party than simply puttering around that giant house. My ears were hot.
“I live across the street,” I said, gesturing vaguely behind me.
Mrs. Parker looked at me, her eyes the stunned eyes of a doe.
“Do you have some sugar?” I asked, relieved to have remembered my excuse.
She smiled then. “Sure, honey. How much do you need?”
I had no idea how much sugar one might need if one truly needed sugar. I was also suddenly aware that I had no way of getting the sugar home. “This much?” I suggested, making a bowl with my hands, seemingly solving both the quantity and container problem.
“About a cup? Sure thing, come on in.”
The inside of Betsy Parker’s house was as tidy as the outside. Fresh flowers stood erect in thin glass vases, catching light from any number of the windows. The floors were completely covered in carpeting. I’d never seen, or felt, anything like it before.
I followed her down a long hallway to the kitchen, where she motioned for me to sit at the clean white dinette set. Mrs. Parker opened up a tin marked “Sugar” in fancy red script and pulled out a scoop. She poured the sugar into a teacup and handed it to me.
“Here you go, exactly one level cup. What’s your momma making?”
I hoped my ears weren’t as red as they felt.
“Doughnuts,” I answered, saying the first sweet thing that popped into my head.
Mrs. Parker’s forehead wrinkled a little, and I was pretty certain I’d been figured out. “Can you be a sweetheart and get the recipe from her? You can bring it over when you return the teacup.” Mrs. Parker smiled. “I can’t find a decent doughnut recipe anywhere.”
I nodded, and was backing down the hall, balancing the teacup by its delicate handle when I remembered why I had really come.
“Oh,” I said. “Is Betsy home?”
“Sure, honey. She’s in her room. Would you like me to go get her?”
I thought about it for a minute, even pictured Betsy Parker in her room, maybe lying on her stomach on her bed, thumbing through a magazine, but the idea of actually talking to her suddenly seemed ludicrous.
“Nah,” I said. “Just tell her I stopped by.”
Mrs. Parker raised one perfect black eyebrow and then winked at me. “Sure thing, sugar.”
The next time I went back, I pretended my mother was making beef stew. I pulled a dusty cookbook down off the highest shelf in our kitchen and scanned the list of ingredients. Bouillon… I couldn’t pronounce it. An onion . My mother didn’t even hear me go.
This time, Betsy answered the door, breathing hard as if she’d been running.
“Hi,” I said, my heart thumping in my chest so hard I was fairly certain you could see it pounding through my shirt.
She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me into the house. “Follow me,” she said, leading me down the long hallway to the kitchen and then out the back door. Her hand was soft. She had a Band-aid on her thumb. Outside, she took off across the shady backyard, climbing nimbly up a giant maple. Once perched in the crook of two large branches, she whispered, “Come up.”
Though the maple was unfamiliar, I’d climbed my share of trees and quickly ascended up into the tree’s depths. To my dismay, Betsy seemed unimpressed by my tree-climbing skills; she was fixated on something in the distance.
The Parkers lived next door to Mr. Lowe, a widower with throat cancer and a reputation for losing his temper in public. He’d been seen screaming at waitresses and gas station attendants and store clerks all over town. Some people said the terrible sounds that came out of his throat were punishment for his temper. He’d even yelled at me once when I lost my baseball in his hedges. Through the trees, I could barely see the shadow of a figure moving in the yard below.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Shhh,” Betsy whispered, pushing the back of my neck down so that my head lowered and revealed a better view.
He was standing in the middle of his backyard in a sleeveless white undershirt, a pair of shorts held up by suspenders. When he bent over to pick up the hula hoop at his feet, Betsy let go of the tree branch and smacked me in the arm. Hard. Below us, Mr. Lowe held the hula hoop tightly around his waist before he set it spinning, released it, and let his hips do the work. Betsy covered her mouth to keep from laughing, and I smiled. He was diligent in this task. Ridiculous. When we finally couldn’t stand it anymore and Betsy started to giggle, the hula hoop dropped to the ground, and Mr. Lowe looked up. When he started to holler with that awful damaged voice of his and shake his fist at the sky, we scurried down the tree. By the time we got to the bottom, we were shaking with laughter.
“I saw him naked once,” Betsy said.
“Nu- uh ,” I said.
“In one of those kiddy pools,” she said, nodding. “He was wacking off.”
“Shut up,” I said, punching her arm. She didn’t flinch.
“I know where there are some dirty magazines,” she said.
“Really?” I asked. Earlier that summer Ray had stolen a copy of Modern Man from his dad’s collection. He’d even let me tear out a page with Bettie Page and Tempest Storm, both nearly naked, which I’d studied like a treasure map. As I traced breasts and teensy panties with my finger, I imagined myself an explorer, the topography both treacherous and thrilling.
She nodded. “I’ll show you tomorrow.”
Now I didn’t need another excuse to come back. I had a real, live invitation. And there was something pretty damn exciting about the prospect of looking at naked pictures with Betsy.
I went back. Between June and August, I must have followed Mrs. Parker down that softly carpeted hallway a hundred times. Mrs. Parker was always wearing something none of the other neighborhood mothers (certainly not my mother anyway) could have pulled off. There was always something bubbling on the stove top, and she always had a frosted glass of lemonade or a Cherry Coke to offer. Betsy and I would gorge ourselves on homemade German chocolate cake or Lorna Doones until our stomachs ached, and then we’d take off on one adventure or another, usually spying on someone in the neighborhood. Betsy taught me the scientific names for genitalia both male and female that summer. And once, she even showed me a picture of Mrs. Parker wearing what looked like a skimpy caveman’s outfit, a giant bone in her hand. “A famous photographer took this of her. Before she married Daddy,” she told me. “She was going to be a model.” I beamed. I figured now that Betsy Parker trusted me, it wouldn’t be long until she loved me too.
But about a week before school started again, I went to Betsy’s house and she said that she wasn’t allowed to have company and closed the door in my face. Stunned, I walked home and found my father unpacking a brand new Kenmore clothes dryer from a cardboard box. The folding machine hadn’t worked, and it seemed to me that my father’s reluctant concession was an admission of failure. But being the half-full kind of person I was, my own failure did not deter me. I went back to the Parkers’ house the next day. And the next. But each time, Betsy said simply that she wasn’t allowed to have guests and closed the door. By the end of the week, I began to worry. It was as if our friendship, like summer, had only been seasonal. As ephemeral and fleeting as Vermont sunshine.
At school, Betsy was careful to avoid me. She wasn’t unkind, but she did make sure to sit across the room from me in homeroom, and she only spoke to me when necessary. By November, I’d forced myself to accept her indifference. I started to hang out with Brooder and Ray again, chucking dirt clods at first graders and chewing tobacco behind the school. In a way, it was as if Betsy had only been a dream.
But just before Thanksgiving, when an early snowstorm brought our first snow day of the year, I felt optimistic. And I missed her. After