“....I WILL NEVER.... BE HUNGRY... AGAIN!” And then the score to Gone With the Wind swelled up as the camera zoomed away from the outline of Scarlett O’Hara and Part One of the movie came to an end.
“Time to the get the second tape,” Jinny said, getting up.
“But not until the music for the intermission is over,” Isaac told her.
“Are you serious?” Cecile looked at him.
Isaac looked a little injured as he stood up and turned on the light.
“Yes. Yes I was. I thought we were going to do it just like we were at the movies.”
“Well, I say let the music run,” Jinny told them. “I need to take a piss. And you,” she told Anne, “could make some more popcorn.”
Beside Jayson, Anne said, “Excellent idea,” and was up.
“I never thought it would be possible for any Black man to say this,” Efrem confided in Jayson, “but Scarlett O’Hara is my new hero. ‘As God is my witness, I won’t let the Yankees lick me....’ ”
“Everyone’s got a Scarlett in ‘em,” Cecile said. “Just waiting for the right tragedy.”
“What about you?” Jayson looked at her.
“I hope I’ve already had my tragedy,” she said blandly.
There was a knock at the door. Anne came out from the kitchen where the bag of microwave popcorn was beginning to pop, but then the door opened and Cecile betrayed herself by shouting, “Ryan!” Jinny, came downstairs commenting, “It’s just like Ashley coming back to Melanie!”
“Only Melanie owned slaves and Cecile would have been OUCH!—” Isaac turned to Efrem who had just pinched him.
“Aw, hey gang!” Ryan sounded incredibly tired. Jinny was next in line to hug him.
“I’m sorry we missed it,” Jinny said. “Oh, my God—you look so tired.” she pulled back, surveying him. The intermission music played on.
“You do look rough.”
“Thanks, Ef!” Ryan tried to laugh tiredly. “I’ve been on the road three days.”
“Next time take me,” Anne demanded.
“No, next time, take me,” Jayson faced his brother now. The two looked at each other and everything stood still.
“You had school,” Ryan told him. He was smacking his gum.
That was that, then.
“I’m glad you’re home, Ry,” said Jayson.
“I’m glad to be back.” They embraced quickly, then separated before sentiment could set in. Time resumed and Cecile cried, “Well thank God the intermission’s done. Time for tape two.”
When Aaron Weaver got off the phone he told his son, who was coming into the kitchen from down the hall, “That was your Aunt Louisa. She’ll be in tomorrow evening.”
“Wonderful,” Isaac looked up from the sheet he’d been studying.
“You have to be nice to her.”
“Of course,” Isaac said. “I always am.”
Aaron cocked his head.
“Oh, by the way,” Isaac added, “Sandy Perizzi called. You should call her.”
“Oh.”
“You know,” Isaac said as his father’s foot hit the step, “I invited her to the wedding.”
“You wha?”
“You needed a date.”
“I don’t—”
“Well, you do if you’re going be at my wedding. I’m not having my father come like some sad old bachelor.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome a lot. You’re only forty-five, Dad. You’ve still got it. You just don’t want to work it.”
Aaron Weaver looked at his impertinent son with a half smile and a raised eyebrow.
“Besides, I like Sandy Perizzi. And she likes you and I think you like her.”
“You just want me to marry her so that I’ll have to be a Catholic too.”
“Yes, Dad that was foremost in my mind. Plus you haven’t dated anyone since mom died.”
“Yes I have.”
“No, Dad, you’ve slept with a lot of women is what you’ve done.”
Aaron raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t suppose there’s anything taboo with you,” he said to his son. “Something you might not say to your old man.”
Isaac shook his head, “Not today, sir. And you are going with Sandy Perizzi to the wedding. That’s an order.”
Aaron turned around, muttering as he headed down the stairs, “I have dated.”
“You said that to your dad!”
“Yeah, well,” Isaac shrugged as Efrem signaled to Trisha, and the waitress approached.
“Man, let me bum a cigarette,” Ryan held out a palm, still chuckling.
“Sure thing. I’ll be glad when you’ve stopped quitting. Then you can buy your own.”
Isaac pushed a pack of Marlboros across the booth table . Out of nowhere, Ryan cuffed his little brother on the head and winked at Jayson.
“What’ll it be?” Trisha says.
“Are you coming to my wedding on Saturday?” Isaac asked.
Trisha looked amazed.
“Nothing should amaze you anymore,” Efrem told her.
“This is...”
“Well if you’re repulsed by the whole idea then just say no,” Isaac shot a pillar of smoke out of his mouth.
“No, I’m just surprised.”
“Even if I didn’t like you. It would be pretty shitty to plot out my wedding in front of you for six months and then not give you an invite.”
The waitress was so beside herself she forgot to take their order, which Isaac pointed out. Chicken Feast, All American Burger, Reuben, Big Fish Platter.
“It’s just a wedding.” Isaac told her. “Your invitation should be in your mailbox when you get home.”
“How—?”
“Come you didn’t get an invitation earlier?” Isaac guessed. “We just started sending them out. I know,” he said. “I’m slipshod.”
“No,” Trisha waved that away, sticking the notepad in her apron. “How’d you get my address?”
“Ef—” Isaac pointed to his quiet friend, who was paying too much attention to the dessert card, “He looked it up. Didn’t you, Ef? The guy’s a marvel.”
Trisha bent down, kissed Efrem on the cheek, and then vanished.
“Well, well,” Efrem murmured.
“You are a marvel, Ef. That was a great idea,” Isaac said. “If you were my slave. I’d free you.”
Efrem screwed up his face.
“I’ve still got Gone With the Wind on the brain.”
“Well, in that case,” Efrem returned, “If you were in Auschwitz, I’d make sure—”
“Hey! Hey!”
“Tit for tat.”
JINNY
IF MY COUSIN IDA HADN’T been there that summer who knows what would have happened? It would have taken more than Cecile to bring me out of my closet. My TJ Max closet. High school ended. It was the first time I had felt cute... ever. Sometimes I felt desirable. With Isaac. But I never felt cute, and I was sure I would never be desirable to anyone else.
My mother didn’t approve of it. You think that your mother is going to be the one to want you to look like a woman, especially after you’ve been looking like a lard ass for all those years.
I can hear Cecile saying, “You’re too hard on yourself. That’s your problem. You don’t see anything cute about you. How will anybody else?”
And that summer when Cecile and I came back from the mall with Sara and Amanda, I remember Ida telling my father to put a sock in it.
“I think everyone’s mad because for the first time you can see Virginia’s pretty.”
My cousin Ida, our cousin, is my father’s first cousin. He married late and is younger than Ida. Ida married pretty young and so she has grandchildren around Anne’s age. Some of them are pretty much like Anne. We never see them even though they live in Ohio too, on the Indiana border. A long time ago Ida came to go to school here, at Saint Clare’s in fact, and she hated it. She had never really lived here and thought she’d find a nice downhome Irish Catholic family. But, as she told me later on, when she came to live with my grandfather, her uncle, he proved to be a big snob. No one ever treated her well and she left. My great grandmother put her sons into school, but one of her daughters didn’t have time for school or decency and that was Ida’s mother who shot out kid after kid to a different father. Ida’s world was not nearly as polished as the one we lived in. Years later I’m sure she’s got more money than us and she’s definitely got more class, but there is something stuffy about our part of the family. She says we’re not really Irish anymore. She says we’ve gotten Anglo-Saxon.
“You all are the whitest people I’ve ever met,” she says, taking out a cigarette. “You might as well be Episcopalians!”
I think she’s right about that. She doesn’t come often, but when she does there are presents for me and Anne, whom she loves, and nothing but derision for my father and his siblings... Who, I’m not too fond of myself.
So that summer she convinced them that I was pretty and they were jealous, and she helped convince me.
“If you ever get tired of this one horse town,” Ida told me. “You can come down to my one horse town. We’ve got a great school down there.”
So Ida is one of those people who’s helped me to feel beautiful through the years. There are too many people who will make you feel ugly, and we spend too much time thinking about them. What they say, how angry we get. I don’t think about Ida enough. Or Amanda and Sara, who I haven’t seen in a long while, hardly saw in high school. Or Cecile who was with me all the way.
The summer I met Isaac, my first and really my only boyfriend, the love of my life, ra, ra, ra, was also the summer that a doctor told me I was fat. And I was. But I cried. And what’s more, he called me morbidly obese. Do you know what that does to a girl? And my mother railed and said, “You are not obese, Virginia.” But she would also say, “Why don’t you not have seconds, honey,” when I’d reach for more roast beef at dinner.
The truth was that I wasn’t morbidly obese, and Efrem said it to me. He said, “If you just forget about it the weight’ll go. That’s what I’ve heard. If you’re always thinking about how fat you are and how you can’t eat you’ll eat. If you just eat when you’re hungry, no problem. If everytime you get hungry, you make yourself aware that you’re about to eat... no problem. You just need to pay attention to your mouth and no attention to everyone elses.”
This was such good advice that I forgot it. I mean I forgot I was doing it. The second bit of advice came a long time later and helped me realize that because I wasn’t skinny didn’t mean I was fat. It was a long time before I realized that some women were big and bigboned and that was all there was to it. Up until then every girl I’d met who called herself big boned I could look at and realize was really fat as hell. I’d encountered very few actual big boned women so it took me awhile to realize I was one. What Isaac got was not a fatty. What he got was a frump.
But he was a frump too. Hell, we were frumpy together that whole summer. We were frumpy when we hung out with Cecile. We were frumpy at the movies. We were frumpy at home. We were frumpy making out. And we knew it. We were hopelessly frumpy in our own world of frumption which is why I think sex came so early. At the technical end it came late, but in actuality we were rolling around almost instantaneously. If we’d been pretty, I don’t think this would have happened. But we didn’t live in the world of pretty people. We lived in the Frumpy Kingdom. And in Frumpyland we could do what we wanted because both of us were pretty sure that no one else was going to do it with us.
But that hadn’t happened the day that I was crying over the phone to Cecile, either forgetting or just not caring that she was a year beneath me.
“Isaac’s going to the public school. He’s going to Whitman.”
“Then why don’t you go to Whitman with him?”
“I can’t. My parents are making me go to Little Flower!”
“Girl, tell them Little Flower’s twelve hundred a year and Whitman’s free. It’s that easy. You better put your foot down.”
Well, I put my foot down and my father said that Whitman wasn’t in our district anyway. Rogers was—which I did not want to go to. I was bowled over to realize that the cut off line for the Whitman district was the other side of my street.
My Aunt Catherine came into the picture now.
“It’s love, isn’t it?” she said.
“What?”
“You’ve got a crush on a boy, don’t you?”
“Well that, and I don’t want any more Catholic school.”
My Aunt nodded. “I can’t blame you for that. Well, I’ll tell you what. You can live here. I mean, for the records. This will be your address.”
“What?”
“This is the Whitman district,” Aunt Catherine told me.
And so it was settled.
I came over to the bookstore and told Isaac.
It never occured to me that I’d be cramping his style by going to his high school. Of course at fourteen Isaac didn’t have any style to cramp.
We were so emotional. It was just like Romeo and Juliet, the Franco Zefirelli version. Isaac closed the store and we went up to his room and we just kept fooling around until we were both thrilled as hell and naked on his bed and then I had my first orgasm. I saw Isaac naked for the first time. I was seen naked for the first time. I knew what it was like to hold a human body between my left and right hands, feel it shudder and come. We lay on our backs, and then turned to each other and went to sleep.
Frumpyland!
