“You’re the one who’s been talking and talking,” she says.
“I am not!”
She giggles. “Good night, Bliss. Sweet dreams.”
helma has decided to help me with Mitchell. While Mitchell is too counterculture for Thelma’s taste, she thinks it’s sweet that I’m sporting such a crush. She also thinks it’s ridiculous (her word) that I’ve had a crush on him for practically two months and have yet to make my move.
Not that she would ever put the moves on a boy.
“I’m just not that forward,” she explained. “But you, you’re more of a . . .” She struggled, biting her lower lip. Then her expression cleared. “Individual.”
I wonder what other labels she considered and rejected.
“Let’s review,” she says today. We’re at lunch—it’s my day to sit with her and the girls—and Thelma folds her hands and places them on the table. “He’s new this year, just like you. He’s into politics. We can assume he’s smart, because he takes calculus and honors English.”
“He slouches,” DeeDee contributes.
“True—he needs to work on his posture,” Thelma says.
“You guys,” I say.
“I’m serious,” Thelma says. “What if you get married? Don’t you want to go to fancy dinners with him and feel proud?”
“You guys. We are not getting married!”
“I love his eyes,” Jolene says. “If your kids get his blue eyes and your dark hair—wouldn’t that be fabulous?”
“The thing is,” Thelma says, “and yes, I know, this is the tricky part—but I’m thinking Bliss has to actually talk to him. Am I right? Before they have their brood of brown-haired, blue-eyed children?”
I swat her. “I’m not having Mitchell’s children!”
“I’m sorry—what?” Thelma says.
Jolene is shaking her head and pressing back laughter. Her expression says, Shhh, you crazy girl!
But I don’t care. If they’re going to embarrass me, then I’ll embarrass them right back.
“I said”—I raise my voice—“I am not having Mitchell Truman’s children!”
Jolene turns beet red, and she and DeeDee dissolve into mad giggles.
“Um, Bliss?” Thelma says. Her gaze travels upward to someone behind me. The way she sucks on her lip makes me nervous.
“Okaaay, I think maybe I won’t turn around,” I announce.
A person of the male persuasion clears his throat.
“Definitely not turning around,” I say. My cheeks are burning. It’s freaky and alarming how much heat is radiating from one little me.
“If you change your mind, we might be able to work something out,” the person of the male persuasion says.
“About the children?” DeeDee asks. “Or the turning around?”
“DeeDee!” Jolene says.
“Both,” says the male-persuasion person.
I shrink in my chair, but I raise my hand over my head and wave.
“Um, hi,” I say to the person behind me whom I’m still not looking at. “I’m Bliss.”
Warm fingers clasp my own.
“Pleased to meet you,” says the male-persuasion person. “I’m Mitchell.”
“Hi, Mitchell.” I try to pull my hand from his grasp, but he won’t let go. “Um, bye now!”
“Not till you turn around,” he says.
I tug harder. No luck. Thelma, DeeDee, and Jolene are close to peeing their pants.
Fine. I twist around and give Mitchell the quickest of glances. His expression is amused, and I grow even hotter.
He squeezes my hand, then lets go. “Just keep me in the loop if you do decide to bear my children. I’m happy to help out.” With that, he strides jauntily to the food line.
Once he’s gone, we lose it. Peals of laughter resound from our table, and the others in the cafeteria look at us funny. We laugh harder.
“Did you see?” Thelma gasps. “Did you see how proud he was?”
“You improved his posture!” Jolene says.
“I’m so glad, since that was my deepest desire,” I say. “Oh my God, I’m going to have to quit school and become a nun.”
“I can’t believe you waved at him,” DeeDee says.
“Your hand was like a little periscope,” Jolene says. “Or, no—like a white surrender flag.”
“It was a surrender flag. I was surrendering myself to abject humiliation.”
“Oh, please,” Thelma says, pulling me into a sideways hug. “Think of it this way: Now you’ve officially talked to him.”
hy’d you ditch me?” Sandy asks on the phone that night.
“I’m sorry . . . what?” I say.
“You ditched me. You sat with your girly-girl friends and talked about boys.” She sounds like an old biddy, and I can’t help but laugh.
“You’re laughing at me!” she cries.
“No, Sandy, I’m not,” I say. “I’m just in a good mood, that’s all.”
She sniffs. At first I think it’s a sniff, but then it happens again, with more quiveriness, and I realize it’s a sniffle.
“Sandy?” I ask. “You okay?”
“No. But who cares? Not you. I could fall into Satan’s grave and you wouldn’t care.”
Satan’s grave? Who says things like that?
Please let me never be so needy, I pray.
“Sandy, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You didn’t sit with me.”
“Yes, but I sat with you yesterday,” I point out.
“You have more fun with them.”
“That’s not true.”
“You guys were laughing at me.”
“What? Sandy, we weren’t. I swear!”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Sandy. You didn’t even . . . enter our realm of consciousness!”
“Oh, gee, well now I feel better.”
I’m exasperated. “Sandy, listen.”
“What?” she says belligerently.
I struggle with how to put it, because how do you tell someone that her very neediness is what makes people resist her? Sandy clings and clings, and yet—because humans aren’t always the nicest—there is the urge to pry free her fingers.
“Do you think . . .” I try to be gentle. “Do you think people like it when you, you know, get so . . .?”
“So what?”
“Defensive? Possessive? I don’t know.”
She’s silent. Great, I’ve hurt her feelings.
“Never mind,” I say.
She’s still silent.
“Sandy?”
“They’re not as perfect as you think they are,” she says.
“Perfect? Thelma and DeeDee and Jolene?” I laugh. “I’m not either. No one is.”
“Bluh bluh bluh,” she says.
“Oh no, that again?”
She huffs.
“You have to work with what you’ve got,” I say. “And not get so upset, or jealous, or . . . needy.”
“Sarah Lynn Lancaster is perfect,” Sandy states flatly.
“Huh?” She’s taken the conversation in a new direction, and I have to catch up. “I thought you hated her.”
“But she wasn’t always perfect,” Sandy says. “She used to be a real bitch.”
“How?” I say. I’m careful to keep my tone neutral.
“She just was. In fifth grade, she made my life hell.”
“Hmm,” I say. In fifth grade, Sarah Lynn would have been ten. Some might dismiss the notion of a ten-year-old bitch, but not me.
When I was ten, I had a brief but intense relationship with a girl named Carmen Pagliossi, whose dad was a drug addict. That was when we lived in the halfway house. Carmen and I caught roly-polies together and braided each other’s hair. We put our hands to each other’s ears and whispered secrets.
And then, one day, Carmen stopped being my friend. Just like that, with no explanation. She switched to hanging out with Lucia, who’d just moved in with her hugely pregnant mother. Carmen and Lucia s
tole the other residents’ food stamps and made greeting cards with them, which they delivered to each other through the cracks beneath their doors. I used a ruler to slide one back into the hall when no one was looking, and I pried open the envelope and read the message. It was about old Mrs. Zevin and how she smelled like fish. I’d thought maybe it would be about me.
Carmen never told me why she stopped liking me. Did I do something wrong? Was I too silly? Not silly enough? Was it bad that I liked bugs? Forever after, until Carmen and her dad left, I felt anxious whenever I saw her, like anything I did would be wrong.
So, yeah. Ten-year-old girls could be cruel.
“What did she do?” I ask, getting back to Sarah Lynn.
“She made everyone hate me, that’s all,” Sandy says. She breathes heavily over the phone. “She whispered about me. The teachers . . . I told them what was going on, I told them! But they said, ‘Not Sarah Lynn. I don’t believe it.’”
“Well, that’s awful,” I say. “But Sandy, that was four years ago.”
“She told people things,” Sandy insists. “She said things.”
“Like what?”
I hear a moist sound, as if Sandy is wetting her lips. I switch the phone to my other ear.
“I had a slumber party,” she says. “I sent out invitations and everything, with buttons glued on them, and bows. I invited every single girl in my class. Guess how many came?”
Uh-oh.
“Zero,” Sandy says.
“Oh, Sandy.”
“For our activity, we were going to make garlands out of flowers. I was going to let Sarah Lynn be the princess, and we’d be her ladies-in-waiting.”
“Even though she was so mean to you?”
“But no one came. She told them not to.”
I grip the phone. I’m sad for her; I’m sad for me. My Mitchell-giddiness is gone with the wind.
On the other end of the line, I hear a woman calling out.
“Hold on,” Sandy says to me. Then she raises her voice. “Just a sec—I’m almost done!”
“I’ve been waiting and waiting,” the woman says querulously.
“Five more minutes? Please, Mam?”
“Waa! I’m ready for my bath!”
“Sandy, it’s totally fine,” I say uncomfortably. “Your mom needs you. You should go.”
Sandy doesn’t respond.
“Is that your mom?” And why does she need you to give her a bath? I want to add.
“Are you still coming to the nursing home with me on Sunday?” she asks.
I sigh. “Yes, Sandy, I’m still going to the nursing home with you on Sunday.”
“Promise?”
“I promise. The only reason I won’t will be if you keep bugging me about it.” I laugh a little to show I’m joking—except I’m kind of not.
She must sense my impatience, because she says, “It’s just . . . you don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand what?”
Her tone turns whiny. “What it’s like to be different.”
At that, I laugh for real. “Are you kidding? Sandy, I lived on a commune, and before that, in the basement of Oregon State University. Before that, in a halfway house full of druggies and pregnant women.”
“You lived in the basement of Oregon State University? You never told me that.”
“That’s because there’s nothing to tell.” I think of the lab rats in their cages, which my parents were so determined to free. “It was dark and it smelled. End of story.”
“Sandra Lurlene Lear!” comes the voice in the background. “You will not disrespect your mother!”
“Bye,” Sandy says quickly, and hangs up.
The sudden silence is a relief, but as I return the phone to its cradle, I consider what it says about me that I’m glad to get off the phone with my friend. Back on the commune, I would have fainted in happiness at the thought of having a friend to chat and gossip and giggle with. Now I have not one friend, but several, and I seem to find fault with all of them.
How ugly that knowledge is. How shameful. And my eagerness to hear the details of Sarah Lynn’s bad behavior? Now that I’m out of the moment, I’m sickened by myself.
It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about Flying V’s hazy warning, but as I slump against the sofa, it resurfaces. Girls your age can be cruel, she said. I assumed she meant other girls, but now I see that there’s more than one way to interpret her remark.
For the first time, I wonder if coming to Atlanta has changed me—not just in surface ways, but deep down at the core. There’s a hardness inside me I’m not accustomed to. Or, not a hardness, exactly. More like a new level of awareness, an awareness that involves passing judgment.
On the way home from school today, I saw a girl (not from Crestview) who wasn’t wearing a bra. Who clearly wasn’t wearing a bra, as in lots of bouncing action and look-at-me nipples. And it shocked me, and I wanted to say to her, What are you doing strolling down Peachtree Road like that? This is Atlanta, not Woodstock!
I also thought she should wash her hair, and that her leather sandals looked embarrassingly rough-hewn.
Two months ago, that could have been me.
n Saturday, Grandmother and I head off for our day of shopping. We take the Cadillac. I ride in the front seat like a princess, which makes me think of Sandy and her failed slumber party, which I promptly cast from my mind. No sadness today—today is all about fun and money-spending.
When we get downtown, I marvel at the impossibly tall buildings. My neck pops as I take in the shiny surfaces and the blue sky way far up. Men in sport coats stroll along the sidewalk with ladies in pastel skirts and matching heels. The men look tolerantly amused, while the women sparkle with the excitement of being on an outing. The women all have bouncy hair.
“Come along, Bliss,” Grandmother says. “Regenstein’s first. I need to exchange a scarf.”
I follow her into the store. Then I stop, stunned by its grandeur.
“Bliss?” Grandmother calls. She pauses by the jewelry counter. “Bliss! No dilly-dallying, please.”
“Oh! Sorry!” I say. It’s just . . . it’s so huge! The ceilings are twenty feet high, and there are mannequins and clothing displays everywhere. The salesclerks are lovely. The air is perfumed.
I trot to catch up, and Grandmother leads us to the accessories department.
“What about this?” she asks, lifting a chiffon scarf that looks nearly identical to the one she’s brought with her.
“It’s pretty,” I say.
“Isn’t it?” She shifts the fabric so the threads catch the light, then smiles at me. I feel a glow of pleasure.
After she makes the exchange, we go to Rich’s, which is even grander then Regenstein’s. It’s four stories high, which boggles my brain. Cosmetics, fragrances, shoes. Linens, towels, housewares. Anything you could possibly want!
The junior-miss department is on the third floor; we take two separate escalators to get there. On each, Grandmother checks her reflection. She’s funny how she does it. She steps onto the escalator, then glances oh-so-casually to the right, where a long, shiny mirror extends from floor to ceiling. Her eyebrows arch—Why, look, it’s me!—followed by a trained pat to her hair and smoothing of her dress. Strangely, these grooming rituals make me like her better. Or maybe what I like is her eyebrow gesture, as if she happened on her reflection by accident and was just as surprised as anyone.
When we reach the third floor, Grandmother steps confidently off the escalator, while I worry about catching the toe of my shoe and give a last-minute hop. I’m not so good at escalators. The disappearing metal slabs seem beastlike with their sharp teeth.
“Let’s start with the sales rack,” Grandmother says, weaving through the carpeted aisles. She holds up a fitted white blouse with tiny pearl buttons. “How about this?”
“Um . . .” It’s almost identical to my school uniform blouses, and I’m not sure why I’d get the same exact thing as I already have.
“I guess I was hoping . . . could I get some jeans? New ones—not all tattered—and maybe a peasant blouse or something?”
“It would be precious with this skirt, don’t you think?” She checks the tag and frowns. “Well. Better keep looking; they’ve only got it in a two.”
She’s so sure of herself in this land of feminine attire. She knows the language, and she knows how to slide the hangers against the steel rod so that they whisper shh, shh, shh.
Mom and I shared few shopping excursions, and I can’t recall ever going to a store where you handed over money and were in return given a crisp paper bag with curved paper handles, like Grandmother’s Regenstein’s bag. Mom and I got our clothes at festivals, where men and women spread out their wares on quilts. We did a lot of trading, which is how I got my jingle bell skirt. Also, I got a lot from the Goodwill bins, where we paid a quarter for five pounds of clothes.
“How about this one?” Grandmother says, freeing a light green blouse.
I glance at the shirt, which also has a Peter Pan collar and capped sleeves.
“It would look pretty with your eyes,” she says. The unexpected compliment triggers a wave of loneliness, and I edge closer, craving . . . something. I don’t know what.
Grandmother awkwardly pats my arm. “You have lovely eyes, Bliss. Just like your mother.”
“Do you miss her?” I blurt. I know this is against the rules, but I can’t help it.
She takes her time putting back the blouse, and then she says, “Of course I do.” She searches my face. “Do you?”
Tears burn my eyes. Grandmother sees, and her own eyes respond in kind, tears to tears.
A woman pushing a stroller cuts through the aisle to our left, and our bubble of connection pops. I swipe my eyes as the toddler reaches for me.
“I’m sorry,” the woman says, attempting to pry her daughter’s chubby fingers from my skirt. The moment she succeeds, her daughter grabs me with her other hand.
“Nancy,” her mother says. “Let go.”
Nancy clutches tighter. “Me say hi.”
Her mother rolls her eyes, but it’s clear she finds her daughter utterly adorable. “Go ahead, then. Say hi.”
Nancy beams at me. “Hi, puppy.”
“She’s not a puppy. She’s a girl,” Nancy’s mother says.