60
She stopped kissing me on Grand Avenue. My mother. At my request. Her leaning over each night and planting a kiss on my cheek began to feel weird. She sensed it, too, saw the way I wiggled and moved and thought of questions to distract her as she approached, so I knew she was thinking of me and not herself when she teased that I might be getting too big for goodnight kisses. I agreed, but was not prepared for the loss that often accompanies the truth. Nor did I expect the hollow flowering in my chest as I heard her make the goodnight rounds, kissing the others, those who still let her.
61
“Shoot me. Shoot me. Shoot meeeee!” I screamed over and over, loud as I could, till someone made a finger into a gun, used a mouth for sound effect, and launched bullets into the air.
“Puh, puh, puh, puh.”
The sound of bullets whizzed my way. I raised my wrists to meet them, deflected them soundly with my tin-foil bands. Wonder Woman wore bands made of Feminum, a magic metal mined only on Paradise Island. But the coconut-scented place and its ore-producing Amazons were a long way from Grand Avenue, so the best I could do was to steal strips of aluminum foil from the kitchen and fold them into wide silver bracelets. I slapped them on my wrists and walked out the door, ready to face anyone, anywhere.
Sometimes the shooter would get fancy and use a machine gun, or two kids would come at me from different directions and shoot me at the same time—so that I had to separate my arms and keep both wrists in perpetual motion to meet the onslaught of air bullets.
But always, I managed.
I’d keep the wristbands on all day. I grabbed a bit of clothesline and coiled it into a loop at my waist. Steph sprayed my lasso gold with leftover bike paint. She was the only one who allowed me to use it on her, which is no great surprise. The lasso was magic, after all; it forced the person in its hold to tell the truth, so naturally, most people avoided it.
But the wristbands had a more general appeal.
It was the wristbands people noticed, and in an attempt at kindness or perhaps a desire to shut me up, they‘d succumb to my request, straighten an index finger, point it into a gun, and shoot me.
I wore denim cut-offs and a white tube top, my hair shimmered from time in the sun and was newly feathered. I applied a coat of white paint over the brown of my clogs, added the golden wings of eagles, and finished them off with red and blue stars. They were my Wonder Woman clogs, and when I had them on I swirled round till I was all satin and power. A superhero. Strong and proud. Capable. Beautiful and protected.
“Shoot me. Shoot me. Shoot meeee!” I‘d scream, till someone finally took pity, pointed a finger my way, and sprayed me with bullets.
62
We’d known Carol Johnson and her kids since I was a baby. She was the one who had been so generous, the one who’d given me the black purse that started my wondering about money. We were no longer living on the same street, but the Johnson family was only a few blocks away, and we made frequent visits to their house on Lamont Place.
Carol had five kids, the youngest from the city bus driver she had recently married. Her older kids didn’t like him, and I lost my own impartial stance the time he and Carol took me fishing at Sodus Point. When I caught more fish than he had, he threw a tantrum on the stony edge of Lake Ontario, and Carol had to soothe him with touches to the back and shoulder. He was so upset about not having more sun-fish flip-flopping around in his bucket than a ten-year-old that he refused to eat any of the cream-filled and glazed we’d picked up from Donuts Delite on the way out to the lake. What an idiot, I thought, as I plopped his uneaten donut into my mouth.
The house on Lamont Place actually belonged to Carol’s father, who occasionally drove in from a nearby suburb to take care of things. The kids were close to my age and they had a yard. It was a recipe for success. We ran and played, sprayed each other with a garden hose, and made up our own version of golf, using baseball bats as clubs. Still, the Johnson kids had a love-hate relationship with me based on their mother’s uncontrollable urge to give me things.
Carol was a giver in general, but for some reason she had chosen me as her favorite recipient. Maybe I let my need show more than the others, or else she still thought of me as the screaming infant from a decade before.
My mother had first met the dark-haired woman while walking down East Main Street. I was just a few months old, and in my mother’s arms. From her porch, Carol called out, asked to see the baby. When she discovered that my mother didn’t have an infant carrier, she removed her son from his, and pushed the carrier toward my mother. My mother put up a good fight, but in the end, it was my small body that settled into the cushioned carrier that day, while Carol’s infant was relocated onto the porch slats.
It had been that way with Carol ever since.
She loved her own children, but taking from them to give to others was what brought her joy. She seemed happiest when she was giving us things—things her kids wanted for themselves, things her family could by no means afford to replace. Sometimes, I took advantage, saying, for instance, loud enough for Carol to hear, how much I liked her oldest daughter’s denim gaucho pants. No sooner had my words reached Carol’s ears than the item was stripped from her child and given to me, while the girls stomped up the stairs.
They spent most of their hate on their mother, but reserved a bit for me. I hung along the sidelines, guilt-ridden but clinging to the transferred object for as long as I could. Which was never long, because as soon as my mother found out, she’d make me return whatever item Carol had given that day.
“But Carol gave them to me,” I’d say while crying, knowing the giving was wrong, but wanting the thing just the same. I cried until my nose ran and my lips swelled. Carol couldn’t bear it. She wrung her hands, whispered for me to stop crying please, and promised to get my things back as soon as she could.
Kara was a social work student at a local Catholic college and had been assigned to Carol’s youngest son as a case study or field practice of sorts. The boy sat in his playpen without making a sound all day. He didn’t talk or cry or coo. Like all things her own, the son did not interest Carol nearly as much as those who were no part of her. He was nearly three and did not play. The social work student was concerned. So concerned, in fact, that she made herself into the backbone of the family, even arranging for the children’s move to their grandfather’s house. Their grandfather and Kara herself were appointed guardians; he would provide the resources, she’d provide the management.
The Johnson kids would have a new home, complete with new clothes and new furniture. I was jealous of their sparkly new lives, but knew somehow that a price had been paid and was cautious with Kara, especially when I saw her eyes closing in on my baby sister.
Carol lost her children quietly, and she and her bus-driving husband moved to another part of town. With the Johnson family disassembled and moved, the house at 10 Lamont Place became available. And when Carol’s father offered to rent it to my mother with the option to buy, she jumped at the chance. And once again, we packed our boxes.
We walked our belongings from Grand Avenue to Lamont Place in open cardboard boxes. Our mother’s car had never been repaired and there was no money for movers, so we pushed our washing machine through the city streets. People stopped and looked and wondered what the hell we were doing. It was the ghetto, but most people could find someone with a truck, or at the very least, a car and some rope. A boy ran up and snatched a sneaker from the box I carried and tossed it high in the air, laughing. Only a little older than me, the boy had no shirt on and his arms were the tight buds of muscle common to city kids. He taunted me with the sneaker, wanted me to chase him, but my hands were full and I was stuck. Other kids watched and wondered whether I’d be fool enough to try to reclaim my sneaker.
“Leave that white girl alone,” someone finally called out. “Don’t make her cry.”
I looked away, my face red. By then, I knew how to let things go and decided to focus on what was
left in my box—a couple of books and few pairs of pants. I wrapped my arms around my remaining belongings, crossed the street, and headed to our new home on the tiny dead end.
part two dead end days
63
By the time we pushed our belongings up Lamont Place, most families were headed in the opposite direction. Anyone with a car got in and pointed it east, toward the comfortable ranches and Cape Cods that had sprung up just beyond the city’s reach.
But to us, Lamont Place was great, a giant step up.
We had our own backyard, big enough to play in. There was room for my mother to plant a vegetable garden, space out front for a line of pink roses, even a big old lilac spreading along the fence line like an overgrown child.
64
As one of her first actions upon our new home, Steph converted the basement into a bike shop. Half of the basement was dirt-floored, and even the half that was floored was dank and cobwebbed. Though space was always at a premium, none of us could find a use for the place. Except Stephanie. She saw possibilities everywhere. She scrubbed the floor, painted the cinder block walls, found an old cabinet to hold paints and a newly purchased soldering iron. To earn money for a few tools and a flat repair kit, Steph raked yards and cleaned out other people’s attics. When her shop was ready, she and Scott Matizzi roamed the neighborhood looking for discarded bike parts—rusted-out frames, ripped up seats, bent handlebars—and carried them back to the shop, where they applied electrical tape and spray paint, finally rolling out shiny, new-looking bikes.
Steph also claimed a corner of the backyard and built a three-room fort with slats carried over from an old firehouse a block away. As builder, she claimed the largest room in the fort for herself, and gave me second choice. She hung curtains and for a while, the fort became a place for secret talk. When we allowed boys in, Jimmy Sulli shared her room, Scott Matizzi mine. Scott and I didn’t quite know what we were expected to do, but tried hard anyway, pressing our clothed bodies together, opening our mouths to each other, wondering the whole time how such cold and clammy touching could ever be such a big deal.
Steph spent the little money that remained after buying bike supplies and snacks for the fort to take the black and white tomcat she’d adopted to the vet after his eye was damaged in a fight. She worried terribly over that bad eye. The vet outfitted the cat with a cardboard collar and for the rest of his life, he was called Funnelhead by everyone, even Steph, who loved him and loyally tended his watery eye.
She rescued strays regularly, hiding them in her dresser when they gave birth, caring for the kittens as best she could, petting them when they were sick, staying by their sides while they died.
65
The dead end of the street was a fenced-in park that sealed off the street like a cork. The weedy lot was used by kids for baseball and running, by men for drinking and fighting, and as access to Goodman Plaza—a square of rundown shops, including a large grocery, a Laundromat, and a furniture store that sold pressed-wood dinette sets to neighborhood women on layaway plans. The pavement in the plaza was smooth, providing a good place to ride bikes and a cut-through to the old Italian bakeries where we bought sweets and pizzas when money was available.
Though I preferred to bury myself under a pile of blankets and read Nancy Drew and Greek mythology all day, Steph was always there, standing over me, pulling me from Persephone on a regular basis. Once she had me in her hold, she’d convince me to ride bikes to Tyron Park or East High School, or to find old sticks and a puck and start up a game of street hockey. Groups of kids headed to the park for sweaty games of baseball and football. We’d spend cool nights playing porch games—Mother May I? and What Time Is It Mr. Fox?—and street games of Spud, Kick the Can, and Hide & Seek.
Girls spent hours twirling bits of rope stolen from mothers’ clotheslines. We drew chalk lines and played endless varieties of hopscotch. An older neighbor would inevitably call the police when games went too late and the laughter failed to die and a blue and white patrol car would skim down the street and ask us to quiet down, which we always did, at least until the police car was out of sight.
We learned to look out for utility vans and police cars. The fact was, most people on the street didn’t drive, so any real traffic came from those who turned onto Lamont Place on accident. We waited as slow coasting cars made their approach. Strangers looked out from windows as if they were seeing ghosts and wondering where the hell they were. We hated having to suspend our play, and stood near the curb, balls set to rest in the dips of our waists, faces wet with sweat, staring into the cars as they finally realized their mistake, screwed up their faces, and turned back around in someone’s driveway.
There was nothing worse than a utility van coming down the street. They weren’t coming to repair lines and wires but, rather, to cut someone’s power off.
Very likely ours.
When my mother couldn’t pay a bill, she’d simply toss it aside, unopened, like a paper boat set upon a stream. As her ability to pay lessened, heaps of unopened mail accumulated on bookshelves and tables. Instead of throwing them away, she’d add each bill to the piles until they grew through the house like a mountain chain.
Utility vans rolled slow and steady toward our house. We’d see them coming, peek out from windows, and pray they wouldn’t stop at our house. When they did, and a uniformed man approached our door, we’d scatter like roaches.
“Shhhh,” someone always said. “If we don’t open the door, they can’t cut off our power.”
This bit of urban lore was true for only a few days. Eventually they’d access the wires from outside the house and we’d suffer the pity of neighbors who donated battery-powered camping lamps and snaked extension cords through their windows and into ours.
We learned to jump at knocks on the door, cringe when the telephone rang. When bill collectors called, I learned to say what they wanted to hear.
“I think she mailed that check out this week,” or “I’ll be sure and tell her to call.”
I became an expert at pretending to write down return numbers. What’s the point, I thought, since my mother won’t be calling them back?
I was caught once. Lying. By a sharp-tongued bill collector whose voice reached through the pumpkin-colored phone mounted to the kitchen wall and grabbed hold of my ear.
“Are you sure you wrote that number down, young lady?”
When I said yeah, she asked me to read it back. I stuttered and stalled; my face went red. I considered hanging up, but lacked the courage. When she asked for my name, I dumbly gave it, and she began to use it. Often, and with authority.
“Let’s be honest now, Sonja, we never wrote that number down, did we?”
My humiliation was thorough. Convinced she could see me through the phone, I felt real nausea as I admitted that I’d never written the number down. Even as I wandered off in search of a pen, I hated her for her tone, her use of the word “we,” the thoroughness of her power over me.
The phone’s ring was not a delight for me, as it was for other preteen girls. Instead a ringing phone was a police whistle, making me stand at attention, pointing at me like a finger.
I never knew who was calling. It could have been Rochester Gas & Electric, Rochester Telephone, or the man who sold appliances out of the back of his van—though he usually came in person to collect payment.
My mother bought a TV from him. Steph had done the math and told her it was a bad deal. She told her she’d be paying much more than it was worth, and was being cheated. My mother knew Steph was right, but was annoyed at her interference. She couldn’t have a child telling her what to do. So she bought the damn TV, and added one more person wanting money we did not have, one more van to look out for, one more reason to hide from knocks on the door.
66
It all came down to the clothes.
Don’t get me wrong, there was never a girl so courteous, so clever, so kind as Nancy Drew. And while other heroines could dodge bullets and fly,
they each had their bad days, cases of raw nerves, bouts of self-doubt, and minor breakdowns. But Nancy, sweet Nancy, was always upbeat.
Nancy lacked a mother, but had no gaping wounds (or at least had grace enough to dress them). There were no prolonged periods of sorrow, no sugared-up memories of a soft face and lilac scent to pinch at the heart.
And while she did not want for resources, she hardly seemed spoiled; any attempt at payment for her services was refused. Nancy was gracious. “You’re kind, but no,” she’d say, and settle instead on a token of thanks; a well-weathered bracelet, a grandmother’s ring.
It was all so simple. So honest. So nice.
But if you took away whispering statues, secret staircases, snake charmers, and the intrigue of words like “incognito”—it always came back to the clothes.
The texture and color. The variety and splendor. The flair and utter packability of Nancy’s nonstop wardrobe got me every time. It was the changing of dresses before dinner, the wearing of pearls and lace, all the talk of full skirts, capped sleeves, and cinched waists. A million and one silks: charmeuse and chiffon, georgette and grosgrain, organza, crepe de chine, and taffeta. It was the swirl and rush of soft fabric brushing against the hard edges of my life as I took in page after page of gossamer and gauze.
And had I been offered her independence, her confidence, her bravery and wit, I would not have turned them down. How could I? The blue convertible, the square-jawed father, the nurturing Hannah, always ready with lemon cake and iced tea.
I could not have said no.
But had I to choose just one thing—select between Nancy’s sleuthing skill or her endless supply of evening wear—I’d have pursed my lips and acted out an internal weighing of thoughts. But in truth, I’d already be imagining myself draped in silk voile.
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