The last day before Christmas break, after weeks of Penny insisting, I finally bring a copy of Howie’s issue of Playgirl to school. We huddle in a gamy old stall in the boys’ room and flip to the center.
Maybe this was a bad idea. Even clothed, I can see the soft folds of my stomach, the absence of chest or arm or pit hair. Only a few sprouts down below, but they don’t constitute pubes exactly. They’re more like sprinkles (in Salem, they call them Jimmies). Jimmies in my jammies, in other words, and not much else. Hard to imagine anyone wanting a centerfold of this. And here is Penny, spending far longer than I would like, lingering over the pictures of Howie in the buff.
“I didn’t realize he was so … muscly,” she says softly, slender fingers tracing his image, breath held. “You just told me he was a hippie. I was thinking of something different.”
“Well, he … you know, he was working out a lot. It’s because of my dad, actually.”
“Uhhhh … I’ve seen your dad. Your dad’s not built like this.” More importantly, I’m not built like this. Next to Howie, I might as well be Nusselballs.
“No, but he inspired him,” I say, playing the passion card. “He convinced him to work harder on his body because … Anyway, you know, they grease you up for the pictures, too, so it makes you look more muscly than you really are. If he was here right now he wouldn’t look like this.”
She nods, flipping back to the beginning of Howie’s section.
I reach gently for the magazine. “We probably need to go back to class.”
“He almost looks like Leif, don’t you think? The way they did his hair? Can I keep this one?”
“Is there a girl in here?” a boy asks, from the urinals outside.
We stop talking. Penny grabs my hand and squeezes, smiling brilliantly. My skin burns hotter, and I shift closer to her on the wobbly toilet seat. She stands up and sits back down on my lap, eviscerating all the bad feelings that had begun to creep into the stall with us. She lifts my hand to her mouth, bites my index finger in mock anxiety. I lean in to her, trying to shift in such a way that our chests might touch. The witch shop incense smell draws me to the nape of her neck and I try to kiss the pulsing bit of her throat that moves as she swallows and pulls back, shaking her head slowly and smiling, pressing a finger to my lips.
“Hello?” the kid calls again. He’s debating whether or not to pee. After a long pause he walks out without doing any business.
“Why not?” I ask. “I don’t like anyone else but you.”
“Gretchen?”
“Ugh. She’s always following me around and showing up at my house without asking. And she talks like—”
“What about the girls from New York?” she asks, a little pout forming on her lips. “They’re much better than I am.”
“I don’t live in New York anymore. And besides, I didn’t like anyone there. I like you. I think we should be boyfriend and girlfriend.” There. I said it.
“I don’t know. You’re kind of my best friend. I don’t want to mess everything up.”
“Just kiss me and see. Just try. Once.” Her face broadens, open to possibility.
Penny leans forward, bringing her face as close as possible to mine, Bubblicious breath and sandalwood filling my nose. “You know what the thing is about boyfriends and girlfriends?” she asks, searching my face.
“No,” I whisper.
“They don’t last.” And she pulls back, the spell broken. “But friends last forever. Everybody else could just disappear for all I care, as long as we can still be friends.”
Ugh. The December chill seeps back into the narrow wooden cubicle that, only a moment ago, had been as hot as the sun. It is that special Salem chill, the one that rides the sea wind and smells of headstone lichen and wet black cat.
But she did say forever. I imagine myself in a loincloth, rifle in hand, and Penny clutching my chest as we ride a horse across the desert. Lady Liberty sinks in the distance, buried in the sand, but up ahead is a world all our own. Her rejection is a no with a maybe wrapped around it. I shake off the chill and try to keep the flicker alive. “We’ll always be best friends,” I promise. “Forever.”
“Great,” Penny brightens, stands up from my lap, rolls the magazine into a tube, and wedges it into her back pocket. “I’ll give this back to you at the end of the day, OK?”
When the bell rings, she’s nowhere to be found.
* * *
Bagels on Sunday and a Christmas tree for Hanukkah: this is the extent of traditions in the Cove household. Thankfully, the first of eight boring days happens to fall next Monday, Christmas Day, so we get to do presents then, like normal people. But the evening of The Thing turned out to be the start of an entirely new tradition: a secret Friday night ritual for Uli and me.
Mama and Papa make the holiday party rounds, filling the void left for them when Howie and Carly left for Pittsburgh. I miss them. They hardly call, and when they do it’s brief, flecked with long-distance static and unfamiliar voices competing in the background. Meanwhile, my parents are making new friends in Salem: artists and judges, writers and priests. They host often, including a party they threw for the entire neighborhood and “anyone who can sled, ski, or snowshoe to our house” during a blizzard when the roads and schools were closed for days. We played all four sides of Saturday Night Fever over and over, all night long, while guests smoked cigars and joints and raised glasses of brown liquor on ice. There wasn’t anyone who hadn’t turned bleary-eyed and silly or just left by ten o’clock. And not many people left.
As disruptive as this parade of strangers can be, I take some comfort in living in the place that people think of when they want to shuck their calloused Salem shells. And Papa is happy to provide. The more, the merrier he is. Spike the punch bowl and dance.
When my parents do look elsewhere for their good times, they want to put me in charge to save money on sitters. I call Uli as soon as they leave, move the clock in the kitchen ahead to persuade Amanda and David to go to bed extra early, swipe a pinch of weed from the cigar box in my parents’ closet, and let the ritual commence.
When we stuff the towel under my bedroom door and light the first bowl, I feel an unfamiliar sense of routine and belonging.
For this round, Uli arrives early with five new records. I pull five of my own. We agree on a playlist, check the Salem Evening News listings to see if the TV lineup has changed and who the guests are on Donny & Marie (George Burns, Chubby Checker, and Evel Knievel) and on Johnny Carson (Johnny Mathis and Mel Brooks), divvy up the pile of porno mags Howie left behind and stack them on our respective bunks, and position our respective cum rags for later use. Then we hit Steve’s Corner Store before dinner.
We load up on Ding Dongs, Big Wheels, Fruit Pies, Fritos, Cheetos, Doodads, and one giant box of forbidden cereal apiece. I go Apple Jacks. Uli always frets over the big choice: Count Chocula or Boo Berry? We get a half gallon of milk each and spend the rest of our money (raided from the trench coats and cluttered purses in the hall downstairs) on comics.
Steve busts us when we try to switch from browsing the twirly COMICS FOR ALL AGES wire rack to eyeing the adult titles behind the counter. He stops his habitual pencil drumming on the counter and yells at us before we’re close enough to make out anything more than the titles. And Steve never yells. But this time he’s waving a copy of the Salem Evening News wildly at us, open to a page with an article titled “Aid Sought in Smut War,” and shaking his head.
“Cease and desist, junior jerk offs. This guy, Connelly? Acting city marshal?” Steve smacks the article with the back of his hand, “‘I’m doing an “out-and-out crackdown on smut,”’ he says. Cops! Like that’s the big problem we got in this town. Not robberies. Not gangs. Skin flicks and Hustlers. You know how much of my business is girlie mags?”
We shake our heads.
“Enough that I ain’t gonna lose my license ’cause you horny wharf rats get me hung out to dry. This guy’s a crusader. And nobody likes a crusader. Especially a Salem crusader.”
“Like the caped crusader?” Uli and I say almost simultaneously.
“Like stick to the comic books and the munchies and find your titty mags somewhere else.”
We settle for new issues of the Defenders, Champions, and Ghost Rider and head home.
Life has become predictable again without Howie and Carly to surprise us. The only magic now comes when Uli and I lock my door and light the match. It’s too cold to smoke on the roof so we stoke the fireplace until the cover is blistering to the touch, then open the windows and put spark to bowl. Like Penny’s cats, this miracle marijuana doesn’t trigger my asthma. I’m free.
Time shifts with the weed, dragging and accelerating simultaneously, and before we know what’s happened we’ve lost all restraint, laughing out of control, pouring milk directly into our cereal boxes, burying faces in pillows to stifle the ecstatic hysteria that flows from a wicked high with a wicked good friend.
We wrestle, land splat on the Fruit Pies, and unleash a Count Chocula milk tsunami across the solid green paint of the floor and debate endlessly about whether or not it’s safe to leave the room.
“It’s safe.”
“Nuh uh.”
“They’re asleep.”
“No they’re not.”
“I heard them.”
“Fuck it.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Wait. See?”
“OK. I’m going crazy in here! Aghhhh!”
Uli suddenly gets serious. “When’s Howie coming back?” he asks, slumping to the floor in front of the fireplace. “Your house is totally more boss with him.”
“I know. This sucks.”
“No, it’s already awesome. I mean, this is the only house I even want to sleep over at.” He picks his nose, flicks the booger into the snapping blaze of logs, and chews his lower lip, squinting at the heat like there’s something hiding from him there. “Seriously. Nobody else has parents like yours. They’re cool and let you talk about stuff. And smoke pot.”
“It’s not as cool as you think. And they don’t really let me smoke pot. They just don’t … bring it up. There’s a difference.”
“You just don’t know because you live here. Does my house seem cool to you?”
Those tiny rooms. The anxious mood. The soundless, stiff-postured, folded napkins, forks-on-the-right-side (left side?) mealtimes. “No.”
“Exactly.” He slides to the floor, looks to the ceiling, and slowly shakes his head side to side. “And I hate it. I want to move out. I want to live someplace where people don’t tell you what to do all the time.”
“My mom keeps telling me I have to study Hebrew. To have a Bar Mitzvah.” Uli frowns at the Jewish gibberish. “A thing you have to do when you turn thirteen. You have to read in Hebrew and everyone comes and then you become a man. Supposedly.”
“You become a man? Right then?”
“That’s what they say.”
“Thirteen. See? That is so cool. I want to be Jewish so bad.”
“Well, then there’d be two of us in this town,” I say. “You sure you want to be the weirdo?”
“I am the weirdo.”
“True. Well, talk to my dad. Maybe he’ll adopt you.”
“I’m going to.”
“Right.”
“I’m not shitting you.” Uli tosses a HoHo my way. “Rem, tongani!”
Mangani. Tarzan’s ape language. Rem means catch. Tongani is baboon.
I stand up and position myself in front of the door, arms akimbo. “This is my domain, and I protect all who come here, for I—”
“—am Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle!” we call in unison. The warbling brings Amanda knocking.
“GO AWAY!” we shout together, then laugh maniacally.
* * *
There are no words to describe what my mouth tastes like when I wake the next morning. Downstairs I find Uli, true to his word, deep in conversation with Papa about converting to Judaism.
“Not because I’m some big Jew,” Papa clarifies. “But you should be free to explore any belief system you want. Not beholden to some mythology you can’t get behind.”
“So you have a Christmas tree because…”
“Because I like the way it makes my house smell.”
“It’s true,” Uli says. “You don’t notice the bunny poop as much.”
“He’s potty trained,” Papa says in all seriousness. “But also because I don’t want anyone to tell me what to do. What? I can’t have a tree because I was born to a Jewish woman and a man with a circumcised penis? I’m not worshipping Jesus here. I’m putting up lights and garland and popcorn and cranberries. I’m not really a Jew or a Christian. I’m an American.”
“I’m going to do it,” Uli says.
“What?” I ask.
“Become Jewish.”
“You’re too old for a bar mitzvah,” I say. “You just missed it.”
“So I don’t have to study Hebrew!”
“Upside to everything,” Papa says. “By the way … did someone get into my stash yesterday?”