A Penny a Kiss

by Judy McConnell

  Dr. Werness paid no attention to my body contortions. “How was school today?” he asked, but I hardly heard him. He could have said “Little girls deserve to be murdered,” and I wouldn’t have known the difference.

  If a cavity was small, Dr. Werness drilled it with no pain-killer because it took only a few seconds. A trillionth of a second was too long. That day five cavities were going to be filled, so Dr. Werness wheeled over the gas machine and the nurse placed a foul smelling rubber mask over my nose and strapped it tightly around my head in a suffocating grip.

  “Just relax. This will be over in no time. Sneezy is waiting for you.”

  The nauseating smell of nitrous oxide crept into my nose. Sometimes this was the last thing I remembered as my eyes clutched desperately at the crust of cloud passing outside the twelfth-story window as I went under. But today, as sometimes happened, the gas did not render me completely unconscious. I could still see the blurred form of the dentist looming over me and hear the screech from the throat of his drill as if in a dream, could feel the needles of pain pressing into my raw tooth and through a network of nerves deep into the far reaches of my body. The cool hand of the nurse rested on my arm like a wet flipper.

  At long last the mask was peeled from my face. The smell of sour gas lingered and my throat felt as if it had been sandpapered with brillo.

  “All done!” Dr. Werness exclaimed and smiled crookedly. He was as relieved as I was. I shuffled out listlessly, silent, and numb. Dr. Werness told me he would see me in a few weeks and to set up another appointment with the receptionist. He must be mad! I told Mother the work had been completed until next year, but the receptionist stepped in and set up another appointment in two weeks.

  As we went down the elevator and out the revolving doors to Ninth Street I could hear the screeching sound of a jack-hammer down the corridor. A shudder went through me as I felt the sound echoing in my mouth.

  Once outside I experienced a surge of relief. It was over . . . for now.

  Chapter 4: Family Dynamics

  Trying to reconstruct family dynamics back in those early years is like trying to build a sod house out of crumbled dirt. The memory is selective, releasing only bits and pieces, and I fear the dark parts leap out and block the rest. But I will attempt to describe how it was for me, as best I can, within the limits of my perception.

  I was needy. Whatever it was I wanted I didn’t have. I was accident prone and I was what Mother termed surly.

  Dad kept repeating, “THINK. STOP AND THINK.”

  Meals were combat zones. I refused to eat. Dinners pivoted around the food on my plate and the dour little face hanging over it as I pushed the peas around with my finger. The family doctor insisted I eat spinach; Dr. Spock said I was begging for attention. As much as Mother tried in her own way to give me whatever I wanted, it was never the right thing or enough.

  Anything that could go wrong made a beeline for my door. I didn’t remember what I was told. I was late for piano lessons. I broke my glasses. I put a long scratch in the new mahogany dining room table. I lost track of time while meandering in the woods. I always seemed to be coming haphazardly in the back door, leaves stuck to my feet, while the others were going out the front, dressed up and purposeful.

  The truth was I didn’t like anything. I hated surprises; they threw me into a shocked uncertainty. I drooped around like a basset hound. When people asked me why I looked so glum I reacted with fury. What was everyone so nosey about? I was not feeling bad. I just hated everything.

  Since the problem was either with my parents or with me, I decided somewhere along the line to choose them. That way I could imagine that I deserved to live.

  Faced with so many failures, I lost my voice. The exuberance produced by my high-strung energy caused too much grief. I learned to clam up, close down, and internalize. I began to feel deprived and helpless. Then came the anger. Anger directed above all towards the one who I was sure was the cause of it all—my mother.

  Ours was a love-hate relationship. After enduring the violence of her own childhood, in the form of Granddad Fought’s tyrannical battering, all she wanted was peace and quiet. Dealing with me taxed her abilities. She hadn’t a clue. She indulged me at every turn, and to Harold’s annoyance I rarely heard the word no. In his eyes I got everything my own way, and I don’t know if he ever forgave me. If things went too far and I seriously misbehaved, Dad would rush in, beating the room with his voice.

  I knew Mother hated me by her glee when I mispronounced a word or when I explained to her friends that a barracuda referred to a bear that had given birth to a cub. Once I came downstairs with a letter I had composed to a magazine editor and meticulously copied onto a sheet of linen paper. She read it aloud and burst out laughing, amused at the pompous last sentence that she repeated, her voice carrying into the next room: “If you will take care of this business as soon as possible, we will consider the matter closed.” Mother found this hilarious. When she told her friends about my letter they joined the laughter. As I stood in the shadows of the stairwell, listening while she repeated my words, hot streams of embarrassment surged through my veins. I realized there was nothing I could do to make up for my failure as a human being.

  I learned to keep my mouth shut.

  My emotional swings and moods grated on Mother’s nerves. For the sake of harmony we weren’t to argue, weren’t to stir up trouble, and weren’t to mind anything. Mother hated confrontation, and disturbances disappeared into the pool of good taste that surrounded her. Everyone was expected to keep their internal struggles to themselves and their differences private—nothing was to darken the glow of happiness shining within our home.

  It drove me crazy that I never knew what was going on, whether the answer to something was yes or no, or how anyone felt about anything. Looking back, I think a price was paid for this drive for harmony. Without feedback there was no way to test the reality of my perceptions or judge what worked. Without wrangling in the open, there was no way to learn how to resolve conflict in a constructive way.

  To boost my self-esteem my parents gave me compliments and exaggerated ideas of my importance. But to identify the vibes in play around me I needed the truth. I needed to be told straight on what was up and what was down and not be left hanging in no-man’s land. I would have to find out who I was later, through painful encounters in the real world.

  In later years I was able to see Mother’s perspective. Her determin­ation to maintain a cheerful, upbeat atmosphere in the household was on one front a gift, bestowed with strength of purpose and self-sacrifice on her part. She wanted us to be happy.

  Luckily I was not Mother’s entire life. She was the epitome of southern charm. People warmed to her assured manner, expansive good looks, graciousness, and intriguing southern drawl. She adored having fun. At parties her usual reserve fell away and she became outgoing and playful. She had a way of tilting her face to the person she was talking to and laughing in unison as their eyes met. She moved through a room with confidence. If a chatterbox threatened to imprison her, she would gently deliver the perfect cut-off remark and slip away gracefully.

  As I look back, Mother led a dream existence. She watched her diet, exercised, and napped afternoons. She dressed impeccably, visited the beauty parlor every week, and drove her yellow late-model Camaro to an array of bridge games, luncheons, parties, dances at the club, and charity performances. She traveled throughout the world with Dad, antique shopped in New York City, and of course golfed. After they retired to North Palm Beach for the winters, she played eighteen holes of golf, swam in the Turtle Beach Club pool, dined at the club house, and took daily walks around the compound. Throughout all this she was adored by a husband who adhered to the straight and narrow and gave her whatever she wanted. Juanita Bradford led a good life.

  Except for me.

  * * *

  Dad did
n’t seem to mind my outbursts as much as Mother, but he took his job as disciplinarian seriously. One fall Saturday when I was about nine, he sat in the living room reading the afternoon Star. Mother was rattling dishes in the kitchen and watching swarms of leaves swirling to the ground like dead butterflies. All at once there was a rumpus from upstairs. Dad rattled his paper and resumed reading, but before he’d read two lines there came a cry, sustained this time. When the cries grew louder he jumped up and dashed up the stairs. He found me standing in the hall peering through a small box-sized opening, and from the other side of the wall he heard the sound of sobbing, mushrooming off and on into screams.

  “What’s going on here?” he demanded.

  The sobs subsided, the door flew open, and Susan stood there, under pants around her ankles, chest heaving.

  “She’s peeking at me through the window,” she wailed. “She won’t let me go to the bathroom. She’s teasing me. She says I look ugly.” Susan stood on one foot whimpering, and peeped at Dad through wide-spread fingers.

  A pass-through door from the hall into the bathroom had been too neat to resist, especially after I discovered the extent of Susan’s modesty. The eye-level opening, the size of a medicine cabinet, held two rows of supplies and could be opened from either side of the wall. One day I discovered that the view angled directly on the toilet.

  Dad glared at me sternly. “We value privacy around here, missy. I’ve told you before to stop badgering your sister. This has to stop.”

  I can’t honestly say I felt remorse. Didn’t she take everything I ever got? She broke the beaded necklace on my American Indian doll and stained its leather dress. She snuck in my room and walked off with things I treasured—if I didn’t like it neither did she—and then flew into the arms of our parents, where she was welcomed with accolades and smiles.

  Dad bade me fetch a stick from the yard. I knew what was coming and returned to the living room flushed and reluctant. Mother had the water running in the next room. I walked over to where he was sitting and watched him lean over and flail his arm back and forth, snapping the rough bark against my bare legs. Whap! Whap! Whap! The humili­ation hurt more than the actual stings.

  I slunk up to my room, shrunken, determined not to bawl. Flinging myself on the bed, I stared at the bookcase across the room containing titles like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Lad, a Dog, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, all of the Little House in the Prairie books, Sunstar and Pepper, Scouting with Jeb Stuart, Little Women, Rosemary by Josephine Lawrence, Nancy Drew, and King Arthur and His Knights. I felt calmer as the familiar titles drew me into their comforting worlds. In these stories, I was transported into living homes and became caught up in the characters and their excitement and grief. I identified with their dreams, experienced the glories that illustrated the triumph of decency and justice. These accounts filled me with high ideals—unfortunately, they didn’t help me deal with the vagaries of everyday relationships.

  Not that I had any relationships to work on. My purview was obedience and compliance. Dad ruled; he took charge and made the big decisions. He commanded a business world that expanded far beyond our single house, a world we knew little about. He was smart, not scatter-brained like Mother and me. I was convinced that there was nothing he couldn’t accomplish, and that no Olympian god could overtake him.

  I feared and worshiped my father from a distance.

  Among his friends “Brad” was well-liked. Handsome, in a non-assuming Spencer Tracey sort of way, he won people over with his affability, a regular guy with a modest, down-home manner, embodying the values of honesty, conscientiousness, and devotion to family. But his never-quit drive overpowered everyone else in the family.

  He was only happy when plunged into a project. Weekends he worked in the yard, and I hung around just to be in his company. Under his direction, I raked leaves, stuffed them in wicker baskets and piled them on the burning leaf pile along the gutter. We were not allowed to tackle more complicated jobs. Dad preferred to do things himself; then it would be done now and done right. Harold and I were failures at handy work. When we talked him into letting us paint the porch siding he brooked no slack. Perfection was pursued with a driving impatience. In those early years, there could be no slip-ups. Bricks had to be laid in exact linear order. Expensive tools had to be returned without a mark. Paint splotches were not tolerated, and the inevitable mishaps had to be obliterated up to the last drop. There was no time to tolerate a learning curve—there were only so many hours in the day and each one required its share of accomplishment.

  We learned to stay out of his way.

  Saturday mornings Dad and I drove to the Minneapolis Farmer’s Market and returned with a bushel of tomatoes, a crate of fat succulent peaches, and five dozen sweet rolls he’d found on sale. “Gracious, how will we eat all those?” Mother protested. He liked to be economical and think big.

  Occasionally, I accompanied him to the twentieth floor of the Roanoke building. His office walls were hung with photographs of men standing or sitting around a shiny oblong conference table, dressed in dark suits and ties. Except for variations in height, they all looked alike—unsmiling businessmen with a purpose. I poured myself a drink of water from a mahogany serving table. Dad showed me how he dictated letters for his secretary on a newly acquired Dictaphone, a dictation machine that cut a mechanical groove into a wax cylinder while the speaker spoke into the cupped end of a long tube.

  The entire floor was lined with rows of desks surrounded by enclosed offices that ran along the sides of the walls and provided window views of the city. While Dad worked in his office, I scooted up and down the aisles on a wheeled desk chair, pushing the floor with my feet to gain as much speed as possible. I snooped through desks, fingering the pencils, yellow legal pads, and fountain pens in the drawers, and I wondered what it would be like to sit at one of the wooden desks and take care of consequential business matters.

  Once Dad’s secretary—who besides dictation ordered theater tickets, went out for aspirin, and bought anniversary gifts—took me to Snyder Drugs on the first floor for a coke. She treated me like a queen, smiling at me and seeing to my needs. I was transfixed by the atmosphere and the continual bustle radiated by the office. I felt important just being in a place where professional people performed crucial activities that made the world run. I couldn’t imagine being bored here.

  * * *

  My parents didn’t argue. That is, not around their children. They were members of a mutual admiration society. My dad adored Mother and she, in her roundabout way, catered to his every wish and applauded his every stride up the ladder. At least that’s how I saw it. Until one time a midnight scene occurred that shook me to the toes and allowed me glimpse, for a few harrowing hours, the realities of the adult world.

  It happened late one night when a sharp voice cut through the wall between my parents’ bedroom and mine and punctured my sleep. Behind it I heard the sound of sobbing. My eyes flicked open wide and I raised my head from the pillow, unable to believe what I was hearing. A male voice continued from the other side of the wall, muffled but the tone was clear. It was stark rage.

  There was no way I was going to go near the source of this inferno, but I couldn’t lie there and do nothing. A sense of impending danger propelled me up, and I went out into the hall. Standing before the door next to mine, I leaned in close. The sounds grew more distinct. Pressing my ear against the wood frame, I struggled to make out the crush of words.

  “How could you!” my father’s voice blared. “It wasn’t as if you didn’t know! And don’t tell me . . .”

  A burst of sobs cut off the rest, and I recognized the high tones of my mother. My arm floated to the door like it had a life of its own and gingerly pushed it open. The air held a sense of menace, and I stood frozen to the floor.

  The minute Mother saw me she let out a cry. “Oh, he’ll kill me!�
� It was the voice of a caged animal.

  I stared at the scene before me. Dad stood in his pajama bottoms on one side of the four-poster bed and Mother, wearing her familiar pink lace nightgown, cringed against the bedpost on the other, with her feet planted wide apart, weeping. I had stumbled onto a drama that was being unleashed that had nothing to do with me. The room had transformed from its usual refuge of quiet tranquility, where Mother spent her afternoons, filled now with turbulence. I felt my limbs my shaking.

  Gripped by a sense of unreality I moved into the center of the room. All at once I felt needed and experienced a strange sense of certainty. Mother ran to me, clutching me in her arms, and together we crept out of the room, past Dad who watched us, his chest heaving and a worried look on his face. Clinging together, the two of us headed straight to my room and crept into my bed. A few minutes later I could feel Dad climbing in on the other side of me, gingerly so as not to jar the mattress. No one uttered a sound. The three of us lay stiffly side by side, rod-still. Once Mother shifted, burrowing her head in the pillow next to mine.

  I lay on my back staring into the darkness. The shock vibes that hung over the bed were so sharp I was afraid they would slice my little world into pieces, like chips off a whirling chain saw.

  This conflict contradicted the usual loving behavior between my parents. I was used to the embraces and smiles when Dad returned from work or the coziness as they snuggled over itineraries for a trip to New Orleans, or one of their West Virginia jaunts to the Greenbrier Hotel. At the sight of Mother, Dad would drop his serious expression, and his face took on a light, playful look. He loved to tease her. One afternoon the three of us had been signtseeing in Manhattan and were riding back to the hotel in a black taxi.

  “Brad, this oriental sculpture was such a bargain. You see the details on the lion’s face. This is not a cheap piece,” she told him peering into the oversized box and stroking the lion’s nose with her finger.