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.