My Mother Was Nuts (2 page)

They wanted me to identify him. But they wouldn’t bring him back to my place because he wasn’t on my property. Instead, I had to go outside in my pajamas, in front of all the press that had gathered, get in a cop car, and let them drive me to the bottom of the street where they were holding him. His mask was off, but I nodded in acknowledgment; that was the same guy.

Like a bad ninja, he scowled at me.

“I should’ve killed you when I had a chance,” he said.

“That’s pleasant,” I said.

The next morning the press knew of the story and media outlets around the world reported “Laverne Foils Ninjas.” Around 6 a.m.,
my phone started to ring. Randy Newman called. “Are you okay?” Paul Schrader called from Guam. “You defended yourself against ninjas?” Jack Nicholson called. “You okay, Pendal? You want to stay here? Only you would wash your face in front of robbers.” Others checked in, too. It was nice.

Later that morning I went to work. That’s just the way I am. One night I’m at a basketball game, the next I’m being held up by armed ninjas. Shit happens. So even though my life had been in danger, time didn’t stop for me. I didn’t reevaluate my priorities. They were already in a pretty decent place. I stayed calm and did what I had to do.

As you’re going to discover on the following pages, this is the real me. I don’t rattle easily. I’m wonderfully, oddly, almost irrationally calm and together in a crisis. It’s when everything is calm that I get a little nutty. I’ve been this way since I was a kid growing up in the Bronx. I’ve come pretty far since those days, yet in some ways—no, make that in many ways—I’m still the same girl stuck in an aging body. I may not suck my thumb, wear braces, run after boys, or hang out on the Parkway rail anymore, but I rely on the lessons that I learned back then. They’ve gotten me this far. There must be something to ’em.

Penny in her dance costume at the Marjorie Marshall Dance School
Hal Altman

N
O MATTER WHAT
it is that happens to us as adults—and as we all know, shit
does
happen—we can usually trace the reasons back to the things that happened in our childhood. Here’s the short version of everything you’re about to learn: My mother was nuts. My father was boring. My older brother was funny. My older sister was girly. And I just wanted to play.

I still do. I attend basketball, football, and baseball games. I waste a stupid amount of time playing Angry Birds on my iPad. I watch movies. I talk on the phone. I’m just like I was as a kid. I like to play. My whole childhood was spent pleading with my mother to play outside for five more minutes.

“No, Penny, come in.”

“Five more minutes. Please?”

“It’s dark.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.”

“But I can still see the ball.”

“How can you see it in the dark?”

“Just five more minutes.”

That was me.

All the kids from my apartment building played together on the sidewalk and in nearby vacant lots. Popular games were stick ball, Skelly, Three Box Baseball, Hot Beans and Fried Potatoes, and I Declare War. It was fun. It was social. Boys and girls mixed. Age didn’t matter. If you could round up enough people for a game, everyone was happy, especially me.

I am not much different now. I have never wanted to grow up and stop playing. In many ways, I haven’t. In my work and in my personal life, I still try to maintain a connection to the sense of play that I remember from my childhood. Those experiences taught me the lessons that came in handy later in my life: Try hard, play by the rules, help your friends, don’t get too crazy, and have fun.

Through all the changes and the challenges of adulthood, I have never strayed too far from those golden rules or from that little girl with the ponytail and the overbite who wanted to keep playing for five more minutes.

Why would I want to be inside at home?

My mother was there. Her name was Marjorie, and she was known across the Bronx as the owner, teacher, and chief choreographer of the Marjorie Marshall Dance School. She had 360 students, and she was beloved by 359 of them. The one that didn’t love her unconditionally was the one who she compared unfavorably to all the other girls, the one who wanted to be outside playing, and the one who regularly heard, “Why can’t you be more like Lois Rosenberg?”

Lois Rosenberg took dance lessons from my mother. She was blond and beautiful, polite and smart, and she loved dance school. She paid attention and tried hard. She was everything I was not. I was extremely skinny. I had a face like a monkey and an overbite that defied orthodontics three times. My study habits were poor, and I thought telling the truth to one’s parents was overrated. It was not for nothing that my mother referred to me as “the bad seed.”

In retrospect, my mother and I were more alike than we acknowledged. Blond and sassy, she was from the Bronx, the only child of Margie and Willie Ward, a homemaker and an accountant. She played the piano and taught herself to dance, and then she began teaching the neighborhood kids how to dance. If she got A’s on her report cards, her father took her to the latest Broadway musical, and she adapted what she saw onstage for her own students. Though her technique wasn’t perfect, she knew how to entertain, and with kids as her stars, her recitals were crowd-pleasers.

She was in college when she met my father, Anthony “Tony” Masciarelli, a handsome, athletic young man majoring in advertising at New York University. He was a clever writer and cartoonist. He wanted to be a big wheel on Madison Avenue. To better his chances, he changed his last name from Masciarelli to Marshall and forevermore denied that he was both Italian and Catholic.

My mother didn’t give a shit about religion or ethnicity, not then when they first got together, or anytime afterward. If he wanted to change his name, fine, she didn’t care. In him she saw someone who possessed the skills and smarts to be a good provider. She was also interested in his ability to draw and write. She wanted him to make programs for her recitals.

My father was no less guilty when it came to ulterior motives. He thought my mother came from a wealthy family that would help him into a comfortable life of commuter trains and country clubs.

As it turned out, both of their assumptions were wrong.

Later in their lives, my mother and father both kept a glass of water next to their beds and at night they put their dentures in them. Other than children, it may have been the only thing they had in common during their marriage. They married in 1932. My mother said that he fell asleep on their honeymoon, and that was probably the most romantic thing I ever heard her say about him.

After she died, I found some notes that she had typed to herself
about the early years of her marriage. They revealed a time more difficult than I ever realized. The first one, written in 1932 following their three-day honeymoon, said, “Tony was rotten to me.”

In subsequent notes she complained about money problems, fights, and general neglect. She said that he stayed late at work and went out with friends afterward. She grumbled that he didn’t give her a birthday present or an anniversary present. She struggled with buyer’s remorse. “New Year’s Eve stayed home & in bed at 11:00,” she wrote. “Tony out several nights a week alone. Well, he married me against his will didn’t he? I practically forced him????”

What?

That was news to me.

They shared a small house in Pelham, just north of the Bronx, with my mother’s parents, who helped with the payments. My father worked as an art director, and my mother taught dance in New Rochelle at the Arcaro Dance School. The Arcaro sisters—there were five of them—owned the school. All of them, including those who were married, lived together in the same house near the school. Though their house was full of married couples, they provided my mother with an outlet from the unhappiness of her own marriage.

My father wanted my mother to stop working, but she had zero interest in playing the pretty little girl on his arm. Apparently he tried to change. “Tony got out of bed,” she wrote, “went in living room and said he was a new man coming back to begin a happy life all over again.” It didn’t last. In 1934 she wrote, “This year’s the worst so far. He gets younger every yr. Now has the mentality of a 10 yr old.”

She was frustrated and took it out on herself. “I feel miserable that such a once-likable fellow should turn into such an awful flop,” she wrote. “I thought he was so fine and that he’d be such a loving thoughtful husband who would try so hard to make me happy. If he’d only try, I wouldn’t mind, but he just doesn’t give a damn. I’m giving him one more chance to prove that he is made of something and that
he can be decent and thoughtful. I do hope he’ll come through just to prove to myself that I’m not such a bad judge of human beings as to pick an utterly worthless person as a mate.”

Life did improve. In November 1934, my mother gave birth to my brother, Garry. In January 1938, she had my sister, Ronny. She was very happy about becoming a mother. After my grandfather battled kidney problems and quit his job, they had to cut costs and moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the Bronx. But that seemed to work out.

Their new address was 3235 Grand Concourse, a six-story building in the heart of New York City’s northernmost borough. It was an excellent location. Jerome Avenue was on one side, Van Cortlandt Avenue on the other, and Mosholu Parkway was a couple of blocks away. Their apartment was on the first floor because my mother was deathly afraid of fires and wanted to be able to get out quickly in the event of an emergency.

My father started his own advertising business, The Marshall Organization, and my mother taught tap, ballet, jazz and acrobatics to neighborhood kids in a large room in the building’s cellar. She referred to it as the
ballroom
, and it may have actually been a ballroom back when the building was classier and the neighborhood as a whole was much fancier. I always called it “the cellar.”

As my father built his business and my siblings grew out of babyhood, my parents seemed to work out their differences, or perhaps they just surrendered to them and enjoyed a manageable peace. He worked long hours, often staying out late with his colleagues, and she built her dance school, putting on shows at charity events, in churches, temples, and anyplace else that needed a show. They entered Garry in a “Cutest Baby” contest sponsored by the New York
Daily News
, and they doted on Ronny, their adorable baby girl.

But the calm ended in early 1943 when my mother found out she was pregnant again. She had wanted Garry and Ronny, but two children
were enough for her. I was not planned. One night early in her pregnancy, as she was eating dinner, she started to bleed and thought she was going to lose the baby. Actually, she hoped that would happen. Later, in my teens, she said, “You were a miscarriage, but you were stubborn and held on.”

Such a loving thing to say.

Penny’s birth announcement, drawn by her father, Anthony Marshall
Marshall personal collection

I
WAS BORN IN
St. Vincent’s Hospital, on Friday, October 15, 1943, at 9:40 a.m., weighing 7.5 pounds and measuring 21 inches. It was the one day in my life that I was a morning person. I had green eyes like God knows who (my father’s were brown, my mother’s were blue—later they told me it was the postman) and a full head of hair—“much more than her daddy,” my mother wrote in my pink baby book. Upon my arrival I had four fingers jammed in my mouth and I sucked them until I found my thumb, which I sucked until I began smoking cigarettes in junior high.