Love, Ellen: A Mother/Daughter Journey (7 page)

On the other hand, Elliot’s constant joking became wearing. Sometimes it would have been healthy to have a serious talk, an argument, even a tantrum. I wanted to be real, but it would take me years to learn how. Somehow Ellen did better at getting past the pretense of normality, seeing things as they really were in all their complexity and being able to talk about them. Vance didn’t do so well at that, and he emerged from our version of
Happy Days
as an extremely private person.

My son and I talked recently about his memories of growing up in a household in which problems or differences of opinions weren’t faced, acknowledged, or talked out. He felt that this was because it was more important to have the appearance of a harmonious family. That was a buzzword in our house—”harmonious”—but the illusion of harmony left at least some of us seething underneath.

El has said she remembers us as being like a TV family—the Daddy, Mommy, Sister, and Brother. And, like a TV family, not quite real.

Not everything about our normality was pretended. Our two children really were well-adjusted, easygoing kids, well-liked socially and involved in many extracurricular activities. In Metairie we were members of the Green Acres Community Club—thanks, once again, to my parents—where we all enjoyed the swimming pool and tennis courts. Vance and Ellen started playing tennis there, and both did very well.

Vance’s big interest was music. As a little boy, he took piano lessons from Elliott’s cousin Dorothy, and he took clarinet in elementary school. The night his class at Bridgedale School gave a program, Elliott and I watched proudly as Vance and another boy played a lovely little clarinet duet. Vance’s clarinet occasionally made that high squeaky sound that clarinets make when you blow into them wrong. And Vance held the clarinet out and looked at it as if to say, “What is wrong with this thing?” We found it very cute and touching.

Since I continued to enjoy playing the piano, I thought I’d expand my musical repertoire and bought a guitar for myself. I didn’t learn much more than the most basic chords, but Vance took to it immediately. He stuck with the clarinet, playing it in the junior high school band, and went on to master the guitar in the rock bands he started to form in these years.

When he was in junior high, Vance joined a band called Lick. The other members of the band were in senior high, so Vance thought he was really something.

I could tell how proud he was by the way he strutted into the kitchen one evening after work when I was in the middle of preparing a quick dinner. I was still trying to get caught up on my culinary skills, which had been neglected all those years when Mumsy did the cooking for us. In spite of my almost full-time work schedule, I was determined to become a good cook, for the sake of my shortchanged but patient family. At first, I fed them far too many “quick and easy” meals from recipes in my two cooking Bibles,
The Joy of Cooking
and
Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook.

One of our mainstays was some sort of shortcut ragout. And then there was something called Lazy Day Casserole that Vance recalls as a favorite and Ellen remembers too, though not exactly fondly. If you lack kitchen experience and need an idea for a quick, filling, inexpensive supper, you might want to try it:

2 cans pork and beans

2 cans Vienna sausage

1 jar applesauce

Put the ingredients in a pot. Heat, stirring.

For a gourmet touch, I suggest adding a soupçon of yellow mustard. (A couple of years ago some publisher proposed that I write a cookbook called
What Ellen Ate.
Ellen’s comment was, “Well, that will be short.”)

Vance was usually the only one who cheered when I made Lazy Day Casserole. Once dinner was ready, I asked him to round up Ellen and Elliott. That meant calling out, “Supper!” Ellen was there in a flash. Vance excitedly told her what was on the menu.

“Lazy Day Casserole?” El said, hiding her distaste. “That’s so funny. I
was
feeling kind of lazy today.”

Vance cracked up while I chuckled, serving everyone. Elliott had yet to appear. “Where’s Dad?” I asked the two of them.

“He went to the bathroom,” Vance replied.

El corrected her brother matter-of-factly. “Vance, you know Dad doesn’t ‘go to the bathroom’—he washes up!”

Vance said something to Ellen about her being a smartmouth.

Elliott arrived just in time to create harmony with his big news: “I saw a tie I really liked today at Godchaux’s.”

Now it was Vance’s turn to be a smartmouth. He asked his father, “So did you go to Maison Blanche and D. H. Holmes and Rubenstein’s too—to see if there was one you liked better?”

We all smiled at this harmless teasing. It was true. Never let it be said that Elliott was impulsive—except, perhaps, when it came to his sense of humor, which was totally spontaneous.

I remember when we brought home our new Yorkie puppy and were wondering what to name him. Without missing a beat, Elliott dubbed the little guy Spot. That way, he said, “When he’s bad we can say, ‘Out, out damned Spot.’ “

Spot was another one who really loved Lazy Day Casserole. Since he was always begging for scraps and Ellen’s plate was always licked curiously clean, I figured that one out pretty easily.

Ellen was definitely an animal lover from the time she was very little. She was forever bringing home lost or wounded animals to add to the family of pets we already had, which consisted of an assortment of cats and dogs, usually one at a time, but sometimes overlapping.

Before Spot, we had a dog that was Vance’s favorite, a mutt who had been abandoned at our swim-tennis club in Green Acres. Everybody fed him, and at the end of the summer someone had to take him home. We were the lucky family. We named him Happy, and he had ten happy years with us. We also had a parakeet who said a few words and phrases. The parakeet flew out of a carelessly opened screen door, never to be seen again.

Added to these family pets were Ellen’s personal pets. At various points, she had fish, mice, a horned toad, baby birds she rescued, a snake that ate live mice (but not her pet mice), and a Burmese cat which she loved although it was a bit too high-strung. The cat had a habit of jumping up on people unexpectedly, holding on with her claws. She died in an unsuccessful spaying operation, and Ellen mourned her for quite a while.

Then Ellen had a chipmunk; it was cute and tiny, and she enjoyed holding and playing with it. One day she thought some fresh air would be a good idea, so she opened her window—and the chipmunk was never seen again. We had a neighbor, a fundamentalist, who had just arrived home from church when all this was happening and she prayed loud and long with Ellen for the Lord to bring back that little chipmunk. I don’t know who didn’t hear that prayer—the Lord or the chipmunk.

In future years, Ellen would combine her love for animals and her offbeat sense of humor in some great stand-up bits. I’m convinced that if she hadn’t eventually gone on to find her niche in comedy and acting, she would have done well in some sort of veterinarian work.

W
E JOKED ABOUT
Elliott and his deliberations over buying one tie, but the issue actually went a lot deeper for me. This was especially true now that we were again living uptown, where we had moved because Elliott had become a First Reader and felt he needed to be closer to church.

After spending every weekend looking at houses to buy, I found these deliberations frustrating. Always, the right house was either just out of reach financially, or not in an area or neighborhood we wanted, or not near the schools we wanted for the children.

I can remember many of those houses well. One of them had only two bedrooms but had a little guest house in the backyard. Vance really wanted us to buy that one. He would have felt like he had his own little kingdom with that guest house. The house was Spanish-style with a red tile roof, two stone lions on either side of the front walk, and wonderful Spanish tiles in the bathroom and kitchen. Not too many years ago, on a visit back to New Orleans, I drove down that street, and the house was gone. It had been bought as a teardown and replaced with a two-story house—much too big for the lot.

In the end, we sold our home in Green Acres and, instead of buying a new one, rented a small house uptown on Audubon Street—from a church member—until it was sold. This was only the first of several moves. We continued house-hunting, dreaming of better days, but we never really took the leap and seriously considered buying one.

We seemed stuck in our working-class struggle, and I wanted better—for my kids, for me, and for Elliot. Just a house of our own, more creature comforts, family vacations—nothing extravagant. I wanted to go back and finish school. Elliott surely wanted all those things for us and himself too. But moving up in the world often requires taking risks. And that he was either unequipped or unwilling to do.

Looking back, I realize how much resentment I was accumulating about this inertia, especially when Elliott turned down better job opportunities because it would have taken us too far away from First Church, which as far as he was concerned was the only Christian Science church. But acknowledging these issues, unfortunately, would have meant confronting many of the things I was in denial about. That’s the key to the pretense of normality: once you admit that even one thing isn’t as hunky-dory as you’d like, the whole house of cards starts to come crashing down.

It almost happened one day when I hurried home to tell Elliott about an opportunity for Ellen to go to camp. It was going to cost us nothing. I had a part-time secretarial job in the physical education department of Newcomb College, a part of Tulane University. Through friends at work, I was offered a job as secretary for six weeks at a summer camp in northern Alabama. El could attend while I was there, free of charge. I couldn’t wait to tell Elliott the good news.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “I didn’t marry you to live like a bachelor.”

That got me. There were many times—either with the kids or with bosses and coworkers—when Elliott didn’t put his foot down soon enough. When he finally did, as in this case, it seemed totally inappropriate. But instead of confronting him then and there, I steamed privately and let it go.

Another time that I came close to a confrontation was when I arrived home from work to find the front door open and nobody in the house. When I got into the living room, I noticed that the TV was gone. For some reason, even though I knew that Elliott was at work, I called out for him, just in case he happened to have come home with a sudden desire to move the TV.

When it finally dawned on me that someone had broken into our house and stolen the television, as well as jewelry, our camera, and a lot of change that we kept in an ornamental can, I became very upset. I called the police, I called Elliott, I called Daddy—in that order. And the first person on the scene was my father. The police came later. Elliott waited to deal with it until he got home.

(An interesting footnote to our burglary is that to this day Ellen has kept that old can which the burglars emptied of our change—a reminder of a different time and place.)

And when it came time to repair the broken door, it was Daddy who was able and ready and helped me take care of it. My husband wasn’t really handy. Nor was he a take-charge kind of guy. So what? I rationalized. Daddy was—and he liked being relied upon.

None of this was explosive. But the next event would definitely inflame me. We’d moved—again. This time we rented an upper duplex on South Robertson Street in the same general area.

I was now serving as Clerk of the church, a paid position. One day while I was at work and Vance was off with his friends, Ellen was out playing with her friends on a swing in a yard across the street and crashed into a low jagged wall, slicing her knee open.

As I later pieced the story together, a woman in a house overlooking the yard happened to be at her window and Ellen saw her mouth, “Oh, my God.” She and her husband came running while someone hurried to tell Elliott. Alter a bit, he came over—calmly—standing apart from Ellen and the crowd around her.

“Come on, El,” he called, gesturing to her to come with him. “You’re OK, honey. Let’s go home.” When he saw she couldn’t walk he picked her up and carried her across the street. At that point, Dr. Buck, our neighbor, had been alerted and had his car door open, ready to take her to the hospital for stitches.

Elliott refused his offer, assuring him that Ellen was just fine, taking her into the house, wrapping her knee with a rag, and drawing a happy face on it.

When I got home and heard the story, I ran downstairs to Dr. Buck and asked if he could still help. He did clean the wound very well and pulled it together as best he could. El’s scar is barely visible now, but for a long time she had a big scar and a story to tell.

I disagreed strongly with Elliott’s handling of this accident. I was starting to see, for the first time in our marriage, the genuine difference of opinion that we had about practicing the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy.

T
WO OTHER THINGS
happened that made me seriously question, and ultimately leave, Christian Science. Earlier, I had come down with a very painful ear infection and could not seem to get relief. I went to one of our neighbors, Dr. Burch, and asked him for a prescription, which he gave me. It worked—fast!—and it made me rethink those years of abstaining from doctors and all medical treatment.

Not much later, on February 3, 1970, to be exact, came the kind of phone call you most dread. I received it while at my job as Clerk at the church. Helen and Mother were calling to tell me that Daddy had been admitted to the hospital. The details of what had happened were sketchy at first.

Daddy was sixty-nine at the time, and although he was a youthful sixty-nine as far as I was concerned, he hadn’t really been himself since his retirement four years earlier. After forty-seven and a half years working for Pan American Life Insurance, this stage of life was hard on him. He had really-defined himself by his position. I guess we all had. When I was a little girl someone asked me if I was Catholic or Protestant. I said, “Neither, we’re Pan American.”