Bud and I took turns at the helm of this monster. This was our welcome to Mississippi: incredible heat that started early and cranked hot all day and stayed sweltering long after dark, August all the way through September and straight on into October without any letup, muggy heat and mosquitoes and the roaring Yazoo and the tang of cut grass and Dad coming out to point out the spots we had missed. I grew to hate every inch of that yard, every fire-ant hill and rock poking up, every patch of gravel spitting back at me like shrapnel. I prayed for a hard freeze to come sweeping down from the north.
On his birthday, November 11, Bud stood up at the supper table to announce that he had joined the Marines.
Mom and Dad were appalled — Vietnam was on Cronkite every night — but there was nothing they could do to stop him. Bud was eighteen. He had signed the papers.
“Basic’s hard, but then it gets better,” he told me that night. We were up late eating big bowls of vanilla ice milk drowned in Hershey’s syrup, and watching Johnny Carson. “You get to pick your specialty. I could learn to fly a helicopter, or electronics. All kind of things.”
“Buddy, you can’t leave me to cut all this grass by myself!”
“Sorry, brother. You knew I was never gonna make it down here.”
“I could go with you,” I said. “I could say I’m eighteen too.”
“First off, who would believe that, and anyway, Dad would come after you and kill you. No Danny, you gotta stick it out like I did.”
“You’ve only been here a couple of months. I’ve got two whole years until I graduate.”
“Think about poor Janie. She’s got, what, five years in this dump? If Dad doesn’t get transferred again.” Bud licked his spoon. “You’ll both turn into total rednecks, you watch. You’re already starting to talk like them.”
“No I ain’t.” I grinned. “Dadgummit!”
Three days later it was time for Bud to go to Parris Island. Dad didn’t want any scenes at the bus station, so we had our scene in the driveway at home. Mom cried. Janie ran wailing into the house. I swallowed my grief and stared at the new seed heads poking up from the grass we had mowed just the day before. “Come back soon, Buddy,” I said.
He turned my hug into a handshake and finished it off with a slap on the back. “Take care, brother. And stay out of my room. Mom? Make sure he stays out.”
No need to worry: that room would become a shrine to Bud the Departed. Only Mom would be allowed in that room, to dust and to weep over his wrestling trophies. A perfectly good TV would sit in there going to waste, on the chance that someday Bud might come back and want to watch it.
Bud had always been my best friend. We grew up together. He learned how to do everything first, then taught me how. I would miss him so much, but I wasn’t going to be such a baby as to cry about it.
Anyway I had another friend now. Tim Cousins. All you really need is one.
3
EVERY SATURDAY NIGHT Tim and I watched The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour over the phone, Tim in his house in town, me sprawled in our family room out on Buena Vista Drive.
“Sonny Bono is so grotesque,” Tim said. “Why do you think she ever married him? He’s not handsome, not funny, he can’t carry a tune. He pretends to be making fun of himself, but actually he thinks he’s so smart for marrying a meal ticket like Cher. Look at that smirk.”
“Maybe he’s got a big wingwang,” I said.
“But God, he’s so queer! Would you look at that nasty mustache . . . it’s like one of those vacuum cleaner attachments you use to clean upholstery. I bet he gets food and stuff caught in it all the time. I bet it gets all sopping with Cher’s vulvular juices.”
“God, Tim, gross me out why don’t you?”
“Wait wait wait,” he said, fumbling the phone. “Here comes her solo.”
At some point in every show, Cher would emerge in an outrageous Bob Mackie costume to sing a torchy ballad. Cher was skinny with no boobs to speak of, but Bob Mackie cut her gowns on dramatic angles to create the illusion of boobs. Each week we waited to see how Bob would surpass the previous week’s spectacular — a blinding curtain of red sparkles, a beaded lime-green wraparound thing with a skullcap, a thatch of springy wires with little balls on the end. This week Cher was the center of an explosion of white feathers, perched on a swing in a giant birdcage, a stuffed Dove of Peace mounted in her hair. She looked fabulous and absurd on her bird-swing, singing a throaty ballad, “Your Love Is Like a Golden Cage.”
Tim’s laugh was sharp and startling, like a terrier’s bark. “Ha! Look at that! Incredible!”
“I must say, I am speechless.”
“Looks like that dove is about to crap on her head.”
“That’s just what I was thinking!”
Tim said, “So listen, have you given any thought to the prom?”
My heart tugged downward in my chest. Tim had a way of lobbing in these big hand-grenade questions as casually as if he were tossing flowers. “No,” I lied, “I haven’t even thought about it.” The Junior-Senior Prom was early this year — the first week of April, less than four weeks away.
“Better start thinking. Gotta buy the tickets by Monday. Unless of course you don’t want to go.”
“What do you mean? We have to go, don’t we? I mean, everybody’s going. Wouldn’t it be weird if we just didn’t go?”
Tim persisted. “So who were you thinking of asking?”
A flutter of panic in my chest. “I have no idea. You?”
“I asked you first.”
“Okay, you’re right, this is serious. Let’s see. What if I ask Terri Cawthon, and you ask Mary Jo Parks.”
“Mary Jo is so stuck up.”
“Yeah, but she likes you. I bet she would go with you.”
“Not a chance. She’ll go with Bill Munger,” said Tim. “You really think Terri Cawthon would go with you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. Why not?”
“Who else could we ask?” he said.
“Uhm . . . Lisa and Molly?”
“Are you nuts? Lisa’s practically going steady with Randy Felts, he’s gonna ask her any minute. And Molly will go with Gary Brantley, won’t she? I mean, I just assumed.”
“I guess you’re right.” Lisa and Molly were cheerleaders: cute, glamorous, popular. Tim and I were buddies of theirs. We were fine for kidding around in the lunch line, but for dating they had real boyfriends — big handsome football players at the top of the Minor High popularity pyramid. You wouldn’t find Lisa and Molly sitting home on a Saturday night watching Sonny and Cher.
“How about the McLemores? They crack me up.”
“They’re going with Kirby and what’s-his-name,” said Tim. “But I did have an idea. Just an idea, now, don’t get all . . . you know.”
“Who?”
“Debbie and Dianne.”
“Oh please. Are you joking?”
“Think about it. They’re nice. We’d have fun. And besides, you know they’d say yes.”
“But Tim. They’re such ––”
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t say it. Nice girls, Durwood. They’re nice. They have great personalities.”
It was true. Everybody liked the Frillinger sisters. They were fraternal twins. Neither one had been treated kindly by the looks department. They wore chunky eyeglasses, steel-wire-and-rubber-band appliances on their teeth, and plain shapeless dresses sewn by their mother. Their family belonged to some Full Gospel Pentecostal church in which dowdiness was part of the religion. They belonged to the Glee Club, the band, Christian Youth Fellowship, 4-H, Campus Life, Math Club, Science Club, and the Future Homemakers of America. They were very nice girls. Girls you asked for the algebra notes, not to the prom.
Not that Tim and I were exactly prime prom material ourselves. We weren’t all that ugly, but we were brain/loser, musical, intellectual, verbal, nonathletic geeks. We ran with the brain/loser/choir/band/geek underground. My favorite subject was band; Tim’s was art. The only sport we wer
e good at was making withering jokes about the popular kids.
Tim was tall and skinny and pale, with that thatch of forward-falling dark hair. Handsome but frail, anemic-looking, as if he’d never finished a meal in his life. I was five inches shorter, on the “husky” side, having never gotten up from a plate with food on it. Aside from my huskiness there was nothing special about me, except a certain hawklike intensity in the eyes (Mom called it my “mean look”) and my bristly whitish-blond crew cut. Dad said long hair was for sissies. He saw to it that I had the last remaining crew cut in the eleventh grade. These were the days of Johnny Winter, remember, and Led Zeppelin, the Moody Blues; you had to grow your hair at least below the collar.
Despite my crew cut and Tim’s general oddness, we believed we were cooler and smarter and funnier than anybody at Minor High. We were so cool that nobody even knew we were cool. We loved Sonny and Cher, so square-trying-to-be-hip, so aggressively uncool. Like us! At this moment, Sonny wore a forty-gallon cowboy hat and fringed chaps, and Cher was done up as an Old West saloon madam, all curly blond wig and fake tits. The jokes were lame, Cher rolled her eyes delivering them, but she did look fantastic in that wig with those big bazooms.
“There’s nothing wrong with the Frillingers,” Tim was saying. “Don’t be such a snob.”
“Come on, for God’s sake, Debbie and Dianne? Couldn’t we at least try for a couple of non-eyesores, like Terri and Mary Jo? And keep the Frillingers in reserve just in case?”
“They’ll hear about it and get all hurt,” he said. “Whereas if we go ahead and ask ’em, everybody will know we did it from the goodness of our hearts, so they could go to the prom. Nobody will think they’re, like, our real dates or girlfriends or anything. See?”
I saw. We could shoot for the moon, in the form of Terri and Mary Jo, risking a humiliating rejection which would become schoolwide knowledge, or we could go for a guaranteed yes from the Frillinger sisters and become the gracious benefactors of two nice girls with good personalities. We’d be reaching down from our heights, instead of reaching up from our depths. We would arrive at the prom enhanced by a glow of charity that might help us trade up once we got there. I said, “Maybe you’re right.”
“Not maybe. I am right. I’ve thought a lot about this.”
“Just, I was hoping we could do a little better. That sounds more like a backup plan.” Cher swept her arm down the bar, sending a torrent of glasses to the floor. “Is this skit supposed to be funny?”
“It’s surrealism. Like Salvador Dalí.”
“Like you and me and the Frillingers.”
“You got any better ideas? Be realistic.”
I chewed my toothpick. “I see the advantages. I do. I’m just trying to picture us walking into the prom with them.”
“It’s not like we would have to kiss them or anything.”
“What? Of course you would. It’s the prom, for God’s sake. What are you gonna do, take ’em and not kiss ’em? That’s cruel.”
“Which one would you want to ask?” said Tim. “Theoretically, I mean.”
“Theoretically, I would like to ask Cher,” I replied. “Would you look at her? Why can’t we take her? Or somebody just the tiniest bit good-looking, Tim, please? Pretty please?”
Cher had put on a sparkly white gown and two pounds of eye shadow for the closing rendition of “I Got You, Babe.” She cuddled little Chastity in her arms.
“Attention, Durwood,” he said. “We don’t know any good-looking girls who would go with us.”
“No, well maybe not like completely gorgeous, but at least not —”
“Don’t say it —”
“At least not a pair of howling, barking dogs!”
“Stop it!” He roared with laughter. “You shut up!”
“Daniel. Do you know what time it is?” Mom’s voice up the hall. In our house, ten o’clock was the middle of the night.
“Gotta go, Timmy. Let me sleep on it.”
“Poor little Chastity. Look how unhappy she is,” he mused. Sonny Bono lifted the child’s pudgy hand to wave night-night. “All those bright lights in her eyes. Shouldn’t she be home in her crib?”
“She’s the most famous baby in America,” I said. “She has a job to do.”
“Betcha Sonny nuzzles her all the time with that mustache.”
“That is so revolting! I’m hanging up. Later —”
“Gator.” He beat me to the click. We always raced to see who could hang up first.
The next night on the phone we refined our Frillinger prom-asking strategy. Tim insisted we had to choose individual Frillingers and ask them separately. Girls were weird about stuff like that, he said, especially twins, who always got treated like two halves of the same person.
We tossed a coin. Heads — I won. I chose Dianne.
“No fair, you got the pretty one,” Tim said with an evil laugh. There wasn’t a pretty one.
God, how mean we were. We told ourselves we were funny, but really we were cruel.
Mom’s sleepy voice up the hall: “Daniel, hang up that phone. You’ve been on there for hours.”
“It’s a local call, Mom. It doesn’t cost anything.”
She said, “Did you ever think somebody else might want to call us?”
“Jesus, she sounds exactly like my mom,” Tim said in my ear. “Are you sure they’re not the same person? Have you ever seen them in the same room?”
“Timmy, gotta go. Later —”
“Gator.” He beat me again.
We finally settled the Frillinger question with a plan for simultaneous hallway invitations after Mississippi History. Juniors all across Mississippi were required by law to take a yearlong class in the subject of our state’s glorious past. Our current assignment was to memorize the names of all the counties. Coach Atkins spent the last ten minutes of each class intoning the list in his narcotic monotone: “Neshoba, Newton, Noxubee, Oktibbeha . . .”
At the bell Tim walked straight over to Debbie Frillinger. That left me no choice but to sidle up to Dianne, mumbling, “Hey can I talk to you a minute? In the hall?”
She must have thought I had gossip. She leaned against a locker, ready to listen. I blurted it out — “Listen, you want to go to the junior-senior with me?”
Her mouth fell open, actually fell open for a moment, her eyes lit up behind the glasses — then she decided it must be a joke. Her eyes hooded over. I saw the wounded little creature behind her eyes. I never told Tim or anybody, but just then I was so glad I had asked this particular girl.
“No, I’m serious.” I smiled. “You wanna go?”
Her eyes melted. “Oh Daniel, really? That is so sweet. But I can’t.”
An alarm horn went off in my mind — oh God, NO! she’s already got a date, I’m about to be turned down by Dianne Frillinger! The shame! Oh, the infamy! I kicked at the floor. “What, somebody already asked you?”
“No, no, are you kidding? Even if they did I’d rather go with you. No, it’s Debbie. Nobody’s asked her. How can I go if she doesn’t get to?”
I felt faint with relief. “Tim’s asking her, even as we speak.”
“Really! My gosh, are you — Daniel, you guys are so wonderful!” She flung her arms around me and brushed my cheek with her lips, a moist little kiss.
I glanced down the hall to make sure no one had seen it. The girl thing had been an uncomfortable mystery since the sixth grade, when most of the boys got their first real crushes. I didn’t really understand all the fuss, but dutifully I got a crush on a girl called Lucy Meagher, a blond slender thing who could do long division in her head.
I remember a rainy day, the smell of wet children just in from recess. I labored over my love note, copying it out twice to improve the handwriting. I folded it four times and watched it make its way, hand to hand, down the line of desks to Lucy. She read it. She made a mark with her pencil, refolded the note, and started it back up the line.
Miss Kamen spotted the surreptitious movement.
She pivoted at the blackboard, her cat-eyes brightening. She clacked over on high heels, seized the note, and brandished it before the class.
“Look, children, one of us can’t wait for the bell to share a secret. I think we should all find out what’s so important, don’t you?” A strange groan rose from the class, half in favor, half against. Miss Kamen smiled as she unfolded the note. “Now let’s see . . . ‘Dear Lucy, I like you do you like me.’ Missing a comma there, and a question mark. ‘Yes, no. Please put a check by the answer and send back. Love, Daniel.’” She looked up. “Daniel Musgrove?”
The only Daniel in the room. I died a few times.
“Your penmanship is improving, Daniel,” she said, “but I’m afraid Lucy has checked ‘No.’”
Miss Kamen ripped the note in two, dropped the pieces in the trash, and went back to the blackboard.
I never cast another glance at Lucy, or wrote another love note, or showed any glimmer of feeling for any girl until all these years later in the hall after Mississippi History when I asked Dianne Frillinger to the prom.
She said yes! She kissed my cheek! I felt sophisticated, a man of the world. There’s no mystery to it. You just pick the right girl, walk up to her, and ask.
“Okay great, it’s a deal, then,” I said. “We’ll be calling you with the details.”
“My goodness, there’s not much time! We have to get our dresses, get our hair appointments, and everything!”
“Yeah. And we gotta rent tuxedos.”
“Oh, you’ll be so handsome!” She looked so excited I thought she might kiss me again. I fended her off with a friendly bop on the shoulder and strutted off to chemistry.
Tim said Debbie was equally thrilled. Our news got all the right reaction in the halls, our generosity was noted and admired. People understood that we could have done better. Girls, especially, liked us for making sure two nice girls got to go to the prom.