by Peggy Rowe
On the way home, Lois instructed her husband to pull into the horsey set’s favorite watering hole. He usually dozed in the car while she indulged at the bar with fellow equestrians. From time to time, Mr. Jackson strode in, grumbled, and stomped out.
I sipped Coca-Cola at a nearby table and listened to the crude banter. Later, as I basked in the odor of horses and beer, I heard the familiar slur of Lois’s words. When she argued loudly with the bartender and slid off her stool onto the floor, I knew what I had to do. After helping her up, I found a telephone.
The stricken, angry faces of my parents appeared across the smoky tavern, and I feared that my little slice of horse heaven was going to evaporate like the foam on the mugs around me.
Unfortunately, I was right.
Family: For Better or Worse
I was pedaling my bike along the sidewalk on Leslie Avenue practicing my no-hands routine when a neighbor called to me.
“Hey, Peggy Knobel, are your parents running a boarding house? Every time I look, there’s another stranger.”
Before she finished her question, I was well on my way and gave her a shrug.
“A boarding house!?” my mother said. “Why can’t people just mind their own business?”
When it came to neighbors, Mom was aloof. She was cordial enough when they met but would no more gossip over the backyard fence than wear curlers in her hair while hanging out the laundry. Hers was not a world of morning coffee klatches. She had followed her mother’s counsel when moving to “the city.”
“Thelma, don’t get close to your neighbors,” Grandma Daisy had said. “And whatever you do, don’t let them know your business!”
In hindsight, the neighbor had a point. In the 1930s and ’40s, my mother was the Harriet Tubman of our family, running her own version of the Underground Railroad. One by one as her siblings finished high school, she brought them from the small fishing village in Fleeton, Virginia, to our home in Baltimore, where they lived until they found work, job training, or a husband.
Dad had grown up in an austere home and welcomed Mom’s cheerful family with open arms. What had begun as a “Depression migration” became a coming-of-age rite of passage for Mom’s sisters.
With just three bedrooms, our house wasn’t large, but every inch was lived in. There were no rooms that were off limits or furniture you weren’t allowed to use, unlike my friend’s house where sofa cushions were wrapped in plastic and lampshades, in cellophane.
For our country aunts, the two-story, brown-shingled house on Leslie Avenue was the equivalent of a five-star hotel, with such luxurious amenities as indoor plumbing, central heating, electricity, and a state-of-the-art black telephone.
When it came to her siblings, Mom was like a proud parent, seeing signs of greatness in each of them.
Aunt Betty (Orvetta) was the Florence Nightingale of the Williams family. Before joining the Army, she went to nursing school and then lived with us while working at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The go-to person for all our health-related concerns, her medical expertise was held in high regard in our house. She was a great proponent of castor oil . . . but I loved her anyway. Later, when Aunt Betty began painting, her waterscapes graced our walls. Through the years, the amateurish pieces were relegated to the bedrooms, while her more sophisticated artwork gave our living room a touch of class. They allowed Mom to brag about her sister without actually speaking.
Aunt Elvira was sweet and creative, or, as Mom liked to say, “fixy.” When Elvira lived with us, there was lace on our bathroom towels, tassels on the sofa pillows, and cheerful flower arrangements on the dining room table—but not the kind one sees in church or the funeral parlor. She was, without question, the Martha Stewart of her time. Once, when I was being unfairly punished, she slipped me a handful of pennies while my mother wasn’t looking. Aunt Elvira was the least worldly and sophisticated of the sisters, and my parents felt protective towards her. Even after she married a Baltimore man and settled nearby, we remained close.
Aunt Nealie (Cornelia) was beautiful and stylish and traveled with a suitcase filled with toiletries and makeup. She was forever combing our hair and fussing over Janet and me (when she could catch me). She married a man she met while living with us and, after moving to Nebraska, sent us delightful packages in the mail. My favorite was a fringed buckskin jacket that caused friction between my mother and me.
It was just like the one Annie Oakley wore in pictures. Poor Janet received a fancy case full of makeup. I felt sorry for her, but she took it well. Pretending to be excited, she ran up the stairs to her bedroom so that we wouldn’t see her disappointment.
“Please, Mom, can I wear my jacket to church with my cowboy boots?” I begged. “Please?!”
“Peggy, your father is a church leader. I don’t think he’d appreciate his daughter showing up in a fringed cowboy jacket.”
Even at my tender age, I knew a bogus argument when I heard it. Dad knew only one thing about fashion—if it was on the bedside chair, he could wear it. My father might have been perceived as head of our family, but that was only because Mom wanted it that way. She liked to give the appearance of being in his shadow, but I knew who made the rules.
Mom and I came to a compromise. What a sight we Knobels must have been walking down the aisle on that early-August morning (long before air conditioning came to Kenwood Church). Dad in his Sunday best, my stylishly dressed mother, and the lovely Janet, straight from the pages of Seventeen magazine, wearing for the first time a hint of coral lipstick and a faint blush.
Bringing up the rear was Annie Oakley. The long fringe on her jacket swaying to and fro as she lumbered down the aisle in her black patent leather shoes, her six-shooter checked at the door.
Uncle Charles visited our home, too, but he wasn’t looking for work; he had his eye on the pretty girl across the street. There was never any doubt that he would follow in his daddy’s footsteps as a waterman when he left the Navy. It was obvious that he held a special place in Mom’s heart. Once when he carried me on his shoulders, I hit my head on a ceiling beam. He laughed at me when I cried and didn’t even get hollered at. He married the pretty girl across the street, became a fish boat captain like my grandfather, and kept us supplied with fish, soft crabs, and oysters through the years—my mother’s favorite foods in the whole world.
Vivacious Aunt Mary, the baby of the Williams family, went to secretarial school and filled our house with laughter and excitement.
“She’s too popular for her own good,” Mom used to say.
“Honestly, Thelma, it’s a wonder I have any dates at all, after you give them the third degree,” Aunt Mary complained, rolling her eyes. But Mom didn’t care. She wasn’t about to shirk her responsibilities, staying awake nights until her little sister came through the front door, no matter how late.
Our home remained the family gathering place through the years. The five sisters were like the characters from Little Women, with their stories of sewing bees, taffy pulls around the dining room table, and clambakes on the beach.
“When we were teenagers, your mother used our parties to get the housecleaning done,” Aunt Elvira reminisced. This didn’t surprise me at all.
Aunt Nealie would invariably chime in, mimicking my mother in a theatrical way that Janet and I would never have dared.
“Well, sure, we can have a party, but first we need to clean. We wouldn’t want our friends to see the house looking like this, now would we?”
Aunt Betty would look at Janet and me and add, “Then your mother would say, ‘And while we’re at it, we’ll just make new curtains and hang wallpaper.’ ”
Mom laughed good-naturedly at the stories, explaining to Janet and me, “Your grandmother wasn’t interested in decorating.”
I admired Grandma all the more, if that was possible. The heart and soul of the Williams family, she was my hero—a fearless, ax-wielding woman in an apron, chasing squawking roosters across the yard. Grandma Daisy might not have been in tune to
the finer aspects of decorating, but she had the best garden in Fleeton and could wring the necks of chickens in record time while singing “In the Garden” without missing a beat.
Of course, people never heard about that side of Grandma from my mother. She chose to accentuate Grandma’s gentler side. She once told a group of church ladies:
“My mother was a gentle woman who walked us children across the road to St. Mary’s Episcopal Church Sunday mornings, then spent the afternoon playing hymns on the upright piano in the parlor. She was a woman of quiet strength and moral conviction. I can still see her worn black Bible on the kitchen windowsill.”
We visited Grandma often, our favorite place away from home. Fleeton was small, as in one road that made a loop at the end of the peninsula. It was a place where grizzled men in overalls left home to work on fish boats. Often gone for days at a time, their women tended the houses and gardens and raised the children in their absence.
Rounding the last bend in that road to Grandma Daisy’s was like stepping through the magic wardrobe into Narnia, except for the mythical beasts.
The closest thing to talking animals in Fleeton were Grandma’s chickens who literally squawked their heads off when she picked up her ax.
Fleeton was wonderfully behind the times when it came to indoor plumbing and electricity. At home we never got to brush our teeth in the backyard in our pajamas and spit on the grass. Or bathe with a basin of water, or wee in a bucket at night. The same mother who acted ashamed of me when I was a horse galloping through the neighborhood at home laughed out loud when I ran through the marsh grasses with the salty wind on my face. Fleeton was a vacation from strict routine and my mother’s close scrutiny.
Growing up with relatives who loved me as much as my parents did had not prepared me for Cousin Jimmy. Nothing could have. I was twelve the year my mother’s nephew came to live with us.
It was evident from the beginning that Cousin Jimmy was no ordinary relative. It wasn’t just the way Mom was tearing through my old bedroom like the cyclone from The Wizard of Oz, scrubbing walls, beating rugs, and washing curtains. I had seen her prepare for visiting relatives my entire life. When she reached into the cedar chest and retrieved her treasured heirloom bedspread, I knew Cousin Jimmy was special indeed. I hadn’t seen those colorful embroidered flowers since the night we hosted our church’s visiting minister and his wife. When she placed a vase of freshly cut lilacs on the old chest of drawers, I said, “Boy, you’d think Cousin Jimmy was the Second Coming!”
“No, this is his first visit.”
Biblical humor was wasted on my mother. When it came to religion, she was deadly serious.
“What’s he like?” I had never met Cousin Jimmy. He was a grandson from Grandpop’s first wife and had grown up in another town. Mom’s next statement said it all.
“Your cousin is the first college graduate in our family! And he’s going to be a schoolteacher!” She made it sound like he was the president. I knew it was going to be a long year.
Then she muttered something under her breath. “He’s probably still a little peculiar.”
Now this got my attention because ours was a house of rules, and Mom had just broken the most important one: Thou shalt not criticize a relative. Or, as she was fond of saying, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all!”
There were other rules. They might not have been chiseled in stone, but they were right up there with the Ten Commandments, and I knew them by heart. Thou shalt not skip church or Sunday School, for instance. There were exceptions, of course. If you were dead—or completely paralyzed. I got a special dispensation when I had scarlet fever and there was a quarantine sign on the door.
One of Mom’s rules was directed straight at me. Thou shalt pay attention in class and do thy homework.
Even Topper had one: Thou shalt stay off the furniture!
Sometimes rules collided, like these two: Guests in our home will be treated with respect at all times and, Thou shalt not use crude language. When this happened, my mother would have to choose which rule to honor. Once when Aunt Mary and my cousins were visiting from the country, we played 500 Rummy around the enamel-top kitchen table with Topper at our feet. During the game, my cousin suddenly sprang from the chair and waved her hands in front of her face.
“Peggy, your dog just farted!”
Now fart was considered a crude term. It could sound like a fart and smell like a fart, but in our house, it was gas. Topper didn’t fart. He passed gas. Aunt Mary was twelve when I was born and had been calling me Fart-Blossom for as long as I could remember (when her big sister wasn’t around). For a while, I thought Fart-Blossom was my name.
Instead of admonishing a guest in our home for using crude language, Mom merely raised her eyebrows and ushered Topper out the back door.
“What do you mean, he’s peculiar?” I asked my mother.
“Cousin Jimmy’s just a little different, that’s all,” she said, leveling her gaze at me. “But he’s a good boy and will be treated with respect while he’s in our home! Won’t he?” It was more a threat than a question.
I’m not sure what I expected of the recent college graduate and soon-to-be schoolteacher, but it wasn’t the skinny, sickly looking specimen we picked up from the bus terminal that summer afternoon.
“I have a low resistance and weak sinuses,” our cousin explained as he unpacked a vaporizer and bottles of tonic and vitamins.
Jimmy’s skin had a grayish pallor, similar to what the dog threw up after foraging through the neighbors’ garbage. And he was the fidgety type, with his feet in constant motion even when he was sitting.
Worst of all were the frightful sounds he made as he cleared his throat and sinuses—noises that would have gotten me sent from the room. Even my mother was not prepared for such drama that first evening Cousin Jimmy joined us for dinner. We had made it through Dad’s prayer and were well into our meatloaf and mashed potatoes when Cousin Jimmy laid his hand to the side of his nose, tilted his head, and honked like a barnyard goose during mating season.
Mom, who was self-control personified, had a low startle threshold. She dropped her fork and grabbed onto the table as though we were having a magnitude 7 earthquake. When I erupted in convulsive laughter, more from shock than anything, she shot me a warning frown, as if I had any control at all. My sister exhibited amazing control. But I knew what was happening behind the napkin covering the lower half of my father’s face.
Just as I was getting a grip on myself, another mighty honk erupted, and the entire table vibrated. I knew I would be on thin ice, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Jimmy,” I said, “you snort like Mr. Sippel’s hogs at feeding time.” Sure enough, my mother’s eyebrows shot up like a rocket. Even more shocking than those barnyard sounds was the fact that Cousin Jimmy seemed entirely unaware. His face was without expression, as innocent as Topper’s when he was farting after feasting on the neighbor’s garbage.
I tried not to laugh; I really did. But everything seems funnier when you know you shouldn’t laugh. On more than one occasion, I was excused until I could get control of myself.
Of course, my mother was ready to accept anything from this college graduate and soon-to-be schoolteacher and, truth be told, we gradually became desensitized to his eccentricities.
There was nothing I liked about our peculiar visitor. He was an unwelcome intrusion in our home. But in fairness to Cousin Jimmy, I was twelve that year and mad at the world. A living, breathing horse had been yanked from under me, and I missed the furry coat and muzzle nuzzling against my neck. I missed the sweet smell of clover hay in the barn and the odor of my jeans after riding bareback.
Ordinarily, I took out my resentment on our neighbors, sneaking outside after dark and throwing stones onto their roofs or ringing their doorbells and running off. I even overturned the occasional garbage can and threw rotting tomatoes at passing cars. Finding reasons to hate Cousin Jimmy was like shooting fish in a
barrel.
There were two things in my cousin’s favor: my mother was now preoccupied with gourmet meals and extra laundry (which gave me more freedom to run amuck), and we now had dessert every night.
Evenings, I looked forward to locking myself in the bathroom with one of Dad’s Lucky Strike cigarettes. Sitting on the toilet seat blowing smoke through an open window (and coughing) couldn’t compare to sitting on a Thoroughbred, but I found it weirdly gratifying—that is, until the college graduate began monopolizing our only bathroom with long, therapeutic, steamy baths.
“Steam opens the sinuses,” he’d say afterwards, vanishing down the hall in a towel, chased by a cloud, while I danced a jig outside the bathroom door with a cigarette in my pocket.
Before long, the bathroom wallpaper peeled off like dead skin after a bad sunburn.
No matter what I said or did, I couldn’t turn my mother against him.
“Look, Mom, Jimmy’s steam made the bathroom wallpaper fall off,” I’d say.
“Oh, I’ve been planning to brighten those walls with a coat of yellow paint, anyway,” she said.
When our record player disappeared from the music room and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies blared from my old upstairs bedroom, Janet and I both complained.
“Jimmy is bringing us culture,” Mom said.
Dinnertime had all the ambiance of a group therapy session with Dr. Freud weighing in on my shortcomings.
“Peggy’s going through that awkward stage.” Or, “Peggy needs to work on a more refined smile.” He even went so far as to say, “One day, Peggy might develop some grace and poise like her sister.”
My mother hung on his every word as though he were some Old Testament prophet.
One evening after Dad had finished grace and Jimmy was cutting his roast beef, our star boarder asked if he might have a glass of wine. “Not only does red wine complement meat—it’s a proven fact that it aids in digestion.”