Totally Joe by James Howe Page B

couldn’t keep me out of her closet, so she finally gave me some of her old clothes and made a dress-up trunk out of a box this big truck from my grandparents had come in. (Hated the truck, loved the box.) I called the box my “mannabah.” To this day, nobody knows what I meant by that, and I am sure I have no idea.
    One thing I remember from the early years is my uncle Scott’s wedding, which happened soon after we moved to Paintbrush Falls. Uncle Scott is my dad’s younger brother. He likes to say he makes his money making money. I used to think that meant he was in his basement printing up counterfeit bills. Then I realized he didn’t have a basement. My dad says his job has something to do with banking. Whatever. Frankly, Uncle Scott is kind of a snob, but I didn’t know that back then. All I knew was that I got to dress up in my best clothes—I actually liked wearing ties, what can I tell you?—and go to this grown-up party in Schenectady.
    The wedding was awesome, especially at the beginning when Aunt Lainy walked down the aisle and at the end when she and Uncle Scott kissed. Uncle Scott is very handsome and Aunt Lainy is very beautiful, so it was sort of like a fairy tale. Besides, I liked kissing. I called it “getting smoochy.”
    The party afterwards was even more awesome than the wedding. There was this huge bowl of fizzy punch with different colors of sherbet floating around in it and a
fountain
in the middle of it! And the wedding cake, which must have been taller than I was, had, like, a zillion sugar flowers all over it, with little gold leaves! Looking back, I’llbet the whole thing was way tacky, but at the time I felt like I was in a
movie
.
    That was the beginning of my wedding obsession. I had this doll Aunt Pam gave me (she had me so figured out) (a lot more than my poor grandparents, who gave me a fire engine for Christmas the year after the truck) (again: loved the box).
    Anyway, I wanted a wedding dress for the doll—formerly known as Cinderella Beauty and renamed Lainy—and Mom took me to the mall, but we couldn’t find one, so she got this woman she knew to make one that would look just like Aunt Lainy’s dress. It took more than a month, and when we finally went to pick it up, I practically peed in my pants I was so excited. But when the woman saw me, she laughed and said, “I never made a doll’s dress for a
boy
before!” I totally wanted to die.
    (This was my first clue that maybe to other people there was something “wrong” with me.) (Not that it stopped me from dressing up or playing wedding.)
    My mom says that I played wedding for about a year and that I kept asking everybody if they would marry me. Even Jeff. (That was the only time anyone can remember Jeff threatening to clobber me on a regular basis.) I had my Lainy doll marry my Ken doll. I also had her marry some of myBarbies. And G.I. Joe. (I hated that the soldier doll had my name. I mean, please. I didn’t play with him much. He was another Christmas present from my clueless grandparents. One time when they were visiting, my grandpa asked me if G.I. Joe had been in any wars lately. I said, “No, but he and Ken got married last week.” Every Christmas since then, my grandparents have sent me a check.)
J is for Joe: The Middle Years
    I’m in the middle years now. I mean, not really, but I’m counting my future as the “later years.” So this is me now:
    1. I am 5’ 2” tall.
    2. I weigh 98 pounds. (Kind of skinny, but not a string bean.)
    3. I have thick, wavy, medium-brown hair, currently streaked with red.
    4. I have dark brown, close-set eyes. (On some people close-set eyes can be attractive. I’ll have to wait and see what the rest of my face does.)
    5. My nose is too big. (Not much hope there.) (Curse you, paternal genes!)
    6. I have nice ears. Not that ears matter much, but at least they don’t stick out