When I Was Your Age, Volume One Read online

  Wet and cold, our way lit by my fast-fading flashlight, we gathered our belongings — most of them, anyway. As we made our way back over the bridge, gusts of wind-blown rain pummeled us until I felt like a used-up punching bag. By the time we got to the subway station, my legs were melting fast. The other guys looked bad too. Other riders moved away from us. One of them murmured, “Juvenile delinquents.” To cheer us up, I got out my comic books, but they had congealed into a lump of red, white, and blue pulp.

  With the subways running slow, it took hours to get home. When we emerged from the High Street Station, it was close to midnight.

  Before we split up to go to our own homes, we just stood there on a street corner, embarrassed, trying to figure out how to end the day gracefully. I was the one who said, “Okay, I admit it. I’m not as tough as you guys. I gave up first.”

  Max shook his head. “Naw. I wanted to quit, but I wasn’t tough enough to do it.” He looked to Horse.

  Horse made a fist. “You saying I’m the one who’s tough?” he demanded. “I hate roughing it!”

  “Me too,” I said quickly.

  “Same for me,” Max said.

  Horse said, “Only thing is, we just have to promise not to tell Mr. Brenkman.”

  Grinning with relief, we simultaneously clasped hands. “No matter what,” Max reminded us.

  To which I added, “Scout’s Honor.”

  “I am a twin and that meant — and still means — sharing with my twin sister, Emily. For example, usually it’s me who tells the jokes while she laughs. Or, if we’re at a party together, Emily does most of the talking, while I tend to be the listener.

  When we were kids, one of her jobs was remembering. Thus, though we were in the same class from nursery school through seventh grade, Emily remembers our classmates’ and teachers’ names. I recall just my friends’ names. In short, my memories of childhood are only of those things I did without her.

  So, when asked to write a story about when I was young, I recalled the time I was trying to be a Boy Scout, my first attempt at an overnight camping trip. Emily wasn’t there.

  Keep in mind that ‘Scout’s Honor’ is a piece of fiction. Though I can’t recall the actual words we spoke, much less the moment to moment events, the broad outlines of that fiasco are true. What’s more, I recall that, even then, we thought it was all pretty funny.

  At the age when this story takes place — though I was a voracious reader — it had never occurred to me that I might become a writer. But I was an inventor of stories, which I — and my friends — acted out, much as described in my book Who Was that Masked Man, Anyway? Only during high school, when I was told I was a bad writer, did I decide to prove that I could write. As for my twin sister, she too is a writer. She writes poetry and nonfiction. So you see, we still divide things up.”

  La’s mother wasn’t there, waiting in front of the school in the dusty white Volvo station wagon. La sat on the lawn and watched all the other mothers gathering their children. When the sun started to go down, she walked home along the broad streets lined with small houses, thick, white, leaflike magnolia blossoms crisping brown at the edges, deadly pink oleander, eucalyptus trees grayed with car exhaust. The air smelled of gasoline, chlorine, and fast food meat, with an occasional whiff of mock orange too faint to disguise much with its sweetness.

  La walked up the brick path under the birch tree that shivered in the last rays of sun and went into the pale-blue wood frame house. She found her father sitting in the dark.

  “Daddy?” she whispered.

  He looked up, and his swollen, unshaven face made her step backward as if she had been hit.

  “What’s wrong?” La asked. “Where’s Mom?” She wanted to say Mommy, but she didn’t want to use baby words.

  “Your mother left.” He sounded as though there were wet tissues in his throat.

  “Where’s Mommy?” she asked again.

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” He never raised his voice to her. “She left us. She’s gone.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  La took a step toward her father, but the look in his eyes made her back away into her bedroom and shut the door. She sat on her bed and stared at the wall she had helped her mother paint with wildflowers, pale and heathery; now they seemed poisonous. La looked at Emily, H.D., Sylvia, Ann, Christina, and Elizabeth sitting on the love seat. Her mother had named them after her favorite poets. They stared back with blank doll eyes.

  La wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. She felt like a Tiny Tears doll with no water inside.

  “La,” said a voice.

  She jumped and turned around. The closet door was open a crack. La never left the closet door open. She was afraid that demons would come out and get her in the night.

  “La,” the voice whispered.

  She held her breath.

  The closet door opened a little more, and a tiny shadow tiptoed out.

  Maybe, she thought later, Blue was really just her tears. Maybe Blue was the tears that didn’t come.

  The creature came into the light. It had thin, pale, slightly bluish skin. It blinked at La with blue eyes under glittery eyelashes.

  “Who are you?” La felt a slice of fear. “Why are you here?”

  “For you.”

  La rubbed her eyes. “Are you a demon?”

  The creature looked about to cry. La shook her head, trying to make it go away.

  “Now you should sleep, I think,” and the creature reached out its tiny blue fingers with the bitten nails and touched La’s forehead.

  Almost immediately La was asleep.

  She dreamed about the creature holding her mother’s hand and running through a field of wildflowers.

  “Blue,” La’s mother said in the dream. “Your name is Blue.”

  The house where La lived looked completely different now. When La’s mother was living there, the garden had been wild, but a garden — now the flowers were burnt up; crabgrass stitched the dirt. There had been bread baking, bowls of fruit, Joni Mitchell singing on the stereo, light coming through the windows. Now, the only light in the living room was from the television’s glow. La’s father stopped writing the novel he had been working on. Every night after he got home from the college, he corrected papers and watched TV. La’s mother had been a student in his English class, and he had fallen in love with her when he read her poetry. Wanting to protect her from a world that seemed too harsh, he had not understood how she dreamed of living in a commune, dancing barefoot in parks, and reading her poems, wearing silver Indian bells and gypsy shawls, even though these were the things that had drawn him to her.

  La remembered when she was a little girl, how her mother had held her close and said, “Can you see the little dolls in Mommy’s eyes?” La had seen two tiny Las there. As she got older, she still looked for herself inside her mother. Now she tried to find that La in her father, but his eyes were closed to her, dull and blind.

  La fixed herself a bowl of cornflakes and went into her room to talk to Blue.

  “Did you know my mother?” La asked

  “I can tell you things about her.”

  “How do you know?” La was suspicious.

  “I know because I know you.”

  “Like what?”

  “She wrote poetry.”

  La thought about the journals with the stiff, creamy paper and thick, bumpy black covers that her mother hid at the bottom of the closet. La had looked for them after her mother had left, but they were gone. She had tried to remember some of the poems her mother had read to her from the books. She had opened a tiny bottle of French perfume that was sitting on her mother’s marble-top dressing table. As she put a drop to her throat, she remembered something about a girl dancing in a garden while a black swan watched her with hating eyes and one poem about a woman with black roses tattooed on her body. Something about a blue child calling to a frightened woman from out of the mists — begging. />
  “Did she want me?” La asked Blue.

  “At first she was scared of you. You were so red and noisy, and you needed so much.”

  La could feel her eyes stinging, but Blue said, “Then she changed her mind. After a while, you were all she really cared about.”

  “Then why did she leave?”

  Blue went and perched on the window sill. “That I don’t know.”

  One day at lunch, Chelsea Fox came and sat next to La. Chelsea had shiny lemonade-colored hair tied up high in a ponytail, and she was wearing pink lip gloss that smelled like bubble gum. La thought she was the most beautiful girl she had ever seen. She made you want to give her things.

  “Don’t you have any friends?” Chelsea demanded.

  La shrugged.

  “Why not?”

  La said, “I like to play by myself.”

  “I used to be that way,” Chelsea said. “I started talking when I was real little, and the other kids didn’t understand what I was saying. They just sat in the sandbox and stared at me. So I made up an imaginary friend I talked to. But my mother told me it wasn’t healthy.”

  “I do have one friend.” La had been wanting to talk about Blue so much. And now Chelsea Fox was asking! La’s heart started to pound against her. She felt as if she were made of something thin and breakable, with this one heavy thing inside of her. “Blue is blue and lives in my closet.”

  Chelsea laughed, all tiny teeth like mean pearls. “You still have an imaginary friend?”

  “Blue is real.”

  Chelsea made a face at La, flipped her hair, picked up her pink metal Barbie lunch box, and walked away. La crushed her brown paper bag with her fist on the lunch table where she sat alone now. Milk from the small carton inside the bag seeped onto the peeling, scratched table and dripped down.

  After that, no one talked to La at all. Chelsea Fox had a birthday party. La saw the invitations with the ballerinas on them. She waited and waited. But she was the only girl who didn’t get one.

  When Miss Rose found out, she asked La and Chelsea to stay after school. Miss Rose was a very thin, freckled, red-haired woman who always wore shades of green or pink.

  “Chelsea, don’t you think you should invite La to your birthday party?” Miss Rose said.

  La looked down to hide her red face. She remembered what Blue had told her about how red she had been as a baby, how it had frightened her mother.

  Chelsea shrugged.

  “Go ahead, Chelsea, ask La. It isn’t nice to leave her out.”

  Chelsea smiled so her small white teeth showed. They reminded La of a doll’s. “La, would you like to come to my party?”

  La was afraid to look up or move. She hated Miss Rose then.

  “She doesn’t want to,” Chelsea said.

  “I think she does,” said Miss Rose. “Don’t you, La?”

  “Okay,” La whispered, wanting her teacher to shut up.

  “Why don’t you bring an invitation in tomorrow?” Miss Rose said.

  “Just don’t bring any imaginary friends,” Chelsea hissed when they were dismissed onto the burning asphalt. La imagined Chelsea spitting her teeth out like weapons. The air smelled grimy and hot like the pink rubber handballs.

  La walked past some boys playing volleyball. The insides of her wrists were chafed from trying to serve at recess; her knees were scraped from falling down in softball; her knuckles raw from jacks. Sometimes her knees and knuckles were embedded with bits of gravel, speckled with blood. She had mosquito bites on her back.

  “There goes Wacko,” one of the boys shouted.

  La felt chafed, scraped, raw, and bitten inside too.

  La wasn’t planning to go to Chelsea Fox’s birthday party, but she saved the invitation anyway. La’s father saw it. He hardly spoke to his daughter anymore, but that morning, he said, “Is that a party invitation?”

  La nodded.

  “Good,” said her father. “It’s about time you did something like that.”

  La went mostly because her father had seemed interested in her again and she wanted to please him — she wanted him to see her. But the next weekend, when he drove her to Chelsea’s tall house with the bright lawn, camellia-and-rose-filled garden, the balloons tied to the mailbox, and the powder-blue Mercedes in the driveway, he was as far away as ever.

  Maybe it is better that he doesn’t offer to walk me in, she thought. I don’t want them to see him anyway.

  She wanted to go home and play with Blue, but instead, she jumped out of the car and went up to the door where a group of girls waited with their mothers.

  Chelsea answered, wearing a pastel jeans outfit. The girls kissed her cheek and gave her presents. When it was La’s turn, she gulped and brushed her lips against Chelsea’s face. Chelsea reached up to her cheek and rubbed away the kiss with the back of her hand.

  Inside, the house was decorated in floral fabrics — huge peonies and chrysanthemums — and lit up with what seemed like hundreds of lamps. Little pastel girls were running around screaming. There was one room all made of glass and filled with plants and leafy, white iron furniture. In the middle was a long table heaped with presents. La sat in a corner of the room by herself. After a while, Chelsea’s mother came in, leading a chorus of “Happy Birthday” and holding a huge cake covered in wet-looking pink-frosting roses. Chelsea’s mother had a face like a model on a magazine cover — cat eyes, high cheekbones, and full pouting lips. She was tall and slender, her blonde hair piled on top of her head, with little wisps brushing down against her long pearled neck. La watched Chelsea blow out eleven candles in one breath.

  “I’ll get my wish!”

  She probably did get her wish, La thought, watching Chelsea’s small hands tearing open the presents — Barbies, Barbie clothes, Barbie cars, stuffed toys, roller skates, jeans, T-shirts, a glittery magenta bike with a white lattice basket covered with pink plastic flowers.

  La had brought the almost-empty bottle of perfume that had belonged to her mother. Even though the fragrance inside it was the only thing that seemed to bring La’s mother back, La had decided to give it to Chelsea. Maybe it would make Chelsea like her, La thought. It was her greatest treasure.

  When Chelsea opened it, she said, “What’s this? It’s been used!” and threw it aside.

  Chelsea’s mother let the girls stay up until midnight, and then she told them to get their sleeping bags. La’s belonged to her father — blue with red flannel ducks on the inside. The other girls had pastel sleeping bags with Snoopy or Barbie on them. La put her bag down in a corner and listened to the sugar-wild giggles all around her.

  Suddenly, she heard Chelsea say, “La, tell us about your imaginary friend. La has an imaginary friend.”

  “She gave you an imaginary present,” Amanda Warner said.

  Snickers. They sounded mean with too much cake. La was silent.

  “Come on.” The girls squealed. “Tell us.”

  La said, “No I don’t.”

  “Your mom left because you are so weird,” said Katie Dell.

  “I think her mom was pretty weird too. She was a hippy,” said Chelsea.

  La buried down in the musty red flannel of her sleeping bag.

  Blue, she thought, to keep herself from crying.

  Near morning, when the other girls were finally quiet, warm thin arms the color of Chelsea Fox’s eyes wrapped around La’s waist.

  “Write about it,” Blue whispered. “Write it all.”

  That was the same thing Miss Rose said the next day in class. “I want us all to write about someone we love.” She looked straight at La. La noticed for the first time how sad Miss Rose’s brown eyes were.

  La went home and shut the door of her room. She lay down on her belly on the floor, with a pen and a piece of paper. There was a creaking sound, and the closet door opened. Blue came out.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m supposed to write about someone I love. I want to write about my mom, but I’m afraid.�
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  Blue began to whisper things in La’s ear. She picked up her pen and wrote.

  La wrote how she had been named La for the musical sound and also for the city they lived in — not for the dry, flat, chain-link-fenced, train-track-lined, used-car-lot-full valley where their house was, but for the city over the hill. In that city, La’s mother — wearing a paisley dress, her long hair hanging to her waist — took La to eat honey-colored cornbread at a restaurant with a mural of an Indian temple on the outdoor courtyard wall and soft candle cubes flickering like chants on every table. She took La to the museum where they saw jewelry in the shapes of fairies with stained-glass wings; to a temple in the hills full of gentle-faced Buddha statues and people planting trees, the air almost lavender with clouds of incense. They walked around the lake tucked into the Hollywood hills, feeling the cool, wet air on their cheeks, looking out at the expanse of water and the small, magical bridge lined with white globes; La imagined a princess receiving her guests there. They rode wooden horses on the carousel at the pier, feeling the smooth, wooden horse flanks, caressing the ridges of wooden roses on the saddles, watching the circle of lights that seemed to make the tinkling music. On dusty trails, they rode real horses, and La’s mother pointed out the wildflowers peeking at them from behind rocks. When they got home, they zigzagged handfuls of wildflower seeds into the earth — primrose, columbine, lupine, and cornflower. They painted wildflowers on the walls of La’s room — “So you will always have them,” her mother said.

  La wrote about her mother coming into her room at night sometimes, to read La poetry by Emily and H.D. in the pinkish light, the words like her mother’s perfume wafting around them. Sometimes, La’s mother read her own poems. La felt the secret of sadness bonding them together then.

  “I will love you forever,” La’s mother had said. “No matter where I am on the planet, I am always loving you.”

  La wrote about all of that and about the perfume bottle shaped like a teardrop that had brought her mother back.