The Yearbook
Sheila pulled a couple of cans out of her gym bag and from a box in the back of her closet, our old elementary school yearbook. I think I had thrown mine away. We lied on her lavender and white bed with the purple heart-shaped velvet pillows and even though the beer was as warm as pee from being socked away for two days, we pretended to be drunk and laughed like crazy at the pictures. Sheila had a crush on Bruce Lorem. He was so-ooo cute! Billy Keane, what a dufus. There’s Greg Selzner. And Jimmy Denning! And Ronald Mollica! Ronald Mollica!
“Oh my god!” she screamed. “Kathy Kelly! Remember Kathy Kelly!”
“You know,” she went on, raising herself up on her elbow to reach across my chest to grab a pretzel, “I got into a fight with her once in gym because she kept stepping on the back of my heels while we were doing that stupid hop thing Mrs. Trobiano made us do on the way back into the locker room.”
Come on girls! Keep it going! Move it Garcia!
“What happened?” I asked.
“I punched her in the stomach. She had to go to the nurse too.”
Kathy came into our class about that time of day when my stomach would start to make noises. We saw the principle’s stiff bouffant outside the door and then our teacher, Mr. Dobias, brought her in.
Her parents were divorced. Her mother was an actress on Broadway, but for some reason wanted Kathy to go to school in the suburbs.
One day in the cafeteria, Sheila and Lenore Taormina sauntered over to eat at our table. Kathy and I were having a giggle about the hair on Cynthia Page’s legs.
Lenore zeroed in on Kathy’s sandwich, cut into triangles with the crusts cut off and held together with pimento-stuffed olives on multi-colored party picks.
“She’s having a cocktail party! A cocktail party!”
Sheila didn’t say boo, but I saw her eyes glaze over with envy as she reluctantly bit into her sandwich of peanut butter and banana.
On the morning of the first day of junior high, hanging out in front of the huge building among more scary-looking kids than you could imagine, we saw Kathy pull up in a large white convertible. I remember her mother’s pale mink coat and slender flesh-toned legs when she got out of the car to give a hug before driving away.
Lenore snapped her gum while scrutinizing Kathy up and down obscenely. Sheila made a cross-bearing comment like, “Well, look who’s back”.
“Are you nervous?” Kathy asked me after the dung hill flies flew away.
“Only of getting lost,” I said. “They’re just jealous of your tan and nice new shoes and stuff.”
“Do you want a pen?” she asked.
“I have three pens,” I said.
“My mother’s boyfriend gave me a really neat one. Look,” she said as she pulled out a new black shiny torpedo.
Oh, how I craved the chance to wave that marvelous object in the other girls’ faces! “Look what Kathy gave me!” But with her parent’s divorce and a maid making her lunch with olives and stuff, she hardly needed more trouble, especially from those nobodies from stupid little Radburn, New Jersey.
Sheila and Lenore were tight that fall, so I walked home with Kathy. It was a much longer hike than the one we had in elementary school, but the leaves had covered the way in a nice warm cozy blanket.
I prayed she wouldn’t say anything about my copying the way she dressed. She didn’t let on until we got to her dark house and she asked me to come inside.
“Here,” she said, “holding up two cashmere cardigans she had taken out of a drawer. One was periwinkle and the other was lemon yellow. “I don’t like these very much. You can have them.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They’re from my father’s mill in Scotland. He sends me too many.”
“Your father has a mill in Scotland?” Then I put on a heavy Southern accent. “Ma daddy just got promoted to fow-man at the Charles Chips potata chip factory in way downtown Elizabeth.”
She suddenly grabbed my arm like my Aunt Rita used to do when she wanted to tell me something bad about my mother.
“I know they all hate me,” she said.
“You’re just up against a bunch of Beverly Hillbillies, that’s all,” I said as I pulled my arm away. “No one like you has ever lived in this puny stuck-up town before. Where’s your maid? I’ve never seen a maid”
“Angela? Angela leaves about noon.”
“What time does your mother get home?”
“About one in the morning.”
The last time I saw her was after I had stayed late in science lab to dissect a frog with Teddy Voss. I had it figured that if I cut across the parking lot I wouldn’t have to trudge up the Euclid Avenue hill and it would save me a good five minutes. Kathy’s navy corduroy coat was bent over between two cars, one of them Miss Padula’s, the art teacher’s new red Mustang. She was letting out what sounded like a series of moose calls and I thought what a sense of humor! Faking throwing up to surprise me! What a card! But when I got closer, I saw that she was really puking her guts up and she was hysterical crying.
I couldn’t bear the sense of something I couldn’t understand so I ran, even though I knew she saw me. I beat it home like a horse scared of lightening but the feeling seemed to be pushing through me, not getting farther away.
That night I prayed for her to just leave all of us alone. She did. She never came back to school and in less than a week she was forgotten.
In the morning, when I woke up on the floor of Sheila’s room, I saw the yearbook lying half-way under the dresser. I wanted another glimpse of Kathy, to see how well she hid her pain. While flipping through the pages to look at the other photos, and then to Sheila and her filthy room that her mother never cleaned anymore, I thought how well we all do.
