Revenge of the Cootie Girls (8 page)

You can imagine how dazzling this was to a couple of girls from a small town, sipping cocktails with swells in the Rainbow Room at the top of the RCA building, for instance, with the glittering jewel box of Manhattan out the window. The tallest building in Ferrous, at six stories, was the Hotel Grand (which also boasted the best restaurant, Filbert's), followed by the four-story MacCosham Professional Center, where most of the area doctors, dentists, plumbers, and chiropractors practiced. The main department store, MacCosham's, still called itself a dry-goods store, and though it was a good place to buy sheets, lawn-mowers, and licorice allsorts, the fashions sucked. People who cared about fashion bought their clothes in Duluth or Minneapolis-St. Paul.

So we ate New York up. I don't think we got more than four hours of sleep a night. We were, after all, in the city that never sleeps, where you can buy a saxophone at three in the morning. You can eat, drink, bowl, work out, buy groceries, pray in a church, hire a PI, mail a parcel to Bulgaria, get your windows cleaned, your pipes cleared, your spine aligned, your aquarium cleaned, an ancient Latin document translated, buy oxygen, and be tried and convicted twenty-four hours a day in this town. You used to be able to get your hair coiffed twenty-four hours a day too, but that place cut back its hours.

During that week, Julie went out with George every night, and I went out with them, and whichever of his handsome young friends he could dredge up for me,
almost
every night. What really struck us, or me at least, was how friendly everyone was to us. We were so popular. Men were constantly mistaking us for models.

Chuck and Lance came back from Florida tanned and swaggering with a few cheap souvenirs and a few more notches on their studly belts. Julie and I came back from New York with an extra suitcase each, bought at a Going Out of Business store in midtown just to carry all our free stuff home. But more than that, we came back changed.

After that trip, any glimpse of New York would set my heart soaring, from the opening credits of “All in the Family,” “Rhoda,” or “Taxi” to an on-location shoot-out scene between cops and drug dealers on “Kojak” reruns. Julie and I began to wonder if we couldn't be like the young Manhattan career women in
Mademoiselle
and
Vogue
who had glamorous jobs, furnished their tiny apartment kitchens in French provincial on an editorial assistant's salary, and transformed themselves effortlessly from Tailored Professional to Boldly Dressed Party Girl, against various Manhattan backdrops. We imagined a dynamic love life, different men every night, play openings, dinner with dashing ambassadors and princes. You too, Robin Hudson, can be an INTERNATIONAL BON VIVANT!

It had been such a great time, and seeing Chuck again was so anticlimactic. The men we met in New York were so exciting, and Chuck didn't seem to get my enthusiasm about New York. My visions of being married to and redeemed by him started fading, though they seemed to infect Chuck, who was suddenly saying he thought we should get married, and as soon as possible. Lance, though, was still intransigent on the marriage-to-Julie question, which confused her, because he had chased her for a long time before she finally went out with him. I figured he was playing hard to get. “But no matter,” I said to her. “You don't need Lance.”

When we did marry, the new daydream went, we would marry handsome big-city men (who would be completely supportive of our glamorous careers), live on Park Avenue, and have citified daughters whom we would take to revivals of
Annie
, followed by ice cream at Rumpelmayer's or Serendipity.

I can't have kids, so there was no Serafina Hudson-Whatever to eat ice cream at Serendipity with Ramona Goomey-Whatever. It made me wonder. I knew Julie had finally married Lance at the beginning of 1980 and moved to Ohio, only to get divorced a couple of years later. When her family packed up and left Ferrous for good, I lost track of Julie completely. Not that I hadn't thought about her a lot, and heard rumors. She was remarried and living in Canada. She was working as a stripper in Vegas. She was in a mental institution in Florida. She was in jail for forgery in Texas, which seemed really unlikely, given her horrible handwriting. Something about Julie had always inspired a lot of gossip.

Was Julie remarried? Did she have kids? Even though she always talked about having kids, I had never pictured her with them. As a child, she was always forgetting her dolls at the playground, where they'd be scavenged by other kids, or torn apart by packs of wild dogs. Oh, wait. That was me.

And what about Billy and George? I'd thought about looking them up when I moved to New York but, remembering all the lies I'd told them, I didn't bother. By that time, disco was dead or dying and I was in J-school at NYU, hanging out with snotty bohos, filmmakers, actors, and so forth, interning in local television, smoking joints with my profs in Washington Square.

So much had happened to me since I'd last seen Julie. My God, I'd completely forgotten that I'd once dreamed of being a Park Avenue trophy wife. Gag. How differently my life turned out. What had happened to Julie? And what brought her back to New York?

6

“G
OOMEY
—that must have been a hard name to have as a kid,” Tamayo said to me.

“Goony Goomey,” I said, nodding. “That's the significance of the cootie catcher. We were both cootie girls. We had cooties.”

“What are cooties?”

“Fleas, lice.”

The subway platforms below the Port Authority, a major transfer point, were jammed with people, by my estimate about a quarter of them in costume, but, then again, in New York it is always so hard to tell.

The train came and the mobbed pressed on. An older black guy was sitting near the door, taking up an extra seat for his dinner, tuna out of a can, the lid pried open and rolled halfway back; a soft pretzel on a piece of wax paper; and a beer in a paper bag. I was tired and I wouldn't have minded a seat, so I fixed my best guilt-inducing stare on him. He looked up at me mildly amused and took a forkful of tuna and a bite of pretzel, washing it down with a swig of beer. He was in work clothes, probably had had a long day, and he was enjoying his meal so much nobody was going to begrudge him the extra seat, not even me.

A guy with an ax coming out of a big plastic wound in his head said, “This train stop at West 4th Street?”

“Yeah,” the tuna-eating guy said.

“You had fleas?” Tamayo said to me. A few people around me inched away from me when she said that.

“These were figurative cooties. Didn't they have cooties in Japan? Cootie girls, fleabags, whatever they were called in your schoolyard. The pariah kids.”

“We didn't have cooties at my school, but we did have pariahs. I was one,” Tamayo said.

“You were?”

“Yeah, me and this boy who had a very long head.”

“Were you an official pariah? Or just a secret dork like most people?”

“I was a real pariah. The kids called me
gaijin
, which means ‘barbarian,' because my dad was a foreigner, American, and then I had another name, which, translated, means ‘bad-tempered girl with enormous feet.'”

“You have big feet?”

“Yeah, for a Japanese girl. I used to like to stomp the feet of the bullies when they were picking on me. Then I'd run like hell.”

She lifted up the hem of her dress to show me her feet. She did have very large feet. I do too, size ten.

“Were you friends with the boy with the long head?” I said.

“God, no. We had nothing in common except that we were hated. Besides, the other kids made jokes about him and me marrying, and what ugly children we'd have, and so I didn't want to do anything that would associate me with him any more than we were already associated. I was a kid.”

“Yeah, Julie and I didn't hang out much with the other cootie girl in our grade, Mabel. She was very quiet and always smelled like insecticide. We also avoided Francis, the cootie boy, like the plague. He was one of those little boys with slicked-back hair, a neatly pressed suit—short pants until junior high school—carried a briefcase. He got his revenge by becoming a hall monitor in junior high. He's now a CEO and a big Pat Buchanan contributor.”

“The kid with the long head turned out badly. He joined the doomsday cult that planted the poison gas on the Tokyo subways.”

“Kinda like Mabel. She became a born-again Christian for a while, dated a lot of substance abusers who looked like Jesus, and had a breakdown after one of them ripped off a liquor store and made his getaway in her Gremlin. The last I heard, she'd become a Moonie and married some Korean guy she knew for ten minutes in a mass wedding in San Francisco. Poor Mabel. But, then, maybe she's happy, or thinks she is.”

“What's the difference? If you think you're happy you are. Ha-ha. You have cooties!”

“You're so mature.”

“What did the kids call you?” she asked. “Carrot Top?”

“Red Knobby until eighth grade, when I developed the worst acne in my school. Then I was Lizard Lady for two years. Seems so funny now.”

We got out at 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue, in Chelsea, or, as Claire once described it, the year-long festival of gorgeous unavailable men, since it is the new gay mecca.

The heat had subsided a bit, but it was still muggy, which made it clammy. On the next block, Sam Chinita glowed. A railway-style diner with hammered tin siding, bare-bones decor, and aqua-green curtains in the smallish windows, it specializes in Cuban-Chinese cuisine, which is fairly popular in New York, where hybrid cuisines like Cuban-Chinese and Mexican-French do well. There are lots of Jewish hybrids too, like kosher Chinese, kosher Italian, kosher Japanese, and kosher Indian.

While we waited for our crackling chicken with fried bananas and salad, Tamayo said, “The name on the handwritten note, Putli Bai, is that some kind of American girl thing?”

“She was an Indian bandit queen in the 1950s, a scarlet woman who led an army of bandits.”

“Like the one in the movie
The Bandit Queen
?”

“That was Phoolan Devi, who came later, but the same idea. Julie read about Putli Bai somewhere when we were kids, and fell in love with the whole idea of her. It was a far cry better than being a cootie girl.”

“I liked to pretend I was a pirate queen. That's a bandit queen, on water. I used one of my mom's knitting needles as a sword,” Tamayo said, miming swordplay. “Tell me more about cooties.”

Tamayo is obsessed with finding the America she saw from a distance, growing up in Japan—the America somewhere beyond
Life
magazine, American TV shows, the movies—and she has an endless appetite for stories about American childhood, especially American girlhood. She would sometimes try to describe my childhood for me, saying things like, “So, Sunday evening, when you and your family were sitting around the Philco watching Ed Sullivan …” For her last birthday, I gave her a book of North American girl songs and she got tears in her eyes and hugged me so hard I thought a lung had collapsed. You would have thought I'd just presented her with the Hope Diamond.

“What do you want to know?”

“Who decided who had cooties?”

“Mary MacCosham was the head arbiter at my school. What a bitch she was. Little Miss Perfect. But she had help in cootie allotment from Sis and Bobby Fanning. They made me a cootie girl at the end of first grade and made Julie one when she moved to Ferrous in fifth grade. Imagine having that kind of power.”

I took out a pen and drew a round dot on her arm, with the initials “C.S.” beneath it.

“This is a cootie shot,” I said. “The other kids had to get cootie shots to protect them from our cooties, in case they bumped up against one of us during fire drill or in the cloakroom.”

You couldn't give yourself a cootie shot, I explained. You had to get it from someone else, so it was imperative to find someone who could give you a cootie shot as soon as you got to school, before you had contact with any cootie kids. Because, if you got cooties from a cootie kid, you'd be a cootie kid too, at least temporarily.

“And what did kids do if they got temporary cooties? Was there a ritual delousing?”

“Yeah. They went to Mary, Sis, or Bobby and got one of them to remove the cooties with a paper cootie catcher, like the one Candy saw in the envelope.”

“Like those monkeys who pick lice off each other.”

“Kind of, yeah.”

When I hear people say children are naturally “sweet and innocent” I think, Excuse me?!? Were you ever a child? Or did you just land here from Mars, or some other planet where children really are naturally sweet and innocent? Alone, kids are sweet. Put two or more of them together and it changes the equation. Children are a little primitive society all their own, with their own leaders, dictators, cops, rules, punishments, uniformity, and papal indulgences. Sweet and innocent, sure, SOMETIMES, and ignorant and helpless, and cruel too. Which is why you have to watch the little buggers like hawks. If they're so naturally sweet and innocent, how come so many of them grow up to be shitty adults? Do the shitty adults turn the kids bad, or do bad kids just naturally grow up into shitty adults? I guess it's a chicken-or-egg thing. Made me think about a saying I saw on a T-shirt in Central Park, “Search your soul … find your inner child … and then give it a good smack.” I'm against smacking, but I thought the shirt made a good point.

“But Mary and her gang would never remove your cooties,” Tamayo said.

“No, so Julie and I made our own cootie catchers, and before class, we'd remove each other's cooties. That way, it theoretically didn't matter as much what the other kids said, because
we
knew we didn't have cooties.”

“At my school the arbiter of social rank was Neiko Hatsumoto. What an asshole. She tried to push me out a window once.”