Riding In Cars With Boys (2 page)

By the summer of 1963, my boy craziness had reached such a pitch that I was prepared to sacrifice the entire summer to catch a glimpse of Denny Winters, the love of my and Donna’s life. Donna and I walked two miles to his house every day, then sat under a big oak tree across the street, our transistor radio between us, and stared at his house, waiting for some movement, a sign of life, a blind pulled up or down, a curtain shunted aside, a door opening, a dog barking. Anything. Denny’s sister, who was older and drove a car, sometimes drove off and sometimes returned. But that was it. In an entire summer of vigilance, we never saw Denny Winters arrive or depart. Maybe he had mononucleosis; maybe he was away at camp. We never saw him mow the lawn or throw a ball against the house for practice.

What we did see was a lot of teenage boys sitting low in cars, cruising by. Once in a while, a carload would whistle, flick a cigarette into the gutter at our feet, and sing, “Hello, girls.” Whenever they did that, Donna and I stuck our chins in the air and turned our heads away. “Stuck up,” they hollered.

But we knew the cars to watch for: the blue-and-white Chevy with the blond boy driving, the forest-green Pontiac with the dark boy, the white Rambler, the powder-blue Camaro, the yellow Falcon. I decided that when I finally rode in a car with a boy, I wouldn’t sit right next to him like I was stuck with glue to his armpit. I’d sit halfway there—just to the right of the radio, maybe.

My father, however, had other ideas. My father forbade me to ride in cars with boys until I turned sixteen. That was the beginning.

“I hate him,” I cried to my mother when my father was out of the house.

“Well, he thinks he’s doing what’s best for you,” she said.

“What? Keeping me prisoner?”

“You know your father. He’s suspicious. He’s afraid you’ll get in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“You’ll ruin your reputation. You’re too young. Boys think they can take advantage. Remember what I told you. If a boy gets fresh, just cross your legs.”

It was too embarrassing. I changed the subject. “I hate him,” I repeated.

By the time I turned fourteen, the next year, I was speeding around Wallingford in crowded cars with guys who took comers on two wheels, flew over bumps, and skidded down the road to get me screaming. Whenever I saw a cop car, I lay down on the seat, out of sight.

While I was still at Dag Hammarskjold Junior High School, I got felt up in the backseat of a car, not because I wanted to exactly, but because I was only fourteen and thought that when everybody else was talking about making out, it meant they got felt up. That was the fault of two girls from the project, Penny Calhoun and Donna DiBase, who were always talking about their periods in front of boys by saying their
friend
was staying over for a week and how their
friend
was a
bloody mess.
They told me that making out had three steps: kissing, getting felt up, and then Doing It. Next thing I knew, I was at the Church of the Resurrection bazaar and this cute little guy with a Beatles haircut sauntered up and said, “I’ve got a sore throat. Want to go for a ride to get some cough drops?” I hesitated. I didn’t even know his name, but then the two girls I was with, both sophomores in high school, said, “Go! Are you crazy? That’s Skylar Barrister, the president of the sophomore class.” We ended up with two other couples parked by the dump. My face was drooly with saliva (step one) when “A Hard Day’s Night” came on the radio and Sky placed a hand on one of my breasts (step two). Someone must’ve switched the station, because “A Hard Day’s Night” was on again when his hand started moving up the inside of my thigh. I crossed my legs like my mother said, but he uncrossed them. Lucky for me, there was another couple in the backseat and Sky Barrister was either too afraid or had good enough manners not to involve them in the loss of my virginity or I really would’ve been labeled a slut. Not that my reputation wasn’t ruined anyway, because sweetheart Sky broadcast the news that Beverly Donofrio’s easy—first to his friends at the country club and then, exponentially, to the entire town. Hordes of boys called me up after that. My father was beside himself. I was grounded. I couldn’t talk on the phone for more than a minute. My mother tried to intervene. “Sonny,” she said. “You have to trust her.”

“I know what goes on with these kids. I see it every day, and you’re going to tell me?”

“What’s talking on the phone going to hurt?” my mother asked.

“You heard what I said. I don’t want to hear another word about it. You finish your phone call in a minute, miss, or I hang it up on you. You hear me?”

I heard him loud and clear, and it was okay with me—for a while, anyway, because my love of boys had turned sour. Sophomore year in high school, my English class was across the hall from Sky Barrister’s and every time I walked by, there was a disturbance—a chitter, a laugh—coming from the guys he stood with. My brother was the captain of the football team and I wished he was the type who’d slam Sky Barrister against a locker, maybe knock a couple of his teeth out, but not my brother. My brother was the type who got a good-citizenship medal for never missing a single day of high school.

Meanwhile, his sister began to manifest definite signs of being a bad girl. My friends and I prided ourselves on our foul mouths and our stunts, like sitting across from the jocks’ table in the cafeteria and giving the guys crotch shots, then when they started elbowing each other and gawking, we shot them the finger and slammed our knees together. Or we collected gin gerbread from lunch trays and molded them into shapes like turds and distributed them in water fountains.

The thing was, we were sick to death of boys having all the fun, so we started acting like them: We got drunk in the parking lot before school dances and rode real low in cars, elbows stuck out windows, tossing beer cans, flicking butts, and occasionally pulling down our pants and shaking our fannies at passing vehicles.

But even though we were very busy showing the world that girls could have fun if only they’d stop acting nice, eventually it troubled us all that the type of boys we liked—collegiate, popular, seniors—wouldn’t touch us with a ten-foot pole.

One time I asked a guy in the Key Club why no guys liked me. “Am I ugly or stupid or something?”

“No.” He scratched under his chin. “It’s probably the things you say.”

“What things?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think it’s because I don’t put out?”

“See? You shouldn’t say things like that to a guy.”

“Why?”

“It’s not right.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, is it because it’s not polite or because it’s about sex or because it embarrasses you? Tell me.”

“You ask too many questions. You analyze too much, that’s your problem.”

To say that I analyzed too much is not to say I did well in school. Good grades, done homework—any effort abruptly ended in the tenth grade, when my mother laid the bad news on me that I would not be going to college. It was a Thursday night. I was doing the dishes, my father was sitting at the table doing a paint-by-numbers, and we were humming “Theme from Exodus” together. My mother was wiping the stove before she left for work at Bradlees, and for some reason she was stinked—maybe she had her period, or maybe it was because my father and I always hummed while I did the dishes and she was jealous. Neither of us acknowledged that we were basically harmonizing. It was more like it was just an accident that we were humming the same song. Our favorites were “‘Bye ’Bye Blackbird,” “Sentimental Journey,” “Tonight,” and “Exodus.” After “Exodus,” I said, “Hey, Ma. I was thinking I want to go to U Conn instead of Southern or Central. It’s harder to get into, but it’s a better school.”

“And who’s going to pay for it?”

It’s odd that I never thought about the money, especially since my parents were borderline paupers and being poor was my mother’s favorite topic. I just figured, naively, that anybody who was smart enough could go to college.

“I don’t know. Aren’t there loans or something?”

“Your father and I have enough bills. You better stop dreaming. Take typing. Get a
good
job when you graduate. ”

“I’m not going to be a secretary.”

She lifted a burner and swiped under it. “We’ll see,” she said.

“I’m moving to New York.”

“Keep dreaming.” She dropped the burner back down.

So I gritted my teeth and figured I’d have to skip college and go straight to Broadway, but it pissed me off. Because I wasn’t simply a great actress, I was smart too. I’d known this since the seventh grade, when I decided my family was made up of a bunch of morons with lousy taste in television. I exiled myself into the basement recreation room every night to get away from them. There were these hairy spiders down there, and I discovered if I dropped a Book of Knowledge on them they’d fist up into dots, dead as door-nails. Then one night after a spider massacre, I opened a book up and discovered William Shakespeare—his quality-of-mercy soliloquy, to be exact. Soon I’d read everything in the books by him, and then by Whitman and Tennyson and Shelley. I memorized Hamlet’s soliloquy and said it to the mirror behind the bar. To do this in the seventh grade made me think I was a genius. And now, to be told by my mother, who’d never read a book in her life, that I couldn’t go to college was worse than infuriating, it was unjust. Somebody would have to pay.

That weekend my friends and I went around throwing eggs at passing cars. We drove through Choate, the ritzy prep school in the middle of town, and I had an inspiration. “Stop the car,” I said. “Excuse me,” I said to a little sports-jacketed Choatie crossing Christian Street. “Do you know where Christian Street is?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, “but I think it’s that street over there.” He pointed to the next road over.

“You’re standing on it, asshole!” I yelled, flinging an egg at the name tag on his jacket. I got a glimpse of his face as he watched the egg drool down his chest and I’ll remember the look of disbelief as it changed to sadness till the day I die. We peeled out, my friends hooting and hollering and slapping me on the back.

I thought I saw a detective car round the bend and follow us down the street, but it was just my imagination. Now that my father’d been promoted from a regular cop to a detective, it was worse. Believe me, being a bad girl and having my father cruising around in an unmarked vehicle was no picnic. One time, I’d dressed up as a pregnant woman, sprayed gray in my hair, and bought a quart of gin, then went in a motorcade to the bonfire before the big Thanksgiving football game. We had the windows down even though it was freezing out and were singing “Eleanor Rigby” when we slammed into the car in front of us and the car in back slammed into us—a domino car crash. We all got out; there was no damage except a small dent in Ronald Kovacs’s car in front. He waved us off, and we went to the bonfire.

Back home, I went directly to the bathroom to brush my teeth when the phone rang. In a minute my mother called, “Bev, your father’s down the station. He wants to see you.”

My heart stalled. “What about?”

“You know him. He never tells me anything.”

I looked at myself in the mirror and said, “You are not drunk. You have not been drinking. You have done nothing wrong, and if that man accuses you, you have every reason in the world to be really mad.” This was the Stanislavsky method of lying, and it worked wonders. I considered all my lying invaluable practice for the stage. There were countless times that I maintained not only a straight but a sincere face as my mother made me put one hand on the Bible, the other on my heart, and swear that I hadn’t done something it was evident to the entire world only I could have done.

My father sat me in a small green room, where he took a seat behind a desk. “You were drinking,” he said.

“No I wasn‘t,” I said.

“You ever hear of Ronald Kovacs?”

“Yes. We were in a three-car collision. He slammed on his brakes in the middle of the motorcade, and we hit him.”

“It’s always the driver in the back’s fault, no matter what the car in front does. That’s the law. Maybe your friend wasn’t paying too much attention. Maybe you were all loaded.”

“You always think the worst. Somebody hit us from behind too, you know.”

“Who was driving your car?”

“I’m not a rat like that jerk Kovacs.”

“That’s right. Be a smart ass. See where it gets you. I already know who was operating the vehicle. You better be straight with me or your friend, the driver, might end up pinched. It was Beatrice?”

“Yes. ”

“She wasn’t drinking but you were?”

“
No
! Did you ever think that maybe Ronald Kovacs was drinking? Did you ever think that maybe he’s trying to cover his own ass?”

“Watch your language.”

I put on my best injured look and pretended to be choking back tears. It was easy because I was scared to death. Cops kept passing in the hall outside the door to the office. I was going out on a limb. If they found concrete evidence that I’d been drinking, my father would really be embarrassed. He might hit me when we got home, and I’d definitely be grounded, probably for the rest of my life.

“They’re setting up the lie detector in the other room. We got it down from Hartford for a case we been working on,” he said. “Will you swear on the lie detector that you’re telling the truth?”

A bead of sweat dripped down my armpit. “Good. And bring in Ronald Kovacs and make him take it, too. Then you’ll see who’s a liar.”

Turns out there was no lie detector; it was a bluff and I’d won the gamble.

When I got home, I played it for all it was worth with my mother. “He never trusts me. He always believes the worst. I can’t stand it. How could you have married him?”

“You know your father. It’s his nature to be suspicious.”