Chapter 8
When we weren’t running around her backyard like three screaming banshees, we sat at Beth’s dining room table eating what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of cookies. The house was well stocked with every variety imaginable. Oreos, chocolate puffs, plain oatmeal, raisin oatmeal, Fig Newton’s, peanut butter, chocolate chip, ginger snaps and my personal favorite, chocolate wafers. None of them were homemade like Ma’s or Mrs. K.’s. Every last one of them came from Loblaws. There wasn’t anything even remotely healthy or natural about these cookies. They were sickeningly synthetic and full of garbage. We ate them by the bag-fulls. It was heavenly, a sweet tooth’s dream come true. Beth munched nonstop and never gained a pound, nor sprouted one zit. Our voracious hunger for sugar in the face of what seemed to be an endless supply of store-bought cookies, on the other hand, brutalized me. My rear-end was in full bloom and by the end of the summer I was a wide load for sure.
I went over to Beth’s house right after breakfast most mornings and spent the entire day there, coming home only on those occasions when my mother needed an errand run or my help with something. At first I came alone but then Danny started whining to Ma that I wasn’t playing with her anymore. Ma said I couldn’t go unless I brought Danny with me so I had to let the little brat tag along. But Beth didn’t seem to mind one bit. In fact, she let Danny play with old Sam while we hung out. Danny thought she had died and gone to heaven. Finally, a real dog to play fetch with, to roll around on the grass with, to hug, to pet, to scratch behind the ears, to kiss on the nose. That summer my kid sister got to know the joys first hand of a real live honest-to-goodness dog smothering her face with doggy kisses with its slobbery tongue and heinous breath. I don’t think I had ever seen Danny quite so happy before, or since.
“Just think. A real dog Jo. Almost like it was my own eh. Right across the street. Ain’t he a beauty Jo? Sam’s even better than Zee
Bee.”
“Sam’s a whole lot better than Zee Bee, Dan. You gotta remember he ain’t yours though. He belongs to Beth.”
“I know that Jo. But I can pretend he’s mine while I’m with him eh? Can’t I Jo?”
“Yeah I guess so squirt. Just so long as you remember he’s not really yours. Just for pretend. Okay Dan? You understand?”
“Yeah I understand Jo. Just pretend.”
Before I barely had my eyes open, Danny would be dancing around my bed bugging me to get up and go over to Beth’s. She was a regular pain, even more than usual.
“Is it time to go yet Jo?” she’d ask.
“Go back to bed Danny,” I’d moan, begging for mercy and just five more minutes of sleep.
“Do you think Sam’s up yet Jo?” she’d ask.
“Go back to bed Danny,” I said. “Get outta here and leave me alone.”We’d go on like this until she drove me crazy and I couldn’t sleep anymore. I’d get up, shower, have breakfast, all the while Danny would wiggle and bounce around like some yappy little dog herself nipping at my heels.
“You don’t need a dog Danny. You got yourself. Yap yap yap all morning long. If you don’t cool it I’ll put a leash on you and take you for a walk.”
“Do you think I could take Sam for a walk today Jo?”
“Jeez Danny, I said cool it! Don’t you hear anything? I told you Sam belongs to Beth. It’s up to her not me.”
“I bet Beth would let me take him for a walk.”
“Yeah, well we’ll see.”
Ma didn’t mind Danny and me spending time with Beth. She charmed her just like everyone else. Once Danny joined our little group, Ma would show up every day around noon with Italian sandwiches and a jug of lemonade for our lunch. At first she was shy about coming into Mr. Luoto’s yard just like I was that first day. But after awhile it seemed natural for Ma to come around the corner of the house with her basket of food. She wasn’t a young woman, but you would never have known it, with her black hair curling softly around her face, dark eyes sparkling the same way Danny’s did when she was happy and her flawless olive skin radiant. She never wore make-up except for a light whisper of lipstick whenever she went out, even if it was just to Loblaws with Joe. A lot of the time Ma looked tired and weary but when she came around the corner with that basket draped over her arm, her cotton housedress billowing at the skirt, she was transformed. It touched my heart to see her smile and humbly hand over the basket of food to Beth like it was a gift for the queen. Beth of course, was an expert at making people feel welcome, always gracious and accepting, instinctively knowing the right thing to say to make Ma feel good about what she had made. Ma refused Beth’s invitation to join us for lunch with a new excuse every day. There was laundry, Joe’s lunch, floors to wash, furniture to polish, garden to weed, bread to bake, cookies in the oven, Mrs. K. to call on. We were so ravenous by the time lunch arrived that we dove into the basket of food like orphans in a Dickens novel, so engaged in the pleasure of eating that we never noticed Ma slip quietly out of the picture. My mother was so good at disappearing acts that she could have taught Houdini a thing or two.
On the days when Harold stayed for lunch our conversations were generally pretty neutral—rock-and-roll, movie stars, television shows and once and awhile baseball, which we discovered Beth liked as much as me and Dan. But on the days when Mrs. K. needed Harold to go home for lunch, the topic of conversation around the lunch basket would eventually become about sex. “I wasn’t really ready for a sexual relationship in Minneapolis,” she said, clear out of the blue one afternoon, between bites of her meatball sandwich. I just about gagged. That was the first time I had even heard anyone actually say those words out loud. Sexual relationship.
Ma and Joe never talked about sex at least not in front of Danny and me. It was taboo around our house. Ma never even explained to me about my period. I just got these cramps one morning before school. I went to the bathroom and there was blood all over my underwear. I screamed for Ma. I thought I was dying. I thought maybe someone had shot me in the stomach while I was asleep and I was bleeding to death. Ma said, “my friend had arrived” and that I would “get these visits every month from now on.” “This was all part of being a woman,” she said. I started to shake, terrified of this uninvited friend who would cause me such pain every month.
“How long will this last Ma?” I cried, holding my stomach and rocking back-and-forth on the bathroom floor. “A few days and then you’ll be back to your old self. It’s nothing to cry about Jo. It gets easier once you get used to it.” Ma handed me clean panties with what looked like a big Band-Aid attached to a garter belt. Then she did this weird little pantomime with the Band-Aid and the panties motioning where everything should go. I slipped into the barbaric looking get-up and put the clean panties over it. Ma shook her head ‘yes’ then left the room with her head down, overcome with embarrassment. I was beyond embarrassed. The fear and the humiliation overwhelmed me as I crawled back into bed. I cried myself to sleep furious at my “little friend” and my mother for not warning me that I would be having these “monthly visits.”The next day I went to the library and took out every book I could find on reproduction, menstruation, sexual intercourse, sexual diseases, anything I could find that would help me unravel the mysteries of the female anatomy and why this was happening to me.
“Are you ready now?” I asked, gulping a meatball whole and swallowing it in one piece like a snake devouring a rat.
“I’m not totally sure, but I think I’m getting close.”
“How do you know something like that?”
“I don’t know. I think it has to do with your hormones. And mine are talking!”
I laughed nervously, afraid of where this conversation was going, but had to ask anyway. “What exactly are they saying to you?”
“It’s nothing you can put into words. Feelings mostly. You know, like whenever I’m around Hank I get all funny inside, warm and weak like I’m going to faint only I don’t. He makes my toes curl when I’m around him. He smells so good and I just want to be close to him, real close. Sometimes I look at him and I just want to cry because he’s so mysterious and unbearably handsome. I’ve never felt like this before, so it can only mean one thing.” “Yeah, it means you’ve lost your mind. And your eyesight,” I protested. “Are we talking about the same Hank, as in Harold Korkala, supreme nerd, royal pain-in-the-butt, drive me crazy all my life Korkala? What are you thinking? If that’s what hormones have to say then I’m not talking to mine. I mean there’s gotta be some kind of pill you can take. It’s just sick!”
Beth let me finish my rant, and then she leaned over, touched my cheek and pulled back a piece of hair that was sticking to my sandwich and said, “one day you will see what I see.”
“Not on your life.” Of course, the second it slipped from my mouth I wished I could have scooped it back up and swallowed it with my meatball sandwich but by then good old Mr. Unbearably Handsome himself appeared out of nowhere. I turned and sneered while Beth leapt to his side and actually took his hand and lead him to the blanket we had spread out for lunch. I got up and mumbled something about bringing the basket back to Ma and then kind of slithered away leaving the two of them engrossed in some meaningless conversation. Danny dozed under the tree with her head resting on Sam’s back, the afternoon sun casting shadows of the leaves like miniature dancers across their faces. I glanced one last time at Beth and Harold and tried to see what Beth saw. But I couldn’t. I only knew I had to leave.