it last week or the week before. Woo hoo, how strange! The songs in my mind don’t get erased every week like the tape on the answering machine.”
She laughed then. She actually laughed. So I gave up, and went back to what I’d been doing before I had the brilliant plan: stacking up my reasons to be angry with her until they grew as tall as Tommy’s tallest block tower.
Of course she had lied to me, not once, but every time she let me keep believing it was Ben’s idea to break up rather than hers. She’d turned her back on a sweet, intelligent man who really loved her; I was positive, no matter what she said. She’d thrown away our chance to get out of Tainer, to move with Ben to some exotic new place like Seattle or New York after he finished his degree. She’d thrown away Tommy’s chance to have a normal family with a dad who cared about him. And worst of all, she’d damn near ruined my fragile belief in perfect, endless love.
But I would get it back. I would believe in a wonderful future, full of possibilities—no matter how unlikely it looked.
It was the beginning of 1983, a full year and a half before the Morning in America ads, when unemployment was still terrible and people were scared of everything from Tylenol tampering to computers that would take over the world. But I was determined. I threw Tylenol into our shopping cart without hesitating; I tore off the cover from the Time magazine announcing that the computer was 1982’s Man of the Year and hung it on my bedroom wall. I listened to Mary Beth’s customers talk about automatic teller machines as though they were an evil plot, bound to lead to bar codes on our wrists and government spies who knew everything about us—and shook my head. I watched the nightly news, full of gloom and doom about everything from the farm crisis to the increasing tensions with Russia—and told myself that they were just trying to scare us. The world was about to get better; it had to be. By the time I was my sister’s age, all of this stuff would be solved, and I’d live in a big apartment in a big city with a dome over everything to keep out nuclear bombs and keep the temperature at a perfect seventy-two degrees, hole or no hole in the ozone.
My optimism extended to everything, even my relationship with Kyle. I wanted to believe it was a good thing, even though almost every date ended with us parked on the cliffs by the river—and me fighting him off.
“Come on, Leeann,” he would say, as he tried to pull my tights down. “I can tell you’re ready.”
“I’m only fourteen,” I would remind him, thinking, I’m not a meat loaf. You can’t look at me and tell I’m ready.
I admit, I liked making out with him. Not so much the reality, which was often awkward: our noses would bump together, out front teeth would clink, I would worry about my breath when I realized his smelled like garlic and we’d eaten the same pizza. It was the idea that pleased me, that and the knowledge I had a private life my sister knew nothing about.
She had her secrets, I had mine. Then too, who knew where this could lead? It certainly didn’t seem like my great love, but maybe great loves don’t seem so great in the beginning. And so what if I was often a little bored listening to him talk about basketball and his car and the next thing he was going to buy? Everyone said I was lucky and I thought so, too. At least I wasn’t like my sister, who’d turned her back on men and romance and everything important in life.
Even her opinions grated on me now. For instance, her constant harping about the Maneater song. Right before winter break it had been the most popular song in the country and weeks later, it was still on the radio—and my sister was still talking about how much she detested it. Of course she had to listen to it, for customers, but she thought it was a very bad sign if a woman found herself stuck on that tune. “It’s not only anti-female, it’s one of the
She laughed then. She actually laughed. So I gave up, and went back to what I’d been doing before I had the brilliant plan: stacking up my reasons to be angry with her until they grew as tall as Tommy’s tallest block tower.
Of course she had lied to me, not once, but every time she let me keep believing it was Ben’s idea to break up rather than hers. She’d turned her back on a sweet, intelligent man who really loved her; I was positive, no matter what she said. She’d thrown away our chance to get out of Tainer, to move with Ben to some exotic new place like Seattle or New York after he finished his degree. She’d thrown away Tommy’s chance to have a normal family with a dad who cared about him. And worst of all, she’d damn near ruined my fragile belief in perfect, endless love.
But I would get it back. I would believe in a wonderful future, full of possibilities—no matter how unlikely it looked.
It was the beginning of 1983, a full year and a half before the Morning in America ads, when unemployment was still terrible and people were scared of everything from Tylenol tampering to computers that would take over the world. But I was determined. I threw Tylenol into our shopping cart without hesitating; I tore off the cover from the Time magazine announcing that the computer was 1982’s Man of the Year and hung it on my bedroom wall. I listened to Mary Beth’s customers talk about automatic teller machines as though they were an evil plot, bound to lead to bar codes on our wrists and government spies who knew everything about us—and shook my head. I watched the nightly news, full of gloom and doom about everything from the farm crisis to the increasing tensions with Russia—and told myself that they were just trying to scare us. The world was about to get better; it had to be. By the time I was my sister’s age, all of this stuff would be solved, and I’d live in a big apartment in a big city with a dome over everything to keep out nuclear bombs and keep the temperature at a perfect seventy-two degrees, hole or no hole in the ozone.
My optimism extended to everything, even my relationship with Kyle. I wanted to believe it was a good thing, even though almost every date ended with us parked on the cliffs by the river—and me fighting him off.
“Come on, Leeann,” he would say, as he tried to pull my tights down. “I can tell you’re ready.”
“I’m only fourteen,” I would remind him, thinking, I’m not a meat loaf. You can’t look at me and tell I’m ready.
I admit, I liked making out with him. Not so much the reality, which was often awkward: our noses would bump together, out front teeth would clink, I would worry about my breath when I realized his smelled like garlic and we’d eaten the same pizza. It was the idea that pleased me, that and the knowledge I had a private life my sister knew nothing about.
She had her secrets, I had mine. Then too, who knew where this could lead? It certainly didn’t seem like my great love, but maybe great loves don’t seem so great in the beginning. And so what if I was often a little bored listening to him talk about basketball and his car and the next thing he was going to buy? Everyone said I was lucky and I thought so, too. At least I wasn’t like my sister, who’d turned her back on men and romance and everything important in life.
Even her opinions grated on me now. For instance, her constant harping about the Maneater song. Right before winter break it had been the most popular song in the country and weeks later, it was still on the radio—and my sister was still talking about how much she detested it. Of course she had to listen to it, for customers, but she thought it was a very bad sign if a woman found herself stuck on that tune. “It’s not only anti-female, it’s one of the
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