WHY CAN'T I CRY? (Part 2: Daffodil)
I tell my best friend about Petunia and her blue Cleopatra eye shadow, all the way up to her plucked eyebrows. He comments that I'm wearing nail polish.
The scene where we girls walked to the movie theater for old Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin movie matinees, for which I can't remember a single title or plot, makes him smile. He too recalls going to the matinees with a few quarters in hand.
I tell him the theater was in the crook of a two lane road not far from the mines, which were long ago closed up, but it must have been opened there for the miner's entertainment back in the 1920's. And maybe there had once been a stage. I heard that years later it had been converted into a dancing school where local girls who aspired to be on drill team started early to learn to twirl batons. I describe the territory; the mission churches, the creek, a graveyard with colonial burials in the woods, overgrown. There's flooding in the spring. A railroad trestle high above. All of these childhood-quaint experiences, these people - their attitudes, all of them would soon enough become worthy of escape.
I'm not especially sentimental.
I tell him that I don't know what compelled me, but that after discovering that Pauly and Petunia were dead, that they had died years ago and I sensed tragedy, I decided to look on the Internet to see how Daffodil was doing; Daffy who had elected to go to electronics tech school right out of high school and was one of the few other girls who identified as a feminist or had feminist leanings. Daffy, who I'd defended when Petunia talked against her that last phone call.
Daffy had said, when we were teens, that she was just being practical. She had already told her boyfriend-fiancée that after she finished tech school they'd see who was making more money. Who was making the least was going to have to stay home to raise the children. Word was that some big companies, sans a single woman employee, were making women who graduated from electronics school higher starter-job offers than the men.
An obituary for Daffy that included her married and maiden name came up quickly on the internet. She had died early December! Recently! Whomever wrote that obituary had no sense of artistry. It said simply Daffy died. I got the impression she had just one day dropped.
She had married - young - and stuck with it - no divorce! She'd had children. She'd become a grandmother! There was no mention of her having worked at any particular job, company, or a career. Nor was she called a 'home-maker.' Apparently she had taken up golfing. Golfing?! Suddenly I imagined her as a corporate wife, the member of a country club, having concluded her job of raising her children. She'd moved further into the country. She'd left a husband behind.
There was one sentence that gave a clue to her personality. It said she always told funny stories. She had! I was so glad to know that was a lifelong characteristic. There was a photo of her with her same wolfie smile I remembered, her hair a little spiked and her eyes full of life.
Bit by bit my memories of Daffy bubbled up. I wonder if she ever told her daughters what it was to live when we were young.
She'd been one of the very few girl-teens to actually buy one when a Hope Chest manufacturer came around to sell big wooden chests with lids. If you're too modern to know, a Hope Chest was supposed to be filled with the things a young bride would need in her marriage, like bath towels and bedsheets, pots and utensils, things you might be gifted at a bridal shower instead. I'd never heard of one before that or contemplated using my teen years, or minimal baby-sitting money or minimum-wage cashiering income, to fill one with things I might need if I ever married, so I thought a Hope Chest as antiquated and seriously not feminist.
Daffy had showed me the Hope Chest catalogue in wood shop. We'd bonded a bit while we crafted wooden jewelry boxes. Hers came out beautifully and made with pride. I could actually imagine her using it. Mine, I sanded into oblivion but I got an A for effort and took it home where it soon disappeared into the basement. Our youngish teacher acted as if he were both blessed to have a couple girls in his class as well as a bit miffed about how to deal with us.
While we figured out how to use grids to copy or enlarge comics from magazines and avoided buzz-sawing our fingers off, Daffy was open about her relationship with her boyfriend. Where they were meeting to have sex, she never said, but she had already bought faux leopard skin lingerie and that had to be difficult to get in and out of in a parked car. And she once brought a sexy magazine to show me full of naked men with erections. What the hell!
But there we were, interpreting our reality as well as our idealism; feminism was also about being able to have sex as freely without guilt as boys did. If one wanted to.
Daffy, unlike other girls in high school who hadn't opted out, took charge of her sexuality. She determined that she needed to get on the contraceptive pill. To do this she had to get her teachers to agree that they would not report her as missing from school.
Here is a scene from my health class in high school: Our teacher takes roll. She says she has a film to show us. She has already taped over the window in the classroom door with cardboard. She locks the door. Somberly she tells us girls, "If any one of you tell on me that I showed you this film, I could loose my job." She proceeds to show us a short black and white film that reveals the existence and use of condoms.
Meanwhile, a good number of boys, especially the school athletes, had been told by their fathers to always carry one of these. I heard they did, in tight jeans pockets and hot and messy glove-compartments in used cars. Always ready these boys were supposed to be. But girls? Girls could still get called whores if they had sex. Who did or did not have sex was always speculation - gossip. Even some girls called other girls whores. Only the cheerleaders could have sex and not get called names, because if they were "going' with someone, they already wore a promise ring; the heck with class rings. Star sapphires were popular.
No one told on the health class teacher for showing us the film.
Every teacher Daffy asked cooperated to hide her absence from school. Everyone knew the only place to go was Planned Parenthood and to get to the closest clinic was going to be a long journey. In fact, it was going to be a whole long day to get there and back.
Daffy and her boyfriend, her fiancée, the man she did marry and stick with till death parted them, were each others very first, only, and forever lovers. Remarkable!
Her boyfriend was a volunteer fireman back in the day.
We had a friend who lived in a hollow with her grandmother, a girl of Native American heritage. Their old house burned down. I never asked where the girl and her grandmother were going to go to live, what they would do, but I turned up when Daffy's boyfriend and the other volunteer fireman brought one of the red firetrucks, filled up with water, and parked it visibly from a two lane. We held up car wash signs on the main road. We girls washed cars all day in exchange for donations to give the homeless girl so she could buy some clothes and personal items.
We were all wearing short-shorts, which we called hot pants. We had no idea how hot we were.
While Daffodil went to electronics school, using public transportation, I once in a while saw her and sat with her. I was dating one of her classmates. She was getting a lot of attention being one of the very few girls who actually went to the school. She was gently and jokingly being sexually harassed, but she seemed to be enjoying it. One day, she said, my boyfriend had followed her down the school hallway with his face very close to her rear end. I was appalled. She thought it was funny. The way she told that story!
He wouldn't have told me he did such things to be funny and popular with the other guys. He wouldn't have pulled such a thing around me. As she laughed aloud and told it, I said, "Really?"
But then there was the time she accused me of flirting with her boyfriend. She was red faced mad and I was shocked that she would think so. To this day I can't remember what might have been said or where because I spent no time with them as a couple at all. More likely it was he who said something complimentary about me to her, to make her jealous. And oh, I hate the type that say or do things just to make you jealous. I thought for a moment and said, "Maybe he just likes girls with ski-noses?!"
She broke out in a wild laugh and that was the end of that. A relief!
There was also time that she explained about getting credit and buying a house. This had never been explained to me. I took mental notes but years later when I first applied for MasterCard or Visa I was turned down.
I can't remember if I was invited to Daffy's wedding or not. Maybe I was invited to a shower? I might not have been. I'm sure I did not attend. But I do remember that I bought a set of six antique hand painted drinking glasses at an antiques show and got them to her somehow. I don't recall a thank you note but maybe she already had a set in her Hope Chest.
Daffodil was just one of my friends who disappeared into marriage.
Disappeared...
C 2026 Christine Trzyna
