My Mother Was Nuts (9 page)

Before accepting any jobs, I had to learn to drive. Mickey taught me on his mother’s car, an automatic sedan. Then he bought an old stick shift. I don’t know what was he thinking. I spent months riding around in first gear.

That spring, as my stomach grew beyond a bump, Mickey’s mother moved into an apartment in a new development. She had her own
money problems. Mickey and I scraped up enough cash to rent a studio apartment in her development. But that tapped us out. If my parents hadn’t bought us a hide-a-bed, we wouldn’t have had anything. Some nights I wrestled Mickey for food.

By June, I had gained fifty pounds. At night, I laid on the floor like a beached whale. Tracy was due in early July. I couldn’t wait to give birth and feel normal again, if that was possible. I counted the days and braced myself for the big event: my mother’s arrival.

Penny and her young daughter, Tracy, in 1965
Marjorie Marshall

M
Y MOTHER ARRIVED
after the Fourth of July. I wasn’t due for a few more days. At that point, my sole preparation for the baby had been to choose between the two local hospitals, the Presbyterian one or St. Something. I’d asked which one had a TV in the room. A day later I began to hear gurgling sounds in my belly. I thought it might be time and I turned to my mother, who had come, as she said, because I was going to need help.

“So?” I asked.

“What do you expect me to say?” she said. “I’m not a doctor.”

I didn’t know anything about labor, and she couldn’t remember shit. Neither could Mickey’s mother. Between them, they had seven children and neither of them knew a thing. They were mute when my water broke the next afternoon. I grabbed my Dr. Spock book, went into the bathroom, and looked up water breakage. It said, “Call the doctor.”

For some reason my doctor said I didn’t have to go to the hospital yet. My mother opened the pullout couch, spread some newspaper, and we watched TV until my contractions grew stronger and more
frequent. Then even I knew we had better start timing things. Finally, I decided to go in. It seemed early, but I thought it was better to be safe than have my mother deliver the baby.

I also wanted to be in the air-conditioning at the hospital. It was summer and close to a hundred degrees outside. I was dying. We got word to Mickey, who was working construction. At the hospital, they ushered me to the maternity ward and assigned me a bed. I remember there was a curtain between me and some other lady who kept screaming, “I’m doing it myself.”

I soon understood why. As I waited, everyone and their uncle stuck their fingers in me to see how much I was dilated. I think the janitor checked, too. It didn’t seem to matter. Mickey came and went because my labor went on for twenty hours without any signs of a baby. At some point, the nurse asked whether I wanted gas or a spinal block during delivery. No one thought of natural childbirth then. I leaned toward the gas because I don’t like needles. I’d never even had Novocain. But it was still too early for either. They told me to walk around or take a shower.

I mentioned that I was very hungry. I hadn’t eaten since the previous day, and this was when I would fight Mickey for food, so just imagine how badly I wanted something to eat. I asked the nurse if they had any food they could bring me.

“You can’t have any food with the gas,” she said. “If you have the spinal, I can give you Jell-O.”

“Okay, forget the gas,” I said. “I want the Jell-O.”

The final six hours were hard labor. They continued to check how much I was dilated and they preferred to do it during a contraction. But something came over me when the nurse tried, and I said, “Get the hell away from me,” and hit her. It was a reflex. Enough was enough. The woman on the other side of the curtain yelled, “You tell ’em, sister!”

Soon after, on the afternoon of July 7, 1964, amid much relief from all those around me (by this time the spinal had kicked in and I didn’t give a shit), especially the nurse, I gave birth to a baby girl. Checking
in at seven pounds, fourteen ounces and twenty-two inches, she had a full head of dark hair and brown eyes just like her father. She looked like a miniature Beatle.

Mickey had hoped for a boy, but by the time he finished counting her fingers and toes he was in love with his little girl. As for her name, all Mickey knew was that he didn’t want Robin or any other birdlike names. As we traded suggestions, I remembered the name of a girl I liked from camp, Tracy Saturn. Tracy was a happy name, as my mother would have said. I liked it. She was Tracy Lee Henry.

I tried breastfeeding Tracy, but my milk didn’t come out. They put her on Similac and gave me a shot to dry up the milk in my breasts. In the meantime, I developed a kidney infection. So there I was, with an ice pack on my chest and a heating pad on my sides. It was lovely.

They kept me in the hospital for nearly a week. Back then they didn’t kick you out in two seconds like they do now. When we finally took Tracy home, our studio apartment seemed even smaller. I emptied out a dresser drawer and she slept there. It was an instant nursery. Despite my happiness and relief, I was disappointed at not being able to go to camp that summer. If not for getting pregnant, I would’ve been at Diana-Dalmaqua again.

But I adapted and turned my attention to being a mom. I fed Tracy, bathed her in the kitchen sink, and learned to rest her in an infant’s seat on top of the dryer or the idling car when she couldn’t go to sleep. I didn’t like the morning feedings, which I had to do when Mickey started school again in the fall and traveled with the team. Otherwise he was good about getting up with her.

I lost twenty of the fifty pounds I’d gained right away. It melted off. I’m sure it was all the running around I did. Like most new mothers, I was amazed at how much work was required for this tiny thing that didn’t do much. I remember being thrilled when Tracy was finally old enough to prop herself up in her playpen and hold her own bottle just like my mother had me do.

At the end of summer, we moved to a two-bedroom apartment. It was roomier and cheaper than our studio, and Mickey was closer to school. After seven weeks at home, I went back to work, too. Mickey’s grandmother watched Tracy, as she’d done with Mickey and his sisters. We also used their swimming pool. I don’t know what we would have done without them.

We had nothing. Our one luxury was a diaper service. It had been a gift, and we had it for three months. I was supposed to rinse the poop in the toilet before putting it in the diaper pail. Sometimes I forgot and the toilet clogged. Hey, I didn’t pretend to be the paradigm of motherhood or domesticity. But I never forgot the strong smell of ammonia in the diaper pail. Just lifting the top for two seconds let out a blast that burned my eyes.

In 1965, my New Year’s resolution was to find work that didn’t require me to get up in the morning. I wanted some kind of life back. My mother suggested that I try teaching dance. Ordinarily I ignored whatever advice she gave me. It was a reflex response. She said something, and I kicked back. But this time I listened. I made a list of dance schools and looked for a job.

My first stop was the Litka School of Music, the city’s top dance school. The owners, Muriel and Adolph Litka, liked my experience and hired me on the spot. They knew how to sell. In a press release, they described me as a Junior Rockette, a June Taylor Dancer, and the winner of the
Ted Mack Amateur Hour
. Even I was impressed. “At the Litka School, she will specialize in precision dancing, acrobatic ballet, and tap dancing,” they said. “She can also teach some jazz.”

As if that wasn’t enough, they added, “Her brother, Garry Marshall, is a writer for Danny Thomas’s production company, which includes shows starring Dick Van Dyke, Danny Thomas, Lucille Ball, and Gomer Pyle.”

I knew Gomer Pyle wasn’t real. Likewise, my credits weren’t entirely accurate, either. But why correct the Litkas? They were happy,
and I was employed. The hours were exactly what I had in mind. The preschoolers came in at eleven o’clock and the older kids arrived in the afternoon. I played the same songs my mother had used and taught the same routines. It was easy. I sat next to the record player, smoked, and said, “Left, right, left, right.”

Penny and Mickey at the 1965 New York World’s Fair
Marshall personal collection

B
Y THE MIDDLE
of spring, I had lost the remaining thirty pounds of my pregnancy weight. I felt much better. Later, when Tracy turned one, the three of us went back to New York and spent a week on the beach in Avon-by-the-Sea. We also went to the World’s Fair to see my mother’s students entertain on one of the stages. When my mother insisted on hiding an entire roasted chicken in the front pouch of my cotton pullover so we could save money and not have to buy dinner there, I thought I might be getting my life back, the crazy life that I knew.

My mother was eager to spend alone time with her one-year-old granddaughter, but with a condition. She didn’t want Tracy to talk as much as she did, which was all the time—and in complete sentences. She was very verbal and had a large vocabulary, thanks to all the time she spent with Mickey’s grandmother. One of her favorite phrases was “Oops, Nana has gas.”

It was cute. But my mother didn’t want so much cuteness. She was pretending that Tracy was six months younger so she wouldn’t have to tell people in the building that I had been pregnant before getting married.

That Christmas, having had his fill of New York—and my family—Mickey stayed in Albuquerque. He was a Jehovah’s Witness, so he didn’t celebrate Christmas. However, after coming home, I found a receipt for flowers. I confronted Mickey. He confessed to having sent them to an old girlfriend. I had problems with that. He couldn’t buy his child a birthday or Christmas present because it was pagan, but he could send an old girlfriend flowers?

After a number of angry arguments, I stopped being angry. I realized the rest of my life, however that turned out, wasn’t going to be with Mickey. I wasn’t mad at him. What was to be mad at? We were two different people trying to do the right thing under circumstances that neither of us was prepared for yet. Mickey knew it, too. I think he came to that same realization when he sent flowers to his ex.

As for what to do next, we had no idea. We had a kid, and we were too young to know how to make a clean break quickly. We didn’t even know how to talk about it. We needed events to push us into action, as they eventually did.

One day a man from the Albuquerque Civic Light Opera came into the Litka School of Music, asking for me. Explaining that he had read about me, he said he wanted me to choreograph their production of
South Pacific
. I said no. It sounded like more than I could handle. Then he asked if I wanted to be in it.

“Do I have to audition?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Then okay,” I said.

With Mickey’s encouragement, I signed on. I was in the chorus of
South Pacific
, as well as
Carnival
, and
High Spirits
. For me, the best part of these productions was discovering other people in town who liked to stay up at night and smoke. Mickey wasn’t a night person; now I had company, people who were fun and had interests similar to mine.