The Blues & Billie Armstrong 14
FAMILY PORTRAIT
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
I lay there reading it backwards like hieroglyphics from a foreign land. I fell asleep wondering if I was looking in or out.
It was Opening Day of the Little League season and Darlene had decided this was a perfect opportunity to advance her fantasies of familial bonding.
My real mother had been to every game of organized baseball I’d ever played, dating back to my first season at eight years old, and I had taken her presence for granted. My father rarely showed up, and I had taken that as a given as well. But here we were, this reconfiguration, conscripted by the nattering Darlene Beverly to trudge the four blocks of storefronts and tree-lined sidewalks to the Little League field on the grounds of the Lupoyoma Elementary School.
A couple nights before, Billie and my father had gotten into a door-slamming argument over the war. My father always gathered the family around the television when the President spoke to the nation. That night he watched from the vinyl recliner, and Darlene, Billie and I sat in a row on the obnoxiously floral couch as President Nixon announced that U.S. forces were now pushing over the Vietnamese border to attack suspected enemy strongholds in the neutral country of Cambodia. This came just weeks after he promised imminent troop withdrawal and an honorable end to the war. But now the President claimed, “We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia, but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam, and winning the just peace we all desire.”
“Liar!” Billie said, and stood up from the couch.
“Sit down!” my father said. But of course she didn’t.
“It’s doublespeak!” she said and threw up her hands. “He’s expanding the war to end the war? Nonsense! We’re supposed to be getting out, not invading another country.”
“If you’ll shut up and listen—”
“I’m not shutting up, and I’m not sitting down. It’s always the same with these fucking warmongers!”
“That’s enough!” Now my father was standing as well. “I won’t have that language in this house.”
You can imagine the rest. More yelling. Finger pointing. The aforementioned door slamming.
And two days later, on our walk to the ballpark, the tension was still sliced a little thick despite Darlene’s white-picket daydreams. I strode out ahead of the group, an impatient pup on a long leash. My father and Darlene dawdled behind, holding hands like besotted teenagers. Billie caught up and fell in step beside me.
There was an awkward wait for one of us to start the conversation.
“So…” I said, with what I thought was a clever, teasing pause, “when is your birthday?”
I saw the hint of a smile. “August 31.”
“Think you can follow the rules that long?”
She laughed. “Well, I’m a Leo—we’re known for our independence.”
I noticed again how a laugh would jiggle her hair, and the way that big smile spread across her face. “My grandma says you’re a radical hippie lunatic,” I said, still teasing.
“Your grandma sounds like an old crone.”
“You haven’t even met her. She’s not a crone… what’s a crone?”
“An old woman with nothing nice to say.”
“Okay, she’s kind of a crone.” I shrugged.
But I wasn’t dropping my line of questioning just yet. “Heard you were in jail,” I said.
“Nah, not really, only juvey… and for carrying a sign for chrissakes… well, and assault on a police officer so they said, but I only swung at him because he felt me up when he searched me. He grabbed my boob! Anyway I missed, never even touched him, how can they call that assault, man?”
“Jeez, what did the sign say?”
“Oh you should’ve seen it, I made it myself.” She waved her hands around as if she was actually showing me the sign. “It had big red and blue letters that said fighting for peace is like fucking for chastity! It was beautiful! But this cop says you can’t say fucking on a sign in Cleveland, so I say what happened to my fucking freedom of speech? And he says you can take that up with a fucking judge, young lady. And then some assistant D.A. wants to lock me up in reform school till I’m twenty-one! You know, the truth is your dad really saved my ass—and I don’t want to fight with him. I just wanna do my time here and be on my way.”
Billie Armstrong had been my step-sister for a week—I barely knew her. Although, to be fair, at the time I barely knew the girls I’d known all my life. (Hell, maybe that’s still the case.) And it’s true I resented her—for a swarm of reasons I couldn’t even sort out. But there was also something about her that made me want to know her in a way I’d never wanted to know other girls. Meeting Billie was like finding a new issue of LIFE Magazine on the coffee table—with those big black headlines and the bright photos that shoved the world in your face—and you want to turn to the next page, and the next, and the next, in a hurry to take in all the possibilities.
I had no solid position on the war at the time (except that I secretly hoped it would be over before I was old enough to participate). And Billie, with all that hair-trigger defiance, scared me almost as much as the draft. I still wasn’t sure if I liked or trusted her, but I wanted to keep turning those pages.
Changing the subject, I asked about her name—why Billie, and why was her last name different than her mother’s.
“Well,” she said, “it’s really Barbara Ann Beverly Armstrong on my birth certificate—but that sounds too much like a goody-goody rich girl who sits in the front row—and my grandma’s name was Barbara and I was named after her but man I’m so not like her! Except for the red hair, that is, and besides…” She was wearing bellbottoms but she did a little pirouette holding out an imaginary skirt and said, “… do I look like a Barbie to you?”
I laughed and shook my head. She could talk like a whirlpool, her hands turning in the air the entire time, and she seemed amused by the confusion it left on my face.
“… And my father’s name was William Armstrong and he went by Bill or Billy—and he was an artist too—but he never married my mom because he went in the Navy and we lost him in the Korean War.” She held out her hands as if revealing a magic trick. “So that’s why I’m Billie Armstrong.” She smiled and moved down the sidewalk in a new series of pirouettes.
Grandma Junia was a fan of the game.
In fact, she had been the Call & Record scorekeeper before my mother—but she was not one to take a leisurely stroll for pleasure (or family harmony). “Do not meander, young man; walk like you have a purpose in life,” was one of her familiar exhortations. She was already at the field when we arrived, the big Buick gleaming in the parking area. She stood near the bleachers in pleated capri pants and tailored blouse and watched silently from behind her cat-eye sunglasses as we approached.
Darlene took the initiative. “Junia, I’d like you to meet my daughter Billie.”
Grandma Junia slid the sunglasses down her nose and looked over them. “Ah, the prodigal stepchild,” she said.
I muffled a laugh. According to Grandma Junia our family was full of prodigals. Prodigal son, prodigal niece, prodigal grandson. And now the prodigal stepchild. She apparently thought the word meant disappointing.
Billie stepped forward and offered a handshake. “Nice to meet you,” she said, quite formally, as if she sensed the force of Grandma Junia’s… uh, personality.
A limp overturned hand and “Yes, dear” was all she got in return.
Darlene had brought a Polaroid Swinger and managed to badger Grandma Junia into snapping our picture. I still have it many years later. We are gathered in front of the snackshack, which is decorated with a fan of red, white and blue bunting tacked up under the counter. You can almost smell the popcorn butter and the meaty steam rising off the hot dogs. There’s me scowling in my baggy Call & Record uniform, still in my tennis shoes, cleats in hand; Darlene is wearing her nervous am-I-doing-it-right smile and a green pantsuit, a desperate bright green that could only be achieved in one hundred percent polyester; my father is “in his shirtsleeves” as the saying went, with a can of Hamm’s held jauntily in the hand he has draped around Darlene’s shoulder; and then there’s Billie Armstrong in her faded and patched bellbottoms, homemade halter top, big round wire-rimmed glasses with pink-tinted lenses and that wide smile framed by her waves of red hair. Barefoot of course.
It is the only picture ever taken of the four of us together—this hasty lineup of cardboard cutouts posing as a family, glued down next to each other by death and marriage and varnished over with wishes and promises.
The Blues & Billie Armstrong is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
© All Rights Reserved