Chapter 21

IN 1967, MY FATHER writes a screenplay adaptation of a novel by Pierre Boulle, the author of The Bridge Over the River Kwai. Planet of the Apes is about astronauts who crash-land on a planet dominated by talking (and fully clothed) gorillas and chimpanzees. After my father does several drafts and makes numerous attempts to stay true to the original story, the producers decide it is too intellectual and will be too expensive to produce, and they bring in another writer, Michael Wilson. I remember some contention surrounding the project, and I know my dad was ultimately disappointed with the overall result, but the superb ending—discovering the head of the Statue of Liberty buried on the beach, signifying the planet is a nuclear-ravaged earth of the future—is the one my father conceived, wrote, and was credited for.

My close friend Jencie and I go to see the movie one sunny spring day in 1968. We love it. Emerging from the Santa Monica Theater, blinking our eyes to adjust to the sudden afternoon light (and our return to “old” earth), we talk about the movie all the way home. I feel enormously proud.

Jencie lives down the street. Our birthdays are three months apart. We have known each other since we were little more than toddlers. I am the complete opposite of her. Brunette to her blond, brown-eyed to her blue, and short to her tall. Her father, John Gay, is a screenwriter whose credits include No Way to Treat a Lady and The Burden of Proof.

We are always at one or the other’s house, pedaling frantically on our purple bicycles to get there. Even in soaking rains, our windbreakers whipping behind us, we always manage to wind up at her front door or mine.

Throughout the years, we sit cross-legged on the floor of our bedrooms, talking about music, school, books, movies, and boys. We braid each other’s hair and beg our mothers to have an overnight (once we tell her mother that we will clean the entire house if she will just say yes). We plan our weekends together and rearrange each other’s rooms, helping the other decorate.

One year, when I am about thirteen, my parents buy me a new desk, wallpaper, a bedspread, and carpet. On the day my room is being redone, I watch the clock at school, willing it to rush ahead. Jencie and I make plans for her to come over that night. When I finally get home, I race up the stairs and look around at my “new” room. Everything is perfect until I notice that something is in the corner. On closer inspection, I discover that one of the dogs has pooped on the carpet and I jump back in disgust. Just then, my dad knocks on the door and I point to the spot. He feigns surprise, walks over to it, and picks it up in his hands. I stare from him to his hand in disbelief. He breaks out into laughter. “I got you, Nanny!” It is plastic dog poop that he found on a novelty rack and waited, all day, to spring it on me when I got home.

After a few days, I hide it in his office. A week later it appears in my closet, then on the floor at his side of the bed, under my desk, his, on his chair, on mine, and on and on. This continues for months, and Jencie and I laugh, planning places where I should hide it.

For years Jencie and I are an integral part of each other’s life, doing our homework together, piecing back one or the other’s shattered heart, and navigating our way through adolescence. We talk about boyfriends, and I ask her one afternoon, “Can you believe Mr. Cagle found our note and read it in front of the whole class?!” We roll on her bed laughing, grateful that although we had revealed each other’s latest love interests we’d only drawn pictures of the boys and hadn’t signed our names to our note.

There is a relative tranquility in our lives. Our talks are the typical conversations of two young girls becoming teenagers whispering in the dark at bedtime.

One Friday night Jencie is doing something with her family, my parents are at a dinner party, and I am curled up on their bed watching Get Smart.

My sister suddenly shouts my nickname up the stairs, “Caldie, I’m going.” She has started jogging over the past month or so. This is before it has become popular, before everyone is doing it. For some reason, when she goes, she wears our dad’s old boots. I don’t think he ever knows this. She always leaves them exactly where she found them. Years later we talk about this, why she didn’t wear her sneakers, why she wore his shoes. I don’t remember if she had an answer, even then, but I remember us laughing for a long time.

That night she is back about a half hour later, standing by the bedroom door. Her face sweaty, and her brown hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. Silently, she points down to her leg and I see that she has fallen, ripped her pants, and that her knee is bleeding. “What happened?!” I nearly shout at her but she only responds with the obvious, “I fell.”

This little accident doesn’t deter her. She’s out again the very next night, beneath the lights, down the neighborhood streets, and still running in our father’s shoes.