We’d started working at Storyland in May, on the weekends, through the Memorial Day rush, until school let out in early June. Then we worked six days a week. Up until then we had met during the school week in the cemetery to smoke. Every day we would have what we called a “cemetery lunch.” I would clamber up over the hill, past the blue meadow of veronica and flax, past the broken stick-arbor and the Seckel pear, down the gravel path, into the planked swamp and on up to the gravestones, where Sils would be waiting, having arrived from the other end. She lived on a small oaky street that dead-ended into the cemetery (next to which she lived). “Is this street symbolic or what?” Sils would say to anyone who visited. Especially the boys. The boys adored her. She was what my husband once archly referred to as “oh, probably a cool girl. Right? Right? One of those little hippettes from Whositsville?” She could read music, knew a little about painting; she had older brothers in a rock band. She was the most sophisticated girl in Horsehearts, not a tough task, but you have to understand what that could do to a girl. What it could do to her life. And although I’ve lost track of her now, such a loss would have seemed inconceivable to me then. Still, I often surmise the themes in her, what she would be living out: the broken and ridiculous songs; the spent green box of Horsehearts; the sad, stuck, undelivering world.
That spring we usually met at the grave of Estherina Foster, a little girl who had died in 1932, and whose photograph, tinted with yellows and pinks, was fastened to the stone. There we would shiver and smoke, the air still too cold. We’d list against the other gravestones, lean forward and brush hair from each other’s face. “Hold still, you’ve got a hair.”
Were we just waiting to leave Horsehearts, our friends, enemies, our airless family lives? I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can only guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?
But what do I mean “they”? Perhaps I mean only Sils. I was invaded by Sils, who lives now in my vanished girlhood, a place to return to at night, in a fat sleep, during which she is there, standing long-armed and balanced on stones in the swamp stream, stones in the cemetery, stones in the gravelly road out back. How I resented the boys coming, as they did. I resented it early, even the hint of it. They were sneering and injurious and uninterested in me. They hooked their thumbs through their belt loops. More obsessed even than we with the fluids and failings of the body, they told long ugly jokes, ones with loud refrains like “plugging in” or “coming in handy.” They owned BB guns and shot the frogs in the swamp, not always killing them right away. Sils and I, stupid and young, would bring tweezers from home and, pushing through the cattails and the gluey pods of the milkweed, would try to seek out and save the poor frogs — digging in through their skin, pulling the BBs out, then bandaging the squirming, bleeding animals with gauze. Few of them lived. Usually, we would find the frogs dead in the watery mud, the gauze unraveled about them, tragically, like a fallen banner in a war.
The week she was hired as Cinderella, Sils made a painting of this, what we’d done with the frogs those years before. She painted a picture in deep blues and greens. In the background, through some trees, stood two little girls dressed up as saints or nurses or boys or princesses — what were they? Cinderellas. They were whispering. And in the foreground, next to rocks and lily pads, sat two wounded frogs, one in a splint, one with a bandage tied around its eye: they looked like frogs who’d been kissed and kissed roughly, yet stayed frogs. She framed it, hung it in her bedroom, and titled it Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
By that time, Sils had a boyfriend — a boy named Mike Suprenante from glamorous, forbidding Albany — and the painting’s meaning had become larger, broader, funnier; it had become everything.
She’d met Mike in late March, up at a lake bar called Casino Club, where we’d gone dancing. We had fake IDs and on weekends during the school year it was a good place to dance. Sometimes we danced with each other — boyless and defiant, with a tight, parodic pout. We would do the twist in a deeply satirical way. We would jitterbug, twirling under each other’s arms. We then waited for the men to buy us drinks. The dance floor was large and platformed; the bands were loud, winking, and friendly; the drinks were cheap on Ladies Night, and sometimes we would see our student teachers there, young and handsome in navy sport coats. Sometimes one of them would ask Sils to dance, not recognizing her immediately, and then in the middle of the song realize who she was and give her an embarrassed “Hi” or a sheepish shrug or point his fingers like a gun her way or else at his own head.
The night Sils met Mike, she was wearing a fake peony in her hair and a long sleeveless tunic and jeans. She wore all her rings and bracelets on one hand, one side, skipping the other, leaving it bare. I danced a lot. Every time a guy headed our way to ask Sils to dance, Mike (a “handsome nondescript person,” I said of him later), who had just walked over and introduced himself earlier that night, would swoop down with extra drinks and take possession of her, steer her back out onto the floor — he’d claimed her, “gotten dibs on her,” and she’d let him. On fast dances with him, she did her intensity dance: she sank deeply into each hip and held her fists up in front of her (one ringed, one naked) like a boxer. Her face — with its long nose cut like a diamond, her cheekbones flying off to either side in a crucifix — looked stark and dramatic in this light. And so, by the time the other guys got to the table, finished swashing their gums with their beer, finished gulping, there was no one there but me. “Well, would you like to dance,” they’d say, looking gypped. I didn’t care. I understood. I’d worn my white earrings that glowed in the black light of the bar; I’d circled my eyes with shadow. I’d brushed my hair over my head and then thrown it back so that it was wild and full. I’d checked myself out in the ladies’ room mirror: I was too skinny, and I wasn’t Sils. But I was of the conviction — a conviction I held on to naively, for years — that if somebody got to know me, really know me, they’d like me a lot.
On the slow dances, like “Nights in White Satin,” I let the men — construction workers, car salesmen — hold me close. I could feel their bellies and their sweat smell, their hard groins, their damp shirts, their big arms around me. Sometimes I’d rest my hands on their hips, my eyes shut and pressed into one of their shoulders while we danced.
“That was nice,” they’d say at the end, shouting it over the band’s next song.
“Thank you,” I’d say. “Thank you very much.” I always thanked them. I was grateful, and I let them know.
“How we getting home?” I yelled into Sils’s ear — the standard question on our nights out. I was staying overnight at her house, one of the few ways I’d have gotten to remain out so late. Her mother had night duty at the motel, and her brothers were staying with their various girlfriends or else were in Canada again, Sils wasn’t sure these days. She looked at me in a bemused way, shrugged, and pointed discreetly at Mike. He was tapping his foot, smoking a cigarette, and looking at the band, but he had his arm around her chair.
Why did I have to ask? I could always count on Sils; Sils was the way; Sils was our ride home, always.