want to upset you. But you’re starting to look more like your sister.”
I said, “You couldn’t upset me any more than I already am. Anyhow, I know. The other day the strangest thing happened. I looked in the mirror, and I saw Margaret.”
“Eek,” said Elaine. “ Persona .”
“What?” I said.
“Ingmar Bergman,” she said. “Swedish. Black and white. Subtitles. Dull. You’d hate it.”
Old films were a passion that Elaine and Margaret had shared. You couldn’t mention an old movie Elaine hadn’t seen. Not only did she know all the stars and directors, but she had a mental filing system so that, if you told her about a conversation you’d overheard at the supermarket or some incident at school, she could name a film in which something similar happened.
“What’s Persona about?” I asked.
“Never mind,” Elaine said. “Just promise me you won’t watch it for another ten years.”
“Okay,” I said. “I promise.”
Elaine loved to make us promise her things. Promise you won’t smoke pot or have sex until you’re twenty-one. Swear you won’t smoke cigarettes ever. Margaret found it easy, because she’d already done all those things, just as I found it easy because I believed I never would.
Drugs and sex seemed like open invitations to confusion and shame, two emotions I dreaded long before I’d been forced to take our school’s useless antidrug program. Our DARE instructor was a uniformed cop named Officer Prozak, which the parents thought was hilarious. Once a week, we’d listen to her ramble on about the ways in which various substances would destroy us. Maybe the accident of her name was why she seemed to expect to be doubted or mocked, and why her manner veered from cringing to hostile. Everyone said she was on drugs, and as she stood before us, chalking the back of her uniform against the blackboard, her terror of us—of everything—rubbed off onto her subject so that even the kids who smoked dope daily were temporarily worried. Just say no, we’d chanted with her. Say no to the recurring hallucinations, the car wrecks, the crack-addled murders, the dried-chestnut brains.
Sex was scarier than drugs. Drugs could only drive you crazy. But sex meant getting naked in front of another person. I’d seen lots of Hollywood sex, perfect people with peachlike skin tumbling with balletic grace in the flattering light. I understood the biology. But textbooks didn’t explain why you would want to take off your clothes with someone you hardly knew.
I thought about kissing, or at least about a boy saying he wanted to kiss me. In sixth grade, there had been a party at which the girls and boys paired off and went into a closet. Twice it was my turn, and both times the boys asked if we could just pretend to have kissed. Once might have been about the boy, but twice had to be about me. Plenty of kids had offered me joints, but not one boy had ever hinted he wanted to hold my hand. How did you know what boys wanted? I would never find out, unless the impossible happened and I became someone’s funny valentine.
After we’d promised Elaine not to smoke or have sex, she’d say, “And if you do , promise me you’ll make the guy use a condom.”
Once Margaret asked if that was how Elaine wound up having Tycho, and Elaine went all dreamy and said, “That’s another story.”
I was encouraged that a guy had wanted to have sex with un-glamorous Elaine. Maybe he’d even loved her for her many admirable qualities. Elaine knew lots of tricks involving pennies, matches, paper napkins you burned with cigarettes until a coin dropped into a glass. She called them bar games, which suggested a sketchy youth of playing strangers for drinks in seedy dives.
Sometimes Margaret and I visited Elaine at her apartment, which she’d decorated with shag rugs, plastic bucket chairs, Sputnik radios, clocks in the shape of spaceships. Margaret laughed about Elaine’s excessively organic, tree-hugging style, but
I said, “You couldn’t upset me any more than I already am. Anyhow, I know. The other day the strangest thing happened. I looked in the mirror, and I saw Margaret.”
“Eek,” said Elaine. “ Persona .”
“What?” I said.
“Ingmar Bergman,” she said. “Swedish. Black and white. Subtitles. Dull. You’d hate it.”
Old films were a passion that Elaine and Margaret had shared. You couldn’t mention an old movie Elaine hadn’t seen. Not only did she know all the stars and directors, but she had a mental filing system so that, if you told her about a conversation you’d overheard at the supermarket or some incident at school, she could name a film in which something similar happened.
“What’s Persona about?” I asked.
“Never mind,” Elaine said. “Just promise me you won’t watch it for another ten years.”
“Okay,” I said. “I promise.”
Elaine loved to make us promise her things. Promise you won’t smoke pot or have sex until you’re twenty-one. Swear you won’t smoke cigarettes ever. Margaret found it easy, because she’d already done all those things, just as I found it easy because I believed I never would.
Drugs and sex seemed like open invitations to confusion and shame, two emotions I dreaded long before I’d been forced to take our school’s useless antidrug program. Our DARE instructor was a uniformed cop named Officer Prozak, which the parents thought was hilarious. Once a week, we’d listen to her ramble on about the ways in which various substances would destroy us. Maybe the accident of her name was why she seemed to expect to be doubted or mocked, and why her manner veered from cringing to hostile. Everyone said she was on drugs, and as she stood before us, chalking the back of her uniform against the blackboard, her terror of us—of everything—rubbed off onto her subject so that even the kids who smoked dope daily were temporarily worried. Just say no, we’d chanted with her. Say no to the recurring hallucinations, the car wrecks, the crack-addled murders, the dried-chestnut brains.
Sex was scarier than drugs. Drugs could only drive you crazy. But sex meant getting naked in front of another person. I’d seen lots of Hollywood sex, perfect people with peachlike skin tumbling with balletic grace in the flattering light. I understood the biology. But textbooks didn’t explain why you would want to take off your clothes with someone you hardly knew.
I thought about kissing, or at least about a boy saying he wanted to kiss me. In sixth grade, there had been a party at which the girls and boys paired off and went into a closet. Twice it was my turn, and both times the boys asked if we could just pretend to have kissed. Once might have been about the boy, but twice had to be about me. Plenty of kids had offered me joints, but not one boy had ever hinted he wanted to hold my hand. How did you know what boys wanted? I would never find out, unless the impossible happened and I became someone’s funny valentine.
After we’d promised Elaine not to smoke or have sex, she’d say, “And if you do , promise me you’ll make the guy use a condom.”
Once Margaret asked if that was how Elaine wound up having Tycho, and Elaine went all dreamy and said, “That’s another story.”
I was encouraged that a guy had wanted to have sex with un-glamorous Elaine. Maybe he’d even loved her for her many admirable qualities. Elaine knew lots of tricks involving pennies, matches, paper napkins you burned with cigarettes until a coin dropped into a glass. She called them bar games, which suggested a sketchy youth of playing strangers for drinks in seedy dives.
Sometimes Margaret and I visited Elaine at her apartment, which she’d decorated with shag rugs, plastic bucket chairs, Sputnik radios, clocks in the shape of spaceships. Margaret laughed about Elaine’s excessively organic, tree-hugging style, but
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