Songbirds
The
Ballad of Bridget and Brian 
Kitty Schooley
Chapter
2
Chickadees
Table of Contents
Chapter 11
Getting Cocked and Cock Fights
I woke to him facing me on his pillow. I wanted to trace the line from the bump at the bridge of his nose to the little hook at the bottom, but it would wake him and I was not ready to disturb him. The vortex began to swirl in my mind, and I heard a voice from over twenty years ago giggle, “It looks like John Lennon’s nose!” She was being kind.
“John Lennon! I don’t think his is as big as Brian’s. Is he your boyfriend?”
“No, we’re just friends.” An anomaly that was hard to accept at our high school, but then since we did not act like boyfriend and girlfriend, it was eventually accepted. We didn’t hold hands, sneak kisses or walk arms linked around each other.
I focused on the present. His face now had grown to accept the nose the gaunt adolescent face could not. It was an aquiline beauty. I would have traced across his eyebrows, too. They lay like two caterpillars stretched out straight over his eyes with just the tail crooked down slightly. They were neither bushy nor wild, just soft and full. So much gray in them now. They used to be dark brown. With that the eddy catches at me again. I am fifteen and on a school bus. I can’t remember when I actually met Brian. He had always been the boy down the street, the one who had gone to the same school and ridden the same bus as me.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s that?” he asked indicating my piano book as he sat on the seat across from me.
“My music.” Had we ever said that many words before? We had, as all kids, gone through the latent sexual period when I hated boys and he hated girls. When interest in the opposite sex dawned on me, I didn’t consider him my type and paid him little notice.
“Yeah, I play guitar. Maybe we could jam sometime.”
“I don’t jam.”
“Can I see?” He stretched out his hand for my piano book. I gave it to him and he paged through it for a few minutes. “Variation on a theme. Improvise. Sounds like jamming to me. Friday night after supper OK?”
“OK.” I think I stunned myself as much as him.
The first time he showed up, my parents were suspicious of him. He had that long tangle of brown curls that nearly reached his shoulders. Eventually, my parents came to think of him as a nice boy, despite his exterior. He worked hard and they never found him in a compromising position with their daughter. They never knew what to make of that either--just like the kids at high school. Was he my boyfriend? Then why didn’t they ever see him even hold my hand?
That night my fingers learned a new dance over the keyboard under his direction. He would tell me a chord progression and a rhythm, perhaps play it as an example on his guitar. Then I’d play and he would improvise some melody or guitar solo. He knew all the songs on the radio. He brought notebooks full of lyrics he had meticulously copied down. He wrote in the chord progressions when he had those figured out.
“How long you been playing,” he asked.
“Since I was seven. You?”
“Started when I was eight.” He smiled impishly. “Guess that makes you more experienced.”
I counted back in my head. That meant Brian had begun guitar when the Beatles became popular and there was a deluge of kids seeking guitars and guitar lessons. Unlike the majority, he had stuck with it. He was good. He played with passion. I admired his devotion. I attempted an awkward compliment that ended with, “So what are you going to do with it?”
“Get a band together.” He frowned at my piano. “We can’t be dragging that around, though. Gotta get you an electric piano or organ. Or maybe one of those new synthesizers.”
“You want me to be in your band?”
“God, yeah, you’re a natural. I explain som’n to you once and you got it. You got a good ear.” That was when Brian had first announced his intentions of taking me along with him to the heights. I had not noticed that there was a sexual component to all this. I was too damn naive for that. Besides, he was so shy about it; it would be a long time before he even touched me.
So we conceived a plan to get a portable keyboard. We worked together and apart, saving nearly every scrap of money we managed to make. During the winter, we shoveled walks together. We used to hope school would be canceled for the fact that we’d make more money if we were home all day unlike other kids who just wanted the release from school routine. During the summer, we washed cars and Brian cut lawns. I got a few of the lawn cutting jobs when he couldn’t handle all of them, but mostly he did those. I baby-sat. Brian would find me more baby-sitting jobs than I could on my own. He did some himself, involving his brother and cousins, but mostly people were mistrustful of a boy baby-sitting at the time. Especially one with long hair.
My dad said, “Brian, you’re going to give hippies a good name.”
“Thank you, sir.” As always he was polite, respectful, and self-effacing.
“What are you two planning to do with all that money?” We told him that we planned on buying music equipment, specifically an instrument I could play in a band.
My father clapped him on the back and laughed, “It’s going to take a long time to make that kind of money. You sure she’s worth it?” I don’t think he believed us, or that we would make it. But he had by that time accepted Brian as a good kid, and making money certainly kept us out of trouble.
We always had our heads together, at school, in our neighborhood, on the bus. We were either discussing music or the plan. The goal of the plan was to make enough money to buy an electronic keyboard. Our little indulgence involved going to the neighborhood music store to ogle, try out, and notice any change in price of the object of our desire.
It was commented on frequently that we were always together and always talking, but that no one had ever seen us so much as hold hands. Eventually there was a boy who tested the waters and dated me. Then a few others came and went. The strange thing was, though we might have held hands, hugged or kissed, I never had as much fun with any of them as I did with Brian.
The boys came and went with indifference to me. There was a subtle change in Brian if there was a series of dates with one boy. Perhaps I noticed it in retrospect. His selection of music we practiced became darker, bluesier. When the particular boy went away, we were nearly playing bubble gum.
Then in the late fall of our junior year, there was Roger. Roger Stone. Star athlete. Most handsome, most athletic, most desirable guy at school. His hair was dark, but he had that Aryan profile that should have warned me. Instead it enticed me. I didn’t notice he had a secret agenda that resembled Hitler’s swath through Europe. If anyone had tried to tell me, I would not have been able to hear. If it had been another girl, I would have thought her jealous. If it had been Brian, I would have thought him jealous and dismissed him for never having given it a shot. I was like France, welcoming Hitler’s troops, then living to regret it.
There was one who did take notice. My sister, Meg, asked after the first night Roger had taken me out, “so what happened to your long-haired, hippie boyfriend?”
“Boyfriend? You mean, Brian? He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Why? D’ya have a fight?”
“No, he’s just not my boyfriend. I’m so tired of this, Meg! I’ve told you a thousand times, we’re just friends. We’re…” I was going to say something like we were going to be in a band together, but at that moment, it didn’t seem like we had any reason to even hope for that. “Why do you tease me about him?”
“Just concerned, Birdie.” That was something at the time I could not believe. “So who did you go out with.”
She knew very well whom I had gone out with. She was a senior at our high school that year. “Really, Meg, you are impossible!”
“Just concerned, little sister.”
Roger did not go away after a short series of dates. At first, Brian stopped coming over, which I barely noticed since I was so busy dating Roger. I began to believe I was his girlfriend and I was on top of the world. Then Brian stopped speaking to me. If I talked to him and if it required an answer, he would reply in short, terse, cold monosyllables. I didn’t see that he was jealous; my head was filled with so much foam for being an item with Roger. I simply felt hurt that my best friend wouldn’t talk to me or sit with me on the bus.
Meg noticed how hurt Brian was. She attempted to have a conversation with me about it, but sibling rivalry was at its heights then. I even believed her jealous and wanting to date Roger. After her first few attempts had gone so poorly, she gave up.
No one specific moment stands out in my dates with Roger. I have since blocked out much of the information because of the pain it caused me. Roger steadily and slowly seduced me. First there was the kiss where his tongue pushed past the blockade of my teeth. There was the unbuttoned blouse, then the bra unhooked. There was petting below the belt. Then there was finally the weekend that Roger announced his folks were away for the night and he had a rubber.
. What I remember that night was not pleasure, not pressure, not even pain. What I remember was his balls slapping against my bottom. Later, I remember the rust colored stain in my panties when I got home and instead of putting them in the laundry, I stuffed them in my housecoat pocket and hid them in my closet until I could dispose of them or destroy them. My mom always seemed to notice when Meg and I were on our period, and trying to explain spotting mid-cycle wouldn’t be easy.
To me, it was an act of commitment. To Roger, it was an act of conquest.
The week after, Roger was cold and indifferent to me. The few times I saw him, it was I who sought him out to talk to him. On Friday, I gathered my courage and asked him. “Where are we going this weekend?”
“We? We’re not going anywhere this weekend. I have plans.” Plans. That meant that he had moved on to another gullible innocent. As I turned to walk away, my own throat muscles threatening to choke me, I heard those guys intimate to his clique chuckle low and mean. I was just another notch on Roger’s bedpost. I was fair game for any one of them. I was easy. I wondered if this was possibly why Meg had told me she was concerned. Was she really concerned, or had she just been teasing me? Perhaps it was some strange combination of both.
All day great torrents of tears burned to get out of my eyes. I did not give in, but if anyone asked me I said I was getting a cold. Only the grapevine had extended its tendrils, and everyone knew the real story.
On the bus that afternoon, I felt like I was walking through a hot steamy mist. “Hey,” Brian said. Hey. Like we hadn’t just spent months not talking to each other. He slid over to the window and I sat down next to him. I clutched the book to my chest and tried not to breathe life into the tears that sought a way out of my eyes. He was quiet for long moments. “I thought I’d come over and jam tonight, OK?”
I wanted to look at him, to face him to see what manner of friend or foe he was. I knew if I looked anybody in the eyes, I would cry. So I just said, “OK.”
I avoided Meg when I got home. I was sure she would taunt me about either the break-up with Roger or the fact that Brian was coming over. It wasn’t difficult as Meg had stayed after school for some extra-curricular activity and was leaving right after dinner with her friends. I only had to avoid being in our room together while she got ready. I sulked in the downstairs rec room with the TV on--with no idea of what was being broadcast--except for dinnertime. A bunch of Meg’s rowdier friends showed up at the backdoor just as we finished dinner and she stood up, kissed our mom and dad, and said to me, “hope you don’t mind me leaving you the dishes alone tonight. I’ll make it up some other night, OK?”
Brian showed up at the backdoor while I was still washing the dishes. I let him in, directed him downstairs, and told him I’d join him in a few minutes.
Brian wasn’t past his moody choice of music. He was singing out with pained emotion. We were playing James Taylor’s Fire and Rain, when the melancholiness of the music drew out what I had so successfully dammed all day at school, through dinner with my family, and washing dishes afterward. Hot, fast streams slid down my cheeks to plink and plunk where they might: my chest, my hands, and the keyboard. There was a tight knot in my throat that I attempted to swallow for fear it would break into racking sobs. With that attempt, my body shuttered and began to shake. I rubbed the backs of my hands across my cheeks, then into my eyes in an attempt to rub the tears away. In an instant, he was next to me on the piano bench facing the opposite direction, his back to the keyboard. He slipped an arm around my waist and pulled my head to his shoulder. “He was such a bastard,” I sobbed. Brian cooed soothing nonsense to me, and combed through my sandy colored waist length hair with his fingers. I don’t know how long we had been like that, but finally I realized it. He was holding me. It felt so strangely right and oddly familiar. I tilted my head back to look at him. Lightning flashed in those storm cloud eyes of his. He kissed me, tender and timid. I kissed him back. Like this my lips and tongue instructed. Got it his lips and tongue answered. I suddenly became intensely aware of the silence we had created that might be more suspect to my parents than the noise we were always being told to turn down. “They might come down to see what’s going on if they don’t hear any music.”
“Right. I’ll fix that!” He stood up and retrieved the guitar I had barely noticed he discarded. He threw the strap over his shoulder in an accustomed motion. Then he stooped to turn the volume knob on his amplifier clock-wise.
“Bri!” I scolded. It was too late. He went into the raunchiest, most raucous rendition of Hand Jive he could manage.
“Bridget!” My father was at the threshold of the stairway door in moments. “Remind Brian he has to keep it down!”
“Yes, Dad,” I called up the stairs.
“Yes, sir,” Brian chimed in as he had stopped by that point.
As if I could read his mind since I had schemed and planned with him so long, I added, “I think we’re just going to watch some TV for now, OK?”
“Yeah, just keep that down, too,” Dad answered.
Brian put down his guitar and turned off the amp. I felt a strange tingle as he took my hand and we walked across the room to the old sofa there. We stopped only to turn the TV on, not caring what station was on. We sat side by side and looped arms around each other and soon found I was sitting on one hip tilted toward him. He sat inclined toward me. Our lips locked, our tongues made up dances we had never thought of before. Our hands explored the surfaces, though we stayed conscious of my family one floor above and never undid any closures. If I could have crawled inside his skin, I could not have gotten close enough that night to Brian. Something deep and secret that had flowed beneath the surface had broken the rocky crust that bound it, and now we were carried along with the strength of a geyser. I had perhaps thrown my leg over his lap, or he had pulled it up there, but I felt the hard bulge in the front of his pants and I felt a surge of power mixed with fear. His hand caressed the underside of that thigh, then my round bottom, pulling me up to straddle his lap. He put his hands on my shoulders, and then dropped them down cupping each breast. He asked me with his eyes if I knew what he was doing, if I cared, if I dared to stop him. Before my mind could think one clear logical thought, my body answered with a language I did not know it had. I found myself arching my back and pushing my breast tighter into his palms. With that his arms swooped around to enclose me in his embrace. We kissed; we twisted and turned until I was underneath him. I wrapped my legs around his. We mimed the missionary position with all our clothes on. As much as Brian ground his pelvis into mine, I pushed and twisted back. When we weren’t kissing the raspy edges of our voices matched, then scraped apart, then matched again, like two saw-toothed edges being dragged across each other. Nothing existed outside of the sofa’s surface beneath my back, our bodies and the heat fields they generated. He nuzzled my ear, and gently nibbled the lobe, then snuggled into the crook of my neck. He shuttered and swallowed a sound. He lay motionless and heavy on top of me. I pushed back the damp disarray of curls from his temple searching for him. I felt lost. Something had happened. Or something that was supposed to happen hadn’t. Brian levered up; his face flushed crimson. “I should go home.”
“You have to?”
I felt frightened as he got up walked across the room to put on his jacket and gather his equipment together. It was something about the way he held his body. I followed him. “Want me to help you?”
“No, that’s OK,” he coiled his guitar cord and placed it in the case in the compartment provided for it. We had indulged in a mike and stand so that there would be one both at my home and his. All he needed to transport back and forth was his guitar and a small amp. When he had the guitar case secure, there was something different but unnamable about how he held his equipment to carry it upstairs and out side. “I’ll see ya.”
I ran to open the door at the top of the stairs to open the door for him and when I turned to look at him, there was something pleading about his eyes as he looked up at me. I felt like I had done something wrong and I couldn’t figure out what it was. He climbed the stairs, and as I held the back door open for him, he called out ‘good-night’ to my parents. They answered ‘good-night, Brian’ in an awkward unison as if it had been any other night that he had come over and jammed with me.
The next morning, Meg, knowing all my fakes and feigning all too well, knew I was not really asleep when she had gotten up to go to the bathroom and returned. “So, lover-boy returned, last night?”
“Shut up!” My sister’s voice and been low, but mine was a high-pitched screech.
“Bridget!” our mom’s voice carried through the walls, “keep your voice down.” By that time she was at the door.
“Mom, she keeps teasing me.” How could I explain that I was so confused about the past day and what happened first with Roger and then with Brian, that I could not abide my normal dose of sibling repartee?
“What are you teasing your sister about, Meg?”
My sister turned demure with our mom. “I just asked her if Brian came over last night.”
“Megan McIntyre, you know very well that he did because I told when you got home last night.”
“But you said he went home early. So what are we to make of that? When he stayed late, she said, ‘we’re just friends,’” Meg’s voice got high and squeaky to imitate me.
“Megan!” our mother’s voice was stern. “Bridget is lucky to have such a wonderful young man as a friend. Perhaps you should give it a try.”
With that, my sister broke out in peals of laughter and hid her head under the covers. I sat up in bed and pulled my knees to my chest. I was sure I was looking forlorn. I thought that Brian loved me, and I felt that I loved him. Except I was confused about why he’d left so suddenly the night before. My mom directed her voice at me, “sweetie, why don’t you get up and have some breakfast. I’m sure you’ll feel better.”
I did not have to sit with my uneasy, unnamable fears for long. Brian showed up early that day, before lunch. When my mother let him in the back door, he held himself in a strange way again, like he was hiding something. It was different than the night before, because when I showed up from the hall entrance, he was smiling mischievously at me. “You’re not planning to start playing already, are you?” my mother asked.
“No, ma’am. I didn’t even bring my guitar. I just brought a surprise for Bridget.” My mother lifted an eyebrow at him, but it was too late for any real protest. My family liked him despite his eccentricities. We did not even have to ask if we could be alone in the rec room, we had been allowed it too often to this point, so we automatically went down there. Once there we stood in front of the coffee table that acted as a barrier between the sofa and the room. It now acted as a barrier between us and the place of a shared moment between Brian and me the night before. He unbuttoned his jacket, and pulled out a brown paper bag. He pulled the contents out. Bills of all denominations. He spread them out on the coffee table. “How ‘bout all those dead presidents?”
I threw my arms around his waist and pulled myself to him. I took in the smell I had first become aware of the night before. “Oh, Bri! How?” Then in an instant, I knew. He had continued to drag the snow shovel around the neighborhood all winter. I had known this and neither said nothing nor offered to help. It had been his dream, I had told myself. I pushed away in embarrassment with this realization.
“You still got all the money you had?”
I had over the past three months played with the idea that I would be able to buy a delightfully wicked prom dress, shoes, and all the accessories to match for the day I walked into the prom with Roger at my side, but I had not touched the money. That dream was now dead. “No, it’s all still there.” I thought of the exact spot, buried and hidden from my sister, Meg, in the bottom of my closet in a shoebox.
“Then we could get it today.” He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and nuzzled in my ear. “Want to?”
At that moment I couldn’t figure out if he meant want to go buy the electric keyboard or if I wanted to do what we had done last night-whatever that was-or both. He let loose of me. “I…I’ve got to get my Saturday chores done.”
“How long? After lunch?”
“Yeah.” I felt stunned. The dream we had worked on for a year and a half was coming to fruition, and I hadn’t even done anything about it in three months. And there was something else, wasn’t there? My head felt like it was stuffed with feathers.
He started to gather up the bills. He stuffed them in the bag. “Come over after lunch. I’ll borrow my sister’s car.” He gave me a quick, tight bear hug. “Don’t forget the money.”
I went through the Saturday morning routine numb. I couldn’t believe the changes the past twenty-four hours had brought and I wasn’t at all sure what they meant. I told my mother that I was going down to Brian’s house after lunch, which of course she thought little of. I failed to mention that we intended to spend hundreds of dollars on an electric keyboard we had been eyeing for nearly two years.
Unfortunately, as I walked into my room to fetch my coat and the hidden money, Meg was there. “Get out!”
“You get out. What’s going on with you and lover-boy? Must be something big for you to be so snotty.”
I gritted my teeth. Times like these made me wish our parents would allow one of us to take over our older brother’s room and not have to share. My mom insisted it would be too much interruption if Luke decided to come home from college one weekend unexpectedly. No, his room was his room until he graduated and moved out.
“ I just need to get something…” I realized that I had started badly. Get something out of the closet and her not see? Right, and then go to Brian’s. What would Meg make of that? That I had to get rubbers or birth control pills? “I need…” I stuttered. “I just want to be alone for a minute.”
“Your box of money,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.
I nearly screeched again, but I controlled myself, as I didn’t want to attract our mother’s attention at that moment. Even though we had confessed our intentions to my dad a year earlier, I was sure it was forgotten. I wanted to leave it forgotten for the moment, as I was feeling far too confused about what was happening. “Megan!” I huffed.
“Relax. I’m not a thief. Just nosey. So what are you and lover-boy going to buy with all that money? He’s got a big pile, too, by my reckoning.”
I knew by the rules of the sibling power struggle, I’d lost. She would not give me my privacy without me divulging what Brian and I were going to spend so much money on. “An electric piano. A keyboard. You know, to play in a band.”
“You sure?” she asked.
I felt a tug, like my older sister was genuinely being concerned. I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to let on. All I knew at that moment was I wanted to spend as much time as possible with Brian, and if it meant buying a keyboard and being part of a band, then I would do that. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
Meg got up. I thought she would just brush past me, but she leaned into my ear when she got close. “I know he loves you. Just be careful. This one is for all the marbles.”
I pushed all the things my sister just said out of my head. I pulled my coat out of my closet, pulled it on, pulled the box out of the bottom of the closet, took the rubber-banded bills from inside, and stuffed them in my pocket. I tossed the box in the trash. It had served its purpose.
A cold March wind whipped down the street as I walked toward Brian’s, numbing my exterior to match the feeling inside. I wasn’t sure why I was so eager to pick up the threads of a dream discarded months ago. I wasn’t sure what was going on between the two of us. I only knew that I wanted to be with him.
At the back door, Brian came out jangling keys in one hand and the same bulge in his jacket he left my house with. He gave me another quick tight hug. “Let’s go.”
The salesman at the store rolled his eyes when he saw us. Brian stood defiantly in front of him. “Sir, we’d like to buy that electric piano now.” Brian produced the bag from his jacket and nodded toward me, so I pulled out the banded bills I had.
The guy was fawning over us in a second. “Of course, this way.” He spared no detail in explaining all the features we were getting, the guarantee, and how they stood behind the products they sold. We had bought two mikes and mike stands there once. Brian bought guitar strings and picks there on a regular basis. Never had we been treated so regally.
Once we got the box containing our prize in the trunk, we slid into the front seat. Brian pulled me over to him, squeezed my shoulders, and kissed my forehead. “Wanna celebrate?”
“Yes,” I said. I was already envisioning a variation on the night before.
“Good. Let’s go set this up and try it out.”
© 2005 Kitty Schooley
SONGS
WRITING SAMPLES
Fantasy Man Love You Tonight Oh Lord Have Mercy on my Soul Salvation Stay with Me I'll Be your Man Boats, Books & Brushes Article
Broken Shell
