A Kick-Ass Fairy: A Memoir (3 page)

The kinks in my neck continued for years.

Most Sunday mornings we were free until around 11 a.m. Diane, Alane, and I, charged with watching Bruce, ate out of cereal boxes while watching episodes of David and Goliath, Gumby, and Wonderama. But, eventually, we got bored. Out of the dressers came all the petticoats and we’d all get dressed up, which included dressing Bruce. Then we’d all jump on the twin beds, bed to bed, bed to floor, then the floor to the bed. Occasionally, Dad would emerge from their room wearing a bathrobe and slippers, his hair all messed up. He would tell us to knock it off and we’d sit down quietly, hands folded across our laps. Then he went back to their room and closed the bifold door. I led the pack and started more jumping after a while. I wondered what they did in there all morning. Eventually Dad would come out and make us pancakes with sausage, or waffles with fried corn beef hash, or bacon and eggs, and then he disappeared to mow the lawn and nap in the afternoon while listening to music with his headphones on.

After the bus incident I needed glasses. When selecting frames I wanted the pink or blue ones “just like the other girls.” My mother would only get the ugly kind, brown with pointed tips. Then my hair started to go from curly to frizz. My new nickname became The Four-Eyed Frizz Bomb.

Something happened to my mother in the years after Bruce was born. She started getting big bumpy pimples on her face that she would pick at all the time with her fingernails. She spent a lot of time in her room, and when she wasn’t in her room she’d yell, hit Alane and me, and say crazy things that didn’t make sense like, “If I say white is black, then black is white.” Sometimes I would see her crying and try to hug her, but she would just say, “Leave me alone.” One day I found a package of twenty-eight little pills in her room that years later she claimed were for her pimples. I think she was also on Valium.

Saturday mornings were spent in Catechism class, where I had to memorize the mortal and venial sins and also learn by heart many prayers—all of which caused me great stress. I wondered what the point to all of this was. It wasn’t like we ever went to church or prayed for anything except to be forgiven for the sins we committed and asking for help to be better behaved.

“God is everywhere,” Mom told us, “and even if I don’t know what you are doing, God can see everything!”

She told us God could even read our minds! In a symbol of make-pretend purity, I received First Holy Communion in a sinless white dress. After that, we had to start going to church on Sundays and there was no more jumping on the bed. I was dropped off for confession every week, and sometimes midweek—for what I didn’t know.

Sometimes on Sunday afternoon we would all go to our grandparents’ house for dinner, where the entire family would gather—aunts, uncles, great-aunts, great-uncles, and, my favorite, cousins. It was here that we would hear my grandfather say things like, “Children should be seen and not heard” or “Who asked for your two cents’?” These sayings were repeated often by my mother, who added “Go tell it to Sweeney” anytime we had any news. Then my father loved to say to each of us at dinner, “You have diarrhea of the mouth and constipation of the brain.” We learned not to say much and to disappear as much as possible.

By the summer of 1965, between second and third grade, I was allowed more freedom. We all had to spend most of the day outside in the yard. Out of boredom, we started digging a hole to China in the back corner next to the fence. I remember the smell and sweet taste of the nectar of the blossoms of the honeysuckle bush, since I was now allowed in the front yard. I made friends with a schoolmate named Jeannie, who lived around the corner. I was allowed to go to her house, where her little brother had a box turtle that I would watch for hours.

One day Jeannie and I walked down to the end of her street. Boys not much older than we were gathered in front of the last house on the left. They noticed us and started teasing us, taunting us, inviting us inside the open garage.

Not one for passing a dare, I told Jeannie, “Let’s go.” Once we were inside the garage, one of the boys told us to take off our underpants. We did. They just looked. Nothing happened. But we ran back up the street anyway, our hearts thumping in our chests, swearing not to tell anyone. I knew before we reached Jeannie’s house, all out of breath, that nothing good would come from telling my mother. It didn’t matter that I would have no way of knowing, at 8 years old, that it wasn’t my fault. I felt stupid now anyway. Jeannie and I didn’t play again for rest of the summer and were never close again. Years later I thought maybe she told her mother and wasn’t allowed to play with me.

Chapter 3

1966–1971

O
n Thursday, September 8, 1966, my relationship with my father changed. That evening, Dad and I began watching Star Trek on a little portable color TV while sitting on the foot of my parents’ bed. This was a weekly ritual for most of the next three years, unless I was being punished.

For me, Dad was a cross between Captain Kirk, Spock, and Dr. McCoy, with a little bit of Scotty thrown in. When Dad missed Star Trek because of a trip to Houston or Cape Kennedy, I would pay extra special attention to the show and then eagerly recount the latest episode when he returned.

Dad was working at Grumman Aircraft on the space program. He sometimes escorted rockets for NASA, and later we would learn of his involvement in the Apollo lunar module project and how he helped the astronauts go to the moon. Star Trek helped me understand why he was never home. It was also about this time that Dad gave me a brand new AM transistor radio, and I started listening to WABC, especially The Cousin Brucie Show using the tiny ear plug. Star Trek and the latest rock-and-roll music formed the cement of our bond.

Mom and Dad would have cocktails almost every night. I really didn’t know what Mom did all day, but she sure did complain, especially about us. And after a couple of cocktails Dad, too, could turn on us on a dime.

One day Mom asked us all into the kitchen, where she showed us a large chart she’d made that listed the days of the week across the top and our names down the side. Assigned chores for each day filled up the middle, with room for her checkmark below. Along with this she came up with the idea for us to receive an allowance. I would make twenty-five cents per week, Alane twenty, and Diane fifteen. At 9 years old, I was to bathe my brother every day, and either set the table, clear the table, or do the dishes. (These chores rotated among us sisters, even though we couldn’t quite reach the sink.) I had to vacuum all the house carpets on Saturday after Catechism class and grocery shopping with Mom and, of course, bring in all the grocery bags. I also needed to brush the fringe on carpets.

We also had to take cod liver oil every morning. Mom warned us, “If any attitude is displayed while taking the tablespoon of cod liver oil, it will result in allowance deductions.”

On the chart, deductions were also listed for answering back, not doing chores, etc. Each infraction I committed, as determined by my mother, resulted in a nickel deduction.

I owed more money than I’d earned long before the week was out.

One morning Alane, now around 8 years old, gagged as usual on the tablespoon of oil, which incidentally smelled rotten as soon as the bottle was opened. But this time it sprayed out of her mouth all over my mother. In an instant, Mom smacked Alane across the face. Alane got on the bus that morning with red-rimmed eyes, red cheeks, a nasty scrape, and the imprint of the stars from mother’s wide wedding ring. We knew not to talk about it. Mom had already told us, “Nobody is to know our business.” But later that night I overheard Dad yelling at Mom. From then on, Dad started sticking up for Alane.

Most days after school, I skipped any snack and rushed to barricade the door of Alane’s and my room at top of stairs in the event that Mom announced that she was “on the warpath” again. Alane and I might have done something while we were at school—or not. The warpath usually started with the banging of pots, slamming down the phone, or slamming a door shut. Then we would hear her feet pounding up the carpeted stairs and the clickity-clack of my mother’s slippers heading down the hall to our room. The warpath resulted in the emptying of drawers or the contents of our closet on the floor and then being told, “Now, clean it up.” Other times it meant getting something taken away, having our hair pulled, or if we were rolled up in a ball while covering our heads with our hands, getting hit in the back, sometimes using the same hairbrush that I used to brush the fringe or the nap of the carpet.

Mom was acting especially weird. One time I overheard her on the telephone saying, “You know now I am 33. This is exactly the same age as Jesus was when he died.” I pondered whether she was afraid she would die, or maybe go to hell, or both.

We usually had roast beef for dinner on Sundays, but one week we were going to have a pot roast. After all taking our assigned seats around the breakfast nook, Mom got mad about something involving Dad, stuck a large serving fork into the roast and hurled it against the wall next to the window over the sink. It landed with a thud on the counter, leaving a trail of gravy dripping down the wall. At least this time, since Dad was home, the food wasn’t thrown at one of us.

Mom started crying, stormed out of house, fired up the car, threw it into reverse, then careened into the busy street, and took off with a screech and smell of scorched rubber. Without turning our heads we all looked at each other out of the corners of our eyes and shrugged. Dad got up and opened the cabinet doors. He handed us pots, lids, and spoons and said “Let’s go!”

We followed him, marching around the house singing, “Ding dong, the witch is dead. Which old witch? The wicked witch,” to which he added in a crazy tone, “If she isn’t yet, she soon will be.” I was exhilarated to be part of the “getting Mom” band, and even happier that Dad was our leader.

During the fifth grade I experienced a series of calamities. First, Gary Hatch, who sat right next to me at school, was killed in a hit-and-run while riding his bike. Then Dad had a car accident and flipped the car. He was all right but had to wear a cervical collar. Then, to prepare us for a nuclear attack, we had duck-and-cover exercises in school, curled up against the wall of the hall in an attitude similar to the hair brush position. The death of Martin Luther King, in April 1968, was followed by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in June. Meanwhile, the kinks in my neck continued. The school year culminated with my breaking my foot after jumping down an entire flight of stairs during a fire drill the last week of school, which meant I missed all the field day games. By the end of fifth grade, I had learned that threats and scary stuff also happened to other people outside of our house.

Early in the summer, Grandpa had gall bladder surgery. With Grandpa in recovery and me on crutches, we watched TV most of the summer, especially the ABC 4:30 movie. As soon as I could walk again, I finally got a bra, after months of pleading and my mother telling me I didn’t need one.

“Your sister Diane”—who was three years younger than me—“is the one that really needs one,” my Mom said.

In November that year we had an early, heavy snowfall. School was cancelled and Dad couldn’t get out of the driveway to go to work. Dressed in a winter coat, hat, and mittens I went outside to the driveway to help Dad. All morning we scraped and heaved the snow. Since I didn’t have windshield wipers for my glasses, I had to open my jacket and use my clothing to wipe them dry. Stopping to do this made me realize I had a stomach ache. As the morning wore on, my stomach continued to feel worse as I kept trying to keep up with the snow. I went inside to the bathroom and saw a big red-brown stain in my underwear. I thought I might be dying, and it was only because of that that I asked my mother what she thought was going on. She took a look and told me I’d gotten my first period. Mortified and confused, I asked her not to say anything to Dad. My older cousins Christine and Claudia had told me that a “period,” also known as “the curse,” was getting two blisters on your belly that popped and bled every month. Kotex was worn as a belt over the blisters. But I had no blisters that I could see.

As soon as I was cleaned up and she’d given me supplies, Mom blasted out the front door and shouted to my father, still shoveling in the quiet of the falling snow, and to anyone else in the neighborhood within earshot, “Bruce, our daughter is a woman!” Within a few months, Alane was moved into Diane’s room and Mom made a lavender-and-white canopy that matched the girly-girl bedding in my own new room.

By the time it was the summer after seventh grade, the Beatles had broken up. On top of that Dad had left Grumman after the moon landing to open an electronics and music store in Chatham, New Jersey. During the week he lived in New Jersey with my mother’s older sister, Aunt Marion, her husband, Uncle Bob, and their children, Christine, Claudia, and Robert. Even though he came home on Sundays, I missed him.

My mother decided to allow me to spend a couple of weeks in New Jersey for a visit. They lived up on Mooney Mountain in Randolph. Uncle Bob picked me up from my father’s store and drove me the 15 miles or so to their town. At the bottom of the mountain we had to take the narrow, winding, tree-lined road to get to their house at the top. The excitement of Uncle Bob’s casual swaying to and fro of the Pinto’s steering wheel up the mountain was the beginning of the adventure.

Soon after arriving, I knew that the place where I’d been living up to now was not where I belonged. Up on Mooney Mountain, my Aunt Marion was always singing, whatever song was in her heart at the moment. Many a morning was spent by me in adoration as my Uncle Bob tinkered in the driveway with the old VW he was restoring for my cousin to eventually drive. He loved Johnny Cash and would be singing along in his low timbre while Claudia and I dutifully handed him the tools he requested, one after the other. He called Claudia “Sam”—“Hey, Sam, would you go inside and ask Mom for a drink?” Then as she went scampering through the garage to the kitchen, he would call out, “Thanks, and don’t forget ice!” I wanted to be Sam. My cousin Claudia, a.k.a. Sam, was four years older than I.

In the afternoons, after lunch out on the redwood picnic table in the yard—no fuss, no muss—Uncle Bob would say, “Who wants to go water skiing?” And just like that, no planning, no preparation other than putting on a bathing suit, we piled in the car, making the wild roller coaster descent down the mountain to Lake Hopatcong.

One, two, three—the boat was put in the water and off we went. All of my cousins were great water skiers. They could slalom ski, turn, and do all sorts of tricks. I thought about my family. We had a boat as well. We were not allowed out of the cabin in Long Island Sound unless we were trolling the canal, so we spent most of the time swatting biting green flies while we tried to have fun singing rounds of “You’re a Grand Old Flag” or “Yankee Doodle”—interrupted by my mother screaming, “Bruuuce, slowww dowwn!” Life preservers were required at all times, adding a thick blanket to the sweltering heat of the cabin.

I was awakened from my musing when Uncle Bob slowed the boat down, turned to me and said, “OK, kiddo, now it’s your turn.”

Huh? I thought, already afraid.

On went the ski belt. Sensing my apprehension, my uncle said, “Just jump over the side. Sam will show you how to do it.” Into the cool, fresh lake I tumbled, tasting for the first time the lake water that tastes like nothing else.

Over and over for the next few hours, I would try to get up and stay up, then fall, drinking in gulps of that lake. Finally, when I realized that Uncle Bob wasn’t in any rush, he had all day, I was able to stay up and really ski. Later, exhausted but equally triumphant, when I climbed back in the boat, Uncle Bob said, “There you go.” Then, he revved the motor and turned toward home. He smiled the whole way back.

After that, when my father joined us for dinners during rest of the week, and though I knew I loved Dad, I still wanted to be Sam. Dad was not my hero anymore. I loved him and I felt protective or sorry for him because of “her.” When someone egged our house on Long Island that fall, it was like someone had egged Dad. I was very confused.

Perhaps it was natural, then, for me to start acting out in eighth grade at Weldon E. Howitt Jr. High. Following many trips to the principal, I was just sent to detention after holding a “protest” in the stairwell over Mrs. Duncan’s latest unfair decree in Spanish class. My mother wasn’t called, so I told her I was doing an afterschool sport.

During detention, right after attendance was taken, I climbed out the window of the first-floor classroom and fell into the bushes, cutting the back of my leg and bleeding through my stockings. I left to go hang out with the other “no gooders” until my mother pulled up to school to pick me up. The last day of school I bought two “uppers” that turned out to be Tic Tacs.

After school was out that summer of 1971, our family moved to a rented home in Florham Park, New Jersey, about 15 miles from Aunt Marion and Uncle Bob—worlds away. All of us except Dad, who was already living there, piled into the 1968 green Impala convertible shortly after the moving truck left our house in Long Island with all of our belongings. Mom put the top down and told us to buckle up. It seemed like the beginning of an adventure pulling out of the driveway, but then I noticed Mom was crying. Driving with the top down across the Throgs Neck Bridge and then the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey made me feel small, though I was excited about starting high school and a new life. Being allowed to sit in the front seat, I looked over to Mom with her kerchief and sunglasses on. She was very quiet, lost in her own thoughts, I guessed. But then I noticed her intermittently blowing her red nose. We’re all tired, I thought, and then my excitement waned.