Chapter 5: Curriculum change
High-school journalism class: putting the school newspaper to bed, typing last-minute stories late into the golden January afternoon. Strange it took a session with a shrink over thirty years later to bring that day to vivid life.
Once more I see palm trees on the edge of the school grounds thrash in the onshore breeze. The breeze would cut like a knife through my denim jacket on the way home. My Cushman motor scooter leaned on its kickstand by the hurricane fence at the school’s north gate beside the journalism teacher’s Nash Metropolitan.
I liked that the school paper was named The Northeaster, because I loved autumn Northeasters that blew in after Labor Day and flushed away summer’s muggy heat. The tourists vanished, the Beaches belonged to the locals again. But I never wanted to be a journalism student. It was forced on me by a curriculum change this second half of my senior year.
My senior art class was canceled over the Christmas holiday. Blond, lanky soft-spoken Mr. Lundquist, with a passion for art and a strange soft lisp somebody said was Scandinavian, was gone as if he had never been. The art classroom was stripped and dark, the students scattered. Nobody seemed to know what happened to him. No teacher would talk about it. If I tried to ask, they got funny strained looks and their eyes got shifty.
I wasn’t happy about journalism class. I didn’t think highly of newspapers and magazines, or the men who wrote for them. One and all, they dragged my mother’s name through the ink after the state attorney said a seafood cook murdered a cab driver because of her. But I already was trying to write fiction, influenced by the matriarch of my family, herself a disappointed writer. My English teachers said my short stories showed I was a good writer when I applied myself. I needed the semester credit to graduate.
“But I want to be an artist,” I told the counselor. “Mr. Lundquist was going to get me an apprenticeship with his friend in Jacksonville who runs a studio. Drawing and painting all day, every day. I can’t draw women. He said his friend would fix that, there were live nude models to study.”
“Yes, well…” The counselor pursed her mouth at the word ‘nude’ and her eyes got shifty like the others.
So now I was under the supervision of petite, spare Miss Bensen, she of the slightly protuberant blue eyes, nondescript pageboy haircut and passion for snappy paragraphs. All the other journalism students had been together since September, so I was odd man out. Miss Bensen liked my writing right away though. And I knew most of my new classmates. The one I knew best was Sharon from Sunday school, ironically named the same as my third-grade girlfriend in another state.
This Sharon, and this long-ago January day, is why my 1990s shrink directed my thoughts backward, deep in time’s well. I saw Sharon almost every Sunday for six years since my family moved to the Beaches. But being with her in a small high school class was different. Sharon had blossomed without my noticing. But I noticed that long-ago January.
Sharon’s body had caught up to her dramatic face. She was like some exotic feline creature among the other teenage girls our age with their faded tans, pancake makeup and plucked brows. I was fascinated and uneasy with Sharon’s changed appearance, and with her familiar-strange nearness in journalism class instead of Sunday school. She had developed softly rounded curves to go with her ink-black hair, smooth olive skin and those dark glowing eyes that always brimmed with secret amusement. Her unplucked crow-wing-black eyebrows met above her strong nose without a break, symmetrical as the lifted wings of that crow. To my fledgling artist’s eye, the effect was a reverse negative of the white wings of flying seagulls Mr. Lundquist had required me to paint repeatedly. Finally he allowed I might become a Boardwalk painter good enough to impress Tobacco Belt tourists.
The matriarch had warned me for as long as I could remember to beware the wiles of girls. She had me scared of girls even as I lusted hopelessly. So far the result was stalemate: no dates, no kisses, no clumsy groping in a movie theater.
Teenage girls at this stage of their lives were after boys for one of two reasons the matriarch would lecture, creaking back and forth in her old Georgia rocking chair in our garage-apartment home. Their first motive was to seduce you into showing interest and then yelling rape if you touched them. The second motive was related to the first, but more deadly. They would trick you into doing more than touch, getting them pregnant, and rope you into an early marriage.
Then you can kiss your art career goodbye she would say, let alone any hope of being a writer. And pause in her rocking to unload a brown stream of Butternut snuff into her spit can. She remained bitter about the marriages of all her sons, and hoped to teach me better. Shameless hussies always go after the honorable boys who would do the right thing for the wrong reason, she warned. By her lights every single female my age was a shameless hussy.
For proof she offered a member of my Sea Scout squadron: a star athlete who dropped out to marry and get a job to support an impending child. He rode a real motorcycle and the blonde always seemed glued to his back, both of which I envied. Our sarcastic squadron-mates asked where the baby would ride — on the headlight?
I could never reconcile the matriarch’s contempt for women with my mother’s evident role as the object of jealous gun-play. Her involvement with the seafood cook left me terribly confused. My brain flatly denied sexual inference — despite salacious hints in newspapers and magazines.
The shrink thought my confusion stemmed from an absent mother spending time with men like a seductive single woman. I rejected that. She wasn’t absent; she was working to put money at the house. She hoarded tip money to purchase my scooter. The matriarch and her husband ran the household, but my mother was always there for me. The shrink’s sudden interest in the seductive absent mother theory (“Every session you reveal another layer, like peeling an onion.”) diverted her momentarily. Professional that she was, she bookmarked my mother for another time and got back to Sharon.
Sharon liked me well enough all the safe Sunday-school years. She seemed to like me in journalism class. The day the shrink dragged out of painful memory unwound behind my eyes like a movie reel… I was on one of the class’s three big Royal typewriters, finishing an editorial about the evils of driving drunk. Timely and relevant, Miss Bensen said — but don’t be too specific and cause fresh pain. On Christmas Eve a drunken college kid had slaughtered the longtime high-school shop teacher and his wife out on Beach Boulevard. This was the first Northeaster since the event. I remembered an old Roy Acuff song on the Grand Ole Opry: “…I heard the crash on the highway, but I didn’t hear nobody pray…When whiskey and blood ran together, I didn’t hear nobody pray…” and used some of the words. Miss Bensen liked it.
Then I finished a sports cartoon, using left-over India ink and sketch pens to draw a catcher suspended high above a baseball diamond, gloving a Soviet Sputnik, while tiny figures below stared up at him. The caption: “Nothing gets by that boy.” Sharon arched her left eyebrow, amused. Asked if I could find typos as well as I drew. Complimenting and teasing me at the same time, strangely exciting. I found more than her. She allowed I possessed many talents.
Even my shrink’s gentle prod could not release how it came up the last school bus had departed and Sharon faced a three-mile walk home. “Let me drive you home.” I plunged before I could think.
Her eyes were full of immediate mirth. “I’m not riding behind you on that.” Head toss toward my scooter out the window. “What? Hike my skirt clear up — I don’t even know how high! — and show my legs and who knows what to everybody on the Beaches? No, thanks.”
In this land of the endless swimsuit, a high-hiked skirt was instantly inflaming. Particularly if such suddenly bare legs would be around my waist. But I was shocked she thought I would compromise her dignity that way. “Your ears are turning red.” She giggled.
“I didn’t mean the scooter. I meant my car.”
“What car?” She didn’t believe me for a second.
“My 1955 Mercury sedan.” Before I could stop myself.
She cocked her head, considering. “Does this car of yours have a heater?”
“Of course it has a heater!” I was sunk. I didn’t have a car. My grandfather had not let me drive the Mercury three times. Maybe she’d turn me down and I could save face…
“Well, okay,” Sharon said. “Where’s your car?”
“At home. Students can’t park cars on the school ground.” That at least was true.
“Oh.” Her mouth turned down. “Too bad. The scooter or nothing, huh?”
My shrink stopped me there. Didn’t I know Sharon accepted the idea of my scooter? Never crossed my mind.
I told Sharon I would go get the car. Digging myself deeper.“Well — Okay,” she said. “But I’m not going to wait here for you. I’ll start walking home. You can pick me up on Third Street when you get back.”
She didn’t want anybody to see her waiting for me. That was really smart of her. That’s how rumors start in high school. It took four kicks for the cold engine to sputter to life. Then the choke caught and held. When the Cushman plodded up to speed my eyes streamed; only sissies wore goggles. Then I was home, wondering what the hell to do now.
The matriarch was ensconced in the TV room watching “Dark Shadows” on the old B&W Muntz. A soap opera about Barnabas the Vampire. The strange details you recall decades later. “What’s got you in such a state of high dudgeon?” I never knew what a state of high dudgeon was till that minute.
The shrink thought it amusing about Barnabas the Vampire. What did you tell her? she asked. I managed to convey poor Sharon was running a bit of fever from hard school work and might catch her death walking home in the chilly afternoon. The old man was napping when the matriarch nudged him. The old fire horse rolled over and started to put on his shoes almost before his eyes were open. Quick as he was, his wife was back with Barnabas before he got them tied.
“I’ll go take the poor child home.” He was yawning and scratching under his arms. My life flashed in front of my eyes. I would die if he went. But he smirked, more comprehending than I could have imagined. “You told her you’d come get her yourself,” he said.
My throat locked, but I nodded.
He flipped me the keys. “Those are cloth and suede seats in that car, you hear? If they get anything sticky on them, they still better come home clean as they leave.”
I fled. The old man had a way with women — any woman, any time, anywhere — that gave the lie to his wife’s fierce portrait of a male’s vulnerability to treacherous witches one and all. It never crossed his mind I wasn’t going to try hanky panky — any more than it crossed hers that I would. I sternly controlled my rioting emotions as I guided the big Mercury out of its narrow garage. If I dented a fender, might as well never come home. No one wanted to awaken the old man’s titanic temper.
Before I knew it I was cruising grandly past the high school, eyes raking Third Street sidewalks for Sharon. Would she walk on this side or the other side? I wasn’t about to drive past her focusing just on one side. Three miles to her cross street at the end of town twisted time’s pace. It had been racing like a stopwatch before I got the Mercury. Now it slowed to a torpid crawl. I was all the way south before I could grasp Sharon wasn’t on Third Street.
The heater was throwing out too much heat. I was sweating through my shirt. I cranked down the window and turned off the heat. The deepening chill off the ocean dried sweat. I could start warming the car up when I saw her.
Maybe she stopped off for a Penny burger and a Coke. I drove north, trying to look everywhere at once. She wasn’t there. Maybe she changed her mind and waited out of the cold. Maybe Miss Bensen made last-minute changes and kept her even later.
Maybe some crazed rapist from New Jersey snatched her off the street in broad daylight.
The journalism classroom was dark. It felt weird to drive the Mercury around the school-bus loading loop. Maybe I heard wrong. Maybe she said First Street and I heard Third. What an idiot! I drove toward the ocean and turned on First Street, rolling slowly through lengthening shadows past motel after deserted motel. Not a tourist to be seen. The motel pools were empty as the parking lots. Most motels had their Vacancy signs turned off. No sign of Sharon.
That only left Second Street, lined with cottages and small apartment buildings, one of which was where the cook ambushed the cab driver. A few locals were out in the cold, some walking dogs. Every female form triggered a rush of relief followed by deepening dread when it wasn’t Sharon.
She had vanished from the face of the earth. All because I offered her a ride home. It was my fault.
Finally I accepted enough time had passed for her to walk home. If newspapers were to be believed, people — children or attractive girls — walked away from home or school and vanished. Sometimes their brutalized bodies were found, sometimes they were simply — gone. Fear crept through my unwilling brain.
Sharon’s big two-story home sat just behind the seawall. Smoke puffed out of a chimney, shredded by the onshore breeze. Long shadows cast by her big house reached across the seawall to the beach. Not details I shared with my shrink, but unrelentingly clear in memory. I trudged up the wide front stairs and rang the bell. A smiling woman answered and invited me out of the bitter wind.
I introduced myself in the wood-smoke-smelling hall as Sharon’s Sunday-school classmate. Her mother said how nice! Oh too bad you’ve missed her! She works late on the school newspaper. I said I knew. Then my words came in a rush. The proffered ride, the agreement to pick her up on Third Street, my search. Maybe Sharon had called? I was afraid I sounded like an idiot until I saw worry.
“No, Sharon hasn’t called.” Her husband came to the door, still in suit and tie from the city.
“This isn’t like Sharon. Is it?” he said.
“No it isn’t.”
They thanked me almost formally. For the offer of a ride, for looking for Sharon, and finally for letting them know something must have happened. I drove home in a daze. Later the matriarch was watching the six o’clock news and I was sitting on the dark downstairs porch close to the old Duo-Therm oil heater when the phone rang.
The old man yelled from the kitchen. “Ish. Some girl.” He handed me the phone. “First time for everything,” he grumbled. “Now they’re calling you at home. Where’s it gonna end?”
I turned my back, ears burning. “Hello?”
“Hello.” Sharon sounded like she was suppressing a laugh. I felt my stomach flip-flop. “My mother made me call you. She said you were all worried about me.”
The amusement in her voice cut. I didn’t know what to say. “I looked everywhere for you,” I said finally. “What happened to you?”
“Nothing happened to me, silly! I just decided to walk home along the beach. Feel the cold breeze in my hair. Winters are too short in Florida, don’t you think?”
I did. Any other time I would have been thrilled Sharon and I saw eye to eye on that. But I couldn’t shake the emotions of the afternoon. “You walked home along the beach,” I repeated mechanically. “But you said you’d like a ride home!”
“No.” Laughing openly now. “You said you’d give me a ride. I just changed my mind and decided to walk on the beach.”
“But I looked for you all over.” I hated the whine.
“I knew you probably would. I didn’t want to be bothered. So I took the beach.”
At that precise instant, the old man went into the tiny downstairs bathroom on the other side of the kitchen wall to urinate. The sound of the heavy flow came clearly into the kitchen — it was why no one could use that bathroom when there was company. I thought I would just go ahead and die if Sharon heard that, sitting in her big warm house with a real fireplace burning real wood.
“What’s that sound?” she asked right away.
“What sound?”
“You sound dopey, Ish,” she said. “Did I wake you up? What’s that roaring sound? It sounds just like an electric train going round and round. Do you still play with electric trains, Ish?”
After her casual cruelty about ducking me, I couldn’t imagine being much more miserable. What on earth had the old man been drinking? He never drank beer and stopped drinking corn liquor when he retired. Finally he was done. “I don’t play with electric trains anymore,” I said.
“You just turned off the transformer and stopped your little Lionel train when I caught you!” Sharon was having fun. “I never knew you were so silly, Ish!”
Words stuck in my throat. The matriarch went on and on about girls who yelled rape or trapped you into marriage. She never warned they could make you feel like an utter moron. I hated this so bad I was grinding my teeth.
“I think playing with an electric train is cute for your age,” Sharon said. “Maybe I’ll come over someday and help you play with it.”
Thirty years on, commenting on my near-total recall of an ancient conversation, my shrink was surprised by my answer that as a child I was told I had a photographic memory. (“Another layer of the onion!”) Then she said if my recall was accurate as that, Sharon was trying to make amends. Didn’t see it then. Still don’t.
“I don’t have an electric train!” I said. “All I wanted was to give you a ride home.”
“Well, I just decided that I didn’t want you to.”
How could I ever face her in class after being such a dupe? Would everybody know? “You could have just told me you didn’t want a ride.”
“I didn’t want to hang around on the street where you could bother me about it.”
Bother. Second time she said it. Such a simple word. Such a dagger in my heart. I was crushed. If this was how it was going to be with girls I wanted no part of it, or them.
But you must have been angry, my shrink said. You had a right to be angry. To speak up for yourself. Try it. Tell her now. Right here. An exercise.
Immediate angry words jammed together in my head. I didn’t mean to bother you, your Highness! Kiss my pimply Georgia ass, Princess! Not on the left side and not on the right side, but right in the middle. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I bother you again, you heartless bitch! There, the shrink said. Don’t you feel better?
Maybe. Maybe not. The shrink was surprised one “trivial” incident poisoned my trust of the female species so thoroughly. She didn’t have the back-story of the matriarch’s conditioning — another onion layer I suppose. She said Sharon liked me, who knows what would have happened if I spoke up for myself? But I didn’t. The humiliation festered. I could barely stand the rest of the semester in journalism class. I armored my soul against her dark laughing eyes. It got easier but no less painful. The last time I saw her was in cap and gown at graduation.
