Riding In Cars With Boys

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

Beverly Donofrio studied at Wesleyan University, then went on to receive an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in
The Village Voice and New York
magazine. She is also the author of
Looking for Mary.

PENGUIN BOOKS
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

First published in the United States of America by
William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990
Published in Penguin Books 1992

Copyright © Beverly Donofrio, 1990

All rights reserved

Portions of this work have appeared in different form in
The Village Voice.

Grateful acknowledgement is made for
permission to reprint lyrics from the following:
“Do You Know the Way to San Jose”
Hal David, Burt Bacharach
Copyright © 1967 by Blue Seas Music, Inc., & JAC Music Co., Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
“All I Want”
Jont Mitchell
Copyright © 1971, 1975 by Jom Mitchell Publishing Corp.
All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“Love Child”
R. Dean Taylor, Frank Wilson, Pamela Sawyer, Dennis Lussier
Copynght © 1968 by Jobete Music Co., Inc., & Stone Agate Music

eISBN : 978-1-101-12763-6

I. Title.
PS3554.0536R5 1990
813’.54—dc20 89-78126

 

To my mother, my father, and my son

I’ M driving my son to college. It’s dark and pouring rain out. I always imagined it would be sunny, like after a storm, magnificent puffs of clouds moving a hundred miles a minute across an electric blue sky. And there I’d be, hanging out a window, waving my arms and shouting hallelujah as my son disappeared around a comer. I thought it would feel like Bastille Day did for the starving French masses. But instead of a freedom frenzy, I’m having a nervous breakdown.

A few days ago I saw this kid on the uptown bus. He was dangling a GI Joe from his mouth as he dug in his backpack, then pulled out some drawings to show to his mother. He watched her face as she placed the pictures on her knees, smoothed them with her hands and smiled. The scene made me blubber. I know everybody cries when their kid goes to college. But this was not supposed to happen to me. I was not supposed to be driving in a downpour, mumbling, “Oh God,” and using every molecule of will in my body to keep from crying.

I was not supposed to have a kid to begin with.

I try to pass a bully truck. A gust of air pushes me to the edge of a lane and sprays water on our little Honda, so the windshield floods and I can’t see through it for a second. Jason grabs the handle on the dashboard and closes his eyes—not hysterical, but indulgent. He thinks I’m a terrible driver, a notion he picked up when he was seven and eight and nine and I’d fly over bumps to make him scream or slam on the brakes for no reason except I loved to scare him. When he was four, I soaped up my face, then scrinched it into a horrifying grimace and chased him screaming through the house. Lately, I’ve been thinking of the things I did and feeling like a maniac mother. Lately, I’ve been looking at my life like there’s something to learn.

I look at my son as he pushes buttons on the radio. How could I have raised such a kid? He’s tall and handsome and calm. Mostly calm. That’s what you think when you see him. You think, That kid’s got self-possession. Like Jimmy Stewart or maybe Gary Cooper. People say I’m lucky, but I always thought different.

I hear Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” I tell Jase to stop there and I think, That’s it. I wasn’t a terrible person. I just did like Frank Sinatra. Then a picture of Sid Vicious singing the same song comes to mind and makes me feel awful all over again.

TROUBLE began in 1963. I’m not blaming it on President Kennedy’s assassination or its being the beginning of the sixties or the Vietnam War or the Beatles or the make-out parties in the fall-out shelters all over my hometown of Wallingford, Connecticut, or my standing in line with the entire population of Dag Hammarskjold Junior High School and screaming when a plane flew overhead because we thought it was the Russians. These were not easy times, it’s true. But it’s too convenient to pin the trouble that would set me on the path of most resistance on the times.

The trouble I’m talking about was my first real trouble, the age-old trouble. The getting in trouble as in “Is she in Trouble?” trouble. As in pregnant. As in the girl who got pregnant in high school. In the end that sentence for promiscuous behavior, that penance (to get Catholic here for a minute, which I had the fortune or misfortune of being, depending on the way you look at it)—that kid of mine, to be exact—would turn out to be a blessing instead of a curse. But I had no way of knowing it at the time and, besides, I’m getting ahead of myself.

By 1963, the fall of the eighth grade, I was ready. I was hot to trot. My hair was teased to basketball dimensions, my 16 oz. can of Miss Clairol hairspray was tucked into my shoulder bag. Dominic Mezzi whistled between his teeth every time I passed him in the hallway, and the girls from the project—the ones with boys’ initials scraped into their forearms, then colored with black ink—smiled and said hi when they saw me. I wore a padded bra that lifted my tits to inches below my chin, and my father communicated to me only through my mother. “Mom,” I said. “Can I go to the dance at the Y on Friday?”

“It’s all right with me, but you know your father.”

Yes, I knew my father. Mr. Veto, the Italian cop, who never talked and said every birthday, “So, how old’re you anyway? What grade you in this year?” It was supposed to be a joke, but who could tell if he really knew or was just covering? I mean, the guy stopped looking at me at the first appearance of my breasts, way back in the fifth grade.

In the seventh grade, I began to suspect he was spying on me, when I had my run-in with Danny Dempsey at Wilkinson’s Theater. Danny Dempsey was a high school dropout and a hood notorious in town for fighting. I was waiting in the back of the seats after the lights dimmed for my best friend, Donna Wilhousky, to come back with some candy when this Danny Dempsey sidled up to me and leaned his shoulder into mine. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a knife, which he laid in the palm of his hand, giving it a little tilt so it glinted in the screen light. I pressed my back against the wall as far away from the knife as I could, and got goosebumps. Then Donna showed up with a pack of Banana Splits and Mint Juleps, and Danny Dempsey backed away. For weeks, every time the phone rang I prayed it was Danny Dempsey. That was about the time my father started acting suspicious whenever I set foot out of his house. He was probably just smelling the perfume of budding sexuality on me and was acting territorial, like a dog. Either that or maybe his buddy Skip Plotkin, the official cop of Wilkinson’s Theater, had filed a report on me.

Which wasn’t a bad idea when I think of it, because I was what you call boy crazy. It probably started with Pat Boone when I was four years old. I went to see him in the movie where he sang “Bernadine” with his white bucks thumping and his fingers snapping, and I was in love. From that day on whenever “Bernadine” came on the radio, I swooned, spun around a couple of times, then dropped in a faked-dead faint. I guess my mother thought this was cute because she went out and bought me the forty-five. Then every day after kindergarten, I ran straight to the record player for my dose, rocked my head back and forth, snapped my fingers like Pat Boone, then when I couldn’t stand it another second, I swooned, spun around, and dropped in a faked-dead faint.

I was never the type of little girl who hated boys. Never. Well, except for my brother. I was just the oldest of three girls, while he was the Oldest, plus the only boy in an Italian family, and you know what that means: golden penis. My father sat at one end of the table and my brother sat at the other, while my mother sat on the sidelines with us girls. You could say I resented him a little. I had one advantage though—the ironclad rule. My brother, because he was a boy, was not allowed to lay one finger on us girls. So when his favorite show came on the TV, I stood in front of it. And when he said, “Move,” I said, “Make me,” which he couldn’t.

But other boys could chase me around the yard for hours dangling earthworms from their fingers, or call me Blackie at the bus stop when my skin was tanned dirt-brown after the summer, or forbid me to set foot in their tent or play in their soft-, kick-, or dodgeball games. They could chase me away when I tried to follow them into the woods, their bows slung over their shoulders and their hatchets tucked into their belts. And I still liked them, which is not to say I didn’t get back at them. The summer they all decided to ban girls, meaning me and Donna, from their nightly soft-ball games in the field behind our houses, Donna and I posted signs on telephone poles announcing the time of the inoculations they must receive to qualify for teams. On the appointed day they stood in line at Donna’s cellar door. Short ones, tall ones, skinny and fat, they waited their turn, then never even winced when we pricked their skin with a needle fashioned from a pen and a pin.