Riding In Cars With Boys (15 page)

Jason would be better off, no question. Even if he did have to live with my smothering mother and mean father. At least my father wasn’t mean to him. Not yet. But wait till the kid reached high school and got caught sneaking a beer. Don’t think about it. I took two more.

My formerly beautiful son looked like a concentration-camp victim. I took two more. And two more. That made twenty-two.

Then I remembered my first suicide attempt. I’d been thirteen and in love with Trevis Glasker, who was sixteen and lived around the block. He wore sunglasses, said his name was Ray and that he was blind. I made a fool of myself mooning over him and yelling at his friends when they made fun of his condition. Then one day Ray walked up, took off his sunglasses, said, “I can see you,” and started laughing. His blindness had been a big joke that everyone was in on. I ran home wailing so loud birds flew off treetops. I took a razor from the medicine chest, then dove into my closet. I hugged my clothes and started singing “The End of the World.” By the end of the song, I wanted to sing it over. I did and got so carried away with the drama, the razor slipped from my fingers and fell between two floorboards. I decided I didn’t want to kill myself anymore. For years after that, whenever I thought about Trevis Glasker, my face got hot and I wished I could forget the incident forever.

But then, one day, it seemed funny.

If I didn’t kill myself now, one day I’d probably laugh: being a convicted criminal while my father and my brother were cops, riding a bus with a bunch of kindergarteners to get to a fake job, making Jason look like a victim of lice. Maybe one day we’d discover some pictures of him, looking like a little Gandhi, in a shoe-box and we’d roll around laughing. What song should I sing now? “It’s My Party and I’ll Die if I Want To?”

I decided not to do it.

THERE‘ S definitely something to that darkest-before-the-dawn line because the next morning I called the psychiatric clinic at the hospital and my life started to look up. My social worker, Mrs. Goldfarb, took out a pad and a pencil and made a list of all the drugs I’d taken in my lifetime: LSD, mescaline, Percodan, horse tranquilizers, Seconal, cocaine, opium, amphetamines, hashish, and marijuana. She nodded her head and said, “That’s quite an arsenal.” When I told her about what a creep my probation officer had been, she was outraged. When I told her I felt guilty that Raymond became a junkie because I got pregnant and ruined his life, she told me that was ridiculous. When I told her I was afraid I didn’t love Jason, she said she was sure I did. I appreciated her rage at Stanley Stupski, but I didn’t believe her on the other two points. Still, it was great to have somebody on my side. Then after two months of once a week, she pronounced me an aesthete and said, “You’re too intelligent to be wasting away. You should go to college.”

I started crying.

She set up an interview for me at DVR, the division of vocational rehabilitation, where they’d give me a battery of tests: psychological, personality, aptitude, and achievement. If I scored crazy and smart enough, they’d send me to college; if I scored crazy and wasn’t smart, I’d get vocational training.

DVR had been established after the Second World War to give veterans with physical disabilities some physical therapy and job training so they could join the work force. Then it was expanded to include everybody who was disabled, including psychologically or emotionally disturbed people, of which, obviously, I was one.

The day of the tests, I arrived at seven and was told to sit at a long metal table in a green room. Soon, a psychiatrist arrived. He wore wire-rim glasses and must’ve been seven feet tall and four feet wide. My strategy was to answer the questions like a crazy person so I’d be considered disabled and a candidate for college or training.

But it turned out I couldn’t distinguish between crazy and sane, which made me think I really was a nut. First, there were the college board-type tests. Then the shrink asked me questions like, “What does the statement ‘Shallow brooks make the most noise’ mean?” I gave him figurative and literal. He looked impressed. He gave me inkblots. He gave me cartoon pictures to put in sequence. He gave me weird tests with questions like, “If you found a letter, addressed and stamped, lying on the ground, what would you do?” I figured to touch it would be a federal offense. Plus, towns don’t have lost-and-founds. I knew that “Open it” was the wrong answer, although it sounded like something I’d do. “Mail it” never occurred to me. I said simply, “I don’t know.” Then he gave me pictures to make up stories about, and each time the psychiatrist held up a new one, it seemed there was only one story in the world that went with it.

In one picture there was a woman lying at the bottom of the stairs. Her eyes were closed, and an older woman was holding the young woman in her arms. I said, “The mistress of the house just fell down the stairs and broke her neck. She’s dead. Now the maid’s holding her and wondering if it was her fault because she put too much wax on the stairs. She’s worried she’ll get fired.”

I probably should’ve said it was her mother and that the young woman just fainted or something, because a couple of weeks later, when I sat in the DVR counselor’s cubicle to hear the results, the geriatric Mr. Randall lifted his feet onto a milk crate and said, “Our testing shows you’re having a difficult time adjusting to adult life. You hate your mother.” He blinked his eyes real fast and said, “Not unusual. Nothing you can’t overcome. You have problems with your father, too. You buck against authority. Somebody tells you what to do, you do the opposite. If somebody told you to wear a bra, for example, you couldn’t do it.”

How did he know? And why do they all notice I’m not wearing one?

“You make it hard on yourself. It seems you also hate men. I understand. I can imagine it’s not easy being a divorcee in this day and age. Men think they can take advantage.”

They never stopped thinking about sex—even if they’re about to croak in a minute like this one.

“You are very intelligent, I’m pleased to report.” He leafed through the papers. “You scored in the ninety-seventh percentile of all freshmen entering college this year. That’s quite high. The doctor was very excited. He recommends we send you to college.”

I felt like Hester Prynne must’ve felt in the next chapter, the one that never got written, the one where she’s in the woods on her way to the rest of her life and finally rips off that ridiculous A and throws it in the camp fire.

“No sense sending you to vocational training; you’d never be happy in a subordinate position. I can’t see you going further than a master’s degree, however. You couldn’t play the politics.

“One thing bothers me, though. You’re like Esau, in the Bible. You’d sell your birthright for a bowl of porridge. You live in the moment. This is what worries me. Say we were to give you money for college, then you get your degree and decide working’s for the birds. You’re going to live on a commune or be an artist or something. Never pay taxes. Then DVR wasted its money. The whole idea is to make you a
contributing
member of society. We’re investing in you. We’re saying, This young woman is going to be productive. She’s going to have a place in society, not drop out of it. So I’m in a bind. We send you to college, we’re taking a gamble.”

Sell my birthright for a bowl of porridge? What did that mean? That I’d go for the easy thing? That I’d go for instant gratification, like an infant? And what did “live in the moment” mean? Was that like Be Here Now? I thought that was good. Maybe that was too Buddhist. Maybe Christians—and if I’d ever seen one, it was this guy—didn’t think like that.

The creep wasn’t going to send me to college.

“Here’s my problem. I want to help you, but you only value what you work for. I want you to prove to me that you want this education. We’ll pay for your tuition and books at community college; you couldn’t get into a better school, with your high school record.”

Why did relief always make me feel like crying?

“You’ll still get your welfare. But you’re going to have to find your own transportation and day care for your child. I want you to feel you had to work for this opportunity.”

Not the goddamn car and not the goddamn kid. Let the problem be anything but the car and the kid. If I had a car and a baby-sitter to begin with, I wouldn’t be sitting in this old coot’s office listening to how I’m an emotional and social basket case, based on ten hours of testing administered by a friggin’ giant. Why didn’t they just do the tarot cards? I was beginning to hyper-ventilate. How could he give me college in one breath and take it away in another? I couldn’t talk. But I had to. I could feel my mouth contort, “Middlesex must be fifty miles away.” The words came out in a shout, and I couldn’t help it. “How am I supposed to get there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you can car pool it. Call the school. Find out who goes there from your area. Show some initiative. You have a lot of potential. Use it. You’ll just have to figure it out. You’re not going to get a free ride here.”

I’D been told by Mrs. Goldfarb I could get a college loan to buy a car. Now my mother split the blinds to take a first look at my new car in her driveway.

“Nice, huh?” I said.

“So clean,” she said. “Better keep it that way.”

That was the thing about my mother. I’d bought this beautiful fourteen-year-old with-a-rebuilt-engine emerald-green Volkswagen after four years without a car—which, incidentally, was not only going to take me to college but eventually off welfare—and all my mother had to say was, Better keep it clean? It’s true, I’d been rude to my mother—probably, since puberty-but she had her faults too, and this took the cake. It was nearing last-straw time, and I don’t mean just with her but my whole family.

I hadn’t even bothered telling my father about college, since we hardly spoke and I knew my mother’d tell him anyway. Now tonight, after I’d arrived proudly with Jason in my new car, my father came home late for dinner, placed his walkie-talkie staticking next to his plate, and said, “So how many miles she got on her?”

“Ninety-seven thousand, but her engine’s rebuilt.”

“How much you say you paid for her?”

“Five hundred dollars.”

He shook his head like there was a bee in it.

“Cupcake,” Jason said.

“What?” my father said.

“That’s what my mother named her.”

My mother clicked her tongue.

“What?” I said. “She looks like she has white frosting.” Her snout was painted white, which also made her look like a pit bull, but I preferred to see her as pastry.

“I don’t know, Beverly,” my mother said.

“You don’t know what?”

“Never mind.”

“You think it’s childish to name a car. You think I’m crazy.”

My father kind of snorted, but nobody answered.

“I think she looks like a cupcake,” Jason said after a minute, which surprised me. Usually, even if we were having fun, even if it seemed like he was my best friend for one minute, as soon as we got in front of my mother, he turned traitor. He was forever threatening to tell my parents I smoked marijuana. Right now, he must’ve felt sorry for me.

“Me too,” said Rose, who was now fifteen and smoking pot every morning, noon, and night of her life. At least there was one other person in my family I could halfway relate to.

I suppose the point wasn’t so much the car but that everybody always had to make a big deal about what a weirdo I was, while they hardly noticed I’d be going to college, which to me felt like all those corny songs—“Climb Every Mountain,” “The Impossible Dream.” I mean, it felt like I’d moved heaven and earth, and then when I told my mother the good news, she’d said, “I thought you wanted a job. Now you got to go, what, four years?” Any normal parent would be proud that her kid was going to college, but not mine, mine was worried.

Then, when my brother walked in for the meatloaf dinner, it was the last straw. First of all, he was in uniform. And second of all, he stood next to me waiting for me to get up. My brother didn’t live at home either, but he ate over as often as I did. When we showed up on the same night, I deferred the chair to him. But not this night.

“Bev, you’re sitting in your brother’s chair,” my mother said.

“Who said it’s his chair?”

“Move,” my brother the blue bulk said.

I wanted to say, What’re you going to do, asshole, clobber me with your billy club? but then who knew what would happen. He might pull me off the chair by my elbow. My father might yell. Whatever. I was too much of a coward to find out. I left the table, and as I seethed in the living room waiting for Jason to finish, I thought, How the hell did I get stuck with this family? A mother who seems afraid of her own flesh-and-blood daughter’s being successful (because then I’d be different from her), growing up in a house where the men were served first and the women had to give their chairs to them. I swore my son would go to college and that never in his life would he think he deserved anything by virtue of his being born with a penis. Then I comforted myself with the thought that at least now I had my car and would be going to college. As soon as I heard the chairs scrape away from the table, I said, “Come on, Jase, we’re going.”

That was the spring of 1974, and I had to wait until the fall for my first day-when I woke up with the jitters. I stepped into the shower and combed my already pixie length hair with a straight-edged razor. As I watched the strands go down the drain, I thought how when I was little I’d made my mother set my hair with bobby pins for first days so I could look like my idol, Betty Boop, and make a good impression. I thought about how far I’d come. Now I walked by mirrors without looking, never wore makeup, shaved my legs, or plucked my eyebrows, and had even developed a vise-grip handshake. This was thanks to the women’s consciousness-raising group I’d joined in New Haven soon after I got Cupcake.