Authors: Lesleá Newman
Jailbait
For A.F.
older and wiser
jailbait
(jal/bat) n.
Slang.
1. a girl with whom sexual intercourse is punishable as statutory rape because of her youth. 2. a sexually attractive young girl. 3. any temptation to commit a crime punishable by imprisonment. (JAIL + BAIT)
—
Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary
NY Penal Code §130.25 [2]
(as it read in 1971)
A male is guilty of rape in the third degree when: Being twenty-one years old or more, he engages in sexual intercourse with a female less than seventeen years old.
“Oh, please. There's no such thing as statutory rape. That girl knew exactly what she was doing.”
—
anonymous woman (overheard in a coffee shop)
Greenwood. What a stupid name. First of all, wood is
brown, not green, and second of all, who makes up these dumb names, anyway? Like Flatbush, where my grandmother used to live before she moved to Florida. Have you ever seen a flat bush? Me neither.
If they had asked me, I would have called this town Boresville. It's not even a town, really, it's a suburb with a million boring houses that look just like ours. A kitchen, living room, and dining room downstairs, and three bedrooms upstairs: one for me; one for my Parental Units, Shirley and Fred; and one for my brother, Mike, who's seven years older than me, only he's away at college.
When I was little, I thought college was a place, you know, like New Jersey. Everyone was always saying, “My brother went to college.” “My sister's in college.” So I figured college was a faraway place they ship you off to when you reach a certain age. Which they sort of do, really, only college isn't one place, it's a lot of places like Princeton, Harvard, and Yale. Only in Mike's case it's SUNY Buffalo and with his grades he's lucky he even got to go there. It's his third college because he keeps dropping out and going back, but it's not like Mike's brain-dead or anything. He just doesn't care. And neither do I. I mean, everyone knows how useless school is. Take geography, for example. Can somebody please give me one good reason why I have to know that the largest state in the country is Alaska? If there ever actually comes a time in my life when I need to know this vital information, I'll just look it up in the encyclopedia.
Anyway, I don't worry about my grades much because I don't even want to go to college. But I would never tell Shirley or Fred that. They would just
kill
me. I still remember the big fight Fred and Mike had the day Mike told the Units he didn't want to go. All Mike wanted to do was get an apartment with some friends in the city, take a year off, and just
live
a little. You'd think he wanted to shave his head, pierce his nose, and join the Jews for Jesus the way Fred blew his stack about it. “I didn't work my butt off all these years so some lousy kid of mine would wind up living on the street selling used books in front of Cooper Union,” he yelled so loud his glasses steamed up and his face turned red.
I don't see what the big deal is. Shirley never went to college. She married Fred right after she graduated from high school and then worked in a stationery store—now there's an exciting career—while Fred went to college and med school and then became a dentist. Then she had Mike and then she had me and then when I was two, we all moved from Manhattan to Greenwood to live happily ever after. Yeah, right. I can't wait until I'm old enough to get out of here. I want to move to a really hip city like San Francisco and live in a totally cool apartment with a bunch of friends who are all writers and musicians and artists and stuff, and we'll all be really famous, only I'm not good at anything so I have no idea what I'll be famous for yet.
In the meantime, though, I'm stuck here in Boresville. For three more years. Fred and Shirley won't even let me go into the city and walk around Greenwich Village by myself even though it's only an hour and twenty minutes away on the train. They used to say, “When you're sixteen,” and now that I'm almost sixteen, they say, “When you're seventeen.” Fred and Shirley moved us out to Long Island—at least that name makes sense, it
is
a long island—because they both grew up in New York City, which they think is the most disgusting, dirty, dangerous place on the planet, as opposed to the suburbs, which are so serene, sanitary, and safe.
Ha. If they only knew.
So this is how it started: It's September 7,1971, the first day
of tenth grade, and I'm walking home after school because I hate taking the bus. No, cancel that. I
refuse
to take the bus because something always happens on it that makes me look like an idiot. Either Donald Caruso, this junior who just lives to make my life miserable, will stick his big ugly foot out in the aisle to trip me and then laugh his head off like that's the funniest thing in the world, or Hillary Ja-coby, who is so desperate to be popular she picks on the lowest of the low (me), will accidentally-on-purpose smush a wad of Bazooka bubble gum into my hair and then look around to see if anyone is impressed with how clever she is.
But that's just kid stuff compared to what happened on a certain day last spring when I woke up late and almost missed the bus. The bus driver saw me running in his rearview mirror and slammed on his brakes so I could catch up. Now, I'm not a person who runs very often, and I guess things were flapping in the breeze because as soon as I climbed on board, before I even had a chance to catch my breath, the whole bus burst into song:
“Do your boobs hang low?
Do they wobble to and fro?
Can you tie 'em in a knot?
Can you tie 'em in a bow?
Can you throw 'em over your shoulder
Like a continental soldier?
Do your boobs hang low?”
I crossed my arms over my more than ample chest, turned around, and pushed against the door until the bus driver opened it. Then I ran off the bus and swore that from that day on, even if it was raining or snowing or bright purple UFOs were falling from the sky, I would never set foot on a school bus again.
So like I said, I'm walking home from school, down Farm Hill Road, with my army green knapsack on my back, just minding my own business, when this car goes by. Usually I don't notice cars—I mean, a car is a car is a car as far as I'm concerned, unlike Fred, who thinks cars are so important he has to trade in his Caddie every year for a more up-to-date model even though I can never tell the difference.
But this car is really, well,
cute
, which is a funny way to describe a car, but it is. It's a brown Volkswagen Bug, and you don't see too many of those driving around Suffolk County—also known as Suffocation County—let me tell you. The only other Volkswagen I've ever seen was an orange VW hippie van that belonged to Kevin, this friend of Mike's. Kevin came to pick Mike up one day, and Fred took one look out the window and started screaming, “No kid of mine is getting into a car made by those lousy Krauts,” and then Mike screamed back, “Simmer, Freddie—boy, I wasn't even born yet,” meaning World War II and everything, and then Fred screamed even louder, “Don't get fresh with me, Michael Kaplan. You'll get into that car over my dead body,” which made me think,
That could be arranged, Daddy-o
, but not really, of course.
So anyway, Kevin drove off, and two seconds later Mike said he was going for a walk, and you'd have to be a total retard not to figure out that he was meeting Kevin on the corner. Anyway, the point is, since we're Jewish and my father grew up during the Holocaust, he is absolutely psycho about the Germans and World War II, he really is. He says Volkswagens are the perfect German car because the motor's in the back so if you get into a head-on collision, the SOBs can just haul your body out of the car and still use the engine. Fred is so anti-German he won't even let us eat sauerkraut on our hot dogs and I'm not even kidding.
So of course I notice the little brown Volkswagen. It looks like a cartoon almost, like a little Hershey's Kiss
scooting around in the sun. It's funny when you think about it, but I had no idea then how that little car was going to change my life forever. I didn't think, for example,
Before you know it, Andi Kaplan, you're going to be sitting in that little brown Bug doing things you never even imagined.
Nope, the thought doesn't even cross my mind. I just stand there and watch the car for a minute, and then I walk over to the fence and call Bessie by clicking my tongue against my teeth.
Bessie's a cow, in case you're wondering. Believe it or not, there actually is a farm on Farm Hill Road, though there isn't any hill. Back in the old days, about a million years before we moved here, Long Island used to be just one big potato farm, which is kind of hard to believe since now it's all developments and grocery stores and gas stations and stuff. This farm on Farm Hill Road is pretty much the only farm left around here, and as far as I know, Bessie's the only cow. I don't even know if her name is really Bessie or not. I just call her that.
See, the Rents won't let me have a pet, so I pretend Bessie is mine. I've wanted a puppy ever since I could talk, but Shirley and Fred refuse to let me have one. First Shirley went on and on about how a dog would shed its smelly wet fur all over her precious living room furniture, which is really a lame excuse because all the chairs and couches are covered with plastic anyway. Then when I told her we could get a poodle, since poodles don't shed at all, she started in on how it would track mud all over her precious shag carpeting, which is hard enough to keep clean as it is since I never remember to wipe my
feet. Finally, when I didn't let up, the Rents said maybe I could get a pet when I was older, and now that I am older, Shirley's line is “You're going off to college in a few years. Who's going to take care of it then?” Like I would really go off to college and not take my pet.
I thought of asking someone to give me a puppy for my birthday last year so that Shirley and Fred would have to let me keep it. Like when I was twelve, the Units finally let me get my ears pierced for my birthday but they only let me wear posts, so I got my friend Ronnie to buy me a pair of gold hoops and then what could they say? Somehow, though, I don't think it would work with an animal. And besides, Ronnie moved to Pennsylvania last spring and I don't really have any other friends, but that's another story.
Anyway, at least I have Bessie. I started hanging out with her last spring when I stopped taking the bus and she's pretty used to me now. Even though I only saw her about once a week over the summer, she still remembers me. As soon as she sees me, she ambles over to the fence, which takes a while because Bessie doesn't do anything in a hurry. I don't know how old she is, but she walks like she's about a hundred and she's all bony besides. She's light brown, sort of a tawny color, except for the tip of her tail, which is black, and she's got the biggest, most beautiful eyes you've ever seen. They're dark, dark brown, like the gooey hot fudge they pour over your ice cream at Howard Johnson's, only Shirley never lets me order a sundae because she thinks I should do myself a favor and join Weight Watchers like she did. I don't have
a big potbelly like Fred or anything but I'm not exactly skinny like Shirley either. I'm definitely soft and lumpy in certain places, not that I really care. But Shirley thinks it's never too early for a girl to start watching her figure, since it's never too early for the boys to start watching it. Yeah, right.