The brunette girl with the pigtails wears a red gingham dress and a huge smile as she squeezes a juicy piece of watermelon. I am mesmerized by that watermelon...
“I can’t stay long, I just stopped by to say ‘Happy Birthday’. I’m going now.”
I swing around and smile weakly at Kathy. “OK, well, thanks for coming over.” She smirks and heads back down our driveway.
“Who wants cake?” My mother swings out the back door with plates and forks, and the quiet yard erupts as my classmates scream their approval.
In honor of my eleventh birthday, I was having a “friends” party in our backyard. With six children in our family, and one more on the way, these occasions were a treat. I invited most of the girls from my fifth grade class at St. Hedwig’s. I took a bus to the school that was part of the Polish parish my mother preferred to attend, so I didn’t live close to most of my classmates. The children in our neighborhood walked down the boulevard to the public elementary school or in the opposite direction to Our Lady of Victory.
Kathy Miller lived two doors away, and she was my tie to the neighborhood. We had been best friends since I was in kindergarten and she was in first grade. Their house on the corner probably wasn’t any larger than ours, but it seemed like it had more space. Kathy had one older, very glamorous sister, Linda, and a younger brother who was always at the playground with my brothers.
Kathy was one year older than me, and she was my gateway into all kinds of new worlds. She had her own room, her possessions untouched by the dirty fingers of younger siblings. Summers found me at Kathy’s house, hanging out in her room, or on the cool wide white porch. The Millers weren’t Catholic, but Episcopalian. This was novel to me, but became troublesome when I stayed for dinner one Friday night. The delicious BLT sandwiches required a trip to the confessional before Sunday Mass.
“I didn’t realize bacon was meat.”
The priest’s laughter spilled out of the dark booth and throughout the church. “What did you think it was, some sort of potato?”
Kathy’s mom was a small, nervous woman who seemed worn out already by the diva-ish Linda’s demands and antics. She would sometimes offer us a snack but we were usually left to our own amusements.
Those amusements progressed from games of Pick-up-sticks and War to analyzing the cover of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album and debating the virtues of Paul versus John. My pre-teen awareness accelerated through my friendship with Kathy and the information she gained from observing the mod sister. It was Kathy who told me the truth about Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, and how babies were made. We were equally grossed out about the last fact, and she was quick to point out how many times my parents had “done it.” I recoiled, and just as quickly countered that it was actually one less time, since my mother had had twins.
During the past year Kathy usually included her new friend Cheryl into our adventures. Cheryl was a cool blonde who seemed bored by any contributions I made to our conversations. A couple of months earlier, on a window shopping excursion to Woolworth’s, her green eyes flicked over the clothes my mother sewed for me as she called Kathy over to her side in the cosmetics aisle. I followed them out of the store and up to the restroom at the nearby Long Island Rail Road station. Giggling, they both pulled out the lipsticks they had pocketed and tore open the packages to apply the thick glossy pink gunk to their mouths. As Kathy outlined her light brown eyes in metallic blue, she looked back at me in the grimy mirror. “Hey, I need you to look up a phone number for me. Go downstairs, there’s a book in the booth, and find Richard Weed.”
Glad to have something else to do, I hurried down to the ground level. I had the book in my hand when the phone booth door closed behind me. “Are you trying to call Dick Weed?” Kathy and Cheryl convulsed with laughter and held the booth door shut. “Is that your boyfriend, Paula, Dick Weed?”
After they lost interest and left, I walked home alone. Seeing them still laughing about a block ahead, I blamed Cheryl and vowed not to get together with Kathy anymore when she was around.
On that sunny June day, my birthday guests had left, and I was helping my mother clean up the backyard. “Paula, where did this come from?” She was holding the cheap ten piece puzzle of the little girl with the watermelon. The child was sitting on a bale of hay, I now noticed, and there were little baby chicks all around.
“Kathy Miller gave that to me.”
“Kathy was here? This was the present she gave you?”When I looked into my mother’s shocked face, I realized that Kathy had needed to sever our tie swiftly and completely. I was my mother’s helper and her straight A student. Overwhelmed by the details of managing our frantic household and her worries about my four rambunctious brothers, my mother rarely concerned herself with the details of my social life. Now, seeing her frown as she put the puzzle down, I turned to go into the house. “I have to go to the bathroom, I’ll come back and finish up, leave it, Mom.” Locking the door to the only private room in our house, I sat on the floor and finally let the tears slide out from my eyes.
