Never Satisfied

Linda Leary is my new best friend in third-grade. She has a dark chocolate ponytail. Mine is the same color as Sampson, my orange tabby. We share the same bus stop and every morning ride to school in the same seat.

Every afternoon when the bus drops me off, she asks, “Wanna come over?”

My answer always, “Sure.”  

After changing into play clothes, I walk down a block, cross the street, then cut through the Jensen’s backyard on the corner, through the Paisano’s and the Mendelson’s until I get to her house with red salvia planted in the triangle between the front porch and the diagonal front walk.  I ring her doorbell, and she ushers me into the front hall beside the telephone table. We bypass her perfect living room with matching furniture and a maple spinet piano, and head straight for the basement.

There’s a laundry area to the right of the stairs. Shirtwaist dresses and blouses hang on an exposed pipe, above an ironing board. Against the perpendicular wall is a turquoise washer and drier. The other half of the basement contains shelves stocked with canned goods above and toys beneath. Linda digs out a doll made of coconuts that her parents brought back from Florida. I reach for a can of Dole pineapple rings. We crouch inside an empty TV console and make up a commercial. Linda shakes the doll into a hula while I hold up my can, urging homemakers to use only Dole pineapple rings for all their upside-down cakes and ambrosia salads. Our sales pitch dissolves into giggles, and we lurch out of the set, in search of more products and props.

After spring vacation, Linda comes back from her grandmother’s house in Florida with a tan.  She has the same pretty face. She wears the same school dresses buttoned down the back with a bow tied above the poufy skirt, but her skin seems to glow. Her teeth and white ankle socks appear even whiter.  

She invites me to sleep over on a night her parents are going out to a dinner dance at their country club. A babysitter answers the door. Holding a pillowcase stuffed with my pajamas and a toothbrush, I stand entranced as Mrs. Leary applies coral lipstick in front of the mirror above the telephone table. She looks like a movie star in her slim indigo evening gown, a thread of stardust around her bronzed neck. Mr. Leary clumps downstairs wearing black pants with a black satin stripe on each leg, a white dinner jacket, and a black bowtie.  

After they kiss Linda and her older sister, Laura, good-bye, Mr. Leary winks at me and says, “Be good.”  

When the door shuts, the babysitter slumps into the seat beside the phone and dials her boyfriend. Linda, Laura, and I race upstairs and bounce on Linda’s bed until our foreheads gleam with sweat. We boing off the mattress and Laura leads the way into her parents’ bedroom. No clothes hang on chairs. No slippers litter the floor. Ceramic lamps with barrel-shaped shades stand on twin bedside tables. Teal throw pillows accent a golden spread. A sleek modern dresser is topped with a golden tray filled with lotions, powders, and a perfume bottle attached to a puff ball sprayer. Laura squeezes the puff ball and mists me with the fragrance Linda says is her mother’s favorite, Madame Rochas. She slides open her mother’s closet to display even more evening gowns in tangerine, turquoise, and black lace. The long dresses brush a shoe rack lined with Cinderella heels.  

I ask Linda how to get tan like her and her movie star mom. She explains you just put on your bathing suit and swim in your grandmother’s pool. Somehow the sunshine gets into your skin, and it changes color. She finds an album and shows me a snapshot of her grandparents’ mansion, made of brown stucco with wrought iron curlicue balconies.

During summer vacation, my family visits my Memaw and Granddaddy on their farm in Virginia. They don’t have a pool, so I leave my right arm out the car window for the eight-hour drive and wait for it to change color. The next day my skin is so red and sore, my mom sprays it with Unguentin.

Upon our return, I notice a National Geographic on the coffee table. The cover shows a Mexican girl in an embroidered blouse. Her face is even tanner than Linda’s. Her lips are brown and full. I open the medicine cabinet and accent my own lips with my mom’s Maybelline eyebrow pencil. I look nothing like Linda or the girl on the magazine.  

Linda and I decide our parents should be best friends like us. I beg my mom to invite Linda’s mom and dad over for dinner. Our two families share hamburgers, homemade French fries, and toss salad at a metal picnic table in our mosquitoey backyard.

Linda invites me to swim at the country club. Mrs. Leary watches our underwater handstands from a chaise in a stiff, black bathing suit that zips up the back and shows off her coppered skin. I notice her toenails painted the same coral as her lips.

My mom is now Linda’s Girl Scout leader too. She takes our troop camping and teaches us how to build a small fire and fry an egg on top of a Hi-C grape juice can.  

I have a photo of Linda and I from the summer after third grade, sitting next to each other cross-legged, and smiling in my front yard. I don’t recall who took the picture. Must have been my mom. But I do remember what I gave my mother that year for her August birthday, a bottle of Madame Rochas.  

I have another picture of Linda, as an adult, still tan and as glamorous as her mother, she’s standing on our front stoop hugging my mom, her old Girl Scout leader.

They say a good photograph captures the heart of a thing in a single image. Comparing those two shots, I see all the moments I wasted wishing I was chocolate instead of strawberry, not understanding it’s God’s love that gets under your skin, making you glow against a dark world eager to sell counterfeits that never satisfy.