My Mother Was Nuts (4 page)

The Woodlawn-Jerome el rumbled past our building. Up on a
nearby hill was a shrine where Crazy Joseph from Villa Avenue saw the Virgin Mary one day when we all were playing. I’ll never forget that day. Jo-Jo suddenly dropped to his knees and started to pray. He’d seen the Virgin Mary, he explained. Most of us didn’t even know who the Virgin Mary was. But soon, people came by the busload to see the spot. A shrine was made, and we sold holy dirt for a dollar.

I never knew boundaries, never paid attention to ethnicities or skin color. I lived on the border between the Jewish neighborhood (the Parkway) and the Italian-Catholic neighborhood (Villa Avenue). I was in the smart classes with the Jewish kids, but I went to school on the High Holy Days and sat in class with the Italian kids, cleaning the board and the erasers. People didn’t know what we were in terms of religion or ethnicity, and neither did we.

To this day people think we’re Jewish, but Garry was christened Episcopalian, Ronny was Lutheran, and I was confirmed in a Congregationalist church. Why such diversity? My mother sent us anyplace that had a hall where she could put on a recital. If she hadn’t needed performance space, we wouldn’t have bothered.

It got even more confusing later on when we went to a kosher Jewish summer camp. We all had to go to services. We read prayers, blessed the bread before each meal, and lit candles and blessed the wine on Friday nights. Ronny and I could
baruch
like nobody’s business.

Identity was never an issue for me. I embraced being from the Bronx. To me, it was the center of the universe, at least the only universe that mattered. I grew up never knowing north, south, east, or west. I only learned uptown, downtown, and “We’re going to Alexander’s.”

Alexander’s was a department store, and for us, it may as well have been the capital of the Bronx. Everybody went to Alexander’s. My mother only bought things that were on sale, though. She bought Christmas presents at the end of spring and summer and hid them in the closet. My blind grandmother, who only liked dark-colored
clothes, ended up in chartreuse and leopard prints. She had no idea. It was hilarious to watch her try on the clothes.

“What color is this, babe?” she’d ask, standing in an outfit that was a shocking pink.

“It’s brown,” my mother lied.

The next outfit was chartreuse.

“What color is this, babe?”

“It’s black.”

Everything was either black or brown. I never asked my mother why she lied to my grandmother. I didn’t have to; I understood. Sometimes you ignored the facts to make life easier.

A 1947 portrait of Penny, her sister Ronny, and brother Garry
Hal Altman

I
DON’T EAT MUCH
. I’m not what you would call a foodie, and I have my mother to thank for that. She was more than satisfied with a bialy and butter or an onion sandwich. She ate standing up in the kitchen rather than sitting down with the rest of us, who she had only the slightest interest in feeding.

She prepared dinner out of a sense of duty and was vocal about her feeling, or lack of feeling, for the culinary obligations tradition had bestowed on women of her generation. The last thing she wanted to do was spend her day standing over a hot stove. To put it bluntly, she hated to cook.

“Only idiots do that,” she said. “They don’t have any creativity. They just read recipes and do what they’re told.”

My father rarely came straight home after work anyway. He preferred drinks with his cronies to dinner with us, though my mother offered her own explanation for his absence. “He has another family in Philadelphia that he likes better,” she said, her voice thick with sarcasm.

But I didn’t know from sarcasm then. I learned later.

His side of the family was a mystery. My father once told us that
our family came to America on the
Mayflower
, which made me feel special in school every Thanksgiving when the teacher showed us pictures of Pilgrims.
Those were my relatives
, I thought. In truth, his parents, Joseph and Ann, lived someplace in the Bronx, but I only went there for dinner a couple of times, and my only memory of those dinners was spaghetti noodles hanging over the back of my grandmother’s kitchen chairs.

My brother and sister went there more often than I did. Garry said it was while eating spaghetti there and listening to opera that he figured out we were actually Italian, not Pilgrims, and our real name was Masciarelli. By the time I was old enough to figure things out on my own, my father had disowned his family and none of us cared anyway. If he really did have another family in Philadelphia, my mother seemed grateful for the break.

Sunday was family night, the only night we could count on my father being home for dinner, and then he wanted spaghetti and meat sauce, with hot peppers on the side, a salad with oil and vinegar dressing, and red wine. The man who denied being Italian wanted only Italian food.

I had no problem with spaghetti. We had it all the time. If any of us wanted spaghetti other than Sunday, my mother made what we called her “orange spaghetti.” She cooked up the noodles and emptied a can of Campbell’s tomato soup on top with chunks of mozzarella cheese. It was delicious, and it was even better the next day, when she heated it up in a frying pan. I pity generations who have only known to reheat food in microwaves. I asked for it so often my mother would say, “You’re going to turn into a piece of spaghetti.”

When I was very little, I would run behind each person’s chair, hang from the back, curl my feet off the ground, and scream, “Hanger! Hanger! Hanger!” I don’t know why. No one questioned it. I just did it. Once I was too old to run around during dinner, I realized that I had the worst seat at the table. Why? It was across from my brother, whose eating habits were disgusting. For some reason, he was opposed
to chewing and mushed all of his food together—and talked throughout the meal, spraying half of what he took in.

Unlike Garry, I didn’t want any of my food to touch. The two of us would have driven my mother crazy if she’d paid any attention.

Only Ronny was the good eater. She ate everything and didn’t care if it touched or didn’t. She wasn’t fat, but she had a round face. “Are you storing food in there for the winter?” asked my mother, who also referred to Ronny’s thighs—again, she wasn’t fat—as “Billy Watson’s Beef Trust.” Billy Watson’s Beef Trust was a turn-of-the-century dance troupe of large women. Dancers had to be more than two hundred pounds to join.

She used to tell me that my buckteeth could open a Coke bottle.

She was like that.

My Nanny had no idea what was on her plate. Nor did she care. She finished her meal every night no matter what was served, then pushed her plate to the side and declared, “I eat what I like, and I like what I eat.”

Holidays were more of the same. For Thanksgiving, my mother cooked the obligatory turkey, and each year, after telling us how she planned to brown it, the bird slipped out of her hands and dropped to the floor. “That’s what makes it so good,” she said as she wiped it off with a dishtowel and put it in the oven. “No one will know.”

On Christmas Eve, my father came home slightly tipsy, lugging a tree into the apartment. My parents decorated it and put out the presents that my mother had bought on sale at Alexander’s throughout the year. One year Garry asked my mother what she wanted for Christmas. She looked toward my father. “I don’t want you to get
him
anything he wants,” she said. When I asked her the same question, she was ready with another request. “I want the kitchen boarded up,” she said.

I had to laugh or kill myself.

Penny (far right) and friends in costume at the Marjorie Marshall Dance School
Hal Altman

M
Y MOTHER’S BALLROOM
was located in the cellar between the incinerator and the storage room for bikes and sleds. There were pipes on the ceiling, and the bulbs that lit the room were plain. Every year we painted the walls turquoise. It was nothing fancy, but for those who took lessons at the Marjorie Marshall Dance School, it was a special place.

You heard the music before you arrived. Then, once inside, you saw my mother at the upright piano, dressed in black slacks and a pale blouse, with a Yoo-hoo and her cigarettes sitting on top of the piano.

Class began with a group sing around her piano and then moved on to dancing: Ballet and acrobatics were on one side of the ballroom, and jazz and tap were on the side with the piano. A thin curtain on a rope divided the two sides. My mother’s partner, Mildred Roth, who lived on 208th Street, collected money and took over costumemaking chores from my grandmother.

Mildred’s daughter, Paula, was my age and she was good in school. I didn’t like her so much. She was always around, being forced on me. That annoyed me, and I took it out on her. I was much nicer to my friends from the building, Rozzie, Wendy, Phyllis, Natalie, and Rina.
My mother’s school had girls from all across the Bronx. Boys not so much. If a delivery boy came to the door and my mother was home, her first question was, “Do you dance?” She had no use for anyone who didn’t go to class, such as Rina’s younger sister, Marsha. “Is that idiot here again?” she said one day after seeing that we were playing together after school. “Doesn’t she have a home?”

“I don’t think your mother likes me,” Marsha said.

“No, she likes you,” I said. “She just says things like that.”

I convinced Marsha to sign up for dancing school. It made my mother happier.

She would have been ecstatic if I had become a dancer like her. She tried her best to mold me into one. At eleven months, I learned to do a backbend, an arabesque, and a somersault. She said I clapped enthusiastically when she did a cartwheel in front of me. At four, I debuted in my first recital. She praised my sense of rhythm and memory. By eight years old, though, I hated every minute of the hour-long classes. I knew the other girls adored my mother and wanted to please her. Not me. I wanted to give her a heart attack.

Why?

Because she was
my
mother.

For me, dance didn’t end after class. At night, following dinner, I would sit at the kitchen table with Ronny, or my fake aunt Tina (a former student of my mother’s who had children of her own; like all of my mother’s friends, she was an “aunt”), or whoever else was around, talking about students, comparing one girl to another, and discussing upcoming shows, all the while pasting tiny colored stars on paper that my mother gave to the little kids after their lessons as a reward for working hard. It was nonstop.

But she meant well. This was her life’s work, and she approached it with an obsessive, missionlike zeal. She believed every child should know what it feels like to entertain. It didn’t matter if they were short or tall, talented or just a kid whose mother dropped her off to get her out of her hair for an hour. She felt it was important to have the experience of hearing applause and making people happy. She
also believed everyone, regardless of their build, deserved a turn in front—“even the fat girls,” she said.

In 1952, my mother met June Taylor, the choreographer best known for appearing each week with her June Taylor Dancers on
The Jackie Gleason Show
. My mother pitched her on having us—her “Junior Rockettes”—perform on Gleason’s show. Approaching June this way was typical of my mother’s ambition and fearlessness. June said she would consider it but cautioned that Mr. Gleason had to approve everything on the show, and he wasn’t known as a big fan of children.

However, my mother soon received a call inviting her to bring us in for a tryout. She was thrilled. Even I got excited about the possibility of being on
The Jackie Gleason Show
. We were always rehearsing, but we practiced extra hard for a couple weeks. At the audition, my mother lined us up in front of June and several others, sat at the piano, and started to play, expecting us to begin as we’d practiced a hundred times. But none of us moved. We stood in place, frozen, staring at ourselves in the mirrors on the wall.

My mother realized immediately what had happened. Our ballroom didn’t have mirrors. We had never seen ourselves dance before. She jumped up from the piano and instructed us to turn away from the mirrors and start over. That worked. We performed flawlessly.