had to focus on some specific thing or another. Mrs. Miller was big on all five senses, but especially smells. I knew something was up that day, because she was wearing an especially strong perfume. My dad only wears cologne when he’s trying to cover up the fact that he’s drunk, so I assumed that was the case here, until she said, “Describe everything you smell in this car.” Just to make her blush, all I wrote was: “Did you eat onions for lunch?”
And then other times she just let me freestyle. She’d press the button on her stopwatch (did I mention she had a stopwatch? she had a stopwatch) and off I’d go:
At twelve, Ruthie was too young for a license, but that didn’t stop her from driving wherever she wanted to go. With a little lipstick, she looked at least sixteen. With a lot of lipstick—which is what she usually wore, along with a lot of eyeliner and enough eye shadow to keep Revlon’s quarterly profits in the black—she looked like my mother, or maybe just the Demoiselles d’Avignon .
She drove her mom’s hand-me-down BMW. The silver convertible emerged from the leafy tunnel of our driveway like a minnow jumping from a pond—Carey Pond, let’s say, in Carey Park, on the southern edge of Hutchinson, which is where she took me to smoke cigarettes (“nature’s natural appetite suppressant,” she told me, which, as far as redundancies go, verges on brilliant ).
“See, this is what I don’t get.” She stood on a fallen elm trunk admiring her reflection in the scummy water, took a drag and held the smoke in her mouth (she hadn’t figured out how to inhale yet), then blew it out with a long sigh, peeking to see if I could tell she was faking. “This is what I don’t get,” she said again. “On the one hand, you have this incredible singer with this like in cred ible voice and this look no one has ever seen before, a junk-store carnival nymph whose first record sells fifteen million copies and produces four number ones. And on the other hand you have this grade-B bimbo with a voice like a parrot dying from throat cancer, who thinks wearing fishnet on your chest instead of your legs is somehow radical fashion, and whose first album, let’s face it, pretty much disappears thanks to the fact that one: it was basically gay disco, which, I mean, nothing against gays or disco but gay plus disco equals, you know, yuck , and two: the videos featured routines that were half spastic imitations of modern dance and half crotch-grabbing. And so whatever, this is what I don’t get: what I don’t get is, why is it that the first girl’s career ends up tanking and the second girl goes on to become the biggest-selling female recording artist in history, picking up a fake English accent, a Kabbalah addiction, and a Malawian orphan along the way? I mean, I don’t get that. Do you?”
“Your cigarette went out.” (Well, what would you have said?)
“Ma don na,” Ruth Wilcox said. “ Duh . And Cyndi Lauper . I thought you were from New York City .”
“I’m from Long Island, which, culturally speaking, is about as far from New York City as Malawi. And your cigarette really did go out.”
“Oh crap ,” Ruthie said, except she didn’t say “crap” but the more common, albeit unprintable (in this context) synonym that she’d been carving into her desk the day I first saw her. (She’d carved the “crap” into my desk too, the year before. “Crap, darn, fudge. They’re all so sixth-grade. Son of a biscuiteater. What self-respecting preteen can say that with a straight face?”) Now, after a couple of failed attempts to light her cigarette (which is very hard to do if you won’t inhale), she threw it into the pond. I thought she’d finally accepted the fact that cigarette smoking is pretty much the grossest thing ever, but instead she nodded toward something behind me. I turned and saw a twentysomething guy walking down the looping path that bounds Carey Park and staring at us with that
And then other times she just let me freestyle. She’d press the button on her stopwatch (did I mention she had a stopwatch? she had a stopwatch) and off I’d go:
At twelve, Ruthie was too young for a license, but that didn’t stop her from driving wherever she wanted to go. With a little lipstick, she looked at least sixteen. With a lot of lipstick—which is what she usually wore, along with a lot of eyeliner and enough eye shadow to keep Revlon’s quarterly profits in the black—she looked like my mother, or maybe just the Demoiselles d’Avignon .
She drove her mom’s hand-me-down BMW. The silver convertible emerged from the leafy tunnel of our driveway like a minnow jumping from a pond—Carey Pond, let’s say, in Carey Park, on the southern edge of Hutchinson, which is where she took me to smoke cigarettes (“nature’s natural appetite suppressant,” she told me, which, as far as redundancies go, verges on brilliant ).
“See, this is what I don’t get.” She stood on a fallen elm trunk admiring her reflection in the scummy water, took a drag and held the smoke in her mouth (she hadn’t figured out how to inhale yet), then blew it out with a long sigh, peeking to see if I could tell she was faking. “This is what I don’t get,” she said again. “On the one hand, you have this incredible singer with this like in cred ible voice and this look no one has ever seen before, a junk-store carnival nymph whose first record sells fifteen million copies and produces four number ones. And on the other hand you have this grade-B bimbo with a voice like a parrot dying from throat cancer, who thinks wearing fishnet on your chest instead of your legs is somehow radical fashion, and whose first album, let’s face it, pretty much disappears thanks to the fact that one: it was basically gay disco, which, I mean, nothing against gays or disco but gay plus disco equals, you know, yuck , and two: the videos featured routines that were half spastic imitations of modern dance and half crotch-grabbing. And so whatever, this is what I don’t get: what I don’t get is, why is it that the first girl’s career ends up tanking and the second girl goes on to become the biggest-selling female recording artist in history, picking up a fake English accent, a Kabbalah addiction, and a Malawian orphan along the way? I mean, I don’t get that. Do you?”
“Your cigarette went out.” (Well, what would you have said?)
“Ma don na,” Ruth Wilcox said. “ Duh . And Cyndi Lauper . I thought you were from New York City .”
“I’m from Long Island, which, culturally speaking, is about as far from New York City as Malawi. And your cigarette really did go out.”
“Oh crap ,” Ruthie said, except she didn’t say “crap” but the more common, albeit unprintable (in this context) synonym that she’d been carving into her desk the day I first saw her. (She’d carved the “crap” into my desk too, the year before. “Crap, darn, fudge. They’re all so sixth-grade. Son of a biscuiteater. What self-respecting preteen can say that with a straight face?”) Now, after a couple of failed attempts to light her cigarette (which is very hard to do if you won’t inhale), she threw it into the pond. I thought she’d finally accepted the fact that cigarette smoking is pretty much the grossest thing ever, but instead she nodded toward something behind me. I turned and saw a twentysomething guy walking down the looping path that bounds Carey Park and staring at us with that
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