The Boys of My Youth (28 page)

Pertinent details. Blond poet. A slightly jaded and weary air about him. Something recognizable in the sideways glance, the
set of the shoulders. He’s sober now, but from what I can tell the former bad boy is buried in a shallow grave. The color
of his eyes escapes me but not the quality of the gaze. He appears to be fully and alarmingly present at all times. I have
to get out of here.

He leaves me a note on the mail table, full of charming misspellings. We meet and walk, describe our lives. He puts his hand
on my arm as we cross a street and continues listening, offering kindness and advice. I have a sudden overwhelming desire
to touch his face. I put my hands in the pockets of my jeans. It feels crowded inside my bell jar; condensation forms and
I begin weeping. He watches calmly, one foot on the bumper of a car. At some point he reaches out, lightly touches my face.

I take to wearing a Walkman and earphones everywhere I go, piping music directly into my head. The phone booth is the only
place it doesn’t work.

“I can only talk for a minute,” I tell her. My days are numbered here; I feel a longing for my empty living room, for the
grizzled face of Sheba the dog. The blue enamel breakfast table, the rug with a picture of New Zealand on it, the bird’s nest
we found outside the country place years ago, made from hair shed by my old dead heroic-hearted collie. I’m tired of being
here. I miss my stuff.

“I’m sick of
my stuff
,” she says. “I want all new everything.”

I want I want I want. I want to go home.

“What’s going on?” she asks. After a short pause a lightbulb goes on over her head. “Uh-oh,” she says.

Yeah.

“Heck,” she says cheerfully. “That’s
good
. Is he nice?”

I don’t think I know what nice means these days. “Well, he hasn’t pulled a gun on me,” I tell her. She sighs.

I’ve spent my whole life in this phone booth. I want my circus footstool, my pink coffee table, my Albert Payson Terhune books.
I want my Bruce Springsteen records. The Walkman lies dormant in my lap. I push the On button and the tiny voice of Van Morrison
emanates from the earphones. “The thing is,” I tell her, “he already has a brown-eyed girl. Back home.” Thank God.

“Oh.” She’s thinking this over. “Hmmmm.”

A pall settles over the conversation. I stare at my reflection, distorted in the chrome of the telephone. “This is still my
youth,” I finally tell her.

“Uh, whatever you say.” She sounds skeptical.

I peer closer at the chrome mirror. My vertical wrinkle is still visible and it’s afternoon. It’s usually faded back into
my face by mid-morning. Also, I might be getting jowls.

“I’m looking at my vertical wrinkle in the telephone,” I say.

“Isn’t it supposed to be gone by now?” she asks. “It’s one o’clock.”

“I hate to break it to you, but it’s two o’clock here,” I inform her. “I need oil-of-old-ladies.” I can’t even bring myself
to mention the jowls, for which there’s no cure anyway. All the women in my family begin to look like bulldogs right around
the age of thirty-eight; it’s a legacy.

The Artful Dodger has taken a turn for the worse. “He’s religious,” Elizabeth says. “And not only that, but he thinks I’m
going to church with him this Sunday.” Oh boy. To my way of thinking, the problem isn’t necessarily that he’s religious; it’s
more that he doesn’t have anything to counter it with, like a
drinking problem or weird sexual tastes. “Well, actually he is a little weird in that category,” she admits. This livens up
the conversation for a few minutes.

Before leaving the phone booth I plug the music back into my head. More hollering from Van. I notice as I set out on my walk
that the New York landscape has taken on the blurred and sepia tones of a distant memory. I’m already back in Iowa, waiting
for my body to join me.

Once home, I discover that I’m bored. Outside, long blank fields of corn and the blue midwestern sky. Inside, the same dustballs
in the same corners. The cat carries tiny corpses up to the back step and arranges them in rows. The kid next door plays basketball
with earphones on in his driveway, mouthing lyrics that would turn your hair white if you could hear them. Squint your eyes
and he looks a little bit like Dave Anderson. Close your eyes altogether and the blond poet appears.

I perfect the art of brooding, gazing for hours at the paint on my living room ceiling, smoking and smoking. Elizabeth comes
to visit me one weekend and we try on each other’s clothes and paint our toenails maroon.

“I’ll say one thing,” she remarks. “I do happen to have decent
feet.”
And she turns them this way and that, admiring.

My own feet look like they belong to a stranger with too much time on her hands. I stretch out on the couch and feed myself
a potato chip. There is a long hair-sized crack running down the center of the ceiling.

“Don’t brood in
front
of me,” she says.

Mister Spider has built a web right above my giant, dying, phallic-looking cactus. It’s a little trampoline and he’s bouncing
around in the center of it right now. Even the spiders are bored.

“It could be worse,” she mentions. “We could be having to
entertain those two mopes.” She means our ex-husbands, the Jim and Eric show.

If they were here, this is what they’d be doing: nothing, that’s what. They’d be placidly sitting around, waiting for us to
make something happen.

“So we’d still be bored,” she concludes, “
and
we wouldn’t even be able to paint our toenails, for fear of ridicule.” It’s true. Not only would it be boring but I’d have
that old feeling back of constantly imagining myself as a widow wearing a great outfit. The phone rings.

“Who could be calling me here?” Elizabeth says.

We let it ring and ring until the answering machine kicks in and then we tiptoe over to listen. “This is what I do when you
call,” I tell her.

My answering machine voice lies about my whereabouts and then the beep comes on. Suddenly I’m standing on my circus footstool
like a mouse has been let loose in the room. It’s the guy.

“Hi, Jo Ann, this is X,” he says and then leaves a long, rambling, totally coherent message and hangs up. Oh man. He’s shimmering
in my living room like a genie released from a bottle.

I don’t know whether to faint or kill myself. Elizabeth laughs unbecomingly. I put both hands around my own neck. We do our
silent screaming routine.

We are no longer bored.

“Truly extraordinary…. It’s a daring act and also a bit of a magic trick to focus on a scrap of real life — a failed family
vacation, a run-in with an irate driver, adolescent ridiculousness, a marriage on the skids—and manage to spin it into something
sad and beautiful. Yet that is exactly what Beard does…. It is the simple fact that Beard gives voice to these small moments
of sometimes sad, sometimes joyous truths — the all but forgotten time that composes the bulk of real life — that makes her
writing so moving…. Beard finds, always and perfectly, the heartbreaking poetry in everyday speech.”

— L
IESEL
L
ITZENBURGER
,
Detroit Free Press

“This engaging collection records both wrenching and riotous episodes in the life of a keenly observant character named Jo
Ann, whom we follow from babyhood to marriage and beyond…. Humor, terrific insights, and not a little rue make these stories
shine, each one a jewel loaded with sparkle and grit.”

—
Elle

“Beard pulls off a neat trick: She shows tragedy for what it is in life — plain old moment-to-moment misery.”

— J
ANET
S
TEEN
,
Time Out New York

“Exquisitely crafted autobiographical essays that have the arc and thrust of good fiction…. Beard’s high-wire trick is that
despite such grievous subject matter, she hangs on to her squinty, skinny-girl-on-the-sidelines sense of humor and never lapses
into mawkishness.”

—S
ARAH
T
OWERS
,
Mirabella

“Jo Ann Beard’s work impresses me no end. Funny without being sitcomish, self-aware without being self-absorbed, scrupulous
without being fussy, emotional without being sentimental, pointed without being cruel — I could go on and on with these distinctions,
all in Beard’s favor, but instead I’ll just say that Jo Ann Beard is a fantastic writer, an Athena born fully formed out of
her own painstaking head.”

— J
EFFREY
E
UGENIDES
, author of
The Virgin Suicides

“Reading Jo Ann Beard’s prose feels as comfortable as falling into step beside an old, intimate friend. She’s the sort of
writer whose charm lies in the voice — a kitchen-table drawl entirely uncontaminated by sentimentality…. Beard remembers (or
imagines) her childhood self with an uncanny lucidity that startles.”

— L
AURA
M
ILLER
,
New York Times Book Review

“Utterly compelling… uncommonly beautiful…. The writing lifts the book into the stratosphere…. The key is a voice of equal
parts curiosity and vulnerability. Life in these pages is an astonishment….
The Boys of My Youth
speaks volumes about growing up female and struggling to remain true to yourself.”

— D
AN
C
RYER
,
Newsday

“Jo Ann Beard sustains an almost miraculous level of detachment as she describes the stuff of nightmares… and how she, and
by implication all of us, survive them…. Beard evokes the dizzying sensation of tragedy, but she also provides weird, sparkling
moments of grace and stillness.
The Boys of My Youth
evokes the mundane, the hilarious, the horrific, and the redemptive all taken together, the very rhythm of life.”

— E
LLEN
K
ANNER
,
Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

“Beard remembers with beautiful simplicity the feeling of youthful longing, and combines those memories with the pains that
accompany adult life.”

—
Marie Claire

“These stories do it all. They are smart, funny, and moving. They are personal and unique and also universal…. There is not
a false note or wrong word.”

— B
ARBARA
F
ISHER
,
Boston Globe

“Smart, funny, and moving….A gifted and gutsy writer…. This is what a first collection of stories should be.”

—Barbara Fisher,
Boston Globe

Cousins, mothers, sisters, dolls, dogs, best friends: these are the fixed points in. Jo Ann Beard’s universe, the constants
that remain when the boys of her youth—and the men who replace them—are gone. This widely praised collection of autobiographical
essays summons back, with astonishing grace and power, moments of childhood epiphany as well as the cataclysms of adult life:
betrayal, divorce, death. It is a book that heralds the arrival of an immensely gifted and original writer.

JO ANN BEARD received a Whiting Writers’ Award in 1997. Her work has appeared in
The New Yorker, Story
, and other magazines. She is a graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and now lives in upstate
New York.

“Extraordinary…. Beard is writing not with the romanticism of a girl looking up at the stars, but with the brilliant cold
light of the stars looking down at us.”

—Ted Anton,
Chicago Tribune

“A luminous, funny, heart-breaking book of essays about life and its defining moments.”

—Meredith Kahn,
Harper’s Bazaar

“Beard remembers (or imagines) her childhood self with an uncanny lucidity that startles.”

—Laura Miller,
New York Times Book Review