They were traveling on a relatively new highway connecting the south to the north. The steel blue station wagon was thumping through the pavement slabs at speeds greater than the limit. Margaret sat in the back seat after having slept for most of the day in the far back of the wagon in her sleeping bag designed for much colder temperatures than that of a heated car. Her brother was still sleeping in the back-back. It was in the middle of the night. This was the first time in her life that Margaret was up at midnight.
She felt queasy. She asked her father who was at the wheel which state they were in, having departed the day prior from Florida. “Georgia,” he said. “Georgia,” she thought. In her integrated elementary school up north, several of the Black school children were born in Georgia.
Margaret peered out of the windows to see what Georgia looked like, but it was very dark. Few lights illuminated the road. She began looking for homes, any size home, but she saw none. As the car sped down the highway, she tried to look through the trees. She saw some shapes, but she could not discern any buildings. She hoped to see a house, or even a shack, that perhaps William might have been born in. William was an out-going boy in Margaret’s fifth grade class who came from Georgia, or so she thought. She fantasized about going back to class and telling William with exuberance that she saw the place where he was born. This would make the two of them even more connected than she already felt with him. He would be impressed that she was in Georgia, assuming he really was from there.
She thought about his smile. She also thought about the moment when she knew he felt what she did, when he asked her if she was going to the playground after lunch. She made certain she went to the playground after lunch. And once there, she ran in circles with the girls from the class and the boys ran around them, none of them touching, nor speaking, just feeling the sun shining on their faces and their limbs. The girls in dresses with bare legs. The boys in short-sleeved shirts. They shared a sliver of grass by the red-brick school building. They had only ten minutes before the bell would ring and go back to class. And in those few minutes, they felt their young bodies moving, unrestrained, part dancing, part running, enjoying freedom of movement.
Her father reached for the radio and turned it on. A new hit song was playing. The words went, “one less bell to answer.” Margaret wondered, “What bell? A school bell?” Then she realized it meant a doorbell. The music and the lyrics continued, “one less egg to fry.” Margaret asked herself why the singer was frying eggs. Then the lyric that cleared it up, “One less man, to pick up after.” “Aha,” Margaret realized, the song was about a break-up. Margaret still didn’t understand though why someone would connect a break-up with frying an egg, but she was caught-up in the sound of the voice. “Each time the doorbell rings, I still run.” Margaret envisioned someone wearing polyester bellbottoms and running down white carpeted stairs to answer a door.
The voice from the radio rose to a higher range: “I don’t know how in the world to stop thinking of him . . . since he went a-a-way.” Margaret thought about this painful line. She wondered if she would ever have the same problem in her life. She had never kissed or touched a boy, but she had feelings for William. Next year, the students move to middle school, and they would not be in the same classroom. She wondered if she would miss William as much as this singer who was swooning, “I live each day the way I . . . crying my heart out.” Margaret’s eyes teared up. The late hour made her feel vulnerable too. She thought about what could happen in her life and that she may love someone this much to cry her heart out.
Margaret began lightly tapping her foot to the beat of the music on the back of her father’s seat. Her heart was pounding with the singer’s words. Again, the woman was singing about not frying anymore eggs. Margaret wondered if this meant that the guy was an “egg” who could no longer be fried. She thought about how she would be as a grown-up, in her own place. She pictured herself wearing the polyester bell-bottoms, frying eggs, and being in love with a man. She saw herself standing on the white carpet, holding the doorhandle, and saying to perhaps William, who grew taller and had a trimmed beard, “I don’t want to fry anymore eggs.”
She continued to tap her foot to the music, but softly so that her father wouldn’t get annoyed that she was kicking his seat. She promised herself that she would purposefully fall in love when she was grown-up just to break up with the guy and deliver that egg line. She couldn’t sing the lines right at that moment because it would wake up her brother and mother, so she felt the lines. Her heart pounded inside her chest. “Since he went, oh he went away.” The steel blue wagon could have risen from the road with the energy that Margaret felt from those words.
Her father continued to look ahead – watching each line by painted line. A cigarette hung from his mouth. He noticed that Margaret seemed to be stirring. Then, he went back to driving.
A few days later, Margaret went back to school. But when she saw William, she said nothing about Georgia, in fact, nothing about her trip. She and William really didn’t converse about anything. Except for when he would ask her, “are you going to the playground after lunch?” And she made sure she did.
And like the last time, they swirled in circles on the playground feeling the warmth of the sun. In those moments, books and desks and homework did not exist. Just running indiscriminately wherever their bodies took them.
June came around quickly, ending the school year. Margaret walked down the hallway stairs with her teacher and classmates for the last time. She waved goodbye to William and with a heavy heart boarded a school bus to the southern part of town, where White families lived. She expected he would take a bus to the northern part, where Black families resided. That summer, she would accompany her mother on any errand, hoping that William would also be with his mother shopping in the center of the village. She knew little about his family other than he lived with his mother. Margaret jumped at the chance to ride to the bank, to walk through the library, even the grocery store with long customer lines, but she never saw him that summer.
She resorted to pulling out a telephone directory and looking up his family’s name. Sitting on the floor of the den, she paged through, looking for names. She did not know what she would say if someone answered the phone. She saw no listings that resembled his.
September came around. Margaret started in the new middle-school; her former classmates scattered in different classrooms. But there was no William to be seen. Some families stayed for generations in that town, while others were transient. She guessed that William and his family must have relocated but left no messages. No one at school knew where he went.
The new school had a much larger field, in fact acres of mowed lawn. Margaret’s heart raced when should thought of lunchtime. But on the first day of class, the girls, separated from the boys, were marched to a small, paved parking lot, empty of cars. The boys were sent to the large, endless field. For the girls, crammed together on rough, broken pavement, there were no running games, just standing still. “Boys have extra energy, and they need the space to run,” she was told. “But I want to run too,” she said.
Fifty years later, she saw an obituary in a local newspaper. The picture of the deceased looked familiar, and the name, though common as “Smith,” was the same. The paper said he was born the same year as Margaret but had lived in a neighboring town. “Perhaps?” Margaret thought. It showed a picture of a man standing with a tool belt near a worktable. Friends and family described him as, “He had a kind heart.” “It must be him,” she realized. But one fact that she finally learned, he was born in Louisiana.