Where's My Wand?: One Boy's Magical Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting (3 page)

The garage door opener began humming. Mother was home.

Val and I prepared for the theatrics that often accompanied Mother’s nightly return. Our afternoon attempts to render the house unlived in, free of all traces of human habitation, usually failed on a scale that could not be measured by existing devices, as her screams of frustration—“GOD IN HEAVENNNN!!”—pierced the evening sky. “WHY, GOD,
WHY
IS THERE WATER IN THIS
SINK
?”

The door opened. Mother stepped into the house, her head bent, a hollow, defeated expression glazing her delicate features. She dropped her purse on the kitchen table, smiled wanly at Val and me, and disappeared into her bedroom.

Silence. Val and I set the table, unable to look at each other. The satisfaction in seeing our mother cowed was overwhelmed by her palpable pain. This was unfamiliar emotional terrain.

Mother reemerged in her “comfy,” an ugly print housedress that had been washed several thousand times. We sat down to dinner.

“How was your day?” she quietly asked my sister.

Val, understandably uncomfortable with our mother’s sudden vulnerability, threw me under the bus. “I caught Eric wearing a bedspread,” she announced.

“It was a cape!” I hollered defensively. “I’m a superhero.” Mother turned to me. She smiled somberly and patted my hand.

“You can be anything you want to be.”

“He thinks he’s BibleBoy or some retarded thing,” Val declared.

“That is not
retarded
, young lady,” Mother announced sternly. We felt the storm clouds gathering, and began to anticipate an outburst, a flash of anger, a roiling moment of ire that, although difficult, would be familiar.

She turned to me with a fragile smile. “That is something to be proud of,” she said softly. “Are you saving the world one soul at a time?”

Before I could answer, the sound of the garage door opening galvanized the room. We turned to our mother as if for direction, unsure what her reaction would be.

Suddenly infused with energy, she jumped up and grabbed a plate and silverware from the cabinets, quickly setting a place for our father. She began to talk quickly, animatedly, making little sense. It didn’t matter.

The door opened. We heard our father’s footsteps across the family room. He entered the kitchen and took his place at the table, still wearing the same white undershirt, Dacron slacks and moccasins he had left the house in the night before.

“That casserole smells delicious,” he declared to Val and me, not looking at our mother. “You can’t go wrong with mushroom soup and Funyuns.”

“Do Funyuns grow in the ground or on trees?” I asked Dad in a rush of words as he sat down.

“In the ground,” he replied, smiling at Val and me without meeting Mother’s gaze. “Maybe we’ll plant some in the garden,” he continued. “It takes a real green thumb to grow ’em with that crispy coating.”

Throughout the meal, Mother and Dad never once locked eyes; but it didn’t seem to matter. Somehow, a truce was negotiated. Armistice was established. And dinner progressed into a tranquil evening unmarred by outbursts.

And I began to believe that perhaps, with the help of a basement and a bedspread, magic could happen.

D
ad, Val and I gathered in the rathskeller of our suburban home, nervously awaiting Mother’s appearance. It was Christmas Eve, 1969, and although she had not been in a good mood since the mid-sixties, her disposition had grown even more unpleasant since our father had lost his job.

Our rathskeller (the sophisticate’s term for a tarted-up basement) was glamorously outfitted with carpet tiles, a styrofoam drop ceiling and a Ping-Pong table. Because Mother worked as the executive assistant to the president of a large furniture corporation, she got sample sofas on the cheap, so everywhere you turned, there were couches, love seats and chaise lounges covered in cotton zebra print or orange corduroy—an eye-catching collection that gave our rathskeller the impressive look of a JCPenney sidewalk sale.

The Poole family rathskeller came into being when, less than a year into the job for which he had moved us to St. Louis, Dad became a casualty of downsizing.

My sister and I learned of this change in employment status the same way we learned about everything important: via a behind-closed-doors discussion between our parents, who were apparently under the impression that the walls of our home approximated a bank vault.

“You moved us down here, and for what?” Mother shrieked. “So I could be the breadwinner?”

“It’s not like I planned this,” Dad replied defensively. “Who could have seen this coming?”

“Would you like a list?” Mother snapped. “They told you they might be restructuring.”

“Pete said my job would be safe.”

“Did he also tell you that pigs would be winging their way over the greater St. Louis area?”

Val and I sat on the floor of her bedroom, subconsciously keeping score: Mother, 5, Dad, 0. “Turn it up,” I whispered, as Val blasted Bobby Sherman singing “Easy Come, Easy Go” on her Close ’N Play in a futile attempt to drown out the proceedings.

“I’ll be getting a month’s severance,” Dad offered.

“Great,” Mother hollered. “That’ll give us enough time to pack before the house goes back to the bank! I’ll be sure to leave out the tin cups. We’ll need them when we’re lying in front of the 7-Eleven, begging for quarters.”

Thus began Dad’s sojourn in the land of the unemployed. Almost immediately upon finding his days free, Dad realized that the best way to keep busy and out of Mother’s gun sights would be to have a project. So he promptly undertook the planning and execution of a rathskeller that became the talk of the Wedgwood Green subdivision. Friends of Dad’s dropped by to ooh and aah at the homemade bar (lovingly constructed out of paneling and linoleum) and inquire how we came by so many pieces of unmatched seating. The rathskeller was truly a place for entertaining, and Christmas Eve was bound to be the most entertaining night of all.

 

 

THE POOL E HOLIDAY SEASON kicked off each year immediately after Thanksgiving with the trimming of the artificial Christmas tree. It was a silver aluminum affair with a rotating color wheel that, when strategically placed, turned the tree into a fantasy of ever-changing hues. It’s blue—no, wait, it’s red!

“Can I put the first ornament on?” I yelled to Dad, who was dragging the tree box downstairs, followed by my sister, who refused to lift the other end because she was convinced that at any moment her new training bra—overloaded with mammaries the size of kiwis—might snap.

Dad, Val and I were bundled up like sherpas, since it was freezing in the rathskeller—Mother was always hot, and she kept the house at a temperature that could allow the curing of meats—yet I was practically sweating with anticipation as I rocked impatiently on my heels.

“Are you serious?” Val snorted, flipping open a Merle Norman compact purloined from the Walgreens by her hot-fingered friend Vicki. “It’s still decorated from last year.” She pursed her lips with all the twelve-year-old seduction she could muster as Dad pulled the tree from the box and set it into its stand. It was indeed loaded down with tinsel and ornaments, not a single branch bare.

“Your mother feels that this is more efficient,” he explained to us, “so that we have more time for the things that really matter.”

“Like what?” Val replied, snapping the compact shut, evidently satisfied that her lips were properly kissable although, as far as I knew, she had never kissed a boy. “She spends all her time in the laundry room, ironing the bedspreads.”

Dad shrugged. “I don’t make the rules. I just work here.”

Val shot me a “No shit” look as our petite mother, General Patton in pedal pushers, marched in from the basement laundry room carrying a freshly pressed quilt. “Good thing you work
somewhere
,” she replied, as she blew past the tree and up the stairs.

Dad sighed heavily and passed me the electrical plug. I stuck it into the wall socket ceremoniously, and the color wheel lit up. I clapped excitedly as Dad’s face turned green, then flaming red. A sign of things to come.

My sister and I had never really believed in the notion of a fat man delivering presents via the chimney, since Mother (a) forbade anyone to use the fireplace, and (b) refused to have all those gifts cluttering up the closets, and instead insisted on wrapping all presents and immediately placing them under the tree upon purchase.

Of course, since she was a busy working woman, she had little time for such mundane tasks as making sure that the wrapping paper covered the entire gift, so one afternoon Val and I rendezvoused under the tree.

“Let’s see . . .” Val busily combed through the packages, turning one over to reveal a label easily readable from beneath a two-inch strip of missing paper. “Oh, jeez. Remington hot rollers. For
that
I was nice all year?”

“Look.” She pointed as she flipped another box over. “You got Matchbox cars.” Not quite the drum set I had hoped for. We looked at each other, deflated. “Guess it’s official,” Val announced. “We’re broke.”

Although greedy and selfish like most kids our age, we were ultimately less concerned about the size of the gifts this Christmas than the size of the blowout that would doubtless accompany our celebration. Now that Mother had become the family’s breadwinner, her resentment of the slobs she was forced to not only clean up after but also support was palpable. And while she democratically managed to inflict a great deal of this frustration on Val and me, Dad was the jackpot winner. I realized, in that moment, that in order to save us all from a particularly humiliating holiday, Dad—who had never exhibited a high degree of backbone with Mother—would have to take charge.

It had been a few weeks since my last magic spell, which I had performed to excise the murderers Val was certain were waiting for us in the house each day when we arrived home from school. (She would unlock the front door, push it open a few inches and shove me inside, pausing to listen for screams and gunfire.)

Despite having nervously performed that incantation in the basement while Val and her friend Vicki were right upstairs secretly test-driving eyeliner, I had obviously not lost my touch: to date, neither Val nor I had been slain in our suburban home.

My magical abilities were obviously becoming keen, and not a moment too soon, because one December afternoon, in some perverse stab at either reassurance or denial, Dad made an ill-conceived announcement.

“I’m gonna surprise your mother with a couple of unexpected gifts,” he confided as we sterilized the kitchen in preparation for Mother’s arrival home. “Is that okay with you kids? You know we’re not gonna have a big Christmas this year, but your mother works so hard. She deserves something special, don’t you think?”

Her cataclysmic mood swings aside, we did have to admit that our mother worked profoundly hard, both as a career woman and a parent. “Yeah,” we grumbled, our enthusiasm dampened by her screaming fit that morning when Dad had impudently turned the thermostat up to sixty degrees.

“When it’s hot in here, you people just lie around!” she had snapped, impressively managing to not only label us as sloths but distance herself from this clutch of cave-dwelling creatures at the same time.

“But you aren’t working,” I said to Dad as I Windexed the Formica counter. “Aren’t we poor?”

Various financial compromises
had
been made since Dad’s unemployment, including cancellation of our membership in the not particularly exclusive Wedgwood Bath and Tennis Club. Val was horrified, but since neighborhood boys routinely tried to drown me in the deep end, I accepted this sacrifice with surprising aplomb.

“Don’t be silly,” Dad replied. “We’re a little strapped, but I’ll get a new job soon.”

And so it was decided. He was going to surprise our mother. This couldn’t go well.

The next afternoon, alone in the rathskeller, I retrieved my Endora caftan from its hiding place and set to work. Summoning all the magical powers of the universe, I closed my eyes, waving my arms dramatically. Our house was swallowed into a blustery void, wind rushing past, the sky closing in, day becoming night as the stars twinkled and snow began to fall. Suddenly, it was Christmas Eve.

As our house settled back into Wedgwood Green, I saw the family gathered around the tree. Mother was opening gifts, chirping with delight and hugging our father, who sat back contentedly and smiled, reveling in his role as patriarch and benevolent leader. She basked in the glow of his authority and commanding presence, a veritable geisha kneeling before Emperor Hirohito. He made a small signal to her and she rose to pour eggnog for each of us as we sang along with the New Christy Minstrels. This was heaven.

I opened my eyes, alone in the basement once again. I was certain that my magic gave me the power to change my family’s destiny; now I would simply have to wait for the results.

 

 

DAYS PASSED. Christmas approached. Nothing seemed to have changed. I remained steadfast, reasoning that magic of this caliber would need time to develop.

Christmas Eve arrived with a crackers-and-cheese selection from Hickory Farms and a bottle of Mateus rosé in its prestigious clay bottle. We were strict Southern Baptists, but Mother and Dad rationalized this particular thirst-quencher as symbolic of the blood of Jesus (whose blood was, apparently, pink).

Val and I chewed nervously as Dad called out to our mother, who was scorching the bedsheets with an iron. “Hurry up, the wine’s gonna turn.”

No answer. Another fifteen minutes passed. We ate. He drank. Andy Williams reminded us that this was the most wonderful time of the year.

He called again. This time Mother emerged from her laundry lair, sighing heavily to remind us of her oppressive workload—those bath towels don’t just press themselves. Val and I sat up eagerly, smiling, suddenly animated. We knew that, like a Whac-A-Mole game, the more we could distract her, the less likely she was to decide that her life had gone horribly, tragically wrong.