The Joyce Maynard Collection by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online Page A

I turned on Three’s Company and ate my chili.
    A few shows later, when I got tired, I looked back in the kitchen. The dishes had been cleared away and washed. He had fixed tea, but nobody was drinking any. I could hear the low sound of their voices, though not the words they said.
    I called out then that I was going to bed. This was the moment my mother would normally have said “Sweet dreams,” but she was occupied.

Chapter 5
    M Y MOTHER DIDN’T HAVE A REGULAR JOB , but she sold vitamins over the phone to people. Every couple of weeks the company she worked for—MegaMite—sent her a printout with phone numbers of potential customers all around our region, to call up and tell about the product. Every time she sold a vitamin package, the company paid her a commission. We also got a discount on vitamins for ourselves, which was a fringe benefit. She made sure I took my MegaMites twice a day. She could see the results in my eyeballs, she said. Some people had these grayish corneas, but mine were white as an egg, and the other thing she’d noticed already was how, unlike so many other kids my age (not that she saw other kids my age much), I did not suffer from acne.
    You are too young to appreciate this yet, she told me, but in the future, you’ll be grateful for how the minerals you’re taking in now will affect your virility and sexual health. They’ve done studies on that. Particularly at the moment, as you enter puberty, it’s important to consider these things.
    These were some of the lines my mother was supposed to deliver to the people on her potential customer printouts, but mostly the person who heard them was me.
    My mother was a terrible MegaMite salesperson. She hated calling up strangers, for one thing, so very often she avoided the whole thing. The new printouts would sit on our kitchen table, on top of the old ones, with a name checked off here and there, and the occasional comment— Line busy. Call back at more convenient time. Wishes she could buy but no $.
    I can tell you’re someone who should have these vitamins, Marie, I heard her saying on the phone one time—a rare night when she had set herself up at the table with the phone, and a pen to take notes, and the list of numbers they’d given her. So far so good, I was thinking, when I came into the kitchen to fix myself a bowl of cereal with powdered milk. This was particularly good news to me because at the time she’d promised, if she could drum up another thirty MegaMite customers, she’d buy me the boxed set of Sherlock Holmes I’d been wanting, from Classics Book Club, that we’d joined the year before to get the free world atlas and a leather-bound edition of The Chronicles of Narnia with full-color illustrations.
    So here’s what I’m going to do, Marie, she was saying now. I’m going to send you the vitamins anyway. I’ll get them myself on my company discount. You can send me a check later, when things improve for you.
    What makes you think that person you never even met is any worse off than us? I asked her.
    Because I have you, she said. Marie doesn’t.
    I DON’T IMAGINE YOUR FATHER HAS TOLD you anything about sex, she said one night, when we were having our Cap’n Andy. I had dreaded this moment, and might have avoided it if I’d told her yes, he explained everything, but it was never possible to lie to her.
    No, I said.
    Most people put all this focus onto the physical changes you’ll be going through soon. Maybe they’ve even started. I don’t intend to invade your personal privacy by asking about that.
    They explained everything in our health assembly, I told her. Cut her off at the pass was my thought. As swiftly as possible.
    They never tell you about love, Henry, she said. For all the discussion of body parts, the one that never gets mentioned is your heart.
    That’s OK, I said. Desperate to get this conversation