Midnight Radio
This memoir segment follows Going Steady.
The party on my eleventh birthday came to an end and everyone went
home. I saw Larry a few more times at school and talked to him on the phone before he and his mother and
brother moved away, first across Wichita to a different school, and
then just gone. Later,
much later, I’d learn that they had moved back to Colorado.
Dennis wasn’t speaking to me, so as far as I knew… I knew
nothing. Larry, foreshadowing his later disappearance from my life, was just not there.
I didn’t have another real boyfriend that year — one I saw outside of
school, that is. There were by far more girls interested in
pairing off than there were boys. Many of the boys still had the
juvenile boys’ attitude toward girls, seeing us as some sort of
repugnant alien creatures. Not only were we girls more sexually
mature than our male contemporaries and already seeking mates, we were
still taller than most of them. In retrospect, I feel sorta sorry
for the little guys whose puberty had pushed them into fascination with
girls before pushing them into a growth spurt, because we were
definitely focused on the tall ones. No girl I knew wanted to
stand next to a boy she had to look down to. This was the stage
at which tall girls started developing a stoop, because no boy would
want to look up at his girlfriend.
Speaking of puberty, six weeks into the school year in seventh grade, I
had my first menstrual period. I don’t know the date, never
attempted to remember the date, but I can’t forget the day. I
know it was six weeks into the term because it was my first “dress-up
day”. On the last Friday of each six-week grading period we had
dress-up day. Except on special days, the dress code for girls
was ankle-length sox. low-heel shoes, casual skirts or dresses and no
makeup. Boys were not allowed to wear blue jeans.
We had several “sloppy” days when girls could wear pants and boys could
wear blue jeans, and every six weeks for one Friday we girls could wear
heels, nylons, costume jewelry, and makeup. On that day, the boys
were supposed to wear dress slacks, white shirts and ties.
I had heels, but hadn’t really learned to walk in them. They were
castoffs from some of the college-age girls who had worked for Mama in
the sundries store. We were given plenty of advance notice of the
dress-up day, and Mama bought me a pair of nylon stockings. They
had seams up the back. One was supposed to put them on in such a
way that the seams would be straight. After a few years of
practice, I finally got the knack of that, but could never manage to
keep them straight for more than a few hours.
That first time, I couldn’t even keep my stockings UP.
My mother didn’t wear garter belts. I don’t know if I’d ever seen
one. Maybe I had, in some catalog. Mama kept her nylons up
with round garters, and she gave me a new pair of them with my new
nylons. They worked for her, with thick rolls of the sheer nylon
wrapped around the stretchy garter, held up by Mama’s fat knees.
They didn’t work for me, and throughout that morning of my first
dress-up day I endured the tickle of falling stockings as I teetered on
4-inch heels from class to class, and then tried to be as surreptitious
as possible when I pulled them back up.
The clothes I wore that day were classy and expensive hand-me-downs
from the time about ten years previously, right after WWII: a
straight wool skirt and matching sweater-set in a warm beige. I
didn’t wear the short-sleeve pullover sweater. I buttoned the
cardigan up the back and wore a green silk square folded diagonally and
knotted around my neck with the point behind one shoulder and the knot
over the opposite collarbone. The skirt had been a few inches below my
knee, and I had cut off some excess fabric at the bottom and hemmed it
to the more fashionable knee-length.
Before the next dress-up day, I would have a panty-girdle with hose
clips. Before that first dress-up day was over, I would have more
embarrasing things on my mind than falling stockings. Right after
lunch, Martha Lou came up behind me and grabbed my arm. “What did
you sit in,” she asked. “There’s a dark stain on your
skirt.” We wobbled into the girls’ bathroom on our pumps, and I
turned my skirt back-to-front to take a look at it. Then I pulled
down my panties to confirm my suspicion.
Sure enough, the panties were all black in the crotch, too. I’d more-or-less been expecting red
blood, but I had seen and smelled enough of my mother’s dark menstrual
blood that I wasn’t too alarmed. The other girls who clustered
around me were alarmed.
There I was, about two years or more younger than any of them, and the
only one in the room who knew anything about menstruation,
apparently. Not that my mother had been any more comfortable
talking about the birds and the bees than any of their mothers.
But when I had started questioning her a few years previously, she had given me the Facts of Life for Children booklet.
I wet a handful of paper towels and sponged most of the blood out of my
skirt and panties. Then I stuffed my crotch with toilet tissue
and went to the nurse’s office. She wrote me an excuse and sent
me to the principal’s office. Nobody was home at our house, of
course. Mama was working in the cafeteria at a high school across
town. They called her and I went on with the rest of my school
day until she got off work and picked me up.
In school, there was one special boy. He was tall and skinny,
reddish-blond and freckled, with crooked teeth and a low-class country
drawl. His clothes were usually clean but always worn and
sometimes torn. There was no kissing or hand-holding between us, but
lots of laughter and horseplay. My relationship with him was
similar to that with most of the Main Street boys in Halstead, where
I’d been one of the boys. I was only in one class with Lucky
Maddox, Mr. White’s general science course, 4th period, right after
lunch. Science was my favorite subject and Mr. White kept it
interesting, but Lucky provided a lot of distraction.
We had assigned seats, and Lucky’s was right in front of mine.
I’m supposing he got the nickname “Lucky” because he liked to
gamble. Our relationship started one day when we got into the
classroom early from lunch. He asked me if I wanted to match
pennies. I had a few pennies, and before we were done, I had a
few more. I started making sure I carried some pennies to school
with me. Sometimes, we’d get scolded by Mr. White for
talking or passing notes in class. When he caught us matching
pennies while he was talking, he locked us both in the supply closet in
the front corner of the classroom behind his desk.
I remember three trips into the closet with Lucky. We’d match
pennies a while until one of us had them all. Then he’d boost me
up so I could see out the little window in the door, and I’d make faces
behind Mr. White’s back and crack up the class. We had entirely
too much fun in that closet, and Mr. White finally assigned Lucky a
desk in one front corner and sent me to one in the opposite back corner
of the room. After that, sometimes we’d get together outside
before the after-lunch bell rang, but there wasn’t usually time for it
because I always ate in the cafeteria and he always brown-bagged it and
ate outdoors, often getting into ball games with other boys.
Walking home from school, I walked with Martha and Mardella
Irvin. We’d stay together to the corner of Broadway and Harry
Street and then stop in for a Coke at the drugstore there. The
place would be mostly full of girls, very few boys. At the time,
there was a belief that aspirin in Coke could get us high, and we made
lots of fizzy messes and nasty-tasting drinks. Whether we got
high on it or not, I don’t know. We were giggly and silly by
nature, I think. When we left there, Mardella would head east on
Harry toward her house, and Martha and I would go west. There was
another drugstore a few blocks down, on the corner of Water Street if I
remember correctly. There was a different clique of girls who
hung out there.
At
some point that year, Martha and I got into a fight with Priscilla
Woods. She was the only girl in a big family without a mother,
and lived in the next block east from me. She and Martha had a
dispute about something, and I stepped into it. It got physical
on the sidewalk in front of Priscilla’s house one afternoon on the way
home from school. Nobody was seriously hurt, but word got back to
our principal. His solution was to assign each of the three of us
a different route to and from school. That took some of the fun
out of my life.
My new route took me past the second drugstore, but I never clicked
with the clique that hung out there, and would just hurry on home to
watch Mickey Mouse Club. My favorite Mouseketeer was Bobby, the
tall one (arms raised, back row left, behind Annette).
I
also had a crush on Tim Considine(far left), the original Spin character, the
juvenile delinquent “bad boy” of the Spin and Marty serial on Mickey
Mouse Club. At least I was consistent. My first movie star
crush was on another bad boy, Leo Gorcey, Mugsy of the Bowery
Boys. I still haven’t gotten over the one who came next, James Dean.
Music was important to me. Dancing was one of life’s greatest
pleasures.
Martha and I would go down into her basement, turn on the radio and
practice the steps we would see other kids doing. We started with
jitterbug and a simple bop, and later on after American Bandstand came
onto local TV we learned the mashed potatoes, pony and some other funny
steps.
Sometime in the middle of that year, Mama started taking me to the FAD
Club (Fun and Dance) dances on Friday nights at a Methodist Church near
school. I think it cost 50 cents to get in. She’d drive me
over there and pick me up after it was over, and we’d usually go
somewhere for a hot fudge sundae afterward.
The music at FAD Club was
all “bop” except for the last dance of the night, which was a slow one,
always the same tune, Stardust. Girls outnumbered the boys there, and
sometimes two girls would dance together, though I never saw any boys
dancing with boys.
Some girls never
got to dance, because the boys didn’t ask them and they were
too shy to ask during the “ladies’ choice” tunes. I remember
being
asked to dance by some of the short boys, and I danced with some of the
tall ones when it was ladies’ choice. I could always find someone
to dance with on ladies’ choice. I didn’t dance with girls, but I
danced to a lot of fast tunes by myself. Many of the boys who
didn’t like or couldn’t keep up with the fast dance steps would find a
girl to dance with to Stardust at the end. I almost always had a
partner for that one.
Mama did some refurbishing of Granny’s house after Charlie McDonald
moved out. She put down new linoleum to replace an old dusty rug
in the front room, and she moved Granny’s old double bed out of the
bedroom and put in our twin beds from Halstead. I no longer slept
on the daybed in the front room and it was getting a lot more use as a
living room now that our TV was in there.
Granny kept an alcove by the east window of the front room filled with
houseplants: ferns, spider plants (she called them airplane
plants), a rubber tree, dumb cane, an avocado tree she started from a
seed, and more. One of Mama’s Lonely Hearts suitors had taken us
to a Shriner’s Circus where I talked him into buying me a live
chameleon. He came with a string around his neck attached to a
small safety pin, and I wore him home pinned to my shirt. He then
took up residence in Granny’s living room jungle.
My first stop when I got home from school was that alcove. I’d
search and search and sometimes wouldn’t see my pet lizard until he
climbed out onto a branch right in front of me. I got as attached
to that little thing as one can be to a cold-blooded creature, I
think. He seemed to be attached to me, too. I don’t
know what happened to him. One day he just wasn’t there.
Maybe he found a hole somewhere and escaped into the outside world, or maybe Spooky ate him.
Spooky
already knew the command, “find Kathy.” Mama would tell him that
and let him out and he would track me all over Halstead on my bike
until he found me, then he’d lead me home. In Wichita, she turned
it into an easier way to get me up for school in the mornings.
She’d open the bedroom door and tell him to get me and he would lick my
face until I got up.
There was a radio in that room, too. It was a yellowed once-white
art deco clock radio that could be set to awaken with an annoying
buzzer or with the radio. It had a timer “sleep” switch on the
back that could be set to shut the radio off in fifteen minutes, and
beside the sleep switch was a timed electrical outlet that switched on
fifteen minutes before the alarm went off. We could load the
percolator and plug it in at night and awaken to the aroma of coffee in
the morning.
I’d listen to the radio as late as Mama would let me. The radio
in my parents’ house in San Jose was always tuned to a country/western
station. That’s what Mama listened to on the car radio, too.
The jukebox in the sundries store in Halstead had held a mix of country
music such as Patsy Cline or Hank Williams, and more mainstream stuff
such as Frank Sinatra, Doris Day and Frankie Laine. Wichita’s
radio stations were predominately country, too. In the daytime, I
listened to them because that was all that came in.
I discovered that late at night I could twist the dial slowly and tune
in some distant stations that played different music. The first
time I heard Elvis Presley was on WLS from Chicago. I first
heard Fats Domino on WNOE from New Orleans. XERF across the
Mexican border from Del Rio, Texas, played blues and rock and
roll. Those records became the soundtrack to my fantasy life.
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