By early October, knowing I had to get up and spend five days a week with Mrs. Gravitts had worn my childlike joyfulness thin, and at ten, I was already acting like a grouchy grown-up. Everybody in my family, even Julie, thought it was funny to call me "Sunshine." Rather than the desired effect of making me see the error of my ways, hearing "Sunshine" just made the dark cloud that brewed over my head grow angrier and blacker. It seems like for a while there I was pretty much a constant brewing storm and threatening tempest.
It was bad enough that my own family members called me names, but one night at the supper table the funnel cloud touched ground and nearly made goulash out of Mother's nicely laid-out rump roast, jacket potatoes, turnip greens, and fried green tomatoes. Julie had invited her boyfriend, Travis Wayne Harvey, over for supper. As he approached the table where I was already sitting, he opened his mouth and said, "Hey, there, Sunshine!"
Well, that was it. The combination of somebody who was not even a member of my family calling me "Sunshine" and Mrs. Gravitts' clanking teeth and murderous paddle frenzies was enough to push me over the edge.
"Don't you Sunshine me, you bigmouthed bully! Did you hear him, Mother? He is not even a member of this family!"
I let loose with a torrent of high-pitched scowls, and then, with a flourish of drama, turned over my chair and ran to my room. I was hungry; I loved fried green tomatoes, and we didn't have them everyday. I fully expected to be rescued and coaxed back to the supper table, but all that happened next was laughter. I could hear them in there laughing at me!
It's a terrible thing when growing up takes you to the place for the very first time where you aren't experienced enough to know what to do next: if you have a semi-civilized family like I did, you aren't street-smart enough to know how to cuss eloquently or get in the last shocking word, and you know that if you go off half-cocked and try to pay them back in some outlandishly violent way like busting out your sister's boyfriend's windshield with your pogo stick or busting out the kitchen window with your fist and scattering glass all over the table, when your daddy gets home, he will forget the civilized part of his nature and let him barbaric nature handle it with his belt. So I just sat there hungry and listened to Brenda Lee singing, "I'm Sorry," (which I wasn't) and Johnny Horton singing, "North to Alaska"( which is where I wished Travis Wayne Harvey would go).
If it hadn't been for me, he might never have made it to first base with my sister. He had been able to pull the wool over Mother's and Daddy's eyes about being an okay boyfriend to their firstborn daughter totally at my expense. It was last fall at one of the football games. Somebody had thrown a cigarette down from the bleachers, and since I was walking by and noticed that it was a perfectly good, unfinished cigarette, I just picked it up and took a couple of puffs. I should have taken time to look around a little bit first, though, because Travis Wayne happened to be leaving the concession stand and saw me. Before I got home, he had found a way to tell my parents the whole story. This made me so mad I couldn't see straight, but of course Julie was so cross-eyed in love with this jerk that she took up for him.
She came to me pleading his case: "Jen, Travis Wayne was just doing what was best for you. You should feel good that he wanted to take care of you! He was really only doing what your own big brother would have had one." This was a down time for Daddy, so she didn't think of him as a brother right then.
Just the thought of Travis Wayne Harvey as my brother made me want to throw up. Since he and Julie had just started going out, I guess he figured he could make a little headway with Mother and Daddy by blabbing, like some self-righteous big brother figure. I should have beat him to the punch right then in the name-calling department before he called me "Sunshine." I had a few good ones for him, "Eddie Haskell" being among the first.
No siree, he had blown it with me, and trying to join in now like he was family was enough to make me want to take a ballpoint pen and go out and let all the air out of his tires.
Our mother was an artistic genius. At the same rate Daddy took up new hobbies and cranked out pranks, Mother cranked out handiwork. Once she made Daddy this beautiful Mexican-style shirt with lace down the front beside the buttons, and after wearing it only one day to work, he came home with a list as long as your arm of women who wanted her to make one for their husbands. Girl Scout leaders were always inciting her to come teach the girls how to embroider or make pillows or candles. On this particular night after the "Sunshine" fiasco with Travis Wayne, Mother started making some mosaic tile pictures. They were a set of clowns, one with a happy face and the the other one with a sad face.
She said, "Jen, I am making these for your room. We'll put one over each of your beds, and every night when you go to bed, you can choose which clown's face reflects the way you are feeling since you seem to be having some bad days this year."
"Okay, I guess that's a good idea," I said. "But don't let that Travis Wayne call me names. He doesn't even belong here. Why does he have to come over here and spoil our meals? Let him find his own food. Doesn't he have a home and a supper table? Why does Julie have to like him? Why does she have to have a boyfriend at all?"
"Well, you should understand, Jen. After all, you have a boyfriend," she answered calmly without looking up from her Elmer's Glue and colored rocks.
"What do you mean, I have a boyfriend?" I asked innocently and I thought quite convincingly too.
"Now you know good and well that you like Johnny Paul Hightower, and he likes you too."
"Me and Johnny Paul and Bubba just play football, together every afternoon. I don't like Johnny Paul for a boyfriend anymore," I assured her. Johnny Paul, who was also in Mrs. Fletcherton's room in fourth grade and lived down the street, had come over and popped Black Cats with me on our front porch several nights in a row before Christmas and, after we ran out of firecrackers, had kissed me on the lips just like Frankie Avalon kissed Annette Funicello at the Rio Theater. We also went to the Methodist hayride and held hands, and so our mothers both went out and bought us Christmas presents to exchange: I got him a red sweater vest, and he got me a comb and brush set with a mother of pearl mirror. Right after Christmas we had broken up because it turns out that he was the kind of boy that only likes a girl when she doesn't like him back. This attitude was the most ignorant thing I had ever heard of, and it made me pretty mad, since I had given up a way of life to become his girlfriend. And besides that, I hated having my hair brushed with his or anybody else's brush, much less combed, which hurts even worse, which means I didn't have any reason to want to look in that dumb mirror he gave me either. So now, I had bounced right back into my tomboyism and didn't know where my mother had gotten such a crazy idea about me having him or anybody else for a boyfriend.
I didn't want to talk about it anymore, so I said, "Can I sleep with Julie tonight?" I had the feeling that Mother and Daddy were going to fight because she kept calling people trying to find him and couldn't. I didn't want to be in the room next to theirs and hear all that, even though I knew that my parents were trying to give my sister some grown-up freedom from her little sister sharing her room now that she was a freshman in high school and how they were going to do that was to tell me I was finally "getting to have" my very own room.
"Now, Jen, why would you want to do that after we've given you your very own room with two beds that will, as soon as I can finish them, have these really cute clowns over them?" Julie isn't getting any new pictures in her room. You just finished telling me you liked these clowns, and we made that plan about you climbing into the appropriate bed every night, remember?"
That was the thing about most adults. You give them an inch, and they take a mile. I mean, what could I do? When she asked me about those clowns, I couldn't just tell her that I was too big for something that she had just spent a bunch of money on trying to use as a psychological plot to make me fell important. So I had very non-noncommittally, mind you, agreed that this was an okay idea. And now, you'd have thought that I put my hand on a Bible and promised to love, honor, and obey these clowns all the days of my life.
But then again, maybe if I was afraid to sleep in my own room, I was not too big for circus clowns.
It was bad enough that my own family members called me names, but one night at the supper table the funnel cloud touched ground and nearly made goulash out of Mother's nicely laid-out rump roast, jacket potatoes, turnip greens, and fried green tomatoes. Julie had invited her boyfriend, Travis Wayne Harvey, over for supper. As he approached the table where I was already sitting, he opened his mouth and said, "Hey, there, Sunshine!"
Well, that was it. The combination of somebody who was not even a member of my family calling me "Sunshine" and Mrs. Gravitts' clanking teeth and murderous paddle frenzies was enough to push me over the edge.
"Don't you Sunshine me, you bigmouthed bully! Did you hear him, Mother? He is not even a member of this family!"
I let loose with a torrent of high-pitched scowls, and then, with a flourish of drama, turned over my chair and ran to my room. I was hungry; I loved fried green tomatoes, and we didn't have them everyday. I fully expected to be rescued and coaxed back to the supper table, but all that happened next was laughter. I could hear them in there laughing at me!
It's a terrible thing when growing up takes you to the place for the very first time where you aren't experienced enough to know what to do next: if you have a semi-civilized family like I did, you aren't street-smart enough to know how to cuss eloquently or get in the last shocking word, and you know that if you go off half-cocked and try to pay them back in some outlandishly violent way like busting out your sister's boyfriend's windshield with your pogo stick or busting out the kitchen window with your fist and scattering glass all over the table, when your daddy gets home, he will forget the civilized part of his nature and let him barbaric nature handle it with his belt. So I just sat there hungry and listened to Brenda Lee singing, "I'm Sorry," (which I wasn't) and Johnny Horton singing, "North to Alaska"( which is where I wished Travis Wayne Harvey would go).
If it hadn't been for me, he might never have made it to first base with my sister. He had been able to pull the wool over Mother's and Daddy's eyes about being an okay boyfriend to their firstborn daughter totally at my expense. It was last fall at one of the football games. Somebody had thrown a cigarette down from the bleachers, and since I was walking by and noticed that it was a perfectly good, unfinished cigarette, I just picked it up and took a couple of puffs. I should have taken time to look around a little bit first, though, because Travis Wayne happened to be leaving the concession stand and saw me. Before I got home, he had found a way to tell my parents the whole story. This made me so mad I couldn't see straight, but of course Julie was so cross-eyed in love with this jerk that she took up for him.
She came to me pleading his case: "Jen, Travis Wayne was just doing what was best for you. You should feel good that he wanted to take care of you! He was really only doing what your own big brother would have had one." This was a down time for Daddy, so she didn't think of him as a brother right then.
Just the thought of Travis Wayne Harvey as my brother made me want to throw up. Since he and Julie had just started going out, I guess he figured he could make a little headway with Mother and Daddy by blabbing, like some self-righteous big brother figure. I should have beat him to the punch right then in the name-calling department before he called me "Sunshine." I had a few good ones for him, "Eddie Haskell" being among the first.
No siree, he had blown it with me, and trying to join in now like he was family was enough to make me want to take a ballpoint pen and go out and let all the air out of his tires.
Our mother was an artistic genius. At the same rate Daddy took up new hobbies and cranked out pranks, Mother cranked out handiwork. Once she made Daddy this beautiful Mexican-style shirt with lace down the front beside the buttons, and after wearing it only one day to work, he came home with a list as long as your arm of women who wanted her to make one for their husbands. Girl Scout leaders were always inciting her to come teach the girls how to embroider or make pillows or candles. On this particular night after the "Sunshine" fiasco with Travis Wayne, Mother started making some mosaic tile pictures. They were a set of clowns, one with a happy face and the the other one with a sad face.
She said, "Jen, I am making these for your room. We'll put one over each of your beds, and every night when you go to bed, you can choose which clown's face reflects the way you are feeling since you seem to be having some bad days this year."
"Okay, I guess that's a good idea," I said. "But don't let that Travis Wayne call me names. He doesn't even belong here. Why does he have to come over here and spoil our meals? Let him find his own food. Doesn't he have a home and a supper table? Why does Julie have to like him? Why does she have to have a boyfriend at all?"
"Well, you should understand, Jen. After all, you have a boyfriend," she answered calmly without looking up from her Elmer's Glue and colored rocks.
"What do you mean, I have a boyfriend?" I asked innocently and I thought quite convincingly too.
"Now you know good and well that you like Johnny Paul Hightower, and he likes you too."
"Me and Johnny Paul and Bubba just play football, together every afternoon. I don't like Johnny Paul for a boyfriend anymore," I assured her. Johnny Paul, who was also in Mrs. Fletcherton's room in fourth grade and lived down the street, had come over and popped Black Cats with me on our front porch several nights in a row before Christmas and, after we ran out of firecrackers, had kissed me on the lips just like Frankie Avalon kissed Annette Funicello at the Rio Theater. We also went to the Methodist hayride and held hands, and so our mothers both went out and bought us Christmas presents to exchange: I got him a red sweater vest, and he got me a comb and brush set with a mother of pearl mirror. Right after Christmas we had broken up because it turns out that he was the kind of boy that only likes a girl when she doesn't like him back. This attitude was the most ignorant thing I had ever heard of, and it made me pretty mad, since I had given up a way of life to become his girlfriend. And besides that, I hated having my hair brushed with his or anybody else's brush, much less combed, which hurts even worse, which means I didn't have any reason to want to look in that dumb mirror he gave me either. So now, I had bounced right back into my tomboyism and didn't know where my mother had gotten such a crazy idea about me having him or anybody else for a boyfriend.
I didn't want to talk about it anymore, so I said, "Can I sleep with Julie tonight?" I had the feeling that Mother and Daddy were going to fight because she kept calling people trying to find him and couldn't. I didn't want to be in the room next to theirs and hear all that, even though I knew that my parents were trying to give my sister some grown-up freedom from her little sister sharing her room now that she was a freshman in high school and how they were going to do that was to tell me I was finally "getting to have" my very own room.
"Now, Jen, why would you want to do that after we've given you your very own room with two beds that will, as soon as I can finish them, have these really cute clowns over them?" Julie isn't getting any new pictures in her room. You just finished telling me you liked these clowns, and we made that plan about you climbing into the appropriate bed every night, remember?"
That was the thing about most adults. You give them an inch, and they take a mile. I mean, what could I do? When she asked me about those clowns, I couldn't just tell her that I was too big for something that she had just spent a bunch of money on trying to use as a psychological plot to make me fell important. So I had very non-noncommittally, mind you, agreed that this was an okay idea. And now, you'd have thought that I put my hand on a Bible and promised to love, honor, and obey these clowns all the days of my life.
But then again, maybe if I was afraid to sleep in my own room, I was not too big for circus clowns.
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