I flip over onto my back and turn my head to peer at Cheryl’s empty bed again, and at the squares of clean white paint next to the closet that mark where her pinned-up posters of Dion and Frankie Avalon once were, along with the colorful sketches of flowers and birds that Cheryl sometimes liked to draw. I wonder what happened to the posters. Surely a married woman can’t put up a poster of Frankie Avalon in the bedroom she shares with her husband, but I sure do hope Cheryl has saved her drawings. I wish she’d start drawing again, like she said she might in her letter. And that even if I’m not there to hear the soothing sound of her pencils scratching on her sketch pad, she soon finds the time to do it, even if she’s a married woman now and supposed to be keeping house.
Like I often do, I think back on that moment, the summer before last, when Cheryl crawled into bed with me in the middle of the night, crying so hard she gave herself the hiccups. She was in trouble, she whispered. Gotten herself pregnant, was what the neighbors would say. It had happened the night of the senior prom, she confessed, and now it was just a few weeks after her high school graduation and she couldn’t ignore the truth anymore. She was going to have a baby.
‘You’re sure?’ I whispered, rubbing Cheryl’s back, running my hand up and down her spine and trying to get her to calm down enough that I could understand her. Cheryl was only able to nod, and I felt a strange mixture of panic but also pride that she thought I was old enough to share this terrible secret.
‘Do you think Dennis will do the right thing?’ I asked, thinking of her prom date, a quiet boy with constant ruby-red blemishes on his chin who lived down the street and read Archie comics and mowed our lawn for pocket change. He seemed nice enough, I supposed. But now Cheryl was going to have to marry him. If she was lucky.
‘I told him today,’ she managed between hiccups, sobbing into my white cotton nightgown so hard it would still be damp when the sun came up. ‘He said he would marry me. He enlisted the day after we graduated, you know. After boot camp, I can join him and we can live on base.’
I hugged her back hard. ‘That’s a relief, I guess,’ I answered, but was it? It meant Cheryl would be leaving. Leaving me. It was impossible to accept. Too painful to be true. But it was true. And it was incredible to me how suddenly Cheryl’s whole life had been decided for her. All because of a few minutes in the back seat of Dennis’s father’s Mercury Monterey station wagon on the night of her senior prom.
Not long after that evening, she and Dennis exchanged vows in our backyard, surrounded only by our families and with Cheryl wearing a simple white dress Grandma had sewed together in a matter of days. Then she and Dennis moved away.
‘Don’t be silly, Evie,’ my mother said when I’d asked her if Cheryl might ever come back to Houston for good. I’d broached the question one evening after dinner while the two of us watched Bonanza and she patched a small hole in the maid’s uniform she wore to the Shamrock Hotel. ‘She might, but now she has Dennis, and a husband decides where a family is headed. Dennis is a good boy, you can tell. He did the right thing by marrying her, after all, and you can’t go wrong with marrying a man in the military. They’re very stable. You should be so lucky.’ Then she took her small rose-gold sewing scissors and snipped a loose thread, and that was that. Conversation over.
But the snap of my mother’s scissors signaled much more than the end of the discussion. It was clear what Mama wanted for me and what I had to look forward to – but even clearer was how strongly I knew this wasn’t the life for me.
I didn’t want what Mama wanted and what Cheryl had, and this scared me. I could feel my throat closing, strangled by that loose thread that had drifted to the ground.
I wasn’t sure what to do to make it less scary. But I had an idea. Something I’d wanted to do for some time. Something that could get me closer to the girls I’d spotted in the hallways at school and at the park. The girls I’d never had the guts to talk to before, but who I knew didn’t seem to care so much about the rules.
Sometimes it was like they were even looking to break them.
The next day I wandered across our driveway to Juanita Barajas’s back steps, where she sat smoking a cigarette and watching her baby niece toddle around the backyard. Juanita and her friends had always seemed fierce to me. Powerful. But I’d never admitted that to anyone. Certainly not to my old friends – sensible girls with sensible lives – who sneered at Connie and Juanita and Sunny and called them trash.
But there was something about Juanita Barajas and the rest of them.
And I wanted that something.
That afternoon I made my way to the Barajases’ backyard, and I asked Juanita just how she made her eye makeup look so tuff. What I meant was how did she make those dramatic, delicious curves? How did she draw those smoldering black lines? How did she transform her eyes into a set of rebellious identical twins?
Juanita took a slow drag off her cigarette and examined me carefully. ‘It’s easy,’ she said, after exhaling a tight stream of smoke, ‘but I don’t think your mother and grandmother are going to like it much.’
I shrugged, hoping I looked nonchalant and cool even though inside my heart was hammering, hoping I could pull this off.
‘I don’t care what they think,’ I said, which was partly a lie but mostly the truth. I quickly crossed my fingers behind my back to make up for the lie part, a girlhood habit I didn’t realize then that I’d soon be giving up. And as it turns out, the untruth didn’t matter because Juanita believed me, and she went inside to get her makeup.
After a silent dinner of peas, rice, and meat loaf with Grandma, my mother comes home late from her shift at the Shamrock. As I’m helping clear the table, I hear her opening the front door, followed by the predictable thunk-thunk of her shoes hitting the floor. Next will come the squeak of our old couch as she collapses into it to rub her feet.
‘Marjorie, do you want your dinner now or should I put it up?’ my grandmother asks as she plates the leftovers.
‘I’ll eat later tonight, Mama, thank you,’ my mother answers.
‘Hey,’ I say, venturing into the den. ‘How are you?’
My mother looks up at me and smiles, then pats the spot next to her on the couch for me to join her. I know Mama worries about me. Loves me. And there’s still a part of me that wants to please her. Make her proud. So from time to time, I find myself skating around her like this, searching for the closeness we once had when Cheryl and I were tiny.
It sure is hard to find, though.
As I curl up by her side and fold my feet underneath me, I see she has today’s Houston Chronicle, the evening paper, folded up in front of her on the coffee table.
‘How I am is tired, Ladybug,’ she says, using my childhood nickname. She doesn’t do that much anymore, or at least she stopped doing it so often after I started running around with Juanita and Connie and Sunny and teasing my hair and wearing eye makeup. The nickname tugs at my heart and irritates me at the same time, and I wonder if there’s something really wrong with me to feel both emotions at once.
I remember when I was little and Cheryl and I would cuddle into her soft spots after one of her long shifts at work, not caring that she smelled of bleach and the city bus. She has more soft spots than she did then, I imagine, but it’s been a long time since I curled up next to my mother.