Paper Hearts

The pastel houses of Long Island were lined up like toys. They smelled of fresh lumber, new cars, and high hopes. Summer brought on barbecues and big cotton sheets that billowed from the clotheslines. It was 1962, and though I did not know it, I was part of the post-war migration of young families who left the city for the dream of owning a private house with a backyard and a bit of grass in front. Sunrise Highway, 27 West, was the main link between this just-sprung world and the gritty place that held our fathers' livelihoods. But I never contemplated what we had abandoned. From my perspective, we had just come leap years closer to the way things were supposed to be.

I even had a best friend. Her name was Louise Longo, and she lived on Magnolia Street, four blocks away. We were in the same seventh grade class at Mulligan Junior High, and we liked to do our homework together at her family's kitchen table, listening to the top hundred hits on WABC and snacking on the pretzels that her mother cheerfully set out for us. Louise's bedroom had pink and purple wallpaper printed with ballerinas in tutus, and a little skirted bedside lamp like one I had seen in the Green Stamps catalog. Sometimes I would sleep over, and we would talk all night about kids we knew, music we liked, private worries, and the grand things we intended to do with our lives.

Saturday was a time for adventure. Louise and I loved to explore the deep scrubby woods on the outskirts of the neighborhood. In less than a decade all the woods would be gone, but for now, Long Island was still what my mother derisively referred to as "the sticks". Occasionally, Louise and I would come upon an abandoned car with rusted doors and bullet-shattered windows, and we'd invent wild stories of gangster escapades, bank robberies, hidden cash, and mad pursuits. A ramshackle shed with a bolted door was someone's secret hideaway, and we were detectives, cunning and bold, in search of clues about mysterious disappearances and shady dealings that were tainting the spanking new suburbs.

Other times, we would walk along the tracks of the Long Island Railroad, a forlorn stretch of nothing, but I always liked seeing a town from the outside, glimpsing the bedraggled yards and back alleys. One afternoon, we came upon a dog that had been severed in two. And once, not far from the tracks, we investigated the blackened ruins of a burned house -- the blank shocked eyes of its gaping windows saddened me. It smelled like charcoal in a barbecue grill on a rainy day.

The lands of our wanderings stretched far. We rode our clunky bicycles to a little town called Blue Point, forgot the way back, and had to call home to be rescued. We ate black cherries from a paper sack as we dangled our feet in the water of the bay. We rambled through white sand on a gray day, slid down a dune, then lay on the beach, looking straight up into the vast dome of sky.

"The world is so big," Louise declared, "Let's travel together when we're out of school. We can start with Morocco."

"Morocco? Where exactly is that?" I asked.

"I'm not sure," she replied, "but I like the sound of it."

I had to agree -- it evoked exotic images of colorful bazaars and date palm trees. And there were a lot of possibilities. Just as we roamed the landscape of Long Island, Louise and I would traipse the globe together. We'd solve mysteries and write books; we'd climb mountains and visit wise men; we'd light candles in cathedrals, and sleep in tents on Persian carpets underneath the desert stars.

"Whatever we do, let's never settle for an ordinary life," I proclaimed.

"Never," said Louise, and that was that.

Early in our friendship, Louise and I had made the delicious discovery that our birthdays were just a day apart. I had skipped a grade, so she was one year older than me, but we decided to plan a double party for my thirteenth and her fourteenth birthday. The Longos' house had a finished basement with blonde wood-paneling, a cabinet full of board games, a card table, and some extra chairs. We would decorate it with magenta hearts and crepe paper streamers. Louise would bring down her record player and a stack of 45s. We even invited boys.

My father let me buy a brand new dress - it was eleven dollars at the Rainbow Shop, not cheap, and I felt very indulged. Up until this time, most of my clothes had been hand-me-downs, and it wasn't often that I got to select a dress for myself. This one had a navy blue skirt, a sleeveless print top, and a matching navy blue jacket. In retrospect, it seems a rather adult and conservative choice, but I felt smart and crisp in it. I even wore nylons, although they pressed down the hair on my legs and made it more conspicuous. My mother had told me that once you shaved your legs, the hair would grow in thicker and blacker than ever, and you would have to shave for the rest of your life. I wasn't about to start anything that I would have to keep doing forever. I didn't figure anyone was gonna look that close at my legs, anyway.

It was a wonderful party. Tommy Kettle asked me to dance a slow dance with him. Oh, we gotta say good-bye for the summer…I had never before danced with a boy, but we just moved around tentatively, and it was pleasant enough. Tommy was a nearly a foot shorter than me, but he was confident and funny. Louise, meanwhile, danced every dance with Bruce Morro, and even when the music stopped, they sat together on the couch beneath a string of paper hearts, needlessly close. There was something intimate in the murmur of their voices, something exclusive about their giggles, something inexplicably jarring about the trifle of a kiss Bruce placed on her cheek as he said good-bye.

On Monday morning, Bruce appeared outside our classroom to walk Louise to social studies, as if she didn't know the way. Her voice took on a false tin quality that I'd never heard before; her laugh grew shrill and silly. After school, when Louise and I usually walked home together, Bruce showed up again, and I found myself following in their wake, stepping over the cheap trinkets of their talk, wondering how someone I knew so well could suddenly seem so alien. I dialed Louise's number several times that evening, and always got a busy signal. I knew she was talking to Bruce.

It would be two more weeks until summer vacation. I was watching Louise brush her taffy-colored hair in the girls' room - she had become inordinately concerned about her appearance lately. "The weather is supposed to be nice this weekend," I ventured. "Maybe we could ride our bikes to Blue Point."

"Bruce and I are going bowling on Saturday," Louise responded, as though she had a date every day, as though "Bruce and I" were a natural thing to say in such a casual, preoccupied way…as though I hadn't recently observed that his name was written in blue ink block letters all over her loose-leaf binder. She wore his chunky school ring suspended from a thin gold chain around her neck. She never talked about Morocco.

Our end-of-the-year school trip was to Jones Beach that year. I packed a can of root beer, two peanut butter sandwiches, baby oil, Jane Eyre and a hairbrush. I wore a blue and white checked one-piece bathing suit that reminded me of summer skies, and felt very attractive until Joyce Conway told me it looked like a tablecloth. But I wasn't going to let it bother me. Jones Beach was a holiday place with bright striped umbrellas and a genuine boardwalk. The water would be great for wading, and I could read Jane Eyre as I got a suntan, and Louise and I could…

But Louise had not included me in her plans for the day. She sat with Bruce on a blanket of their own, giggling that new giggle she had recently acquired. She was as frothy as soda pop, as fake as a dime store ring that turns your finger green...

And there was Bruce doting on her, encouraging this awful metamorphosis. I reached for my hairbrush and flung it with an anger I had not known was there. It hit him in the chest, hard.

"Why, you…you…if you weren't a girl!" he sputtered.

Nothing was solved. Louise wouldn't speak to me. Bruce told everyone I was jealous and nuts. My bathing suit looked like a table cloth, I hadn't shaved my legs, and there was sand in my peanut butter. I sat on the bus alone and tried to read my book. Tears burned eyes but I wouldn't let them go. I couldn't even explain what had caused them.

Pretty soon, the woods came down and little houses grew everywhere like a spreading garden of artificial flowers, all mint green and yellow, pink and pale blue. The hearts of the towns along the railroad track crumpled, displaced by covered shopping malls. The neighborhoods seemed tattered, the fathers grew tired, ordinary people lived their ordinary lives, and I forgot about Morocco until now.

- Cynthia Carbone Ward