Riggs Park by Ellyn Bache Page A

time Marilyn suddenly stopped chopping and put down her knife. “You know the only one Steve never called sweetie was Penny. And you know why? Because even then she wasn’t his sweetie. She was his love.”
    The welcome, light mood vanished. Dejected, Marilyn dumped her pile of chopped veggies into a bowl. “You know, sometimes I wish we could go back to being in love with Eddie Fisher. Before everything fell apart.” A determined don’t-dare-make-fun-of-me expression settled on her face. “While we all still thought Eddie Fisher was great.”
    “Eddie Fisher! I haven’t thought about him for forty years.”
    “See? Our first true love, and you repressed it.”
    But I remembered now. Penny and Marilyn and I had fallen in love with him right after we’d returned from Camp Chesapeake, a curly-haired teen idol we’d thought was the handsomest man alive. A man who sang with the tongue of an angel! And Jewish! We could marry him and our mothers would have to approve! We arranged our schedules so we could watch his fifteen-minute TV show, Coke Time, in the privacy of Marilyn’s basement. We sighed collectively as he crooned the words to “Oh, My Papa.” Unless Marilyn’s mother was close by, we screamed as Eddie held out his beckoning arms. We took turns kissing his face on the little black-and-white screen. Each of us hung autographed photos of him on our bedroom walls.
    One day, Marilyn read aloud from an article about Eddie Fisher in a movie magazine. “Although it isn’t generally known, Eddie Fisher shares a problem well-known to many of his fans.” Her voice grew low and dramatic. “Eddie Fisher suffers from acne. The scars and eruptions are invisible on TV only because he wears heavy makeup.”
    “Eruptions!” Penny was horrified. “Makeup!”
    From that moment, the romance was ruined. Penny was too appalled to let it continue. Pimples! How disgusting! We’d been duped! Penny wept bitter, genuine tears.
    So for Penny’s sake, we ended the relationship with Eddie, with Coke Time, with the kissable face of Marilyn’s TV. Anxious to placate, Marilyn and I vowed the three of us would fall in love only with real boys from then on. It turned out to be a difficult promise. We weren’t ready for real boys yet. We were happy loving Eddie. I wondered now—and was sure Marilyn was wondering, too—if that hadn’t been the first moment, just for a second, we’d resented giving in to Penny’s needs.
    But by then we had started seventh grade, our first year at Paul Junior High, and we felt so sorry for Penny that it would have been wrong to resent her, wrong not to try to help. She became a worse student than Steve, getting Fs on three English tests in a row before she discovered she was failing because she couldn’t see the board. Her mother took her to an eye doctor who prescribed glasses. They were thick, with tortoiseshell frames that were supposed to complement her red hair. Penny hated them. She had worn them only because she’d hated her nearsightedness more.
    We were still lost in memory when Bernie came into the kitchen and plucked a handful of vegetables from Marilyn’s bowl. “All talked out already?” He looked quizzically from one of us to the other. “You two are mighty quiet.”
    “Thinking about Penny,” Marilyn said.
    “Ah.” Bernie popped a slice of celery into his mouth. “Don’t get too morose. You had some good years with her when you were younger.”
    “Younger!” Marilyn savaged an onion with her knife. “She wasn’t even fourteen when her childhood was wiped out. Fourteen! All the good stuff gone in the course of a single afternoon!”
    “You don’t know—” Bernie started to say something and then stopped. “Didn’t they say she was only—Only—”
    “ Only molested. Not raped?” Marilyn slapped away the hand Bernie dipped back into the vegetables. “Don’t you think molested would have been bad enough?”
    “I didn’t mean—” Bernie was clearly at a