My Mother Was Nuts (7 page)

By the week of the dance, I was waiting for either Jeffrey “Mousey” Strauss or Joel Permsian to ask me. I liked both of them. Now, fifty-five years later, I don’t remember who took me. Thanks to my diary, all I know is that I danced with Jeffrey, Norman, Joel, and Yohan. Gene wouldn’t dance with me or anyone else, but I excused him because, as I wrote, “He’s sooooo cute.”

Like most thirteen-year-olds, I didn’t realize that my dramas were actually normal life. But they were utterly normal. Consider this diary entry: “Today in school I was sitting in back of Joel and next to Anita. We were laughing and talking so we have to stay in on Thursday. I tripped Joel and he went flying and landed on his side. I got scared because I thought he got hurt. I also got my period today. By the way, Eddie broke two of his fingers playing basketball.”

Two years later, my friends and I moved on to high school, believing we were wiser, smarter, and more experienced. Were we? I dug out my ninth-grade autograph book, looking for pearls that would show that some of us at least knew what the hell was going on. I found this note from my friend Kenny, who clearly had figured out what mattered and passed it on to me:

Penny,
When you are kissing
don’t be hasty.
Take your time
and make it tasty!

Penny at the 1960 Westbury High School prom with her date, Frank Ryder
Marshall personal collection

I
CAME HOME FROM
school one day when I was fifteen and my mother surprised me with the news that she and my father were getting a divorce. She said it matter-of-factly, as if it was on her list of things to tell me before dance class, and in fact, it was. She didn’t give me a chance to ask any questions.

“Decide who you want to live with,” she said. “Him or me.”

“Do I have to decide now?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “And take out the garbage on your way out.”

I went outside and stood next to the incinerator, wondering if my life had just gone up in flames. What had happened? Why were they splitting now? But more important, which one of them did I want to live with?

I weighed the pros and cons of each. My mother was funnier—and that counted for a lot. But she would insist that I continue dance school, which I hated. My father was boring and humorless but more lenient. He wouldn’t care where I went. However, he would probably move to Manhattan and I didn’t want to leave my friends in the Bronx.

I was still trying to decide when my father came home from work. I told him that I had to talk to him and pulled him into the
kitchen. Then I started asking him questions, like where he planned to live.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

I filled him in.

“We aren’t getting divorced,” he said.

“But Mom said—”

“Don’t listen to her,” he interrupted. “She’s crazy.”

Inside, they had a scene where the truth came out. It turned out that my father was about to make a commercial for the A.M.A., and my mother had suggested that her dance students could dress as pills and tap around a large prescription bottle. When he said no, it wasn’t appropriate, she stewed until I came home from school and then hit me with the divorce story.

Who was she punishing?

My mother was right about one thing. Broken homes did lead straight to juvenile delinquency.

A few weeks after that shocker, I was still reeling. This was just more proof of how I bore the brunt of my parents’ hatred for each other after my brother and sister left home. Despite the pledge Garry, Ronny, and I made to take care of one another, I felt abandoned. One day, as I left school with my friend Marsha, I suggested going to Alexander’s.

“To do what?” she asked.

“Let’s shoplift,” I said.

My friends Sharon and Gail had recently bragged about taking some clothes and makeup. It sounded exciting, like fun.

Marsha followed me into the department store, where I stole some shit I didn’t need and then headed for the door, thinking I had been pretty slick. But the cops were waiting for us outside. They knew we were two foolish high school girls rather than hard-core criminals warming up in Alexander’s before hitting the Bank of New York. In fact, I thought I detected a look of pity from the one cop who asked why I had shoplifted.

I probably could have explained that my mother put on the store’s annual show and gotten away cleanly after receiving a lecture from the store’s manager and offering an apology. Instead I was a smartass and told the cops that we were “pixilated.” It was a word I remembered from the scene in the movie
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
where an old woman testifies to Mr. Deeds’s sanity—or temporary lack thereof—by describing him as
pixilated
, or possessed by pixies.

Not amused, the cops took us away. Both Marsha and I ended up going to night court, where we got probation. Other than my parents being upset, it wasn’t too bad. In the Bronx, night court was a big date night. I’m not kidding. You watched people get put away. It was entertainment. My brother later wrote a joke that you even wore a tie and jacket on Fridays. It was felony night, and you didn’t want to be underdressed.

I attended Walton High School, an all-girls school. It was only one bus ride from home. My sister had lied about her address and gone to Evander Childs because it was co-ed. But that was two bus rides. I couldn’t handle that in the morning. Nor did I care. My social life was at the Parkway.

As a sophomore, I took calculus, chemistry, and physics with the smart kids. I was good at studying things like the periodic table of elements, charts, and graphs. But essays gave me trouble. I remember a question on the history Regents, an end-of-the-year test that all New York high school students had to pass in order to go to college. It asked why the Roman Empire fell. I wrote, “Carelessness.”

After my grades slipped from A’s to B’s and C’s during my junior year, the guidance counselor called my parents in for a conference. He was worried about my chances of getting into college.

“How can we make her do better?” my father asked.

“Send her to school in Turkey so she doesn’t know the language and can’t make friends,” he said.

I was probably too social for my own good. But I wasn’t about to trade the Parkway for the library. After graduating from Northwestern,
my sister had gone to secretarial school so she could get a job. If that was the case, why did I need to give a shit about grades? If my choice was boys or books, I picked boys. I had loved them ever since my friend Phyllis Altman’s brother, Robert, and I had played doctor as little children.

My mother called all of my boyfriends bums. But they were upstanding guys. I dated Bobby from the neighborhood, and then Matt, who went to Cardinal Hayes, and also Harold, who wasn’t allowed to date non-Jews, so he had to pick up Tema and all the other Jewish girls his mother knew before getting me. I also went with Gus, the son of a super in a building near mine. I still have the love note he wrote me: “To the most perfect girl I have ever met. And the only one who has ever brought me happiness and joy.”

Poor Gus.

I don’t know which one of us aimed lower.

There were other boys, including Lefty, who was close to being a hoodlum and could spit farther than any human being on the planet. My mother saw him in our apartment and pulled me into another room. “Don’t tell me you can take care of yourself,” she said. “I know the bums you’re hanging out with.”

“They aren’t bums,” I said.

“You’re necking, aren’t you?” she said.

I didn’t know what necking meant. What did two necks do? We called it making out.

“I can take care of myself,” I said.

My junior year ended with Frank Ryder, a handsome boy I knew from camp, taking me to his prom at Westbury High on Long Island. My mother thought I looked very nice. If dancing was involved, she approved.

As a senior, I took typing and shorthand with the expectation of someday becoming a secretary. I also took Spanish, though Walton was the only school in the country to teach Castilian. So I learned
to pronounce everything with a lisp—
mucho grath-e-ath
—which wasn’t hard for me because I had an overbite.

It added to my well-roundedness. According to
The Periwinkle
, Walton’s yearbook, I had over the past three years distinguished myself as WSSC Volunteer Aide, Homeroom Vice President, and Aide to Miss Chambers. Translation: I was the rag monitor and wiped the tables in the cafeteria after lunch.

Although it may have seemed as though I wasn’t trying very hard to reach the end of the school year before I flunked out, I never doubted that I would go to college. Like most seniors, I had to decide where. Like a smaller subset, though, I also had to figure out where I could get in with a C average.

My first choice was Ohio State because a guy I liked from camp went there. But I didn’t have the grades to get in. Another guy I liked was at Brooklyn College. But my father said that he’d rather sell pencils on the corner than send me to a city school. One day he brought home a brochure from William & Mary, the liberal arts college in Williamsburg, Virginia. “Are you going to be a Magnolia Queen?” my mother asked. “I don’t think so.”

We also discussed Fairleigh Dickinson, the private school in New Jersey. But I couldn’t figure out how you could cheer for Fairleigh Dickinson at a game. Go Fairleigh? Go Dickinson? What were you supposed to say? Finally, my father brought home a pamphlet from the University of New Mexico. As I read the description, I realized this school was different from the others. They accepted anyone from out of state, which upped my chances of getting in.

As promised, I received an acceptance letter. I was thrilled, but what surprised me even more was my mother’s reaction. She wasn’t the slightest bit emotional about her last child leaving home. Then I realized that she was under the impression that all the “New” states were bunched together—New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and New Mexico—so she thought I’d be close to home.

I didn’t bother to correct her.

Penny’s 1961 Walton High School graduation photo
Marshall personal collection

M
Y FATHER TOOK ME
to Albuquerque. Our plane stopped in eight million cities along the way. I think we flew the milk route. Once there, I found the campus was relatively empty since I had arrived a couple weeks before classes in order to go through rush. My sister, a Chi Omega at Northwestern, advised me that joining a sorority was the best way to meet people. I was a legacy, she added—whatever that meant.

Hundreds of girls went through rush, and we followed one another from house to house, where the sorority girls sang us songs, threw parties, and asked questions. I thought the conversations were inane.

“Where are you from?”

“The Bronx.”

“Do you live on campus?”

No, I commute
. “Yes, I live on campus.”
What are you, an idiot?

One of the rules during rush was that pledges couldn’t speak to any boys. I had no problem withholding conversation from the boys rushing fraternities, but there were football players on campus, too, and I wanted to hang out with them. They were practicing before the
season started. They were enormous. I had never seen a guy my age over 5’6” or 5’8”. I said if I can’t talk to them, the hell with rush, and I quit.

Coming from New York, I thought that I would be the fast, big-city girl among the freshmen in my dorm. Then I walked into my room and found my new roommate sitting on her bed, smoking a Hav-A-Tampa cigar. She looked at my cigarettes as if to say she had outgrown those in fifth grade. She wasn’t an isolated case. I met girls from Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas who’d slept with their cousins at fourteen. By comparison, I’d done nothing.

At registration, I signed up for math, accounting, psychology, and anthropology classes. After receiving some bad grades in math and accounting, though, I changed my major to phys ed. Then, because I didn’t want to take anatomy or kinesiology, I changed my major again, this time to recreation. I know. I hadn’t heard of it either. But my advisor said people would have a lot of free time in the future.