My Mother Was Nuts (3 page)

At home, my grandmother, who we all called Nanny, hung a pink flag out the window, informing the neighborhood that my mother had given birth to a girl. A formal announcement followed. My father drew a
New Yorker
–style cartoon of a man sitting on a couch in the hospital waiting room looking shocked as a nurse peeks around the door at a newborn baby. The baby is saying, “What did’ya expect—Hedy Lamarr?”

So that was also nice.

Everyone called me Penny. It was supposed to appease my brother and sister, who had saved their pennies all summer to get a pony
and were disappointed when my mother brought home a baby sister instead.

But my full name is Carole Penny Marshall. Yes, Carole—after my mother’s favorite actress, Carole Lombard—is my actual first name. It came as news to me, too. At the end of my second day of kindergarten, my teacher, Mrs. Goodblatt, sent me home with a note expressing concern. She thought I might be retarded (her word, not mine) because I didn’t respond to my name. My mother took me to school the next day and set her straight.

“Call her Penny,” she said. “She doesn’t know that she has a first name.”

From then on, I started the first day of each school year with a note from my mother. “Do not call her Carole. She will not respond.”

Why did my mother even bother with Carole?

I don’t know.

I really don’t. If you notice, our names all have double letters and end in a
Y
. Pronouncing them, as my mother once explained, made you smile.
Gar-REE. Ron-KNEE. Pen-KNEE
. They were happy names, she said. Other names, such as Susan, Paula, and Katherine, were flat. To her, they were sad names. “And Penny,” my mother wrote in my baby book, “is always ready for a hardy laugh.”

From what I was told, my brother and sister were both good-natured children who endeared themselves to the family with cute antics like running up to the roof of the building to look for incoming Japanese war planes and promising to yell if they saw any. Those were the days when there were air raid drills. Then I came along like a low-flying plane no one saw. My mother said they loved me best when I finished my bottle. “That’s when Penny smiles.”

According to my baby book, my personality emerged early. At five months I got sick and lost weight. After a rash appeared on my ass—or my
heinie
, as my mother called it—she took me to the doctor. But he refused to give me an injection. Why? “Because he didn’t want to annoy her,” my mother wrote.

I had a soft side, though. I spoke early, made funny faces, and, as my mother noted, “When you tell Penny to love something, she puts her little head against your face or neck.” The thing I loved most of all was my doll, Nancy. My grandmother made her from a pattern that came in the mail and gave her to me after my first birthday. Nearly two feet tall, Nancy’s black button eyes dangled by threads, her hair was matted, and she was full of lumps from being stuffed with Garry’s and Ronny’s old clothes.

She was proof that my grandmother’s days as a brilliant seamstress—she’d once made adorable clothes for my brother and sister and costumes for my mother’s students—were behind her, the result of advancing glaucoma, which she refused to treat because she didn’t trust doctors. Her eyes were a milky white and she bumped into furniture and walls. Basically, she was blind.

She blamed me, too. She told anyone who asked that she’d lost her eyesight after tripping over my bicycle. Her inability to see made her wary of the world at large. She insisted on having eighty-two locks on the front door. It took her four days to get it open. I wanted to kill myself as I waited in the hallway for her to unlock them one by one. It was not fun when I had to go to the bathroom.

Once inside our apartment, there was a closet on the left and one on the right. My mother’s ermine coat hung in the one on the right, in the back (it was deep enough for double rods), and I liked to hide in there, sucking my thumb as I rubbed my face against the soft fur. My mother’s desk was a few steps into the foyer. Her typewriter was front and center, and she kept quarters for the washer and dryer in the middle drawer, even though she repeatedly swore that the laundry room wasn’t safe because rapists hid there.

We had a dining room table with fold-down sides that was never used because we never had company. We also had a credenza where we displayed the good dishes and serving pieces. Our candy dish also sat on the credenza.
That
we used. It was a green bowl that was usually filled with buttons and paper clips, not candy. It was always fun to watch the delivery boys wait at the door as my blind grandmother
carefully unpinned the dollar bills my mother had attached to her dress and then offered them a piece of candy from the bowl.

“How about a treat?” she said.

They looked at the paper clips and buttons.

“No, thank you.”

My mother’s upright piano was in the living room. Ronny and I both took lessons. After years of instruction, we each knew one piece. My brother played the drums and was in bands through college. He inherited my mother’s musical talent. Our TV was also in the living room. In the late 1940s, after the neighbors down the hall from us, the Altmans, became the first in the building to have a TV, my father brought one home. Our favorite shows ranged from my father’s dramas to my brother’s comedies. I liked to watch
The Lone Ranger
and Charlie Chan on Saturday mornings.

But variety shows were the ones we really looked forward to. We wanted to see the dancers. My mother had to see what they were doing, what they were wearing, what she could steal. We gave my blind grandmother TV duty. Her job was to monitor the shows and yell to us anytime she saw dancing. Of course, she couldn’t see. That was the flaw in our plan.

When she called us—“Hurry, they’re tapping”—we would fly into the room from all corners of the apartment and see not a dancer but someone typing, usually a secretary on a show. Nanny thought they were tap dancing. If she was upset about the mistake, I would hear her grumble about it all night. She’d remind me that she had gone blind after tripping over my bicycle.

That wasn’t the only lie I dealt with. Ronny wet her bed until she was twelve but blamed me. How could it have been me? My grandmother, Ronny, and I all slept in what would have been our dining room if it hadn’t been converted into a bedroom for us, and I shared a bed with my grandmother.

The other bedrooms were farther down the hallway. Before you got to them, though, you had to pass the linen closet. Why was the
linen closet important? That’s where my mother kept her “suicide jar”—a collection of pills. If any of us got a prescription for whatever reason, a few pills went into her jar. They were her safety, her Plan B. She swore she would swallow every damn one of them before she would let herself become a burden.

“I’ll just kill myself,” she’d say.

Garry and my grandfather shared one of the two bedrooms at the end of the hallway. They listened to Yankee games on the radio (Garry cried when they lost), and if a game wasn’t on, my grandfather would stare out the window and avoid my grandmother. Theirs was another marriage not made in heaven. One day he moved into the apartment across the hall. Two spinster sisters lived there. I guess he’d just had enough. We still took him food every day.

My parents were in the other bedroom. They had separate beds, of course, separate dressers—separate everything. My father kept all of our school drawings and family photographs neatly organized and filed in a locked cabinet near his bed. I guess he was sentimental. My mother wasn’t. “Why do you need all that junk?” she used to say.

She could barely hide her disgust for anything to do with him. As a little girl, I liked to comb my father’s hair after he came home from work. It was my way of playing barbershop. It seemed to make my mother sick.

“How can you touch him?” she would say. “Look at the back of his chair. It’s all greasy.”

I would feel bad. And yet these were the good times. It would get worse before it got intolerable. They should have gotten divorced. But no, my mother believed that children from broken homes turned into juvenile delinquents. In other words, my parents stayed together so we wouldn’t end up in jail. Of course, with eighty-two locks on the door, we already were incarcerated.

Penny’s childhood apartment building on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx
Marshall personal collection

I
’M GOING TO CALL
the super!”

I heard that all the time. The threat came from my grandmother, who was our building’s witch lady (every place had one), and it was directed at my girlfriends and me. My friends Rozzie, Rina, Wendy, Phyllis, and Natalie were all from the building. We played on the sidewalk or gathered in the courtyard on the Van Cortlandt side of our building and played King, Queen, Jack; Chinese handball; jump rope; and potsie, which is what we called hopscotch.

However, the courtyard was beneath the windows in our living room and kitchen, where my grandmother sat and listened to her “stories” on the radio. She was hooked on the daily serials. As soon as she heard our voices rising up from the sidewalk—in other words, as soon as she heard us having fun—she opened the window and yelled at us. “Stop making noise. You kids better go away or else I’m going to call the super.”

I ignored her. Most of my friends also lived with at least one grandparent, so they understood. She was a pain in the ass, as were most of the old people in the neighborhood. They were all spies. They pulled their bridge chairs out in front of their buildings and watched what
everyone did, or they stared out the window. I couldn’t do anything without my mother finding out.
Penny’s on the fire escape. Penny’s chasing the boys. Penny’s walking up on the roof. Penny’s playing in the gutter
.

For excitement, I watched for the knife sharpener and the I Cash Clothes guy (he bought old clothes from people). There was a guy with a horse and cart who came around and charged a nickel for rides along Jerome Avenue, which was still cobblestone (so going over the bumps tickled). The ice cream man was also popular. As soon as we heard the melody from his truck, all the kids playing outside would stop and shout up at the building. “Mommy! Mommy! The ice cream man!” Their mothers wrapped coins in napkins and dropped them out the window. My mother was one of the few who worked, so she was never home to drop down money. But not to be denied, I would run inside and steal quarters from her desk.

I would also climb on top of the garage next to our building, retrieve the balls that had landed there during stickball games, and try to sell them back to the older boys playing in the street—that is, if the cops hadn’t already come and broken their stick and tossed it down the sewer, as was the practice that usually ended those games.

If the weather was bad, we played inside. We skated across the marble lobby area, slid down banisters, bounced down the stairs on our butts, or pressed all the buttons in the elevators. Two boys once got in trouble for having a peeing contest in front of the mailboxes. Another time I heard that a man was exposing himself on the staircase. I ran as fast as I could to where he had been spotted but arrived too late to see anything. It was still exciting.

Snow days were the best. I would go up to the sixth floor and hang out the windows of my friend’s apartment and watch the cars skid on the Grand Concourse. For me, that was an activity.

I would have liked to hang out more with my brother and sister, but the truth was, I barely knew them. Nearly nine years older than me, Garry was always sick or injured. The list of his known allergies ran
fourteen pages. He once said that he began to write because it was something he could do in bed while he was itching or throwing up. But I was still a little kid when he started at DeWitt Clinton High School, where he immersed himself in a variety of interests ranging from playing the drums to writing about sports for the school paper.

Ronny was six years ahead of me. Once she hit her teens, our age difference seemed even bigger. She lied about her address so she could get into the co-ed Evander Childs High School. She became boy crazy, and then I became an afterthought to her. If she did pay attention to me, it was because she needed an excuse to get out of the apartment. She would take me to the swings at the Oval, the park where her friends hung out. Then she would flirt with the boys and forget about me.

She also changed my life by teaching me how to cross the street on my own. The Grand Concourse was too big and too busy for a kid to cross on her own. Once I started going to PS 80, though, I had to get myself to and from school. My mother wasn’t going to wake up early to take me. She had Ronny take me to the corner and show me how to ask an adult for help. You went up to someone who looked normal and shouted, “Hey mister! Cross me?”

That’s what all the kids said. “Cross me? Cross me?” We were like little chirping birds.

Crossing the Grand Concourse was literally a rite of passage, a key to independence and exploring the rest of the neighborhood. St. Phillip Neri Church was down the block, Ciro’s Bowling Alley was across the street, and nearby was Jerry’s Pizza, which had a fire every week. On Jerome Avenue, there was a shop for everything, including meat, pickles, hosiery, hardware, candy, nuts, vegetables, bagels, shoes, and curtains. We got chicken soup at Schweller’s Deli, and Scheff’s was our bakery. You want to know heaven? Walking home while eating the warm heels from a loaf of freshly baked seedless rye, sliced.