Maureen Traverse’s “Year of the Bimbo” starts off innocently enough, with the narrator and her best friend playing Barbies and speculating on the love life of Teeny’s sister, Nicole. But in true coming-of-age fashion, the closer the narrator observes Nicole and Dom, the darker their relationship is revealed to be.
Teeny’s big sister Nicole broke up with Dom over the summer, but he still drives past their house and walks down their street sometimes. Teeny says Dom used to come to dinner and watch movies in the basement and showed her how he could spin a book on the tip of his finger, but Teeny and I weren’t friends until second grade, so I’ve only ever seen Dom from her window, across the street, about a thumb tall at that distance, slumped in his sweatshirt, standing like someone waiting for something for too long.
Whenever Nicole is home, she stays in her room and talks on the phone. We hear her laughing the way she does when she understands a joke we don’t. If the door is open a crack, we can see her vanity, the oval mirror with photographs slipped into the frame, and one of her long, runner’s legs sticking out from under the comforter patterned with purple brush strokes on a bed twice the size of Teeny’s bed. At the head and foot, metal curlicues make it look like a sleigh, which we’d pretend it was if Nicole ever let us into her room, but she doesn’t, and we don’t mind because this feels right to us, just what a teenager would do.
Nicole looks exactly like her mother, flower-petal skin and fluffy black hair, while Teeny looks more like her father, who is red-headed and freckled, Irish and handsome. Teeny says Dom looks like Sam Donaldson, who does the news, because he has thick eyebrows like two caterpillars sat on his face, and we can’t stop laughing about it. When Nicole goes out at night, we take her eyeliner and draw dark eyebrows on our faces and name ourselves after boys in our class who, on chicken nugget day, drink down tiny cups of barbecue sauce, then sit on each other and fart. Teeny says when we grow up we will have to go out on dates with these boys, the way Barbie and Ken go around together, although mostly when we play Barbies, she is always getting ready for a date, a date she never seems to go on.
The only Barbies at my house are my Pretty in Pink Barbie and my sister’s Malibu Barbie, sent to us by Grandma Marsh who we hardly ever see, and the dolls spend most of their time naked, tied to the doorknob of our bedroom as a warning to grown-ups to stay out. But at Teeny’s house, twelve Barbies live in a pink and white suitcase with a whole wardrobe of swimsuits and evening gowns and high heels the size of elbow macaroni, and there are two Ken dolls, one blond and one with sculpted brown hair, and even though I don’t like playing Barbies, I like playing with Teeny and I like the way she makes Barbie talk to Ken and the other Barbies in impatient little snarls because she is in a hurry and she doesn’t have time for how silly they all are about dates and clothes.
At Teeny’s house, we can’t watch whatever we want and one time when Nicole rented St. Elmo’s Fire, her father made us turn it off. I’m allowed to watch whatever my father watches, and there’s no bed time at my house, so I tell Teeny all the funny parts from Saturday Night Live, like Jan Hooks pretending to be Jessica Hahn on “Church Chat.” We say bulbous buttocks over and over like a tongue twister. Teeny doesn’t know anything about Jim or Tammy Faye, so I have to explain how Jim was a minister, which is like a priest except in a different kind of religion, what Grandma Bizjak calls fly-by-night churches. Jim had an affair with Jessica and Tammy Faye’s eyeliner runs down her cheeks whenever she cries about it on television. We use Nicole’s eyeliner to draw brown tear trails down our faces and we pretend to cry about Ken having an affair on Barbie. We are sitting on the steps carpeted in plush white, unlike the brown shag at my house, which makes Barbie’s world seem heavenly, cloud-like. Teeny likes to play Barbies on the steps because she says we need a different stage for each place Barbie goes. Here is her bedroom where she changes her clothes, and here is the backyard where Ken is waiting for her to take him back, and here is the driveway where she parks her pink corvette. Barbie lets Ken take her for a ride, but the corvette plunges off a cliff and topples down the jagged mountainside and ends up on the floor at the bottom of the stairs.
“Now we need a hospital,” Teeny says. She takes one of the brown-haired Barbies, whose name she says is Monique, to be the nurse. We make a bed out of a tissue box and Ken stands next to it, holding Barbie’s hand. “He still wants to be her boyfriend,” Teeny says. “Even though he had an affair.”
“Barbie is unconscious,” I remind her. “Maybe she lost her memory and when she wakes up she won’t know he had an affair.”
“Dominic has a blue car,” Teeny says. “Sometimes he parks on the street and just sits there. We all know it’s him because paint is peeling off the roof and the motor is loud. One time my dad went out to talk to him but he just drove away.”
“He drove away so fast his eyebrows flew off,” I say.
Teeny starts laughing until she snorts. She takes the stairs on her seat, lowering herself onto each step until she reaches the floor, then tiptoes over the white hexagon tiles across the front hall and into the living room, which is carpeted in the same thick white as the steps. She continues on her toes, then lays out on the blue loveseat, one hand on her hip.
“I’m going to get high heels,” she says. “My mom said I could.”
Teeny’s blond hair turns curly at the ends. She has blue eyes and pale freckles. In the summer, she likes to stomp on lightning bugs and smear their glowing insides on the front step. I beg her not to hurt them, but telling Teeny to stop is pointless. Many times, her father has asked and she has refused to stop making chewing sounds into the microphone of her plastic tape recorder, claiming a goat is eating the curtains. Teeny never stops.
Lying on her side on the loveseat, her head propped in her hand, she snatches the sheer curtain and drapes it over the loveseat. The white carpet, the blazing sunlight, the blue upholstery might as well be a movie compared to my living room, which is beige and dim and cluttered with a television cart and magazines and VHS tapes. Here the bright clean dazzles and the curtains fall in perfect scallops from rods with big silver balls on the ends, and curled up on the steps I feel like a cherry on top a luscious mound of pastel ice cream and I know why Dom stands across the street staring at the house because that is exactly what I would do if I was ever banished from this place.
* * *
Teeny’s father drives us in the minivan to Nicole’s cross country meet and we stand in the grass behind the thin rope line crowded against coats and purses and that strange leather smell of adults. We stretch over the rope trying to glimpse her as she comes around the bend. There are a few girls ahead, one from Nicole’s school in the lead, the others in shiny maroon shorts, galloping powerful as horses. A moment later, we see Nicole gaining ground, hunched and wiry, her hair tied back in a frizzy black pompom. I expect her to smile and wave as she passes us, but she only stares straight ahead, her flushed face fixed like someone who has bad news. Still, she manages to pull into third, displacing the other team’s runner to fourth which means an extra point for them. Nicole’s school wins and the girls celebrate by chanting, slinging their arms around each other’s shoulders and posing for silly pictures.
A hand clamps my shoulder and when I turn, I see Teeny also gripped by her father, who is guiding us away from the crowd back toward the parking lot. He has never handled me this way before and I suspect we have done something wrong, or more likely, that Teeny dug up a clod of dirt and threw it at someone or she tried to jump over the rope line. The sudden touch of an adult is startling and embarrassing, the way it was when one of the skate refs at United Skates had to pick me up and carry me off the rink in front of everyone because I was too slow to leave after free skate. I feel suddenly noticed in a way I don’t like and the fury climbs up from my stomach and heats my face until the tips of my ears burn despite the cold. Teeny’s father hustles us into the minivan and tells us to stay put before he slides the door closed. We watch as he stalks back across the grass into the crowd where the girls in their bold colored track suits stand out. Teeny climbs up into the front seat and puts her chin on the dashboard, crouching like she doesn’t want to be seen.
“Dom is here,” she says and gently lifts her hand to point straight ahead. Off to the side of the crowd, they stand talking to each other, or else Dom is talking and Nicole is listening. I finally have a better look at him than before, and it’s true about his eyebrows, but the rest of his face isn’t squinty or funny, but smooth and serious as a statue. He’s wearing torn jeans and a hooded sweatshirt and he keeps his hands stuffed into the front pocket. Nicole does not look at Dom, but hangs her head and toes at something in the grass.
“It’s a free country,” Teeny says. “So he can come here if he wants.”
By now, her father has reached them and he seems to be coaxing Nicole away.
“Did he have an affair?” I ask, and Teeny clicks her tongue like I’m stupid.
“She just didn’t like him anymore.”
“How come?”
“It’s a free country,” Teeny says again.
Nicole is backing away with her father when Dom lurches forward and grabs her arm with two hands. Her father’s back is turned and at first he doesn’t see it happen.
“She can outrun him. But he can talk faster. He can say the Pledge of Allegiance in five seconds. We timed him.”
Now her father turns and finds Nicole stuck, held in place by Dom, almost like his touch has frozen her. As we watch, she seems to throb with color, black hair and white legs, her navy and gold uniform bright as a flag. Her father says something, holds up a single finger and points it at Dom, and even though I can’t hear him, I can tell what he means. But Dom doesn’t let go. Then, just as Nicole and Teeny’s father had gripped my shoulder, he takes hold of Nicole’s arm and yanks it away. If it hurts, Nicole doesn’t show it, and Dom looks too surprised to move, his hands out as if he is still holding onto her.
Before Nicole and her father reach the crowd clumped along the edge of the field, Dom takes off after them, but her father pays no attention, marching Nicole ahead of him as if he had her at gunpoint. Dom doesn’t stop. He catches up and steps in front of Nicole, his arms out at his sides, and for a moment I’m sure he has them trapped, but the field is so wide and it’s nothing for Nicole’s father to step around. As he does, he pushes Dom’s arm down, not especially hard or mean, more like he doesn’t care. They head toward where the team is still gathered, leaving Dom standing alone in the field.
* * *
Teeny gets her high heels just like her mother promised. They are white and propped up by a heel no taller than a chess pawn. Still, she slips them on and parades around in her printed cotton dress and white anklets, clomping a little so we can hear the heels hitting the kitchen tile. We are all going out to eat at a restaurant where I have never been, but where Teeny tells me there is a real railroad crossing that blinks and a model train that rides around near the ceiling. She will order the chicken marsala, she says, and a Shirley Temple, which is really just cherries and ginger ale.
In her high heels, Teeny looks mostly wobbly to me, resting back on her hips so her stomach sticks out. She doesn’t look older, but always seems older than I am, even though she is six months younger. I don’t know if it’s because she has all the ideas, or because she wanders easily in and out of the neighbors’ houses, finding the kids who have pudding pops or Vicks, which we wipe on our chests to make our skin burn. At the same time, she seems younger than me because she repeats herself constantly and cannot listen. We never fight, but if we did, I know she would win by sheer force, because she would yell louder and hit harder and would never be afraid of hurting me.
When her father comes in from raking leaves and sees Teeny in the middle of the kitchen, showing us how she can walk with a cookbook on her head, he looks at her feet and makes a face. Teeny’s mother turns from the sink where she is washing dishes, dries her hands and rolls her sleeves back down. Her parents look at each other long enough I figure Dom could have said the Pledge of Allegiance twice, and then her mother takes the shoebox from the table and holds it out to Teeny, who removes her shoes without a word and tucks them into the box.
For the rest of the day, Teeny is cranky—the Barbies snipe at each other more ferociously than usual—and I want to feel bad for her, but I don’t really. My mother died having my sister when I was two and Grandma Bizjak isn’t the same as a mother but more like the wrinkled gnome in a fairy tale who is just as likely to grant your wish as to put a curse on you. Sometimes she presses our cheeks between her hands and calls us her cookies, but when we lay on the floor and watch cartoons after school she says our mother wouldn’t like us to be so spoiled. When our mother was a child, she got up early and did her chores without complaining, polished everyone’s shoes and left them in a row down the hallway.
For church Grandma Bizjak puts on dark slacks and a blouse with a bow, but the rest of the time she wears terrycloth slippers and a quilted housecoat that zips up the front. I have never seen her wear high heels, and sometimes when she needs to take out the dog, she sticks her gnarled feet into the boots my father leaves by the door. One time she bought me a bike at a garage sale, and even though I love the sunset colors on the frame, the chain clicks and catches whenever I start to gain on Teeny, standing while she pedals her shiny green bike with the white tassels at the end of the handlebars.
* * *
Johnny Carson says people are calling 1987 the Year of the Bimbo, and when I tell Teeny, she looks at me as if I have told her it is Christmas already. I explain how there were so many bimbos that they needed a whole year.
“What bimbos?” she wants to know, clearly annoyed to have missed such a thing.
“Well, Jessica Hahn. And Fawn Hall, and the lady who sat on Gary Hart’s lap.”
“Fawn,” Teeny says, her eyes wide. “When I grow up, I’m going to change my name to Fawn and wear a brown fur stole with white spots.”
We don’t have a fur stole for Barbie, so we cut the tail off of a stuffed cat and drape it around her shoulders. “Fawna,” Teeny says, then takes California Dreams Barbie in her neon yellow bathing suit and stands her beside Fawna. “Here’s Shawna. They’re twins.”
We take out the Corvette and the convertible and Gem’s tour bus and we fill them with Barbies for the parade. We make a banner that reads Year of the Bimbo, and we tear up construction paper into tiny pieces of confetti. Teeny digs out an old cassette of Fourth of July music and puts it into her tape player. We dress Ken in the best clothes we can find, a pair of red pants and blue cowboy shirt with white fringe, and we stand him on the top step and he gives a speech because he is the president.
Teeny stops the music and puts Ken’s arms up in the air. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she bellows. “Today, we celebrate bimbos from the East and the West and the North and South.”
I make the breathy sound of a crowd cheering.
“Bimbos from Asia and Africa and even Antarctica. All of these bimbos are amazing. They are beautiful and they have style and they have lots of jobs and they are famous.”
One by one, I lift all of the Barbies’ arms up and use my voice to fake a whistle. I can tell Teeny is not sure what else to say so I remind her that bimbos can do whatever they want and they never get in trouble. We end by cheering again—long live the bimbos—and we start the parade.
* * *
Nicole stops going out on weekends and Teeny tells me it is because Dom knows Nicole likes to hang out at Richmond Mall and then at Yours Truly for milkshakes. I still laugh when Teeny calls him Sam Donaldson, but I don’t tell her that when I saw him up close, I thought he was handsome. Instead of going out with her friends, Nicole stays home with us, eats pizza, and watches the movies we put on even though she is too old for An American Tale and The Boy Who Could Fly. If Teeny takes out Super Mario Brothers or California Games, Nicole won’t play but sits on the couch with her legs propped on the wall, winding a tail of hair around her finger, just staring at the screen. Later on, she goes up to her room and closes the door, leaving us in the basement.
Now that Nicole is home on a Saturday night, her parents can leave her in charge and go to dinner theater with the Schmidts. Once Nicole leaves Teeny and me alone in the basement, we pretend the mossy green carpet is the floor of a forest and the dark wood paneling the trees. The bar with no liquor bottles is the altar in a mysterious temple. We line up the Barbies with Dream Glow Barbie in the middle, then turn off the lights and admire her dress flecked in luminescent dots. Just as my eyes adjust to the dark, we hear a thump overhead as if someone has jumped on the kitchen floor hard enough to rattle the light fixture.
Eager to tell off Nicole, who like us should not be stomping that hard in the house, Teeny charges up the stairs in the dark and throws open the basement door, but the sound she makes at the top of the stairs is strange. When I come up behind her, I can see Dom standing in front of the kitchen sink, holding one of his sneakers in each hand, wide-eyed and panting. He looks just as I remember him, and suddenly I’m embarrassed to be a little girl playing Barbies. Cold air from the open window over the sink fills the room. It is only once Nicole comes up behind us that I remember he has no business being here at all. It’s a free country, but this is private property. Nicole shoos us back into the basement and slams the door. In the dark, Teeny crouches on the steps and presses her ear to the wood. She tells me there are sounds, voices, but she can’t understand what they’re saying.
“Why doesn’t she tell him to go away?” Teeny hisses.
“He won’t listen.” But even as I say it, his refusal seems like only half the puzzle. On the other side is Nicole, who didn’t storm off at the cross country meet and who hides up in her room like Rapunzel.
“We have to see what’s going on,” Teeny says, and opens the basement door slowly enough not to make a sound. As I follow Teeny, I notice how we glide on our pajamas across the glossy tile. At my house, my hands and knees turn gray and bits of grit end up under my fingernails if I crawl on the kitchen floor. When Teeny reaches the dining room, she stands slowly and peers around the corner of the china cabinet. Once I am beside her, I can see just over her head.
Nicole stands in the middle of the room and Dom is on his knees, wrapped around her, his face pressed into her sweatpants, right between her legs. Her arms hang at her sides, and I wonder if he has won after all. When Dom reaches up and tugs at the waistband of Nicole’s sweatpants, she lets out a faint sound that could mean he is hurting her, or about to, and I realize they are standing right in front of the picture window, just the sheer curtain and the glass between them and the whole world. He is going to take off all her clothes. He is going to embarrass her in front of the whole neighborhood.
From just under my chin, Teeny lurches forward. “Get off of her!” She crashes into them and they separate, Nicole fixing her sweatpants and Dom struggling to his feet. Then Teeny does what she always said she would do if someone broke into the house. She grabs the fireplace poker, jangling the metal set, and charges at Dom. She could hit or stab a burglar, I remember her saying, and now she chooses to hit, winding up like a batter and striking him in the leg. He yelps and grabs his shin, his dark eyebrows and his nose scrunched up from the pain. I feel it too, like a little spot of heat in my stomach, and I come out from my hiding place. When I’m close enough, I touch the sleeve of his sweatshirt. The arm underneath is warm and holding it sends a startle through my body. I don’t want to let go, and I pull his arm to my face, so close I can smell soap and rain and skin.
But Dom shakes me off and lurches toward Teeny, making an animal sound. By now, Nicole has his other arm and I back away just as he grabs the poker from Teeny and holds it above his head before whirling around and shattering the white vase on the mantel. The sound of the pieces hitting the fireplace and Nicole yelling is still loud in my head, even as I’m running from the room. Out in the night, I become gradually aware, the slab of driveway under my bare feet, the cold seeping through my thin pajamas, my breath forming little twirls in the air. The pudding pop neighbor and the Vicks neighbor both have lights on in the windows. I pick the house where I know the children are small, where there is a nursery done up in buttery yellow and we slipped our fingers through bars of the crib to touch the baby.
* * *
The police officers keep Dominic in their cruiser for a long time, parked out by the curb with the lights flashing. By now, Teeny’s parents are home and her mother has made coffee so the house smells like morning and is lit up almost as brightly. Nicole sits on the couch, the upholstery torn where she says Dom kept hitting with the poker. Someone has picked up a lamp that fell over, but the shade is still perched on the top of the wingback chair, tipped like a fancy hat. Their father is on the couch, Teeny in his lap, and for the first time I can remember, she says nothing.
Finally, one police officer raps on the door and Teeny’s mother brings him coffee. He takes a seat with his little notepad, like the kind we use to write down our homework, and asks if can we tell him about what happened. Nicole looks at her father before she starts, not with that night, but months before, how Dominic would sit in his car on the street, how he would find her when she went out with her friends, how he would trail her around the mall, how he’d slipped a note into her purse when she was standing at the counter at TCBY. The officer writes in his pad, then licks his finger to flip the page. I look away and back at him again and again, each time expecting the inky blot of his uniform, the glimmering name plate etched with B. Fronzak, the snaps and patches to vanish, as strange a presence as he is, like someone famous climbed right out of the television.
“And before that?” he says, once Nicole has finished talking.
Again, she looks at her father, seems to address her confusion to him.
“He says he was your boyfriend?”
Nicole nods. She is still wearing the grey sweatpants and navy t-shirt that reads Dominion Blue Streaks, Regional Champions, 1986.
“And tonight, he came over,” the officer says. “Did he do that before? When your parents were out? When he was your boyfriend?” He has looked up from his notes and he stares at Nicole, who looks down at her lap.
“One time,” she says, and coughs. “But it wasn’t—I had his jacket and he needed it back.”
The officer makes another note, pokes the cap of his pen into the corner of his mouth and chews. When he pulls out the pen, his lips stay the same shape, turned up at the corner in the slightest smile.
* * *
“You don’t even know what a bimbo is,” Teeny says to me. We have the Barbies out on the steps again. Teeny only talks to me to tell me I have put Barbie in the wrong gown, that Skipper is too young to drive the Corvette, or that Ken is not taking Barbie to a restaurant, but on a picnic with the basket full of tiny plates and cups and a red-checked blanket, so she’d better wear something casual. I’m always wrong, and it becomes so familiar that I stop playing all together and watch as Teeny moves Barbie up and down the stairs, in and out of rooms she is too busy to be in for long.
“What’s a bimbo, then?” I had thought a bimbo was a beautiful woman, one who had affairs and went on television, someone too glamorous for an ordinary life.
“She’s stupid, too,” Teeny says. “An airhead.”
I pick up a Barbie and study her painted face. To me, she looks happy, her blue eyes narrowed by her pink smile. I figured bimbos were happy, too, or maybe a little mad, but only the way Barbie is mad because Ken and the other Barbies are not doing anything right.
“You’re stupid,” Teeny says suddenly. “You like him.”
My cheeks burn. Again, I feel like someone has lifted me right off the floor, a little girl in the hand of a giant. I can’t explain why I wanted to touch Dom, or why I felt bad that he hadn’t noticed me. The police officer had told us that Dom was crying out in the cruiser, that he’d broken down the second they got him in the car, that he kept saying how sorry he was, that he would pay for the damage, that he would make it all right. I keep imagining the scene over and over, Dominic in handcuffs, although I’m pretty sure he wasn’t, hunched over in the back of the cruiser, his shoulders trembling and his sweet face pink from crying.
“If I’d still had my high heels, I could have hit him with one.” She picks up one of Barbie’s pink shoes and presses the heel into Ken’s face. “Right between his big, fat eyebrows.”
I snatch Ken away from her and smooth my thumb over his forehead. “You really hurt him.”
Teeny stands up and kicks the Corvette down the stairs. “You’re horrible,” she says. “You’re a bimbo.”
The car lays on the hexagon ties, turned over on its back like a fat beetle. One of the Barbies was in the car when it fell and now she’s trapped underneath, still smiling, but missing the floppy hat I’d tucked over her hair for the picnic, one arm up in the air just like she’d been holding on and had to let go.
Maureen Traverse graduated from the MFA program at The Ohio State University. Her work has appeared in Prime Number, StoryQuarterly, and CutBank. Her novel, This Is What Always Happens, will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2027. The manuscript was on the shortlist for the 2022 Southeast Missouri State University Press Nilsen Prize, the first chapter was short-listed in the 2019 CRAFT First Chapters Contest, and the year before, she was awarded a Vermont Studio Center fellowship based on an excerpt. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she has lived in Washington, DC; New York City; and Columbus, Ohio. More than ten years working in the mental health field strongly informs her writing, particularly her focus on narratives shaped by point-of-view. Now a consultant and researcher, she lives in Watertown, Massachusetts with her husband and son.