The wedding is held in a large sitting room. The wide-plank colonial flooring is fastened with pegs. A local Unitarian minister officiates, expounding on a theme—selected by Paloma—that emphasizes universal love and peace. As maid of honor and the only bridesmaid, I process in first, to the strains of the theme song from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey playing on a tape player on top of an antique baby grand piano. There is no pianist.
Paloma has picked out (and her mother has paid for) all the wedding outfits. Balancing a flower wreath on my head, I make my way carefully down the center aisle wearing a colorful floor-length hippie skirt and a white embroidered peasant blouse. The minister wears an ordinary suit, but Paloma has dressed Gary in a mango-colored East Indian tunic and baggy trousers. Paloma enters after me wearing a long, flowing dress, tie-dyed in rainbow colors and covered with block-printed peace signs. Daisy chains trail down her waist-length red hair, and she carries a bouquet of jaunty wildflowers. As she swaggers down the aisle at an exaggeratedly measured bridal pace, I can see she’s having a hard time trying not to burst out laughing.
After the ceremony and a rushed reception with punch, cookies, coffee, and a many-tiered chocolate wedding cake topped with two white doves, Paloma and Gary drive off to a local motel to spend their wedding night.
The next morning, I get a phone call from Daddy. All the other guests have left except Paloma’s older sister, Phoebe. Paloma’s mom is in the kitchen, cooking our breakfast, when the phone rings.
“Lissa, it’s your father.” Paloma’s mom motions me over to take the call.
“When are you coming home?” Daddy’s voice sounds urgent, almost panicked.
“Paloma and her husband are going to drive me up to Maryland day after tomorrow, when they get back from their honeymoon.”
“Lissa, I need you here. I fell the other day while Spence was at work. I’d like you to come back right away. I’m not feeling so good.”
Now I’m panicking. I can’t just abandon him. “I’m so sorry, Daddy. I’ll come home as soon as I can.”
I try to explain the situation to Paloma’s mom and Phoebe. “I need to get home as soon as I can. Could someone drive me back to Maryland later today? Phoebe?”
“I think,” Phoebe says, “that you ought to wait until they get back. Leaving without saying goodbye to Paloma would be pretty rude.”
Overwhelmed by guilt about neglecting Daddy and wounded at the thought of being rude, I burst into tears. Paloma’s mom, concerned about my father’s health, calls Paloma at the motel. Paloma, who knows me very well, rushes back with Gary, and they drive me home that very afternoon.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I AM THAT I AM
WHEN Paloma and Gary drop me off in Maryland, Paloma says, “I love you, Lissa,” and gives me a strong hug at the back door. Gary backs the car around, ready to head back down the driveway, and honks. Paloma hops back in the car and waves, and they head back to Virginia. I guess they want to salvage as much of their honeymoon as they can.
I rush inside the house to make sure Daddy’s okay. I find his bedroom door closed—unusual during daylight hours. I tap on the door. No response. I put my head against the door and hear a deep, solemn voice coming from inside. I enter the room slowly. The yellowed paper window shades at both bedroom windows are pulled down to shut out the fading afternoon light.
Daddy is reclining, propped up against the adjustable back support of his Morris lounge chair. A record turns on a portable record player, newly placed across from Daddy on his white marble dresser top. A droning voice intones, at regular intervals, “I am that I am, I am that I am….” From his chair, Daddy repeats those words.
Though I am standing behind Daddy, I can see his reflection in the large mirror that rises nearly ceiling-high, a looking glass opening the narrow bedroom into a duplicate world in another dimension. Daddy’s eyes are half-closed. His hands are relaxed, palms up, on the chair’s broad cherrywood arms. I tiptoe over to the dressing table and read the label on the record jacket: Overcome All Pain with Self-Hypnosis.
“I am that I…Lissa! I’m so glad you’re home. I was worried about you.” Daddy grabs my hand and squeezes it tight in his as I walk back past his chair. “What are you going to make for supper? I sure did miss your cooking.”
I shrug. “Guess I’ll have to take a look and see what’s in the pantry.”
“You’ll find a new recipe book on the top shelf. Adelle Davis. Maybe you could try one of her recipes for supper.”
“Okay, Daddy. I’ll see what I can do.”
“You know, Lissa….” Daddy grabs me by the arm as I start to leave the room. “I’ll be ninety-one at the end of this month. So, if I eat right, I could live another nine years. I could live to be a hundred. I’m determined to do that, Lissa, so I can be around long enough to see you and Spence grow up and get a good start in life. I don’t know what I’d do without my little girl to take care of me. I had to make my own bed while you were gone.”
As I head downstairs to start supper, I feel a weariness like old age bearing down on my shoulders, threatening to collapse my spine. I make a grocery list for the missing ingredients in Adelle’s stew recipe. She’s big on adding yeast as a nutritional supplement.
As winter approaches, Daddy invests more heavily in health foods. He buys a juicer. He takes me with him to visit an old Greek man who makes a special fermented yogurt health drink and bottles it himself. The drink is called lozak, and the man who makes it has a disheveled mane of white hair and an ageless face. Thick black nose hairs bristle in his nostrils, and very long, curly gray hairs protrude from both his ears.
Wednesday becomes Daddy’s juice day. I help him chop up beets, carrots, celery, an avocado, and a variety of other raw vegetables. He feeds them into the top of a heavy-duty white blender, and out flows a purple concoction that he refrigerates and sips throughout the day. It gives him a purple mustache that he forgets to wash off.
Friday is Daddy’s weekly fast day. He begins by squeezing a dozen fresh lemons into a large bowl and pouring the juice into several glass gallon jugs of water. He saves old glass root beer containers from the Twin Kiss ice cream shop for this purpose. Then, from morning until sundown, he eats nothing solid, sustaining himself with glass after glass of lemon water. He breaks his fast on Friday evening with a light fruit salad (which I make for him), a mug of buttermilk, and a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, laced with a raw egg and four ounces of milk.
Daddy subscribes to a magazine published in Yucatan by a group of mystics who study the Mayan calendar. He begins to study charts and investigate Mayan calendrics. He learns about the 26,000-year astronomical cycle, the precession of equinoxes that ancient Mayan priests charted with the naked eye. He begins to watch the skies himself, to determine the timing of the world’s transition to a more advanced stage of development.
“We’re moving toward a time,” Daddy tells me, “when humans will be able to communicate telepathically, and be in harmony with all times, all places. Seers will be able to watch for signs and wonders of this approaching era. When the winter solstice sun aligns to bisect the Milky Way, this new age will awaken.”
I’m not sure how to react when Daddy conveys this esoteric knowledge to me, so I just listen, watch the skies with him in the backyard, and wait for this time to come. I ask Spence what he thinks about all this.
Spence is just home from work, still dressed in one of the fashionable three-piece suits he wears these days. He shrugs. “I don’t think it’s scientifically accurate. If you want to study the movements of the planets and the stars, you can use my old telescope, but you really need a much stronger lens, a more powerful telescope, maybe something like ‘Big Eye’ at Palomar in California.”
When I tell Daddy about Spence’s advice about using a telescope, Daddy just shakes his head and says, “Magnification won’t help. It requires an enlightened subtle eye, an eye with a very sensitive vision. Scientists can’t replicate that.�
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Though the event occurred more than a year earlier, it’s not until November 1969 that the My Lai Massacre hits home. The evening news breaks, bringing disturbing TV footage into America’s living rooms.
I watch with Daddy as viewers across America learn that a U.S. Army company called Charlie has killed between 200 and 500 unarmed civilians in a hamlet near the northern coast of South Vietnam. On the morning of March 16, 1968, a platoon of American soldiers entered My Lai as part of a search-and-destroy mission to flush out Viet Cong guerrillas. The soldiers were advised by army command that anyone found in My Lai could be considered Viet Cong or active Viet Cong sympathizers. Instead of guerrilla fighters, the soldiers found unarmed villagers—mostly women, children, and old men.
The misguided attack was alarmingly brutal. Villagers were raped and tortured before being killed. Dozens of inhabitants, including young children and babies, were dragged into a ditch and executed with automatic weapons before the massacre was halted. America was left with an indelible blemish on its conduct in the war.
As Daddy gets older, he asks me to do more personal things for him. Once a week, I shave his beard. Daddy stretches out flat on his back on the sofa. I spread a towel over his chest, tucking it under his shirt collar like a bib. From the kitchen, I fetch a basin of water, heated on the stove until it’s plenty hot. I dip a fresh washcloth into the basin, wring it out, then press it over his beard to soften it while Daddy lies back with his eyes closed, enjoying being taken care of. When the washcloth begins to cool, I remove it, and lather his beard with a shaving brush and cream. I try to be very careful, but once in a while, I nick one of those tricky spots—like where the jawbone juts out like a knob down below his ear. “Oops! Sorry, Daddy.” But he doesn’t complain.
When the job is done, I douse him with his favorite aftershave. I dump the soapy water out behind the house. Sometimes, when I come back, he’s fast asleep, snoring. I cover him up and look around to see what other chores need to be done. There’s always something. I smile when I remember what Paloma’s mom says about being a housewife. It’s kind of like a mantra for her. “When in doubt, do dishes!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
LATE BLOOMER
THE Vietnam War is at its height when Alice and Grace, two sisters who are friends from high school and church, invite me to become a USO hostess. They’ve been going to the USO for about a year now, hoping to find husbands.
“Why don’t you come with us, Lissa? It’s a lot of fun. You’ll meet lots of cute guys there. Good husband material.”
I’m not really looking for a husband, but I would like to get out of the house and have some fun. When I ask Daddy for permission, his response surprises me.
“Maybe you can find yourself a nice husband there. You can get married and live here with me. You can still take care of me, but you’ll have a man to support you after I’m gone.”
Daddy checks out the USO. He speaks on the phone with one of the elderly lady chaperones, and is relieved to learn that the USO keeps a careful eye on all its hostesses. Besides, the sisters’ mother—whom Daddy calls “a good, decent woman”—is letting her daughters go there.
So, on a warm evening in March, I walk into the Baltimore USO for the first time. I’ve just ridden into Baltimore with my two girlfriends. Alice finds a cramped parking space in a lot just off an alleyway next to the Odd Fellows Hall, a brick masonry building at Cathedral and Saratoga Streets near the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The USO occupies the northern section of the Odd Fellows building. At the northeast corner, I.O.O.F. 1891, 1931 is chiseled into the cornerstone.
Following behind Alice and Grace, I pass beneath a brownstone entryway through a set of modern glass and steel doors. The front lobby opens onto a large dance hall. We step down onto a polished wood dance floor. From the high ceiling far above us at the center of the room, a lighted, mirrored glass ball slowly revolves. A stage looms at the opposite end of the room; a bank of pool tables flanks the dance floor on the left.
Alice and Grace take me downstairs with them to the ladies’ room, where they check their hair, fix their makeup, and make sure their slips don’t show.
This basement level is a lounge. Here, besides the men’s and ladies’ rooms, are a bank of old wooden phone booths, wobbly card tables and folding chairs, lounge chairs, a couple of TVs with rabbit-ear antennas, some end tables with lamps and ashtrays, a couple of Gideon Bibles, and a bookcase filled with tattered paperbacks and back issues of Reader’s Digest.
When I look in the ladies’ room mirror, I think I look pretty good, but I feel a little self-conscious. I’m wearing a fuchsia crepe dress I borrowed from Alice. It’s printed with big, gaudy flowers, and it has a low ruffled collar that is open to about four inches below the bottom of my neck. It has a tight skirt that comes in close at the waist and hugs my hips and butt.
“You look sexy, Lissa,” Grace says.
I’m not sure how to handle that. When we walk back upstairs, I notice some guys looking at my butt. At least, I think that’s what they’re looking at.
Upstairs one of the soldiers is acting as a disc jockey, playing records on a turntable. At first, I take a seat on one of the folding chairs lining the walls, and watch Alice and Grace dancing with some of the guys they seem to know. Then the DJ announces a dance contest.
“Okay, now, folks, guys and gals, I’m gonna turn up the volume and play you some Iron Butterfly, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” all seventeen-plus minutes of it. So grab a dance partner, get out there on the dance floor, and do your best to keep it rockin’ all the way through to the end. The winning couple gets a pair of movies tickets.”
The music starts up. Organ, drums, electric guitar. It’s rhythmic, but also loud and aggressive. Right away, a guy comes over and holds out his hand. “May I have this dance?” He seems nice, very friendly.
“Well, I don’t really know how to dance to this music.”
He smiles and sits down next to me. “Me neither. How about I just sit this one out with you?”
“Okay.” He seems relaxed and open, which makes me feel more at ease.
The music pulses on, and it’s hard to have a conversation.
“Name’s Jack.” He leans in close to my ear so I can hear him.
I lean over toward him and say in his ear, “Hi, I’m Lissa.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Lissa.”
The music goes on and on. Sometimes it gets discordant, and the lyrics are eerie, but sometimes the words sound oddly ethereal to me.
“What kind of music is this?” I ask.
“I think this qualifies as hard rock. I heard the title of the song is really a slurred version of “In the Garden of Eden.”
All I can think to say is, “Wow!”
The song finally ends, and my friend Grace and her partner, who have been swerving their hips and gyrating up a storm the whole time, win the contest.
The next song is “Sweet Caroline.”
“May I have the pleasure?” Jack says.
I’m a little nervous, but Jack is so charming and has such good manners, I say, “Okay,” and he draws me out on the dance floor.
The beat keeps slowing down and speeding up. The couples on the floor seem to be having a hard time deciding whether it’s a fast dance or a slow dance. Jack and I start fast, kind of skipping and swaying back and forth separately. But when Neil Diamond starts to sing “Hands, touching hands. Reaching out, touching me, touching you,” Jack pulls me in close, and I find myself melting into the beat with him.
On the way home with Alice and Grace, I sit in the back seat, my eyes closed, still hearing those sweet lyrics, “Warm, touching warm, reaching out, touching me, touching you. Sweet Caroline, good times never seemed so good.” Dancing with Jack was even better than dancing with the wind.
I see Jack a few more times at the USO. Then he ships out to Vietnam, and I never see him again.
In the spring of 1970, I enter the annual Miss Baltimore USO
contest. It’s an unusual time to be entering a beauty contest. Women’s liberation is gaining momentum. Just two years earlier, women gathered from all over the USA to protest the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Feminists were upset because beauty pageants paraded women like “cattle,” emphasizing a woman’s physical appearance over other qualities. They felt that these contests made women—those who didn’t measure up to certain superficial standards—feel inferior. To show their independence, women tossed bras, curlers, girdles, high heels, eyebrow tweezers, and false eyelashes into “freedom trash cans.” Some women burned bras to protest being “pushed up” and uncomfortable; some began to wear no bras at all.
I enter the Miss USO contest anyway. I need to prove something to myself. I’ve been what you might call a wallflower all through high school—no dating, no real boyfriends. Now I need to prove that I am attractive, that I can win something—something of my own and on my own. To me, it’s kind of like pretending, taking a role in a play. I always wanted to be in the plays at school, but Daddy would never let me stay after school to try out. So now I’m going to go for it!
Long, straight hair is in now. Before the contest, I put my hair up on gigantic rollers to stretch out the curls. I comb my hair out long and straight, parted in the middle. It goes way down below my shoulders to the middle of my back.
As I line up onstage with sixteen other contestants, wearing a super-padded bra and plastering my most winning smile on my face, the voices of female activists rumble around in the back of my mind and jeer at me.
First, we file one by one down and back a floodlit runway, modeling a street dress. I got my dress on sale at Ward’s; Spence gave me the money for it. The dress has red and white stripes, very patriotic. It’s short, just above the knees. With the white heels, it shows off my legs and ankles. I remember how Daddy used to say he turned me on his lathe, and that I was perfect. Well, I guess I’ll have to see if the judges think he was right. I’m relieved we’re not asked to model bathing suits.
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