Julie
1962
I
knew the day everything went wrong. It was August fifth, a Sunday. It was also the day Marilyn Monroe died.
That morning after church, all of us except Isabel took our seats at the porch table, ready to dig in to our usual hearty Sunday breakfast.
“Isabel?” My mother leaned back from her chair so she could see into the living room. We would not be allowed to start in on the eggs and bacon and rolls and crumb cake until my older sister was at the table and grace had been said.
We heard Isabel’s bare feet skitter across the linoleum in the living room. She zipped onto the porch and sat down in the chair next to me.
“Marilyn Monroe is dead,” she announced, just as we all reached for one another’s hands to say grace.
“What?”
My mother took Lucy’s hand in hers. “What are you talking about?”
“I just heard it on the radio,” Isabel said. “She killed herself.”
“Oh, what a shame,” my grandmother said.
My father made a sound of disgust. “It figures that she would die committing a sin, since that’s the way she lived,” he said.
“How did she kill herself?” I asked, curious.
“I don’t want to hear about it!” Lucy plastered her hands over her ears and hummed loudly as my sister started to answer.
“Not now, Isabel,” Grandma said. “Lucy doesn’t want to hear it.”
I knew little about Marilyn Monroe, only that she was blond and beautiful and extremely sexy. Men swooned over her and women envied her. Why would someone like that kill herself?
“Let’s say grace,” my father said, reaching for my hand on one side of him and my grandmother’s on the other. We bowed our heads, reciting the words by rote, and then settled down for some serious eating. My father was the chef on Sunday mornings and his scrambled eggs were always doctored with onions and peppers and tomatoes. Sunday breakfasts were one of my favorite times with my family.
“Tonight,” Grandma said as she cut her eggs with the side of her fork, “Grandpop and I want to take you girls to the boardwalk.”
I whooped with joy, but I wasn’t surprised when Izzy begged out.
“Thanks, Gram,” she said, “but I already have plans.”
“Will you come, too, Mom?” Lucy asked.
My mother poured herself a second cup of coffee. “No, honey,” she said. “I’ll stay home and catch up on housework.” It would be years before I realized how much my mother probably welcomed an occasional respite from having us all underfoot.
It wasn’t until halfway through the meal that the topic of Marilyn Monroe’s suicide came up again.
“Girls,” my father said, “there’s a lesson in Marilyn Monroe’s death.”
“Daddy.”
Lucy set down her juice glass and looked at him indignantly. “We’re not supposed to talk about it now.”
“You’re not too young to know these things,” he said to her. He looked at me, then at Isabel. “She lived in sin in many, many ways. Not only didn’t she care about how she was hurting God, she didn’t care about how she hurt other people, either.”
“I don’t think she was
that
bad, Charles,” Grandpop said as he buttered his second hard roll.
“Look at the facts,” Daddy said. “She had affairs with married men. Many of them. She broke up marriages. She posed…without clothes on for calendars and magazines.”
“They found her nude,” Isabel added, and my father shook his head, as if to say
See what I mean?
“Probably the worst thing she did was have abortions,” he said. “Several of them.”
I cringed. I’d been taught so well by my father. How could any woman take the life of her unborn child?
“What’s an abortion?” Lucy asked.
“You don’t need to know that.” My mother sent my father a look of exasperation above Lucy’s head.
“And many people believe that she’s been having an affair with President Kennedy,” my father added.
“Oh, that’s ridiculous,” my grandmother said. “You’re filling these girls’ heads with rumors.”
“I believe it’s true,” Daddy said, tapping his fingertips on the rim of his coffee cup. “I’m sorry to say it, but I believe Jack
Kennedy’s capable of breaking his marriage vows, and Marilyn Monroe was certainly capable of tempting him to do so. Nothing good could come of the sort of behavior she was known for.”
I thought of my impure thoughts, reassuring myself that they were mild in comparison to the things Marilyn Monroe had done.
“I heard about a girl who cheated on her husband.” Isabel had one elbow on the table, her hand holding a piece of crisp bacon that she waved a little in the air as she spoke. “She went off on a vacation with her boyfriend and they were in a helicopter and when they got out of the helicopter, the propeller was spinning around and it cut off her head.”
“Oh, Isabel!” my mother said.
“I am
not
listening to another disgusting word!” Lucy got up, lifted her plate from the table and carried it into the house.
But Isabel, as usual, had won my father’s affection. He looked across the table at her, nodding.
“Exactly,” he said.
My father was so blind. I wished I had the guts to tell him that Isabel and Ned met on the platform in the bay every night. My attempts to push Bruno and Isabel together had failed so far, and on those nights when I snuck out on the boat, there they were—Isabel and Ned, hugging and kissing…and much, much more.
My father left for Westfield later that afternoon and I saw that Wanda and her family were still on the other side of the canal. They usually fished only in the morning, but the weather was cool and I guessed they had simply decided to make a day of it. I thought I would join them.
I got my fishing gear from the garage, then walked around
the side of the house to grab a dry towel from the clothesline. Isabel’s wonderful giraffe towel hung there among the plain old beach towels. I assumed that Izzy was already at the beach, so as long as I returned the towel to the line before she got home, she would never know that I’d borrowed it. I tossed the towel over my arm, then headed around the house to the backyard.
My fishing line had snapped the last time I’d used it, so I sat on one of the Adirondack chairs to repair it. Next door, Ned, Ethan and Mr. Chapman were in their boat in the dock. I could see the tops of their heads and I could hear conversation, some of it heated, but I could not make out the words.
Suddenly Mr. Chapman’s voice rose. “I said
no!
” he shouted.
Ned yelled something back at him, his words unintelligible.
“Go in the house, Ethan,” Mr. Chapman said, and I guessed that Ethan was either being punished for something or—more likely, from the sound of it—the conversation was not meant for his ears. I buried my head close to the fishing line, pretending to be engrossed in my task in case one of them glanced in my direction, but I was actually straining to hear what was being said.
Once the door to the Chapmans’ porch had slammed shut behind Ethan, Mr. Chapman spoke up again. “You’re not going to see her tonight,” he said.
Curiosity and hope welled up in me. If
I
couldn’t break Ned and Isabel up, maybe Mr. Chapman could. My nose was so close to the fishing line that I could smell the briny scent emanating from it.
“If you’ve known all this time,” Ned said, “why are you cracking down all of a sudden?”
Mr. Chapman lowered his voice, and although I leaned my head a few inches closer to their yard and pushed my hair behind my
ear, I could not hear what he said. Their conversation lasted only a few more minutes before Mr. Chapman went into the house. I felt sorry for Ned. I knew what it was like to be chewed out and how powerless and angry it could leave you feeling.
I had long since finished working on my fishing line, so with the excitement over next door, I carried my pole and bucket and the giraffe towel to my own dock. I descended the ladder and was about to jump into the runabout when I heard Ned softly call my name. I peered over the bulkhead to see him walking toward me, and I dropped everything into the boat and rushed up the ladder to the sand.
I started to call hello to him, but he put his finger to his lips.
I nodded.
I understand,
I was saying to him. He didn’t want his father to hear.
He waited until he was right next to me before he spoke again, his voice very low. “Is Izzy home?” he whispered. He glanced toward his house as though afraid his father might be watching him. I could just about smell the fear on him.
“No,” I said. I looked at his hands expecting to see the toy giraffe, but he didn’t have it with him. “She’s gone to the beach with Mitzi and Pam, I think.” I watched his face to see if the mention of Pam sparked any reaction in him, but he barely seemed to notice. I was one-hundred-percent certain George had either mistaken someone else for Ned that day in the river or else he’d just been teasing me.
“I was wondering if you’d give her a message for me?” Ned asked.
“Sure.”
I would do anything for you,
I thought. It was great that he was talking to me on a Sunday. My hair always looked pretty and wavy on Sundays because I washed it and set it for church.
I wondered if he noticed how good it looked. I tossed it over my shoulder as we talked, hoping the gesture was as sexy as I thought it was.
“Tell her I can’t see her tonight, okay?” he asked.
I nodded. I felt so adult. So proud to be trusted with their secrets. “Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “I’ll tell her.”
“Thanks.” He reached toward my head and I gritted my teeth, expecting him to tousle my hair as if I were a kid, but instead, he rested his hand on the back of my head and looked into my eyes. “You’re the most, Jules,” he said.
I wanted to stand on my tiptoes and kiss him. It would have been easy. He was so close, so handsome. But I kept my bare heels glued to the sand and simply smiled at him, acknowledging the compliment. Then I headed for the ladder once again.
I was still elated by the thrill of his touch a short time later, as I cast my line into the water from the other side of the canal. I’d hung Isabel’s towel over the fence in front of me so that the giraffe was watching us with his big, long-lashed eyes. Wanda loved the towel so much that I wished I could give it to her.
“You ever seen one of them for real?” she asked me, pointing to the giraffe.
“Sure,” I said. “At the zoo in New York. Haven’t you?”
“Uh-uh,” she said, and as we started fishing, I began hatching a new plan. I could save some money and take Wanda—and maybe George, if he was nice to me—on the train to New York and we could spend the whole day at the zoo. If Wanda had never seen a giraffe, she’d probably never seen an elephant or a rhinoceros or any other wild animals. It would be so much fun to introduce her to that whole new world. I was trying to fig
ure out how I could get away from the house for an entire day when George interrupted my thinking.
“So,” he said as he baited his hook, “why’s your big sister’s boyfriend talkin’ to a raggedy little child like you?”
I guessed he had seen Ned and me talking in my yard.
“He happens to think I’m the most,” I said, my nose in the air.
“The most
what?
” he asked, laughing.
I ignored him. “What if someday soon, the three of us go to the zoo in New York?” I suggested.
“How you gonna get your daddy to let you do that?” Wanda asked, and George shook his head.
“You two on your own,” he said. “I ain’t gonna get my ass caught taking some white girl across the state line.”
Our banter went on that way for nearly an hour, with me plotting our trip and the two of them telling me why it wouldn’t work. Salena and the men were a distance away from us, and I could hear them singing along with the songs on the colored radio station they listened to. Nothing was biting, but none of us minded.
The canal provided plenty of entertainment with the Sunday swarm of boats in all shapes and sizes. A few of the taller ones rocked in place in front of us as they waited for the bridge to open and let them through. More and more of the larger vessels clogged the canal, and finally, the bridge began making its familiar clanking sound as the roadway above the water slowly swung open. I wasn’t used to seeing the bridge from that side of the canal, and I was watching in fascination when a speedboat pulled up alongside the bulkhead right in front of me.
“Hi, Julie!”
I looked down, surprised to see Bruno Walker sitting below me in his boat.
“Hi, Bruno,” I said. His nearly black ducktail was a bit windblown which made him look even sexier than usual, and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. You could see every bulging muscle outlined beneath his tan skin. Even lifting his cigarette to his mouth was enough to turn his arm into a brawny network of hills and valleys.
“What are you doing over here?” He looked at Wanda, then George, then back at me again. He wasn’t wearing sunglasses and he could barely mask the surprise in his eyes at finding me fishing with colored people.
“Fishing,” I said, not answering the question he was really asking. “These are my friends, Wanda and George. That’s Bruno,” I said, nodding toward him.
Wanda and George said nothing. They knew my world did not mesh well with theirs.
“I wanted to ask you something,” Bruno said. His boat bobbed on the wake of a passing ship, but he held it steady in front of us. “Are you and Isabel real close?”
I shrugged. “Sort of,” I said. “Why?”
“How serious do you think she is about Ned?”
Although the boat ride I’d arranged for my sister, Ned and Bruno didn’t seem to have sparked the triangle I’d been hoping for, I could see another possibility opening up in front of me. “I think she’s losing interest in him,” I said.
“You don’t say.” He barely moved his lips when he spoke, like the words weren’t very important to him. But I knew that was just his style, and I grew bolder.
“You should talk to her about it,” I suggested.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think I’m her type.”
“Well, maybe she hasn’t really figured out her type yet.” I sounded like Dear Abby, giving advice to the lovelorn.