On a Downtown Street

A group of skinny teenage boys, their hair slicked down by Vitalis, stopped no more than a foot from where I sat hunkered down in the back seat of the car. High on downtown Saturday night and Lucky Strike cigarettes, they jostled and punched one another. "Hey, do that again and I'll show you who's tough." More laughter and shoulder jabbing, then someone fell against the car with a thud. He recovered, his fists clinched and his head down, ready to throw a Joe Lewis-style punch. "Tell me if this hurts," he joked. They must have liked the sound of body against steel because history repeated itself. A punch, the encounter, and the car rocked. Their laughter turned to whistles when a line of girls walked by. The girls tightened their lips and stuck their heads a little higher in the air.

The energy generated by these teenage boys could have overrun a German bunker, but it wasn't all about hormones. They were nervous. As soon as they graduated from high school. Uncle Sam would call them to fight somewhere in Europe or the Pacific. Agile young limbs would go from playing around to lobbing grenades; keeping ships afloat, navigating B-29's. In my girlish 7-year-old mind, they hardly looked like soldier material. I saw them as a menace to civilized society. The car rocked again as one of the boys yelled out, "Don't lida me." I couldn't figure it out. What did "Don't lida me" mean? I translated his run-together words to "Don't lie to me," but I still didn't understand. Who was lying to him and what were they lying about? His voice, sharp and demanding, annoyed me. I slid deeper into the car's back seat. "Don't lida me," he shouted again and the car took another hit.

My parents returned with ice-cream cones and the boys moved down the street a few yards. Maybe my parents had observed the goings-on from inside the ice-cream store; maybe they hadn't. Whichever, I think they would have been forgiving. They had two teenage sons of their own — one serving with the Army in the Pacific and the other fooling around with his own buddies on Saturday night. Maybe he was being a menace to society. I wouldn't have put it past him. My parents were rather lenient when it came to the boys, and maybe their leniency had something to do with boys going off to war. Girls were safe, but not all of them. My Aunt Booty had joined the WAVES. She wore a crisp blue and white uniform and worked for the Navy Department in Washington, D.C. Women usually didn't face the enemy except for nurses, I'd heard the grown-ups say. Once it occurred to me that my parents would coddle me if they thought I might turn out to be an Army nurse trapped in the jungles with enemy soldiers closing in, so I tried this scenario out on my mother. I hoped to bring a tear to her eye as she thought of her only daughter's untimely death, but she just kept on kneading bread dough. "The war will be over way before you're old enough," she said. "Here's the broom. Sweep off the porch for me."

Nobody ever worried about me, I concluded, so I lived in my own little world, making up a life that suited me better. I even fabricated some early family history. We didn't know where we came from until many years later when the family genealogists did their work. Before the truth surfaced, I claimed to be of Irish descent because everybody wanted to be Irish in those days. As it turned out, I wasn't Irish at all. The Winfreys came from France. They moved from France to England, where they changed their name to one that the English could pronounce and spell. They lived as Protestants while they were in England and after they came to America. However, if, as purported, we were descended from the French king, Philip the Fair, it's likely that in France we were Catholic. French and Catholic? In the hills of Southern West Virginia, no one would have believed me, so it's just as well that I touted my Irish blue eyes out of ignorance. Ignorance as well led me to want what I didn't have and to ignore the advantages of my birth.

One of the advantages was that I belonged to a large extended family — a clan you may call it. All together, they owned over 1,500 acres of land. That amount of good earth may sound impressive today, but I'm talking about the 1940s, when rural America had lost its allure. Americans were living in the heyday of the small American town, and town was where most young girls wanted to be. Our modest country house sat just yards from a barn, a meadow, a creek and a waterfall, but I would have given it all to live in town, the benchmark of prosperity back then. A postage-stamp yard inside the town limits brought a higher price than enough land to pasture horses and cows. A strip of sidewalk outside one's front door garnered more respect than a private country lane. A detached garage had a purpose; a waterfall and a creek were immaterial. Since my parents ignored my incessant, "Why don't we move to town?" the next best thing was going to town and that we did every Saturday night of the year.

On warm nights we ended up at Franklin's Ice Cream Bar, where boys nervously expended the energy that our military would soon claim. Before we could add ice cream to our itinerary, however, we did what we had to do. My father parked the Ford on Main Street, as close as possible to the epicenter of activity. In Kroger, the first stop, my parents read off their list of staples to the grocery clerk: oatmeal, flour, sugar, Karo Syrup, bologna, light bread, mayonnaise, peanut butter, coffee and loose tea. As called for, we replenished baking essentials — cocoa, raisins, vanilla and lemon extracts, yeast cakes, baking powder and soda. The balance of our good diet — meats, milk, eggs, and vegetables — came from our farm. We never went hungry.

We loaded brown paper bags of groceries in the car, left it unlocked, while we walked a few steps to G.C. Murphy Five and Dime. We depended on Murphy's for school supplies, sewing notions, piece goods, kitchenware, goldfish and canaries, if one were so inclined, which we weren't. We loafed near the candy counter with its wide selection of candy by the pound, most of it totally chocolate or immersed in chocolate. We watched Virginia peanuts and Spanish peanuts tumble to an oily, salty roasted perfection. We mingled with relatives and neighbors, the women sharing family news, the men swapping benign jokes while their children tugged on their hands and begged, "Let's go." As outgoing as all of this sounds, I must shatter the myth. Everyone doesn't know everybody else in a town of 5,000. Clusters of faces unfamiliar to me cruised the downtown sidewalks on any given Saturday night.

On the infrequent occasions when I saw downtown on a weekday, my mother accompanied me, but once she trusted me enough (or didn't worry about me enough) to allow me to go there alone. This happened in the same year that boys rocked my cocoon in front of Franklin's. It happened on a school day, and it happened because my mother went to the refrigerator to take out bologna for my lunch and found only a piece of red casing in the folds of white butcher paper. Someone had snatched the last slice of bologna and covered up the crime. My mother, unperturbed, gave me a quarter and said, "You can buy your lunch downtown today."

At 11:50 a.m. the walk-homers at Mercer School went home to eat; the bus kids (of which I was one) went to the gym for lunch; and I, on this particular day, set out for the long three-block march to a restaurant of my choosing. I felt sinful when I passed a beer joint, the open door releasing the odors of stale brew. I felt sinful simply because I'd inhaled the vapors. In George's Restaurant, where the low red leather booths swallowed me, I had to reach up for my hot dog and Coke, already making plans for spending the remaining 10 cents. I went back to school by way of the ice-cream store, which was quietly empty in the middle, of the day. A teenage girl who should have been in school took my order. Prettier than I would ever be, she had refined features compared to my large eyes, round freckled nose and full mouth that drooped if I didn't follow my mother's advice and smile at all times. Both of us had mousy brown hair, but there was a difference. If she had taken the time to wash her hair the night before, those thick locks would have shined and waved without the benefit of metal curlers. A beauty operator had called my thin straight strands "hopeless" after she scorched the nape of my neck and burned my hair to a crisp while giving me a machine perm. Even with all her cosmetic potential, the girl behind the ice-cream bar had something I didn't want. She had vulnerability. I didn't know the word "vulnerable," but I knew vulnerability when I saw it. Here was a pretty girl, older than I was but young enough to live at home and she'd worn a wrinkled white T-shirt to work. T-shirts were sold in the men's underwear department; that's what gave her away.

I sat at a small round table licking vanilla ice cream while I pondered her fate. My cousin Nancy, who I considered wise beyond her years, had educated me on the subject of vulnerable girls. They were the ones who fell for "lines" from boys and got into trouble (had babies in other words when they weren't married). I couldn't figure out the relationship between bad boys and good girls. How did God decide who had babies? Or was it just dumb luck that babies came to women after they were married? It didn't seem fair that the girl selling ice cream would be a target. She seemed so nice, just vulnerable. A few years later, after my friend Ellen filled in the blanks for me, I would try to trick my mother into talking about the beginning of life. I went to her and said, "What is a womb? It's in the Bible." My mother's answer came quickly. "Look it up in the dictionary."

By the time I'd finished my ice-cream cone, my predictions for the pretty girl in a wrinkled man's undershirt were dismal. Over the years, I continued to ponder her fate but I grew cautiously optimistic. Perhaps she married a sailor and had a baby too soon. He came home from the war and they fought; they divorced; and she remarried. This time, to an older man who treated her well. She'd have more children and they would have children. When Main Street fell on hard times, she Christmas-shopped for her children and then her grandchildren at the big mall, where there'd be no clusters of friends and neighbors swapping stories near the peanut roasting machine. She'd only see clusters of unfamiliar faces coming from all over the county and from across the state line. That's what I see when I go back home and take a trip to the mall. I look into the eyes of aging shoppers, hoping to see a familiar face from the years when my hometown was in its heyday.

The boy who said, "Don't lie to me," may be there, wearing a hearing aid and carrying a cane. I'd strike up a conversation with him, and he'd probably say the mall is convenient and the selection grand and, with a little prodding, he might tell me the story of his life. I'd like to take him back to when he was a rowdy teenager, high on Lucky Strikes and downtown Saturday night. He and his generation, their combined energy powerful enough to defeat two armies, kept our country safe. Perhaps he married when he got back, couldn't adjust at first, drank too much, but finally his life came together.

On the other hand, he's old now, and he just might not remember a minute of Saturdays on a downtown street. He's just trying to get to the mall and back home one more time. Everything else is irrelevant.