My Mittens Back
I didn't know about the sex part. Stupid, maybe, but I just didn't know about it. I thought he wanted to go out with me because I was cute or there was something he liked about me. That's why I wanted to go out with him.
Everyone is saying that I am either playing stupid or an idiot. That what is wrong with me that I thought a senior guy wanted to go out with me and just hold hands and talk about our families. That is sort of what I thought, I guess. I never really thought that hard about it before, but I suppose that is the kind of thing I pictured when I daydreamed about Ron all week before the date.
Ron Wake has been my biggest crush all the way since like third grade. Either third or fourth, I am not sure which because I get him and Don Oshtown mixed up from back then; I liked them both. They were both 6th graders when I was a 3rd grader. One of them was sitting outside of Mr. Ashbrook's class the first time I saw them, crying in the hallway. He had gotten in trouble, and it made me like him so much seeing a big 6th grader crying like that. It was Ron, I am pretty sure. Don ended up liking me, but it was always Ron who I really loved from afar.
Ron's dog used to take my mittens in the winter when I walked to school, because I'd pet him through the fence and he'd grab one and take it back into his dog house. This was when Ron was already in junior high, so the only times I saw him over the years between 3rd grade, when we were both at Franklin Elementary, and 9th grade, when we were both at Dondero High School, were those years--4th and 6th grades--when I walked to school by his house and his dog stole a mitten. Because then I'd have to knock on the door and tell his mom, and she would get Ron and tell him to go and get my mitten for me. And he would always be so nice about it. That's what I've loved about him since 3rd grade, was his niceness. Ever since he cried in the hall outside Mr. Ashbrook's class, to him being so nice and smiling at me when he gave me my mittens back, to now, when I am in 9th grade and actually had a chance to finally go out with Ron.
Which happened last Saturday night.
And which I wrecked by not doing it with him.
Because I am an idiot.
I don't know which feels worse: finding out he only wanted to have sex with me, or being such an idiot that I didn't realize that was part of the package. That was the package, I guess.
Bill Kiser and me got to being friends in gym. He is from Adams, the other junior high from me (I went to Keller), and he also has a brother who is Ron's age. They are seniors, me and Bill are freshman. Bill and me were getting to be buddies pretty good, and he sort of figured out that I liked Ron.
"You like Ron Wake?"
"He seems nice."
"Ah ha, you like Ron Wake!"
"I just said he was nice. I've known him since elementary school." These stupid Adams people.
But Bill of course saw through it and knew I had it bad for Ron, and that is how something private and meaningful and mine alone for over six years became ugly, public knowledge. Not longer after, Bill and I were both at a party at Fay Herndon's house. An Adam's girl, and I was out of my league at the party. But holding my own. Fay was a freshman like Bill and me, but she had a sister who was a junior, so there were older people there. Including some seniors who came late and went straight down to the basement. I was standing in Fay's kitchen with Bill when the front door opened and Bill's brother Jeff came blowing in with the cold, and with Ron. They nodded into the kitchen on their way to the back of the house, and I was pretty sure Ron gave me a nice, Franklin-Ron smile, innocent and kind and sincere.
Then Bill disappeared. I wobbled from the beer in my red plastic cup, wished I had someone to talk to around, and wondered if my mom had called Denise's for me and if I was busted already for being at this party. Life was increasingly a series of claustrophic dead-ends with increasingly unsatisfactory options. I realized I had to pee, bad, and took a peek down the hall to the bathroom. There were five or more girls in line, most of them juniors or seniors. No way I would go stand in line with them; the older girls all hated me. Still do. Always did. Except when I was little and went to Berkley. For some reason, back then the older girls in life tended to be especially fond of me. But once I got to Royal Oak, as we all know by now, my life went way downhill and somehow I became known as a slut and hated by older girls.
Anyway, the line of the bathroom was a danger zone, so I went outside to go in the backyard. Before you think I'm a pig, I already knew that people were doing that, and plus I was drinking a lot of beer. So sue me, but that is the way it's done at a party. The driveway was a pot-smoking zone of older people mostly, but easy to slide by in the shadows. I did my business behind the Herdons' garage, spent a little time looking up at the cold night and wondering what my life was, where my dad was, and how I could ever get back to a self that felt safe, then went back inside.
Bill was waiting for me in the kitchen, I guess, because he pounced as soon as walked in the front door. Bill Kiser is a little guy with a lot of curly hair and a reputation for being a sneaky dick, but somehow he gets away with it. I guess because he's so small, so people feel sorry for him? I don't know.
"Ron Wake said he'd go out with you."
I looked at him and leaned back on the counter, getting my coat wet from a leaking sink. Or spilled beer; I don't know. I remember seeing Bill's face, all excited, and thinking he looked exactly like the Heat Miser in that Christmas special, I think it could be Rudolph, but I'm not sure. The puppet Heat Miser is what Bill Kiser looked like when he told me that the love of my life would go out with me. Laura Harvey was slamming down a shot glass on the living room coffee table to my left. Deborah Gibson's "Only In My Dreams" was blaring from the boombox on the kitchen table. I could hear Denise laughing in the basement.
"Shut up," I said.
"I just talked to him."
Panic lightened through me. "What did you tell him, Bill?" I might have grabbed him by his shirt when I said this; not sure.
"I told him you had a crush on him, and he said he'd go out with you if he could deal you."
Information overload. Every drop of alcohol in my system stood up and took notice, suddenly working full blast to do it's job of fucking with reality and gravity. I put my hand out to balance on the counter and got a fistful of ashes.
"Shit." The ashtray toppled and hit the floor. Butts and ashes all over.
"Don't worry about it," Bill said smearing it into the Herndon's kitchen carpet with his foot. "So, you gonna do it?"
I wound up saying yes. After much investigation about what "deal" meant. I did get to spend one blissful week of my life thinking that Ron Wake and I shared a mutual love that had lasted over six years, and now was going to take the next step of a date. One week of life's axis righting itself, hope reintroducing itself to me, and peace settling into my gut. One week before my investigations finally turned up the meaning of 'deal.'
"It means he wants to fuck you."
"What?" Bill Kiser again, this time with the answer to the question of deal, fresh from covert operations in the senior section of the bleachers at the Clawson football game.
"He'll go out with you if you fuck him." Bill did not seem to think this added much import either way to the original big news. I was devastated. And flattered, if I could work up a level of delusionment sufficient to bring me back into the hopeless reality I'd left a week ago. I mean, if he actually wanted to sleep with me, have sex with me, he had to be attracted to me; right? Ron Wake was into me enough to want to have sex with me? Whoa. I was in the big leagues, though.
All of a sudden a senior, my heart, Ron Wake, wants to have sex with me. Oh. My. God.
I have always planned on waiting until I get married to lose my virginity. It's just the way I think it should go, for me at least. No question. In fact, my stepmom tried to talk about birth control with me over the summer and really pissed me off. Bad. I told her I was waiting until I get married, and she just kept saying, "Well, I'm just letting you know that when the time comes, just in case, let me know and we'll get you to a doctor and taken care of right. Birth control isn't something to mess around with." But she said it all with the special moment Hallmark sensibility, like we were sharing some great milestone of my life together. Or would if I would only quit being difficult, and let her have this moment of putting me on birth control together. God, that pissed me off so bad. Just because she didn't wait until she was married doesn't mean I'm not. I am not her. It pissed me off so bad, her dismissing what I am going to do, so bad that I refused to eat the whole week we were there visiting her and my dad in Texas, and I only ate dill pickle chips and ketchup the whole time. She kept trying to make me eat, and I wouldn't. It really pissed her off, ha ha.
Anyway, the idea of Ron Wake be willing to actually go out with me, and liking me enough to want to have sex with me, that was just not ever something I'd considered in the whole virginity picture. I gave it so much thought, because I didn't want to be an idiot and pass up the best opportunity of my lifetime if I was maybe being sort of childish by holding onto my waiting until I was married plan. I mean, being married is like at least ten years away; it is the future. Ron Wake going out with me is the now. It seems only practical to give more weight to the now than the far away and maybe never happening future. The future I'd sort of been banking on all my life, it doesn't seem to have much to do with my life as it is now, and probably there is a good chance I have no future, anyway. See previous chapters for that whole discussion.
My aunt Maryellen has always been the person I can turn to for advice. She is cool, and younger than my mom, and she is just very close to us. And I know that she is not a virgin, because she told me before that when she was in high school, she just decided that she didn't want to be a virgin anymore, so she just picked a guy out on a camping trip once and had sex with him. The end of that week, after I learned what 'deal' meant, Maryellen was driving me back home after hanging out with her at my grandpa's house. We got into her green van, and I asked her.
"Do you ever regret not being a virgin?" She is eleven years older than me, which makes her twenty-six.
She drew the corners of her mouth down and her eyebrows went up in surprised thought. "You mean, like I wish I hadn't done it yet?"
"Yeah."
"No, not at all." We shut the doors and she started up the van. I love her van. It has green shag carpet inside and lots of frogs. Maryellen loves green and she collects frogs.
"Really?" She didn't regret it at all? I had always thought it was such a big deal. Maybe I am just retarded.
"Yeah. Why would I feel bad? I wanted to do it, so I did." She smiled at me as we backed down the driveway. "Why?"
"I don't know," I said. "I just wondered." We started south down Kipling toward Eleven Mile; that was the way Maryellen took to my house. My mom and stupid Nick always turned the other way and went up Catalpa. They always do everything different now.
The Doobie Brothers were in the tapedeck. I liked the van seat, how I felt sitting up high like that. And in the front. I never get to sit in front seats. My sister gets car sick, so she always gets the front, and I'm in the back. Everywhere else, I'm just a kid so in the back. It's different with Maryellen.
We turned left onto Eleven Mile and headed toward my doom, my house. I have to leave all personality behind when I walk through those doors. It is dooming and damning and I hate it hate it hate it.
"This guy I like said he will go out with me if I'll do it with him."
Maryellen turned to look at me, grinning. "You haven't yet?"
"No, I'm sure," I said. "I want to wait until I'm married."
We drove past Little Ceasar's and Boston Drugs and the A & P Food Store, which my grandpa always called the "A & Poo Feed Store."
"But he won't go out with me if I don't."
"Well, is he that big a deal?"
I thought of him sitting outside Mr. Ashbrook's class, crying into his hands, Converse All-Star'd feet together in shame. "Yeah, he is. I've liked him since I was in third grade."
"Well, I've never regretted it," Maryellen said. "Maybe I'm just weird, but I never saw it as that big a deal." She shrugged, and we slowed to turn right onto Woodward. Halfway home now.
"Yeah, I guess nobody else makes such a big deal out of it like I do." I felt embarassed, like a little junior high school girl. This was Ron Wake we were talking about; I needed to rise to the ocassion. Grow up, if that's what it was.
* * *
And so, I told Bill Kiser that yes, Ron could deal me. Bill relayed the message to Ron. To my surprise, there was no phone call. No actual date action happened. Instead, the message came back from Ron through Bill that I should go to Church Schwartz' party that weekend (last weekend) in Madison Heights. This invite was a very big deal, because no freshman every got invited to a Chuch Schwartz party. They were getting to be legendary since Chuck Schwartz switched schools and starting going to Dondero. At least a couple times a month there are major bashes there that the whole school hears about. Mostly I think just seniors go, but probably some juniors and a few sophmores. But I have not heard of any freshman being invited there at all. And now I was going.
The issue of how to get out of my house for the night was not even a question for me. I would shoot somebody if I had to. And I did.
Everyone is saying that I am either playing stupid or an idiot. That what is wrong with me that I thought a senior guy wanted to go out with me and just hold hands and talk about our families. That is sort of what I thought, I guess. I never really thought that hard about it before, but I suppose that is the kind of thing I pictured when I daydreamed about Ron all week before the date.
Ron Wake has been my biggest crush all the way since like third grade. Either third or fourth, I am not sure which because I get him and Don Oshtown mixed up from back then; I liked them both. They were both 6th graders when I was a 3rd grader. One of them was sitting outside of Mr. Ashbrook's class the first time I saw them, crying in the hallway. He had gotten in trouble, and it made me like him so much seeing a big 6th grader crying like that. It was Ron, I am pretty sure. Don ended up liking me, but it was always Ron who I really loved from afar.
Ron's dog used to take my mittens in the winter when I walked to school, because I'd pet him through the fence and he'd grab one and take it back into his dog house. This was when Ron was already in junior high, so the only times I saw him over the years between 3rd grade, when we were both at Franklin Elementary, and 9th grade, when we were both at Dondero High School, were those years--4th and 6th grades--when I walked to school by his house and his dog stole a mitten. Because then I'd have to knock on the door and tell his mom, and she would get Ron and tell him to go and get my mitten for me. And he would always be so nice about it. That's what I've loved about him since 3rd grade, was his niceness. Ever since he cried in the hall outside Mr. Ashbrook's class, to him being so nice and smiling at me when he gave me my mittens back, to now, when I am in 9th grade and actually had a chance to finally go out with Ron.
Which happened last Saturday night.
And which I wrecked by not doing it with him.
Because I am an idiot.
I don't know which feels worse: finding out he only wanted to have sex with me, or being such an idiot that I didn't realize that was part of the package. That was the package, I guess.
Bill Kiser and me got to being friends in gym. He is from Adams, the other junior high from me (I went to Keller), and he also has a brother who is Ron's age. They are seniors, me and Bill are freshman. Bill and me were getting to be buddies pretty good, and he sort of figured out that I liked Ron.
"You like Ron Wake?"
"He seems nice."
"Ah ha, you like Ron Wake!"
"I just said he was nice. I've known him since elementary school." These stupid Adams people.
But Bill of course saw through it and knew I had it bad for Ron, and that is how something private and meaningful and mine alone for over six years became ugly, public knowledge. Not longer after, Bill and I were both at a party at Fay Herndon's house. An Adam's girl, and I was out of my league at the party. But holding my own. Fay was a freshman like Bill and me, but she had a sister who was a junior, so there were older people there. Including some seniors who came late and went straight down to the basement. I was standing in Fay's kitchen with Bill when the front door opened and Bill's brother Jeff came blowing in with the cold, and with Ron. They nodded into the kitchen on their way to the back of the house, and I was pretty sure Ron gave me a nice, Franklin-Ron smile, innocent and kind and sincere.
Then Bill disappeared. I wobbled from the beer in my red plastic cup, wished I had someone to talk to around, and wondered if my mom had called Denise's for me and if I was busted already for being at this party. Life was increasingly a series of claustrophic dead-ends with increasingly unsatisfactory options. I realized I had to pee, bad, and took a peek down the hall to the bathroom. There were five or more girls in line, most of them juniors or seniors. No way I would go stand in line with them; the older girls all hated me. Still do. Always did. Except when I was little and went to Berkley. For some reason, back then the older girls in life tended to be especially fond of me. But once I got to Royal Oak, as we all know by now, my life went way downhill and somehow I became known as a slut and hated by older girls.
Anyway, the line of the bathroom was a danger zone, so I went outside to go in the backyard. Before you think I'm a pig, I already knew that people were doing that, and plus I was drinking a lot of beer. So sue me, but that is the way it's done at a party. The driveway was a pot-smoking zone of older people mostly, but easy to slide by in the shadows. I did my business behind the Herdons' garage, spent a little time looking up at the cold night and wondering what my life was, where my dad was, and how I could ever get back to a self that felt safe, then went back inside.
Bill was waiting for me in the kitchen, I guess, because he pounced as soon as walked in the front door. Bill Kiser is a little guy with a lot of curly hair and a reputation for being a sneaky dick, but somehow he gets away with it. I guess because he's so small, so people feel sorry for him? I don't know.
"Ron Wake said he'd go out with you."
I looked at him and leaned back on the counter, getting my coat wet from a leaking sink. Or spilled beer; I don't know. I remember seeing Bill's face, all excited, and thinking he looked exactly like the Heat Miser in that Christmas special, I think it could be Rudolph, but I'm not sure. The puppet Heat Miser is what Bill Kiser looked like when he told me that the love of my life would go out with me. Laura Harvey was slamming down a shot glass on the living room coffee table to my left. Deborah Gibson's "Only In My Dreams" was blaring from the boombox on the kitchen table. I could hear Denise laughing in the basement.
"Shut up," I said.
"I just talked to him."
Panic lightened through me. "What did you tell him, Bill?" I might have grabbed him by his shirt when I said this; not sure.
"I told him you had a crush on him, and he said he'd go out with you if he could deal you."
Information overload. Every drop of alcohol in my system stood up and took notice, suddenly working full blast to do it's job of fucking with reality and gravity. I put my hand out to balance on the counter and got a fistful of ashes.
"Shit." The ashtray toppled and hit the floor. Butts and ashes all over.
"Don't worry about it," Bill said smearing it into the Herndon's kitchen carpet with his foot. "So, you gonna do it?"
I wound up saying yes. After much investigation about what "deal" meant. I did get to spend one blissful week of my life thinking that Ron Wake and I shared a mutual love that had lasted over six years, and now was going to take the next step of a date. One week of life's axis righting itself, hope reintroducing itself to me, and peace settling into my gut. One week before my investigations finally turned up the meaning of 'deal.'
"It means he wants to fuck you."
"What?" Bill Kiser again, this time with the answer to the question of deal, fresh from covert operations in the senior section of the bleachers at the Clawson football game.
"He'll go out with you if you fuck him." Bill did not seem to think this added much import either way to the original big news. I was devastated. And flattered, if I could work up a level of delusionment sufficient to bring me back into the hopeless reality I'd left a week ago. I mean, if he actually wanted to sleep with me, have sex with me, he had to be attracted to me; right? Ron Wake was into me enough to want to have sex with me? Whoa. I was in the big leagues, though.
All of a sudden a senior, my heart, Ron Wake, wants to have sex with me. Oh. My. God.
I have always planned on waiting until I get married to lose my virginity. It's just the way I think it should go, for me at least. No question. In fact, my stepmom tried to talk about birth control with me over the summer and really pissed me off. Bad. I told her I was waiting until I get married, and she just kept saying, "Well, I'm just letting you know that when the time comes, just in case, let me know and we'll get you to a doctor and taken care of right. Birth control isn't something to mess around with." But she said it all with the special moment Hallmark sensibility, like we were sharing some great milestone of my life together. Or would if I would only quit being difficult, and let her have this moment of putting me on birth control together. God, that pissed me off so bad. Just because she didn't wait until she was married doesn't mean I'm not. I am not her. It pissed me off so bad, her dismissing what I am going to do, so bad that I refused to eat the whole week we were there visiting her and my dad in Texas, and I only ate dill pickle chips and ketchup the whole time. She kept trying to make me eat, and I wouldn't. It really pissed her off, ha ha.
Anyway, the idea of Ron Wake be willing to actually go out with me, and liking me enough to want to have sex with me, that was just not ever something I'd considered in the whole virginity picture. I gave it so much thought, because I didn't want to be an idiot and pass up the best opportunity of my lifetime if I was maybe being sort of childish by holding onto my waiting until I was married plan. I mean, being married is like at least ten years away; it is the future. Ron Wake going out with me is the now. It seems only practical to give more weight to the now than the far away and maybe never happening future. The future I'd sort of been banking on all my life, it doesn't seem to have much to do with my life as it is now, and probably there is a good chance I have no future, anyway. See previous chapters for that whole discussion.
My aunt Maryellen has always been the person I can turn to for advice. She is cool, and younger than my mom, and she is just very close to us. And I know that she is not a virgin, because she told me before that when she was in high school, she just decided that she didn't want to be a virgin anymore, so she just picked a guy out on a camping trip once and had sex with him. The end of that week, after I learned what 'deal' meant, Maryellen was driving me back home after hanging out with her at my grandpa's house. We got into her green van, and I asked her.
"Do you ever regret not being a virgin?" She is eleven years older than me, which makes her twenty-six.
She drew the corners of her mouth down and her eyebrows went up in surprised thought. "You mean, like I wish I hadn't done it yet?"
"Yeah."
"No, not at all." We shut the doors and she started up the van. I love her van. It has green shag carpet inside and lots of frogs. Maryellen loves green and she collects frogs.
"Really?" She didn't regret it at all? I had always thought it was such a big deal. Maybe I am just retarded.
"Yeah. Why would I feel bad? I wanted to do it, so I did." She smiled at me as we backed down the driveway. "Why?"
"I don't know," I said. "I just wondered." We started south down Kipling toward Eleven Mile; that was the way Maryellen took to my house. My mom and stupid Nick always turned the other way and went up Catalpa. They always do everything different now.
The Doobie Brothers were in the tapedeck. I liked the van seat, how I felt sitting up high like that. And in the front. I never get to sit in front seats. My sister gets car sick, so she always gets the front, and I'm in the back. Everywhere else, I'm just a kid so in the back. It's different with Maryellen.
We turned left onto Eleven Mile and headed toward my doom, my house. I have to leave all personality behind when I walk through those doors. It is dooming and damning and I hate it hate it hate it.
"This guy I like said he will go out with me if I'll do it with him."
Maryellen turned to look at me, grinning. "You haven't yet?"
"No, I'm sure," I said. "I want to wait until I'm married."
We drove past Little Ceasar's and Boston Drugs and the A & P Food Store, which my grandpa always called the "A & Poo Feed Store."
"But he won't go out with me if I don't."
"Well, is he that big a deal?"
I thought of him sitting outside Mr. Ashbrook's class, crying into his hands, Converse All-Star'd feet together in shame. "Yeah, he is. I've liked him since I was in third grade."
"Well, I've never regretted it," Maryellen said. "Maybe I'm just weird, but I never saw it as that big a deal." She shrugged, and we slowed to turn right onto Woodward. Halfway home now.
"Yeah, I guess nobody else makes such a big deal out of it like I do." I felt embarassed, like a little junior high school girl. This was Ron Wake we were talking about; I needed to rise to the ocassion. Grow up, if that's what it was.
* * *
And so, I told Bill Kiser that yes, Ron could deal me. Bill relayed the message to Ron. To my surprise, there was no phone call. No actual date action happened. Instead, the message came back from Ron through Bill that I should go to Church Schwartz' party that weekend (last weekend) in Madison Heights. This invite was a very big deal, because no freshman every got invited to a Chuch Schwartz party. They were getting to be legendary since Chuck Schwartz switched schools and starting going to Dondero. At least a couple times a month there are major bashes there that the whole school hears about. Mostly I think just seniors go, but probably some juniors and a few sophmores. But I have not heard of any freshman being invited there at all. And now I was going.
The issue of how to get out of my house for the night was not even a question for me. I would shoot somebody if I had to. And I did.
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