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"People here have to be woken up to be told they've woken up," she told me.
"Maybe that's why it's called Sandburg. They named it after the Sandman," I added, always trying to keep up with her wit.
"No, no one was that creative. It's named after the nearby creek. Speaking of names, I like yours," she told me.
"My name? Why?"
"I envy people with unusual names. Zipporah. It shows your parents weren't lazy when it came to naming you. My name is so common, my parents could have imitated Tarzan and Jane and called me Girl, and it wouldn't have made all that much difference," she said, the corners of her mouth turning down and looking as if they dripped disgust. I couldn't imagine how someone like her could be unhappy with herself in any way.
"It's not so common. I like your name. It takes too long to say mine."
"It does not. Don't let anyone call you Zip," she warned. "It sounds too much like the slang for zero, and you're no zero."
"What makes you so sure?" I asked. How had she come to that conclusion so quickly? I wasn't exactly Miss Popularity with either the girls or the boys at my last school. In fact, I had yet to receive a single letter or phone call from a single old friend.
"Don't worry. I have a built-in zero detector. I'll point out the zeros in our school, and you'll clearly see that I know a zero from a nonzero."
It didn't take long for me to believe she could do that. Anyone she disliked, I disliked; anyone she thought was a phony, I did as well.
Both Karen and I were fifteen at the time, less than a year away from getting our junior driver's licenses. She was two months older. With passing grades in the high school driver's education class, we could get our senior licenses at seventeen, which meant we would be able to drive after dark. We would also get a discount on auto insurance. This was all more important to me than to her, because I was confident I could eventually have a car of my own. Jesse had his own car, a graduation present, so I assumed I would, too.
We talked about getting our licenses and a car all the time, dreaming of the places we would visit and the fun we would have. Sometimes, up in the nest, we pretended we were in my car driving along. We'd sit on the old sofa, and as I simulated driving, she pointed out the scenery in Boston or New Orleans and especially California, shouting out the names of famous buildings, bridges, and statues. We used travel brochures and pretended we were actually plotting out an impending vacation.
We considered a driver's license to be our passport to adulthood. As soon as you got your license, your image among your peers and even adults changed. You had control of a metallic monster, the power to move over significant distances at will, and you could grant a seat on the journey with a nod and make someone, even someone older, beholden.
"Of course, it's obvious we don't need a car to get around Sandburg," Karen said. "It's so small the sign that says 'Leaving Sandburg, Come Visit Us Again,' is on the back of the sign that says 'Entering Sandburg, Welcome.' "
When I told Jesse what Karen had said, he laughed hysterically and said he was going to try to get a sign made up like that and put it on his dormroom wall. He was so excited about the idea that I wished I had been the one to say it, especially after he remarked, "Your girlfriend is pretty clever and not just pretty."
The imaginary sign wasn't all that much of an exaggeration. There was only one traffic light in the whole hamlet. It was at the center where the two main streets joined to form a T, and because this was a summer resort community, during the fall, winter, and spring, the traffic light was turned into a blinker, more often ignored than obeyed. If Sparky--the five-yearold cross between a German shepherd and a collie owned by Ron Black, the owner of Black's Cafe-- could speak, he would bear witness against threequarters of the so-called upstanding citizens who ignored the light. Whenever he was sprawled on the sidewalk, Karen and I noticed that Sparky always raised his head from his paws each time a car drove through the red without stopping. He looked as if he was making a mental note of the license plate.
We laughed about it. Oh, how we laughed at ourselves, our community, our neighbors, back then. There seemed to be so much that provided for our amusement, such as the way Al Peron, the village's biggest landlord, strutted atop the roof of one of his buildings with his arms folded across his chest, his chin up, as if he were the lord of the manor, looking over his possessions. We called him Our Own Mussolini, because he resembled the Italian dictator as pictured in our history textbook. We giggled at the way Mrs. Crass, whose husband owned the fish market, swayed like a fish swimming when she walked. Stray cats followed cautiously behind her as if they expected some fresh tuna to fall out of her pockets.
We laughed about Mr. Buster, the postal clerk, whose Adam's apple moved like a yo-yo when he repeated your order for stamps and wrote it down on a small pad before giving them to you, and we shook our heads at the way the Langer Dairy building leaned to the left, a building Karen called the Leaning Tower of Sandburg.
"If too many customers stand on one side, it might just topple," she declared. Mrs. Langer wondered why Karen and I shrieked and then hurried from one side to the other when people came in behind us.
Karen and I observed so many little things about our community, things that no one else seemed to notice or care to notice. I began to wonder if we indeed had a bird's-eye view of everything and floated far above our world. Whenever I mentioned something Karen and I had noted, my mother or my father would say, "Oh, really? I never thought of that," or, "I never realized it." Maybe adults see things too deeply, I thought, and miss what's on the surface. They were once like us and saw what we saw, but they forget.
Karen agreed.
"Time is like a big eraser," she said.
It was Karen's idea that we should write down all these insights and discoveries someday, because it was a form of history, our personal history, and we would become like our parents, oblivious, distracted.
"Years and years from now, when we're both married and have clumps of children pulling on our skirts wailing and demanding, and we look like hags with cigarettes drooping from the corners of our mouths, we'll remember all this fondly, even though we make fun of it now," she said. "That's why it's so important."
It did sound important enough to write down, but we never created that book together. We often talked about doing it. Later, when we had little else to do, we passed some of our time remembering this and that as if we were both already in our late seventies, reminiscing about our youth, looking back with nostalgia and regret.
It was lost for both of us just that quickly.
1 Li
ving in a Fantasy
My mother, my father, and I moved into the Doral house in mid-August 1962. Jesse had left for his college orientation the day before, and I was so envious I nearly cried I think that was why he put me in charge of his things. Unlike so many of my girlfriends who had brothers, I didn't fight with mine He teased me whenever he could, but he was never mean to me, and he was always very protective. He was an honor society student and a baseball star for our high school. The college in Michigan awarded him a scholarship to play for the college team, in fact.
He didn't care so much about which room he would have in our new house, but he did take the one across from mine. It was about the same size. He told me to look after his precious stamp collection, which consisted of almost a dozen thick albums He kept them in a carton on the floor in his closet.
