That’s me, the thing on the couch. TV: on. TV kept me company after school, taught me what no one else would. “Sex and the Single Girl” was the ABC 3:30 Movie’s theme during Valentine’s Week. I didn’t know for sure what sex was but at age nine I was, by definition, a single girl. The movie, Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, was teaching me that growing up female means you’ll become addicted to pills, booze, or men. I was leaning toward men. Boys really. Just one. I was hooked on Charles Slattery, and like any good addict, I kept this a secret.
To throw my sister off, I feigned gluttony. She was convinced my addiction was food. It wasn’t a stretch. On the couch, nesting on either side of me, were boxes of Girl Scout cookies I had pretended to sell. The couch was deep and cushy—a womb for extended viewing of the new wood-encrusted, stretch-TV.
When I heard the gate outside unhook and clang shut, I emptied a row of cookies into my lap. In walked my sister Patty, a big-shot eighth-grader, cradling her basketball with one arm, just as the announcer said, “and now back to ‘Sex and the—’”
“Mom know you’re eating all those cookies?” Patty said.
“Mom know you got a basketball indoors?” I said, French kissing the mint off a cookie.
“Mom know you’re watching something with ‘sex’ in the title?” She started dribbling right there in the doorway, knowing she’d won. Mom knew none of these things because she was safe at work, lamenting that I was a latchkey kid, and some day I would tell her not to feel guilty because those sixty minutes alone after school were the high point of my day. “You want some?” I said, holding up the peanut-butter-chocolate-covered and the peanut-butter-sandwich.
“No, Porky. I have Etiquette Class today,” she said, gazing at the cookies with real concern. Her eyes were wide and golden brown; mine were round and hazel, the loser of eye colors. Her hair was light brown, stick straight, obedient; mine was black, corkscrew, chaos. I didn’t look like my parents either, which is why her claim that I was fathered by Crazy Harry, the school janitor, took root. To my sister I was the blob that sat on the couch all day—moss on a rock—while she had worlds to conquer or at least a reason for learning etiquette.
Patty wedged herself between the coffee table and me, holding the basketball with both hands, positioning it right in my face so I was inhaling the dirty rubber. “Do you like anyone in your class yet?” she said. “You know, like, like?”
“No.”
She felt it was her personal responsibility to get me to think about boys, real boys, the ones in my class, ever since she walked in on me kissing Peter Brady on the TV screen. Her concern was more my choice of Brady, not that I didn’t understand the concept of television.
“You should like Greg, anyway,” she had counseled. “Peter’s weird.” But that was the precise attribute that made me kiss the electronic box.
She took a step closer still and I felt the pattern of the ball press into my nose. “If there was an earthquake and only one boy in your class survived, who would you hope it would be?”
“Would I die in the earthquake?”
“No, idiot! You would survive and repopulate the world, so choose wisely.”
“Oh. Then I’d want Charles Slattery—” It slipped out. My feelings for him could overtake me just like that, as I had worshipped Charles half my life.
“What?” She pulled back. I had more than disappointed her; I had offended her. “It can’t be him. He’s too smart. Boys that smart are freaks. He’ll only get more weird. Trust me.”
“I do—”
“Let me guess.” She stared down at me. Etiquette Class had given her perfect posture, which made her seem taller, parental—except without the unconditional love. “He plays some obscure instrument. . . . The recorder?” Charles did play the recorder, but she need not hear this from me.
“Choose someone else to like,” she said approaching the doorway. “You have until Valentine’s Day to find someone new. Otherwise, I’ll pick someone for you, someone normal.” She left, pounding the ball into the floor.
The next day before school started, I scoped out the classroom to size up my alternatives. It was a testament to my commitment to Charles that no other boy had ever been detected on my radar screen. Most of the boys blended into each other, but there were three who I didn’t think hated me. Sitting at his desk by the windows was Sam, who was half my size, sniffing his lunch bag like a discriminating mouse. Standing at the back of the room was Anthony, who appeared to be counting the days of the year on the calendar—not monthly or weekly but day by day. Along the blackboard was a squirming Jim Plumb who the week before had left an oozing pile steaming on his reading book so we no longer sat on our readers. The stain on his pants had been shaped like a butterfly—a perfectly symmetrical wing on each buttock, the crack its body. From then on he was Butterfly Butt.
Crossing the threshold in grand style was Charles, wearing a plaid Sherlock Holmes coat and hat. When I told my sister there was no boy I liked, it was not a lie because my feeling for Charles was love. Charles didn’t look like a nine-year-old boy; he already looked like a professor—with brown curly side burns and round, dark-rimmed glasses, a war wound from reading the dictionary. He wore a red crisscross tie, and when he knew the answer, which was always, he didn’t throw his whole arm up in the air, like the other thugs who didn’t know what the question was much less the answer; he would calmly raise his index finger. Mostly what I noticed about Charles was that he didn’t laugh or even smile. He was always thinking.
Even with chairs being scraped across the floor, bookbags being dumped, and random classroom hubbub, you could hear the snap-snap sound of Miss Arrow’s heels echo down the hall a minute before she entered. Miss Arrow was, like me, a single girl not of the Old Maid variety. No one knew how old she was or where she lived or what she did after 2:45 each day. Her eyelashes might have been fake. They looked like a doll’s—long, but with big gaps in between. Her braid, too, was almost too black and too long to be real; it took up the length of her back. The high heels she strutted around in put her a head over the principal, Mr. Pump, who also kept to himself but was hanging around our room more and more frequently.
Miss Arrow usually started class midstream, picking up where she left off the day before, without any acknowledgment that we had left. But on this day she paced in front of the class, holding a little silver hotel bell, the kind that needed just a feather tap to ding. Miss Arrow held the unsuspecting bell in the palm of one hand while she dinged the life out of it with the other palm until we were sitting with our hands folded. No news had ever been this big.
She stood in front of the sprawling blackboard, all expression erased from her sculpted face. “I have an announcement.” Her voice was deep and, like everything else about her, evoked Chér. “I’m going to put it on the board, so there will be no need for questions.” My classmates and I looked at each other with mouths ajar. We had dreamt of a day like this—when the teacher would tell us someone important had died, someone important enough to send us home from school, but unimportant enough for us to care. Miss Arrow turned her back to us and wrote on the board in “C”-quality penmanship, and I wondered what ever possessed her to go into teaching. She stepped aside and pointed to the name on the board as if she were a Price is Right model. The name she wrote on the board was Miss Arrow. My classmates and I communicated only with raised brows. Miss Arrow then turned to the board, erased part of what she wrote, and wrote something new. Stepping away from the board, she revealed Ms. Arrow. “It is pronounced MIZZ. I want to hear you say it.”
Thirty-five different attempts at “MIZZ” ricocheted off the walls.
“MIZZ Arrow,” she corrected us. “Now there is a word for women to use that does not give away their marital status. Get it? Got it? Good.”
I, for one, did not get it, but I sensed that one small step was being made for womankind.
“I have one more announcement,” she said. “Charles, come to my desk.” Despite her newly discovered feminism, Ms. Arrow still preferred the boys. All teachers played favorites, it’s human nature, but to turn your back on your entire gender? “Class, Charles is going to distribute a handout.” The stack of handouts on her desk was hair-trigger, and when she tried to grab one, a bunch floated slow-mo to the floor. She gaped at the papers. With the micro-mini she had on, she knew if she bent down to pick them up, we’d see Christmas.
Charles took charge. Behind his glasses, behind his eyes, ideas were spinning and triggering other ideas, and I pictured what was going on inside of his head was a miracle equivalent to the Mouse Trap game: the boot kicking the bucket, the marble going through the maze and down the curving ramp, the second marble dropping into the old-fashioned tub, the skinny grampa jumping backwards—everything working perfectly. My own brain wasn’t as perfect. I had a photographic memory for one thing: the TV Guide. Even the shows I didn’t watch, I could tell you the times of, who the co-stars were, and if it would be a rerun or not. I could provide a crude, one-sentence plot summary for each: “Mary and Mr. Grant go on a date.”
In Mouse Trap, with the cheese in the right spot, the mouse gets caught, and sister’s orders or no sister’s orders, that’s what I wanted to do with my Charles. When I ruffled up his hair and removed his glasses to clean them, I would call him Charlie. With his defenses down, he would tell me the theorems and philosophies going on inside his head, and I would tell him about TV and the latest knock-knock jokes to make him laugh. We would be like complementary angles.
Charles picked up the stray handouts, and when Arrow placed the rest of the stack in his hand, he almost smiled. When Charles handed me mine, I hoped to make eye contact and say thank you, but he just gave two to the girl next to me.
“Now, Charles, would you read it aloud?”
Charles’s voice, if you didn’t love him, could be annoying, the way a male Munchkin’s could. He cleared his throat and announced, “Friday is Valentine’s Day,” and I wondered in what universe would someone not know this. The gist of the handout was that the school had a new policy about distributing valentines. If you brought one, you had to bring enough for the whole class. “No favorites!” Charles said with high-pitched authority. To me the policy was un-American.
I read the fine print, and there was no law saying each valentine had to be the same. For everyone else I would bring store-bought cards. Charles’s valentine would be a creative expression of my love.
The ABC 3:30 Movie was Tom Jones, and from the bawdiness of the preview, I knew it would be instructional so I worked on the valentine right there in front of the TV. On either side of me on the couch were additional boxes of Girl Scout cookies Mom did not yet know she would have to buy, along with a decade’s worth of National Geographics, which she had insisted on saving for educational purposes.
Even though Charles got 100s in every subject, his specialty was science. I flipped through a few of the National Geos, cut out a picture of an inflamed human heart, glue-sticked it onto a piece of red construction paper, and framed it with aging white lace Mom stowed in her sewing basket.
The human heart is not as good-looking as you’d think. Nor as sturdy. It’s really just a shell. Shaped more like an upside-down pear than a valentine’s heart, it’s got tubes coming out of it, and it’s covered in a thin layer of fat—slimy and gelatinous—which makes it look like a bad ham. Even the lace couldn’t dress it up.
As I flipped the valentine over to adorn the other side, the TV made a popping noise and lost its voice. The new TV! I had been concentrating so hard on my valentine I didn’t really know what was going on in the movie except that barmaid-type women with breasts where their necks should be were chasing poor Tom around as they gnawed on turkey legs.
It was creepy quiet in the house so I decided to turn on the record player to provide companionship and inspiration. The album on the turntable was foreign to me, but I didn’t dare switch it. I moved the needle close to the song that looked best for my purposes. “Stairway to Heaven” would be the perfect accompaniment because what was my valentine if not a stairway to Charles’s heavenly love?
I dipped a few of my fingers into the finger-paints and heard an odd yet familiar instrument. It was the melodic sound of a recorder playing in the background! I closed my eyes and pretended Charles was serenading me. The music was quiet and peaceful, and guitars strummed slowly, and a few of my fingers made perfect figure eights, and even though the paint was cold, it was smooth, and massaging it in the paper with the guitars and the recorder and the flutes in the background was hypnotic, but the music was starting to hint at something hopeless.
Then the song got loud and wild, and the singer was yelling and shouting and sort of wailing, and there was an explosion of electric guitars and drums and drum jams, and my fingers lost control, and the song refused to end. All ten fingers were oozing paint, running amok on the page, air-guitaring on Charles’s heart, and the singer was howling bloodcurdling screams, and my thumbs became drums. My heart was thumping, thumping, and now, knowing what it really looked like, my heart was grotesque to me. It pounded louder and louder until I saw Patty in the doorway dribbling.
“You’re dead,” she said. Her proclamation was gloomy, but she didn’t look it. She was in full make-up mode. Slowly, she set the ball down. She walked toward the stereo, pausing in front of the TV as if to give me a moment to run for my life, but the blob was immobile. She raised the album from the turntable. Twisting the pole to the blinds so they were in the fully open position, she held the album to the sunlight, tilted just above eye level, looking for signs of contamination.
“That record was on there,” I said. Barely touching the edges, she put it back on the turntable like it was a paper-thin sheet of glass. “I swear, my fingers never touched it.” I looked down at the valentine to review what my fingers had touched. My love-note was drenched in paint, thick and brown and grim, like it had been trampled on in a swamp. At least it was nameless and unrecognizable as a valentine so she couldn’t make fun of me for it.
“Finger-paints? Are you retarded?” She walked toward me and saw that the TV was on. “Why is the volume down?” And with squinty eyes, “What are you watching?” A happy Tom was being spanked. “I just want you to be normal!” she shouted, clasping her hands together in front of her face as she looked up to the dropped ceiling for a miracle. “Normal!”
I wanted to please her, but I was who I was. I stood to try to deal with my mess, but she held her palm out to me. I waited for her to scream “Normal!” again. Instead, she said in a gentler tone, “Which is why I’ve spoken to Jim Plumb’s older brother, Tom, about what a cute pair you and Jim would make.”
“Butterfly Butt?” So that’s all I was to her: a human sacrifice. Patty had liked Tom Plumb for most of her life so she decided to offer me up to his bowel-challenged brother so she would have something to chitchat with him about. “He’s a total outcast!”
“All the more reason for you to befriend him—”
“What did he say?”
“He said he didn’t know who his brother liked or if he liked anyone and that guys didn’t talk about that kind of thing. I have a good feeling about it.”
“You’re using me as . . . bait!” I wanted it to sting, but she laughed in my face.
“Some day, you’ll thank me,” she said, picking up the ball.
“When I’m senile.”
She pretended to throw the ball at me, and I fell for it as I always did except for when she wasn’t faking and I got it in the face.
The next morning, I was anxious to get to school, but I always got the bathroom last. Patty and I have to use it one at a time because even though it’s called a half bath, it’s more like one-quarter size. The kelly green carpeting is not tacked down so every time you open or close the door, the carpeting acts up. Usually Patty’s too lazy and immodest to deal with the carpeting, so she just plops on the pot with the door open. It’s a live-action horror movie.
The tiny vanity top is overflowing with whatever war paint she wore or thought about wearing that day: old and new makeup bags, blushes, an eyelash curler, mascara, eyeliner, a tweezers, and six lipsticks, plus gloss. On the toilet is a suitcase full of eye shadow even though only the green and the brown have ever been touched.
Brushing my teeth, I wondered if Charles was brushing his teeth at that same moment, and I pictured Charles’s bathroom floor-to-ceiling with the latest edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. I would be smarter if I went to the bathroom at Charles’s house.
Instead, I was surrounded by all those lipsticks so the inevitable happened. I tried one. It was the one most like a normal lip color, not Flame or Pink Apéritif, not Goddess, or Savage, or Damsel. It was called Mirage because even though you paid for it, nothing was really there. I knew it was there, and I thought maybe it would counteract some of the parts of my valentine that didn’t turn out as hoped.
I walked to school dangling the valentine from one corner because it was still damp. The other kids walked into school giggling and carefree, like they weren’t worried how the day would turn out. I closed my desktop after carefully placing Charles’s valentine inside. Jim Plumb was standing there. He had a militia crew cut with a cowlick, and flat features that made it look like he ran into a wall. “My brother told me to tell you to get lost.” He was rejecting me? There was a toughness, a meanness in his voice that he didn’t have before the accident. The nickname “Butterfly Butt” would probably haunt him all the way to prison. “Get lost” was a hurtful way to put it, and I wondered if Patty had just heard the same words.
I didn’t eat my lunch because of what he said so by the time 2:25 rolled around and Arrow said it was time for our so-called party, I was starving and praying that maybe Charles brought me some of those 100-percent-sugar candy hearts.
“Class, you may now pass out your valentines and what have you,” Arrow said, and for a teacher she was a few olives short of a martini. Any normal adult would have had us go row by row so there wouldn’t be chaos, but chaos there was. Everyone sprang up at once. Kids were plowing into each other bumper-car style. No rules of the road, just everyone moving randomly but quickly because there wasn’t much time, and kids were knocking heads, and a desk got flipped, and all the while Arrow stood still looking at her watch.
As I passed out my valentines, I started to feel bad about how interchangeable mine were—I didn’t even put anyone’s name on the envelope; whereas most kids spent hours decorating, addressing, individualizing each one. I saved Charles’s for last, hoping that I could hand it to him at the very end when he and I were finished but everyone else was wrapping it up. I went back to my desk, which was piled high with valentines. I fanned them out, checking for Charles’s handwriting while keeping one eye on him.
Charles had left nothing on my desk yet, but I still had hope. He stood frozen, looking at the big black clock above the doorway. His hands were empty. He walked to his desk. Squatting, he pulled out something red from inside of it. He, too, had held one valentine back! One he was now holding close to his heart. He wore that blank, colorless look you get when you’re about to throw up. The rest of the kids were still scurrying right and left, up and down aisles, so I grabbed my opportunity. I approached Charles from behind and was about to offer my valentine to him when Mr. Pump appeared in the doorway with a bouquet of red roses. Everyone stopped as if the plug to the bumper cars had been yanked. We took our seats in silence.
Mr. Pump stood in the doorway looking at Ms. Arrow, and because he had two functioning eyes—kind eyes despite the tragic wall-to-wall eyebrow—he noticed what I had noticed. Either her micro-mini was today a micro-micro-mini or her high-high heels were higher. The fact was—the distance between Mother Earth and the bottom of her skirt was record breaking.
The roses were shaking in Pump’s hands. Arrow looked shocked but happy—a nervous, straight-line smile—and she started fumbling with her purse. A card flew out of it, and today especially she couldn’t bend to pick it up. I bolted up to get it for her before she could ask Charles, but he was on his feet as fast as I was.
I had put all of myself into Charles’s valentine, but as I crouched on the floor, I saw that Arrow had me beat. Not only was her valentine soaked in cologne—exotic cologne that smelled like after-dinner drinks and nutmeg—she had painted her lips Savage and then kissed the envelope and kissed it. Her lipstick print was going in every possible direction—rightside up, upside down, diagonally, reverse diagonally, lips puckered, lips apart. As I stood, she snatched it from my hand, but Charles was close enough to see it. He had never looked dumb before until then with his chin on the floor and his eyes bugging out.
Mr. Pump said quietly, “Ms. Arrow, a gentleman stopped by and asked that these be delivered to you.” He stepped inside, approached her desk, and shook the bouquet as if she hadn’t noticed it. The smile faded from Arrow’s face as she took a step closer to him.
The bell rang. Kids scampered. It was now or never.
I heard sniffling. It was Sam beside me, waving a valentine, which he handed to me and dashed. I handed my valentine to Charles who handed his valentine to Arrow who handed her valentine to Pump who handed the roses to Arrow who tossed the roses into the trash can.
The class cleared out quickly, their bags of valentines and candy swinging behind them. We four remained. A few lips moved but nothing came out, like prayers. Quickly and silently, we packed up, following Pump single-file after he turned and hit the lights.
That’s Patty and me on the couch, the loser boxes of Girl Scout cookies on either side of us. We sat blinking at the silent ABC 3:30 Movie. Patty was silent, too. Her eyes were glazed over. This wasn’t the mood I was hoping she’d be in when I broke it to her that I couldn’t like anyone normal and that even the abnormal person wouldn’t have me. “Don’t you have Etiquette today?”
“I quit,” she said with a finality that allowed no further discussion. “Why were you late getting home? Did you kiss someone after school?”
“You’re crazy.” She wouldn’t have believed me even if I told her the truth: I got lost coming home. There are two ways to get home from school, and I’ve been taking them both for years, but I just couldn’t find my street, which is the kind of thing that proves real craziness—so I had to throw her off track by proclaiming hers.
“Do you want some valentine’s candy?” I said, dropping a full brown lunch bag on her lap. My stomach was still rumbling, but I wasn’t about to fill it with those crappy hearts. “Crappy,” I said.
“Potty mouth,” she said, plunging her hand into the bag.
“I don’t have anything good to report,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t make me spell it out. She just stared at the TV like a zombie. “Why don’t they put more realistic words on these hearts? Like ‘Hate You’?”
“No one would buy them.” Patty filled her palm with the hearts and poked around. “And people would kill themselves.”
“I have better candy hidden in my dresser.”
“I know, Chub.” She put her hand on my knee and patted it to an irregular one-two, one-two-three beat the way Mom sometimes would. “What are we watching?” she said.
The movie, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, was mostly commercials because so much had to be cut out. At the show it had been an “R.” Two men, two women, not one of them smiling, just like Pump & Arrow & Charles & Me. But that’s not the write-up I gave Patty. I gave it to her word for word: “Swingers learn the price of free love.”
She nodded, rifling through the bag, reading different sayings. “Here,” she tried to hand one to me.
“I don’t even want it,” I said pushing her hand back. I didn’t look at it because it didn’t matter what it said. It wouldn’t mean anything because it wasn’t from Charles. She opened my hand, pressed it into my palm, and closed it again.
I watched the four actors saying nothing and pictured the four of us mute in the classroom holding hearts in our hands. I would never make sense of that chain of events.
Patty squeezed my knee. “If you and Charles like each other, that’s . . . fine,” she said. I assumed she had taken a dodge ball to the head.
“He’s in love with MIZZ Arrow,” I said, wiping what was left of the Mirage onto my sleeve, “but she’s too stupid to love him back.” We kicked our four feet up onto the table. I was thankful Patty didn’t know what I knew about addiction—that we would be sweating it out forever like that poor girl in the Valley of the Dolls. We would always be MIZZ.
“I’ll never love anyone the way I love Charles,” I said, hoping she would trash talk him—not that it wouldn’t prove to be true.
“Yeah,” she said, “he has a lot going for him.”
“What? You’re supposed to tell me what a freak he is for being so smart.”
“If he likes Arrow and not you, he’s not that smart.”
Patty stared at the TV and almost put me in a trance with her patting on my knee. I looked at her from the side and thought how lucky she was that she had a jawbone and cheekbones, angles instead of roundness, which was the main feature of my face, and I wondered if I whistled a lot if I could give myself cheekbones and if that’s what Charles liked about Arrow. I puckered my lips and tried to whistle, but I couldn’t even do that. Patty had to have heard and felt me blowing on her cheek, but she remained still—as in dead—looking at the TV. I seriously thought about turning it off.
With the sound killed and all the choppy editing, Bob & Carol . . . was hard to follow. Plus, my hand was getting clammy, so I slowly opened my fist and peeked. “Dig Me,” the heart said. It was pale purple with unfocused pink letters, and from the quiet way she was acting I knew no one did. Especially not Tom Plumb. I dug her, but I was afraid if I told her, she would laugh. Anyway, what good is my love? The lowest person in the world doesn’t even want it.
I looked at her cheekbones again and tried harder to whistle. This time, some spit got on her face. You would have thought my one drop of spit was the bucket of water that gets thrown on the Wicked Witch of the West, Patty being the Witch, the way she ran around screaming. She actually cried. One drop of me is that vile.
Since then, my sister doesn’t talk much. She’s given up on her love life, given up on me. I can eat back-to-back brownie sundaes, I can kiss the TV—I can make out with it—and she still won’t come out of the funk she went into that Valentine’s Day.
Mary Beth Hoerner is a Chicago playwright and fiction writer. Her play Atomic Honeymoon was performed at the Cornservatory in Chicago, she is a network playwright at Chicago Dramatists and she was the recipient of a Ragdale residency in playwriting. Her short fiction has appeared in various publications and her memoir, Night Games, appears in the anthology Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year.
Ferris wheel photo courtesy David Rice
