Phyllis Barber is a fiction/non-fiction writer who lives in Park City, Utah. She has published nine books, one of which (How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir) won the Associated Writing Programs Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Her latest work is a novel, The Desert Between Us, published by the University of Nevada Press in 2020. She graduated from San Jose State University with a degree in music, from an MFA-in-Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and taught for 19 years in the writing program at VCFA. She has received awards for both her fiction and nonfiction and has published essays and short stories in North American Review, Crazyhorse, AGNI, and The Kenyon Review, among others. She has been cited as Notable in both The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing series. In 2005, Barber was inducted into the Nevada Writers' Hall of Fame.
Work
Love Via Johnny
LOVE VIA JOHNNY
Johnny Mathis’ velvet voice drifts through the living room, his words more powerful than the sound of the air conditioner. Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful for the cool air. We live in a desert after all. It’s still hot outside, even though the sun’s gone down. In fact, it’s super hot. I don’t understand why the nights are almost more sweltering than the days. It should cool off when the sun goes down, but there’s barely relief in the summer—maybe not until the early hours of morning. So, I repeat, thank goodness for air conditioning. Luckily, we’re wearing shorts and tank tops and lying on the shag carpet in Cheryl’s living room listening to music. We’ll stay cool enough.
Except, my mind is wandering. These nights are sensual, though is “sensual” a word I should be using about a summer night in the desert? I mean, all there is is night with its varying phases of the moon. The sun has gone down, the stars are out. Why should it be anything more? But it’s almost like a person can reach out with her fingertips and feel the velvet of night. Stroke it. Put it next to her face. Caress it. Bunch it up into wrinkled silk. Maybe I’m thinking about lying under the cover of night. Under a sheet. With someone.
“Chances are ‘cause I wear a silly grin the moment you come into view, chances are you think that I’m in love with you.” Ah love. I sigh. Wouldn’t it be nice? Love is the thing I’ve been hoping would show up for years, at least since I was twelve. Johnny’s voice floats, just like he must have done when he soared over the bar as a high jumper in high school. He was even an Olympic hopeful, but now he’s singing to me and Cheryl, “Chances Are.” “Just because my composure sort of slips, the moment that your lips meet mine. . .”
We’ll be going back to Las Vegas High School in a few weeks. We’ll be seniors—the class of ‘61. Maybe someone will be waiting to fall in love with me, someone who can really see who I am. This hope, this possibility for love, is playing on Cheryl’s hi-fi, on the 45 rpm we play over and over. Sometimes I think I’d be flattered by anyone who wore long pants taking notice, though that’s not what I’ve been taught, that’s not what I really think. One must be choosy. Look for the best, for the most compatible. A good man. But after listening to Johnny, I’m full of wanting—wanting someone to come along and see me hidden behind my nervousness and shyness and gangly self that doesn’t seem to fold in the right directions. I’ve tried to hide between hunched shoulders, behind a timid, almost neurotic laugh. Sometimes, I curse myself for being what seems mousy and insignificant to me, though that’s harsh. Still, I wish I were more flirty, edgy, and careless, meaning I wish I didn’t care so much. The Purple Streak. The Bomb. The Flippant One.
Cheryl’s parents are gone for the evening, and, though I don’t tell her, I want to bury myself in the shag of her carpet. Cover myself with the strands of thread. Disappear in the warp and weft as if we could all merge into oneness, wholeness, into love. She’s lying on her stomach, leaning on her elbows, raising her legs behind her knees. Sometimes she puts her heels together. Sometimes she switches one leg above the other. She’s got a boyfriend. I bet she’s thinking about him, forget the chances out there. It’s not fair that she has someone and I don’t, but she’s my friend and she’s pretty. Short and compact. Curvy. I’m a tall drink of water, straight as a board mostly. I’m starting to fill out a little, and I’m hoping there are curves ahead.
But Johnny. Something about his voice makes love seem like the only thing anyone could want. I think I need someone to love me. Me above all others. I do. But if I love anybody too obviously or am too needy, they don’t love me back. It’s happened before. Maybe the popular boys—those cool representatives of the high school state-of-mind—are embarrassed to be seen with Skinny Minny—tall, thin me. I’m not exactly eye candy, I know that. Sexy is not a word I’d apply to myself. But I keep hoping. I’m becoming, after all. I’m getting the things I need— bumps for breasts and curves, slowly but surely, and I have my period.
Last spring, I told another friend that I wanted to ask Bruce to the Girls’ Reverse Dance. She did me the big favor of warning him. She did. What a traitor. Because she had prepared him for the big shock of me asking him, he was prepared to say “no, thank you.” He said “no” very quickly, almost before I finished asking him, and that “no” still rides high in my memory. How could a friend betray me like that? Bruce told me “no” out there in the stark sunshine with a totally blinding blue sky. I’ll never undo that hurt, even if I understand practical explanations. Maybe he’d rather go with someone else. Someone sexy. Like my friend, maybe—the one who told him that someone unworthy was about to ask him to the dance. She was a viper is all I can say.
“Chances are you think my heart’s your Valentine.”
I need someone to come along and take notice. Not only that, but someone who desires me, someone who calls me at night and tells me he can’t wait to see me again. I could ride next to him in his car and our shoulders could touch. We’d go to Sill’s Drive-In and cruise past the flashing neon bulbs dotting the roof line. We’d listen to the sounds of radios blaring from every car. People would ask, “Are they going together?” And I’d smile to myself, fingering the engraved silver disc on the chain around my neck—the one with my love’s name in cursive.
“Just because,” I sing along, “my composure sort of slips.” My composure won’t slip and slide when that certain someone sees me walking down the hall at high school next fall. I’m ready. I’ll be someone who’s arrived at sweet womanness. A blossom. Someone more than ready.
With the shag next to my face, though not quite long enough to reach my mouth, thank goodness, I really wouldn’t want to gag on a shag rug, I think about Josh, that one boy who called me when I was a sophomore. How can I be thinking about him now? Over the phone, he read excerpts from a sex book about positions and possibilities. Is this really happening, I wondered as he read. Am I hearing what I’m hearing? And why am I listening to him? If someone were to ask, I’d say he was horny and touched in the head because it seemed that sex was all he could think about. But I listened, I grant you that, more attentively than I imagined I could listen. My hormones were as busy as his testosterone, both of us in perilous puberty.
Maybe he wasn’t all that different from me. Maybe we were both controlled by the Big Urge to procreate. Being a boy, he couldn’t help himself, at least that’s what I’ve been told about teenage boys: all they can think about is sex. Forget about love. Yet, why am I so shocked at such a natural occurring event? Look at all the people walking around, created and born in the same way. Some of the way-overweight and some of the plain women at my church still amaze me that they have children. I can’t visualize them doing “it,” though I guess nobody escapes that process if he or she has children. So that boy was probably just trying to reach across that chasm between boys and girls to find the place he could connect, even if he had to use words and explanations of pictures to bridge the gap between us, to somehow create his dream-time phallus, longer than long, wistfully seeking a home, a place to be caressed and held.
Once, he told me about the time he was slow dancing with a girl at a Friday-night-after-the-game dance, how he got a hard on and had to put his hand over his crotch when he walked her back to sit down. I couldn’t help but wondering how much she noticed? Whether he had to hurry to the bathroom to straighten everything out or not? How would that be? To be busted so visibly? To have your craving for sex so apparent? And, hardest of all for me to understand, it’s out of his control, that thing called a penis that has its own say in the way it rises and falls. It’s no Roman Empire with a definite beginning and end. No sense of history, except predictability.
I listened to Josh read and tell me those things, curious though I pretended not to be. I was horny, too, wanting someone to touch me and tell me I was beautiful and appealing and all things magical. But I listened with divided attention as he plunged deeper into the text about the rawest of sex—almost as if it was happening for real. I could get in trouble for being interested. A teacher at church had told us that fornication or adultery was next to murder. A Big Sin, one of the biggest of all, and we girls should be on the watch for any slide toward the breaking or bending of that rule. That warning probably saved me when Josh and I went on our one-and-only date and saw “Around the World in 80 Days” at a drive-in theater. His hands started to explore, and part of me allowed myself to fantasize: what would it feel like to have someone’s hands on my flesh? No one’s hands have touched my flesh before, except when I was a baby with diapers and baths, of course. But I told him to keep them to himself. He wasn’t the man of my dreams to begin with. But what if he had been? Would I have responded differently to someone else? I wonder if Cheryl and her boyfriend talk about these things.
Oh, Johnny. It’s all so complicated—people wanting to be loved, to be held, to be stroked, or whatever they need to be. But you make it sound so right, so desirable, so possible. How could anyone sing the way you do and make all of us wish we could be right there, listening to you, taking the chance of being in love? Why do you have that kind of voice—so finely pitched, so sensual, so vivid about what it means to be in love?
“Let’s go to Sill’s,” Cheryl says as the phonograph record reaches the place where it has no sound except a repetitive thunk against a final, single thread stamped into the plastic. The needle needs to be picked up and started again, but then, it’s time to do something else. And we both know what that will be.
I stretch out, pointing my toes, extending my arms, straightening my elbows, and saying “ahhh.” She’s probably hoping she’ll meet up with her boyfriend, that he’ll be back from The Tracks where the boys drink beer before they look for the girls who inspire the hope that they’ll get what they want. I don’t know what Cheryl does when she gets in the car with the one she loves, nor do I think much about it. It’s not for me to say, I sing to myself, and then laugh because I’ve snitched a line from Johnny. How he haunts my life. I hum the rest of that melody, hoping that tonight I’ll have happy hunting.
“Okay,” I say, pushing up from the shag carpet, pulling my car keys out of my pocket, jangling them as if they belonged to me. I re-tuck my shirt, check my lipstick to see if I still have some on my lips, and straighten the mussed hair at the back of my head. Cheryl turns out the lights. We lock the door behind us.
When we drive to Sill’s in my parents’ unsexy Plymouth, which they let me borrow for the evening, we look at the parked cars lined up in the stalls. Some are full of girls, some with boys slouched down in their seats nursing a beer. Some are being served by carhops, and some are drinking cokes out of straws. I wonder if that someone I’m looking for might be here, in one of these cars, waiting for me?
Cheryl’s boyfriend’s not driven into Sill’s yet, and I wonder if the one I’m looking for is with him out at that bridge in the desert where the tracks cross a gully, shored up by crossbars of heavy wood: The Tracks. I’ve never been there but I can only imagine what it’s like. Is my someone with the boys tonight? Are they thinking about “Chances Are” or composure sort of slipping or is that only me wishing and wishing on stars that are twinkling overhead but oh so far away? Is he on his way to the drive-in, looking for someone just like me? Oh, please, be somewhere. He has to be somewhere. A good boy? A bad boy? A dangerous one in one of these cars? Anxiously opening the door when he sees us drive through in the Plymouth which has suddenly become a Magic-Mobile with stardust on its fenders. Holding up his hand saying “Wait.”
Johnny’s on the radio now, crooning again. “Wonderful, wonderful.” Johnny who makes all the world seem silvery, like glistening thread on a spool where regular thread is supposed to be. He’s a man who lives in the magic of moonlight which could shower down on us at any moment if we’re only patient enough, though, who wants to be patient?
And we cruise.
Bibliography
The Desert Between Us, University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada, April 2020. Novel,
To the Mountain: One Mormon Woman's Search for Meaning, Quest Books, Wheaton, Illinois, 2014. Memoir.
Raw Edges, University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada, Spring 2010. Memoir.
Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination, Signature Books, Salt Lake City, Utah, April, 1999. Short stories.
How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir, The University of George Press, Athens, Georgia, Spring 1992 (hardcover), The University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada, 1994 (paperback)
And the Desert Shall Blossom, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, Utah, Fall 1991 (hardcover), Signature Press, Salt Lake City, Utah, Summer 1993 (paperback). Novel.
Legs: The Story of a Giraffe, McElderry/Macmillan, New York, Fall 1991. MG/YA novel.
The School of Love, University of Utah Press, Spring 1990. Short stories.
Smiley Snake's Adventure, Aro Publishing Company, Provo, Utah, 1980. Children's picture book.