his seat.
I tried to return to normalcy, but that had just gone out of style in our house. I waited until he had settled back into his seat in the living room, and then called Laura.
“What’s wrong?” she asked as soon as she heard my voice.
“I…I need to be with a friend tonight,” I said. “Can we get together? Just for a little while.”
I heard muffled voices as she covered the mouthpiece of the phone.
“Okay,” she said. “Listen very carefully, and do exactly as I say. When you get off the phone, go pack an overnight bag. Then call your mom and tell her you are staying at my house tonight, and if she needs it, give her my number and have her talk to my mom. Then get your jacket on, the pink one with the fake white fur collar that I like so much, and take the overnight bag and go downstairs, where Julie and I will be waiting.”
“Thanks,” I said, blinking back tears. I hung up and did exactly what she said. I told Mom that Dad had told me, and she understood everything else.
“But honey,” she said. “We still need to talk.”
“I know, Mom. It’s just that…well…”
“I know, honey. You need time to digest everything.”
“Yeah.”
I told Dad I’d been invited to stay with a friend, and he nodded and said okay, but I had the feeling that if I’d said I was going to join the Communist Party, he’d have nodded and said okay. When I opened the door, I saw Julie’s big black Chrysler, with Laura in the front seat and April in a car seat in the back.
“Thanks so much!” I said as I got in. Then I turned to April, who was giving me one of her big smiles. “Hi, cutie!” I said.
“We thought she might cheer you up,” Laura said.
“Okay, girls,” Julie said. “When we get to the house, do you want to talk first or have pizza first?”
Laura looked at me, and I gestured back to her. “I think quick talk,” she said. “Then pizza, then long, long talk.”
“Thanks,” was all I could say before I started to cry. I didn’t cry long or hard, and it wasn’t because I was so upset about my dad. Laura’s family hardly knew me, and yet they’d been ready to help at a moment’s notice. I was so touched!
Laura had another surprise in store for me. Waiting in the Bartoli kitchen when we arrived was Cookie. She immediately came to me and gave me a hug.
“I have a cousin who’s a hood,” she said. “Just tell me who you want to have beaten up.”
In spite of everything, I laughed, although I was kind of crying, too. Cookie hugged me again.
“Hey!” she said. “This isn’t the Erin I know. What’s the deal?”
“My father just told me he’s an alcoholic,” I said. I then realized that Julie and Mrs. Bartoli were right there, and maybe I should have waited until the three of us were alone. But, having blurted it out, I decided to continue. “I mean, I’ve known for a while that he had some kind of drinking problem, but there’s just something about him telling me that…I don’t know…made it like a disease or something.”
“It is a disease,” Mrs. Bartoli said. “And a very serious one. He’s going to need a lot of help, and even then, it’s a real uphill battle. I had an uncle who was an alcoholic, and he struggled every day of his life to stay sober.”
I nodded.
“My dad told me that there is no such thing as a cured alcoholic, only one in recovery. It’s like every day you’re being tested, and every day, you can fail.”
“All true, Erin,” she said. “But there’s one very important thing you have to remember. There isn’t anything you can do for him, other than to make him as comfortable as possible. You can’t make him stronger, and you can’t make him want to succeed. So, you must not waste any of your life trying – you must live your life and do everything you can do. You must take care of yourself.”
We were all taken aback by her emotion, and she could see that, and she smiled at it.
“You’re a very, very nice girl, Erin, and there may well be some very rough seas ahead for you. I just want you to know that you have friends who care.”
I hugged her, then Laura, then Cookie again. Then we had a pizza party, after which Julie helped us all do our nails. We talked endlessly about cosmetics and styles, and I was surprised that Laura’s mom seemed to have relented on her prohibition about makeup, but then realized that Cookie probably had something to do with it.
We sat up and watched a late movie, then repaired to Laura’s room where two sleeping bags were laid out on the floor.
“Sorry about the Bohemian conditions,” Laura’s mom said. “But we only have a couple of sleeping bags, so this seemed like the best solution.”
We assured her it was fine. She closed the door and left, and we got into our pajamas. Cookie was completely uninhibited getting undressed, and I had my first up-close look that every boy in the eighth grade would have killed to have.
“Ta da!” sang out Cookie as she pulled her bra away, and Laura and I both laughed. “Hey,” Cookie said as I took off my bra and slipped into a nightshirt, “Someone else isn’t too far behind me.”
I giggled, but she was wrong. I could barely fill a B cup, but she was already outgrowing a C.
Then the serious talk started. Laura started brushing her long, straight hair, but then Cookie took over, taking her time, not letting the talk distract her from the brushing or vice versa. When she had finished, Laura returned the favor, but then I took over for her.
Cookie’s hair was about shoulder length, and just as straight as Laura’s. It was kind of a dirty blonde and framed her face nicely. I found brushing her hair made me feel closer to her.
As we pampered one another, I found myself talking a lot, telling them of life in Queens, and of our trip to Ireland, and of the drum corps and the band I’d been in. I even told them about John and my first kiss. Cookie turned around, forcing me to stop brushing her hair.
“You were ten?!” she gasped. “And he was thirteen? Geez, I really did misjudge you. You are still a virgin, aren’t you?”
“Cookie!” Laura gasped.
“Well, we might as well know what’s what,” she said.
“Yes, Cookie, dear, I am still a virgin. Anything else you want to know?”
“Erin!” Laura gasped. Cookie smiled.
“Anything you want to tell me,” she said. Then, more thoughtfully, “Or ask.”
“Well,” I said after thinking about it, “I did have a boyfriend last year, a year older than me. We played in a band together…”
“That drum corps thing you told us about?” Cookie asked.
“Um, no. It was actually a rock band. Well, kind of a blues and rock band. We…”
“What were you, the lead singer?” Cookie asked with sudden interest.
“On some songs, yeah. But mainly I played guitar.”
“Whoa!” she said. “You mean, you play guitar?! Like John Lennon and Keith Richards?!”
“Yeah, I do.”
“And why are we just finding this out now?” Laura asked.
“Because when I first got here, I didn’t want to be, like, ‘okay, I’m a rock musician so you have to accept me’. And then we became really good friends, and I didn’t want you to think I’d been like holding out on you.”
“Okay,” Cookie said, suddenly grinning mischievously. “We’ll forgive you, on one condition: you have to tell us how far you went with your musician/boyfriend.”
I have long believed that moving that year was the single worst decision my parents ever made regarding me, and not only because we became part of the infamous “white flight” (that just made it worse): at 13, I was painfully vulnerable and insecure, and the last thing I needed was to move into a new town and a new school, where everyone had found their comfort zone but me. For many reasons, I have always regarded the school year of 1966-67 as the worst of my life, although, as you will see, the next two gave it a run for its money.
This section is the only one in which I present Erin in a superior light to what I actually went through. My reasons for doing so are embedded in the story, and in looking back on it, I am comfortable with the assumption
Thank you all for your continued support. Love ya Robyn!
The uniforms at the new school were a real letdown compared to what we’d worn the year before. The boys wore no blazer, and they wore a white shirt with the worst tie I ever saw – a light blue tie with the letters of the school emblazoned in white down the front. We girls wore a plain white blouse and a blue plaid skirt; I felt like I was back in sixth grade.
There was one saving grace – eighth grade girls had the option of wearing knee socks or stockings. Mom groaned when we read that, because she felt she could no longer deny me permission to wear stockings to school: how could she say stockings were bad if the nuns said they were okay? I was thrilled when my back-to-school shopping included lots of pairs of stockings.
It felt like a hollow victory, though, as I got ready for school that first morning. I was about to get my period, and felt so bloated and cramped that I had no patience for stockings that first morning. Mom was sympathetic when I showed up at the breakfast table wearing knee socks and struggling to get breakfast down.
By the time I got to the schoolyard, I had no desire at all to be outgoing and sociable, and apparently my new classmates had no desire to give me the benefit of the doubt. Wherever I turned, I could feel the baleful stares boring into me, and with my raging hormones I was in a really rotten mood.
I did find one friendly face. Tom Barrett, who was my cousin’s cousin (his mother was my uncle’s sister-in-law), was in my class. We’ve always gotten along okay, but I guess that peer pressure can be really intense, because he didn’t look all that glad to see me.
When we got upstairs, I found that my teacher, Sr. Clara, was new to the school, as well. She seemed even more nervous than me, and when a few of the boys started cutting up, she landed on them pretty hard. All I could think was, “Nice first day.”
The rest of the week was no better. It didn’t help that I felt miserable most of the time, with cramps and bloating. I was beginning to think each period was going to be worse than the last one, although Mom kept telling me that they would become more regular, which usually made them more bearable.
I was becoming aware of a certain amount of sniggering directed toward me by what I had come to realize was the “in” crowd – a group of both boys and girls who sat atop our class’ social ladder. The queen of the group was a girl named Irina, better known to her friends as Cookie. Virtually every boy in the class was crazy about her, mostly because of her boobs, which were by far the biggest in the entire eighth grade.
Irina was quite aware of the stir she caused, and in fact seemed to do her utmost to encourage it. What was really strange was the fact that she seemed to enjoy a certain notoriety with the girls as well as the boys. It was almost as though her bust made her a legend among the less well-endowed. Wherever she went, she ate up the attention and always made sure everyone knew she was the queen bee.
It didn’t take me long to develop an intense dislike of her. What I objected to most of all was the way she would brazenly tease some of the boys – not the members of the “in” group, but the quieter, shy boys who made the mistake of being caught ogling her. In just that first week, I heard her humiliate three different boys in the schoolyard, and it wasn’t long before she and I were more or less snarling at one another.
By the second week of school, my period had ended and I felt a lot better. I started wearing stockings to school, along with a really cute pair of mary janes – they were coming into fashion for teens and women – with a double t-strap. My sense of fashion didn’t last long, however, because Irina and two other girls showed up that day wearing the exact same style of shoe, and the glances I got from the girls suggested that they regarded me as a pathetic copycat.
I desperately needed someone to talk to about all this, and one afternoon as I was coming in from school, I ran into Janice in the hallway. She was padding around in her nightgown, robe and slippers. She looked awful.
“Oh,” she said with a weak smile when I asked. “I had to stay home because of really bad cramps.”
“Oh, God!” I blurted. “You mean I’m still going to have to deal with them at 15?!”
She laughed heartily at that.
“I doubt it,” she said. “When I was your age, I hardly had any shape at all – flat as a piece of paper. I only got my period last year. It was nothing at first; it’s only been the past couple of months that have been really bad for me.”
I told her what my experiences had been so far, and she said not to worry about it, that everyone was different.
“Hey,” she said. “You want to come in? I’d love the company, and you look like you could use some yourself.”
Remembering how I’d felt the week before, I accepted. Once again, I was struck by her sweetness. She poured me a glass of iced tea, and we went into her room to listen to music and chat.
We talked for a while, and I told her what I had been going through.
“But this nun I have…I don’t know. She’s friendly enough with the girls, and in fact makes it pretty obvious that she dislikes the boys almost on principle. She’s also real demanding of the girls, and she loses patience if we answer in a way she doesn’t expect. And she seems cold to me, personally, and I think it’s because she’s uncomfortable being so new, and so she’s following the crowd in making me an outcast.”
“Eewww!” Janice said.
“It wouldn’t be so bad if I at least had a couple of friends in class. But I don’t, and even my cousin’s cousin doesn’t want to know me.”
Janice was sympathetic, and it felt good to get all that off my chest. She had no advice other than to hang in there and not let it bother me, but I appreciated it. Finally, I thanked her, gave her a hug, and went upstairs.
There was one nun whom I did like a lot, and that was Sr. Joseph, our reading teacher. She was an older nun, but she was quite young at heart. She loved Simon and Garfunkel, and during the year, we actually studied the lyrics of some of their songs as poetry.
I had grown up with my parents listening to folk music, and so I had a natural affinity for this music. I even got my old acoustic guitar out and played it from time to time. I bought the album “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme” and listened to it endlessly, loving songs like “Dangling Conversation”, “At the Zoo” and “For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her”.
Over the Columbus Day holiday, Sr. Joseph gave us an interesting assignment – to write a poem of our own. With no school, the leading clique in the class decided to organize a kind of class outing at the Floral Park Playground, with a trip to a pizza place to follow. Knowing I was not welcome, I stayed home and worked on my poem.
Our class was beginning to experience a certain amount of coupling up. And the leading couple was Irina and the guy who was considered the coolest of the cool, Mark Dillon. He was foul-mouthed and crude, and one of his favorite things to do was wait until one of the quieter boys was ogling Irina, then go over and start to pick a fight with him. She seemed to enjoy this as well.
But the morning after Columbus Day, Mark wasn’t picking a fight with anyone. Instead, he was regaling us with excerpts from the “poem” he claimed he was going to turn in. It was nothing more than a bunch of nonsensical, filthy couplets, such as “I’m gonna get a match, and light it up her ******.” Irina and some of the other girls stood there giggling, much to my disgust.
“Awww!” he said, suddenly turning in my direction. “Look, I’ve offended poor Erin!”
I could feel my blood beginning to boil, but then I caught myself. No, I thought, I am not going to be drawn into this.
“Mark,” I said sweetly, “You don’t matter enough to offend me.”
Just then the bell rang, and we formed up into a line as silence fell. I’d just insulted the leader of the boys, who also was the heartthrob of the girls, and as we marched inside I realized I’d just dug myself in even deeper.
“I just have to get through this year and make it into high school,” I said to myself as we climbed the stairs to our classroom.
Not long after the schoolyard incident, I started taking long walks in the afternoon. When staying at home and playing guitar started to feel too closed in, it felt good to get out. It was a pretty town, when I was honest about it, and under other circumstances, I might have liked it there.
I had turned down a side street almost at random when I saw a familiar figure walking toward me. It was Laura Bartoli, and she was pushing a stroller. Laura was a very pretty girl in a very sweet way. She had fair complexion and straight black hair that fell well below her shoulders; she was not quite as tall as I was, and she was slim, with eyes that were large brown pools.
I had talked a little with her in the schoolyard, but not much. She seemed to be very friendly with Irina, though, which left me very cautious.
“Hi,” I said as we got close to one another. In the stroller was a little girl of about two, with hair not nearly as dark as Laura’s and as curly as Laura’s was straight. But her face was very much like Laura, the resemblance unmistakable.
I hadn’t gotten too many babysitting jobs since moving here, and I missed being with young children. This little angel smiled back at me as I knelt down to say hello.
“And what’s your name, sweetheart?” I asked, and got a giggle in return.
“She’s my niece,” Laura said. “Her name is April.”
“Hi, April!” I said. I got another giggle.
“Wow,” Laura said. “She really likes you. It usually takes her a while to warm up to someone new.”
“Yeah?” I said, talking to April more than Laura. “That true? You take your time?”
She was grinning at me. “She’s adorable!” I said as I stood up. “How old is she?”
“Nineteen months.”
“Well,” I said to April, “You sure are a sweetie!”
“My sister and her husband live in the apartments right by the post office, so she comes by two or three days a week,” Laura said as I stood up. We started walking. “When the weather is nice, I usually take April out. It gives Julie, my sister, a break, and I find I like getting the exercise.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Sometimes I walk over to my grandparents’ house, but usually I just walk for the pleasure of it.”
“Oh, where do your grandparents live? Are they here in town?”
“Uh huh. On Cherry Street, between Hemlock and Bellmore.”
“Oh, wow!” she said with a smile. “Right near me." She told me where she lived. "And Cookie is just down the street from school.”
I frowned automatically at the mention of Cookie. Laura caught it.
“Sorry,” she said. “I guess you and she don’t exactly get along.”
“You could say that.”
“Well,” she said with a sigh, “I don’t understand it.”
“We’re just different, I guess.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean, you just seem to kind of look down on everyone, keep us all at a distance. And now that we’re talking, I can see that you’re a nice person. You have a real knack with kids, and you seem to be a really warm person. I like that.”
“Laura, I didn’t exactly find a welcoming committee here. It’s like everyone was looking for something to jump on the minute I showed up.”
She thought about that for a minute.
“I just don’t think you gave anyone a chance, that’s all. I know I wanted to say something to you that first day, but you just had the most forbidding look on your face. Everything about you seemed to say, ‘go away’.”
I groaned.
“That whole first week, I had my period, and it was terrible. I felt awful.”
She stopped and stared at me.
“Really?! Oh, Erin, I’m so sorry. I haven’t had my first one, yet, but Julie says it should be any day. And I remember what Cookie went through last year when she had hers; even now, she still has some bad months. I guess that was really bad timing.”
I agreed with that. Then I asked a question that had been gnawing at me.
“What kind of name is ‘Cookie’, anyway?”
“It’s just a pet name her mom gave her when she was little. A few kids from our class live on her block – Don lives right next door, and Joe lives across the street. When they all played together when they were little, Cookie’s mom would always call her to come in using that name, and the kids picked up on it and it just stuck. Lately, it’s become a way for her to let you know you’re her friend, if you can call her that.”
“Status,” I said darkly. Laura looked really upset.
“You don’t understand,” she said softly.
“I guess I don’t. You’re a really nice girl, Laura. You’ve got a really sweet personality, you’re thoughtful, and I can see how you are with April. I just don’t see you and Cookie in the same circle.”
“You don’t understand. There’s a side of her you haven’t seen.”
“Try me.”
Laura had a slight speech impediment, what I would later in life learn was called a lateral lisp. It had gotten a lot better as she had gotten older, but as a young child, it had been really bad. And some of the kids in school had called her names. By third grade, the teasing had reached intolerable levels, as some of the boys would chase her around the schoolyard yelling and spraying spittle. Her teacher had seen this and had warned the entire class not to tease Laura any more, or there would be serious punishments meted out. The teasing only got worse, only it now took place on her way home from school.
One morning, right after the class had gotten settled in, the teacher came in and called out the names of nine boys, all of whom had been brutally teasing and harassing Laura. She made them stand at their places and proceeded to recite everything they had done to Laura since the teacher had given her warning. One boy, Gerry, who was still in the class, was at the time the ringleader, a bully and the most defiant.
“Says who?” he shrugged. He then turned and glared at anyone who looked like they might say something. The whole class sat silently. Then Cookie stood up and walked to the front of the room and turned and faced them all.
“I saw it, and it was disgusting!” she said. “Everything Sister said you did, you did, and I know because I’m the one who told her. And if any of you ever bother Laura again, I’ll tell Sister again and you’ll get expelled. Now, go ahead, Gerry, and tell everyone how you’re going to beat me up after school!”
Gerry got suspended from school for a week, the other boys for two days, and no one ever bothered Laura again. Laura was brushing away tears as she finished the story. So was I.
“Wow,” was all I could say.
“That’s kind of how I feel about it,” she said with a smile. “So, you see why I’m so loyal to Cookie. And I think if you get to know her better, you would like her, too. Besides, I think if you come to school with a fresh perspective, maybe the others will have one, too. They really don’t understand why you’ve been so hostile, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.”
I thought about that.
“Maybe,” I said. “Why don’t we just take things a day at a time? Right now, I’m just glad that you and I can be friends.”
The next day, when I got to school, Laura just smiled and said hi, and I did the same. We chatted a little. A couple of other girls came by, and they seemed friendly enough; Cookie came over, and I just said, “Hi.”
“Hi.”
I watched her as she chatted with the other girls, and as she flirted with the boys. Flirting was an instinct with her, and over time I became convinced that she often wasn’t even aware she was doing it. I also noticed how the boys couldn’t seem to help staring at her bust; well, I could kind of sympathize with that, since I’d had something of the same experience in seventh grade, although nothing like Cookie.
Suddenly, Sr. Clara appeared, and none-too-gently yanked Cookie off the line.
“Uh oh,” said Cathy, one of the other girls. “I think I know what that’s about.”
“I told her not to wear makeup to school,” Laura sighed. “But she wouldn’t listen.”
As I thought about it, I realized that something about her had been different. She’d been wearing just a little lipstick and blush, and maybe some mascara. When she came back to the line, it had all been washed off.
“Oh, well,” I said. “Nice try.”
At first, she wasn’t sure how to take it. Was I making fun of her? But then I guess she saw my expression.
“You think so?” she asked.
“Yeah. Your eyes might not be the feature the boys focus on, but they’re your best.”
It was true. Cookie had really big, blue eyes that were very pretty. They twinkled a little now.
“Thanks,” she said.
Just then the bell rang, cutting off any further conversation. But we picked it up at recess, when Cookie joined Laura and me to chat.
“That woman’s a witch,” Cookie snarled. “She told me that I could wash it off this time, but if I ever wore makeup to school again, she’d be the one to wash it off, and she’d probably be sloppy and smear it all over my face, and I’d have to sit there like that all day.”
“Don’t push it, Cookie,” Laura said. The pleading in her voice was obvious, and Cookie looked annoyed. Then Laura surprised me. “What do you think, Erin?”
Cookie turned to look at me, and it wasn’t quite a glare. She clearly hadn’t made up her mind about me, and I couldn’t blame her for that.
“I’m not sure you really want my opinion,” I said. We looked into each other’s eyes, and I could see the defiance in hers. This was about more than just makeup, I knew that.
“You think Laura’s right.”
It was a statement, not a question. I nodded toward one of the boys, who’d been battling with Sr. Clara since the school year had started, and losing every round.
“I think you need to be smart about this, and don’t do it the way Ricky’s been doing it.”
Laura looked at me in alarm.
“I think Laura is right about not wearing makeup to school or in school, where she can take action that humiliates you. That’s the way Ricky would do it, and look how happy he is!”
“So, that’s it,” Cookie said.
“Not necessarily. Let me ask you something – does your mom know you wear makeup?”
“Sure. She thinks girls our age should wear makeup, and learn to use it properly. She considers it a normal part of growing up.”
I could see Laura nodding, as if to assure me it was true. I was glad Cookie didn’t see that.
“Well, then, the thing to do is to come out of school at dismissal, walk just beyond the school’s property, and coolly and calmly do your makeup, using your compact. Then, Sr. Psycho can fulminate all she wants, but she can’t do anything about it, least of all smear it all over your face because when you’re in school, you’ll never be wearing any.”
Laura looked doubtful, but Cookie’s eyes lit up.
“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I still get cheated out of wearing it in school…”
“But you can’t win that one,” I said. “Unfortunately, she makes the rules. You have to let her know that her rules have no effect on you as a person.”
“Thanks, Erin. Really. I was wrong about you, and I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay, Cookie. I was wrong about you, too.”
That afternoon, we came out of school, and while Sr. Regina stood on the front steps with her hands on her hips, watching the crowds of children disperse, Cookie walked to the edge of school property and took one step past it, calmly handed me her books, opened her shoulder bag, took out a compact and lipstick, and very slowly turned her lips a bright pink. I could see Sr. Regina watching and fuming.
“Why, thank you, Erin,” Cookie said as I gave her back her books.
“Oh, it was my pleasure, Cookie,” I replied, as the three of us giggled all the way down to Cookie’s house. Sister glared at us hard the next day in school, but never did anything else.
Cookie had a number of pieces of advice to offer me, but none were better than when she urged me to join in with the class for another holiday outing, this one set for Veteran’s Day. The boys organized a basketball game, and we cheered them on. Then we went over to a pizza place and had a little party.
Mark and Cookie seemed to be an item, and he certainly acted like she was his girlfriend, but she managed to remain aloof enough so that the rest of the boys were not so sure. As we sat at a large table in the back, the boys mostly stayed together and so did we girls. But the air was soon crackling with flirting between the two groups.
Tom Barrett was suddenly more friendly, although he clearly was uncomfortable at any mention of a family connection. At first I was puzzled by it, but as we sat in the pizza parlour on that chilly, gray afternoon, I realized why. He was, in his own rather shy way, flirting with me.
I came home from that outing feeling really good. I still missed Terri and my other friends, but I didn’t feel so desperately alone and at odds with everyone. And I was coming to terms with the fact that my continued membership in the drum corps wasn’t really possible. I’d been missing more and more rehearsals because it was hard for me to get there.
Dad was sitting in his easy chair in the living room when I came home, which was strange because I knew he’d gone to work that morning, and it was only a little after three in the afternoon. He had kind of a stunned look on his face, and he was, as usual, drinking a beer. Usually, as he finished one can and opened another, he disposed of the empties, but now the end table was cluttered with three or four empty cans.
Mom was in the kitchen, making dinner, as she’d had the day off.
“Dad lost his job,” she said. “They sold the hotel, and the new owner wants to bring in someone new.”
She didn’t sound any happier than I felt, so I didn’t ask any of the questions that were bothering me. The new owners were a major hotel chain, and they’d been in place for some time. I didn’t have to ask; we both knew pretty much what had happened.
Still, it was a shock. Things had seemed to be going along well for us. Tony downstairs had invited Dad to join the Knights of Columbus, and he’d done it. He’d had to go back to the church in order to do it, and had gone to confession and mass for the first time in my memory.
Then again, being a member of the K of C meant privileges at the clubhouse, which was within walking distance from our house. Among those privileges were bar privileges, and drinking was certainly a normal part of the social interaction.
The next few weeks were tense around the house as he looked for work, but I sensed something else in the air, as well. One Friday afternoon, when I came home from school, Dad was waiting for me. He wanted to talk to me, and he sat me down at the dining room table, which was a pleasant change from his usual habit over the years of dragging me to a bar any time he wanted to talk to me.
“Erin, there is something I have to tell you,” he said. “I’m an alcoholic.”
He paused to let the impact sink in.
“I don’t know if you knew that, or not, but I thought I should tell you.”
“Dad, I’ve known for a few years that you drank too much. But I didn’t know if you were actually an alcoholic.”
“Anyone who has to drink is an alcoholic,” he said. It was only then that I noticed he was shaking slightly. “The thing is, they have to admit it. I’ve admitted it. I haven’t been very fair to you and to Mom, and I have to make changes now.
“I’ve tried to quit drinking before, a couple of years ago, when Mom and I used to go out every Thursday night. We were going to AA meetings. Mom has joined a group called Al-Anon, and you might very well want to join Al-a-Teen.”
He went on to tell me about how he had started drinking, how it had been somehow connected to him going for an army physical when he tried to enlist near the end of World War II. He’d been found to have a mild form of gyneconmastia, a disorder in men in which they begin to develop breasts. They hadn’t rejected him because of that, per se, but rather because of how violently he’d reacted when they’d mentioned it.
“I went right to a bar on Whitehall Street and announced that I’d just been accepted, and I got drunk,” he said.
So now, he was making a concerted effort to quit drinking, and he’d been dry for a couple of days. He was starting to go through withdrawal, much as a drug addict would. He was drinking endless amounts of fruit juices, and smoking almost constantly. In the ensuing days, he would sit for hours in his chair in the living room, wrapped in a blanket as he fought the chills and delirium tremors.
“What do you need me to do?” I asked.
“Two things,” he said as he was wracked by sudden shivering. “Please don’t play your electric guitar for a while, or any loud music; I can’t take any loud noises, especially sudden ones. And please don’t hate me.”
“I don’t hate you, Dad. I love you, and I know you’re going to make it.”
And then, as if to emphasize his point about sudden noises, someone outside set off a firecracker, and started so badly he almost came completely out of his seat.
I tried to return to normalcy, but that had just gone out of style in our house. I waited until he had settled back into his seat in the living room, and then called Laura.
“What’s wrong?” she asked as soon as she heard my voice.
“I…I need to be with a friend tonight,” I said. “Can we get together? Just for a little while.”
I heard muffled voices as she covered the mouthpiece of the phone.
“Okay,” she said. “Listen very carefully, and do exactly as I say. When you get off the phone, go pack an overnight bag. Then call your mom and tell her you are staying at my house tonight, and if she needs it, give her my number and have her talk to my mom. Then get your jacket on, the pink one with the fake white fur collar that I like so much, and take the overnight bag and go downstairs, where Julie and I will be waiting.”
“Thanks,” I said, blinking back tears. I hung up and did exactly what she said. I told Mom that Dad had told me, and she understood everything else.
“But honey,” she said. “We still need to talk.”
“I know, Mom. It’s just that…well…”
“I know, honey. You need time to digest everything.”
“Yeah.”
I told Dad I’d been invited to stay with a friend, and he nodded and said okay, but I had the feeling that if I’d said I was going to join the Communist Party, he’d have nodded and said okay. When I opened the door, I saw Julie’s big black Chrysler, with Laura in the front seat and April in a car seat in the back.
“Thanks so much!” I said as I got in. Then I turned to April, who was giving me one of her big smiles. “Hi, cutie!” I said.
“We thought she might cheer you up,” Laura said.
“Okay, girls,” Julie said. “When we get to the house, do you want to talk first or have pizza first?”
Laura looked at me, and I gestured back to her. “I think quick talk,” she said. “Then pizza, then long, long talk.”
“Thanks,” was all I could say before I started to cry. I didn’t cry long or hard, and it wasn’t because I was so upset about my dad. Laura’s family hardly knew me, and yet they’d been ready to help at a moment’s notice. I was so touched!
Laura had another surprise in store for me. Waiting in the Bartoli kitchen when we arrived was Cookie. She immediately came to me and gave me a hug.
“I have a cousin who’s a hood,” she said. “Just tell me who you want to have beaten up.”
In spite of everything, I laughed, although I was kind of crying, too. Cookie hugged me again.
“Hey!” she said. “This isn’t the Erin I know. What’s the deal?”
“My father just told me he’s an alcoholic,” I said. I then realized that Julie and Mrs. Bartoli were right there, and maybe I should have waited until the three of us were alone. But, having blurted it out, I decided to continue. “I mean, I’ve known for a while that he had some kind of drinking problem, but there’s just something about him telling me that…I don’t know…made it like a disease or something.”
“It is a disease,” Mrs. Bartoli said. “And a very serious one. He’s going to need a lot of help, and even then, it’s a real uphill battle. I had an uncle who was an alcoholic, and he struggled every day of his life to stay sober.”
I nodded.
“My dad told me that there is no such thing as a cured alcoholic, only one in recovery. It’s like every day you’re being tested, and every day, you can fail.”
“All true, Erin,” she said. “But there’s one very important thing you have to remember. There isn’t anything you can do for him, other than to make him as comfortable as possible. You can’t make him stronger, and you can’t make him want to succeed. So, you must not waste any of your life trying – you must live your life and do everything you can do. You must take care of yourself.”
We were all taken aback by her emotion, and she could see that, and she smiled at it.
“You’re a very, very nice girl, Erin, and there may well be some very rough seas ahead for you. I just want you to know that you have friends who care.”
I hugged her, then Laura, then Cookie again. Then we had a pizza party, after which Julie helped us all do our nails. We talked endlessly about cosmetics and styles, and I was surprised that Laura’s mom seemed to have relented on her prohibition about makeup, but then realized that Cookie probably had something to do with it.
We sat up and watched a late movie, then repaired to Laura’s room where two sleeping bags were laid out on the floor.
“Sorry about the Bohemian conditions,” Laura’s mom said. “But we only have a couple of sleeping bags, so this seemed like the best solution.”
We assured her it was fine. She closed the door and left, and we got into our pajamas. Cookie was completely uninhibited getting undressed, and I had my first up-close look that every boy in the eighth grade would have killed to have.
“Ta da!” sang out Cookie as she pulled her bra away, and Laura and I both laughed. “Hey,” Cookie said as I took off my bra and slipped into a nightshirt, “Someone else isn’t too far behind me.”
I giggled, but she was wrong. I could barely fill a B cup, but she was already outgrowing a C.
Then the serious talk started. Laura started brushing her long, straight hair, but then Cookie took over, taking her time, not letting the talk distract her from the brushing or vice versa. When she had finished, Laura returned the favor, but then I took over for her.
Cookie’s hair was about shoulder length, and just as straight as Laura’s. It was kind of a dirty blonde and framed her face nicely. I found brushing her hair made me feel closer to her.
As we pampered one another, I found myself talking a lot, telling them of life in Queens, and of our trip to Ireland, and of the drum corps and the band I’d been in. I even told them about John and my first kiss. Cookie turned around, forcing me to stop brushing her hair.
“You were ten?!” she gasped. “And he was thirteen? Geez, I really did misjudge you. You are still a virgin, aren’t you?”
“Cookie!” Laura gasped.
“Well, we might as well know what’s what,” she said.
“Yes, Cookie, dear, I am still a virgin. Anything else you want to know?”
“Erin!” Laura gasped. Cookie smiled.
“Anything you want to tell me,” she said. Then, more thoughtfully, “Or ask.”
“Well,” I said after thinking about it, “I did have a boyfriend last year, a year older than me. We played in a band together…”
“That drum corps thing you told us about?” Cookie asked.
“Um, no. It was actually a rock band. Well, kind of a blues and rock band. We…”
“What were you, the lead singer?” Cookie asked with sudden interest.
“On some songs, yeah. But mainly I played guitar.”
“Whoa!” she said. “You mean, you play guitar?! Like John Lennon and Keith Richards?!”
“Yeah, I do.”
“And why are we just finding this out now?” Laura asked.
“Because when I first got here, I didn’t want to be, like, ‘okay, I’m a rock musician so you have to accept me’. And then we became really good friends, and I didn’t want you to think I’d been like holding out on you.”
“Okay,” Cookie said, suddenly grinning mischievously. “We’ll forgive you, on one condition: you have to tell us how far you went with your musician/boyfriend.”
Last edited by Erin L on Fri Mar 20, 2009 8:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
I'm not that kind of girl.
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Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
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Erin L
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- Location: Queens, NY
No, Absaroka, the boyfriend wasn't black. The black boy was just a friend. But he was important because he had walked home with me one day (talking about music) and my father had seen him, and it was that, more than anything, that convinced him that we had to move as soon as possible.
In Erin's story, it's more dramatic because of old stereotypes of white girls not being safe around black men, and my father would have gone totally postal. But in real life, there really was a black boy who moved in near another friend of mine, he and I did get into a conversation one day at the gate to my house (and, in fact, he was a really nice kid whom the rest of us in the neighborhood liked a lot), my father did come along and really was beside himself and my parents really did begin a frantic search for a new place to live at that point.
In Erin's story, it's more dramatic because of old stereotypes of white girls not being safe around black men, and my father would have gone totally postal. But in real life, there really was a black boy who moved in near another friend of mine, he and I did get into a conversation one day at the gate to my house (and, in fact, he was a really nice kid whom the rest of us in the neighborhood liked a lot), my father did come along and really was beside himself and my parents really did begin a frantic search for a new place to live at that point.
I'm not that kind of girl.
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Robyn Katie
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Erin L
- Miss Emerald Goddess
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- Joined: Thu Oct 30, 2008 11:38 am
- Location: Queens, NY
December, 1966 - June, 1967...
It was Christmas season before we knew it. Christmas Eve, we spent with Dad’s side of the family, and Dad was still on the wagon, which was really exciting. He had also gotten a new job installing burglar alarms, so he was pretty upbeat.
I talked Mom into going to midnight mass, and when we walked into church, Laura and Cookie were there, as well as several other kids from school. Mom understood when I detached myself to join them. We stayed in the back of the church.
I had misgivings, because at this point in my life, I was rather serious about my religion. My dad’s sobriety was something I prayed for on a daily basis – the first time I had ever asked God for something serious and not directly affecting me. I knew that hanging with the kids would likely mean some distraction, and I didn’t really want that.
So, I was surprised when the mass actually started and everyone settled down, except for a group who stayed out in the vestibule. Cookie was on the point of joining them, but then decided to stay with Laura and me instead.
I was paying attention to the mass, so I really don’t know when Andy slipped in next to me. But by the time the gospel was read, I was aware of his presence. I was wearing a dress, stockings and heels, as well as a makeup job that included lipstick, blush, mascara, and a little eye shadow, and therefore felt I was looking my best.
When it came time to exchange the sign of peace, Laura, Cookie and I hugged and kissed each other. Then, I turned to face Andy, and he was grinning at me. So, flush with excitement and Christmas spirit, I kissed him on the cheek and wished him Merry Christmas.
We were all standing together outside after mass when Mom came out. Mrs. Bartoli came up and offered to drive us home, and she and Mom were off to the side, chatting with a few other adults. A light snow was falling, and I was actually glad to see Mom getting to socialize.
I didn’t see it for long. Andy was next to me, again. We started chatting, mostly banal stuff about school. Then he started asking about what kind of music I liked, where I wanted to go to high school, that sort of thing.
“Um, Erin?” Laura was suddenly at my elbow. “We’re waiting for you.”
“Sorry,” I said, blushing a little. “Gotta go.”
Walking to the car, I glanced at Laura out of the corner of my eye and saw she was grinning at me.
“Okay,” I said. “How long were you calling me?”
“Oh, I think we started around 2:00 this morning, which was an hour ago,” she said.
“You did not!”
I looked at my watch; it was twenty minutes to two. We were at the car, and Laura and I got in the back seat.
“Nice of you to join us,” Mom said dryly.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“Oh, that’s all right. Far be it from me to interfere with…”
“Mom!”
I was the only one in the car not laughing.
I had stayed in touch with Terri, of course, and we had occasionally gotten together. But I had fallen out of touch with Diane and Cathy, and so when Terri invited me to stay over for a few days between Christmas and New Years, I jumped at the chance to rekindle old friendships. I arrived at her house the day after Christmas and stayed until New Years Eve.
One evening, Terri and I were trying to decide what to do when I heard music coming from the basement. Her brother, Rod, who was now eighteen, was down there. The voice of the singer was not especially pleasing, and yet it drew me; more than that, the song drew me – slow, gentle, and somehow hypnotic.
I stood at the head of the stairs, until Terri gave me a nudge and I went down. Now, I could hear the lyrics. I had already been attracted, with a little help from Sr. Joseph, to the poetic lyrics of Simon and Garfunkle. But these were different – poetic, but not so concrete. It was as if the meter of the lyrics was as important as the words that made them up.
It was Bob Dylan doing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowland”. Up until then, the only song I had heard Dylan sing had been “Rainy Day Women”, which I didn’t like at all. But this was so different that I had trouble believing it was the same guy.
Rod looked up, startled to see me.
“You like Dylan?” he asked, surprised. I didn’t answer. I was too enthralled with “my warehouse eyes, my Arabian drum…should I leave them at your gate, or, Sad-Eyed Lady, should I wait?”
The song took up an entire side of an album. There were leisurely bridges in the middle, light organ solos that just seemed to fit. The verses were long, poetic and lovely.
“You like the Young Rascals?” he asked when the song had finished.
“Sure.”
“What’s your favorite song on their album?”
“I like ‘Midnight Hour’ a lot, but my favorite is ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.”
“Dylan wrote that,” he said with a smile. When I was surprised, he grinned and said I’d be surprised at how many great songs Dylan had done – “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “Chimes of Freedom”, and “Blowin’ In The Wind”.
I frowned, and Terri, who by now had joined us, laughed.
“Poor, Erin,” she said. “Always out in front of the rest of us on music, and here’s one she missed.”
“That’s okay,” Rod said. “We can get her caught up, now. That is, if you two don’t have other plans.”
“It’s okay with me,” Terri said, quickly. She had not been feeling well, and she was just as happy taking it easy while I listened to music. So, we settled in while Rod went through his collection.
We listened to all of “Bringing It All Back Home”, “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde On Blonde”. I was mesmerized. A few songs I asked him to play again, and a few, like “Highway 61”, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Desolation Row”, I had to hear several times.
When I first heard “Highway 61”, I laughed out loud, picturing God and Abraham talking to each other in modern slang – “Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on!’.” And when I heard the line in “Tom Thumb’s Blues” about “I started out on burgundy but soon I hit the harder stuff”, I thought of my father, and then it really came home when I heard the line “But the joke was on me, there was no one even there to bluff.” And I knew I had to make that song one of my own.
After Christmas vacation, I went back to school anxious to see how Andy might act toward me. It was extremely cold, and no one was in a very sociable mood. Andy might have thought about opening a conversation with me, but he didn’t do anything about it, and over the next few weeks, we seemed to be held at a distance from one another.
One night, my folks and I were invited downstairs to Tony and Rosa’s. Janice and I spent a lot of time in her room listening to music, mostly a few new Dylan albums I’d just bought, and she was urging me to find someone to play in a band with. I had to admit, I was starting to really get the itch.
It had started snowing early in the evening, and by the time Rosa called us out to the kitchen for coffee and cake, we were in the throes of a big winter storm. But in that warm kitchen, with friends, we felt rather removed from it all, and no one wanted the evening to end. It was a little after 11:00 when Mom noticed the time and said she really had to get back upstairs, that tomorrow was going to be difficult enough, causing Tony to laugh heartily.
“Tomorrow?!” he said. “Relax, because no one is going anywhere tomorrow.”
To my surprise, Mom settled back and we didn’t go back upstairs until after midnight. Janice had told me that the signal that all the schools in town were closed would be six blasts on the village fire horn, repeated twice. And that’s exactly what I woke up to the next morning.
By late morning, the snow had stopped and the sun was out, and Dad and I went downstairs to help Janice and Al shovel snow. The driveway alone was a huge job, so the extra help was appreciated. We were finishing the entrance to the driveway when we saw Steve, Charlie and a couple of the other boys from the neighborhood walking up the block.
“Hey, Erin,” Steve said. “You got a minute? Next Saturday, I’m having a few friends over for a sort of jam session. I was wondering if you might like to join us. We’ll get started about 1:00.”
Steve, I had learned a while back, played the drums.
“I’ll carry your amp,” Charlie said. He lived across the street from me.
“Well,” Steve said, “He’ll get it to the corner, anyway.”
Janice and I laughed, and Charlie stared at the ground. Actually, I was surprised by this because Steve and I hadn’t really hit it off at first. I considered saying no.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
I was actually excited about it, and I laughed when Charlie was waiting in front of the house waiting to carry my amp. I laughed even harder when he could only make it to the end of the block before he had to put the amp down and rest. He did pick it up and carry it again, but when we got to Steve’s house, he was exhausted.
We made our way down his basement stairs, and I was surprised to find that Charlie’s friend, Duke, and Margaret were both there. Steve looked more displeased than surprised, but despite how crowded it was in his basement, he didn’t ask them to leave, or Charlie, either. I was setting up my amp and guitar when I heard a familiar voice call from across the room.
“Why, it’s Erin, as I live and breathe!”
“Lenny!” I gasped, and ran to hug him. I hadn’t seen him since we’d moved.
It turned out that Lenny and Steve both belonged to the same protestant church and had known each other for years. When Steve had approached Lenny about the jam session, he had mentioned that there was a girl in the neighborhood who had lived near Lenny.
“Erin?” Lenny had asked, and when Steve said, yes, Lenny added, “Get her to join us if you possibly can.”
It was crowded in that basement. In addition to Steve and his drums, Lenny and me, there was Bob, who played organ, Cal who also played guitar, and Gary who played bass. I hadn’t played with anyone since the Larkin Boys, and I was afraid my rust would show, so I was content at the outset to play rhythm.
We had a hard time getting started, with a lot of conflicting suggestions as to what to play. Steve tried making some suggestions, but whatever Lenny could play, Cal didn’t know, and vice versa, or so it seemed. Finally, Bob just shrugged and started belting out “Knock On Wood” on his organ, and Lenny and I joined in, but no one sang.
We played through it a couple of times, each time Steve providing the thumping bass drum beat for knocking on wood, when finally Lenny yelled across to me, “C’mon, Erin, I know you know it!”
“Me?” I asked. “You want me to sing?”
“Hell, yeah,” Lenny said as Bob and the rest of us stopped, Bob showing indignation at the interruption. “You know you can.”
Suddenly, I remembered doing “Not Fade Away”, and I decided, why not? Well, there was one very good reason why not, and he was standing across the way from me – Cal. His hostility had first shown when he realized I was there to play and not for show, and it increased when Lenny and I joined in a number that he either didn’t know or didn’t like.
“Okay,” I said with a shrug, deciding that it was just a jam session. We started right back up, and I got into the song. Lenny, who didn’t have much of a voice, sang some harmony, and I couldn’t help thinking of the Starlighters singing Beatles songs on his porch. All in all, it sounded pretty good.
We did “Like A Rolling Stone”, and Cal sang, but he did it more like the Rascals than like Dylan, and I didn’t care for it. So, I suggested “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, and Lenny sang it, with me harmonizing on the last line of each verse.
Cal suggested a couple of more standards, and then I suggested “For What It’s Worth”. I had only just heard Buffalo Springfield doing it on television a week earlier, and had run right out and bought the record. Lenny was the only other one there who knew it, and we played it together, with Gary and Steve kind of following along.
At the end of the afternoon, we were left with the fact that Lenny and I, and to a lesser extent, Steve, were into the more cutting edge material of the day, while Cal and Bob preferred more of the Top 40 stuff. It didn’t look very promising. And as we were packing up, Lenny said how much he’d enjoyed this and he hoped we could get in a couple more sessions before June, because that’s when he was moving away.
A few days later, I was in the Cow Shed, a convenience store at the end of our block, when Steve walked in.
“We’re thinking of giving the band a try,” he said. “Would you be interested?”
“What about Cal?” I asked. He smiled.
“Cal’s not in the picture right now. It would just be the five of us. Lenny is in until the end of the school year, and I’m hoping that we can get a gig or two before then, just because it would be cool. I think we can con Gary into doing the male vocals if you’ll do the female ones, and Lenny says you’ll play some good leads if we ask you nicely.”
I laughed heartily, right there in the store. And then I said yes.
We started rehearsing a couple of evenings a week, and Saturdays. Laura and Cookie were very understanding and very supportive, telling me I should definitely see where this went. I seemed to be hitting one of those stretches of life when it seems nothing could possibly go wrong.
I came home from school after hanging out at Cookie’s on a Friday afternoon; Dad was home from work early, which I was used to seeing – sometimes if he finished his jobs a little early, he just came home. He was sitting in his usual easy chair. And he had a can of beer open and sitting on the end table.
At first, it didn’t quite sink in. I actually walked out of the living room and then came back in, as if that would make a difference. But it didn’t; the malignant can was still sitting there, emblematic of yet another failure.
Without saying a word, I turned and walked out, making my way unsteadily back to my room.
“I’m not going to cry,” I promised myself. “I’m not!”
But when I’d closed the door and lay down on my bed, I did. And I was still crying when Mom came home a little later. She made a bee line for the living room and lit into Dad, telling him that he’d broken my heart.
I stormed back down the hall and into the living room.
“No, Mom,” I said sharply. “This isn’t about me. This is about him. It isn’t my life you’re destroying,” I said, turning on him. “It’s yours. But I don’t have to watch.”
I grabbed my jacket and shoulder bag and stormed out. I didn’t know where I was going, and it wasn’t until I was passing the library that I realized was still wearing my school uniform. I crossed the street to the train station and found a phone booth with a functioning phone.
I fished some loose change out of the bottom of my bag and called Laura.
“Hi,” I said when she answered. “It’s Erin…I…”
It all erupted at once, and I couldn’t get a coherent sentence out. I was crying; I was angry, kicking the side of the phone booth; I had never felt so alone in my life. Laura listened calmly and waited until I came up for air.
“Erin, just tell me where you are.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t do that to you again. I can’t impose on your family again…”
“And you can’t go home like this. Give me the number of the phone booth you’re in.”
I did, and she told me to hang up and wait for a call back. I waited for four minutes, and the phone rang. When I answered, it was Cookie.
“Come over,” she said without any prelude. “Don’t make me come out and get you.”
I started to argue, but she said, “Hey! You want me to get my cousin, the hood, to explain things to you?!”
“Thanks,” I said, laughing a little. I started walking, and I was just passing our school when I saw her coming toward me. I ran to her, already starting to cry again, and I practically jumped into her arms.
“Come on,” she said, soothingly. “Laura’s on her way over. I see you’re still dressed for school, so you’re in luck – you can wear some of my clothes for a change.”
It had only been a couple of hours since I’d left their house, but Cookie’s mom welcomed me as a long lost friend. True to her word, Cookie had me change before dinner. I figured I’d borrow something casual, but to my surprise, she leant me one of her skirts, and it was the shortest miniskirt I had ever worn. A V-neck sweater went with it, and the V was cut quite low, perfect for showing off Cookie’s considerable assets, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t do it justice.
“Looks good to me,” she said, and Laura agreed. I kept the stockings and shoes I’d worn all day, and I immediately experienced the challenge of short skirts.
“Cookie, how am I supposed to keep the tops of my stockings from showing with this skirt?” I asked. She laughed.
“Why would you want to do that?” she asked, feigning mild shock.
We returned to the dining room, where I kept my knees locked together and sat as primly as I could. It was just the three of us and Cookie’s mom for dinner, so I was able to relax a bit. After dinner, we repaired to Cookie’s room, where she informed me that we were staying the night.
I called home, and Mom said she understood. Then I went in and told Cookie and Laura what had happened. They both hugged me and told me they loved me, and that we would always be friends.
“I just feel like I’m always imposing on you two,” I said. “You’re always helping me.”
“Don’t worry,” Cookie said. “It’ll be your turn before you know it. You can bet money on it.”
After a while, our house settled back down to normal. Dad’s drinking was a pattern I’d grown up with, so after a while, it almost seemed like he’d never stopped. The biggest difference now was that, although he had stopped going to AA meetings when he fell off the wagon, Mom kept going to Al-Anon meetings. It was to become a major bone of contention between them.
In the meantime, he seemed anxious to do something to win me over, and he hit upon a plan that certainly got my attention.
“Honey,” he said to me one night with no introduction. “Did you know the K of C has a youth organization called the Squires? It’s for boys around your age. Well, the Squires have dances periodically at the clubhouse.”
“So,” I said cautiously, “You’re suggesting that I go?”
This would be interesting, because Mom was adamant that she did not want me dating until I was 14. Was he going to defy her?
“Not exactly,” he replied with a laugh. “I thought maybe your band might want to play at one. I asked Tony downstairs about it, and told me he can get your band an audition, if you’d like.”
I did like, and very much. And when I mentioned it to Steve and the guys, they liked it a lot, too. We weren’t expecting things to move with lightning speed, but within a week, we got an audition. Of course, the negative for me was that Dad wanted to be there, and that made me very self-conscious. But we played well, anyway, and we were offered a job playing a dance in mid-March.
Laura and Cookie were thrilled when I told them, and the night of the dance, half the eighth grade class turned up. Cookie insisted that I wear her mini again, and I decided to do it, with a sleeveless top because I knew it would get warm, and a nice pair of heels. That night, as we were setting up, before the doors opened, I was surprised to look up and see Andy.
He came over and gave me a nice, breezy hello. I was glad to see him. Since we had seen each other at Midnight Mass, he’d barely said ten words to me – always friendly, but distant – and I had wondered why we never quite recaptured that ease with each other we’d had that night.
He offered to help, or to get us something to drink, but we were already set up, and Lenny and I were getting ready to tune up. I wondered how he had gotten in so early, and it turned out that he was a member of the Squires, and had volunteered to help out.
“You’re amazing,” he said, suddenly. “You look like this is just something to do. You don’t look nervous at all.”
It was true – I wasn’t. Maybe it was all those parades and competitions I’d been in, or the short appearance I’d had with the Larkin Boys, or playing “Taps” that year on Memorial Day. But as I looked over at Steve and the guys, the only one who looked as relaxed as I felt was Lenny.
The doors opened and kids started streaming in. It was then that I realized that this was my first dance, and that I had no idea what to expect. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so relaxed anymore.
“Hey, Erin,” Lenny said, jolting me a little. “You ready?”
I was. We started off with “Hungry”, by Paul Revere and the Raiders, played some Stones, some Beatles and various pop favorites. But we also mixed in the songs that had us excited as musicians. We played for a total of three hours, with three 50 minute sets and two 15 minute breaks. We finished the first set with “Highway 61” and then “Like A Rolling Stone”, with me on the lead vocal.
I had just placed my guitar back in its stand when Andy appeared with ice cold bottles of Coke – the old glass bottles.
“Bless you, my son!” gasped Bob, who I had come to learn had a very dry sense of humor. He gulped his down while Steve toweled off heavy perspiration.
“Thanks, Andy,” I said. He shrugged and mumbled something about it being his job. Then he excused himself and dashed off to attend to some chore or other.
“Hey,” said Cookie, behind me, “That was damned good!” Then, turning to Steve, she added, “You ought to have Erin sing more leads, she sounds terrific.”
“My agent,” I said, and Steve just grinned, then walked away. I found a place to sit down, which came as a relief.
“Don’t tell me,” Cookie said. “The heels were a bad idea.”
“My back is killing me,” I admitted. “How am I going to get through two more sets?”
“Easy,” she said with a laugh, reaching into her bag and pulling out her pair of double t-strap mary janes, the ones that were just like mine.
“What made you bring those?”
“I was afraid my feet would hurt, dancing in heels. So, I wanted something to change into. But I’m fine, we wear the same size, so…enjoy!”
I placed my heels behind the amplifier, and felt much better in the second set. I relaxed as we played, and took notice in how my friends were faring on the dance floor. Cookie had a constant stream of dance partners, but I was also glad to see that Laura, so shy by comparison, was getting lots of attention from the same crowd.
To be honest, one of the reasons I was glad was that I had begun to sense that I wasn’t the only one who liked Andy – Laura seemed to like him, too. And until I realized that as a volunteer, he wasn’t going to get to dance tonight, I had been anxious watching for him to possibly ask Laura to dance. I knew that if he had, I wouldn’t ever do anything to disrupt things, but I just hoped he wouldn’t.
He didn’t. And when our second set ended with “Ruby Tuesday”, Laura was actually dancing with Mike Roberts from our class. Great, I thought, because he was such a nice guy. We took our second break, and Andy returned with more bottles of Coke.
He turned to go, and I called him. He turned back, and I froze. I had nothing to ask him, and I couldn’t make anything up.
“Do you have anything you have to do right now?” I asked before I died of embarrassment.
“No,” he said, baffled. “Why?”
“Um…just thought I’d ask. It must be tough to not be able to join in.”
“Well, you’re in the same boat,” he said.
“Yeah, I am.”
“Hey, Andy!” one of the older guys called. “Got a minute?”
He frowned, apologized to me, and left.
The third set, it all came together. We led off with “Under My Thumb”, and Bob, Lenny and I all took solos to extend it. Later in the set, we did the medley of “Not Fade Away” and “Who Do You Love”, which the guys had all been excited about when I had told them how we’d done it with the Larkin Boys. Of course, I was a year older, Lenny was a much better guitarist than I had been, and we had Bob on organ, so we had quite a lot of fun with it.
I sang “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, which we played as a slow dance. Then we livened things up with “Midnight Hour”. We did an elongated version of Chuck Berry’s old song, “Reelin’ and Rockin’, and had almost everyone in the place dancing by the time it was over.
Lenny introduced everyone in the band, and then I introduced Lenny.
“We’re gonna do our last song of the night,” Lenny then said, prompting some disquiet, because it was only twenty to eleven.
“We’d better explain, Len,” I said into the microphone, then turned to face the dance floor. “This is a slow song…a long, slow song…a long, long, long slow song. So, we’re gonna give you all a minute or two to find your partners, and then…well, you know.”
Cookie laughed so loud, I heard her up on stage, and everyone else laughed, too. And then we did “Sad-Eyed Lady”. Steve had argued against it, saying that it was too long to dance to, and that the lyrics would be lost on everyone in a dance venue. They may have been, but I measured the success of the song by Laura, who I saw hardly moving in a long embrace with Mike in one corner of the room, and when it was over, he kissed her, right there on the dance floor.
Cookie had been dancing with some guy she met from Memorial, as Mark wasn’t at the dance. Mark would subsequently hear all about it from others who were there, and his jealous rage would be evident for a few weeks afterward. As we were loading out afterward, I caught a couple of glimpses of Andy, but we had no chance to talk, and I had decided that this wasn’t going anywhere, after all.
“Erin?”
I turned to see Andy behind me.
“Do you need a ride home?” he asked. I was really disappointed, as I had just loaded my amp and guitar in Steve’s brother’s car. I was trying to calculate if I could leave them with Steve and pick them up tomorrow, when his brother, Dave, called over to me, “Ready to go, Erin?”
“Um…no, thanks,” I said to Andy, cursing my luck. “I had already arranged one.”
“Oh. Okay. See you Monday,” he said, and left.
The reviews from the class, from what I heard, were mixed on our performance. The kids who tended to like just the pop music didn’t appreciate the Dylan stuff or some of the other stuff we did. The ones who were already looking ahead seemed to like us a lot.
Somehow, Mark’s jealous rage got tangled up with reactions to our band. Looking back on it, I think he was so mad at Cookie that he wanted to topple her from her queen bee status, and since she and I were now good friends, he thought of us as linked. And maybe part of it was the fact that I really had never warmed up to him.
Mark’s campaign only lasted a couple of weeks, and then suddenly he and Cookie patched things up. In the end, queen bee status in the graduating class meant too much to her, and while it would have been very cool for her to date a high school guy while still in the eighth grade, it wouldn’t have been the same. And as the school year wound down, we were focusing more and more on graduation activities.
There would be an outing for all three classes to Rye Beach, and following Mark and Cookie getting back together, Mark asked her to go with him. At first, it seemed silly – we were all going, anyway – but when Cookie accepted, the idea quickly caught on, and the Rye Beach trip would a First Date for a lot of kids in our class.
Now the tendency to couple up had a focus, and there quickly developed a frenzy of boys asking and girls either accepting or refusing. One poor boy in our class asked about five different girls, until one girl told him that he was fickle. But, really, what was the poor guy to do?
Andy asked me one morning while we were waiting for the line to form to head into school, a lovely spring morning that he instantly made better. Cookie later told me that after waiting so long for him to make a move – after all, he’d been sort of pursuing me since Christmas – I should have played a little hard to get. But I liked him too much for that, and when he asked me, I smiled as warmly as I knew how, nodded, and said yes.
There would also be a graduation dance a few nights after the graduation ceremony itself. We were taking dance lessons for a large group dance in front of the parents beforehand, to Herb Alpert’s “Spanish Flea”. It was awful, but we all survived.
We were also awaiting word from the high schools that we had applied to. Cookie, Laura and I had all applied to Mary Louis. One night, during one of our many sleepovers, we had talked about it; they had both been seriously considering Sacred Heart, which was out in Hempstead, but I told them that I really had to return to Queens if I possibly could, that I had other friends with whom I had agreed long ago to apply.
I had told them a lot about Terri, as I had told Terri about Laura and Cookie. And until I knew what they were going to do, I had lived in fear that they would try to pull me in opposite directions. The day we’d submitted our applications, Laura had asked my order of schools, and I had told her, with my heart in my throat, Mary Louis, first; Sacred Heart, second; St. Mary’s, third; and the diocesan school, Maria Regina, out in Uniondale, fourth.
They had both put in the same schools in the same order.
We had to let Sr. Clara know when we heard from a school, whether it was an acceptance, rejection, or waiting list. It quickly became apparent that what I had sensed when talking to Richie that night a year earlier had been correct – we girls had a much harder time getting into parochial high schools than did the boys. The girls’ schools were smaller, and there were fewer of them.
Sr. Clara seemed to take it personally every time a girl got a rejection, and soon she was taking it out on any boy who was accepted to a school and who she thought was unworthy. I got my rejection from St. Mary’s first, then my acceptance from Maria Regina. Mom asked me if I wanted her to send in a deposit to hold a place in case I didn’t make Mary Louis, but I demurred. I knew that money was still pretty tight, and I also didn’t want to waver at all about Mary Louis – it had come to mean too much to me.
Laura and I got accepted to Mary Louis on the same day, and Andy got accepted at Chaminade, which was considered among the very best of schools. Cookie started getting nervous, and when her acceptance came from Maria Regina, her mother sent in the deposit without even asking Cookie. She took it as a lack of confidence, and for the first time, she seemed really shaken.
Her mood worsened when I got accepted to Sacred Heart and she got rejected. For the first time, she was considering the fact that she just might not make it. She was suddenly a little less defiant and less confident, and it was not a pretty sight.
What was an even less pretty sight was the look of disdain she got from Sr. Clara the day she breathlessly reported that she had been accepted to Mary Louis. Cookie had been bursting with excitement as she returned from lunch, telling everyone on line that she had made it. And then Sr. Clara had come out right before the bell rang, Cookie had told her, and been immediately told, loudly enough to carry the whole line, that she did not deserve it.
The band got another gig, playing for a dance at Steve and Lenny’s church. I found it was a lot more comfortable playing where I didn’t know anyone. We played the same three sets we had the first time, and I thought we sounded just as good.
The money I made from both gigs, plus what I had saved from babysitting, gave me enough to buy myself one heck of a pre-graduation present – a Fender Stratocaster. The action was like silk, and when I played it, my fingers felt like they’d been unchained. Dad had driven me to the music store where I bought it – we had recently gotten a worn-looking 1960 Ford Falcon from one of Mom’s uncles, the first time I could remember us having a car – and he grinned at me as I tried it out in the store. I think he was also impressed that the salesman seemed to think I could play.
By the first week of June, things were really winding down at school. We were finished with schoolwork, everyone knew where they were going to high school, and a good percentage of the class had successfully coupled up for Rye Beach. Everyone was feeling good about things, so naturally Sr. Clara felt the need to act.
Her ire was directed at the coupling for Rye Beach. She announced that she was shocked at such a thing, and decreed that anyone who wanted to go on the outing as a “date” would have to submit a detailed note of permission from their parents – girls would have to get permission to go on a “date”, and boys would have to get a note saying that their parents were accepting full responsibility for what happened on the “date”. We were then given 15 minutes, right there in class, to talk it over with our dates.
I think back on that moment now with a smile – it must have been amusing to see the entire class dissolve and then coalesce into couples. And it also must have been interesting to see the specific couples that emerged – Cookie and Mark, Laura and Mike, Nicki and Tom Barrett, Andy and me. It also would have been interesting to note the variations in demeanor in all of us.
While some of the couples chatted just as couples, the eight of us had something of a group session. We started as distinct couples, but then came together. Andy had a very worried look on his face when I saw him.
“Erin,” he said, seriously, “I’m not sure how my parents will react to this. Do you think your parents will give you permission?”
“I don’t plan on asking,” I replied softly. He looked more alarmed at that. “Why? You weren’t actually thinking of going along with this, were you?”
Part of me was demanding that I cool it. I had waited five months for Andy to ask me out, and he had finally done it. Sr. Psycho had was now trying to screw things up, but did I really want to land on Andy, who I knew was a really good guy?
“I don’t like it any more than you do,” he said. “But I don’t see how we have any choice.”
Just then, Laura pulled Mike over and said, “Please tell Erin and Andy what you think.”
Mike laughed easily and said, “I don’t see the problem. We just don’t tell Psycho that we’re going on dates.”
“Nice plan,” Andy replied. “But what happens when she sees us together at Rye Beach?”
“Well, so what? Let’s say for a minute that you, Mark, Tom and I are all hanging out at Rye, and Erin, Cookie, Nicki and Laura are all hanging out, and we end up in a group together, and then we sort of couple up. It’s not a date, we just end up together. Problem solved.”
“Except that when she sees that the same couples who are talking right now are also together that day…” Andy started, and Mike laughed.
“Even if that happens…so what? The trip is after Graduation Day. So, what, she might not let us dance to ‘Spanish Flea’?”
By now, Mark and Cookie had joined us, along with Nicki and Tom. Mark and Cookie were still clearly miffed, but their expressions were changing. Tom looked perplexed.
“You’re right,” I said. “She can’t possibly enforce this unless we let her. And we just won’t. Nobody hands in any notes from parents, and we just hook up when we get there. Mike, you’re a genius.”
Laura was beaming. Mark still looked miffed, because he hadn’t come up with the solution. Cookie was starting to relax.
“I don’t know…” Andy said, and my heart sank. The other couples moved away, and I turned to him.
“What don’t you know?” I asked softly.
“I don’t know if it’s a good idea. I mean, what if she somehow screws up our diplomas, or messes with our records going into high school?”
Sr. Clara was calling us all to return to our seats.
“Tell me, Andy, were you planning on asking her permission to dance with me at the graduation dance, too?”
After school, I walked home with Cookie, while Laura had to go straight home. I was still fuming, and Cookie knew why. It wasn’t just Andy’s seeming lack of backbone; it was the fact that, earlier in the year, I had told her that I thought Andy had a lot more character than Mark did, that he seemed like a lot more of a leader than Mark.
We didn’t say a word as we walked to her house. Her mom gave us a big hello, and we went up to her room. I plopped on her bed while she changed her clothes.
“It’s not you,” she said at last. “You have to know that.”
I wasn’t so sure. He had taken so long to approach me after Christmas Eve, when I’d been so sure we had really connected. Now, it was as if he was using any excuse to get out of being with me, and it hurt.
“But it’s not you,” she repeated. “I’m not sure why Psycho has him so freaked out, but we’ve all seen her have that effect on a lot of people this year.”
I wanted to believe her, but I couldn’t. And when I walked home a little later, I could feel myself sinking into a very deep blue funk. I was usually a good judge of character, and throughout most of the school year, I had seen Andy has having one of the best in the class; he wasn’t suddenly changing his nature, so it had to be me.
Graduation activities swept up all of us. First there was an awards night, then Graduation Day itself. Before that, on the last day of school, all the boys gathered in front of the school and made a pile of their ugly ties, poured lighter fluid on them, and burned them.
“Did they get permission slips from their parents to do that?” I asked Cookie, who rolled her eyes but said nothing.
We were walking up to church for the Graduation Mass – Mom, Dad and me. I was wearing my white cap and gown, with a nice pale blue dress underneath, and white pumps with a two-inch heel, the highest I’d worn, yet. About halfway down the block, I saw Dave, Steve’s older brother, walking toward us.
“Congratulations, Erin,” he said with a big smile. I smiled and thanked him.
The church was hot, and the monsignor seemed to drone on forever. But at last it ended, and I was free.
My cousin Brian graduated the same day I did, so we had a combined graduation party at our apartment. Maureen and I played some guitar together, which was fun. We also had a chance to talk a little bit, in private – I talked about my dad, she talked about her mom, the first indication I had that my aunt had a drinking problem, too.
The next day was the Rye Beach trip. When I got to the schoolyard, I saw Cookie, Laura and Nicki. We started chatting easily, even though my heart really wasn’t in it.
As casually as I could, I glanced over to where a group of the boys were standing. Sure enough, there was Mark, along with Tom and Mike and a few others, laughing and kidding around. Andy stood off to the side, looking miserable.
“Just answer me one thing,” Laura said, quietly. “If he wanted to be with you today, would that be okay?”
“Honestly?” I asked, and she nodded. “Yeah.”
Just then, Cookie came over to chat with me, and I lost track of Laura. I never saw her signal to Mike, or Mike go talk to Andy. But when Cookie suddenly stopped talking, I saw Andy approaching me.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” he asked. I said okay. “I’m really sorry about how all this happened,” he went on. “It’s just that me getting into Chaminade is like the most amazing thing that’s happened in my family, and the thought that Psycho might somehow be able to screw that up…I just couldn’t think straight. So, can we start over, today?”
“You mean like a date?” I asked.
“Oh, no!” he said with mock seriousness. “Not one of those. Just kind of a friendly outing between friends…of the opposite gender…together…but without any permission slip.”
I stifled a laugh.
“Okay.”
The original plan was to sit on the bus, girls with girls, boys with boys, but we decided that was silly, and couples sat together, including Andy and me. I had a momentary fear that someone might make a wisecrack to either him or me, but no one did. And Andy was holding my hand before we’d been on the road for ten minutes.
We had a great time; we went on rides together, Andy scored enough in target shooting to win me a stuffed animal, and unattached members of the class mostly were attached by the end of the day, thanks to The Olde Mill. That was the park’s tunnel of love, and it had been dominating conversation for the better part of two weeks. All during the day, Mark kept making references to it, and I was wondering what he might actually try to do when we got there.
We got into the cars, which were actually floating in water through the ride, a series of tunnels with little scenes and mechanical characters in each one along the way. Mark and Cookie were the first ones in, then Andy and me. I really didn’t want to ride with them, but Laura was better at hanging back, so we got in. Laura and Mike were in the boat behind us, with Tom and Nicki in the back.
As soon as we entered darkness, I felt Andy’s arm around my shoulder and gently pulling me toward him. I decided to go, and I turned to face him and his lips were immediately on mine. What a sweet kiss!
I put my arms around his neck and he held me more tightly. It was as if all the inhibitions of the past several months had melted away. From someplace in front of me, I could hear Cookie’s voice in a soft, murmuring sound, and that somehow made me a little less inhibited than I otherwise would have been, so when Andy wanted to French, I let him.
We were holding each other more tightly, kissing more passionately, and I was running my fingers through his thick, curly hair. I shifted my position a little because my back was starting to hurt a little, and the motion caused him to accidently brush lightly against my breast. I felt an electric charge of excitement shoot through me, and I felt it echo deep inside me.
Please do that again, my mind yelled, but I said nothing.
From in front of me, I heard Cookie suddenly bark, “Stop!” Reluctantly, Andy and I broke our embrace.
“I mean it,” she said. “That hurt!”
I could see Andy’s face in the reflected light, and he was as concerned as I was.
“You guys okay?” Andy said. “Cookie? You okay?”
“I’m fine, Andy. Thanks for asking,” she said. Andy looked at me for verification and I whispered in his ear, “I’m sure she’s okay.”
We picked up where we had left off, but there were only a couple of minutes left. I actually came a little out of my seat to press myself more firmly into his arms. Brightening light told us we were coming to the end, and we broke our embrace for the last time.
As we came into daylight, Mark and Cookie were sitting as far from one another as possible. I looked at Andy’s face and started to giggle. I’d gotten lipstick all over him. As we came around the last turn, he wiped furiously with a handkerchief.
We came to a halt, and Cookie quickly jumped out and started walking, not waiting for Mark.
“You’d better go ahead,” Andy said. “I’ll see you on the bus.”
Laura and I were racing to catch up with Cookie when she suddenly looked at me and stopped.
“My God!” she blurted. “What happened to you?!”
Cookie heard the question and turned to see what it was about. When she saw me, her jaw dropped.
“Erin!” she said, her face suddenly breaking into a smile. “If you get on the bus looking like that, they’ll never let you in another Catholic school as long as you live!”
I stopped and pulled a compact out of my purse. One look told me all I needed to know: I was a mess. A tissue cleaned away the smeared lipstick, and some quick work with a hair brush took care of my Bride-of-Frankenstein hairdo. I re-did some lipstick, gave a couple of other quick touches, and Cookie and Laura pronounced me as presentable.
We noted that Laura also was in need of some repairs, and Mike and Andy looked on in great amusement. Mark meanwhile took the long way around back to the bus.
As we walked back to the bus, we had to cross the parking lot, including a large open space in front of the bus. Bob McDonough, the class comedian, was providing commentary on all of the couples as we returned to the bus.
“And, yes,” he said, “here comes Mike with the lovely Laura, and since Mike is walking normally we’ll assume he didn’t try anything. Next we have Erin and Andy, finally together, can you believe it? Of course, they both look like they’ve been through a car wash! Don’t worry, folks, a drive-in confessional is available on this trip.
“And then we have Cookie and…Cookie and…um…okay, let’s send for the paramedics, Mark is among the missing!”
I glanced over at Cookie, afraid that she might not be up to this, but she was grinning from ear to ear. Andy took my hand in his as we walked, and I gave his a squeeze. A few minutes later, when Mark tried to sneak on the bus, Bob called out, “quick, check him for injuries, then take a statement.”
Sr. Psycho got on the bus and demanded what was going on, but everyone just laughed. It was only later, after we’d gotten back to school, after Andy had quickly and stealthily kissed me goodbye and Mike and Laura had done the same, that Cookie told us what had happened.
“We were making out,” she said. “He decided to take it up a notch or two. I figured, why not? So, he grabs my right boob and squeezes it hard! It hurt like hell! I told him to stop, but he kept it up. Idiot!”
Two nights later was the dance. During rehearsals, it had seemed that my partner changed every week – the boys and girls were each placed in lines of size order, so attendance determined who my partner was each week. As luck would have it, Andy was my partner on the night we actually performed the dance, and I gave him a brilliant smile when we turned to face one another.
After the performance, we had our dance in the cafeteria while the adults had theirs in the auditorium/gym. I introduced Andy to my parents, and he introduced me to his. Then we left, holding hands.
Mark begged Cookie for forgiveness, and although she’d told us beforehand that hell would freeze before she forgave him, she did. I guess she decided that she didn’t really want to risk being without a date that night, although half the class would have gladly done the job. We all ended up at the same table – Mark and Cookie, Laura and Mike, Nicki and Tom and Andy and me. Mark was pretty quiet the whole night.
After a while, I didn’t notice. Andy and I danced every dance, taking time out only when we were eliminated in the dance contest. The band was the Night Raiders, the best known band in the area. Everyone kept urging me to get up and jam with the band, but I didn’t want to and I knew they wouldn’t want me to. Andy was about to go ask, anyway when I begged him not to.
The slow dances were wonderful. Andy held me more closely than I’d ever been held. And once, we managed to dance our way into a dark corner, and he started kissing me, but suddenly Sr. Joseph appeared and we got back to just dancing.
The band was just getting ready to play the last song of the night when Dad suddenly walked in. He came over and talked to me a little, and then the last dance was beginning, and he wasn’t leaving. I froze, afraid to move with him standing there.
“Erin,” Andy said. “Don’t you want to dance?”
“Oh. Um…yeah, sure.”
I swallowed hard as he took me in his arms and we began to sway to the music, feeling my cheeks burn as Dad stood and watched while I slow danced with my new boyfriend.
“You okay?” he asked me softly, and I said I was.
“It just freaks me out a little with my dad standing there,” I said.
“No kidding. I can’t even try anything with him right there.”
I almost laughed out loud, and I relaxed enough to finish the dance.[/i]
It was Christmas season before we knew it. Christmas Eve, we spent with Dad’s side of the family, and Dad was still on the wagon, which was really exciting. He had also gotten a new job installing burglar alarms, so he was pretty upbeat.
I talked Mom into going to midnight mass, and when we walked into church, Laura and Cookie were there, as well as several other kids from school. Mom understood when I detached myself to join them. We stayed in the back of the church.
I had misgivings, because at this point in my life, I was rather serious about my religion. My dad’s sobriety was something I prayed for on a daily basis – the first time I had ever asked God for something serious and not directly affecting me. I knew that hanging with the kids would likely mean some distraction, and I didn’t really want that.
So, I was surprised when the mass actually started and everyone settled down, except for a group who stayed out in the vestibule. Cookie was on the point of joining them, but then decided to stay with Laura and me instead.
I was paying attention to the mass, so I really don’t know when Andy slipped in next to me. But by the time the gospel was read, I was aware of his presence. I was wearing a dress, stockings and heels, as well as a makeup job that included lipstick, blush, mascara, and a little eye shadow, and therefore felt I was looking my best.
When it came time to exchange the sign of peace, Laura, Cookie and I hugged and kissed each other. Then, I turned to face Andy, and he was grinning at me. So, flush with excitement and Christmas spirit, I kissed him on the cheek and wished him Merry Christmas.
We were all standing together outside after mass when Mom came out. Mrs. Bartoli came up and offered to drive us home, and she and Mom were off to the side, chatting with a few other adults. A light snow was falling, and I was actually glad to see Mom getting to socialize.
I didn’t see it for long. Andy was next to me, again. We started chatting, mostly banal stuff about school. Then he started asking about what kind of music I liked, where I wanted to go to high school, that sort of thing.
“Um, Erin?” Laura was suddenly at my elbow. “We’re waiting for you.”
“Sorry,” I said, blushing a little. “Gotta go.”
Walking to the car, I glanced at Laura out of the corner of my eye and saw she was grinning at me.
“Okay,” I said. “How long were you calling me?”
“Oh, I think we started around 2:00 this morning, which was an hour ago,” she said.
“You did not!”
I looked at my watch; it was twenty minutes to two. We were at the car, and Laura and I got in the back seat.
“Nice of you to join us,” Mom said dryly.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“Oh, that’s all right. Far be it from me to interfere with…”
“Mom!”
I was the only one in the car not laughing.
I had stayed in touch with Terri, of course, and we had occasionally gotten together. But I had fallen out of touch with Diane and Cathy, and so when Terri invited me to stay over for a few days between Christmas and New Years, I jumped at the chance to rekindle old friendships. I arrived at her house the day after Christmas and stayed until New Years Eve.
One evening, Terri and I were trying to decide what to do when I heard music coming from the basement. Her brother, Rod, who was now eighteen, was down there. The voice of the singer was not especially pleasing, and yet it drew me; more than that, the song drew me – slow, gentle, and somehow hypnotic.
I stood at the head of the stairs, until Terri gave me a nudge and I went down. Now, I could hear the lyrics. I had already been attracted, with a little help from Sr. Joseph, to the poetic lyrics of Simon and Garfunkle. But these were different – poetic, but not so concrete. It was as if the meter of the lyrics was as important as the words that made them up.
It was Bob Dylan doing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowland”. Up until then, the only song I had heard Dylan sing had been “Rainy Day Women”, which I didn’t like at all. But this was so different that I had trouble believing it was the same guy.
Rod looked up, startled to see me.
“You like Dylan?” he asked, surprised. I didn’t answer. I was too enthralled with “my warehouse eyes, my Arabian drum…should I leave them at your gate, or, Sad-Eyed Lady, should I wait?”
The song took up an entire side of an album. There were leisurely bridges in the middle, light organ solos that just seemed to fit. The verses were long, poetic and lovely.
“You like the Young Rascals?” he asked when the song had finished.
“Sure.”
“What’s your favorite song on their album?”
“I like ‘Midnight Hour’ a lot, but my favorite is ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.”
“Dylan wrote that,” he said with a smile. When I was surprised, he grinned and said I’d be surprised at how many great songs Dylan had done – “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “Chimes of Freedom”, and “Blowin’ In The Wind”.
I frowned, and Terri, who by now had joined us, laughed.
“Poor, Erin,” she said. “Always out in front of the rest of us on music, and here’s one she missed.”
“That’s okay,” Rod said. “We can get her caught up, now. That is, if you two don’t have other plans.”
“It’s okay with me,” Terri said, quickly. She had not been feeling well, and she was just as happy taking it easy while I listened to music. So, we settled in while Rod went through his collection.
We listened to all of “Bringing It All Back Home”, “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde On Blonde”. I was mesmerized. A few songs I asked him to play again, and a few, like “Highway 61”, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Desolation Row”, I had to hear several times.
When I first heard “Highway 61”, I laughed out loud, picturing God and Abraham talking to each other in modern slang – “Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on!’.” And when I heard the line in “Tom Thumb’s Blues” about “I started out on burgundy but soon I hit the harder stuff”, I thought of my father, and then it really came home when I heard the line “But the joke was on me, there was no one even there to bluff.” And I knew I had to make that song one of my own.
After Christmas vacation, I went back to school anxious to see how Andy might act toward me. It was extremely cold, and no one was in a very sociable mood. Andy might have thought about opening a conversation with me, but he didn’t do anything about it, and over the next few weeks, we seemed to be held at a distance from one another.
One night, my folks and I were invited downstairs to Tony and Rosa’s. Janice and I spent a lot of time in her room listening to music, mostly a few new Dylan albums I’d just bought, and she was urging me to find someone to play in a band with. I had to admit, I was starting to really get the itch.
It had started snowing early in the evening, and by the time Rosa called us out to the kitchen for coffee and cake, we were in the throes of a big winter storm. But in that warm kitchen, with friends, we felt rather removed from it all, and no one wanted the evening to end. It was a little after 11:00 when Mom noticed the time and said she really had to get back upstairs, that tomorrow was going to be difficult enough, causing Tony to laugh heartily.
“Tomorrow?!” he said. “Relax, because no one is going anywhere tomorrow.”
To my surprise, Mom settled back and we didn’t go back upstairs until after midnight. Janice had told me that the signal that all the schools in town were closed would be six blasts on the village fire horn, repeated twice. And that’s exactly what I woke up to the next morning.
By late morning, the snow had stopped and the sun was out, and Dad and I went downstairs to help Janice and Al shovel snow. The driveway alone was a huge job, so the extra help was appreciated. We were finishing the entrance to the driveway when we saw Steve, Charlie and a couple of the other boys from the neighborhood walking up the block.
“Hey, Erin,” Steve said. “You got a minute? Next Saturday, I’m having a few friends over for a sort of jam session. I was wondering if you might like to join us. We’ll get started about 1:00.”
Steve, I had learned a while back, played the drums.
“I’ll carry your amp,” Charlie said. He lived across the street from me.
“Well,” Steve said, “He’ll get it to the corner, anyway.”
Janice and I laughed, and Charlie stared at the ground. Actually, I was surprised by this because Steve and I hadn’t really hit it off at first. I considered saying no.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
I was actually excited about it, and I laughed when Charlie was waiting in front of the house waiting to carry my amp. I laughed even harder when he could only make it to the end of the block before he had to put the amp down and rest. He did pick it up and carry it again, but when we got to Steve’s house, he was exhausted.
We made our way down his basement stairs, and I was surprised to find that Charlie’s friend, Duke, and Margaret were both there. Steve looked more displeased than surprised, but despite how crowded it was in his basement, he didn’t ask them to leave, or Charlie, either. I was setting up my amp and guitar when I heard a familiar voice call from across the room.
“Why, it’s Erin, as I live and breathe!”
“Lenny!” I gasped, and ran to hug him. I hadn’t seen him since we’d moved.
It turned out that Lenny and Steve both belonged to the same protestant church and had known each other for years. When Steve had approached Lenny about the jam session, he had mentioned that there was a girl in the neighborhood who had lived near Lenny.
“Erin?” Lenny had asked, and when Steve said, yes, Lenny added, “Get her to join us if you possibly can.”
It was crowded in that basement. In addition to Steve and his drums, Lenny and me, there was Bob, who played organ, Cal who also played guitar, and Gary who played bass. I hadn’t played with anyone since the Larkin Boys, and I was afraid my rust would show, so I was content at the outset to play rhythm.
We had a hard time getting started, with a lot of conflicting suggestions as to what to play. Steve tried making some suggestions, but whatever Lenny could play, Cal didn’t know, and vice versa, or so it seemed. Finally, Bob just shrugged and started belting out “Knock On Wood” on his organ, and Lenny and I joined in, but no one sang.
We played through it a couple of times, each time Steve providing the thumping bass drum beat for knocking on wood, when finally Lenny yelled across to me, “C’mon, Erin, I know you know it!”
“Me?” I asked. “You want me to sing?”
“Hell, yeah,” Lenny said as Bob and the rest of us stopped, Bob showing indignation at the interruption. “You know you can.”
Suddenly, I remembered doing “Not Fade Away”, and I decided, why not? Well, there was one very good reason why not, and he was standing across the way from me – Cal. His hostility had first shown when he realized I was there to play and not for show, and it increased when Lenny and I joined in a number that he either didn’t know or didn’t like.
“Okay,” I said with a shrug, deciding that it was just a jam session. We started right back up, and I got into the song. Lenny, who didn’t have much of a voice, sang some harmony, and I couldn’t help thinking of the Starlighters singing Beatles songs on his porch. All in all, it sounded pretty good.
We did “Like A Rolling Stone”, and Cal sang, but he did it more like the Rascals than like Dylan, and I didn’t care for it. So, I suggested “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, and Lenny sang it, with me harmonizing on the last line of each verse.
Cal suggested a couple of more standards, and then I suggested “For What It’s Worth”. I had only just heard Buffalo Springfield doing it on television a week earlier, and had run right out and bought the record. Lenny was the only other one there who knew it, and we played it together, with Gary and Steve kind of following along.
At the end of the afternoon, we were left with the fact that Lenny and I, and to a lesser extent, Steve, were into the more cutting edge material of the day, while Cal and Bob preferred more of the Top 40 stuff. It didn’t look very promising. And as we were packing up, Lenny said how much he’d enjoyed this and he hoped we could get in a couple more sessions before June, because that’s when he was moving away.
A few days later, I was in the Cow Shed, a convenience store at the end of our block, when Steve walked in.
“We’re thinking of giving the band a try,” he said. “Would you be interested?”
“What about Cal?” I asked. He smiled.
“Cal’s not in the picture right now. It would just be the five of us. Lenny is in until the end of the school year, and I’m hoping that we can get a gig or two before then, just because it would be cool. I think we can con Gary into doing the male vocals if you’ll do the female ones, and Lenny says you’ll play some good leads if we ask you nicely.”
I laughed heartily, right there in the store. And then I said yes.
We started rehearsing a couple of evenings a week, and Saturdays. Laura and Cookie were very understanding and very supportive, telling me I should definitely see where this went. I seemed to be hitting one of those stretches of life when it seems nothing could possibly go wrong.
I came home from school after hanging out at Cookie’s on a Friday afternoon; Dad was home from work early, which I was used to seeing – sometimes if he finished his jobs a little early, he just came home. He was sitting in his usual easy chair. And he had a can of beer open and sitting on the end table.
At first, it didn’t quite sink in. I actually walked out of the living room and then came back in, as if that would make a difference. But it didn’t; the malignant can was still sitting there, emblematic of yet another failure.
Without saying a word, I turned and walked out, making my way unsteadily back to my room.
“I’m not going to cry,” I promised myself. “I’m not!”
But when I’d closed the door and lay down on my bed, I did. And I was still crying when Mom came home a little later. She made a bee line for the living room and lit into Dad, telling him that he’d broken my heart.
I stormed back down the hall and into the living room.
“No, Mom,” I said sharply. “This isn’t about me. This is about him. It isn’t my life you’re destroying,” I said, turning on him. “It’s yours. But I don’t have to watch.”
I grabbed my jacket and shoulder bag and stormed out. I didn’t know where I was going, and it wasn’t until I was passing the library that I realized was still wearing my school uniform. I crossed the street to the train station and found a phone booth with a functioning phone.
I fished some loose change out of the bottom of my bag and called Laura.
“Hi,” I said when she answered. “It’s Erin…I…”
It all erupted at once, and I couldn’t get a coherent sentence out. I was crying; I was angry, kicking the side of the phone booth; I had never felt so alone in my life. Laura listened calmly and waited until I came up for air.
“Erin, just tell me where you are.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t do that to you again. I can’t impose on your family again…”
“And you can’t go home like this. Give me the number of the phone booth you’re in.”
I did, and she told me to hang up and wait for a call back. I waited for four minutes, and the phone rang. When I answered, it was Cookie.
“Come over,” she said without any prelude. “Don’t make me come out and get you.”
I started to argue, but she said, “Hey! You want me to get my cousin, the hood, to explain things to you?!”
“Thanks,” I said, laughing a little. I started walking, and I was just passing our school when I saw her coming toward me. I ran to her, already starting to cry again, and I practically jumped into her arms.
“Come on,” she said, soothingly. “Laura’s on her way over. I see you’re still dressed for school, so you’re in luck – you can wear some of my clothes for a change.”
It had only been a couple of hours since I’d left their house, but Cookie’s mom welcomed me as a long lost friend. True to her word, Cookie had me change before dinner. I figured I’d borrow something casual, but to my surprise, she leant me one of her skirts, and it was the shortest miniskirt I had ever worn. A V-neck sweater went with it, and the V was cut quite low, perfect for showing off Cookie’s considerable assets, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t do it justice.
“Looks good to me,” she said, and Laura agreed. I kept the stockings and shoes I’d worn all day, and I immediately experienced the challenge of short skirts.
“Cookie, how am I supposed to keep the tops of my stockings from showing with this skirt?” I asked. She laughed.
“Why would you want to do that?” she asked, feigning mild shock.
We returned to the dining room, where I kept my knees locked together and sat as primly as I could. It was just the three of us and Cookie’s mom for dinner, so I was able to relax a bit. After dinner, we repaired to Cookie’s room, where she informed me that we were staying the night.
I called home, and Mom said she understood. Then I went in and told Cookie and Laura what had happened. They both hugged me and told me they loved me, and that we would always be friends.
“I just feel like I’m always imposing on you two,” I said. “You’re always helping me.”
“Don’t worry,” Cookie said. “It’ll be your turn before you know it. You can bet money on it.”
After a while, our house settled back down to normal. Dad’s drinking was a pattern I’d grown up with, so after a while, it almost seemed like he’d never stopped. The biggest difference now was that, although he had stopped going to AA meetings when he fell off the wagon, Mom kept going to Al-Anon meetings. It was to become a major bone of contention between them.
In the meantime, he seemed anxious to do something to win me over, and he hit upon a plan that certainly got my attention.
“Honey,” he said to me one night with no introduction. “Did you know the K of C has a youth organization called the Squires? It’s for boys around your age. Well, the Squires have dances periodically at the clubhouse.”
“So,” I said cautiously, “You’re suggesting that I go?”
This would be interesting, because Mom was adamant that she did not want me dating until I was 14. Was he going to defy her?
“Not exactly,” he replied with a laugh. “I thought maybe your band might want to play at one. I asked Tony downstairs about it, and told me he can get your band an audition, if you’d like.”
I did like, and very much. And when I mentioned it to Steve and the guys, they liked it a lot, too. We weren’t expecting things to move with lightning speed, but within a week, we got an audition. Of course, the negative for me was that Dad wanted to be there, and that made me very self-conscious. But we played well, anyway, and we were offered a job playing a dance in mid-March.
Laura and Cookie were thrilled when I told them, and the night of the dance, half the eighth grade class turned up. Cookie insisted that I wear her mini again, and I decided to do it, with a sleeveless top because I knew it would get warm, and a nice pair of heels. That night, as we were setting up, before the doors opened, I was surprised to look up and see Andy.
He came over and gave me a nice, breezy hello. I was glad to see him. Since we had seen each other at Midnight Mass, he’d barely said ten words to me – always friendly, but distant – and I had wondered why we never quite recaptured that ease with each other we’d had that night.
He offered to help, or to get us something to drink, but we were already set up, and Lenny and I were getting ready to tune up. I wondered how he had gotten in so early, and it turned out that he was a member of the Squires, and had volunteered to help out.
“You’re amazing,” he said, suddenly. “You look like this is just something to do. You don’t look nervous at all.”
It was true – I wasn’t. Maybe it was all those parades and competitions I’d been in, or the short appearance I’d had with the Larkin Boys, or playing “Taps” that year on Memorial Day. But as I looked over at Steve and the guys, the only one who looked as relaxed as I felt was Lenny.
The doors opened and kids started streaming in. It was then that I realized that this was my first dance, and that I had no idea what to expect. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so relaxed anymore.
“Hey, Erin,” Lenny said, jolting me a little. “You ready?”
I was. We started off with “Hungry”, by Paul Revere and the Raiders, played some Stones, some Beatles and various pop favorites. But we also mixed in the songs that had us excited as musicians. We played for a total of three hours, with three 50 minute sets and two 15 minute breaks. We finished the first set with “Highway 61” and then “Like A Rolling Stone”, with me on the lead vocal.
I had just placed my guitar back in its stand when Andy appeared with ice cold bottles of Coke – the old glass bottles.
“Bless you, my son!” gasped Bob, who I had come to learn had a very dry sense of humor. He gulped his down while Steve toweled off heavy perspiration.
“Thanks, Andy,” I said. He shrugged and mumbled something about it being his job. Then he excused himself and dashed off to attend to some chore or other.
“Hey,” said Cookie, behind me, “That was damned good!” Then, turning to Steve, she added, “You ought to have Erin sing more leads, she sounds terrific.”
“My agent,” I said, and Steve just grinned, then walked away. I found a place to sit down, which came as a relief.
“Don’t tell me,” Cookie said. “The heels were a bad idea.”
“My back is killing me,” I admitted. “How am I going to get through two more sets?”
“Easy,” she said with a laugh, reaching into her bag and pulling out her pair of double t-strap mary janes, the ones that were just like mine.
“What made you bring those?”
“I was afraid my feet would hurt, dancing in heels. So, I wanted something to change into. But I’m fine, we wear the same size, so…enjoy!”
I placed my heels behind the amplifier, and felt much better in the second set. I relaxed as we played, and took notice in how my friends were faring on the dance floor. Cookie had a constant stream of dance partners, but I was also glad to see that Laura, so shy by comparison, was getting lots of attention from the same crowd.
To be honest, one of the reasons I was glad was that I had begun to sense that I wasn’t the only one who liked Andy – Laura seemed to like him, too. And until I realized that as a volunteer, he wasn’t going to get to dance tonight, I had been anxious watching for him to possibly ask Laura to dance. I knew that if he had, I wouldn’t ever do anything to disrupt things, but I just hoped he wouldn’t.
He didn’t. And when our second set ended with “Ruby Tuesday”, Laura was actually dancing with Mike Roberts from our class. Great, I thought, because he was such a nice guy. We took our second break, and Andy returned with more bottles of Coke.
He turned to go, and I called him. He turned back, and I froze. I had nothing to ask him, and I couldn’t make anything up.
“Do you have anything you have to do right now?” I asked before I died of embarrassment.
“No,” he said, baffled. “Why?”
“Um…just thought I’d ask. It must be tough to not be able to join in.”
“Well, you’re in the same boat,” he said.
“Yeah, I am.”
“Hey, Andy!” one of the older guys called. “Got a minute?”
He frowned, apologized to me, and left.
The third set, it all came together. We led off with “Under My Thumb”, and Bob, Lenny and I all took solos to extend it. Later in the set, we did the medley of “Not Fade Away” and “Who Do You Love”, which the guys had all been excited about when I had told them how we’d done it with the Larkin Boys. Of course, I was a year older, Lenny was a much better guitarist than I had been, and we had Bob on organ, so we had quite a lot of fun with it.
I sang “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, which we played as a slow dance. Then we livened things up with “Midnight Hour”. We did an elongated version of Chuck Berry’s old song, “Reelin’ and Rockin’, and had almost everyone in the place dancing by the time it was over.
Lenny introduced everyone in the band, and then I introduced Lenny.
“We’re gonna do our last song of the night,” Lenny then said, prompting some disquiet, because it was only twenty to eleven.
“We’d better explain, Len,” I said into the microphone, then turned to face the dance floor. “This is a slow song…a long, slow song…a long, long, long slow song. So, we’re gonna give you all a minute or two to find your partners, and then…well, you know.”
Cookie laughed so loud, I heard her up on stage, and everyone else laughed, too. And then we did “Sad-Eyed Lady”. Steve had argued against it, saying that it was too long to dance to, and that the lyrics would be lost on everyone in a dance venue. They may have been, but I measured the success of the song by Laura, who I saw hardly moving in a long embrace with Mike in one corner of the room, and when it was over, he kissed her, right there on the dance floor.
Cookie had been dancing with some guy she met from Memorial, as Mark wasn’t at the dance. Mark would subsequently hear all about it from others who were there, and his jealous rage would be evident for a few weeks afterward. As we were loading out afterward, I caught a couple of glimpses of Andy, but we had no chance to talk, and I had decided that this wasn’t going anywhere, after all.
“Erin?”
I turned to see Andy behind me.
“Do you need a ride home?” he asked. I was really disappointed, as I had just loaded my amp and guitar in Steve’s brother’s car. I was trying to calculate if I could leave them with Steve and pick them up tomorrow, when his brother, Dave, called over to me, “Ready to go, Erin?”
“Um…no, thanks,” I said to Andy, cursing my luck. “I had already arranged one.”
“Oh. Okay. See you Monday,” he said, and left.
The reviews from the class, from what I heard, were mixed on our performance. The kids who tended to like just the pop music didn’t appreciate the Dylan stuff or some of the other stuff we did. The ones who were already looking ahead seemed to like us a lot.
Somehow, Mark’s jealous rage got tangled up with reactions to our band. Looking back on it, I think he was so mad at Cookie that he wanted to topple her from her queen bee status, and since she and I were now good friends, he thought of us as linked. And maybe part of it was the fact that I really had never warmed up to him.
Mark’s campaign only lasted a couple of weeks, and then suddenly he and Cookie patched things up. In the end, queen bee status in the graduating class meant too much to her, and while it would have been very cool for her to date a high school guy while still in the eighth grade, it wouldn’t have been the same. And as the school year wound down, we were focusing more and more on graduation activities.
There would be an outing for all three classes to Rye Beach, and following Mark and Cookie getting back together, Mark asked her to go with him. At first, it seemed silly – we were all going, anyway – but when Cookie accepted, the idea quickly caught on, and the Rye Beach trip would a First Date for a lot of kids in our class.
Now the tendency to couple up had a focus, and there quickly developed a frenzy of boys asking and girls either accepting or refusing. One poor boy in our class asked about five different girls, until one girl told him that he was fickle. But, really, what was the poor guy to do?
Andy asked me one morning while we were waiting for the line to form to head into school, a lovely spring morning that he instantly made better. Cookie later told me that after waiting so long for him to make a move – after all, he’d been sort of pursuing me since Christmas – I should have played a little hard to get. But I liked him too much for that, and when he asked me, I smiled as warmly as I knew how, nodded, and said yes.
There would also be a graduation dance a few nights after the graduation ceremony itself. We were taking dance lessons for a large group dance in front of the parents beforehand, to Herb Alpert’s “Spanish Flea”. It was awful, but we all survived.
We were also awaiting word from the high schools that we had applied to. Cookie, Laura and I had all applied to Mary Louis. One night, during one of our many sleepovers, we had talked about it; they had both been seriously considering Sacred Heart, which was out in Hempstead, but I told them that I really had to return to Queens if I possibly could, that I had other friends with whom I had agreed long ago to apply.
I had told them a lot about Terri, as I had told Terri about Laura and Cookie. And until I knew what they were going to do, I had lived in fear that they would try to pull me in opposite directions. The day we’d submitted our applications, Laura had asked my order of schools, and I had told her, with my heart in my throat, Mary Louis, first; Sacred Heart, second; St. Mary’s, third; and the diocesan school, Maria Regina, out in Uniondale, fourth.
They had both put in the same schools in the same order.
We had to let Sr. Clara know when we heard from a school, whether it was an acceptance, rejection, or waiting list. It quickly became apparent that what I had sensed when talking to Richie that night a year earlier had been correct – we girls had a much harder time getting into parochial high schools than did the boys. The girls’ schools were smaller, and there were fewer of them.
Sr. Clara seemed to take it personally every time a girl got a rejection, and soon she was taking it out on any boy who was accepted to a school and who she thought was unworthy. I got my rejection from St. Mary’s first, then my acceptance from Maria Regina. Mom asked me if I wanted her to send in a deposit to hold a place in case I didn’t make Mary Louis, but I demurred. I knew that money was still pretty tight, and I also didn’t want to waver at all about Mary Louis – it had come to mean too much to me.
Laura and I got accepted to Mary Louis on the same day, and Andy got accepted at Chaminade, which was considered among the very best of schools. Cookie started getting nervous, and when her acceptance came from Maria Regina, her mother sent in the deposit without even asking Cookie. She took it as a lack of confidence, and for the first time, she seemed really shaken.
Her mood worsened when I got accepted to Sacred Heart and she got rejected. For the first time, she was considering the fact that she just might not make it. She was suddenly a little less defiant and less confident, and it was not a pretty sight.
What was an even less pretty sight was the look of disdain she got from Sr. Clara the day she breathlessly reported that she had been accepted to Mary Louis. Cookie had been bursting with excitement as she returned from lunch, telling everyone on line that she had made it. And then Sr. Clara had come out right before the bell rang, Cookie had told her, and been immediately told, loudly enough to carry the whole line, that she did not deserve it.
The band got another gig, playing for a dance at Steve and Lenny’s church. I found it was a lot more comfortable playing where I didn’t know anyone. We played the same three sets we had the first time, and I thought we sounded just as good.
The money I made from both gigs, plus what I had saved from babysitting, gave me enough to buy myself one heck of a pre-graduation present – a Fender Stratocaster. The action was like silk, and when I played it, my fingers felt like they’d been unchained. Dad had driven me to the music store where I bought it – we had recently gotten a worn-looking 1960 Ford Falcon from one of Mom’s uncles, the first time I could remember us having a car – and he grinned at me as I tried it out in the store. I think he was also impressed that the salesman seemed to think I could play.
By the first week of June, things were really winding down at school. We were finished with schoolwork, everyone knew where they were going to high school, and a good percentage of the class had successfully coupled up for Rye Beach. Everyone was feeling good about things, so naturally Sr. Clara felt the need to act.
Her ire was directed at the coupling for Rye Beach. She announced that she was shocked at such a thing, and decreed that anyone who wanted to go on the outing as a “date” would have to submit a detailed note of permission from their parents – girls would have to get permission to go on a “date”, and boys would have to get a note saying that their parents were accepting full responsibility for what happened on the “date”. We were then given 15 minutes, right there in class, to talk it over with our dates.
I think back on that moment now with a smile – it must have been amusing to see the entire class dissolve and then coalesce into couples. And it also must have been interesting to see the specific couples that emerged – Cookie and Mark, Laura and Mike, Nicki and Tom Barrett, Andy and me. It also would have been interesting to note the variations in demeanor in all of us.
While some of the couples chatted just as couples, the eight of us had something of a group session. We started as distinct couples, but then came together. Andy had a very worried look on his face when I saw him.
“Erin,” he said, seriously, “I’m not sure how my parents will react to this. Do you think your parents will give you permission?”
“I don’t plan on asking,” I replied softly. He looked more alarmed at that. “Why? You weren’t actually thinking of going along with this, were you?”
Part of me was demanding that I cool it. I had waited five months for Andy to ask me out, and he had finally done it. Sr. Psycho had was now trying to screw things up, but did I really want to land on Andy, who I knew was a really good guy?
“I don’t like it any more than you do,” he said. “But I don’t see how we have any choice.”
Just then, Laura pulled Mike over and said, “Please tell Erin and Andy what you think.”
Mike laughed easily and said, “I don’t see the problem. We just don’t tell Psycho that we’re going on dates.”
“Nice plan,” Andy replied. “But what happens when she sees us together at Rye Beach?”
“Well, so what? Let’s say for a minute that you, Mark, Tom and I are all hanging out at Rye, and Erin, Cookie, Nicki and Laura are all hanging out, and we end up in a group together, and then we sort of couple up. It’s not a date, we just end up together. Problem solved.”
“Except that when she sees that the same couples who are talking right now are also together that day…” Andy started, and Mike laughed.
“Even if that happens…so what? The trip is after Graduation Day. So, what, she might not let us dance to ‘Spanish Flea’?”
By now, Mark and Cookie had joined us, along with Nicki and Tom. Mark and Cookie were still clearly miffed, but their expressions were changing. Tom looked perplexed.
“You’re right,” I said. “She can’t possibly enforce this unless we let her. And we just won’t. Nobody hands in any notes from parents, and we just hook up when we get there. Mike, you’re a genius.”
Laura was beaming. Mark still looked miffed, because he hadn’t come up with the solution. Cookie was starting to relax.
“I don’t know…” Andy said, and my heart sank. The other couples moved away, and I turned to him.
“What don’t you know?” I asked softly.
“I don’t know if it’s a good idea. I mean, what if she somehow screws up our diplomas, or messes with our records going into high school?”
Sr. Clara was calling us all to return to our seats.
“Tell me, Andy, were you planning on asking her permission to dance with me at the graduation dance, too?”
After school, I walked home with Cookie, while Laura had to go straight home. I was still fuming, and Cookie knew why. It wasn’t just Andy’s seeming lack of backbone; it was the fact that, earlier in the year, I had told her that I thought Andy had a lot more character than Mark did, that he seemed like a lot more of a leader than Mark.
We didn’t say a word as we walked to her house. Her mom gave us a big hello, and we went up to her room. I plopped on her bed while she changed her clothes.
“It’s not you,” she said at last. “You have to know that.”
I wasn’t so sure. He had taken so long to approach me after Christmas Eve, when I’d been so sure we had really connected. Now, it was as if he was using any excuse to get out of being with me, and it hurt.
“But it’s not you,” she repeated. “I’m not sure why Psycho has him so freaked out, but we’ve all seen her have that effect on a lot of people this year.”
I wanted to believe her, but I couldn’t. And when I walked home a little later, I could feel myself sinking into a very deep blue funk. I was usually a good judge of character, and throughout most of the school year, I had seen Andy has having one of the best in the class; he wasn’t suddenly changing his nature, so it had to be me.
Graduation activities swept up all of us. First there was an awards night, then Graduation Day itself. Before that, on the last day of school, all the boys gathered in front of the school and made a pile of their ugly ties, poured lighter fluid on them, and burned them.
“Did they get permission slips from their parents to do that?” I asked Cookie, who rolled her eyes but said nothing.
We were walking up to church for the Graduation Mass – Mom, Dad and me. I was wearing my white cap and gown, with a nice pale blue dress underneath, and white pumps with a two-inch heel, the highest I’d worn, yet. About halfway down the block, I saw Dave, Steve’s older brother, walking toward us.
“Congratulations, Erin,” he said with a big smile. I smiled and thanked him.
The church was hot, and the monsignor seemed to drone on forever. But at last it ended, and I was free.
My cousin Brian graduated the same day I did, so we had a combined graduation party at our apartment. Maureen and I played some guitar together, which was fun. We also had a chance to talk a little bit, in private – I talked about my dad, she talked about her mom, the first indication I had that my aunt had a drinking problem, too.
The next day was the Rye Beach trip. When I got to the schoolyard, I saw Cookie, Laura and Nicki. We started chatting easily, even though my heart really wasn’t in it.
As casually as I could, I glanced over to where a group of the boys were standing. Sure enough, there was Mark, along with Tom and Mike and a few others, laughing and kidding around. Andy stood off to the side, looking miserable.
“Just answer me one thing,” Laura said, quietly. “If he wanted to be with you today, would that be okay?”
“Honestly?” I asked, and she nodded. “Yeah.”
Just then, Cookie came over to chat with me, and I lost track of Laura. I never saw her signal to Mike, or Mike go talk to Andy. But when Cookie suddenly stopped talking, I saw Andy approaching me.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” he asked. I said okay. “I’m really sorry about how all this happened,” he went on. “It’s just that me getting into Chaminade is like the most amazing thing that’s happened in my family, and the thought that Psycho might somehow be able to screw that up…I just couldn’t think straight. So, can we start over, today?”
“You mean like a date?” I asked.
“Oh, no!” he said with mock seriousness. “Not one of those. Just kind of a friendly outing between friends…of the opposite gender…together…but without any permission slip.”
I stifled a laugh.
“Okay.”
The original plan was to sit on the bus, girls with girls, boys with boys, but we decided that was silly, and couples sat together, including Andy and me. I had a momentary fear that someone might make a wisecrack to either him or me, but no one did. And Andy was holding my hand before we’d been on the road for ten minutes.
We had a great time; we went on rides together, Andy scored enough in target shooting to win me a stuffed animal, and unattached members of the class mostly were attached by the end of the day, thanks to The Olde Mill. That was the park’s tunnel of love, and it had been dominating conversation for the better part of two weeks. All during the day, Mark kept making references to it, and I was wondering what he might actually try to do when we got there.
We got into the cars, which were actually floating in water through the ride, a series of tunnels with little scenes and mechanical characters in each one along the way. Mark and Cookie were the first ones in, then Andy and me. I really didn’t want to ride with them, but Laura was better at hanging back, so we got in. Laura and Mike were in the boat behind us, with Tom and Nicki in the back.
As soon as we entered darkness, I felt Andy’s arm around my shoulder and gently pulling me toward him. I decided to go, and I turned to face him and his lips were immediately on mine. What a sweet kiss!
I put my arms around his neck and he held me more tightly. It was as if all the inhibitions of the past several months had melted away. From someplace in front of me, I could hear Cookie’s voice in a soft, murmuring sound, and that somehow made me a little less inhibited than I otherwise would have been, so when Andy wanted to French, I let him.
We were holding each other more tightly, kissing more passionately, and I was running my fingers through his thick, curly hair. I shifted my position a little because my back was starting to hurt a little, and the motion caused him to accidently brush lightly against my breast. I felt an electric charge of excitement shoot through me, and I felt it echo deep inside me.
Please do that again, my mind yelled, but I said nothing.
From in front of me, I heard Cookie suddenly bark, “Stop!” Reluctantly, Andy and I broke our embrace.
“I mean it,” she said. “That hurt!”
I could see Andy’s face in the reflected light, and he was as concerned as I was.
“You guys okay?” Andy said. “Cookie? You okay?”
“I’m fine, Andy. Thanks for asking,” she said. Andy looked at me for verification and I whispered in his ear, “I’m sure she’s okay.”
We picked up where we had left off, but there were only a couple of minutes left. I actually came a little out of my seat to press myself more firmly into his arms. Brightening light told us we were coming to the end, and we broke our embrace for the last time.
As we came into daylight, Mark and Cookie were sitting as far from one another as possible. I looked at Andy’s face and started to giggle. I’d gotten lipstick all over him. As we came around the last turn, he wiped furiously with a handkerchief.
We came to a halt, and Cookie quickly jumped out and started walking, not waiting for Mark.
“You’d better go ahead,” Andy said. “I’ll see you on the bus.”
Laura and I were racing to catch up with Cookie when she suddenly looked at me and stopped.
“My God!” she blurted. “What happened to you?!”
Cookie heard the question and turned to see what it was about. When she saw me, her jaw dropped.
“Erin!” she said, her face suddenly breaking into a smile. “If you get on the bus looking like that, they’ll never let you in another Catholic school as long as you live!”
I stopped and pulled a compact out of my purse. One look told me all I needed to know: I was a mess. A tissue cleaned away the smeared lipstick, and some quick work with a hair brush took care of my Bride-of-Frankenstein hairdo. I re-did some lipstick, gave a couple of other quick touches, and Cookie and Laura pronounced me as presentable.
We noted that Laura also was in need of some repairs, and Mike and Andy looked on in great amusement. Mark meanwhile took the long way around back to the bus.
As we walked back to the bus, we had to cross the parking lot, including a large open space in front of the bus. Bob McDonough, the class comedian, was providing commentary on all of the couples as we returned to the bus.
“And, yes,” he said, “here comes Mike with the lovely Laura, and since Mike is walking normally we’ll assume he didn’t try anything. Next we have Erin and Andy, finally together, can you believe it? Of course, they both look like they’ve been through a car wash! Don’t worry, folks, a drive-in confessional is available on this trip.
“And then we have Cookie and…Cookie and…um…okay, let’s send for the paramedics, Mark is among the missing!”
I glanced over at Cookie, afraid that she might not be up to this, but she was grinning from ear to ear. Andy took my hand in his as we walked, and I gave his a squeeze. A few minutes later, when Mark tried to sneak on the bus, Bob called out, “quick, check him for injuries, then take a statement.”
Sr. Psycho got on the bus and demanded what was going on, but everyone just laughed. It was only later, after we’d gotten back to school, after Andy had quickly and stealthily kissed me goodbye and Mike and Laura had done the same, that Cookie told us what had happened.
“We were making out,” she said. “He decided to take it up a notch or two. I figured, why not? So, he grabs my right boob and squeezes it hard! It hurt like hell! I told him to stop, but he kept it up. Idiot!”
Two nights later was the dance. During rehearsals, it had seemed that my partner changed every week – the boys and girls were each placed in lines of size order, so attendance determined who my partner was each week. As luck would have it, Andy was my partner on the night we actually performed the dance, and I gave him a brilliant smile when we turned to face one another.
After the performance, we had our dance in the cafeteria while the adults had theirs in the auditorium/gym. I introduced Andy to my parents, and he introduced me to his. Then we left, holding hands.
Mark begged Cookie for forgiveness, and although she’d told us beforehand that hell would freeze before she forgave him, she did. I guess she decided that she didn’t really want to risk being without a date that night, although half the class would have gladly done the job. We all ended up at the same table – Mark and Cookie, Laura and Mike, Nicki and Tom and Andy and me. Mark was pretty quiet the whole night.
After a while, I didn’t notice. Andy and I danced every dance, taking time out only when we were eliminated in the dance contest. The band was the Night Raiders, the best known band in the area. Everyone kept urging me to get up and jam with the band, but I didn’t want to and I knew they wouldn’t want me to. Andy was about to go ask, anyway when I begged him not to.
The slow dances were wonderful. Andy held me more closely than I’d ever been held. And once, we managed to dance our way into a dark corner, and he started kissing me, but suddenly Sr. Joseph appeared and we got back to just dancing.
The band was just getting ready to play the last song of the night when Dad suddenly walked in. He came over and talked to me a little, and then the last dance was beginning, and he wasn’t leaving. I froze, afraid to move with him standing there.
“Erin,” Andy said. “Don’t you want to dance?”
“Oh. Um…yeah, sure.”
I swallowed hard as he took me in his arms and we began to sway to the music, feeling my cheeks burn as Dad stood and watched while I slow danced with my new boyfriend.
“You okay?” he asked me softly, and I said I was.
“It just freaks me out a little with my dad standing there,” I said.
“No kidding. I can’t even try anything with him right there.”
I almost laughed out loud, and I relaxed enough to finish the dance.[/i]
I'm not that kind of girl.
-
Robyn Katie
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 380
- Joined: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:02 pm
Hi sisters, here's something to curl up with over the weekend, as Robyn goes through one of those life transitions ... Happy reading!
Love, Robyn Katie
***
The Welches got television, the new radio with pictures. They installed it in the room full of books around all four walls they call the library. They put up folding chairs in front of it so a bunch of us kids could see this rumored magical screen that actually shows people and things from far away.
One of the kids was this strange slat of a girl with cottony blonde hair and unpredictable gaze, she’s the daughter of a pilot for Eastern Airlines, her name is Katie Evers. While we’re all sitting there staring at the television set, wondering how to start it, Katie confidently gets up from her chair, goes and twists a knob. The picture comes on. How did she learn to do that? How did she get so bold as to touch somebody else’s set?
But we can only go over to see television at the Welches’ once a week. It’s strictly rationed. Nearly all my time not actually in school is spent at home, trying to keep afloat.
This is not easy. Mom and Daddy are glum and cocktail hour makes it worse. As for little sister Alice, she is spoiled rotten, she gets away with things they would never let me do. She’s a nuisance, I try to ignore her. I pretend she’s not my sister. I’d like to pretend she doesn’t exist, but that’s more pretending than I can manage to do even on my best day.
Mom is obsessed with my underwear. I get underwear for birthday and underwear for Christmas, when I’d rather have just about anything else. Just lately she’s bought me some new underpants, only they’re made of nylon or some such Miracle Fabric and "underpants" isn’t what you call them.
“Panties. They’re more appropriate to a girl your age. And—”
This seems all right, as they do feel nicer than the horrid old cotton! But as often happens, along with things I don’t mind, she sneaked in something else I’m not so darn sure about.
“—You are going to need a brassiere, young lady.”
“But why?” I shook my head, which felt suddenly giddy. “I don’t need one. Not really—”
“I’m sorry, but you do.” A stab of guilt in my heart, because of these little bumps growing on my chest lately. I’d been hoping everybody would just not notice them, or at least be polite and ignore them. But no, around here nothing embarrassing gets ignored.
Stricken to the heart, I pleaded, “Not just yet? Please? I couldn’t stand to. Everyone would notice—”
Unfortunately at our house being utterly mortified with shame is never an excuse, in fact it’s mandatory. So Mom says we will go into town to Sears Roebuck and get me a bra, actually two, so I can’t use the excuse that it’s in the wash.
Not much was left but stubbornness, which I’m not very good at. “I don’t need a bra!” I protested.
“Don’t you want one?”
“No!”
“Why not, honey?”
“The idea makes me feel uncomfortable.” Shouldn’t that be enough?
It isn’t. “Let’s see, I need to drive into town Saturday morning to the grocery store. You can come with me and help out, then we can go bra shopping for you.”
Saturday. Doomsday. How will I ever face Sears? I don’t even like Sears. The few times I have been in there, all they had was stuff I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, even their Silvertone guitars are very poor make. But nothing will stop Mom. She will see to it that I get those two bras whether I like it or not. I shiver at the thought of the Fatal Moment: the money paid down at the cash register, me being handed the paper bag with the bras in it. Then I will be stuck, they will be in my drawer, but I won’t be able to just leave them there. Mom will insist on me wearing them. What a price to pay! Geez, getting older isn’t any fault of mine!
My heart is in my shoes.
After supper that night I dig out the most recent Sears catalog, a big thick thing, must be a thousand pages. I look brassieres up in the index, and turn to that section. There are pages and pages of them, gruesomely pictured in sepia. Who ever dreamed they made so many?
I guess it ought to be some consolation that one or two of the girls in my class have started wearing bras—Martie McKeown, Penny Tyrell, oh and strangely enough little Marcia Root. But it isn’t.
I make one last ditch stand at the stockade as the Indians come whooping around in their thousands, and arrows kill everyone around me.
“I’ll do all the ironing myself for a solid month! I’ll—” spouting a string of empty promises and reasons why it would be much better if I don’t wear a brassiere. “ … And besides, I don’t want them all staring at me like they do at the eighth grade girls …”
“Well, dear, I’m afraid that can’t be helped.” For you can’t persuade Mom of anything once she’s got her mind fastened on it.
So Saturday morning, which is supposed to be my free time all to myself, I have to put on a nice dress and off we go in the Chevrolet over the old concrete highway, bump, bump, bump to Doylestown. I dawdle at the grocery store, but nothing can avert this oncoming disaster. Groceries in the trunk, we drive up the hill and through the center of town, park on the street in front of Sears and get out on the sidewalk.
I make a last faint plea. “If we could only just not—”
Mother ignores this. In we go--me all the while pleading and pantomiming No! Please! Mortifying me further, she walks right up to a portly saleslady and tells her, “My daughter would like to look at your selection of training bras.”
“Ah! Of course, madam,” taking a big fat look at my poor picked-on chest. There, where so recently I hadn’t anything yet, or hardly, just my darn little sticky-out swollen nipples which felt twice as tender being looked at, my two telltale bumps panged with apprehension. They really weren’t very big, hardly noticeable compared with some people’s! But at the moment they felt like mountains.
The saleslady turned and made for a bunch of boxes in back of the counter, saying, “I think we have just the thing,” neatly disposing of my vain hope that there wouldn’t be anything in stock.
“Actually,” I spoke up in pipsqueak desperation, “that’s all right, you needn’t bother. I don’t believe I need one! Not for a while yet—””
“My dear, you are budding,” said the saleslady like she was the Queen of England. “And you will shortly blossom. You wouldn’t want to do so unprepared. That is the reason you need to start with a training bra.”
“What for? Train what?”
But pure reason wasn’t going to do it. What might help, throwing myself on the floor in a tantrum and squalling, never even occurred to me, so short was I on my natural instincts for self-defense. I was a young lady now, according to Mom, and young ladies don’t even know how to throw tantrums, also according to Mom. So as calmly as I could I said, “Look, I’m really not feeling that well, please could we not? Not today?”
The saleslady smiled regally past my nose as if I were a worm on a hook and told Mom, “Such a difficult time for young girls. I well remember when I was that age.” That’s the sort of baldfaced lie people always tell you at times like this, knowing full well that even though they never were your age and never could have been, you can’t do anything about it.
Off came the box lids, to reveal these various affairs of elastic and hooks to be “fitted” to me. I was marched into the little booth and made to stand naked to my waist (blushing like something a lot redder than a rose) while the saleslady fussed with measuring tape in my most difficult places and tried bras on me and in her bright false manner crowed, “There! These two, I think. And,” rejoining Mom with me clad once more, “colors, shall we?”
“Neutral, I should think,” Mom said. She likes neutral everything, you couldn’t get a primary color on her if you paid her money.
“Red,” I said, figuring that would stop it in its tracks.
“White?” the saleslady asked. “Beige?”
“I don’t like beige,” I said, “it always makes me sick to look at.”
“White, then,” passing over a box of pale pink ones that I suppose you would wear if you wanted to be hired as a burly-Q dancer or something. “Would you like to wear it home?”
“No thanks.”
As I beat a retreat car-ward I got one last amused stare from the saleslady. “You never know,” she twinkled, “you may find you like it.”
As we bumped the seven long miles back home, I thought queasily of all the months I had spent scared, fascinated, repelled at the threat that breasts were going to grow on me. I remember thinking, Gee, hope I’ll be lucky and they won’t. (I’d seen older girls here and there with hardly any; why not me?)
But no. Too late. They were growing on me.
“Go up and put one of them on, why don’t you?” Mom said jauntily. In my room I tried to remember how these complicated things worked and finally got it hooked like the saleslady showed me. My new little breasts felt captured, held rigid, hostages twisted and pulled and stuffed into the narrow mesh. Drawing up the shoulder straps I thought, It’s all their fault. Darn breasts! And this is to be their penalty: death by suffocation. Both of them.
And downstairs I went to Mom’s critical gaze, thankful at least that Daddy was at work and wouldn’t see me till well after lunchtime. I would have asked her please could she not call my new piece of apparel to his attention, but why bother? It wouldn’t do any good.
Embarrassed though! What will I do? There they are sticking out on the front of me, not small enough to hide. Everyone will see them!
Katie Evers, the tall cottony-haired girl who knew how to turn on a television set, has joined my seventh grade class! She’s moved here as a transfer student from I’m not sure where, as her father’s an airplane pilot and they move all over the place. but now she’s here along with her sister Merodie, who’s in eighth, a grade ahead of us.
I don’t know how it happened, but I have fallen in love with Katie. Everyone thinks it’s just a schoolgirl crush but it’s not. I would die for her.
I know I have to seem to be calm about this. Girls are not supposed to be in love with girls. But I have, and now I am stuck. When we’re apart I can scarcely breathe.
Her full first name is Katherine, same as my middle name. We’re both Katies! This seems like fate to me. We’re destined!
But star-crossed apparently. For Katie doesn’t know what to make of me. When I told her I love her (maybe I shouldn’t have done that) she gave me a puzzled expression. She does still let me put my arm around her when we walk together (if no one else can see), but when I try to kiss her she leans away. On the other hand she likes me a lot, she says. She likes being with me lots. We are definitely a pair. It’s just that—well, I don’t know what.
I should say what she is like.
She is a tomboy, like I was just a year ago or so. She hates dresses and only wears them when she must. She’s most comfortable in a T-shirt or a flannel shirt and corduroy pants and sneakers, same as I was, only now I’m not, ‘cause I’ve begun to like being in a dress. We’re such a good match, though she’s an inch taller than me. Her wonderful dishwater-blonde hair fluffs and bounces in ragged clumps. I love her hair, why isn’t mine like that?
She doesn’t wear a bra, just undershirts like a little girl, even though she’s starting to become noticeable too. Will she think badly of me because I do wear one? I have the most awful desire to rub my little budding breasts up against hers. But anything like that will be a long time coming, for she’s skittish and restless and we don’t get to sit together long.
She visits us, and I visit her. We live about twelve miles apart, so anywhere but in school it is a big deal to go see her. Car, etc. I can’t ask Mom to drive me every day in the week. So a lot of the time I am sitting home brooding over Katie, unable to go see her, scribbling in my diary, which instead of true things is filling up with fancies about what I wish Katie and I were doing together. What a lorn existence.
All winter is nothing but Katie, Katie, Katie. Love is overwhelming, how did this happen? I was contented before. Now I am in turmoil all the time, she’s all I can think of, all I want is to be with her, hug and snuggle and rub myself on her. In bed at night I pretend my pillow is Katie and kiss and squeeze it till it’s half lumps.
Are these kinds of feelings supposed to happen to girls when they get my age? If so I never heard of them before. But they must be OK, mustn't they?
Love, Robyn Katie
***
The Welches got television, the new radio with pictures. They installed it in the room full of books around all four walls they call the library. They put up folding chairs in front of it so a bunch of us kids could see this rumored magical screen that actually shows people and things from far away.
One of the kids was this strange slat of a girl with cottony blonde hair and unpredictable gaze, she’s the daughter of a pilot for Eastern Airlines, her name is Katie Evers. While we’re all sitting there staring at the television set, wondering how to start it, Katie confidently gets up from her chair, goes and twists a knob. The picture comes on. How did she learn to do that? How did she get so bold as to touch somebody else’s set?
But we can only go over to see television at the Welches’ once a week. It’s strictly rationed. Nearly all my time not actually in school is spent at home, trying to keep afloat.
This is not easy. Mom and Daddy are glum and cocktail hour makes it worse. As for little sister Alice, she is spoiled rotten, she gets away with things they would never let me do. She’s a nuisance, I try to ignore her. I pretend she’s not my sister. I’d like to pretend she doesn’t exist, but that’s more pretending than I can manage to do even on my best day.
Mom is obsessed with my underwear. I get underwear for birthday and underwear for Christmas, when I’d rather have just about anything else. Just lately she’s bought me some new underpants, only they’re made of nylon or some such Miracle Fabric and "underpants" isn’t what you call them.
“Panties. They’re more appropriate to a girl your age. And—”
This seems all right, as they do feel nicer than the horrid old cotton! But as often happens, along with things I don’t mind, she sneaked in something else I’m not so darn sure about.
“—You are going to need a brassiere, young lady.”
“But why?” I shook my head, which felt suddenly giddy. “I don’t need one. Not really—”
“I’m sorry, but you do.” A stab of guilt in my heart, because of these little bumps growing on my chest lately. I’d been hoping everybody would just not notice them, or at least be polite and ignore them. But no, around here nothing embarrassing gets ignored.
Stricken to the heart, I pleaded, “Not just yet? Please? I couldn’t stand to. Everyone would notice—”
Unfortunately at our house being utterly mortified with shame is never an excuse, in fact it’s mandatory. So Mom says we will go into town to Sears Roebuck and get me a bra, actually two, so I can’t use the excuse that it’s in the wash.
Not much was left but stubbornness, which I’m not very good at. “I don’t need a bra!” I protested.
“Don’t you want one?”
“No!”
“Why not, honey?”
“The idea makes me feel uncomfortable.” Shouldn’t that be enough?
It isn’t. “Let’s see, I need to drive into town Saturday morning to the grocery store. You can come with me and help out, then we can go bra shopping for you.”
Saturday. Doomsday. How will I ever face Sears? I don’t even like Sears. The few times I have been in there, all they had was stuff I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, even their Silvertone guitars are very poor make. But nothing will stop Mom. She will see to it that I get those two bras whether I like it or not. I shiver at the thought of the Fatal Moment: the money paid down at the cash register, me being handed the paper bag with the bras in it. Then I will be stuck, they will be in my drawer, but I won’t be able to just leave them there. Mom will insist on me wearing them. What a price to pay! Geez, getting older isn’t any fault of mine!
My heart is in my shoes.
After supper that night I dig out the most recent Sears catalog, a big thick thing, must be a thousand pages. I look brassieres up in the index, and turn to that section. There are pages and pages of them, gruesomely pictured in sepia. Who ever dreamed they made so many?
I guess it ought to be some consolation that one or two of the girls in my class have started wearing bras—Martie McKeown, Penny Tyrell, oh and strangely enough little Marcia Root. But it isn’t.
I make one last ditch stand at the stockade as the Indians come whooping around in their thousands, and arrows kill everyone around me.
“I’ll do all the ironing myself for a solid month! I’ll—” spouting a string of empty promises and reasons why it would be much better if I don’t wear a brassiere. “ … And besides, I don’t want them all staring at me like they do at the eighth grade girls …”
“Well, dear, I’m afraid that can’t be helped.” For you can’t persuade Mom of anything once she’s got her mind fastened on it.
So Saturday morning, which is supposed to be my free time all to myself, I have to put on a nice dress and off we go in the Chevrolet over the old concrete highway, bump, bump, bump to Doylestown. I dawdle at the grocery store, but nothing can avert this oncoming disaster. Groceries in the trunk, we drive up the hill and through the center of town, park on the street in front of Sears and get out on the sidewalk.
I make a last faint plea. “If we could only just not—”
Mother ignores this. In we go--me all the while pleading and pantomiming No! Please! Mortifying me further, she walks right up to a portly saleslady and tells her, “My daughter would like to look at your selection of training bras.”
“Ah! Of course, madam,” taking a big fat look at my poor picked-on chest. There, where so recently I hadn’t anything yet, or hardly, just my darn little sticky-out swollen nipples which felt twice as tender being looked at, my two telltale bumps panged with apprehension. They really weren’t very big, hardly noticeable compared with some people’s! But at the moment they felt like mountains.
The saleslady turned and made for a bunch of boxes in back of the counter, saying, “I think we have just the thing,” neatly disposing of my vain hope that there wouldn’t be anything in stock.
“Actually,” I spoke up in pipsqueak desperation, “that’s all right, you needn’t bother. I don’t believe I need one! Not for a while yet—””
“My dear, you are budding,” said the saleslady like she was the Queen of England. “And you will shortly blossom. You wouldn’t want to do so unprepared. That is the reason you need to start with a training bra.”
“What for? Train what?”
But pure reason wasn’t going to do it. What might help, throwing myself on the floor in a tantrum and squalling, never even occurred to me, so short was I on my natural instincts for self-defense. I was a young lady now, according to Mom, and young ladies don’t even know how to throw tantrums, also according to Mom. So as calmly as I could I said, “Look, I’m really not feeling that well, please could we not? Not today?”
The saleslady smiled regally past my nose as if I were a worm on a hook and told Mom, “Such a difficult time for young girls. I well remember when I was that age.” That’s the sort of baldfaced lie people always tell you at times like this, knowing full well that even though they never were your age and never could have been, you can’t do anything about it.
Off came the box lids, to reveal these various affairs of elastic and hooks to be “fitted” to me. I was marched into the little booth and made to stand naked to my waist (blushing like something a lot redder than a rose) while the saleslady fussed with measuring tape in my most difficult places and tried bras on me and in her bright false manner crowed, “There! These two, I think. And,” rejoining Mom with me clad once more, “colors, shall we?”
“Neutral, I should think,” Mom said. She likes neutral everything, you couldn’t get a primary color on her if you paid her money.
“Red,” I said, figuring that would stop it in its tracks.
“White?” the saleslady asked. “Beige?”
“I don’t like beige,” I said, “it always makes me sick to look at.”
“White, then,” passing over a box of pale pink ones that I suppose you would wear if you wanted to be hired as a burly-Q dancer or something. “Would you like to wear it home?”
“No thanks.”
As I beat a retreat car-ward I got one last amused stare from the saleslady. “You never know,” she twinkled, “you may find you like it.”
As we bumped the seven long miles back home, I thought queasily of all the months I had spent scared, fascinated, repelled at the threat that breasts were going to grow on me. I remember thinking, Gee, hope I’ll be lucky and they won’t. (I’d seen older girls here and there with hardly any; why not me?)
But no. Too late. They were growing on me.
“Go up and put one of them on, why don’t you?” Mom said jauntily. In my room I tried to remember how these complicated things worked and finally got it hooked like the saleslady showed me. My new little breasts felt captured, held rigid, hostages twisted and pulled and stuffed into the narrow mesh. Drawing up the shoulder straps I thought, It’s all their fault. Darn breasts! And this is to be their penalty: death by suffocation. Both of them.
And downstairs I went to Mom’s critical gaze, thankful at least that Daddy was at work and wouldn’t see me till well after lunchtime. I would have asked her please could she not call my new piece of apparel to his attention, but why bother? It wouldn’t do any good.
Embarrassed though! What will I do? There they are sticking out on the front of me, not small enough to hide. Everyone will see them!
Katie Evers, the tall cottony-haired girl who knew how to turn on a television set, has joined my seventh grade class! She’s moved here as a transfer student from I’m not sure where, as her father’s an airplane pilot and they move all over the place. but now she’s here along with her sister Merodie, who’s in eighth, a grade ahead of us.
I don’t know how it happened, but I have fallen in love with Katie. Everyone thinks it’s just a schoolgirl crush but it’s not. I would die for her.
I know I have to seem to be calm about this. Girls are not supposed to be in love with girls. But I have, and now I am stuck. When we’re apart I can scarcely breathe.
Her full first name is Katherine, same as my middle name. We’re both Katies! This seems like fate to me. We’re destined!
But star-crossed apparently. For Katie doesn’t know what to make of me. When I told her I love her (maybe I shouldn’t have done that) she gave me a puzzled expression. She does still let me put my arm around her when we walk together (if no one else can see), but when I try to kiss her she leans away. On the other hand she likes me a lot, she says. She likes being with me lots. We are definitely a pair. It’s just that—well, I don’t know what.
I should say what she is like.
She is a tomboy, like I was just a year ago or so. She hates dresses and only wears them when she must. She’s most comfortable in a T-shirt or a flannel shirt and corduroy pants and sneakers, same as I was, only now I’m not, ‘cause I’ve begun to like being in a dress. We’re such a good match, though she’s an inch taller than me. Her wonderful dishwater-blonde hair fluffs and bounces in ragged clumps. I love her hair, why isn’t mine like that?
She doesn’t wear a bra, just undershirts like a little girl, even though she’s starting to become noticeable too. Will she think badly of me because I do wear one? I have the most awful desire to rub my little budding breasts up against hers. But anything like that will be a long time coming, for she’s skittish and restless and we don’t get to sit together long.
She visits us, and I visit her. We live about twelve miles apart, so anywhere but in school it is a big deal to go see her. Car, etc. I can’t ask Mom to drive me every day in the week. So a lot of the time I am sitting home brooding over Katie, unable to go see her, scribbling in my diary, which instead of true things is filling up with fancies about what I wish Katie and I were doing together. What a lorn existence.
All winter is nothing but Katie, Katie, Katie. Love is overwhelming, how did this happen? I was contented before. Now I am in turmoil all the time, she’s all I can think of, all I want is to be with her, hug and snuggle and rub myself on her. In bed at night I pretend my pillow is Katie and kiss and squeeze it till it’s half lumps.
Are these kinds of feelings supposed to happen to girls when they get my age? If so I never heard of them before. But they must be OK, mustn't they?
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Robyn Katie
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 380
- Joined: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:02 pm
Mother sternly insists on taking me shopping. She acts almost as if it’s my fault I’m growing. She is so worried about money! So is Daddy. My parents went through the Depression and it marked them for life.
“You need two new dresses,” she says in a bitter tone.
“’Those silks and satins and ribbons that shows,’” I carol, clowning, “’and I’m all yours in buttons and bows.’”
She does not regard this as funny. But off we go to Strawbridge & Clothiers where, embarrassment piling on embarrassment, it seems I no longer fit in the children’s styles, but have to be taken to Young Ladies’. There an obsequious saleslady holds up dress after dress to me (I look like a victim at the stake in the triple mirror) while Mom gazes with a critical eye.
“I like this one,” I say. It has bright primary colors and looks like a rainbow. I am partial to rainbows, and it amazes me that they actually make such a wonderful dress, it’s like Polychrome the rainbow fairy in the Oz books!
“Not very practical, dear, I’m afraid,” says Mom, not unsympathetically. “These are meant for everyday wear, and it wouldn’t do to get something quite so unsuitable.”
“When one is in the process of becoming a young lady,” agrees the saleswoman deferentially, “suitability is vitally important.” So I get overruled on the dress I really love ‘cause it is not Young Ladylike. Everyone seems determined to make a Young Lady out of me no matter how I try digging in my heels.
Speaking of heels, I’ve been wearing Brenda Endicott’s. If Mom thinks my new dresses are extravagant, it’s a good thing she hasn’t seen Brenda’s! When I visited the Endicott girls in Dolestown a week ago last Wednesday afternoon, they put me in one of hers. It was gloriously impractical and I liked it, though it was very low cut in front, and the skirt flounced way out -- because underneath it they had me wear a crinoline, a thing I didn’t even know existed.
Then we made me up (I’m learning to do this for myself), mascara and lipstick and rouge and powder. They sniffed superiorly at my strap shoes, and pushed them aside, giving me Brenda’s heels to wear instead. Then out we went on the streets of Doylestown, women of the world! Those heels! I could hardly walk, I stumbled and twisted my ankle, they had to take me home limping, but before that happened we went for sodas at the Palace of Sweets, and some boys tried to pick us up, only we weren’t having any.
“Get lost,” said Brenda to one of them. But he didn’t mind, because she only half seemed to mean it. When he offered, she let him buy her a soda. This amazed me. Later, after the sodas, we had to more or less give them the slip, for they were very persistent.
“They’ll do that if you let them,” laughed Brenda later.
“Do what?”
“Take you with them, she means.” Jill’s grey eyes seemed enormously wise. “Even to their houses sometimes.”
Agape, I immediately wanted to know if either of them had ever been taken to boys’ houses.
“That’s for us to know and you to find out,” said Brenda, laughing. It made me mad she wouldn’t tell me; after all, don’t I tell her everything? Well, I suppose not everything, at that.
Then last Wednesday, all dolled up as Jill puts it, the weather was so fine we walked all the way out to the Fair Grounds, which is a really long way. There wasn’t any fair on at the time, so the grounds were empty, the buildings all locked up. But there were boys there, and they seemed to know Brenda and Jill. They flirted with us, I could die. Then walking back, we got drenched in a thundershower. My blouse turned transparent, Jill said you could see my bra through it, which disconcerted me very much.
They have gotten me started shaving my legs—another development I hesitate to tell Mom about. Though she is bound to find out anyway, as the first time I did it in the bathtub I cut myself, and it bled for about a century, soaking any number of bandaids, before it agreed to stop. I was afraid I would basically have to dye all my clothes red. Jill says you have to have a lighter touch than you think.
After getting my parents’ permission, Dr. and Mrs. Westcott took the three of us to the Water Wheel Inn, it used to be a flour mill, the big water wheel is still there, down underneath, fallen slightly sideways on its broken axle, it makes me giddy to stare down into there. I did feel very much the young lady,, on my best behavior in the prettiest dress on loan from Jill, hoping my makeup was sufficiently splendid and yet not utterly tasteless, for it appears people have very decided views on the subject. We had fillet of sole, which I sort of picked at, as I don’t care for sea food. Next time I’ll think twice before I let somebody else order for me just ‘cause the waiter (he was very goodlooking) happens to recommend it.
This other hot day in July Mom brings me into Doylestown to go to Pearlman’s music store, but there are no new folk song records. Just as well, as my 50c-a-week allowance doesn’t stretch very far. The heat is intense, it’s baking up off the sidewalk, I feel it in my crotch under my skirt like something breathing there.
Music is pouring out the outdoor speaker of the soda fountain as we approach. Music such as I’ve never heard before, sprays of beautiful needle tones I could never make on my guitar: “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” they sing as we go in and get ice cream to help us through this hot, hot day. I have to find out who the singers are. This is music made as if in my bloodstream.
So yearning all the while! Mustn’t give myself away. Shyly I duck my head and blush and walk on, carefully placing my feet as we go, for the sidewalk is cracked just here. Oh, that Tzena thing—I want to play music like that.
Well, I found out what made those scintillating notes -- it was a banjo. The singers are called the Weavers, the person who plays banjo with them is Pete Seeger. The stores don’t have his records. So I scrape together the necessary three dollars and send away to this obscure place in New York for his long-playing album, Darling Corey. The record is wonderful, and the notes say it is a "five-string" banjo.
I put the music store to work searching for one, and it takes weeks, but eventually they find one. Thirty-five dollars! No possibility that I can afford such a sum! All I can do is beg, wheedle, abase myself, and ask if I can have it as an early birthday and Christmas present. Very well, say my parents, just remember that on your birthday and Christmas you’ll not be getting anything else. Gratefully I clasp my hands and promise, starlight in my eyes.
My banjo is here. Lovingly I handle it, so different from the guitar. How, though, am I to coax from it those pretty notes, so jangly, so brilliant? With my last pennies in the world I send to Mr. Seeger for his banjo instruction manual, it costs a dollar. Hereafter my life, already dominated by closeting myself in my room endlessly practicing songs with guitar, will also be marked with the banjo’s starlike notes. It will take me quite a while, though, to make them sound like anything more than garbage can lids clashing.
Dad is hosting the office picnic this year. Having started in the depression as a cashier, he has risen and is now in charge of the trust department at the Provident Trust Company in Philadelphia.
You would think a banker’s family would be rich, but not us. Money is almost never to spare in this house. Alice and I earn our meager pennies by hard work, planting the vegetable garden in spring, weeding and mowing the lawn in summer, sawing wood with Daddy in the fall and winter, plus doing dishes, washing, ironing, more or less everything there is to do, chores piling up on us, too bad our tiny piggy banks don’t pile up on us too.
Anyway, everyone in his department is invited out to our house in the country for a picnic, the highlight (other than liquor) being a baseball game. I love baseball and am good at it, ‘cause we practice all the time, Daddy knocking out flies and grounders and us fielding and throwing. I am not very strong with a bat, but I can place hit like the dickens. So I joy in outplaying those old out-of-shape office people, pitching, catching, playing shortstop, “hitting ‘em where they ain’t” like the great Wee Willie Keeler, dashing around the bases, heavy pigtails flopping, standing on third proud as punch after cracking a triple, but it’s only a triple ‘cause those overweight, clumsy office people can’t catch up with the ball.
What I don’t realize is how the men have been watching my body as I ran, my fleet legs bared by my shorts, plus my pretty behind (they apparently think). Naturally I don’t know about any of this until afterward, as it gets dark and the adults all start having drinks. Then, having changed into my best dress so as to be “sociable and conversational” as Mom and Daddy want me to be, I am sitting on the couch by the fireplace sipping my root beer, trying to think up clever things to talk about with these disconcerting strangers. That’s when I begin to guess where the men’s eyes have been all afternoon, or at least one of the men’s. For this horrible friend of Daddy’s puts his hand on my knee.
“You have a lovely figure,” he says softly, not bothered apparently by the two or three people sitting nearby. “Fine figure of a girl.”
My alarm goes off. “Figure” is such a clever word, for people can say it, yet claim they only meant my whole self, head to toe. But I know what he’s secretly talking about: my breasts.
I crumple up inside. I cross my arms over them, hoping my face isn’t giving me away. I don’t dare remove his hand from my knee—he’s a guest! And what he’s doing must be all right, since no one else is stopping him.
“Um, I have to go—”
“What’s your hurry? Sit and talk to us.” This is said, not by the man, but by his wife. Is she in on it too? What is going on here?
“No, seriously. Excuse me.” And I’m up and out of his clutches, my bare knee burning from his hot damp grip. What would he have done to me if he could?
Now I get an inkling, just the first hint in my life, that people can indeed see something about me, something vulnerable, as if they sense I can safely be approached, petted, fondled. As if they can play their little seducement tricks on me, and I won’t be able to tell on them, because I won’t know how.
“Why, hello, young lady. Robyn, isn’t it?”
“Yes’m.”
“Well, aren’t you the pretty thing. And are you having a lovely time this evening?”
Rudely I don’t reply. The truth is, if I replied I’d be even ruder. So instead I turn and thread my way among the people sitting having buffet dinner on paper plates in their laps, careful not to brush anything with my skirt, because wouldn’t you know, clumsy as I am, I’ll knock somebody’s hamburger on the floor and everyone will laugh, or scold, or tell me to go upstairs and stay there. Which I wouldn’t mind doing, if it weren’t such a dead giveaway.
Gee, I wish I had one of those bikini bathing suits! Here I am at Kennebunk Beach for our two weeks summer vacation, and lots of girls my age are walking around doting on themselves in two-piece suits like I never saw before! There is a tiny halter on top, then sort of a panty on the bottom, with skirt or not, and that’s all. They cheerfully go bare from here all the way down to there, and nobody says a thing about it! Yet me? Here I sit under the umbrella with Mom and Aunt Betty and the others in my one-piece bathing suit looking like a little girl.
“You don’t want to expose yourself like that,” Mom says in her frowny tone.
“Yes I do.”
“Well, you’re better off not.”
I’m not a little girl any more, even if she thinks I am. ....
Lots of things I don’t understand. Like my mad mood walking down to the beach on the hot streets among the cottages surrounded by their bushy green, feeling as if flashing eyes are staring down at me from their high windows, watching every move I make, prying at everything my bathing suit hides. On the sand I dawdle down toward the water, my whole body a hunger. How can I explain this? I seem to be in such a daze, a hot daze, a wanting daze, I don’t know what it is I want, but it seems to have to do with what I am, what I am like, how I look, my whole body is hungry and not for food …
I met this girl Barbara, she’s my age but she seems so much older, she was sitting playing cards on the counter at the Dipsy Baths. She sort of took me under her wing, she seems very experienced.
We got picked up by these boys and as it was low tide the water in the cove was out. So they led us out to the floating dock where the swimming lessons are given, and they put Barbara down on her back and fooled around, a lot.
I was scared, no idea what to do about any of it. Barbara seemed not to mind, though. Later she and the oldest boy walked down a disused road and spent some time in the bushes together. I feel way out of my depth. Should I be glad they didn’t take me in the bushes too? Or should I feel sorry ‘cause I nobody offered to touch me or anything and I missed out? I don’t know what to think.
I came home to find a letter from Katie Evers. All tingly with gladness I tore it open, only to learn that Katie was gone! Her family moved near Hartford, Connecticut, hundreds of miles away. Her father the pilot got sent there by the airline. I'll never get to see her again!
Crushed, longing as if my chest will burst, I write her a passionate letter. She replies with a cautious letter saying nothing much. School starts in a week, it fills me with dread. How can I live throughthe eighth grade when Katie is gone? I don’t even know if there is any way out of this corner I’m in. How can my world of love with her can be saved?
It feels like my life is over before it's begun.
***
(But, thank goodness, Robyn is wrong about this. Stay tuned.)
Love, Robyn Katie
“You need two new dresses,” she says in a bitter tone.
“’Those silks and satins and ribbons that shows,’” I carol, clowning, “’and I’m all yours in buttons and bows.’”
She does not regard this as funny. But off we go to Strawbridge & Clothiers where, embarrassment piling on embarrassment, it seems I no longer fit in the children’s styles, but have to be taken to Young Ladies’. There an obsequious saleslady holds up dress after dress to me (I look like a victim at the stake in the triple mirror) while Mom gazes with a critical eye.
“I like this one,” I say. It has bright primary colors and looks like a rainbow. I am partial to rainbows, and it amazes me that they actually make such a wonderful dress, it’s like Polychrome the rainbow fairy in the Oz books!
“Not very practical, dear, I’m afraid,” says Mom, not unsympathetically. “These are meant for everyday wear, and it wouldn’t do to get something quite so unsuitable.”
“When one is in the process of becoming a young lady,” agrees the saleswoman deferentially, “suitability is vitally important.” So I get overruled on the dress I really love ‘cause it is not Young Ladylike. Everyone seems determined to make a Young Lady out of me no matter how I try digging in my heels.
Speaking of heels, I’ve been wearing Brenda Endicott’s. If Mom thinks my new dresses are extravagant, it’s a good thing she hasn’t seen Brenda’s! When I visited the Endicott girls in Dolestown a week ago last Wednesday afternoon, they put me in one of hers. It was gloriously impractical and I liked it, though it was very low cut in front, and the skirt flounced way out -- because underneath it they had me wear a crinoline, a thing I didn’t even know existed.
Then we made me up (I’m learning to do this for myself), mascara and lipstick and rouge and powder. They sniffed superiorly at my strap shoes, and pushed them aside, giving me Brenda’s heels to wear instead. Then out we went on the streets of Doylestown, women of the world! Those heels! I could hardly walk, I stumbled and twisted my ankle, they had to take me home limping, but before that happened we went for sodas at the Palace of Sweets, and some boys tried to pick us up, only we weren’t having any.
“Get lost,” said Brenda to one of them. But he didn’t mind, because she only half seemed to mean it. When he offered, she let him buy her a soda. This amazed me. Later, after the sodas, we had to more or less give them the slip, for they were very persistent.
“They’ll do that if you let them,” laughed Brenda later.
“Do what?”
“Take you with them, she means.” Jill’s grey eyes seemed enormously wise. “Even to their houses sometimes.”
Agape, I immediately wanted to know if either of them had ever been taken to boys’ houses.
“That’s for us to know and you to find out,” said Brenda, laughing. It made me mad she wouldn’t tell me; after all, don’t I tell her everything? Well, I suppose not everything, at that.
Then last Wednesday, all dolled up as Jill puts it, the weather was so fine we walked all the way out to the Fair Grounds, which is a really long way. There wasn’t any fair on at the time, so the grounds were empty, the buildings all locked up. But there were boys there, and they seemed to know Brenda and Jill. They flirted with us, I could die. Then walking back, we got drenched in a thundershower. My blouse turned transparent, Jill said you could see my bra through it, which disconcerted me very much.
They have gotten me started shaving my legs—another development I hesitate to tell Mom about. Though she is bound to find out anyway, as the first time I did it in the bathtub I cut myself, and it bled for about a century, soaking any number of bandaids, before it agreed to stop. I was afraid I would basically have to dye all my clothes red. Jill says you have to have a lighter touch than you think.
After getting my parents’ permission, Dr. and Mrs. Westcott took the three of us to the Water Wheel Inn, it used to be a flour mill, the big water wheel is still there, down underneath, fallen slightly sideways on its broken axle, it makes me giddy to stare down into there. I did feel very much the young lady,, on my best behavior in the prettiest dress on loan from Jill, hoping my makeup was sufficiently splendid and yet not utterly tasteless, for it appears people have very decided views on the subject. We had fillet of sole, which I sort of picked at, as I don’t care for sea food. Next time I’ll think twice before I let somebody else order for me just ‘cause the waiter (he was very goodlooking) happens to recommend it.
This other hot day in July Mom brings me into Doylestown to go to Pearlman’s music store, but there are no new folk song records. Just as well, as my 50c-a-week allowance doesn’t stretch very far. The heat is intense, it’s baking up off the sidewalk, I feel it in my crotch under my skirt like something breathing there.
Music is pouring out the outdoor speaker of the soda fountain as we approach. Music such as I’ve never heard before, sprays of beautiful needle tones I could never make on my guitar: “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” they sing as we go in and get ice cream to help us through this hot, hot day. I have to find out who the singers are. This is music made as if in my bloodstream.
So yearning all the while! Mustn’t give myself away. Shyly I duck my head and blush and walk on, carefully placing my feet as we go, for the sidewalk is cracked just here. Oh, that Tzena thing—I want to play music like that.
Well, I found out what made those scintillating notes -- it was a banjo. The singers are called the Weavers, the person who plays banjo with them is Pete Seeger. The stores don’t have his records. So I scrape together the necessary three dollars and send away to this obscure place in New York for his long-playing album, Darling Corey. The record is wonderful, and the notes say it is a "five-string" banjo.
I put the music store to work searching for one, and it takes weeks, but eventually they find one. Thirty-five dollars! No possibility that I can afford such a sum! All I can do is beg, wheedle, abase myself, and ask if I can have it as an early birthday and Christmas present. Very well, say my parents, just remember that on your birthday and Christmas you’ll not be getting anything else. Gratefully I clasp my hands and promise, starlight in my eyes.
My banjo is here. Lovingly I handle it, so different from the guitar. How, though, am I to coax from it those pretty notes, so jangly, so brilliant? With my last pennies in the world I send to Mr. Seeger for his banjo instruction manual, it costs a dollar. Hereafter my life, already dominated by closeting myself in my room endlessly practicing songs with guitar, will also be marked with the banjo’s starlike notes. It will take me quite a while, though, to make them sound like anything more than garbage can lids clashing.
Dad is hosting the office picnic this year. Having started in the depression as a cashier, he has risen and is now in charge of the trust department at the Provident Trust Company in Philadelphia.
You would think a banker’s family would be rich, but not us. Money is almost never to spare in this house. Alice and I earn our meager pennies by hard work, planting the vegetable garden in spring, weeding and mowing the lawn in summer, sawing wood with Daddy in the fall and winter, plus doing dishes, washing, ironing, more or less everything there is to do, chores piling up on us, too bad our tiny piggy banks don’t pile up on us too.
Anyway, everyone in his department is invited out to our house in the country for a picnic, the highlight (other than liquor) being a baseball game. I love baseball and am good at it, ‘cause we practice all the time, Daddy knocking out flies and grounders and us fielding and throwing. I am not very strong with a bat, but I can place hit like the dickens. So I joy in outplaying those old out-of-shape office people, pitching, catching, playing shortstop, “hitting ‘em where they ain’t” like the great Wee Willie Keeler, dashing around the bases, heavy pigtails flopping, standing on third proud as punch after cracking a triple, but it’s only a triple ‘cause those overweight, clumsy office people can’t catch up with the ball.
What I don’t realize is how the men have been watching my body as I ran, my fleet legs bared by my shorts, plus my pretty behind (they apparently think). Naturally I don’t know about any of this until afterward, as it gets dark and the adults all start having drinks. Then, having changed into my best dress so as to be “sociable and conversational” as Mom and Daddy want me to be, I am sitting on the couch by the fireplace sipping my root beer, trying to think up clever things to talk about with these disconcerting strangers. That’s when I begin to guess where the men’s eyes have been all afternoon, or at least one of the men’s. For this horrible friend of Daddy’s puts his hand on my knee.
“You have a lovely figure,” he says softly, not bothered apparently by the two or three people sitting nearby. “Fine figure of a girl.”
My alarm goes off. “Figure” is such a clever word, for people can say it, yet claim they only meant my whole self, head to toe. But I know what he’s secretly talking about: my breasts.
I crumple up inside. I cross my arms over them, hoping my face isn’t giving me away. I don’t dare remove his hand from my knee—he’s a guest! And what he’s doing must be all right, since no one else is stopping him.
“Um, I have to go—”
“What’s your hurry? Sit and talk to us.” This is said, not by the man, but by his wife. Is she in on it too? What is going on here?
“No, seriously. Excuse me.” And I’m up and out of his clutches, my bare knee burning from his hot damp grip. What would he have done to me if he could?
Now I get an inkling, just the first hint in my life, that people can indeed see something about me, something vulnerable, as if they sense I can safely be approached, petted, fondled. As if they can play their little seducement tricks on me, and I won’t be able to tell on them, because I won’t know how.
“Why, hello, young lady. Robyn, isn’t it?”
“Yes’m.”
“Well, aren’t you the pretty thing. And are you having a lovely time this evening?”
Rudely I don’t reply. The truth is, if I replied I’d be even ruder. So instead I turn and thread my way among the people sitting having buffet dinner on paper plates in their laps, careful not to brush anything with my skirt, because wouldn’t you know, clumsy as I am, I’ll knock somebody’s hamburger on the floor and everyone will laugh, or scold, or tell me to go upstairs and stay there. Which I wouldn’t mind doing, if it weren’t such a dead giveaway.
Gee, I wish I had one of those bikini bathing suits! Here I am at Kennebunk Beach for our two weeks summer vacation, and lots of girls my age are walking around doting on themselves in two-piece suits like I never saw before! There is a tiny halter on top, then sort of a panty on the bottom, with skirt or not, and that’s all. They cheerfully go bare from here all the way down to there, and nobody says a thing about it! Yet me? Here I sit under the umbrella with Mom and Aunt Betty and the others in my one-piece bathing suit looking like a little girl.
“You don’t want to expose yourself like that,” Mom says in her frowny tone.
“Yes I do.”
“Well, you’re better off not.”
I’m not a little girl any more, even if she thinks I am. ....
Lots of things I don’t understand. Like my mad mood walking down to the beach on the hot streets among the cottages surrounded by their bushy green, feeling as if flashing eyes are staring down at me from their high windows, watching every move I make, prying at everything my bathing suit hides. On the sand I dawdle down toward the water, my whole body a hunger. How can I explain this? I seem to be in such a daze, a hot daze, a wanting daze, I don’t know what it is I want, but it seems to have to do with what I am, what I am like, how I look, my whole body is hungry and not for food …
I met this girl Barbara, she’s my age but she seems so much older, she was sitting playing cards on the counter at the Dipsy Baths. She sort of took me under her wing, she seems very experienced.
We got picked up by these boys and as it was low tide the water in the cove was out. So they led us out to the floating dock where the swimming lessons are given, and they put Barbara down on her back and fooled around, a lot.
I was scared, no idea what to do about any of it. Barbara seemed not to mind, though. Later she and the oldest boy walked down a disused road and spent some time in the bushes together. I feel way out of my depth. Should I be glad they didn’t take me in the bushes too? Or should I feel sorry ‘cause I nobody offered to touch me or anything and I missed out? I don’t know what to think.
I came home to find a letter from Katie Evers. All tingly with gladness I tore it open, only to learn that Katie was gone! Her family moved near Hartford, Connecticut, hundreds of miles away. Her father the pilot got sent there by the airline. I'll never get to see her again!
Crushed, longing as if my chest will burst, I write her a passionate letter. She replies with a cautious letter saying nothing much. School starts in a week, it fills me with dread. How can I live throughthe eighth grade when Katie is gone? I don’t even know if there is any way out of this corner I’m in. How can my world of love with her can be saved?
It feels like my life is over before it's begun.
***
(But, thank goodness, Robyn is wrong about this. Stay tuned.)
Love, Robyn Katie
-
Erin L
- Miss Emerald Goddess
- Posts: 244
- Joined: Thu Oct 30, 2008 11:38 am
- Location: Queens, NY
Wonderful, Robyn Katie. Just wonderful!
The Weavers!! Lee Hayes' rumbling bass, Fred Hellerman's lilting tenor and guitar, Pete Seeger who in his time not only played the banjo so wonderfully, but even put out an instructional recording on the instrument (which I still have somewhere around here), and the lovely Ronnie Gilbert (who made a brief appearance in the film "Crossing Delancey"). Their concert at Carnegie Hall in 1963 is still one of those "must have" recordings.
So many wonderful folk groups were influenced and inspired by the Weavers - The Limelighters, The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary were my favorites.
In my freshman year of college, I attended a Coffee House concert on campus in which several students came in and played folk music of various stripes. One ended with "Goodnight Irene" (Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, wrote it with Alan Lomax, but the Weavers made it a hit), and everyone in the crowd sang along.
Irene Goodnight, Irene Goodnight
Goodnight, Irene; Goodnight, Irene
I'll see you in my dreams
Hugs,
Erin[/i]
The Weavers!! Lee Hayes' rumbling bass, Fred Hellerman's lilting tenor and guitar, Pete Seeger who in his time not only played the banjo so wonderfully, but even put out an instructional recording on the instrument (which I still have somewhere around here), and the lovely Ronnie Gilbert (who made a brief appearance in the film "Crossing Delancey"). Their concert at Carnegie Hall in 1963 is still one of those "must have" recordings.
So many wonderful folk groups were influenced and inspired by the Weavers - The Limelighters, The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary were my favorites.
In my freshman year of college, I attended a Coffee House concert on campus in which several students came in and played folk music of various stripes. One ended with "Goodnight Irene" (Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, wrote it with Alan Lomax, but the Weavers made it a hit), and everyone in the crowd sang along.
Irene Goodnight, Irene Goodnight
Goodnight, Irene; Goodnight, Irene
I'll see you in my dreams
Hugs,
Erin[/i]
I'm not that kind of girl.
-
Leeza
- Miss Ruby Goddess
- Posts: 1745
- Joined: Tue Mar 18, 2008 4:46 pm
- Location: McCook, Nebraska
- Contact:
-
Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
Robyn I loved Cab Calloway. He wrote another song, sequel to Minnie and parrallel to Kicking The Gong Around, called Jerry the Junker, which I also liked. And then there was Little Joe From Chicago by Andy Kirk. Who says having the wrong message in popular music is something new?
My daughter did Minnie in her school jazz band. The teacher said "there's words to this song too, but I'm not going to repeat them to you"
My favorite was St James however. It has the same changes as Minnie by the way. I can do a pretty good solo on it with a plunger.
At one time Cab had a young up and coming trumpet player in his band that he fired. It was Dizzy Gillespie.
Erin I didn't need to go inside to know. I could tell just by standing on the street looking at the house if my dad was relapsing. I'm not sure how I could tell, but I could.
Absaroka
My daughter did Minnie in her school jazz band. The teacher said "there's words to this song too, but I'm not going to repeat them to you"
My favorite was St James however. It has the same changes as Minnie by the way. I can do a pretty good solo on it with a plunger.
At one time Cab had a young up and coming trumpet player in his band that he fired. It was Dizzy Gillespie.
Erin I didn't need to go inside to know. I could tell just by standing on the street looking at the house if my dad was relapsing. I'm not sure how I could tell, but I could.
Absaroka
Last edited by Absaroka on Sat Mar 28, 2009 11:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
-
Robyn Katie
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 380
- Joined: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:02 pm
Hi everyone, More weekend reading ... Love, Robyn Katie
***
This summer I am working for Pearl in the dairy. My main job is to help keep the milk records and make sure the bacteria count doesn’t get too high so the commercial dairy won’t take the milk. Last year they refused the Welches’ milk for three whole weeks till they got the bacteria down to proper levels. The rest of the time when I’m not doing that, I help with the milking, shoveling out the barn and so on, but my first job is keeping those dairy records straight.
For this I get 25c an hour, two dollars a day. It seems very little. The boys get 50c for doing much less; they are always goofing off and hardly put in four hours work in an eight hour day. I asked for a raise but Pearl says I’m not worth any more to her than 25c, and it’s very good pay for a girl too. It’s enough to make a person slip up on the milk records accidentally on purpose. Unfortunately my parents raised me in such a way that I am unable to act like a criminal. It’s a great handicap.
I’m not cartooning as much as I used to. The fun seems to have gone out of it somehow. In sixth grade there were three of us who cartooned, and we had great fun competing and passing each other drawings with funny captions. But I’m the only one still doing it, there’s no one to show the drawings to who cares anything for them. And then I haven’t had much time, what with housework, and chores, and practicing music.
When I can, though, I try to get Mom to drive me to Dolestown so I can look over the romance and love comics and pulp magazines at Kenny’s. The women in them are older than me of course, eighteen, nineteen, but so beautiful. Do you think there is a chance in the world I could ever be that beautiful and have a beautiful girl in love with me?
Oops I must've meant to write "a handsome man." Mustn't I?
No, not exactly. For ~girl~ feels righter somehow.
People work hard to give you the impression that it’s horribly wrong for a girl to fall in love with another girl. All sorts of gruesome things happen if you do this, or so they would have you believe. Well I don’t care, I want one. In bed at night I still hug my pillow and pretend the Good Fairy has brought me a girlfriend of my very own. I only feel guilty and ashamed about this half or less of the time. I am getting calluses on my social outlook over this. And I won’t make my heart un-tender to my fellow maidens just to suit people who don’t know any better and think boys are the only thing for a girl, so there.
I applied to Gerrold School and got in. This is where nearly all my class is going, and even though I’m not close to any of them, I would feel awful if I didn’t go along. When I get my callused hands home and washed in the evening I am still practicing banjo very hard, guitar too—it doesn’t bother me any more that one breast has no place to go. I do think it would be an excellent thing if they would make guitars for girls with two curves hollowed out instead of one. Think how convenient, attractive too. Though then perhaps they’d have to make guitars in cup sizes, like bras!
Folk songs are all I sing, and not the modern ones either, but the old traditional ones that have been handed down from mother to daughter for centuries. There’s no other kind of song that’s half as pleasing. I’m trying to learn to play and sing like the real authentic singers on the recordings from long ago, like this record I have of people in Virginia and places singing way out in the country, people who never paid any attention to commercial style. That’s the kind of music I like. Fat chance anybody else I know will ever like it, but I do.
Sounds like I’m getting to be a rather serious girl I suppose. Well I’m not. I run around yelling and laughing and act like a coot, I hit triples and read romance comics and make puns all the time. Yet it’s true I do have quiet times when I wonder about things. And I read a lot, read everything I can get my hands on. Wonder if I have an inner light like the Quakers talk about? I can sort of picture it in there, a kind of candle in the darkness. Beats being totally empty inside.
But being serious around here has its drawbacks. For instance Mom is liable to say, “Don’t scowl, dear, put on your good sweet face.” Ugh. Makes me recall all her similar homilies about looking receptive, pleased, grateful, expectant. Anything less calculated to make a girl smile …
I think I’m a good sport all around, considering.
I guess my summers of visiting during the languid hottest days with Brenda and Jill Endicott have left their mark on me. Don't quite know how this works, but all those days of doing my hair under their pitiless sophisticated town girl eyes that know everything have left me with fingers that dab here and there and twitch curls and presto, it's pretty. Or so I fondly delude myself. Three solid summers of dress-ups, and boy talk, learning lipstick, mascara, eye pencil, eye shadow, then wiping it all off with cold cream before going home because Mom would never approve. Going to the movies and the soda fountain, doing my best to mimic their flirting in a pretty dress, though I was so shy, so ashamed I scarcely dared say boo to anyone. Just a silly game, but it's turned me into someone different. I never expected this.
Now, on the brink of high school, I’ve so much I have to do. Getting my hair done at the salon, first time ever. Matching colors. Polishing my nails (yes I do like blood red, pooh on your delicate shades). Shaving my legs. Buying actual nylon stockings for school—Mom, who always before refused to allow it, just came back from shopping in town having bought me four pairs and a garter belt to hold them up. I was dumfounded. “Stockings?”
“Nylons. Wouldn’t want you to be the only freshman still in socks.”
So strange they felt on the smooth surface of my ever longer legs. (Legs which probably shouldn’t get much longer, or I shall be a stork.)
I am wearing the first pair of high heels I have ever owned. This Saturday I am to march in the shoe store and get two other pair—and they mustn’t be too fanciful.
“But I don’t understand. Where is the money coming from?”
Mom is smooth. “Wouldn’t want you to disgrace us.”
Believe me, I feel like saying, I can disgrace you in high heels and nylons just as easily as in jeans and sneaks. But I am learning to button my lip just a tiny bit more than before, honest! Such a diplomat, they need me at the United Nations.
At Kennebunk Beach I finally, tentative, unsure, feeling practically naked, step forth on the sand in my first bikini. No kidding, I’m so exposed! My cousins and the girls next door laugh at me. But bikinis do get results. Boys begin turning up at my blanket, which I’ve started putting down on the sand some distance away from the family umbrella, out in the sun nearer the lifeguard stand.
Of course when they try to talk to me I nearly die. Luckily I have a shield: a tall elegant brown-haired girl named Susy Shafer, who with lightning speed makes fast friends with me. Suddenly we are inseparable. More boys come. (She is rather beautiful.) I am just learning the fine art of remembering not to rise up off my towel when my bra straps are undone when unexpectedly, on account of lying out in the sun so much, the worst happens. I get an awful sunburn.
All evening I shudder with chill, the burn so bad I’m actually sick the next day and can’t go to the beach at all! My admirers! What will they do? They don’t know where I live! Can’t I at least go down and tell Susy? I plead with Mom, but no soap. The least sun could pose a danger to me in my condition, she says. I am abandoned alone in the house reading James Oliver Curwood novels between talking with my great uncle Will, who fortunately is too old to make a pass at me (or, at least, he doesn’t).
The next day my skin is too sore to be in the sun, so I have to go to and from the beach in a sweatshirt with a towel to shade my legs and a big picture hat on my addled head. I have to crawl back under the umbrella for days, which makes me very blue.
I’d like to think I’m a free, easy, unafraid girl (when not too shy or terrified). But what happens during our all-day trip home is enough to scare the pants off any two of me.
I start bleeding between my legs!
Nobody warned me! I don’t know why the Endicott girls didn’t include this in their education of me in womanly ways; they weren’t shy about anything else. But somehow they left it out. As for Mom, though she has hinted a couple of times, she never really got around to preparing me for this. Later she will say she always meant to, and just left it till too late. But the fact is, she is easily upset by stuff of this nature, and I’m sure she just couldn’t bring herself to deal with it to my face.
So when I see the blood (in the Ladies’ Room at the Howard Johnson's in Hartford where we stop for lunch) I think the worst. Trying not to let terror get the best of me, I whisper to Mom, “I don’t know, but I think I might have, um, hurt myself somehow.”
Well, nothing will do but we go back into the Ladies’, Mom all fuss and feathers. The upshot of a difficult ten minutes is that I have gotten my first period. Now, I have heard of menstruation, but the details are something you cannot find out about anywhere except by word of mouth, so Mom has to give me a rapid catch-up course in female physiology, at the end of which I want to throw my skirt over my head and never come out. The remedy is even worse. Mom has these huge Kotexes …
Okay, we will skip all that.
Shaken, feeling the eyes of the world on me (especially after Mom says something behind her hand to Daddy), I emerge with a happy face painted on. The minute I sit down, my bratty little sister Alice, who is already starting to grow breasts for godsake, is afire to know what happened.
“I’ll tell you later.”
“No you won’t. You always say that, but you never do.”
“Shhhh!”
Well, obviously now I can’t just forget it as I normally would. So in the back seat somewhere around the Sawmill Parkway I tell Alice to shut up about a million times and then explain, in broken English suitable for children, that I am having a little blood, but it’s normal, because—”
“You’re men-stroo-at-ing!” she claps. Heaven knows where she ever got the word; children these days are appalling. “Robyn is men-stroo-at-ing!”
"Shut up! And anyway that's not how it's pronounced!"
I never hear the end of this until we pile out of the car at home in the dark, unload, get all the suitcases (with a quantity of sand) in the front hall, send Alice to bed, and wangle me a hot bath away from all people whatsoever.
The Kotex is fairly horrible looking. Putting that where I won’t have to look at it, I examine myself with the sort of care you usually spend on gawking at a highway accident. The tub is my last resort. I have to step in gingerly ‘cause my skin is still hurting from that darn sunburn, but I manage somehow. Fresh at last, and rather steamy, I put on a wrapper, pad to my room and get in my nightie.
High school in a week. I will be a boarding student, as twenty-six miles (fifty-two mile round trip) is too far for Mom to drive me to school every morning and come back and pick me up every night. I’ve never lived away from home before! (Not counting being parked at Welches’ during Mom and Daddy’s ski vacations)
Thanksgiving. That’s two months away! Christmas, that’s even farther!
I will be staying in a dormitory with lots of other girls. What will this be like? I don’t know if I will feel at home there among so many. And I do know I’m already feeling desperately homesick, though I haven’t even left home yet.
So much to get done beforehand! Make myself attractive. Work at it. Hard! Everything I wasn’t supposed to do a year ago, I now have to do post haste. Mom says I must remember to blot my lipstick; it’s true traces do seem to turn up in the oddest places. She says not too much eye makeup, please. (She uses none and thinks it is degenerate or something). We go to Jenkintown where Wanamaker’s has its shot at me. Clothes! Shoes! Hat and gloves in case I have to present myself somewhere, like at a tea! (Mom says they have teas, but I think she’s misremembering, isn’t that college? Nobody ever heard of a high school having teas.)
I am turning into a Before and After like in the magazine advertisements. At fleeting moments I have the experience of feeling slim, svelte, perfectly made up, stocking steams straight. That lasts less than an eyeblink, and I’m my awkward self again.
The whole incoming freshman (what a word) class is invited to this party at the house of one of the freshman girls. There’s food, we swim, the pool is lighted so we keep swimming in the dark. I feel like I am having to manage extra hands and feet. Once in my bathing suit I don’t know whether to yell with the boys or act demure with the girls. Smile, show pretty teeth, sparkling eyes, was the advice. Somewhere I learned that, where?
Being driven home I am crushed to think what a glump I was. Said all the wrong things, laughed immoderately, forgot myself at one point and screeched and ran about like a sixth-grader, showing off for our class hostess, slim dark Phyllis Longman, then being nut enough to tease her as well, so she is pretty well guaranteed to detest me forever. Definitely not ready for civilization.
As a going-away present the night before we leave for school, Daddy and Mom give me a beautiful pink gown. "Semi-formal,” says Mom. “For dances.”
“Parties too,” says Dad, trying his best not to leer.
Guess I’m a grownup girl now?
***
This summer I am working for Pearl in the dairy. My main job is to help keep the milk records and make sure the bacteria count doesn’t get too high so the commercial dairy won’t take the milk. Last year they refused the Welches’ milk for three whole weeks till they got the bacteria down to proper levels. The rest of the time when I’m not doing that, I help with the milking, shoveling out the barn and so on, but my first job is keeping those dairy records straight.
For this I get 25c an hour, two dollars a day. It seems very little. The boys get 50c for doing much less; they are always goofing off and hardly put in four hours work in an eight hour day. I asked for a raise but Pearl says I’m not worth any more to her than 25c, and it’s very good pay for a girl too. It’s enough to make a person slip up on the milk records accidentally on purpose. Unfortunately my parents raised me in such a way that I am unable to act like a criminal. It’s a great handicap.
I’m not cartooning as much as I used to. The fun seems to have gone out of it somehow. In sixth grade there were three of us who cartooned, and we had great fun competing and passing each other drawings with funny captions. But I’m the only one still doing it, there’s no one to show the drawings to who cares anything for them. And then I haven’t had much time, what with housework, and chores, and practicing music.
When I can, though, I try to get Mom to drive me to Dolestown so I can look over the romance and love comics and pulp magazines at Kenny’s. The women in them are older than me of course, eighteen, nineteen, but so beautiful. Do you think there is a chance in the world I could ever be that beautiful and have a beautiful girl in love with me?
Oops I must've meant to write "a handsome man." Mustn't I?
No, not exactly. For ~girl~ feels righter somehow.
People work hard to give you the impression that it’s horribly wrong for a girl to fall in love with another girl. All sorts of gruesome things happen if you do this, or so they would have you believe. Well I don’t care, I want one. In bed at night I still hug my pillow and pretend the Good Fairy has brought me a girlfriend of my very own. I only feel guilty and ashamed about this half or less of the time. I am getting calluses on my social outlook over this. And I won’t make my heart un-tender to my fellow maidens just to suit people who don’t know any better and think boys are the only thing for a girl, so there.
I applied to Gerrold School and got in. This is where nearly all my class is going, and even though I’m not close to any of them, I would feel awful if I didn’t go along. When I get my callused hands home and washed in the evening I am still practicing banjo very hard, guitar too—it doesn’t bother me any more that one breast has no place to go. I do think it would be an excellent thing if they would make guitars for girls with two curves hollowed out instead of one. Think how convenient, attractive too. Though then perhaps they’d have to make guitars in cup sizes, like bras!
Folk songs are all I sing, and not the modern ones either, but the old traditional ones that have been handed down from mother to daughter for centuries. There’s no other kind of song that’s half as pleasing. I’m trying to learn to play and sing like the real authentic singers on the recordings from long ago, like this record I have of people in Virginia and places singing way out in the country, people who never paid any attention to commercial style. That’s the kind of music I like. Fat chance anybody else I know will ever like it, but I do.
Sounds like I’m getting to be a rather serious girl I suppose. Well I’m not. I run around yelling and laughing and act like a coot, I hit triples and read romance comics and make puns all the time. Yet it’s true I do have quiet times when I wonder about things. And I read a lot, read everything I can get my hands on. Wonder if I have an inner light like the Quakers talk about? I can sort of picture it in there, a kind of candle in the darkness. Beats being totally empty inside.
But being serious around here has its drawbacks. For instance Mom is liable to say, “Don’t scowl, dear, put on your good sweet face.” Ugh. Makes me recall all her similar homilies about looking receptive, pleased, grateful, expectant. Anything less calculated to make a girl smile …
I think I’m a good sport all around, considering.
I guess my summers of visiting during the languid hottest days with Brenda and Jill Endicott have left their mark on me. Don't quite know how this works, but all those days of doing my hair under their pitiless sophisticated town girl eyes that know everything have left me with fingers that dab here and there and twitch curls and presto, it's pretty. Or so I fondly delude myself. Three solid summers of dress-ups, and boy talk, learning lipstick, mascara, eye pencil, eye shadow, then wiping it all off with cold cream before going home because Mom would never approve. Going to the movies and the soda fountain, doing my best to mimic their flirting in a pretty dress, though I was so shy, so ashamed I scarcely dared say boo to anyone. Just a silly game, but it's turned me into someone different. I never expected this.
Now, on the brink of high school, I’ve so much I have to do. Getting my hair done at the salon, first time ever. Matching colors. Polishing my nails (yes I do like blood red, pooh on your delicate shades). Shaving my legs. Buying actual nylon stockings for school—Mom, who always before refused to allow it, just came back from shopping in town having bought me four pairs and a garter belt to hold them up. I was dumfounded. “Stockings?”
“Nylons. Wouldn’t want you to be the only freshman still in socks.”
So strange they felt on the smooth surface of my ever longer legs. (Legs which probably shouldn’t get much longer, or I shall be a stork.)
I am wearing the first pair of high heels I have ever owned. This Saturday I am to march in the shoe store and get two other pair—and they mustn’t be too fanciful.
“But I don’t understand. Where is the money coming from?”
Mom is smooth. “Wouldn’t want you to disgrace us.”
Believe me, I feel like saying, I can disgrace you in high heels and nylons just as easily as in jeans and sneaks. But I am learning to button my lip just a tiny bit more than before, honest! Such a diplomat, they need me at the United Nations.
At Kennebunk Beach I finally, tentative, unsure, feeling practically naked, step forth on the sand in my first bikini. No kidding, I’m so exposed! My cousins and the girls next door laugh at me. But bikinis do get results. Boys begin turning up at my blanket, which I’ve started putting down on the sand some distance away from the family umbrella, out in the sun nearer the lifeguard stand.
Of course when they try to talk to me I nearly die. Luckily I have a shield: a tall elegant brown-haired girl named Susy Shafer, who with lightning speed makes fast friends with me. Suddenly we are inseparable. More boys come. (She is rather beautiful.) I am just learning the fine art of remembering not to rise up off my towel when my bra straps are undone when unexpectedly, on account of lying out in the sun so much, the worst happens. I get an awful sunburn.
All evening I shudder with chill, the burn so bad I’m actually sick the next day and can’t go to the beach at all! My admirers! What will they do? They don’t know where I live! Can’t I at least go down and tell Susy? I plead with Mom, but no soap. The least sun could pose a danger to me in my condition, she says. I am abandoned alone in the house reading James Oliver Curwood novels between talking with my great uncle Will, who fortunately is too old to make a pass at me (or, at least, he doesn’t).
The next day my skin is too sore to be in the sun, so I have to go to and from the beach in a sweatshirt with a towel to shade my legs and a big picture hat on my addled head. I have to crawl back under the umbrella for days, which makes me very blue.
I’d like to think I’m a free, easy, unafraid girl (when not too shy or terrified). But what happens during our all-day trip home is enough to scare the pants off any two of me.
I start bleeding between my legs!
Nobody warned me! I don’t know why the Endicott girls didn’t include this in their education of me in womanly ways; they weren’t shy about anything else. But somehow they left it out. As for Mom, though she has hinted a couple of times, she never really got around to preparing me for this. Later she will say she always meant to, and just left it till too late. But the fact is, she is easily upset by stuff of this nature, and I’m sure she just couldn’t bring herself to deal with it to my face.
So when I see the blood (in the Ladies’ Room at the Howard Johnson's in Hartford where we stop for lunch) I think the worst. Trying not to let terror get the best of me, I whisper to Mom, “I don’t know, but I think I might have, um, hurt myself somehow.”
Well, nothing will do but we go back into the Ladies’, Mom all fuss and feathers. The upshot of a difficult ten minutes is that I have gotten my first period. Now, I have heard of menstruation, but the details are something you cannot find out about anywhere except by word of mouth, so Mom has to give me a rapid catch-up course in female physiology, at the end of which I want to throw my skirt over my head and never come out. The remedy is even worse. Mom has these huge Kotexes …
Okay, we will skip all that.
Shaken, feeling the eyes of the world on me (especially after Mom says something behind her hand to Daddy), I emerge with a happy face painted on. The minute I sit down, my bratty little sister Alice, who is already starting to grow breasts for godsake, is afire to know what happened.
“I’ll tell you later.”
“No you won’t. You always say that, but you never do.”
“Shhhh!”
Well, obviously now I can’t just forget it as I normally would. So in the back seat somewhere around the Sawmill Parkway I tell Alice to shut up about a million times and then explain, in broken English suitable for children, that I am having a little blood, but it’s normal, because—”
“You’re men-stroo-at-ing!” she claps. Heaven knows where she ever got the word; children these days are appalling. “Robyn is men-stroo-at-ing!”
"Shut up! And anyway that's not how it's pronounced!"
I never hear the end of this until we pile out of the car at home in the dark, unload, get all the suitcases (with a quantity of sand) in the front hall, send Alice to bed, and wangle me a hot bath away from all people whatsoever.
The Kotex is fairly horrible looking. Putting that where I won’t have to look at it, I examine myself with the sort of care you usually spend on gawking at a highway accident. The tub is my last resort. I have to step in gingerly ‘cause my skin is still hurting from that darn sunburn, but I manage somehow. Fresh at last, and rather steamy, I put on a wrapper, pad to my room and get in my nightie.
High school in a week. I will be a boarding student, as twenty-six miles (fifty-two mile round trip) is too far for Mom to drive me to school every morning and come back and pick me up every night. I’ve never lived away from home before! (Not counting being parked at Welches’ during Mom and Daddy’s ski vacations)
Thanksgiving. That’s two months away! Christmas, that’s even farther!
I will be staying in a dormitory with lots of other girls. What will this be like? I don’t know if I will feel at home there among so many. And I do know I’m already feeling desperately homesick, though I haven’t even left home yet.
So much to get done beforehand! Make myself attractive. Work at it. Hard! Everything I wasn’t supposed to do a year ago, I now have to do post haste. Mom says I must remember to blot my lipstick; it’s true traces do seem to turn up in the oddest places. She says not too much eye makeup, please. (She uses none and thinks it is degenerate or something). We go to Jenkintown where Wanamaker’s has its shot at me. Clothes! Shoes! Hat and gloves in case I have to present myself somewhere, like at a tea! (Mom says they have teas, but I think she’s misremembering, isn’t that college? Nobody ever heard of a high school having teas.)
I am turning into a Before and After like in the magazine advertisements. At fleeting moments I have the experience of feeling slim, svelte, perfectly made up, stocking steams straight. That lasts less than an eyeblink, and I’m my awkward self again.
The whole incoming freshman (what a word) class is invited to this party at the house of one of the freshman girls. There’s food, we swim, the pool is lighted so we keep swimming in the dark. I feel like I am having to manage extra hands and feet. Once in my bathing suit I don’t know whether to yell with the boys or act demure with the girls. Smile, show pretty teeth, sparkling eyes, was the advice. Somewhere I learned that, where?
Being driven home I am crushed to think what a glump I was. Said all the wrong things, laughed immoderately, forgot myself at one point and screeched and ran about like a sixth-grader, showing off for our class hostess, slim dark Phyllis Longman, then being nut enough to tease her as well, so she is pretty well guaranteed to detest me forever. Definitely not ready for civilization.
As a going-away present the night before we leave for school, Daddy and Mom give me a beautiful pink gown. "Semi-formal,” says Mom. “For dances.”
“Parties too,” says Dad, trying his best not to leer.
Guess I’m a grownup girl now?
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Robyn Katie
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 380
- Joined: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:02 pm
Hi, sisters,
And just a quick note to say thank you, thank you each so much for the nice things you said.
I'm glad the music is striking a chord. The amazing jumpin' hot Cab Calloway (if you ever get a chance to see one of his live 1920s-early 30s film shorts with the band, do!) was the force that led me into liking and playing oldtime blues, from Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf on back to Charlie Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson. I also feel extremely lucky to have been able to learn from mountaineers and oldtime cowboys in singing traditional ballads and songs and picking banjo. There'll be occasional touches of that as time goes on.
And as for the Ink Spots, well, I've heard them from infancy (as with Cab Calloway) and can't be objective, I just think they're wonderful. Pete Seeger and the Weavers -- Susan Reed -- Jean Ritchie -- and eventually field recordings and down-home musicians both white and black -- those were my schooling in music. I've been a truly lucky girl not to miss that!
There will be more of my unfashionable music likes to come, I promise, but I also promise, in fairness to all, to keep it pretty short so it doesn't take over.
Love, Robyn Katie
And just a quick note to say thank you, thank you each so much for the nice things you said.
I'm glad the music is striking a chord. The amazing jumpin' hot Cab Calloway (if you ever get a chance to see one of his live 1920s-early 30s film shorts with the band, do!) was the force that led me into liking and playing oldtime blues, from Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf on back to Charlie Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson. I also feel extremely lucky to have been able to learn from mountaineers and oldtime cowboys in singing traditional ballads and songs and picking banjo. There'll be occasional touches of that as time goes on.
And as for the Ink Spots, well, I've heard them from infancy (as with Cab Calloway) and can't be objective, I just think they're wonderful. Pete Seeger and the Weavers -- Susan Reed -- Jean Ritchie -- and eventually field recordings and down-home musicians both white and black -- those were my schooling in music. I've been a truly lucky girl not to miss that!
There will be more of my unfashionable music likes to come, I promise, but I also promise, in fairness to all, to keep it pretty short so it doesn't take over.
Love, Robyn Katie