M y best friend and I knew that we were going to grow up to be ugly. On a backyard lawn—the summer light failing west of the mulberry tree where the house of the most beautiful girl on the street stood—we talked about what we could do: shake the second-base dirt from our hair, wash our hands of frog smells and canal water, and learn to smile without showing our crooked teeth. We had to stop spitting when girls were looking and learn not to pile food onto a fork and into a fat cheek already churning hot grub.
We were twelve, with lean bodies that were beginning to grow in weird ways. First, our heads got large, but our necks wavered, frail as crisp tulips. The eyes stayed small as well, receding into pencil dots on each side of an unshapely nose that cast remarkable shadows when we turned sideways. It seemed that Scott’s legs sprouted muscle and renegade veins, but his arms, blue with ink markings, stayed short and hung just below his waist. My gangly arms nearly touched my kneecaps. In this way, I was built for picking up grounders and doing cartwheels, my arms swaying just inches from the summery grass.
We sat on the lawn, with the porch light off, waiting for the beautiful girl to turn on her bedroom light and read on her stomach with one leg stirring the air. This stirred us, and our dream was a clean dream of holding hands and airing out our loneliness by walking up and down the block.
When Scott asked whom I was going to marry, I said a brown girl from the valley. He said that he was going to marry a strawberry blonde who would enjoy Millerton Lake, dirty as it was. I said mine would like cats and the sea and would think nothing of getting up at night from a warm, restless bed and sitting in the yard under the icy stars. Scott said his wife would work for the first year or so, because he would go to trade school1 in refrigeration. Since our town was made with what was left over after God made hell, there was money in air conditioning, he reasoned.
I said that while my wife would clean the house and stir pots of nice grub, I would drive a truck to my job as a carpenter, which would allow me to use my long arms. I would need only a stepladder to hand a fellow worker on the roof a pinch of nails. I could hammer, saw, lift beams into place, and see the work I got done at the end of the day. Of course, she might like to work, and that would be okay, because then we could buy two cars and wave at each other if we should see the other drive by. In the evenings, we would drink Kool-Aid and throw a slipper at our feisty dog at least a hundred times before we went inside for a Pop-Tart and hot chocolate.
Scott said he would work hard too, but now and then he would find money on the street and the two of them could buy extra things like a second TV for the bedroom and a Doughboy swimming pool for his three kids. He planned on having three kids and a ranch house on the river, where he could dip a hand in the water, drink, and say, “Ahh, tastes good.”
But that would be years later. Now we had to do something about our looks. We plucked at the grass and flung it into each other’s faces.
“Rotten luck,” Scott said. “My arms are too short. Look at ‘em.”
“Maybe we can lift weights. This would make up for our looks,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” Scott said, depressed. “People like people with nice faces.”
He was probably right. I turned onto my stomach, a stalk of grass in my mouth. “Even if I’m ugly, my wife’s going to be good-looking,” I said. “She’ll have a lot of dresses and I’ll have more shirts than I have now. Do you know how much carpenters make?”
Then I saw the bedroom light come on and the beautiful girl walk into the room drying her hair with a towel. I nudged Scott’s short arm and he saw what I saw. We flicked the stalks of grass, stood up, and walked over to the fence to look at her scrub her hair dry. She plopped onto the bed and began to comb it, slowly at first because it was tangled. With a rubber band, she tied it back, and picked up a book that was thick as a good-sized sandwich.
Scott and I watched her read a book, now both legs in the air and twined together, her painted toenails like red petals. She turned the pages slowly, very carefully, and now and then lowered her face into the pillow. She looked sad but beautiful, and we didn’t know what to do except nudge each other in the heart and creep away to the front yard.
“I can’t stand it anymore. We have to talk about this,” Scott said.
“If I try, I think I can make myself better looking,” I said. “I read an article about a girl whitening her teeth with water and flour.”
So we walked up the street, depressed. For every step I took, Scott took two, his short arms pumping to keep up. For every time Scott said, “I think we’re ugly,” I said two times, “Yeah, yeah, we’re in big trouble.”
Thinking About the Selection
1. Respond: What were your feelings for the boys as you read this essay? Explain.
2. (a) Recall: What jobs do the boys hope to have when they get older? (b)Infer: What do the boys’ choice of future jobs suggest about their characters? Explain.
3. (a) Infer: Do you think this is the first time the boys have watched the beautiful girl? Why or why not? (b) Draw Conclusions: What does the girl in the window seem to represent for the two young boys?
4. Speculate: What advice do you think an adult might give the two boys to help them feel better about themselves?
