I sliced my hand with a steak knife the day after Christmas, sneaking leftover pie. The wound stung and pulsed. I made my way to the sink, rinsed my hand over the piled dishes. It hurt. The water ran over my steel P.O.W. bracelet. The word was, if your P.O.W. returned from Vietnam, he would take you for a steak dinner. The blood kept coming.
Mrs. Healey lived kitty-corner across the street. My class’s room mom. None of the classmates’ mothers had volunteered, so she’d stepped in. She was that kind of lady.
I ran.
When Mrs. Healey appeared at her door, It took her a moment to register who I was. I raised my dripping hand and she blanched before recovering. “Oh, honey! What on earth? Come in!”
“An accident. I was washing glasses,” I lied, following her inside. My voice caught; I thought I might cry. The kitchen walls were a lush avocado shade. The dark cabinets gleamed. What would she have thought about our grimy cupboards, the sink filled with dishes? Mrs. Healey tore a paper towel and handed it to me. “Hold this against your…wound. I’ll be right back.”
She returned with a tidy canvas first aid kit and poured liquid from a brown bottle onto my palm. The bloody slit fuzzed up. Stung. I focused on Mrs. Healey’s white sandals and tangerine toenails. She blotted, then applied a rectangular bandage. After gently pressing it to my skin, she stepped back
“Oh! You’re very grown, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” My voice came out in a babyish mew. I hated it. Yes, yes; I needed a bra, I needed deodorant. The day before Christmas break, three of the bigger girls at school had cornered me in front of the drinking fountains and told me so. But I connected the world of grown-up underthings and hygiene purchases with a murky future I didn’t want to think about.
Some of the kids at school had older siblings who had left San Pedro for college or the military. I’d heard about the students in Ohio, shot during their protest. And then those blank-eyed Manson girls, carving Xs in their foreheads as they called for their murdering guru to be freed.
Had Mrs. Healey guessed my stoned dad was home at his typewriter, in my parents’ sweltering bedroom? Her own husband, Mr. Healey, was as wholesome as an astronaut. The word was, if Mr. Healey didn’t like a man, he would address him as “pal.” If he liked him, he’d call him “chief.”
#
Thanks to Mrs. Healey, I didn’t need stitches. New Year’s Eve came. The Healeys were having a party for the adults on the block. My parents were younger than the others. We rented our house. My mom worked at the cannery and my dad wrote articles for magazines with names like Mary Jane and the L.A. Freekly.
I implored them not to go. “I could make cookies! We can bang pots!” I stood beside my mother and dropped my head on her shoulder, something she used to like.
“For Christsakes, we’ll be right across the street,” she laughed, edging free.
Fawn, the high schooler next door, had been engaged to watch me. Her father was an LAPD officer who showed he was cool by lighting illegal fireworks in his driveway every 4th of July. A space between the two hibiscus bushes in our front yard provided a shortcut to Fawn’s house. On the rare occasions she babysat me, I’d slip through the space and rap for admittance on their aluminum screen door.
The last time I came, Fawn had turned off all the lights and made me listen to an album her English cousin had sent. Paranoid, it was called. She could only play it when her dad was at work, she said, since it was against the war. The singer screamed more than sang. Witches at black masses. Brainwash. Robot slaves. The worst was the singer croaking, Electric funeral! Electric funeral!
My father bounced down the stairs wearing a flowered shirt and bell-bottom jeans. “We won’t be long, Sugar Cube,” he drawled. Then to my mother, “Hey, where’s my poncho?”
Chief or Pal? I was afraid to know what Mr. Healey would call him.
#
I crouched between the hibiscus bushes between our house and Fern’s, watching my parents cross the street. On the Healey’s bright-lit porch, they slipped off their shoes and let themselves in.
A warm wind stirred the palm fronds. The streetlights buzzed. How many more minutes until it was a whole new year? Fern’s screen door slapped shut behind her. She bent to me in her UCLA sweatshirt. “I’m having a cold one; want a swig?”
I tasted. The beer was terrible and sour. I sucked another mouthful. “I’ll stay.”
“Suit yourself,” Fawn said, and backed out through the gap between the bushes.
Would my parents be treated kindly? Would the Healeys be outraged to have hippies in their home? Would my father say something nonconformist and be ordered out? I removed my bandage, slipped it into my pocket. I poked at my palm with my index finger. My wound smarted.
My parents left our house as a young couple I barely recognized. My mother, in a headband of fake daisies and gauzy white muumuu. My dad in his woven purple poncho. I crept back to our front porch and sat on the cool cement.
I regarded our cul-du-sac, rendered pastel in the night. All at once I was overcome with yearning and dread for our family and its future. I was ten years old. Soon I would be a teenager. We would all know each other less and less as the years unfurled. Oh, I just wanted more time. A violet sadness consumed me as I willed the hippies to re-appear and ford the river of blacktop. Hurry back to me and our home and all we had together there in 1971.
