Donna woke up at the first click, the unmistakable sound of Denny Golden tossing stones against her window. Her sister Joanie sighed in her sleep and turned toward the wall. Denny called out Donna’s name in a loud stage whisper that soon became a drunken shout. Ignoring him wasn’t going to work. She knew he wanted her to come outside and sit in the backyard in the dark with him. He didn’t seem to hear her when she said no. She wasn’t sure how she had gotten herself into this situation. They had just met a month or two before, when he asked her out on her first real date.
Denny was a public school boy who came by Incarnate Word Academy, the all-girls Catholic high school outside St. Louis, to meet girls in the afternoon when classes ended. He had a nice enough face, pale and serious, and when he asked her out, Donna was happy. No one had ever asked her out before. As long as they were never alone, her parents didn’t mind, which surprised Donna a little. She was sixteen, but they rarely treated her like it. Her father drove them to the Two Plus Two Club to dance with their friends, or to the movies, where they kissed the whole time. Right away, Denny started leaving tightly folded squares of frayed notebook paper in her mailbox, notes so full of yearning she had no idea what to say to him when she saw him after reading them.
“Donna, you are the sweetest and most wonderfulest girl I know,” he wrote, as if the word wonderful wasn’t big enough.
In his school picture, he wore a suit and tie. His dark hair was combed flat and parted on the side, and she thought she could see something like mystery in his eyes, but she wasn’t sure. She let him take her to the homecoming dance, but he wrecked it by showing up half drunk. Now he just wanted to apologize over and over again.
Donna had already told Denny she couldn’t see him anymore. He was scaring her a little. Maybe scaring wasn’t the right word. He was overwhelming her. She couldn’t even figure out how she felt about him. Maybe that was just because he drank so much. She didn’t like it. She tried to explain that her father had heard Denny ranting in his yard and wasn’t happy about it. Denny’s next note read, “I am not going to stop until you tell me goodbye, but I hope you don’t. I think that [I should] apologize to your dad, and then maybe we could go to a game.”
She leaned out the window and whispered, “Denny, go home!”
It went quiet outside, but she stayed by the window, looking at the gray moonlit grass where he had stood until she was sure he was really gone.
After school, the girls in Donna’s class changed out of their uniforms and into outfits that followed another sort of dress code: plaid A-line skirts, prim shirts with Peter Pan collars, and cardigans in matching colors. For a really special touch, some girls took their sweaters to a local convent where the nuns carefully embroidered monograms onto them. Hair was worn teased into bubbles and decorated with headbands and bows like Patty Duke’s. To maintain the look, you had to sleep in hard plastic curlers and back-comb your hair into a nest in the morning with a rattail comb and blast it with clouds of hairspray. Donna’s mother, Tommie Jean, understood better than anyone how important it was to have just the right clothes, but she was working with a very tight budget. Donna would ask for a Villager blouse and her mom would buy a less expensive imitation with an odd ruffled collar instead. She’d ask for a pair of stylish slip-on shoes and her mom would buy gold old-lady sandals that came folded in a pouch like a pair of house slippers. It was humiliating. Donna poked through patterns at the fabric store, looking for pantsuits and A-line dresses to show her mom. Her mom spent hours in the evenings sitting at her sewing machine, its tiny bright light shining on her lovely face. Donna wished she could be as beautiful and glamorous as her mother. Her mom’s room was a world unto itself—polished, sweet smelling, and off-limits to her children. When she was very young, Donna would sneak in and sit at her mother’s vanity to sniff her waxy red lipsticks and golden perfumes, and look into her tidy drawers of folded stockings and silky things. She would lean into her mother’s closet and press her face into the cool rayon dresses and feel a pining pull in her chest like romantic love. Now she stood in her parents’ doorway and remembered the feeling sadly, without going inside.
Donna got a summer job at a soda fountain in Clayton to earn shopping money. She made malts and open-faced sandwiches drenched in gravy for $1.07 an hour. She bought herself a shiny green pack of Salems and forced herself to smoke a whole one before her shift. They tasted awful and made her woozy, but she felt graceful and kind of French holding a lit cigarette. No one called her Bean Pole or Bunny Teeth anymore. After years of painful orthodontia, including medieval headgear that forced her teeth into place, Donna was blossoming into a pretty teen.
When her family moved to a new house on Dawn Valley Drive just before the start of Donna’s junior year of high school, it was a radical change. She and Joanie were finally allowed to go to a secular school, and the family went to church only on Sunday now, in a modern neighborhood church with none of All Souls’ mystery. It was easy to disappear at Parkway High School. Donna wasn’t sure how to start up conversations with new girls, and clothing was more important than ever. When she walked down a hallway full of boys, she wondered how she looked or if they were looking at her at all.
She still relied on her friends from Incarnate Word, like Maureen and Mary Jo, who were actually more worldly than most, even though they went to Catholic school. Maureen was a beautiful, rebellious blonde who managed to make her school uniform look ironic and sexy just by standing with her hand on her hip, smiling. She had been suspended from school once for peeking at the nuns while they showered during a school retreat. Donna and Maureen talked on the phone until their ears were hot.
Mary Jo was different—small, dark-haired, and fine-boned. She would bend her head to the side and assess things with serious eyes. Mary Jo knew all kinds of people from hanging out at teen clubs like the Castaway, where she taught Donna how to dance the shing-a-ling, swiveling her hips to the groove. The guys Mary Jo knew made Denny Golden seem like a child. They were mostly local musicians. Mary Jo would light two Salems and hand her one, the smoke ballooning in the colored lights, blue and red. Donna wished they could just stay there, drifting in the streaming songs, dancing together.
Tommie Jean was busy decorating their new house. She picked metallic floral wallpaper for the downstairs bathroom and thick shag carpeting for the den, and reupholstered the sofas in patterned orange velveteen. The house had a modern split-level floor plan; the front door opened onto a wide landing with wrought-iron railings. Swinging saloon doors opened into the kitchen, which had a padded breakfast booth like in a restaurant.
Tommie Jean ruled the Dawn Valley house with vigor and intensity. Nothing could get cleaned well or quickly enough to please her. It was a physical relief when her husband came home at night. She greeted Gil with a long list of grievances. The teenagers were driving her crazy with their smart mouths and loud music. He had to do something. Once the kids were sorted out behind closed doors, she could finally breathe freely and treat Gil like a husband.
Donna did her homework without being asked and kept her grades high. After Catholic school, public high school seemed easy. She took typing and shorthand, which she especially liked for use as a secret code, and home economics, where she learned to sew and bake. Practical subjects were novel and fun compared to her previous school’s heavy academics and religious instruction.
Donna was quiet and rarely gave her parents trouble, unless Joanie was driving her crazy, following her around. Donna’s worst offense was being moody and withdrawn, occasionally rolling her eyes or being sarcastic. Once she called her brother a fruit and her father slapped her so swiftly she was too shocked to cry. As loose as life seemed now, there were still rules and her mother’s yelling and her father’s hand enforced them. Donna realized that when either of her parents made quick moves toward her, she couldn’t help but flinch, expecting a sudden smack, and that made her very sad. Still, she loved them.
She didn’t get to spend much time with her father, so when he offered to teach her how to drive she jumped at the chance. He took her out in his Volkswagen Bug and sat beside her with calm confidence radiating from his eyes. As they rode through their suburban neighborhood on the newly paved roads, Donna found it challenging to maneuver the little bubble of a car; it was hilly and the streets looped around blindly into cul-de-sacs. Her daddy was patient. He didn’t yell when she made horrible scraping sounds with the clutch and he didn’t let her give up until she could angle the car into a tight parking space and do a three-point turn without stalling. When she pulled back into their driveway, he put his hand on her head and said, “You did good, kid.”
By the summer of 1967, Donna could drive herself downtown to Gaslight Square, a long stretch of nightclubs and coffee shops where folk music spilled out onto the street. Boys her age had hair past their collars, long sideburns, mustaches, and trim beards. Downtown girls wore their hair long and silky with their skirts well above the knee. There was energy all around her.
Mary Jo invited Donna to go to a love-in. Donna wasn’t sure what it was, but she wanted to check it out. Young people sat cross-legged in circles in Forest Park, singing songs, hugging and kissing, painting hearts on their cheeks and laughing. Girls danced barefoot in the grass in colorful patterned dresses, their faces bright with sweet, simple joy. A boy with long blond hair gave Donna a droopy little daisy with a silent smile. It was such a lovely gesture. Her mother was standing in the front yard when she got home. She showed her the flower and Tommie Jean smiled. Donna was kind of surprised, for some reason. Then she asked Donna if she knew the boy.
“No, mom. He was a hippie. You know, a flower child.”
Her mother looked at her like she was speaking a foreign language. Her parents were so straight. They didn’t drink or smoke or swear and they could never imagine the way the world was changing, right now. Soon they complained that Donna’s bleach-blond bangs were hanging in her eyes and her black mascara was too thick. Tommie Jean would catch her on the way out the door and try to wipe off her eye makeup and tug down the hem of her skirt, until Donna wriggled free and ran to her car.
Life was basically uneventful. School and home, dinner in the kitchen with her siblings, homework and sleep. Maybe one good phone call. She could feel herself outgrowing her family in a way she couldn’t explain. She wanted to retreat to her room and listen to the Beatles and Buffalo Springfield. Love songs helped her imagine what love could be and she could feel it, just by closing her eyes.
Daydreaming in class one afternoon, Donna was jarred awake when her teacher asked her to step into the hall. She couldn’t imagine what she had done wrong. Her stomach went sour when she saw her father standing tall beside a row of lockers in the hallway, looking serious around the mouth. He said he needed to take her home. She couldn’t remember later exactly how her daddy told her; she could only remember his hand on her back while they walked out to his car, and how afraid she felt not knowing what was going on.
Her father took her out of school to tell her that Denny Golden, the first boy who had ever liked her, had fallen into a diabetic coma and died suddenly after his high school graduation party. Her parents were afraid she would find out at school and decided it was best that they tell her at home. Alone in her room, she took out Denny’s love notes and arranged them in front of her on her bed, a half-moon of folded squares. She couldn’t bring herself to read them, but she didn’t want to put them away, either. She thought of Denny’s mother, and how kind she had always been to her. Donna gathered his letters into her cupped palms, a pile as light as the bones of a bird. Poor Denny.
She was almost eighteen when Donna met another boy she liked, a painter named Dennis Gregorian. He wasn’t exactly a flower child; he was darker and more mysterious than that, like Bob Dylan, with long brown hair and a full mouth. She thought his face was beautiful. He lived in a rented room in a run-down boardinghouse in Gaslight Square. He and his brother John were runaways, cruising around town in their big all-American heap of a car. Dennis told her they were broke. They siphoned gas from strangers’ cars at night to keep their own car running. When Dennis and John picked Donna up after school, girls would stare and wrap their arms more tightly around their books. Sometimes Donna went back to his room and they kissed a little, but usually they took drives in Forest Park and sat in the sun, talking about art and music. Being with Dennis was easy and sweet, with just a faint feeling of something more serious beginning to happen underneath.
On April 4, 1968, a few minutes after six o’clock in the evening, Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee. As the news of his murder spread, people began taking to the streets all over the country in outrage and sorrow. The Roosmann house was quiet; no one was talking about what had happened. Donna had snuck out of the house to go dancing at the Starlight Ballroom with Mary Jo, unaware of the assassination in Tennessee. As people gathered, word of King’s death shocked the teen club into silence. No one there was sure how to mark the horrible moment, except to spend it quietly together.
Riots were erupting all over the country. Chicago and Washington, D.C., were burning. Louisville, Baltimore, Kansas City, and a hundred other American cities were overcome by riots that led to occupations by the National Guard, called in to restore order. Thousands of people were injured and arrested, buildings were destroyed, power was knocked out, curfews were imposed, and even as the revolts went on for days, it still felt to many like no response could ever be great enough to express the damage done to the world. King’s death was an immeasurable loss.
Donna was only dimly aware of the scale of the trauma that was tearing the country apart, but in a way, it effected a rupture in her life as well. She leaned into her parents’ bedroom door late that night, and whispered that she was home. From their bed, her parents could smell the pungent reek of cigarette smoke on their daughter’s clothes. Her mother started to shout.
“Donna, where have you been? Have you been smoking? There is a curfew! You should have called! Do you have any idea what you have put us through?”
Her father boomed louder, “While you live in my house, you will live by my rules!”
“Then maybe I shouldn’t live here!” she answered, so quickly and firmly she surprised herself.
Just like that, Donna turned on her heel and left the dark house with nothing but a little purse over her shoulder. She walked down the hill past all the silent, shadowed houses, their lawns damp from sprinklers. She was so angry, she felt like screaming. As she turned back to look toward home, her mother’s car rolled slowly toward her, Tommie Jean’s face peering through the windshield. Donna stepped quickly behind a neighbor’s thick hedge and crouched down until the car rounded the corner.
She ran in her high-heeled sandals straight down to the gas station at the foot of the hill, swearing she would never go back again. She called Dennis from a pay phone but he didn’t answer. She knew she had to stay off the street because of the curfew, so she hid in the Shell station ladies’ restroom. She leaned against the wall by the towel dispenser, then sat balanced on the dirty ledge next to the sink with her legs crossed and waited, looking slowly at each item in her purse, counting out meager change in her palm. She thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., and tried to remember something he had said, some part of a speech she had heard on the radio, but nothing would come. It seemed even more outrageous that her parents were being so unfeeling, on this night of all nights.
A couple of hours later, Dennis finally picked up the phone in the boardinghouse hallway, sounding dreamy and odd, and agreed to pick her up. He swung his big car around the gas pumps and stopped right in front of the restroom door, and Donna jumped in and slid close to him on the bench seat. They drove back to Gaslight Square slowly and carefully with headlights off, rolling through the locked-down city like a shadow.
Donna stayed with Dennis for almost a month. Dennis took her to school in the mornings, and after classes, she took a bus to her job as a cashier and stock girl at Pier 1 Imports. Her mother visited her at work a couple of times and tried to convince her to come home, but she wouldn’t. When Donna went home to pick up some of her things, she didn’t say a word to anyone. She felt like a thief in her own closet.
Dennis’s room had a high ceiling and scant furniture, just a narrow bed, dusty dresser, and wooden chair that looked decades old. He owned nothing but a couple of shirts and some jeans, art supplies he kept in a dented toolbox, and a few canvases leaning against the wall. The room’s air was stale. One weak bulb lit the room. The single window looked out over a row of the old gas streetlights the neighborhood was named for, shining on the sidewalks where hip kids walked back and forth all night long. Donna felt time slow down and open up, unfurling empty hours belonging only to them. She wanted to walk outside into the tumult of the street and stay there until the morning, just to feel the truth that no one was watching or waiting for her.
Donna and Dennis slept side by side in the little bed, which she had never done with a boy before. Lying there in their cotton underwear, kissing slowly, she somehow felt he was out of reach. This was the problem with Dennis: Donna couldn’t get close to him. She couldn’t catch and keep his eye. Sex wasn’t even a thought between them; she wasn’t ready and he wasn’t asking. He had other interests. Dennis was a drug addict.
He and his friends shot paregoric, a tincture of opium. You could get it at drugstores, although they limited the number of bottles you could buy at one time. You were supposed to sip it in small doses for upset stomachs. Donna sat with Dennis in a stranger’s dim kitchen and watched him cook down dark liquid in a little saucepan to concentrate the opium and burn off the camphor. Then he wrapped a rubber tube around his arm and slid a needle smoothly into his vein. She watched his expression slip down, then his body follow in a slump. He was more gone than he’d be if he walked out the door; his eyes were unseeing, his back bent low. Donna was alone and could only look at him and wonder what he felt like inside.
When Tommie Jean leaned over the counter at Pier 1 and told Donna she had to be careful, Donna worried for a minute that she had intuited something about the drugs. Then Donna realized with horror that her mom thought she was having sex. She had never talked to her mother about such intimate things, and under the fluorescent store lights with a counter between them, she was mortified by her mother’s intensity. It was awful to imagine what her father must think, and in a strange way, her desire to stay with Dennis ended right then. The fragile shell around her new life broke and the fear she pushed away flooded in. This wasn’t the life she wanted. She wanted music and dancing and the sun on her face—she wanted her freedom—but she wasn’t going to lose herself to get it. So, she went home. If Dennis noticed and minded, she couldn’t tell. He just let her go without a word.
Months later, on the day Donna graduated from high school, Dennis finally called her. She was out with her friends and missed the call. She guessed it was sort of a big deal that he called, but she felt different now. She was really over him. She did keep one of his paintings hanging in her room, a portrait of a man in a red velvet cloak, the shadows of the soft folds of fabric rendered in the most amazing way.
In the summer of 1968, Donna’s father gave her his VW Beetle. She really got her look together. She bought a pair of knee-high boots and a peach satin minidress and round wire-rimmed sunglasses.
And then she met Duane.