As recently as May, Bernadette had dressed up in white with all of us other girls on Canal Crest Drive and participated in the first and last ever Miss Canal Crest Pageant, put on by ourselves, finally crowning by unanimous vote a younger girl on our street, who spent most of her spare time training as a gymnast. We festooned her with a sash made from one of our mother’s scarves, crowned her with a cardboard tiara, and knelt at her feet. We watched as she did a series of handsprings across the yard, followed by a dizzying circle of cartwheels and a headstand that made the skirt of her mother’s white nightgown fall, like a curtain, and obscure her face.
Bernadette Robeson had three older brothers and an older sister. Mr. and Mrs. Robeson were from West Virginia, and now he was director of the YMCA across the river in New Brunswick. Mrs. R worked part-time as a nurse at St. Peter’s. When they were teenagers, the boys bunked in an attic converted into a dormitory. Bernadette shared a room on the landing below with her older sister, Corinna, who wore white lipstick, used powder shampoo, smoothed out her long brown tresses with a hot iron, and primped around in a paper minidress in front of the mirror. The eldest boy had gone off to a technical college in Pennsylvania a few years back. Donny, in the middle, owned a used GTO that he drove up and down the street to work at the gas station on River Road. We adored him from afar until he moved to Montclair to live closer to his girlfriend. Gary, the youngest of the three, was the best. He was gentle, with the same almond eyes as Bernadette. Bernadette told me that he recited poems to her and Corinna. He’d read them a long adventure story called Beowulf, and sometimes I would sit with them on the carpet of his room as he played folk and protest songs on his guitar. “Five Hundred Miles.” “If I Had a Hammer.” Then, around the time of the Canal Crest beauty pageant, his number came up, and he was drafted.
Bernadette didn’t come around to play after the beauty contest. June arrived. School ended. For a while, the summer—and what still felt a little bit like childhood—stretched out before me, as it always had in the past: a time for the fields, for reading. For dress-up, for dolls. I’d given that up, the dress-up, the dolls. The Barbies and all their clothes were buried in a box beneath my bed.
I missed Bernadette. Our sleepovers. Our playhouses, the stews we made of sassafras leaves and grass. How I’d run my fingers through her shoebox collection of religious coins, scapulars, St. Christopher medallions, Saints cards, rosary beads. How, one late afternoon, heading home from playing in the fields, we pinky-swore we saw heaven in the gilt cumulous configurations of the sky. So every now and then that summer, I’d wander up the block to Bernadette’s house. A couple of times, I’d knocked on their screen door.
“Oh, hi, honey,” said Mrs. Robeson through the screen, still in her uniform, white stockings, and shoes, holding her purse. She set her car keys down on the hall table and took a drag of her cigarette. “Bernie’s not here. I think she’s at the park.” She flicked some cigarette ash into a tray on the table. “Okay,” I said and turned away, thinking about how much Bernadette must miss Gary singing and reading to her. I thought to go back and ask, “How is Gary doing, Mrs. Robeson? Have you heard anything from Gary?”
Mrs. Robeson tamped out her cigarette. She set her pocketbook, which had fallen, upright on the hall table. “We don’t hear much from Gary,” she said. “I think it’s very hard on him. He wasn’t born for all that.”
As I was leaving, I heard her mutter, “‘Peace with Honor,’ my ass.”
The park was just a big open field across from Bernadette’s house, on the other side of Canal Crest Drive. It held a baseball diamond where the Little Leaguers practiced, metal bleachers, some picnic tables under a corrugated shelter, a modest playground (sliding board, monkey bars, a seesaw), and a boulder that builders must have unearthed when digging our basements, with a brass plaque affixed to it naming the person whose former farm we all lived on now, in our little houses, beside a tall pole from which flapped an American flag. At the far end of the park, where mown grass turned into another field, was where the older kids hung out.
In years past, as we rode our bikes up to the public pool or just around the neighborhood, Bernadette and I could see them, always a little cluster of mostly boys and a few girls. It was hard to tell the difference sometimes. Some of the boys were older, already out of high school, with jobs. There might be a couple of bicycles or even a motorcycle. There would be distant laughter, occasional shouts, a haze of smoke. Sometimes, two or three of them would slip off into the scrubby field. Corinna was often down there, with a couple of girlfriends. They’d still be there, coming and going, as it grew dark, their cigarettes pulsing, like fireflies. Through the open window of Bernadette’s bedroom, we could hear them playing a radio when I spent the night, and Corinna would tiptoe in, late, after we were supposed to be asleep.
I did okay without Bernadette that summer. I did a lot of babysitting and made enough money to buy the pair of short, white go-go boots with side zippers that I wanted for the start of school, though my mother said I shouldn’t wear white shoes after Labor Day. They weren’t real leather, but I loved them. I read a lot. I helped my mother can tomatoes from our garden and make jelly from our wild cherry tree. The cherries were no bigger than the tip of my little finger and were mostly pit. I practiced my bassoon, soaked and whittled with my father’s pen knife the double reeds I ordered from someone up in Bergen County, who made them by hand and sent them by mail in a cardboard envelope.
One hot July night, my father woke me up. We didn’t have air-conditioning window units yet, so I don’t think I’d been asleep very long.
In the unlit den, my mother was watching television. “Will you look at that?” she said, pointing the glowing ember of her cigarette at the television. There, in the grainy screen of our black and white television, I saw a large, uniformed and helmeted snowman lumber across a strange, cratered beach toward an American flag. “I never thought I’d live to see anything like it,” said my mother, snuffing out her cigarette. “A man on the moon, Lucy! A man on the goddamn moon!”
Before I went back to bed, I went outside with my father and looked at the moon, a tipsy white and mottled crescent glimmering over the Salernos’s garage. It gave me a funny feeling to think of living humans walking, breathing, way out there in black and white as I stood in the dark yard. Someone once told me that dogs can only see in black and white, and it gave me the same feeling—sad, a little afraid. The way colors disappeared at night, and how colors weren’t really color—it was just a matter of what kind of thing absorbed what kind of light. I thought of Gary Robeson, far away in the black and white jungles of Vietnam. I knew they were green, but that’s the way we saw them, on our television—thickets of bamboo, fields of rice, copters and planes, black and white and gray. And I thought of Bernadette alone in her bedroom, missing Gary, and I wondered about Corinna, maybe outside somewhere under the same moon, probably not far away, laughing, smoking, maybe getting kissed or felt up, a thing she’d told us about. I touched my own small breasts. I’d been so proud when they’d started to grow. How did things know when to stop growing? Or to grow a different way?
The summer went black and white for a while after that. Almost every evening, as my mother cooked supper, I lay on my belly on the living room carpet and pored over the pages of LIFE or the Saturday Evening Post or the Newark Star Ledger, my forearms mottled with newsprint. Before turning to the comics page—my favorites were Li’l Abner, Apartment 3-G, Rex Morgan, M.D., and Blondie—I read about a crazy cult that had committed mass murder in California. A pregnant woman, a movie star, had been one of the slain, the unborn baby dying inside her. Then I’d look again through an issue of LIFE that had come some weeks before, in late June. On the cover was the enlarged face of a soldier and the title “The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll.” Inside, laid out tile-style, like a school yearbook, were rows and rows of the faces of boys and men, two hundred forty-two of them, all killed in Vietnam between May 29th and June 3rd. Even though I’d looked at each face countless times, reading names, ages, hometowns, I couldn’t stop scanning them each night, fearing I might have missed seeing Gary’s face among them. Many of the boys were eighteen, just five years older than I was. Some wore their graduation robes and mortarboards or their prom bowties; others knelt under heavy helmets and packs, holding guns. The sergeants and lieutenants looked more like bus drivers, with jaunty caps and medals on their lapels. I became obsessed with each of them, imagining their families, siblings, girlfriends. It was their ears that really got me, vulnerable, sticking out beneath their headgear from shorn heads.
Two years earlier, in a LIFE article I also kept and reread, I’d learned about the Speck murders in Chicago in the summer of 1966, eight nurses killed and the one who escaped by hiding under a bed. I was only ten then. From my spot on the living room rug, I had asked my mother, “What is rape?” After some silence from the kitchen, she said, “It’s when you are forced to have sexual intercourse against your will.” I had no idea what “sexual intercourse” was or even what my “will” meant, but I kept quiet. I worried about them all—the baby who never got to be born, the dead boys trapped forever on the pages of a magazine, the nurse hiding under the bed, the astronauts loose on the moon in all that space. Gary, Corinna, Bernadette.
In August, as my mother was sewing back-to-school outfits for me—girls were still not allowed to wear pants to our school, so new skirts and jumpers—I gazed at images in the paper and on television of Woodstock: throngs of muddy hippies moving along a highway of abandoned VW buses and Datsuns or swaying in the muck as rock stars played on stages in the rain. When it was time for my mother to adjust a skirt hem or pin a sleeve, I’d move from the den to her sewing room. It was hot, and the rough wool of kilts and jumpers meant for fall and winter irritated me. “Hmmm,” said my mother, tugging at the side seams of an A-line skirt, “stop twitching. Getting a little broad in the beam, Lucy-Mae.”
“Broad in the beam,” I thought later, lifting my shirt and pinching an inch of fat between my fingers with new unease.
Just before Labor Day, a week that always felt like one long Sunday night before the excited dread of school, I thought I’d wander up the street and see if Bernadette was around. I still harbored the fantasy of our walking to school together. Last year, when I started Junior High, she had shown me where to line up outside, how to open a locker. Where the Girls Room was. She might still look out for me.
Mr. Robeson was just stepping out of the house, car keys in hand. He looked old and very tired. I’d always loved his kind face, which reminded me of Abraham Lincoln’s. On television, I once heard someone ask Ringo Starr why he always looked so sad. “It’s just me face,” he’d said.
“Bernadette’s not here, Lucy,” said Mr. Robeson when he saw me. “She’s gone to visit her grandmother in West Virginia, with Corinna.” I nodded and started back down the sidewalk, but Mr. R called after me. “Lucy,” he said, “I wonder if you would like to take a drive with me. I’m going out to look for Gary.”
“Mr. Robeson,” I said, “Gary is in Vietnam.”
He looked down at his keys. “Actually,” he said, “he’s been back home for a couple of weeks. He never left the country. He was discharged. Allowed to come home. But now he’s gone off.”
I didn’t know what to say as I climbed into the passenger seat beside him.
Mr. Robeson stopped his station wagon in front of my parents’ house so I could hop out, run inside, and get permission to go along. My mother walked me back out to the curb. “Tom,” was all my mother said, wiping her hands on her apron and pressing his arm, which rested on the car’s windowsill.
It was a quiet ride. I knew better than to question Mr. Robeson about Gary. About his time in boot camp, about why he’d never gone over to fight in the war, and why he’d had to come home so soon. About how glad I was that he was home. That he wasn’t dead. I didn’t ask about Bernadette either. I wasn’t sure why.
We drove all around, on highways, on back roads, places I’d never seen—through the streets and underpasses of nearby townships, but also past farms, old barns, fields of Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans, filling stations, strip malls. The sky was white, the way it can get in late August. The mimosas and oaks we passed were full of big gauzy sacks of tentworms. There was no air-conditioning in the station wagon, so we drove with the windows down.
We searched and searched. Once, we thought we saw Gary—a sturdy, hunched figure with a knapsack and a blue bandana wrapped around his head—walking along Route 287, but it was someone else. Later, when we stopped to get cold sodas at a gas station, we saw another boy with short hair and a backpack, sitting on the ground beside an ice chest. Who were these young men, wandering the highways in their hiking boots or Earth Shoes, carrying their lives on their backs, so different from the long-haired ecstatic crowds in jeans and no shirts that I’d seen in photos just weeks ago, swaying and embracing in the fields of upstate New York?
We drove and drove until it began to get dark. At a certain point, I knew Mr. Robeson had turned the car toward home. I started to recognize things, the bridge over the Raritan, the old houses along the River Road. Some of them, we learned in school, had secret rooms under the floorboards where runaway slaves heading north to freedom on the Underground Railroad could hide if need be.
As we turned onto Canal Crest Drive and started up the street, Mr. R spoke.
“Thank you for coming with me, Lucy,” he said. “I thought if we did find Gary, and he saw you, he’d be more likely to get in the car. I know he always thought of you as one of our girls.”
“I’m sorry we didn’t find him,” I said. “Maybe he’s waiting for you at home. Maybe he was just out taking a walk.”
“Maybe so,” said Mr. Robeson. “Also, Lucy, there’s another thing. Corinna is pregnant. She’s going to have a baby. In West Virginia. And then put it up for adoption with a Catholic agency. Bernie went out with her, to my mother’s, but she’ll be back next week to start school. They, she, Corinna, fell in with some bad sorts. I . . .”—but then suddenly there we were, in front of my house, the porch light brightly shining, my parents waiting for me inside. I paused a second, but he said no more. I climbed out of the car and said goodbye. “Goodbye, Lucy,” he said. “Thank you again. You take care. You give your folks my regards.” He waited for me to reach the porch, then drove slowly off, the headlights reaching out, like ghostly arms of a sleepwalker, in the dark.
Afterward, lying in bed, I thought about my last sleepover at the Robeson’s. It had been sometime right before the Canal Crest Beauty Pageant, back in May. It was a warm night, and the bedroom window was open. I could already hear revving engines and faint laughing and music coming from the park across the street.
Corinna was getting ready to go out, and she was joking with Bernadette about a friend of hers who would graduate the next month, in June, the “Class of ’69.” Bernadette giggled and nudged me. “Don’t you get it?” she asked.
“Get what?” I’d said.
“Explain it to your baby friend,” said Corinna, tugging down her jeans so her navel showed. She headed out through a curtain of beads that hung where a door should be. “Don’t wait up.”
Bernadette tried to explain it to me, twisting her thumbs and fingers to form a “6” with the left hand and a “9” with the other, putting the finger numbers together so they touched. I’m sure I looked as stupid as I felt.
“Look,” she said, trying again, “it’s when one person gets on top, and the boy’s head is at one end and the girl’s on the other. One body’s the six and one’s the nine.”
I pretended to understand and gave a fake laugh. “Gross,” I said. “Not really,” said Bernadette. And then we went downstairs to watch Gunsmoke.
Lying in bed after the search for Gary, I still couldn’t understand what Bernadette had been trying to tell me that night. It had been the last real conversation we’d had. I thought about the Robesons’ house, a few lots up the road, quiet and lonely. I knew that Gary had still not come home. I thought about Corinna out in West Virginia, a baby growing in her belly. I thought of runaway slaves cramped and terrified, hiding in darkness under the floor, footsteps overhead. Of men and boys hiding in jungles or in plain sight out on the highways and back roads of America.
I had planned to be a flapper for Halloween that year. My mother had sewn rows of silver fringe to the front of one of her dark blue shifts and made a silver headband to match. I would hang lots of long costume necklaces around my neck and swing them around. I’d wear white stockings and my white boots.
In the end, I opted to stay home and pass out candy to the kids who came by. “Are you sure?” my mother said. She knew how much I loved Halloween. I think she also enjoyed being the one to pass out the packs of candy cigarettes and Baby Ruth bars. “I think I’m getting too old to trick-or-treat,” I said. I could tell it disappointed her a little that I hadn’t even bothered putting on my costume, so I went and changed into it, but not the headband, boots, or stockings. It was a warm October night. I was barefoot and didn’t even need a sweater.
It was fun, watching all the little hobos, skeletons, and Snow Whites, the witches, ghosts, dinosaurs, and winged fairies with wands climb the steps to the porch, where I sat on a lawn chair, holding out a soup kettle of candy. We had two jack-o’-lanterns on the porch, one carved a few days ago and one we’d cut just that evening. My dad came out every now and then to light fresh candles inside them. Finally, at about nine, he opened the screen door. “Boo!” he said. I laughed because I knew he wanted me to. “I think maybe it’s time to call it a night,” he said.
I opened the door and handed him the pot of candy, just a pile of Mary Jane nougat bars left. Did anyone really like them? They were always the last to go. “I’ll blow out the candles,” I said. “Okay, Lucy-belle,” he said. “Don’t be long.”
I love the smell of a scraped-out pumpkin that has been scorched with candle flame. I lifted off the shriveled caps by the stems and blew out both candles, then put my head inside the freshly carved one to inhale its smoke and fragrance. Along the street, people were shutting doors, turning off porch lights. The other pumpkin was pretty shriveled up, its toothless mouth caving, its eye sockets wizened. I would bring it inside or it would be covered with ants in the morning.
Just as I stood up and folded the lawn chair, a car came speeding up the street. It swerved past our house, the seats crammed with bodies, some in each other’s laps, laughing, shrieking. Ribbons of toilet paper streamed from the back bumper. Someone leaned out of an open window and threw an aluminum can into the street, just past our mailbox.
Inside our bright kitchen, my mother was turning the State Farm Insurance wall calendar page to November. That would bring Thanksgiving, and after that, Christmas. A few months after that, I’d be fourteen, and we would have started a new year, a new decade. I was growing.
I set the collapsing jack-o’-lantern on the kitchen counter. I lifted its cap by the stem to take one last whiff of Halloween.
My stomach lurched. Scarred black pulp, molding seeds. I pictured bodies—Bernadette’s, Corinna’s, my own—upside down and backwards. Tongues. Fingers. Bernadette’s twisting her hands to make two bodies. Her laughter. Something else. “Swallow a watermelon seed,” my father always joked, “you’ll grow a watermelon!” I felt the vines pushing up my throat, into my nose. A baby could grow from a seed, someone once told me. I felt a twinge in my belly, with its soft lingering lap of baby fat.
Upstairs, my parents were getting ready for bed, the floorboards creaking. I tried to jab the rotten stem and cap back in place, but it wouldn’t fit. I pushed it through the hole into the pumpkin’s soft skull, opened the trash can with my knee, and slammed the mess into it. Then I slipped out the back door and ran barefoot to where our mown grass met the back field. I don’t know why, but I reached beneath my flapper dress, yanked off my underwear with sticky, pulpy fingers, and threw the panties as far as I could into the dark.
(Image: Chris Friel’s cf65 – headland, 2010)
