Riding in Cars With Boys: Confessions of a Bad Girl Who Makes Good Read online

  “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.”

  “I wish he worked at the steel mill.”

  “You and me and the man in the moon. Then maybe I could pay the doctor bills. But that’s not your father. He wanted to be a cop and make a difference. He didn’t want to punch a time clock and have a boss looking over his shoulder.”

  When I was four, before my father became a cop, he pumped gas at the garage on the corner, and every day I brought him sandwiches in a paper bag. He’d smile like I’d just br
ightened his day when he saw me, then I sat on his lap while he ate. Sometimes I fell asleep, leaning my head against his chest, lulled by the warmth of his body and the rumble of trucks whoosh ing past. Sometimes I traced the red-and-green American Beauty rose on his forearm. I thought that flower was the most beautiful thing in the world back then. Now it was gray as newsprint, and whenever I caught a glimpse of it, I turned my eyes.

  “You should’ve told him not to be a cop,” I said. “It’s ruining my life.”

  “It’s not up to the wife to tell the husband what to do,” my mother said.

  “He tells you what to do all the time.”

  “The man wears the pants in the family.”

  “I’m never getting married.”

  “You’ll change your tune.”

  “And end up like you? Never in a million years.”

  “You better not let your father catch you talking to me like that.”

  CHAPTER 2

  MAYBE it was poetic justice for being so contemptuous of my mother and her position in life—as my father’s servant—that landed me, before I graduated high school, at the altar.

  I met Sonny Raymond Bouchard on New Year’s Eve in the eleventh grade. As usual, I didn’t have a date and neither did my best friend, Fay Johnston. Her parents were away for the weekend, so I was sleeping over. We were drinking gin and Fresca in martini glasses and pretending we were rich and famous and living in New York City when her brother Cal showed up with two of his hoody friends, Lizard and Raymond. I’d heard about a friend of Cal’s named Raymond and how his brother was in jail for holding up Cumberland Farms with a gun. Raymond’s hair was black and greased high back. He wore tight black pants and pointy black shoes.

  Cal crammed a case of Colt 45 in the refrigerator, then stood in the doorway of the living room and said, “Happy New Year!” as he slammed his heels together and pointed a can of beer in the air like a Nazi salute. Then the three of them came into the living room and started talking about Lizard’s giving a guy at the Farm Shop a bloody nose.

  “Why’d you hit him? What did he do?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Lizard said.

  “He ranked on Lizard’s sister,” Raymond said, opening a beer.

  “Called her a douche bag.” Cal giggled.

  I liked that. Hoods had their drawbacks—like using dems and dose when they spoke and wearing their hair like Elvis‘s—but usually they weren’t afraid to fight for a girl’s honor.

  Ray took a long drink of beer, and when he put the can down, his eyes landed on me. Then Cal put “Sunny” on the record player. It skipped: “Sunny, thank you for the ... Sunny, thank you for the ... Sunny, thank you for the ...” Cal said, “First one to change the record’s a pussy.”

  This went on for ten minutes. I kept an eye on Ray to see how he was taking the torture. That’s when I noticed he smoked Lucky Strikes, like my father. I wondered what he was thinking. He sat still in the chair like the Lincoln Memorial, except every once in a while when he lifted a heel off the floor then put it back down. I wondered if he carried a gun like his brother. I figured he could probably fix cars because that’s why hoods were called greasers.

  Cal flung his shoe at the record.

  “Eh-heh,” Fay said. “Cal’s a pussy.”

  “Shut up, chicken legs.” He swigged his beer.

  “Drop dead, raisin nuts.” She threw a pillow at him, knocking his beer in a gush across the carpet.

  Fay stood up and dropped into Lizard’s lap. He was called Lizard because he’d eat any kind of insect. Only thing was, it had to be living. Fay didn’t care who she flirted with.

  “Do my bones dig into you when I sit on your lap, Liz?” Fay said.

  “You’re light as a bird.”

  “Do you think I’m too skinny?”

  “Nah, you’re just right.”

  I knew she was thinking, Well, you’re fat as an ox and ugly as sin or something like that. Fay was always flirting with guys who didn’t have a chance in hell. Usually, I thought it was mean, but this night I thought maybe she had the right idea, so the next time I returned from the kitchen with a gin and Fresca, I coasted into Raymond’s lap and said, “Hi, I’m Beverly.”

  “Raymond.” He nodded and shifted his weight. I suggested we move to the sofa.

  “I never saw you around school,” I said.

  “Quit. ”

  “Why?”

  “Buy a car.”

  “Your parents didn’t care?”

  “Nope.” He stretched and laid an arm across my shoulder. I thought of Danny Dempsey and wondered if Raymond carried a knife. I put my head on his shoulder and interrogated him.

  “So, you have a job?”

  “Yep. ”

  “What do you do?”

  “Work down Cyanamid. Is your old man the cop?”

  “Yes. I hate him. Is your brother really in jail?”

  “Yep.”

  “For what?”

  “Armed robbery.”

  “That’s terrible. Did your mother cry when she found out?”

  “Yeah.” He kept flicking his thumb with his index finger. I took his hand in my lap to hold it still.

  “What about your father?” I asked.

  “He don’t know. He ain’t been around for a couple of years.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Bowery. ”

  “In New York?”

  “He’s a drunk.”

  Raymond was a high school dropout, his brother was a thief in jail, and his father was a Bowery bum. He needed me. More than anything else in the world I wanted Raymond to cry on my shoulder. I kissed his forehead. He pulled his face away and kissed my mouth.

  It would be like On the Waterfront. He’d be Marlon Brando and I’d be Eva Marie Saint. I’d tutor Raymond for his high school equivalency; he’d listen to me recite Shakespearean soliloquys in my cellar. Pretty soon he’d wear crewneck sweaters and loafers. He was lying on top of me. It was probably too late to turn back now: I had a hood for a boyfriend.

  By the time Raymond and I came up for air, the room was deserted. I told Ray I had to go to the bathroom, and as soon as I sat on the toilet, Fay barged in. “What are you doing? You like Sonny?” she said.

  “I think so.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “What’s to tell? He was the neighborhood simp. We never let him play baseball and shit because he was such a slug. Used to call him spider after a hairy mole he had growing under his earlobe. Teased him so much he had it removed, surgically.”

  “Poor Raymond.” I flushed the toilet.

  “Sonny Bouchard is retarded, Beverly.” She sat on the toilet. “I can’t believe you like him. Are you sleeping with him on the couch?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Have fun.” She flushed the toilet and walked out.

  When I went back to Raymond, I looked for the mole scar. It was a silvery patch the size of a quarter beneath his earlobe. I kissed it and we lay down. I told him I hated the name Sonny and would always call him Raymond. Soon he was breathing regularly and I slid off the couch, tiptoed outside, and stood on the carport. There was no moon, but the sky was heavy with stars. My breath puffed white clouds and there was no sound except for 1-91 in the distance. I walked to Fay’s window and tapped it. She got up and opened it. “What’re you, crazy? It’s freezing out.”

  “Nice though.” I spread my arms to demonstrate.

  In a minute she stood beside me, a blanket around her shoulders. She wrapped me in. “Let’s walk,” I suggested.

  The grass cracked under my bare feet. When we stepped onto the main road, a car whizzed by beeping. Soon it would be light out. I spotted a red flag sticking up on a mailbox. I pushed it down, then back up, and without thinking about it, I bent it back and forth until it snapped off in my hand. “Wow,” Fay said. She went across the street and did the same. We hurried around the block breaking off every flag in sight, until we�
��d circled back to her house. We had about thirty of them wrapped in the pouch of our blanket. “What’ll we do with them?” I said.

  “I don’t know.” Fay hugged herself. “I bet we could get arrested.”

  “Willful destruction of federal property or some shit.”

  “I know,” she said. I followed her into a vacant lot. She knelt down on the ground and banged a flag in with a rock. I hammered in the next one. We made a circle of red flags in the middle of the field, then stood for a long time looking.

  “Maybe no one will touch them,” she said.

  “Maybe they’ll be here forever.” I shivered.

  One year later, almost to the day, I was shivering again, this time from nerves. I was in Fay’s bedroom and at one o‘clock on the dot, I dialed the phone to find out if I was pregnant. I dropped the phone and fell face first on the bed.

  “Well, what did they say?” Fay asked.

  “Positive.”

  “Postitive? What does positive mean?”

  “Pregnant.”

  “But it could mean you’re positively not pregnant, couldn’t it?”

  “Could it?”

  “Call them back and ask.”

  “You call.”

  I slid onto the floor and rested my forehead on her knees as she dialed. She hung up and said, “You’re fucked.”

  I broke the news to Raymond that night as we sat at the drive-in, the little portable heater between us on the seat, a motorcycle movie called The Wild Angels (Raymond’s all-time favorite) on the screen.

  “Raymond,” I said. “Our lives are ruined.”

  “Don’t you love me?”

  “Yes. But still. I mean, why’d this happen to us? Why me? Do you think I have bad luck?”

  “You probably got it from me. I told you you shouldn’t love me. I’m trouble.”

  Raymond always said things like that. In the beginning, it made me hug him and kiss him. The first time I’d said “I love you” was when he was drunk and crying. It was in response to his saying, “You shouldn’t love me.” Now his self-pity just made me mad. Possibly because I was thinking he was right, I shouldn’t love him, because if I hadn‘t, I wouldn’t be sitting at a stupid motorcycle movie, pregnant.