“Are you sure your mother knows you’re fooling with this stuff?” the druggist said. For some reason he shot me a dirty look, and then continued, “It’s one thing to take it off your legs, Brenda Belle, but you shouldn’t play with something that can get into your eyes and blind you for life!”
Brenda Belle.
That was an unlikely name for her. That was a name for some bovine blonde with a sweet disposition and nothing to say.
“I’ll walk you home and recite the poem,” I horned in.
She still kept her hand across her mouth. “No!” she snapped back in a muffled exclamation.
“Why?” I asked.
“Stand aside, boy,” the druggist commanded.
I stood aside while she passed him three dollars.
“You tell your mother what you bought before you use it,” the druggist said.
“Skip the poem,” I said to her. “I’ll just walk you home.”
She had two cents change coming, but she didn’t wait for it. She headed out the door like the place was on fire.
“Hey, Brenda, wait!” I shouted, but she was out of sight before I could even get my coat from the hook.
The druggist eyed me coldly while I buttoned up and put my scarf around my neck. “What’s the matter with a boy like you?” he said. “A boy like you ought to use his head. That was a highly personal transaction. A gentleman steps aside in such a circumstance, in case you didn’t know!”
I didn’t know how to answer him, how to get across that it hadn’t seemed that highly personal because of knowing Billie Kay so well, all her beauty secrets and what she called “tricks of the trade.”
I didn’t have to answer, because he went right on bawling me out. “Now, you’re a newcomer,” he said, “and I don’t know where you come from, but you learn yourself some manners, Mister, or don’t show your face around my place!”
I was ashamed and then angry. There was a time when I’d have answered, “I don’t think you know who I am!” and then told him. . . . But all that was in the past.
I was on my own, in Storm, Vermont, for the first time in my life. It was my own idea, because I was fresh out of ideas for my future. I wouldn’t have blamed my father for completely disowning me at that point in my life. I was certainly nothing he could brag about, and everything that could disappoint him.
“The goddam trouble is,” I told him over the long-distance phone one week before that Wednesday, “I’m sick of being the famous man’s son!” (I knew I was copping out when I said it, but I said it anyway.)
“That’s not the goddam trouble,” he barked back. “That’s the goddam excuse.” You don’t fool a man like my father. What I wished I could say was something like: I’m sorry I’m a lousy son, and I don’t blame you if you hate me. I could never say anything like that to him. I thought that was probably part of the problem: I could never seem to level with him.
“Listen,” I said. (I prefaced a lot of my sentences with “Listen” when I spoke to him; I guess it was because I was always so aware that he was forced to stop really important things to tend to my little messes.) “Listen, Dad, how about letting me go somewhere where no one knows who I am?”
“And where would that be?” he barked back at me.
“Couldn’t I go live with Grandpa Blessing?”
There was a long silence. For a moment, I had this crazy idea that my father was going to answer, A.J., I want you with me. It was really an insane thought, not only because my father travels so much, but also because how the hell would he explain me? I mean, was a man like my father supposed to introduce me by saying, “This is my son, the troublemaker. No school will keep him. I have him with me because there’s no place else for him to go.”
During that silence, I was also thinking of a line from a Robert Frost poem: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.”
My father finally spoke. “Grandpa Blessing doesn’t even know you.”
“He sends me a Christmas card every year. He asks me to visit him. He says he lives all alone.”
“Maybe he could use a little extra money,” my father said.
I said, “What?” I’d heard him very clearly, though; I sometimes say “What?” when I’m in shock. The idea of paying someone to take me in was what shocked me. It shouldn’t have, I guess. After all, my father had paid Choate and all the other schools—why not a relative?
My father said, “I said maybe we can work something out with him. Maybe that’s not a bad idea.”
So there I was, one week to the day later, on my own, with this hick druggist dressing me down for something I wasn’t even sure I’d been that wrong in doing.
“I’m very sorry, sir,” I told the druggist as I picked up my books from the table. “You’re absolutely right.”
I was just going to have to learn . . . and to unlearn. . . . But I worried over how the girl felt about me, how Brenda Belle felt.
Oh, and incidentally, my grandfather refused my father’s offer of money. He also told my father that I wouldn’t need much of an allowance in Storm, either. No more than five dollars a week.
At Choate I’d been managing on one hundred and fifty a month.
Notes for a Novel by B.B.B.
Hairgo is a waxy substance you apply warm, let dry on your skin, and then rip off in exactly ten minutes. Seven minutes had passed that night when my mother entered my bedroom and said, “Always the clown, hmmm, Brenda Belle?”
What made her say that was the wax mustache I had made from Hairgo. It was colored pink and firmly attached to my upper lip.
I made a face and bowed low, letting her think I was just fooling around. I didn’t want her to know my mustache was a depilatory, for fear she’d go into one of her famous panics.
“You know, Brenda Belle,” she said, sitting down on the edge of my bed, “playing the clown isn’t a very feminine thing to do. A funny woman is rarely a lady. I’m telling you this for your own good.”
“You’re probably right,” I said, watching the second hand on my alarm clock. I had two minutes to go before it was time to remove the wax.
“I don’t want to criticize you,” my mother continued, “but it is a fact that very few female comediennes have happy lives.”
“I don’t particularly want to be a female comedienne,” I said.
“Men laugh at funny women,” my mother said, “but they rarely fall in love with them. A man likes a serious woman, a quiet woman.”
“I plan to be a quiet, serious woman,” I told her. “I promise.”
“You don’t seem to be headed in that direction, Brenda Belle. Even now you’re intent on being the funny girl.”
“I’m just practicing for a part in a school play,” I said.
“Brenda Belle, you’re not going to take a male role in a play, are you?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve decided against it.”
My fingers were playing with the wax mustache; I was seeing if it was possible to just pull it off in front of her, without her guessing its real purpose. The wax would not give an inch.
The ten minutes were up.
“You’re at an age now when you should begin to grow out of your tomboy stage,” my mother said.
“I