The Boys of My Youth Read Online Free Page B

wear curlers because her hair is short but she has two clips crisscrossed on either side of her head, making spit
     curls in front of her ears. Every time a car drives by she reaches up automatically, ready to yank them out. She has on Bermudashorts and a wide-bottomed plaid blouse with a bow at the neck. They are both pregnant again.
    We’re going to be in a parade at four o’clock, Wendell and I, riding bikes without training wheels, our dolls in the baskets.
     We asked to have the training wheels put back on for the parade but they said no. Our older sisters are upstairs somewhere,
     dumping perfume on one another and trying on bracelets. They’ll be in the parade, too, walking behind us and throwing their
     batons in the air, trying to drop them on our heads.
    Wendell jumps at the rooster suddenly and he rushes us, we go off screaming in different directions while he stands there
     furious, shifting from one scaly foot to another, slim and tall with greasy black feathers and a yellow ruff like a collie.
     He can make the dirty feathers around his neck stand up and fall back down whenever he gets mad, just like flexing a muscle.
     Even his wives give him a wide berth, rolling their seedy eyes and murmuring. They get no rest. I haven’t yet connected the
     chickens walking around out here with what we had for lunch, chopped up and mixed with mayonnaise.
    The mothers give up and go in the house to smoke cigarettes at the kitchen table and yell at us through the windows. Wendell
     and I work on decorating our bikes and complaining about no training wheels.
    “What about if there’s a
corner?
” I say.
    “I know,” says Wendell. “Or if there’s
dog
poop?” I don’t know exactly how this relates but I shudder anyway. We shake our heads and try twisting the crepe paper into
     the spokes the way our mothers showed us but it doesn’t work. We end up with gnarled messes and flounce into the house to
     discipline our dolls.
    Here is the parade. Boys in cowboy getups with cap guns and rubber spurs, hats that hang from shoestrings around their necks.
     The girls squint against the sun and press their stiff dresses down. This is the year of the can-can slip so we all haveon good underpants without holes. Some kids have their ponies there, ornery things with rolling eyes and bared teeth, all
     decorated up. Two older boys with painted-on mustaches beat wildly on drums until they are stopped. Mothers spit on Kleenexes
     and go at the boys’ faces while fathers stand around comparing what their watches say to what the sun is doing.
    Two little girls wear matching dresses made from a big linen tablecloth, a white background with blue and red fruit clusters.
     One has a bushy stand of hair and the other a smooth pixie. Both have large bows, one crunched into the mass and the other
     practically taped on. The scalloped collars on their dresses are made from the border of the tablecloth, bright red with tiny
     blue grapes, little green stems. There are sashes tied in perfect bows, and pop-bead bracelets. Our shoes don’t match.
    The dolls rode over to the parade in the trunk of the car so we wouldn’t wreck their outfits. They have the ability to drink
     water and pee it back out but they’re dry now, our mothers put a stop to that. They have on dresses to match ours, with tiny
     scalloped collars and ribbon sashes. We set them carefully in our bike baskets with their skirts in full view. Mine’s hair
     is messed up on one side where I put hairspray on it once. Wendell’s has a chewed-up hand and nobody knows how it got that
     way. We stand next to our crepe-papered bikes in the sunlight, waiting for them to tell us what to do.
    Our sisters have been forbidden to throw their batons until the parade starts and so they twirl them around and pretend to
     hurl them up in the air, give a little hop, and pretend to catch them again. They are wearing perfume and fingernail polish
     with their cowboy boots and shorts. They don’t