The Boys of My Youth (5 page)

The sisters are making deviled eggs. They have on dark blue dresses with aprons and are walking around in nyloned feet. No
one can find the red stuff that gets sprinkled on top of the eggs. They’re tearing the cupboards apart right now, swearing
to each other and shaking their heads. We all know enough to stay out of the kitchen.

We’re at my grandma’s house in our best dresses with towels pinned to the collars. Our older sisters are walking around with
theatrical, mournful faces, bossing us like crazy, in loud disgusted whispers. They have their pockets loaded with Kleenex
in preparation for making a scene. We’re all going to our grandfather’s funeral in fifteen minutes, as soon as the paprika
gets found.

Wendell and I get to go only because we promised to act decent. No more running and sliding on the funeral-home rug. Someone
has
died
, and there’s a time and a place for everything. We’ll both get spanked in front of everyone and put in chairs if we’re not
careful. And if we can’t keep our gum in our mouths then we don’t need it: both pieces are deposited in a held-out Kleenex
on the ride over. Wendell and I are in disgrace from our behavior last night at the visitation.

“It wasn’t our fault he moved,” Wendell had explained, right before being swatted in the funeral-home foyer. Our grandfather
had looked like a big, dead doll in a satin doll bed. We couldn’t stop staring, and then suddenly, simultaneously, got spooked
and ran out of the room, squealing and holding on to each other. We stayed in the foyer for the rest of the night, greeting
people and taking turns sliding the rug across the glossy floor. We were a mess by the end of the evening.

Our dads have to sit in a special row of men. They’re going to carry the casket to the graveyard. We file past them without
looking, and the music gets louder. The casket sits like an open
suitcase up front. After we sit down in our wooden folding chairs all we can see is a nose and some glasses. That’s our grandpa
up there, he won’t be hollering at us ever again for chewing on the collars of our dresses or for throwing hangers out the
upstairs window. He won’t be calling us giggleboxes anymore. He doesn’t even know we’re all sitting here, listening to the
music and the whispers. He is in our hearts now, which makes us feel uncomfortable. Wendell and I were separated as a precautionary
measure; I can just see the tips of her black shoes. They have bows on them and mine have buckles. She is swinging hers a
little bit so I start to swing mine a little bit too. This is how you get into trouble, so I quit after a minute and so does
she.

Pretty soon the music stops and my mother starts crying into her Kleenex. My aunt’s chin turns into a walnut, and then she’s
crying too. Their dad is dead. Wendell puts her shoe on the back of the chair in front of her and slides it slowly down until
it’s resting on the floor again. I do the same thing. We’re not being ornery, though. A lady starts singing a song and you
can hear her breath. I can see only one inch of her face because she’s standing in front of the dads. It’s a song from Sunday
school but she’s singing it slower than we do and she’s not making the hand motions. I do the hand motions myself, very small,
barely moving, while she sings.

Wendell’s mom leans over and tells me something. She wants me to sit on her lap. She has a nickname for me that nobody else
calls me. She calls me Jody and everyone else calls me Jo. She’s not crying anymore, and her arms are holding me on her lap,
against her good blue dress. It’s too tight in the armpits but you can’t tell from looking. My mom’s got Wendell.

After a while everyone starts crying, except Uncle Evan, my grandma’s brother who always spits into a coffee cup and leaves
it on the table for someone else to clean up. My aunt rests her chin on my head and rearranges her Kleenex so there’s a
dry spot. I sit very still while the preacher talks and the mothers cry, not moving an inch, even though my arms don’t have
anywhere to go. Wendell keeps moving around but I don’t. Actually, I don’t feel very good, my stomach hurts. I’m too big to
sit on a lap, my legs are stiff, and now my heart has a grandpa in it.

The fairgrounds are huge and hot, an expanse of baking bodies and an empty stage. There are guys monkeying around on the lighting
scaffold, high in the air. Mostly they’re fat, stoned, and intent on their tasks, but Wendell’s spied one that might be okay.
Ponytailed and lean, he has his T-shirt off and stuck in the waistband of his jeans. I can’t look at him because he’s too
high up, hanging off of things that don’t look reliable. Wendell trains her binoculars on him, focuses, and then sets them
down. “Yuck,” she reports.

We will see God this afternoon — this is an Eric Clapton concert. We’re sitting on one of our grandmother’s worn quilts, spread
out on the ground twenty feet from the stage. “Hey, look.” I show Wendell a scrap of fabric. It’s blue-and-red plaid with
dark green lines running through. She and I used to have short-sleeved shirts with embroidered pockets made out of that material.
On the ride over here we each took a small blue pill, a mild hallucinogen, and now Wendell has to put her face about an inch
away from the quilt in order to get a sense of the scrap I’m talking about.

“It used to be seersucker,” she says sadly. “And now it isn’t.” We think that over for a few minutes, how things change, how
nothing can be counted on, and then Wendell remembers something. “My shirt had a pony on the pocket and yours had a
schnauzer
.” She snickers.

For some reason that irritates me no end. I hadn’t thought of that schnauzer in years, and she has to bring it up today.
Thanks a whole hell of a lot. It did used to be seersucker, too, which is very strange, because now it’s not. What could have
happened to it? How can something go from being puckered to being unpuckered? You could see if it was the other way around,
but this just doesn’t make sense. My halter top keeps feeling like it’s coming undone.

We put the cooler over the unsucked seersucker so we can quit thinking about it. Wendell stretches out on her back and stares
at the sky. I stretch out on my stomach and stare at some grass. We are boiling hot but we don’t know it, my hair is stuck
to my back and Wendell’s is standing straight up in a beautiful manner.

“Your hair is standing straight up in a beautiful manner,” I tell her. She nods peacefully. She holds her arms up in the air
and makes a
c
with each hand.

“I’m cupping clouds,” she says. I try to pay closer attention to my grass, which is pretty short and worn down. It looks like
it’s been grazed. I read somewhere once that hysterical fans used to eat the grass where the Beatles had walked.

“Do you think Eric Clapton walked on this grass?” I ask Wendell. She looks over at me and considers. She thinks for so long
that I forget the question and have to remember it again.

“No,” she says finally. I feel relieved.

“Well then, I’m not eating it,” I tell her flatly.

“Okay,” she replies. I wish she had said “Okey-dokey” but she didn’t. She said “Okay,” which has an entirely different meaning.

I sit up and my halter top sags alarmingly. All I can do is hold it in place. There’s nothing else to be done, I wouldn’t
have any idea how to retie it. Wendell is curled up in a ball next to me with her eyes shut.

“My top is falling off,” I tell her. She doesn’t open her eyes. I can feel sweat running down my back like ball bearings.
Wendell groans.

“The clouds are cupping
me
now,” she says. “Get them off.” She’s still got her eyes shut, making a whimpering sound. I don’t know exactly what to do
because I can’t see any clouds on her and my shirt is falling off. I have to think for a moment. If I had just taken one bite
of grass this wouldn’t have happened.

A guy on the blanket next to us tries to hand me a joint. I can’t take it because I’m holding my chest. He looks at me, looks
at Wendell balled up on the ground, and nods knowingly. “Bummer,” he proclaims.

I can’t stand to have Eric Clapton see me like this. I let go of my shirt for one second and wave my arms over Wendell. My
halter top miraculously stays in place. In fact, it suddenly feels too tight. “I just got the clouds off you,” I inform her.
She opens one eye, then the other, and sits up.

“You look cute,” she tells me. She’s turning pink from the afternoon sun and her hair is hectic and alive. We open beers from
our cooler and start having fun.

By the time old Eric comes out, we’ve completely forgotten about him, so it’s a pleasant surprise. We climb up on our cooler
and dance around, waving our arms in the air. We’re so close to the stage he is almost life-size. This is amazing. We dance
and mouth the words while Eric sings tender love songs about George Harrison’s wife and plays his guitar in a godlike manner.

The sky has turned navy blue. Eric stands in a spotlight on the stage. I pick him up once, like a pencil, and write my name
in the air, then put him back down so he can play his guitar again. My halter top stays stationary while I dance around inside
it naked.
Darling
, we sing to Eric,
you look won-der-ful tonight
. The air is full of the gyrations of six thousand people. My cousin is covered with clouds again but she doesn’t seem to
notice. Although it’s still five months until Christmas, tiny lights wink on and off in her hair.

The tablecloth is covered with pie crumbs and empty coffee cups, a space has been cleared for the cribbage board and ashtrays.
The sisters are smoking, staring at their cards, and talking about relatives. Neither of them can believe that Bernice is
putting indoor-outdoor carpeting in her kitchen.

“You can’t tell her a thing,” my mother says. She lays down a card and moves her red peg ahead on the board.

“Shit,” my aunt says softly. She stares at her cards. One of the husbands comes in for more pie. “What do I do here?” she
asks him. He looks at her hand for a moment and then walks around the table to look at my mother’s hand. He points to a card,
which she removes and lays down. “Try that on for size,” she tells my mother.

The back door flies open and two daughters enter. There is a hullabaloo. Barbie’s little sister, Skipper, was sitting on the
fence and accidentally fell off and got stepped on by a pig. “She’s wrecked,” Wendell reports. “We had to get her out with
a stick.” I show them the stick and Wendell shows them Skipper.

“Stay away from the pigs,” my aunt says. She’s looking at her cards.

“We
were
staying away from the pigs,” I answer, holding up the muddy stick as evidence. “Tell them to stay away from
us
, why don’t you?” My mother looks up. “Well,” I say to her.

“You might find out
well
, if you’re not careful,” she tells me.

Wendell takes a whiff of Skipper, who is wearing what used to be a pair of pink flowered pajamas. A small bit of satin ribbon
is still visible around her neck, but the rest, including her smiling face, is wet brown mud and something else. “Part of
this is
poop,”
Wendell hollers.

My aunt turns around finally. “Take that goddamn doll outside.”
She means business so we go upstairs, put Skipper in a shoe box, and find our Barbies.

“Mine’s going to a pizza party,” I say. My Barbie has a bubble haircut, red, and Wendell’s has a black ponytail.

“Let’s just say they’re sitting home and then Ken comes over and makes them go to a nightclub,” Wendell suggests. Hers doesn’t
have a pizza-party outfit so she never wants mine to get to wear one either.

“Mine’s going to sing at the nightclub then,” I warn her.

“Well, mine doesn’t care,” Wendell offers generously. She’s eyeballing a white fur coat hanging prominently in my carrying
case. Her Barbie walks over to mine. “Can I wear your fur tonight?” she asks in a falsetto.

“If I can wear your bola,” my Barbie replies.

“It’s boa, stupid,” Wendell tells me. She digs out a pink feathered scrap, puts it in her Barbie’s hand, and makes her Barbie
throw it at mine.

“Let’s say it’s really hot out and they don’t know Ken is coming over and they’re just sitting around naked for a while,”
I suggest.

“Because they can’t decide what to wear,” Wendell clarifies. “All their clothes are in the dryer.” She wads up all the outfits
lying around and throws them under the bed.

“Oh God, it’s so hot,” my Barbie tells hers. “I’m going to sit at the kitchen table.” Naked, she sits down in a cardboard
chair at a cardboard table. Her hair is a smooth auburn circle, her eyes are covered with small black awnings, her legs are
stuck straight out like broomsticks.

Black-haired, ponytailed Barbie stands on tiptoe at the cardboard sink. “I’m making us some pink squirrels,” she announces.
“But we better not get drunk, because Ken might come over.”

Both Barbies do get drunk, and Ken does come over. He arrives
in an ill-fitting suit, and the heat in the Barbie house is so overwhelming that he has to remove it almost immediately.

“Hey baby,” Ken says to no one in particular. The Barbies sit motionless and naked in their cardboard kitchen, waiting for
orders. This is where Dirty Barbies gets murky — we aren’t sure what’s supposed to happen next. Whatever happens, it’s Ken’s
fault, that’s all we know.