lipstick. The refrigerator is stocked with Snack Packs and mummified microwave dinners, ample provisions for the afterlife. Everything seems easy—easy to find, easier to make, easiest to clean up.
Mrs. Jankoff works odd hours as an emergency-room nurse and spends most days dressed in rose-colored scrubs and ortho-pedic shoes, her blond hair fastened in a nest of loose curls. But twice a week she undergoes a magical transformation. After her shift ends, she goes out for drinks at Watson’s, a pine-paneled neighborhood bar. She has single friends, loads of them, and at Watson’s they meet men in droves. The following day, she describes to us whatever lawyer, welder, or real-estate agent she met, and in our own vernacular. “Joe was hot,” she’ll say over the kitchen stove, where she is standing in a terrycloth bathrobe and cooking scrambled eggs. “But at some point I realized he was a little messed up in the head.”
When Billie’s mom goes out to Watson’s, she even dresses like one of us. She wears army boots, flannel skirts, and baby-doll
T-shirts with broken hearts ironed on. She refuses to wear a bra because, she says, they’re just another way in which the world keeps women down. So her breasts sway like water balloons when she walks, and I love the way they make my mother wince. As much as I love Mrs. Jankoff, I know Billie spars with her, too. She fights with her mom the same way I fight with my mom, but for opposite reasons. I want to be independent from my mom, and Billie wants to be dependent on hers. Billie loves my mother’s involvement, while I love Mrs. Jankoff ’s detach-ment. We both have the magnetic properties that attract us to each other’s mothers, and repel us from our own. I want to drive my mother away from me by being deceptive; Billie tries to
lure her mother home by proving she’s trustworthy.
The more time I spend with Billie, the more I realize I have her pegged all wrong. Sure, she smokes. She also wears satin bras and smeared eyeliner, and in school, she is all too happy to scream at Mr. Coffee or skip gym class on the days that we are forced to run a mile. But when it comes to her real assets, the things Natalie would have considered no doy, like the fact that she has the house without chaperone for hours on end, complete with access to her mother’s cherry schnapps, she pleads bank-rupt. In her own house, she is quiet and reserved.
Friday nights, while Natalie is in some boy’s dorm room burn-ing incense, listening to way-hip post-rock Brit-pop, and drinking Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine, Billie and I do nothing. We stretch out on the kitchen counters, where we can watch headlights stream by on Water Street, and half-think we see someone we know coming or going, then speculate as to where. We eat chocolate chips from the bag and listen to FM radio until “Love Songs After Dark” turns into “Marty in the Morning.”
38 INITIATION | First Waste
Some nights we work on our witchcraft, but even that is dull. We want to draw baths filled with rose petals, but we can’t af-ford to buy a dozen roses from the farmer’s market, and Billie won’t let me steal them. We also long to do love spells, but there is no way for us to gather boys’ toenail clippings. There are no stores within walking distance that sell orrisroot.
Instead of making me calm, Billie’s immobility makes me restless.
Afternoons at her house, I feel fidgety. I am incapable of be-ing still. I have an urge to scratch my nails down my cheeks, tear the skillets down from the pot rack, strip off my clothes, and run bare-assed and shrieking through the condo’s parking lot. I want to turn on the stove and press my palms into the burners just so I can test my synapses. I need to know I can still react, still feel terrified, still feel.
At the same time, I am so thankful to have Billie for a friend that I don’t know how to tell her I’m bored. I don’t know how to say I’m not used to a
Mrs. Jankoff works odd hours as an emergency-room nurse and spends most days dressed in rose-colored scrubs and ortho-pedic shoes, her blond hair fastened in a nest of loose curls. But twice a week she undergoes a magical transformation. After her shift ends, she goes out for drinks at Watson’s, a pine-paneled neighborhood bar. She has single friends, loads of them, and at Watson’s they meet men in droves. The following day, she describes to us whatever lawyer, welder, or real-estate agent she met, and in our own vernacular. “Joe was hot,” she’ll say over the kitchen stove, where she is standing in a terrycloth bathrobe and cooking scrambled eggs. “But at some point I realized he was a little messed up in the head.”
When Billie’s mom goes out to Watson’s, she even dresses like one of us. She wears army boots, flannel skirts, and baby-doll
T-shirts with broken hearts ironed on. She refuses to wear a bra because, she says, they’re just another way in which the world keeps women down. So her breasts sway like water balloons when she walks, and I love the way they make my mother wince. As much as I love Mrs. Jankoff, I know Billie spars with her, too. She fights with her mom the same way I fight with my mom, but for opposite reasons. I want to be independent from my mom, and Billie wants to be dependent on hers. Billie loves my mother’s involvement, while I love Mrs. Jankoff ’s detach-ment. We both have the magnetic properties that attract us to each other’s mothers, and repel us from our own. I want to drive my mother away from me by being deceptive; Billie tries to
lure her mother home by proving she’s trustworthy.
The more time I spend with Billie, the more I realize I have her pegged all wrong. Sure, she smokes. She also wears satin bras and smeared eyeliner, and in school, she is all too happy to scream at Mr. Coffee or skip gym class on the days that we are forced to run a mile. But when it comes to her real assets, the things Natalie would have considered no doy, like the fact that she has the house without chaperone for hours on end, complete with access to her mother’s cherry schnapps, she pleads bank-rupt. In her own house, she is quiet and reserved.
Friday nights, while Natalie is in some boy’s dorm room burn-ing incense, listening to way-hip post-rock Brit-pop, and drinking Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine, Billie and I do nothing. We stretch out on the kitchen counters, where we can watch headlights stream by on Water Street, and half-think we see someone we know coming or going, then speculate as to where. We eat chocolate chips from the bag and listen to FM radio until “Love Songs After Dark” turns into “Marty in the Morning.”
38 INITIATION | First Waste
Some nights we work on our witchcraft, but even that is dull. We want to draw baths filled with rose petals, but we can’t af-ford to buy a dozen roses from the farmer’s market, and Billie won’t let me steal them. We also long to do love spells, but there is no way for us to gather boys’ toenail clippings. There are no stores within walking distance that sell orrisroot.
Instead of making me calm, Billie’s immobility makes me restless.
Afternoons at her house, I feel fidgety. I am incapable of be-ing still. I have an urge to scratch my nails down my cheeks, tear the skillets down from the pot rack, strip off my clothes, and run bare-assed and shrieking through the condo’s parking lot. I want to turn on the stove and press my palms into the burners just so I can test my synapses. I need to know I can still react, still feel terrified, still feel.
At the same time, I am so thankful to have Billie for a friend that I don’t know how to tell her I’m bored. I don’t know how to say I’m not used to a
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