A Penny a Kiss

by Judy McConnell

  There was nowhere to turn. My head drooped and my eyes locked dully on the floor. I wished myself sucked into a galactic hole or buried in a crater in the desert. Or anywhere else! I squeezed my eyes, and they locked into a frozen pose of humiliation. Today I was the star, but the stars weren’t shining. I couldn’t do anything right. I hated it. I hated everything.

  Harold swung his arm in the air. “Here’s the shoe. It was under the couch,” he said with a slight grin on his face.

  I stared at him, incredulous. I’d already looked there. Was this another trick? But there was no time for suspicion. We had to leave, without my white gloves or handkerchief. Dad hastily snapped our picture, showing me morosely holding a corsage of yellow and white flower buds, backed by a heavy white doily, my mother wearing gardenias, and Harold placid in his new tweed suit.

  Once inside the gray stone church we hurried to a forward pew. The scent of sour candle oil drifted over from the altar. When my turn came, I stood at the chancel and the minister sprinkled water on my head from a marble font, with Mom, Dad, and Harold looking on. Far from enjoying the attention focused on me, I felt lost in the enormity of it all and gripped with the sting of an acid stomach.

  From some mountainous distance the notes of an organ bellowed into the chapel like a cornered animal and for a split second the gold crucifix and the black silhouette of the minister’s arms looming just above my head mesmerized me, ground me into a tiny star in the dark pool of the marble floor.

  My parents gazed anxiously at my drooping face, willing my mood to change. When I glanced at Harold standing in the background, he jerked his head away as if touched by a hot wire. I expected him to fly off at any minute out the door and into the sanity of another life. I wanted to fly with him.

  Mother, Dad, Harold, and I on my baptism day—1941.

  * * *

  There were advantages to being a girl. I was pampered and primped in velveteen dresses, and brushed and combed and groomed like Mother. I wanted to be like Mother. At first I was a cute little thing (until I grew gangly and tomboyish). I had a little girl voice and innocent little girl eyes. I was valued. I had a unique place in the family. I was the only girl they had.

  This was not to last.

  Most of the time, Mother was out shopping, playing bridge, stirring pans in the kitchen, or resting upstairs. While she dressed for a social event, I hung in her bedroom, mesmerized by the faint scent of White Shoulders as she glided by in her swishy dress and tiny suede heels with bows, carefully selecting clip-on earrings and matching bracelet. Sitting at the dressing table smiling serenely into the mirror as she brushed her soft brown hair, she looked so contained, so mature, womanly and lustrous. It was clear that even grown up I wouldn’t look remotely like her, never claim her soft gentleness. I would never match her grace and confidence or draw a continual beam of admiring glances. But I didn’t give up wishing.

  One afternoon, I spied a pair of identical mother/daughter dresses in a catalog. The cotton dress had a red, blue and yellow patterned skirt, which was connected to the bodice by a wide elastic waistband in the same colored plaid pattern, running in the opposite direction. Mother was unenthusiastic, but I thought it had a smart, perky look. When she finally gave in and ordered the dresses I was ecstatic. I could hardly wait for our twin outfits and the splash we would make as look-alikes.

  When the dresses finally arrived, it was too late. I was told, in hushed tones, that with a new development in our household Mother was no longer able to concern herself with elastic dresses. She and Dad were expecting a newcomer to the family—a baby. Wow. There was to be another person in the house to play with or even better, to hold and protect. Someone for me to love, they said. Now this sounded tricky. I heard a tone of expectation and wondered exactly what role I was supposed to play. It would be an exciting, happy event—but that was all I was allowed to know. It was a delicate topic, and I would have to wait and see.

  When I learned that Mother’s stomach would be getting bigger and she would not be wearing the dress after all, I thrashed out of the house and hid behind an oak tree. The dream of Mother and me parading hand in hand in our matching red dresses had crumbled to pieces. The safe arms where in lucky moments I drew warmth, the center of life, the source of nourishment was being withdrawn. Once I wore the red dress on my own, but it had lost its appeal. It hung in the closet with the red, blue and yellow colors lost in the shadows like a flag after the celebration was over. The sight of it reminded me how the shape of my little world had changed. There were challenges afoot as I was faced with consequences that displaced my visions of baby allure. The new addition had already, from inside my mother, started to change her and to vary the complexion of our family life.

  When the big day arrived, I sat on the piano bench by the window, peering up the road for a sign of the car. Finally our brown coupe appeared between the stone gates and scooped down into our driveway, and I rushed to the garage door, cries of excitement bubbling in my throat. Mom, Dad, and baby Susan burst out of the car. I stared at the bundle of pink fleece and lace and into a little face so innocent and helpless it made my heart stop. The baby was to stay in the spare room over the garage, which was not a true bedroom since it connected to the hall through Harold’s room. We’d only lived in the Tyrol Hills house a year and it was already too small. It would be six years before we moved closer to town. I wasn’t allowed in the nursery, so I stood in the doorway and peered at the bundle of pink wiggling in the wicker basinet. Mother, wearing a gold bracelet set with four red stones Dad had given her and a blowy peach-and-cream dress with pearl buttons, glowed as she bent over the crib.

  I wasn’t allowed to go near Susan. Week after week visitors passed the growing baby from hand to hand, while I looked on from the dining room, doomed to be forever standing the shadows. The baby needed protection, I supposed, from accidents or foolishness, which Mother seemed to think I would amply supply. In later years I learned that the obstetrician had given strict orders to keep me away from the baby. The fear of germs was rampant—diseases could maim, kill. Visitors had to wear masks and siblings had to keep their mass of contagion at bay. The doctor’s expertise was not to be challenged. The live-in nurse proved to be a strict sentry.

  Mother faded into the nursery. Sometimes, when the house was still and the only sound was the rhythmic slurping of the baby on its bottle, I kneeled outside the door and peeped in, watching Mother’s form in the maple rocking chair, her head curved over the bundle on her arm. The look on her face was tender, her shoulder under the rose-colored robe soft and inviting, and a hypnotizing scent of gardenia drifted from her presence. I imagined myself curled in her lap, enveloped in a halo of brightness, pure contentment. As I pressed against the jamb, a pounding in my throat threatened to explode into my head. When the nurse padded across the room and shut the door the vision flooded my mind for some time.

  After that I kept my distance. The plaid dress hung in my closet untouched, reminding me every time I opened the door how empty and cheated I felt and that it was all this baby’s fault. I spent more and more time in my room reading in bed, where I fell contently into a make-believe existence, and the blaze of jealousy raging through my limbs became absorbed in the pages of far-off reality.

  Everyone said the baby looked like Dad. Mother was pleased. Here was a little girl who wasn’t bothered by things, who was perky and positive and laughed happily. Who remained quiet and content. And who to my annoyance retained the aura of cuteness that accompanies infancy far beyond her infant years.

  Despite my disappointment about the dress, I wrote a two-page story, something about the wonder of babies, especially a baby sister. I vowed I would teach her how to say her prayers and let her know right off that she would never be lonely. Mrs. Moore, who lived next door, praised my enthusiasm and said to guard the piece carefully for my sister to cherish one day. Three months later I ripped it up.
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  For being so tiny, the new baby consumed a great deal of house­hold energy. She filled the room with gushing visitors and the scent of talcum powder, and seemed to require the attention of every adult in the house at all times. As the months passed I stopped minding the “look-not-touch” ban. I had other things to think about—like how to fill an entire afternoon.

  When Susan started wandering into my room, the first thing she did was waddle up on shaky legs and grab whatever I was holding. At first I ignored her, but it became clear that whatever I wanted Susan would get, and whatever focus Mother was able to give to child-raising was beamed on her. Gradually I developed ploys to keep her away. If I heard little footsteps approaching my door and stopping outside, I refused to respond, and when she invaded the living room where I was playing paper dolls with a friend, I herded my friend upstairs to my bedroom. She constantly trailed me about, but I kept my bedroom door shut.

  One day, Susan was in the back yard, carrying our new Labrador puppy draped over her arm by its stomach, with its legs dangling and its head pumping as it uttered little cries of protest. I ran outside to put a stop to this torture, but Mother intervened, insisting Susan have her rightful turn. Banished to my room, I peered out the window and watched the puppy struggle as Susan twisted it around like one of her stuffed toys. I was determined to wait until the puppy was released from its misery, no matter how long it took, my stomach clutched into a ball between my ribs.

  Finally, after Susan became bored, I sat on the bed with the puppy in my arms, and stroked the golden head that smelled of warm milk and acorns. Across the room the plaid dress drooped in my closet. Suddenly I was overcome with anger. This little sister was anything but the bundle of joy I had been led to expect. I felt the well source of my feelings shrivel and a sense of loss threatened to extinguish my very breath. The days of curling against Mother’s warm breast were over—she was busy elsewhere. I would never wear the dress alongside her, and worse I would never be her. Eventually I balled the dress up and stuffed it in a corner of the closet behind some shoe boxes.

  Susan and me in Tyrol Hills, 1946.

  Chapter 3: Into the Woods

  The family moved in 1941 to Tyrol Hills in Golden Valley, and we now resided in a self-contained neighborhood surrounded by thick woods and an air of secluded liberty. I had reached the ripe age of seven.

  I launched with enthusiasm into a new freedom where I could roam at will, safe within the confines of the large yards with brick and clapboard houses scattered among the hills. Since the single entrance to Tyrol Hills was through a stone gate bordering the service road along Highway 12 (later 394), cars passing in and out were local. Safety was guarded by the presence of bustling mothers in each house, keeping watch with eagle eyes at the windows. It was not long before I knew every hill, every door stoop, every shortcut between garages, and how to navigate the trails around the low-lying swamp in the early moonlight.

  Our French provincial house had a large bay window overlooking the back yard, second-story dormer windows, and connecting fireplaces in the living room, master bedroom, and basement. Above the back stoop, a small hatch opened to a metal slot where the milkman inserted glass milk bottles two or three times a week. For the master bedroom Mother purchased an antique poster bed of dark mahogany with a white ruffle running along the top of the four posts and a queen mattress, considered oversized in those days. A matching hourglass dressing table with a stool and mirror and a tall mahogany chest of drawers stood against one wall.

  I loved the house, with its carved woodwork, the surprise angle of the walls, the split Dutch front door, and especially my parents’ unorthodox closet that consisted of cupboards, rods, shelves and drawers built into the walls of a narrow corridor that ran all the way from the master bedroom to the other end of the house. Beyond this corridor was a spare room that was first a den and later converted to a nursery when Susan was born. This room led into my brother’s room, which in turn opened to the upstairs hall, completing the circle.

  We lived on the outskirts of Minneapolis, a short commute to the Roanoke building in Minneapolis. Dad could drive down Highway 12 between stretches of wooded hills where the Prudential Insurance building now stands, past Dunwoody Institute and down Hennepin Avenue and be sitting in his office at Investors Syndicate in fifteen minutes.

  Dad set about improving the house. In the basement he built divider walls for an amusement room, poured concrete, installed paneling, and cut a door to the back yard. Nothing was too big to tackle; if he hadn’t done it before, he’d find a way. The next year he built a screened porch on the back of the house and beyond it a brick barbeque grill. He thrived on the work, the sweat, the accomplishment, and the thought of all the money he was saving.

  House in Tyrol Hills, Golden Valley.

  A coal furnace at one end of the laundry room resembled an old iron frigate. To fill the firebox a truck pulled up to the side of the house and poured coal down the steep chute into a dusty basement bin. Several times a week Dad cranked open the heavy iron door and shoveled crumbled black coal into the blazing red depths. The flames crackled and roared, creating a throbbing ball of fire that scorched your face if you peered too close. When the air was humid the cankerous smell of coal ash seeped up the stairs and through the laundry chute to the above floors.

  After burning, Dad had to cart the ashes outside to be trucked away. Carbon dust settled everywhere, and yellowish particles produced a haze in the air and coated our gray Pontiac with thin ash. Little Bobby Ludwig ran around the neighborhood with a black mask covering his asthmatic nose. Not long after we moved in Dad replaced the coal furnace with a streamlined gas system. Mother acquired a new wringer washing machine, a round chrome tub on legs topped with two abutting rollers. Wet clothing was fed between these rollers, powered by a side handle rotated by hand. Each dripping piece was tucked in the crack between the rollers and drawn through, emerging as a flat mass of folds that resembled a floppy fish. To scrub stubborn stains, Mother used a wavy metal washboard. In summer our sheets, bright off the outdoor line, stretched smooth across the beds, newly ironed and smelling of fresh daisies and ivory soap.

  Mother was welcomed into a close-knit South Tyrol community of like-minded stay-at-home moms who loved to socialize as much as she did. There were continual Saturday night parties, bridge games and barbeques. She and the neighborhood ladies commiserated about overworked husbands, the best dentists for children, and the latest styles at Young Quinlan’s. Mother kept some of these friends for years after she’d moved her social focus to the Lafayette Club and the popular downtown restaurants. With Mother busy much of the time, I was left to my own devices. I didn’t have, in second grade, homework or any tasks around the house. There was really nothing I had to do except obey and not make trouble. I would have much rather operated the washing machine or performed a task that would let me into the adult realm so I could feel a part of something. Instead, I had plenty of time to fret and wander around feeling isolated, to contemplate my lacks and failures, which my parents often found the most compelling thing about me.

  * * *

  Every morning I waited for the school bus at the stone entrance pillars along Highway 12. On frigid days, as the wind whipped through, piercing everything in sight, I huddled behind a pillar, inching round the sides to escape the frigid onslaught. With my coat clutched around my throat, I shivered until I spied the nose of the yellow school bus down the road. I leaped on and stared out the window as the bus wound through North Tyrol, down Glenwood Avenue and across the Highway 100 overpass to a square two-story red brick building just beyond.

  Meadowbrook School held four classrooms: grades one/two and three/four were set across from each other on the first floor, with identical rooms for grades five/six and seven/eight directly above them on the second. Along the front of each room ran a separate cloakroom with an open archway on either end for winter gear and lunch pails. Wh
ile the teacher stood at the front desk teaching one grade, the students in the other grade were bending over their assignment in their half of the room. You could go through a grade twice if you listened carefully to both lectures. Not that anyone ever did, of course.

  They didn’t work us too hard. During my eight years we were not given take-home assignments and there were no organized sports. The boys tossed basket balls into the hoop standing in the school yard, and baseball teams, which included girls, were thrown together casually during recess. The younger students played on the swing set.

  During second grade, I got into real trouble. Every morning Mrs. Bolton had us sing Faith of our Fathers, a hymn that went on and on, verse after verse, until we spaced out—we thought Battle Hymn of the Republic had much more zing. Timmy Olson and I shared one of those beige two-seater desks with lifting lids and a cut-in ink well. Timmy sang out, he loved music. Not only did he play Chopin—his mother was a piano teacher—but he could draw lifelike pictures of animals and created birds of all types with ease. His slender fingers could make a blue-bird come to life on the page, standing on a twig or guarding a nest. I tried to copy his sketches, but my birds didn’t even enter the ranks of the living.

  One afternoon while Mrs. Bolton was instructing the first graders, Timmy’s elbow pressed against mine. He opened a lettering book and between the pages I saw he had drawn a naked woman. I pressed my lips together into a half smile and glanced at him, trying not to blush. He withdrew the book and in a minute slithered it back to me. This time he had drawn a naked man and I had to swallow a giggle. We took turns adding parts to the figures, inventing and exaggerating and stifling our titters as best we could. This went on for several days and no one seemed to notice. We were in stitches, burying our heads in our books to look busy, then slipping out the drawings when Mrs. Bolton was preoccupied elsewhere.