WHY CAN'T I CRY? (Part 1: Petunia)
A sense of doom to start the new year overcomes me, not helped by a hellish cold - a face of pain - that has had me laying around for a couple days, creaking, and a partial loss of my voice.
I'm in this sad state because I revisited the past.
It began without intent. I was sitting with my best friend talking about this and that. This was between Christmas and the New Year. We had done a few interesting things to celebrate Christmas but it's not religious for us - a neighborhood Christmas light show - a choir performance at a liberal church - a tour of a historical Victorian house, every room dressed in holiday glitz. New Years, and future-thought, was replaced by one-day-at-a-time.
For some reason I thought of someone I had not in years, a memory that came to the surface like a bubble making it to the surface in the La Brea Tar Pit. Someone from my early teens. Let's call him Pauly. He was a neighbor kid who liked our yard because he was looking for slimy snails - interesting insects - and salamanders. I saw him in my minds eye in our yard searching around the slab wall and heard him shout salamanders ! I expected that this neighbor kid must have gone on to study these creatures. Maybe he was a famous scientist or taught at a college.
I went on the Internet to look him up. This looking for people from my past is something I almost never do. But I did.
Years ago he had died at the age of twenty! Of what? Who knew? Of course I imagined a car crash first, a drug overdose second, but who knows. His father had died more recently of very old age. Pauly was named in the obituary. There was his father's tombstone and on it were affixed two other plaques: his and - his sisters. Petunia had also died!
This - the death of his sister years ago - was also a surprise. As a child, as a pubescent girl, I had once considered her a best friend. She had died at 40.
I thought of us as girls, how in the short story I once wrote about her I described her spending hours picking at her zits, applying Ponds skin creme from the drug store, and powdering over her overworked skin. I saw Petunia once again in my mind, plucking at her eyebrows, fashioning her dark hair into a greasy mop. Very early on she had a strong sense of being feminine and was determined to be a diva. She had a bedroom that was stereotypically pink, with a canopy bed, and a dresser - and a mirror - all ruffly - which I could not relate to or desire.
I can't recall how it was that we two girls had started a friendship, other than that she was kid in my grade school and they went to our church. I don't recall ever seeing her or her family in church but maybe I wasn't that observant. Had she invited me over first? Was it our mothers that thought playing together might be good?
Besides Pauly, there was a third, younger brother, who was probably an 'idiot savant', but who knew such diagnosis or labels back then? He spent hours every day listening to rock and roll records and playing the drum parts. His siblings were in awe of him because they said he only had to listen to a 45 rpm once and he had it down. He'd been sent to a special school and her mother seemed to have a great sense of shame about this. There were rumors that she would not leave the house.
Now, if you're stuck in a tiny apartment and won't leave, that can be bad, unless you're intentionally sequestering yourself to get into flow and stay there for days on end, which I've done. This was a house with a good yard, and she went out in it, so perhaps it was that she would not leave the property. There were stories that this mother had to see a psychiatrist, and that Petunia's father would drive her there, and that this mother would wear a trench coat and big dark Jackie Kennedy type sunglasses, and kept her head down. Within the household, however, this woman was in charge.
She was not one of my favorite mothers, though I willed to like her.
One day when I was over there playing, Petunia's mother asked me if I liked the Monkees or the Beatles. Naturally I said the Beatles. Petunia's mother screamed at me. She told me off and she was not my mother! Something to do with that John Lennon had said the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ. I was unaware that he had ever said such a thing. I could not defend him. What did a grade-schooler know about such things - or care? It may be my imagination, but if I recall Petunia's mother broke a vinyl record or two in half in front of us. She threatened to tell my mother! She scared me.
I didn't tell on Petunia's mother when I got home. What would my mother, who didn't like rock and roll at all, say, if Petunia's mother called mine? Luckily, from that time on, when I was over there, it seemed her mother was busy - setting up records for the younger son to drum to, making dinner, and watching the clock to tell me it was time to go because they were going to have their dinner.
One time Petunia and me and her salamander-loving brother walked all the way to the matinee at an movie theater that ran old Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin romps on Saturdays. This was quite an adventurous walk for us although it was probably no more than a mile. How we knew what was too risqué or not, I have no idea, but at one of these movies there was a scene that was too sexy. What if our mothers found out? Petunia raced to cover Pauly's eyes.
I think she went to another school by the fifth grade. This was because she wanted to learn to play the clarinet and our school had no music - no instrument instructions - no band. It seems to me that ours became a friendship that picked up over the summers, since we were no longer in the same school.
They got a blue aluminum and turquoise plastic-lined, above ground pool, at the time when an above ground pool was key to having a social life and kids could compete about how deep; another of our friends had one that had five foot walls but had been dug down into the earth to be six feet deep. (There as also a handsome older brother over there that could dunk you, if you weren't careful about getting out of his way as he showed off and dove in.) Those were the days. No one was worried about skin cancer. The deeper the tan the better. Coppertone. Baby Oil. Bare skin and the sun.
We had such vigor.
I was invited to spend afternoons in Petunia's family above-ground pool maybe once a week one summer. Other kids came too, sometimes. When we tired of other games, we'd go walking round and round in the water in a group, clockwise or counterclockwise, to make the water whirlpool until it started splashing out over the sides and then refill it with the hose. We did not have a pool so I could not invite Petunia to mine, but I did invite her to run through our lawn sprinkler. I know how pathetic that must sound, but Petunia actually did show up! Pauly would show up too and continue his never-ending search for slimy snails, interesting insects, or salamanders! This was good healthy fun, no doubt about it. And when we took a break to lay out and tan, sometimes we still played with Barbie dolls.
I had a Barbie. Petunia had Barbie, Midge, and Skipper. And it was clear that she could and would dominate any play-action we had with these dolls. After all, it was her house, she had three dolls, and she had lots of clothes for her dolls. (Where was Ken? The convertible car? The house?) I didn't mind really. I'd never been all that into dolls but to not have a Barbie at all was to be totally socially outcast. Then one day, while my borrowed Midge gave in to Petunia's Barbie, Petunia asked me if my mother had told me yet that pretty soon we were going to bleed. She said it was how women had babies. My mother hadn't said a word. I didn't believe Petunia though I also didn't suspect her of lying or having any motivation. When I admitted I had not been told, she made me promise not to tell, that every girl's mother had to tell her about it. I walked home feeling sober, feeling the implication that my mother had decided I just wasn't mature enough yet to know such dark secrets. Then, quickly, I forgot about it.
Petunia continued her domination of me in other ways. I didn't quite understand it that way at the time but that's what it was. One day, instead of going to the matinee at the old theater, which was probably closed by then, she asked me to walk to the store with her. When we got there she picked up a box of sanitary napkins from the shelf, handed me the money, and expected me to be the one to actually buy these, saving her some, shall we say? embarrassment. I understood that she, unlike me, had started to bleed.
For some reason, my mother took to Petunia in a way that her mother had not taken to me. Maybe Petunia was playing up to her. It seemed to me Petunia was being treated and talked to my my mother as if she were more mature than me! Was she my friend or my mothers? Everything about Petunia was more mature than me.
She was in her high school marching band with her clarinet. She was proud of her white boots with the pom poms. She was often at band practice - busy. She said that band taught people how to get along with each other; she made other friends. The division between the two of us was widening. While I might not have been as mature as Petunia, who was doing blue eye-shadow like Liz Taylor as Cleopatra, I was becoming more sophisticated.
I realized that she, and Pauly, were racist. I might not have said so, when they called other people "niggers," but I inwardly cringed. I never did understand how racism could be acceptable within Christianity.
More important to me than racism was feminism. I was becoming aware at a time when to be so was to be openly mocked by my classmates - both male and female - and by some relatives. Their understanding of feminism was so banal. It was in their heads that to be a feminist was to hate men, to be quite possibly 'lesbian' and also the height of stupidity. I would grow up and out of it, that's what they thought. All it would take, it was implied, was meeting 'someone' (i.e. the man I wanted to marry) and I would give it all up and return to the way things in the world really were. What did I know? I hadn't fallen in love yet. I was too young.
Petunia made it clear she was no "woman's libber." Just as she ridiculed 'niggers' she sneered at women who wanted equality with men.
Even then, as limited as my experience and understanding was, having not lived as a full adult yet, I knew that it was all more complicated than that.
In my high school, there was one other female teen in my class besides me who took wood shop and graphic arts which had for years only been allowed to be taken by male students; let's call her Daffodil, Daffy for short, because she had such a good, fun, sense of humor, and she will soon become part of the story. Daffy had a mother who had to raise her and her sisters alone because her father was a merchant marine and only came home when the lakes froze over. Clearly Daffy had given some thought about going into so called "men's work."
At some point, when we were about fifteen, I visited Petunia in her fluffy pink bedroom. For Christmas yet, she had gotten a Ouiji board, a board with letters, numbers, and symbols and a movable planchette that was supposed to move with mysterious means across the board, to give answers to serious questions, about love, for instance. I'd never heard of or seen such a board, but when she asked me to join her, placing our hands together on the planchette and asked to summon a spirit, I tried it. Of the occult, I must say, it was popular, and Petunia was not the only teen into some aspect of it at the time, but when the planchette spelled out "Jesus Christ," I felt scared.
At sixteen, my first job as a minimum wage worker- cashier, a seasonal job, and other activities and school took up almost all my time. There were a couple teen boys from other schools who worked at the same store. I dated one of them, not seriously, in the end briefly, but enough to think that meant that a girlfriend (a good one, the only kind) would respect that. And one day as I cashiered, here came Petunia, and her latest side-kick girlfriend, targeting this kid for flirtation, astutely sneaking around me. I saw them. I got it, Petunia was after a prom date and she had somehow also met him - or he her - and she was targeting him. The diva in her was going to get what she wanted. This might have been enough for me to be, sadly, wearily, wary of her, but it was made worse when she showed up to gift me, something she had never done.
She gave me a black candle. It smelled of liquorish. I put the unexpected gift in my bedroom. Bad things started to happen. I thought she had put a curse on me - that candle, and after lighting it a few times, I got rid of it. Was that just my imagination, running away with me?
Why waste herself on hating me for no good reason, when she could bless herself with a love spell?
Senior year, other people told me that Petunia had run away from home. There was a conflict, especially with her mother. Petunia had lost respect for her mother or her mother had lost respect for her and was abusive to her. Years after the incident when her mother had told me off over John Lennon's statement, I believed it and pitied her. Petunia had said she was going to have children because if someone as ridiculous as her mother could give birth, she could. I also thought she was lucky to have her side-kick' and the side-kick's family who said she could live with them and finish high school.
And suddenly, soon after, Petunia and her family, her mother, her father, her and her brothers, united, had moved to another state. Up and went.
But some time before they left, there was a phone call. I probably didn't realize it would be the last time we spoke. She went on with me about the stupidity of feminists and mentioned Daffy, who I had taken to, and who was going to tech school for electronics after graduation. I heard myself say something I meant but I regret. I told Petunia that she could lay off Daffy who as least respected herself! I could tell I upset her.
I had finally said something to her that also defined where I stood. Besides her lack of respect for our friendship that had gone as far back as Barbie dolls and swimming pool summers, I also thought sneaking around me to get herself a prom date as she had was a lack of self-respect.
(Her target did go to the prom - three different schools - three different girls. Not her. Not me. And I didn't care.)
About a year after high school graduation, I heard that upon arrival in the other, southern, state, the eighteen year old Petunia had been a big hit with the men, that she'd been sought after. She had met and married a horse jockey so she must have been going to the races! But then I heard he had beaten her and so she had divorced. Of course, she didn't deserve that. She would not, in time, be the only friend of mine who experienced domestic violence in marriage.
But now, circa January 2026, on the Internet, knowing that there are errors on the Internet, I learned that Petunia had died at 40, that she'd died divorced because her body was in with her father and her brother, and worse, that Petunia had been married four times and had not one child before whatever happened happened. In my gut I thought, perhaps unfairly, she had taken her own life.
From this distance I still think of her as trapped in pre-feminist thinking. Her mother's advice that she'd relayed to me, such as "When you go on a date to play miniature golf, always let the boy win" was about manipulation, about taking on a persona instead of being real. But was it her mother's advice? Because the truth is her mother was no diva herself. She was like any other housewife/ stay-at-home mom you could meet. Wearing slacks and a tennis shoes and a casual top, worried that her thighs were too big, thinking about if dinner should be home-made spaghetti with meat sauce or opening a couple cans of Campbells soup.
Petunia once told me that when I went on a date, I should not get in or out of a car by myself. I was to stand there or sit there and wait for a man to open doors for me. Such gentlemanly behavior was supposed to show respect for me as a woman, to acknowledge the differences biologically between genders.
If I'd listened to her, I'd probably still be waiting.
C 2026 Christine Trzyna
