“Staying for dinner, Addie?” Betsy ties on her apron, reaches under the cabinet, and lifts out a white coffee-can-sized can with no label, just MEAT in big black letters, which she plunks on the counter. “Could be pork chops.”
“Sure,” Addie says, “I like pork chops.”
Betsy has short hair, which she cuts herself and dyes yellow. She is loud like a man, and likes to whistle.
Addie rolls a Tang ice cube over her tongue and lets it plunk into her glass. “What’s ‘make out’?” she asks Shelia.
Shelia frowns; her eyes wobble.
“It means,” Betsy says, and slings a spoonful of Crisco into her frying pan, “you get by on what you’ve got.”
Bryce gets paid on Fridays and takes the family out to dinner. Afterwards, he stops in the VFW for a drink. Addie and Sam wait with Claree in the car. Addie slides down low in the back seat in case anyone walks by.
“I would never do this to my children,” she says. She is thirteen.
“You don’t have children,” Sam says.
Claree, facing the windshield, says what she always says. “He won’t be long.”
“This is yours to keep.” The health teacher solemnly hands each girl a pink booklet. “Take it home and read it.”
The other girls roll their eyes. They’ve already started. They don’t need pink booklets. Shelia has started. Addie is the only one who hasn’t. She rolls her eyes along with them, but secretly she can’t wait to get home and read her booklet.
It has line drawings. The writing is clear and direct. “During your cycle,” it says, “you may feel bad about your body. Pamper yourself. Take a scented bubble bath. The water should be warm but not hot.”
She memorizes her favorite parts. “Warm but not hot.”
High school.
Girls huddle in the hall talking in whispers, pretending not to notice when people eavesdrop. They wear makeup. They wear halter tops and hip-hugger jeans that show their navels. They carry little purses for their lipstick and lunch money and cigarettes. Boys love and fear them. Addie sometimes wishes she were one of them. She wishes she were one of anything.
She reads. She reads Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. She believes Franny and Zooey have something to teach her, even if they’re high-strung and always talking in italics, even if the things they call phony, things that really get under their skin, are things that only privileged people or New Yorkers ever have to deal with. She recites Franny’s Jesus prayer. She goes on Franny’s cheeseburger diet. She doesn’t have a mystical experience, but the ritual is comforting. Eaten every day, even a cheeseburger (she likes hers with pickles and mayonnaise) can be holy.
She reads The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. A Separate Peace. Huckleberry Finn. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. To Kill a Mockingbird. A Clockwork Orange. Light in August. Brave New World. Mrs. Dalloway. In Cold Blood. The Stranger. All the King’s Men. She reads Daybreak by Joan Baez and Tarantula by Bob Dylan, a book that makes her decide to write poetry because she sees how you can write anything and call it a poem.
She and Roland have one class together, an elective called “The American Counterculture” taught by Mr. Saraceno, a young teacher with horn-rimmed glasses and black hair that curls down onto his shoulders. He wears jeans and blazers with patched elbows and comes from “places too many to name.”
They read the Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg, William Burroughs. They talk about sex and drugs. They can’t believe they have a teacher like Mr. Saraceno in Carswell, and figure he’ll get fired when their parents find out what he’s teaching.
In his class, Addie is outspoken, brazen, always raising her hand, always arguing. “Why weren’t there any women Beats? It’s not like women hadn’t already been part of the literary scene. Look at Edna Millay in the twenties. She wrote better than any of these guys. She was a bohemian. She was sleeping with everybody in Greenwich Village while Jack Kerouac was being fussed over by his mother and all those Catholic nuns who thought he was some kind of saint.”
“There were women Beats,” Mr. Saraceno says.
“Spectators,” Addie says. “Disciples. They sat around listening to all that crap poetry, snapping their pretty fingers. They cooked and cleaned and had sex and helped their men get famous. And ended up in mental hospitals, hanging themselves. They didn’t write, and if they did, why aren’t we reading it? They were nothing like women now. Look at Joni Mitchell. She’s a poet and a painter and a musician.” She pauses to catch her breath. “You know, Mr. Saraceno, American counterculture didn’t begin and end with the Beats.”
Roland, sitting in the desk behind hers, leans forward. “Tell it, baby,” he whispers. She can feel his breath in her hair.
Smokers congregate at the wall outside the Language Arts building after class and light up. The guys walk out in a row, three or four across, bent-kneed, jeans scraping the ground, long hair fanning out over the collars of their denim jackets. They lean against the wall and shake cigarettes out of Winston and Camel and Marlboro packs, cup their hands around matches, narrow their eyes, lean back, blow smoke rings, flick ashes.
Addie sits on the ground, the brick wall warm against her back, her composition book open on her knees, her long red hair falling around her like a curtain.
Betsy in her wrinkled shirt
makes coffee out of kitchen dirt.
She tries to write like Edna, like Joni, with rhythm and rhyme.
I’m seventeen, my skin is pale,
my eyes are green, I bite my nails.
I wish that I were someone else.
When she writes, the rest of the world disappears. She doesn’t notice when Roland sits down beside her.
“Can I see?” he says.
This is the first time he’s ever sought her out. He barely knows her, though she knows everything about him. He’s a musician, a guitarist. He has a Fender Stratocaster strung backward so he can play it left-handed. His favorite thing to talk about is music; his favorite music is the blues. Duane Allman is his hero. He is still mourning Duane’s death.
When he talks about music, people flock to him. When he talks, he’s a star.
He doesn’t wear his hair long. He doesn’t wear T-shirts or jeans to school. His mother, Pet, won’t allow it. Pet is famous for her rules. Roland has to wear corduroy pants, shirts with collars.
He doesn’t complain or apologize when he talks about Pet; he talks about her like she’s a character in a book. His Pet stories make him popular. Because of her, people are kind to him. Girls especially.
“I mean, if it’s okay,” he says to Addie. “I don’t mean to be presumptive.”
“Presumptuous,” she says, and hands him her notebook.
A red-haired woman sings the blues
to skinny boys in lace-up shoes.
She sings because they ask her to.
She sings and they applaud her.
She sings “My Baby” by request—
they always like the slow ones best.