Chapter 18
Eighteen
Belinda
1974
She’d never seen her mother so angry or her father so cold. Joetta was In Trouble. At sixteen, she’d gotten in the worst trouble they could fathom, and now Belinda sat at the top of the stairs, listening in.
Their mother was yelling, so it was easy to hear.
“I can’t show my face anywhere, ANYWHERE, thanks to this. Thanks to you !”
Joetta kept trying to get their mother to listen, to help, to understand. “We are going to get married. He loves me.”
“That laborer? He’s base, and you’re too stupid to know it. I raised you to be better than this, and you’ve thrown it away.”
Her little sister was crying, which cut Belinda to the core. She hated to see her sad or even disappointed.
“Daddy. Can you please forgive me? We just need a little to start out.”
Their father coughed. And then Belinda heard footsteps. He was walking away. While their mother berated Joetta, their father walked away. Belinda didn’t know which was worse.
“GET OUT OF MY SIGHT!”
Joetta ran now, too. Belinda stood up and was there to catch her little sister as she collapsed into wracking sobs.
This was awful, a mess, the worst mess she could imagine.
“Come on.” Belinda led Joetta to her room. She sat her little sister on her bed and found a Kleenex.
“Here, stop. We need you to stop.”
“But, but Daddy wouldn’t even look at me.” The words sputtered out between sobs.
“I know. I know. We have to think. Can you give it up for adoption? Go visit the relatives back east, and then you know, come back here? No one would know.”
“No, I won’t. I can’t .”
“Why can’t you?”
“You’re not listening to me either. No one is except him. He listens. He asked me to marry him, and I said yes. Baby or not, I’m marrying him.”
“What about Banks? He loves you, I think.” Belinda’s mind was racing, trying to stop Joetta from marrying this man she hardly knew. Her sister seemed way too young to know what in love really meant.
“What?”
“At least he’s here. We know him. He’d do anything for you.”
“But I don’t love him.”
It all began to sink in for Belinda; their lives as sisters, the only lives they’d ever known, were about to change. There was no going back to the two girls on the beach.
In that moment, Belinda grew up, maybe even more than Joetta did, and she was the one In Trouble.
“You need to get out now, then.”
“What? I want a wedding. A dress. The club. We can do all that right away, and then no one will even question the rest of it.”
“You just said Daddy won’t even look at you. He’s not going plan a wedding for you.”
Joetta swallowed hard. She wiped her eyes. “What do I do?”
Belinda knew, down to her bones, what was next. Mommy and Daddy were going to cut Joetta off. There would be no wedding or registry or any of it. Joetta would be lucky to have whatever was in her piggy bank.
“We start packing. Now.”
Belinda grabbed a suitcase from the back of Joetta’s closet and laid it on the plush carpet.
Joetta nodded and started adding dresses and shoes and her little pink diary. She put a stuffed animal and a curling iron in the suitcase. Mommy had given them both a set when they went to New York on holiday.
Belinda watched her sister pack for a life that seemed like the one they already lived, where she’d need cocktail dresses, a formal, and her Pucci.
But Belinda doubted the man that had gotten Joetta In Trouble belonged to a country club or went to the Junior League fundraisers with his parents or played shuffleboard. In the few interactions she’d had with him, he barely spoke, much less socialized.
Joetta’s life was not going to go like she was fantasizing. She would not be playing house.
That’s when Belinda went back to her own room. She opened her piggy bank. She had three hundred dollars in cash. That was a lot. But not enough.
Joetta got the same allowance as Belinda, but she knew her little sister spent it as soon as she got it. She knew Joetta’s piggy bank was empty. Next, Belinda went to her jewelry box. She had Grandma Esther’s stick pin. Her mother told her never to wear it because the little gold tulip wrapped around a real diamond. She grabbed it.
She also knew Mama had bigger, fancier jewelry. Should she dare?
For a moment, she considered grabbing a fist full of their mother’s prized collection but then reconsidered. The way mother and father were behaving, it wouldn’t surprise her if they threw Belinda and Joetta in jail if any jewelry came up missing. She thought better of it.
She grabbed the pearls she’d received for her sweet sixteen. That was something. She walked back to Joetta’s room to find her sitting on the suitcase trying to close it.
“Here, let me.” Belinda sat with her and their combined weight was enough to get it shut.
Belinda walked over to Joetta’s matching jewelry box. Her pearls and their Grandma Esther’s teardrop earrings were in Joetta’s stash.
“Why didn’t you pack the jewelry?”
“It’s so old-fashioned. I hate it all.”
Belinda scooped up the little treasures and added them to the ones she’d brought in.
“What in the world?”
“Here’s the cash in my piggy bank. And take my jewelry. I don’t know how much it will get you, but it’s real, so it has to be worth something.”
“He has a job, an apartment, and a car, we don’t need to?—”
“—Joetta, you don’t know what you’re getting into. And maybe he does have all the things you’ll need, and you love him and all that. Just consider this your shower gift, then. But don’t tell him you have it. Just put it in this bag with your makeup. It’s for an emergency.”
“You’re such a good saver.”
Joetta did as Belinda instructed. She also took the money and put it in her favorite purse.
“I have to go.”
Joetta and Belinda looked into each other’s eyes. They’d barely spent a day in their lives apart. And now Joetta was moving away. She was going to have a baby. And she was marrying that man who, if Belinda was being honest, scared her a little. If for no other reason other than that he was so different to them.
Belinda pulled Joetta into her arms. She hugged her hard. “We’re always going to be the Gulfside Girls.” They put their palms together and did a quarter turn.
Belinda knew that they would likely never be those girls again.
And things were going to change forever.