Wilde Lake(51)
Yet when my triumphant shopping day finally arrived, I was in no hurry to get started. Instead, I trailed AJ and his friends through the mall. They roamed in a pack, their agenda clear only to them. They seldom stopped moving and they never went into stores. There was a conceit at the time, a suburban legend if you will, that Wilde Lake students, whose high school was a two-story, windowless octagon built around the hub of a “media center,” had been trained to walk in a circle. When AJ and his friends stopped moving, they leaned on the metal railings along the mall’s second floor, just as they leaned on the railings at school between classes. There was a photograph in AJ’s yearbook, the Glass Hour, showing them doing just that in the fall of 1978. Let the freshmen and sophomores hurry to class. They were juniors now, sure of their power.
On this particular August day, AJ and his group lingered long enough at the Hickory Farms kiosk to grab samples of summer sausage from a girl with stringy hair, a face sodden with acne, and a Barbie-doll figure. If the term “butterface” had been in vogue then, someone might have made that cruel assessment, but I don’t think that crass term existed.
Cruelty did, however. We had plenty of cruelty in 1978. AJ’s friends didn’t even bother to walk out of earshot before they began making fun of the girl.
“If anyone knows sausage,” Lynne said, “it’s Nita Flood.”
Everyone laughed at this, except Ariel, who blushed and looked at the floor. Nita Flood stared stonily in the other direction, as if fascinated by the small camera store tucked into the corner of the mall just opposite her. I didn’t get the joke, but I knew better than to ask. That would only draw attention to my not quite legitimate presence. My arrangement with AJ was that I could follow him when he was with his friends, but I couldn’t interact with them. I was like Casper the Friendly Ghost, condemned to scare off the very people I wanted to befriend. AJ posed this as a win-win—we both got out of the house and away from Teensy, who always found chores to fill our idle summer days. But it was more of a win for AJ. My brother was generally a good big brother. And like our father, he disdained overt unkindness. I was astonished that he didn’t reprimand Lynne for mocking someone, just as he and Davey had come to the defense of that kid at the cast party. But the girl selling sausage apparently wasn’t worthy of his protection.
We were almost to Friendly’s when Lynne whispered something in Bash’s ear and he, with a backward glance at me, whispered in turn to AJ.
My brother stopped and walked back toward me, hands in pockets, eyes fixed at some point behind me. “Lu, don’t you have any friends your own age to hang out with?”
That was cruel. AJ knew I didn’t. Although I did have a plan to take care of that, a strategy for transformation that would make me the most popular girl in the third grade. All summer, I had been reading magazines like Young Miss and Seventeen, trying to figure out the formula for popularity. Clothes were the secret. Clothes and hair and clear skin, but skin was not my problem, unless one counted freckles. Over the summer, I had started growing my hair out, having persuaded our father that I could take care of it. And after studying the magazines, I had decided on a particular back-to-school outfit, which I found later that day in the girls section at Woodward & Lothrop. My father, as promised, came back to the mall with me that evening and paid for the outfit on hold there, along with some other basics—jeans, T-shirts. I wasn’t a tomboy, but I had grown up in a household of men. (Apologies to Teensy, but she never fussed over me. It was easier for her if I wore clothes like my brother’s, even his hand-me-downs in some cases.) I could score a baseball game, but I couldn’t find the business end of a lipstick. I suppose that made my upbringing progressive in a sense, but it was mainly careless and it left me vulnerable to missteps. The outfit I chose that day was disastrous, but no one in my household seemed to recognize that, not even AJ, who always wore the right thing, said the right thing, did the right thing.
Why did he allow me to make such a horrible mistake when it came to my third-grade back-to-school outfit?
Maybe he simply realized it was too late to intervene when I showed up for breakfast a week later in plaid gauchos, a long-sleeved white blouse, a newsboy cap, and a ring-tab-festooned vest I had crocheted that summer under Teensy’s supervision. Had the Annie Hall fad finally trickled down to the junior set? My father immortalized the first day of school with photos, so I don’t have to rely on my memory: I looked like a caddy, circa 1920.
“I’ve heard of high-waters,” one of my classmates said as I took my seat in the second row. (The front row was for brownnosers. I had made that mistake last year.) “But I hope the water never gets knee-high.”
“These are gauchos,” I said. Then, always quick to go on the offensive—if the other kids didn’t appreciate my superiority, I would simply rub their noses in my grandness—“And they cost seventeen dollars.”
To be fair, I don’t think Young Miss or Seventeen had encouraged me to brag about the price of things to gain popularity.
“Isn’t that a kind of a cookie? Gauchos?”
“Or that old guy with a mustache who died last year?”
Randy Nairn bent over at the waist, walked up and down the aisle, pretending to puff a cigar. For the rest of the day, whenever the teacher’s back was turned, kids would point to me and waggle their eyebrows, smoke pretend cigars. Randy, ever bold, even jumped into the aisle a time or two when the teacher’s back was turned and did the loping Groucho walk.