An Honest Day’s Pay
And a friendship for the ages
By Jan Wheaton
My first summer job was the brainstorm of my best friend, Sheila. She came up with it as we were lying on the deck of her parents’ house, catching some rays before a trip to Ocean City with my mother, a friend of hers and her kids.
“We need to make some money,” Sheila said, drumming her fingers.
“Money for what?”
“For the beach — we might want to buy some stuff.”
“OK. How?”
We were too young to get real jobs and had long ago made a pact never
to babysit.
“We’ll wash cars,” she said and frowned back at my frown.
I had met Sheila the previous September on the first day of our freshman year in high school. We were both new, military kids, and we knew how to pick and make friends fast. Sheila flounced into English class two minutes late, her yellow-blond hair flipped at her shoulders and her cat-green eyes lined like Brigitte Bardot’s. “Sorry,” she said in a low, breathy voice. “I couldn’t get the combination on my locker to work.”
She ducked her chin over the pile of books she clutched to her chest, hiding her face behind her cascade of hair as she headed for the back of the room, the heels of her white boots clicking on the linoleum floor. As she slid into a seat next to mine she dropped her purse. Two pens and a package of peppermints skidded across the floor, a lipstick rolled under my desk. There was a titter of laughter and two boys jumped to the rescue. I picked up her lipstick and set it on her desk.
Sheila shot me a sideways glance of gratitude that invited complicity. A few minutes later she passed a note to me that read, “You have the greenest eyes!”
I wrote back to her: “Contacts.”
After class I helped her with her locker, which turned out to be at the opposite end of the building. By the time we got there and opened it I had decided she was going to be my new best friend and invited her to come over to my house Saturday afternoon. We sat on the floor of my bedroom and exchanged critical teenage information. Favorite bands (hers was the Doors, mine was the Monkees). Most revered top models (hers, Veruschka, mine, Jean Shrimpton). Historical trivia (she’d been a cheerleader at her last school; I’d been sergeant of the School Safety Patrol.) She taught me to apply eyeliner. I introduced her to the poetry of Dorothy Parker.
We became inseparable at school, except for the rare class we didn’t share, and spent much of our weekend afternoons at shopping malls trying on cool clothes our mothers would never buy us, taking black and white pictures of ourselves in photo booths and shopping for albums at the record store, which we would later play in her basement rec room while we go-go danced on a piano bench. On days when we couldn’t get a ride somewhere, we took walks in the Virginia woods adjacent to our neighborhood and talked about all the really heavy stuff, like what a drag our parents were and what a downer the suburbs were.
On Saturday nights, we often went to hear bands at the Legion hall — dropped off and picked up by a parent. Boys lined up to dance with Sheila, and while they waited, they danced with me. But many a Saturday night there was no dance, and not being allowed to date, we hung out in her parents’ rec room, creating fictitious boyfriends we gave code names like Babe Blue and Tall Slim, and spinning long, complicated stories full of intrigue and heartache.
After being friends for almost a year, I knew if Sheila said something would be cool, it would be cool. So the following Saturday, wearing two-piece swimsuits under our shorts and T-shirts, we set off down the street, dragging a red wagon laden with soaps, glass cleaners, chrome polishers, upholstery cleaner, paper towels and rags, a cooler with snacks and drinks, and a transistor radio. The first two doors we knocked on were answered by housewives, who turned us down flat. The third woman assured us her husband washed the cars. When she closed the door, Sheila and I exchanged a nod and headed off down the sidewalk, looking for signs of a husband at home.
“Bingo,” Sheila said as we approached a house with a dusty, white 1965 Ford Mustang in the driveway and a man in the open garage pouring gasoline into a lawnmower. He appeared to be about 40 and came out into the sunlight, wiping his hands on a rag, as we wheeled up our wagon. He had nice eyes, somewhat creased and shadowy, and his belted blue jeans hung just below a still definable waistline. He smiled as Sheila described our special deluxe treatment, and it occurred to me that he could have once been a Babe Blue.
“Five bucks, huh? And I guess you girls are working for a good cause?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. We’re going to the beach,” Sheila said, flashing her wide smile.
He pushed out his lower lip, dimpling his chin.
“I think I can support that.”
Just sitting in the shade watching us wash his car could’ve alone been worth $5 to this guy, but Sheila and I took our jobs seriously. We pulled our hair back with rubber bands, turned on our radio and went to work. Sheila climbed in the front with Babe Blue’s vacuum cleaner and I took the back — emptying ashtrays, wiping down the red vinyl seats and cleaning the hand-crank windows.
By the time we got the interior done, we were sweating pretty good in the early afternoon sun, so when we got out to do the exterior, we peeled down to our swimsuits and sudsed, sprayed and scrubbed every square inch of that little car. We sang “Summer in the City” with The Lovin’ Spoonful and belted out “It Ain’t Me, Babe” with The Turtles over the roof, trunk and hood as we wiped and buffed till our arms felt like they were going to fall off. We didn’t toss our rags in the wagon until every inch of that car was pristine. The paint glistened, the chrome sparkled, and the white walls would glow in the dark. Our client, who had continued to putter in his garage most of the time we worked, gave his white Mustang a close inspection and blew a satisfied whistle through his teeth. “Nice work,” he said and handed us a $10 bill.
Word spread, and we had no trouble finding cars to wash for the next three days.
On our first evening at the beach, Sheila and I ditched the adults and headed down to the water in front of our hotel. We kicked off our sandals and sat cross-legged in the sand. A trio of boys wandered down from the boardwalk and tried to join us, but we waved them off. Sheila was in one of her existential moods, talking about the ocean, its primordial energy, the eternal rhythm of the waves and inevitability of the tides. I pulled up my knees and locked my hands around them. Listening to the sound of those waves and her low, breathy voice, I felt a degree of contentedness I’ve found hard to replicate in life. I was 15, tanned and at the beach with the coolest best friend in the world. A new pair of silver earrings, purchased with car-wash money, dangled from my pierced ears.
A fresh wave swirled up under us and left a pool of froth where we sat. I felt the sand slip away as the water retreated, and I dug my toes in, trying to hold back the grains. Sheila looked over her shoulder. “Those guys are coming back,” she said. PS
Jan Wheaton is a Pinehurst resident, native North Carolinian, unpublished novelist, and the compiler of PineStraw’s calendar.
