Guilt-ridden before he’d even done it, guilt-ridden for even thinking about it, Craig finally confessed the whole home-alone scheme, expecting or maybe just hoping that my mom would blow a gasket and forbid him to go.
But she didn’t. She wouldn’t. It wasn’t how she operated.
She listened, but she didn’t absolve him from the choice at hand. Instead, she returned him to his agony with a blithe shrug of her shoulders. “Handle it how you think best,” she said, before turning back to the dishes in the sink or the pile of laundry she had to fold.
It was another small push out into the world. I’m sure that in her heart my mother knew already that he’d make the right choice. Every move she made, I realize now, was buttressed by the quiet confidence that she’d raised us to be adults. Our decisions were on us. It was our life, not hers, and always would be.
* * *
By the time I was fourteen, I basically thought of myself as half a grown-up anyway—maybe even as two-thirds of a grown-up. I’d gotten my period, which I announced immediately and with huge excitement to everyone in the house, because that was just the kind of household we had. I’d graduated from a training bra to one that looked vaguely more womanly, which also thrilled me. Instead of coming home for lunch, I now ate with my classmates in Mr. Bennett’s room at school. Instead of dropping in at Southside’s house on Saturdays to listen to his jazz records and play with Rex, I rode my bike right past, headed east to the bungalow on Oglesby Avenue where the Gore sisters lived.
The Gore sisters were my best friends and also a little bit my idols. Diane was in my grade, and Pam a grade behind. Both were beautiful girls—Diane was fair-skinned, and Pam was darker—each with a kind of self-possessed grace that seemed to come naturally. Even their little sister, Gina, who was a few years younger, emanated a robust femininity that I came to think of simply as Gore-like. Theirs was a home with few men. Their father didn’t live there and was rarely discussed. There was one much older brother who was a peripheral presence. Mrs. Gore was an upbeat, attractive woman who worked full-time. She had a makeup table laden with perfume bottles and face powder compacts and various ointments in tiny pots, which given my mother’s modest practicality seemed as exotic as jewels to me. I loved spending time at their house. Pam, Diane, and I talked endlessly about which boys we liked. We put on lip gloss and took turns trying on one another’s clothes, suddenly aware that certain pairs of pants made our hips look curvier. Much of my energy in those days was spent inside my own head, sitting alone in my room listening to music, daydreaming about a slow dance with a cute boy, or glancing out the window, hoping for a crush to ride his bike down the block. So it was a blessing to have found some sisters to ride through these years with together.
Boys weren’t allowed inside the Gore house, but they buzzed around it like flies. They rode their bikes back and forth on the sidewalk. They sat on the front stoop, hoping Diane or Pam might come out to flirt. It was fun to be around all this expectancy, even as I was unsure of what it all meant. Everywhere I looked, bodies were changing. Boys from school were suddenly man-sized and awkward, their energy twitchy and their voices deep. Some of my girlfriends, meanwhile, looked like they were eighteen, walking around in short-shorts and halter tops, their expressions cool and confident as if they knew some secret, as if they now existed on a different plane, while the rest of us remained uncertain and slightly dumbfounded, waiting for our call-up to the adult world, foal-like on our growing legs and young in a way that no amount of lip gloss could yet fix.
Like a lot of girls, I became aware of the liabilities of my body early, long before I began to even look like a woman. I moved around the neighborhood now with more independence, less tied to my parents. I’d catch a city bus to go to late-afternoon dance classes at Mayfair Academy on Seventy-Ninth Street, where I was taking jazz and acrobatics. I ran errands for my mom sometimes. With the new freedoms came new vulnerabilities. I learned to keep my gaze fixed firmly ahead anytime I passed a group of men clustered on a street corner, careful not to register their eyes roving over my chest and legs. I knew to ignore the catcalls when they came. I learned which blocks in our neighborhood were thought to be more dangerous than others. I knew never to walk alone at night.
At home, my parents made one major concession to the fact they were housing two growing teenagers, renovating the back porch off our kitchen and converting it into a bedroom for Craig, who was now a sophomore in high school. The flimsy partition that Southside had built for us years earlier came down. I moved into what had been my parents’ room, they rotated into what had been the kids’ room, and for the first time my brother and I had actual space for ourselves. My new bedroom was dreamy, complete with a blue-and-white floral bed skirt and pillow shams, a crisp navy-blue rug, and a white princess-style bed with a matching dresser and lamp—a near-exact replica of a full-page bedroom layout I’d liked in the Sears catalog and been allowed to get. Each of us was given our own phone extension, too—my phone was a light blue to match my new decor, while Craig’s was a manly black—which meant we could conduct our personal business semi-privately.
I arranged my first real kiss, in fact, over the phone. It was with a boy named Ronnell. Ronnell didn’t go to my school or live in my immediate neighborhood, but he sang in the Chicago Children’s Choir with my classmate Chiaka, and with Chiaka acting as intermediary, we somehow had decided we liked each other. Our phone calls were a little awkward, but I didn’t care. I liked the feeling of being liked. I felt a zing of anticipation every time the phone rang. Could it be Ronnell? I don’t remember which one of us proposed that we meet outside my house one afternoon to give kissing a try, but there was no nuance to it; no shy euphemisms needed to be applied. We weren’t going to “hang out” or “take a walk.” We were going to make out. And we were both all for it.
Which is how I landed on the stone bench that sat near the side door of my family’s house, in full view of the south-facing windows and surrounded by my great-aunt’s flower beds, lost in a warm splishy kiss with Ronnell. There was nothing earth-shattering or especially inspiring about it, but it was fun. Being around boys, I was slowly coming to realize, was fun. The hours I passed watching Craig’s games from the bleachers of one gym or another began to feel less like a sisterly obligation. Because what was a basketball game if not a showcase of boys? I’d wear my snuggest jeans and lay on some extra bracelets and sometimes bring one of the Gore sisters along to boost my visibility in the stands. And then I’d enjoy every minute of the sweaty spectacle before me—the leaping and charging, the rippling and roaring, the pulse of maleness and all its mysteries on full display. When a boy on the JV team smiled at me as he left the court one evening, I smiled right back. It felt like my future was just beginning to arrive.
I was slowly separating from my parents, gradually less inclined to blurt every last thought in my head. I rode in silence behind them in the backseat of the Buick as we drove home from those basketball games, my feelings too deep or too jumbled to share. I was caught up in the lonely thrill of being a teenager now, convinced that the adults around me had never been there themselves.