Blue Sky Dream (15 page)

Joe loved to make his eyes twitchy and then lock them onto yours and let out a high, deranged giggle. “You see these weeds?” he’d say to me as he chopped away with a hoe at some dandelions in a flower bed (Mr. Giannini required Joe to keep the lawns and garden in perfect condition). “You see ’em? They’re the Red Chinese” (twitchy eyes, mad giggle) “and I’m an H-bomb!” His red-blond hair already thinning in high school, his small frame sinewy from lifting weights to rock ‘n’ roll in his garage, Joe
looked nothing like the rest of the Gianninis because he had been adopted from Ireland, a fact he celebrated by hanging Emerald Isle tourism posters all over the room he shared with Nicky. Joe did not have a best friend to help him navigate afternoons on the cul-de-sac, and so he invented his own amusement. He searched out black widow spiders in dark crannies, keeping them in a glass jug, feeding them flies and urging Nicky and me, whenever we were around, to come and see his nesting pets. “After they mate, know what the mother does to the father?” (twitchy eyes, mad giggle). “Sucks his juices out!” Joe’s hobby fit well with his love of the horror films that played on television at three-thirty in the afternoon. My mother did not want me watching such disturbing fare, but Mrs. Giannini was less vigilant, happy, it seemed, just to know her boys were close by but out of her way as she labored over the night’s rigatoni and roast beef.

“Nicky!” Mrs. Giannini would shout down the cul-de-sac in a screechy voice that had no trouble catching up to us on our Stingrays or in the branches of a walnut tree. “Nicky! You come inside for a while. Bring Dave. It’s too hot! Come inside and watch TV!” We would be summoned inside of Nicky’s world and Mrs. Giannini would turn off Dean Martin and Joe would find the monster movie channel and over the next few hours Nicky and I would watch, quivering and rapt, while Joe giggled and Mrs. Giannini cooked. We would watch Godzilla lay waste to a city or the Blob melt unsuspecting lovers or the Wasp Woman seduce and kill or the Tree Monster crush those unfortunate enough to dally in its branches. When the movie was ended and dinner was ready and Mr. Giannini was due in the door at any moment, Mrs. Giannini would send me home, my knees weak and my head aswim with alien forms of life.

B
ehind every same door, within every same floor plan, a world unto itself. This, to my tribe, was the appeal of the detached single-family residence in the blue sky suburb. The sameness of
those houses reassured us that, despite the closed curtains, all of us were similar people. The detachedness of those houses meant the possibility of removal from unwanted variables. A blue sky child was to be given sun and space, his mother nearby, the companionship of siblings and other children like him, was to be given religion and manners, was to be given a safe and managed universe within which to define himself. That was our faith. That was thought to be enough, in the middle 1960s in neighborhoods like mine, to ensure our tribe’s regeneration. The children, so incubated, would acquire the necessities of white collar success, the same drive and propriety that had won each house, each “nice home,” for their parents.

Critics of the suburban form have long argued that such faith made us our own dupes, that by fleeing the difficulties posed by the cityscape, the public realm, we opted for the soft life of private consumption. They say that a family together alone in its tract home made the perfect patsy for the spine-weakening seductions of TV. When I hear this I find myself thinking back to how my father and mother made me feel about the television set that sat at the center of our house. They conveyed toward “the tube” (as my father always called it) a deep suspicion, even resentment, of its presence, its power, in our midst. “Insipid!” “Utter waste of time!” “That damn boob tube!” “Tripe!” my father would fume as he strode through the family room on his way in or out of the garage, his cloud of contempt temporarily blocking our view of
Bewitched
or
I Dream of Jeannie
or
The Addams Family.
Mom’s quiet, shooing suggestions that we find something else to do were just as damning. What Mrs. Giannini would call to Nicky—
Come inside and watch TV!
—my mother would never say to me.

I knew that the pastor of Queen of Apostles told us not to covet, and then on television folks dressed up as fools and squealed with greed at the feet of Monty Hall. I knew the nuns told us to tell the truth, and then the TV ads brazenly lied about soup and soap and cigarillos ten times an hour. In the morning, death was something somberly sacred, wrapped in incense and
intonations at the funeral Mass I’d serve as an altar boy, and then, that night, death happened between corporate jingles, a plot device on
The Rat Patrol.
My father and mother did not fail to remind us of such contradictions, nor, by the looks on their faces, of where they stood. My father’s continuous critique of the tube followed several lines: That most television was a threat to our intellects (“mindless”). That most television was work poorly done (“junk”). That most television was the domain of people on the make (“hucksters”) who did not care for our best interests. My father made it known that there was a monster in the universe beyond our cul-de-sac, a great crassness that wanted into our home, our world unto itself, via the tube.

As a family, we nervously co-existed with the television, for it was understood that television, like temptation itself, could never be banished from our existence. We did allow as how there was such a thing as a “good” show. My mother considered Captain Kangaroo “good” for small children. And, as well, some nights my parents would actually wake me from my sleep to watch something “good” on TV, a documentary, for example, about life onboard an aircraft carrier. When my father laughed at
Get Smart
, I understood that, while the show was not necessarily good, its small value lay in the fun it poked at much worse TV.
Hogan’s Heroes
could never be good because “there’s nothing funny about a concentration camp,” my father said, and so I watched that show with the sense of self-loathing my father intended. The monster movies I saw at the Gianninis’ were certainly nothing good, crass attempts to shock with no point to them.

If their children had to have monsters, my parents would allow us the sort found on
Lost in Space.
Here was family fare about a blue sky family of the future, the Robinsons. John, the dad, was a scientist. Maureen, the mom, well, her impeccable credentials were that she was June Lockhart, Lassie’s mother in a silver jumpsuit. Dad and Mom and daughters Judy and Penny and son Will had set off in their flying saucer with their handsome pilot, Don, to begin a new life on a planet in the Alpha Centauri
star system, only to be sabotaged by the villainous stowaway Dr. Zachary Smith. Now the group found themselves crashing into one uncharted planet after another. The monsters they ran into were so campy (one was a walking, talking carrot) that I cringed at the cheesiness even at my young age (eight when the series started in 1965).

And yet I was drawn to
Lost in Space
like no other show, pointed all week toward 7:30 on Wednesday night. The cliffhanger endings no doubt made me want to tune in again, as did the fact that most stories revolved around the perils of Will, who was smart and serious and just about my age. But thinking back, I see that the very premise of the show, a dark one, must have exerted a visceral pull on me.
Lost in Space
was gloomier by far than its contemporary,
Star Trek
, which predicted a future in which Earth’s inhabitants, having reached peaceful higher consciousness, would join with other planets under galactic government. Kirk and his crew, an integrated society with even a Vulcan aboard, were men (and a few women) off at work: a smooth-running corporation of technical specialists flying through space with the ongoing support of the Federation.

But the poor Robinsons. Earth had become overcrowded and, as a result, they were white middle-class folks who’d volunteered for a transfer. Now they found themselves every week alone together in the ultimate single-family detached residence, forced to invent over and over their own haven in a heartless cosmos. Mom would be tending the hydroponic garden, and Dad would be combing the new neighborhood in the van (with tractor treads and spinning radar dish). Life would seem, finally, to be improving for the Robinsons. But then some monster would invade their storyline, usually with the collaboration of the devious and cowardly Dr. Smith. Now it was time to see how a family performed under pressure. Tomorrow’s family together alone, beating back monsters wherever fate had landed them.

M
y mother, as she often said, got “a kick out of” Mrs. Giannini, with whom she shared a warm friendship. But my mother, who had four young children, found more in common with Mrs. Williams, who had five and who lived two doors down. The two mothers would sit in the dining nook of our house some mornings, an ashtray between them filling up with cigarette butts while babies swarmed around their feet. They laughed a lot, I remember, shaking their heads as they blew smoke up at the ceiling.

At that time it was possible, of course, for a mother like mine to be home with her children all day, every day. It was possible, too, for a son like me to find his mother an enigma precisely because of what her being at home all day entailed. The work of my mother was an invisible timetable of needs to be met, carpets that had to be swept before company came, windows that had to get washed some time over the long weekend, bathrooms that had
already
gone too long without cleaning. Every mealtime balanced on the point of her focus, every crying child was her problem to address. What did a modern mother do? Nothing a son could imagine doing, could imagine
wanting
to do. He only knew that a mother was required to be simply always
there
, a
there-ness
that would make our tract home world carry on in its existence the way the
there-ness
of the sun made day after empty day exist for the benefit of playing boys.

There were many days when my mother would begin to feel taken for granted, would want to pierce her children’s indifference to her
there-ness.
She would mope and chip at us, telling us that, for example, “If I were laying there dead on the kitchen floor, you’d all just step over my body on the way to the refrigerator for a Popsicle.” Some days, her lament—“Just once I wish someone would help out without being asked …”—would rise to excoriation.
Damnit to hell!
my Catholic mother would scream. She would scream, but never as loud as Mrs. Williams, whose diatribes traveled through open windows and all down the cul-de-sac.

The possibility of being home in a blue sky tract home with
her children all day, every day, was something my mother had eagerly pursued as a modern opportunity, a freedom, the freedom to mother well. Yet one of the things she liked to laugh about with Mrs. Williams was the impossibility of
not
being with her children all day, every day. That was a perverse function of the “functional” design of the homes and the neighborhood we inhabited. The “open interior” floor plans gave a child six ways to find Mom. The hollow core doors closing off the “master bedroom” and bathrooms were sieves for the sound of children’s demands. For a mother to leave her home and stand in the front yard was to announce her presence to every child like a stuffed exhibit in a museum diorama.

Sometimes my mother and Mrs. Williams found refuge together by hiding in the plywood playhouse in the Williamses’ backyard, but the cigarette smoke rising from the cut-out windows would give them away. “Seen my wife?” my father asked Mr. Williams one Saturday.

“She’s in the playhouse with Mary Ann electing the next Pope,” came the answer.

One time my mother climbed into the branches of the backyard walnut tree, but a child soon stood by the trunk looking up at her. My father bought her a bicycle with a basket on the front, but what destination, in the boundless galaxy of subdivisions that surrounded our own, was there for a mother to pedal toward alone on a bicycle? I remember her riding mostly to Queen of Apostles school at lunchtime, the basket full of neatly bagged hot dog lunches for her children.

“Filiarchy” is the scorning word William H. Whyte, Jr., author of
The Organization Man
, used to describe the universe I inhabited, the baby boom subdivision where a middle-class mother is too much in thrall to her children, too willing to be at home drinking coffee and smoking with another mother simply because the two mothers’ children were at their feet playing together. “It begins with the children. There are so many of them and they are so dictatorial in effect that a term like
filiarchy
would not be entirely facetious. It is the children who set the
basic design; their friendships are translated into the mother’s friendships, and these, in turn, into the family’s.”

He was writing in 1956. In 1963, oppression by filiarchy was thoroughly denounced in Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
, a book which (as Barbara Ehrenreich has noted) drove straight at the middle-class fear of waste and sloth and stasis. The college-educated mother was said to be “infantilized” by housework and child care, by work doable by even the “feeble-minded,” and so such work that should be hired out, in the name of efficiency, to lower-class women. To be home all day, every day, with your children was to waste your college degree, to cede public life to men, to let your character go to mush until you had been reduced to nothing more than a trapped and passive consumer. Friedan’s manifesto, which powerfully resonated with millions of suburban women all over America, did not penetrate the walls of my home, my world. Had my mother read Friedan, which she did not, she might have found some of her frustrations given a voice. But I doubt that she would have agreed with the prescription offered her for those days when she moped and screamed and felt taken for granted by husband or children or both. To have worked outside the home while her children were very young would have meant leaving her post, would have struck her as running
counter
to the ideal of self-reliance that our family wanted to see in a tract home life. My mother hiring a servant while she earned a paycheck might have equalled efficiency in the macro-ledgers of a Betty Friedan, but that outsider invited into our private world would have signified, to my mother, a snooty dodge of the scut work that every other blue sky mother in the cul-de-sac tackled every day. It even may have made her look greedy for things the extra money might buy, announcing herself to be truly an escapist consumer.