With the exception of my husband and my senior year sweetheart, every boyfriend I’ve ever had has been a loser. Even the ones who were kind of cool as people were losers as boyfriends. In nights of reminiscing about old times, I’ve often asked my best friend why the hell she let me date those guys. Seriously, Ginger. Lance Naito. Really? How could you?
In 1990, the summer before my fifth grade year, my family moved from one small eastern Oregon town to another. In many respects, Ontario was no different than La Grande. They were both close to the same size, about 11,000. They both had only one middle school and one high school. They both had a large sprawling of out-of-town rural homes, and consisted of a lot of farm land and ranches. Although small—painfully small for those of us living there—they were each the epicenter of the surrounding towns. People from Elgin would drive the ten miles to “go into town”—La Grande. People from Payette would drive across the river to spend their time cruising up and down SW 4th Avenue in Ontario—the place to be on a Friday night. But the people, the people were different. The girls in my fifth grade class curled their hair. I’d never used a curling iron in my life. I quickly began to play along, like any young girl, longing to fit in. The first couple weeks of school, while my family was getting set up in our new house, with our new schedules and our new arrangements, my dad dropped me off at the house of his colleague, whose daughter, Danielle, attended the same school and was in the same grade as me. On the second day of school, during lunch, after asking if I had watched last night’s episode of 90210 and my responding “What’s 90210?, Nancy Drake said to me “You should curl your hair. It’d look a lot better.” This was the era of bangs, and boy oh boy, did these gals have some bangs.
My late elementary-early middle school career was a giant competition as to who could get their bangs the biggest. Big bangs existed in two styles—The Claw and The Wave. The claw consisted of two to three impeccably rounded layers. My best friend Ginger Ito had a perfect claw, rivaled only by Heather Hyde, who was blessed by the middle school gods and somehow managed to get in four layers. The Wave consisted not of layers, but height. One perfectly rounded layer covered the forehead. The second layer went not on top of the first, but instead extended out from the part over in a much more vertical spread and was usually curled back, not under. On the third day of school, I asked Danielle to curl my hair. She was a pro—she flattened or curled her hair every day, and often did her little sister’s hair as well. But the universe tried to give me a hint, subtly letting me know that high-maintenance hair would never be my thing, and, with a big clump of hair packed in the tongs, Danielle dropped the burning-hot curling iron, leaving it dangling from my bangs. After standing there in shock for a minute, Danielle grabbed the curling iron and released me and my bangs. Luckily, I escaped unharmed. And although I tried for many years, my bangs never looked half as good as Ginger or Heather’s.
Their heightened sense of style was only the beginning. These girls had boyfriends. They talked about sex. I'd never had a boyfriend, and I didn’t really know what sex was. Like most ten-year-old girls, I had little understanding of sex education. But these girls knew something I didn’t know. They talked about sex like it was something any of them might just do one of these days. They joked about how the boys probably thought it just slipped right in. What slipped right in? I thought. Where is it slipping into? I understood that for sex, people rubbed their privates together, but was unaware of the specific physics of the act. I thought you just laid in bed, man on top of woman, bouncing and rubbing against one another. I also knew that this somehow caused pregnancy. But I also knew it took more than one time to get pregnant, and I imagined people just doing this over and over and over in a day’s time--bouncing around in the bed for a few minutes, stopping, then bouncing around again for a few more minutes, hoping to get it right.
The first stone in my path of loser boyfriends began early, with this new move and my newfound friends. Roger Thomas. I don’t remember how it came about, but by the middle of the year, Roger and I were boyfriend and girlfriend. One day at recess we held hands. My mom was confused at the idea of me “going out with” someone in the fifth grade. What does that even mean? she asked. Where are you going to go out to? You can’t drive. You can’t go anywhere without me. Roger and I went out for all of a week (surprisingly, not my shortest relationship) before he told Ramiro Rodriguez to tell Nancy Drake to tell me he wanted to break up. Rumor had it Roger worshiped the devil. Yes, that’s right; my first boyfriend ever was a devil worshiper. And it just got better after that.
No comments:
Post a Comment