hear me go.
This time, Betsy answered the door, breathing hard as if she’d been running.
“Hi,” I said, my heart thumping in my chest so hard I was fairly certain you could see it pounding through my shirt.
She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me into the house. “Follow me,” she said, leading me down the long hallway to the kitchen and then out the back door. Her hand was soft. She had a Band-aid on her thumb. Outside, she took off across the shady backyard, climbing nimbly up a giant maple. Once perched in the crook of two large branches, she whispered, “Come up.”
Though the maple was unfamiliar, I’d climbed my share of trees and quickly ascended up into the tree’s depths. To my dismay, Betsy seemed unimpressed by my tree-climbing skills; she was fixated on something in the distance.
The Parkers lived next door to Mr. Lowe, a widower with throat cancer and a reputation for losing his temper in public. He’d been seen screaming at waitresses and gas station attendants and store clerks all over town. Some people said the terrible sounds that came out of his throat were punishment for his temper. He’d even yelled at me once when I lost my baseball in his hedges. Through the trees, I could barely see the shadow of a figure moving in the yard below.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Shhh,” Betsy whispered, pushing the back of my neck down so that my head lowered and revealed a better view.
He was standing in the middle of his backyard in a sleeveless white undershirt, a pair of shorts held up by suspenders. When he bent over to pick up the hula hoop at his feet, Betsy let go of the tree branch and smacked me in the arm. Hard. Below us, Mr. Lowe held the hula hoop tightly around his waist before he set it spinning, released it, and let his hips do the work. Betsy covered her mouth to keep from laughing, and I smiled. He was diligent in this task. Ridiculous. When we finally couldn’t stand it anymore and Betsy started to giggle, the hula hoop dropped to the ground, and Mr. Lowe looked up. When he started to holler with that awful damaged voice of his and shake his fist at the sky, we scurried down the tree. By the time we got to the bottom, we were shaking with laughter.
“I saw him naked once,” Betsy said.
“Nu- uh ,” I said.
“In one of those kiddy pools,” she said, nodding. “He was wacking off.”
“Shut up,” I said, punching her arm. She didn’t flinch.
“I know where there are some dirty magazines,” she said.
“Really?” I asked. Earlier that summer Ray had stolen a copy of Modern Man from his dad’s collection. He’d even let me tear out a page with Bettie Page and Tempest Storm, both nearly naked, which I’d studied like a treasure map. As I traced breasts and teensy panties with my finger, I imagined myself an explorer, the topography both treacherous and thrilling.
She nodded. “I’ll show you tomorrow.”
Now I didn’t need another excuse to come back. I had a real, live invitation. And there was something pretty damn exciting about the prospect of looking at naked pictures with Betsy.
I went back. Between June and August, I must have followed Mrs. Parker down that softly carpeted hallway a hundred times. Mrs. Parker was always wearing something none of the other neighborhood mothers (certainly not my mother anyway) could have pulled off. There was always something bubbling on the stove top, and she always had a frosted glass of lemonade or a Cherry Coke to offer. Betsy and I would gorge ourselves on homemade German chocolate cake or Lorna Doones until our stomachs ached, and then we’d take off on one adventure or another, usually spying on someone in the neighborhood. Betsy taught me the scientific names for genitalia both male and female that summer. And once, she even showed me a picture of Mrs. Parker wearing what looked like a skimpy caveman’s outfit, a giant bone in her hand. “A famous photographer took this of her. Before she married Daddy,” she told me. “She was going to be a model.” I beamed. I figured now that Betsy Parker trusted me, it wouldn’t be long until she loved me too.
But about a week before school started again, I went to Betsy’s house and she said that she wasn’t allowed to have company and closed the door in my face. Stunned, I walked home and found my father unpacking a brand new Kenmore clothes dryer from a cardboard box. The folding machine hadn’t worked, and it seemed to me that my father’s reluctant concession was an admission of failure. But being the half-full kind of person I was, my own failure did not deter me. I went back to the Parkers’ house the next day. And the next. But each time, Betsy said simply that she wasn’t allowed to have guests and closed the door. By the end of the week, I began to worry. It was as if our friendship, like summer, had only been seasonal. As ephemeral and fleeting as Vermont sunshine.
At school, Betsy was careful to avoid me. She wasn’t unkind, but she did make sure to sit across the room from me in homeroom, and she only spoke to me when necessary. By November, I’d forced myself to accept her indifference. I started to hang out with Brooder and Ray again, chucking dirt clods at first graders and chewing tobacco behind the school. In a way, it was as if Betsy had only been a dream.
But just before Thanksgiving, when an early snowstorm brought our first snow day of the year, I felt optimistic. And I missed her. After going back to bed for another hour, I decided to give Betsy one more chance. I thought that the prospect of pristine snow, just wet enough to make snowballs, might bring her back to me.
What I noticed first was the loose board on the front steps. It surprised me. Then I saw that the paint on the porch was peeling, that the roses, blooms long gone, had not been tended to. The bushes were skeletal, snarled.
Mrs. Parker answered the door wearing her slip, and I felt myself blushing. She looked exactly like Elizabeth Taylor now—in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (which Brooder and I had snuck into the theater to see). Her hair was messy, and she was barefoot. She stepped out onto the porch and looked past me down the street.
“Is Betsy home?” I asked.
She stood shivering on the porch for what seemed like forever.
“Mrs. Parker,” I said. “We should go inside. You’ll catch a cold.”
She came back to me then and nodded.
Inside, the house was unfamiliar. There were stacks of old newspapers all over the floor. The sink was full of dirty dishes. Mrs. Parker had to rummage through them to find a pot, which she rinsed and then filled with milk to warm for hot chocolate. Betsy came out of her room, and while she and I sat silently at the table dunking marshmallows in our mugs of cocoa, Mrs. Parker disappeared. When she came back, she was carrying a child’s sand bucket filled with snow. She set it down on the kitchen floor and smiled. “Let’s build ourselves a snowman,” she said. Betsy sank lower into her seat.
I sat quietly and watched. Mrs. Parker opened the back door when the bucket was empty and stepped out into the snow, still without any shoes on. She brought in more and more snow, until there was a huge pile of it on the linoleum. The kitchen was warm; the snow was melting all over the floor.
Betsy’s eyes were wide and wet.
“Here,” I said. “I’ll help.” I ran outside to the backyard and made a snowball. I set it down in a good patch of snow and rolled it back and forth across the lawn until it was the size of a large medicine ball. I went back into the kitchen to get them, to show them what I’d made, but by the time I got there Mrs. Parker had disappeared and Betsy was sitting
