Girl Walks Out of a Bar

by Lisa F. Smith

  “But I don’t want to go to another elective. I hate sports,” I protested, knowing that this was futile. The two of them just shook their heads at me and I fought back tears.

  That night, I explained my plight to my mother while she made dinner for my brother, Lou, who was six, and me. “I know you don’t want to do it, but it’s good for you to try other things,” she said, stirring powdered Ore-Ida mashed potato mix into a pot of hot milk, her gold chain bracelets jangling. “And get your hand out of the cookie drawer! Not before dinner!”

  Lou and I heard the groan of the garage door opening, and that meant one thing: Dad and his ’72 Chevy Nova were home for the night! We squealed as we rushed to the door that connected our living room to the garage.

  “DAD! DAD!” We both tried to simultaneously hug and climb up him as he crossed the threshold, still in his suit and carrying his tennis bag. I always wondered why he wore a suit to work when all he was going to do was take off the jacket so he could wear the black robe.

  “Yessss. What’s going on, kids?” he said, messing up our hair and trying to high-step beyond the little koalas that clung to his pant legs.

  “Dad, the idiots at camp don’t want me to go to Indian Lore anymore because they think I need to try something else. I hate everything else. I hate that camp,” I said.

  My dad smiled. He hadn’t even had a chance to put his bag down. Then he looked to my mom for help. She shook her head and pursed her coral-glossed lips. “Listen to your mother,” he said with a laugh. That was his escape line that signaled the death of the subject. Then he headed for the stairs and said, “I’m going to change out of these clothes.” With Dad upstairs and Mom busy stirring instant potatoes, I sneaked into the bread drawer and ate two Yodels.

  Back at camp I accepted defeat and searched for the next least physically challenging elective. Although it involved more time on the plake, canoeing appeared to be the best option. It didn’t require real strength or coordination, and it didn’t seem to involve competition or any of the athletic world’s other countless opportunities for failure. Over in a designated area of the plake, canoers practiced in long aluminum two-man canoes. If at least eight people showed up on a given day, I would be out of the water lounging on the grass around the plake at least half the time. It wasn’t Indian Lore, but I liked the numbers.

  But to my surprise, I wasn’t a bad canoer, so I elected canoeing every day. I attributed my non-disastrous learning curve to the fact that canoeing involved more strategy than strength. I worked with a partner, Tim, a nerdy brown-haired boy about my age. Together we learned the most advanced canoe maneuver: tipping the canoe over, righting it, and climbing back in from the water to retake control. We practiced this move over and over, getting every step just right. Before long, I was instructed to man the back of the canoe and lead the “tip overs,” the role assigned to the better canoer in each pair. Me. The “better canoer.” Incredible.

  At the end of the summer, Tim and I were chosen to perform in front of the entire camp at the Water Show, the big performance on the plake featuring the best people in each water skill. “You should be excited! This is a real honor!” Dina said when she heard the news.

  “Yeah, it’s great. I can’t wait,” I lied, gnawing my fingernails. The dread in my stomach told me that no good would come of this. I thought about faking illness on the day of the Water Show—the only problem was Tim, who was excited to show the camp what he could do. I couldn’t ruin it for him. Dear God, how long until ice cream break?

  The day of the Water Show was sticky hot, and I was made even stickier by the Native American gear and headdress that Dina had convinced me to wear. “It’s perfect!” she had gushed. “You know—the whole Indian theme with the canoes … you’ll be so authentic!” Standing at the side of the plake, I turned to look at the hundreds of kids scattered along the grass. I felt dizzy and leaned against a tree.

  A lifeguard with a bullhorn on the plake’s diving platform narrated the show. The counselors cheered and shouted at their protégés from the sidelines, like revved up Little League parents with everything to lose.

  When it was our turn on the plake, my stomach rumbled and swirled like an old washing machine during its last days. The feathers in the headdress caught some wind and I worried that the whole thing might blow off. Tim and I climbed into the wobbly canoe, and my bare feet felt colder than usual against the metal bottom of the boat, but we paddled out without incident. The sun shimmered off the water, and the sky was the brilliant blue that every child chose from the Crayola box when asked to “draw a picture of a perfect day.” After a few turns and glides by the crowd, we waved to them, smiling, and I thought I might be enjoying myself.

  Then came the big move. I lifted my paddle to signal to Tim that we were ready for the tip over. “One! Two!” I called out and we rocked the canoe with our hips, increasing the momentum until we were ready to flip it over. “Three!” And “sploosh!” we were in the water. It was colder than I expected, but the rush of excitement was bigger than the cold. We each made our way under the canoe, and, just as we’d practiced over and over again, we lifted it straight up in unison. Gently, carefully, we placed it back on the surface of the water. Then we set our oars in the boat and climbed back in. I felt my face break out in a huge, genuine smile. I thought, this must be what it’s like to hit a home run.

  Tim and I smiled at each other in acknowledgement of a job well done, and then I turned to look at the shore and enjoy the applause. But wait. What was that? I didn’t hear applause. I heard laughing. And I saw pointing, kids pointing and rolling in the sand in an exaggerated way. Oh my God, I thought … they’re laughing at us! Oh my God! Those idiots thought we had accidentally capsized our canoe in front of the entire camp. And I was wearing that stupid headdress!

  I hated the morons. I hated them all. I could see that the camp leaders were trying to help, explaining that we had just performed a difficult trick, but it was no use. The joke was already on us.

  That night, my mother watched from the couch as I dramatically reenacted the catastrophe. In the middle of our den, I swept my arms back and forth to show our canoe paddling and then I rolled on the floor to demonstrate the reaction of the crowd. I looked like someone playing charades where the answer was, “Successful Canoe Maneuver Leads To Abject Humiliation.”

  “Oh, Lisa. That’s terrible,” she said. “What can I do to make you feel better?” She scratched my back as I climbed on the couch and put my head in her lap.

  I looked up at her with hopeful eyes, “Can I have two bowls of ice cream tonight?” Normally, I was allotted one standard size bowl of my favorite, vanilla fudge.

  My mother looked a little disappointed. “You haven’t even had dinner yet. How do you know you’re even going to want a second bowl?” she asked.

  “I know,” I said. “I just know.”

  Even at that age, I understood that my compulsion to eat wasn’t shared by other people I knew. I licked spatulas covered in Duncan Hines Brownie mix and then licked the bowl. I sneaked from cookie jars and hid candy that I could eat later when no one else was around. It was never enough and it was never too sweet. Food, and desserts in particular, just plain made me feel better. Other kids would eat a cookie at recess and run out onto the playground, excited to have the freedom to jump around. I would eat a cookie, sit in the grass, stare at the sky, and wish I had a dozen more cookies.

  At my annual visit to the pediatrician that autumn, Dr. Birnbaum ran through all the checks he performed on me year after year: heart, lungs, teeth, height, weight, immunizations, and so forth, and then began scribbling on my chart. Sitting on the exam table, I amused myself by swinging my legs back and forth and twisting my ankles left and right, pointing and flexing my toes the way I saw gymnasts do it. Without looking up from his clipboard, Dr. Birnbaum said, “If you don’t stop eating, you’re going to be as big as a house.” My extended legs and pointed toes froze in place. His words sent a rush of acid shame i
nto my stomach. I felt a flash of heat up my neck and into my face, and I remained silent with my head held down. The only sound was the crinkling of the paper on the exam table.

  During the drive home was the first time I ever heard my mother use the word “asshole.” “You never have to go back to that asshole doctor again,” she said, as she sneaked glances at the tears streaming down my cheeks.

  I couldn’t look at her, but I nodded. “Can we have Burger King for dinner?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Lou and I were hunched over our Whopper Jr.’s and large orders of fries at the kitchen table when my dad walked in that night. Fast food was thrilling to us, so much so that on that day we hadn’t pulled ourselves away to attack him at the door. “What’s the occasion?” he asked. “We’re eating like Kings on a Tuesday night?” It was his code for Burger King. If we had Dairy Queen for dessert, we “ate like Kings and Queens,” which was a real treat.

  “Yes,” my mom said. “Lisa had her physical today, and that Dr. Birnbaum is a nasty man.” As far as I know, that was her only comment to my dad about the incident. And if they discussed my weight when they were alone, neither of them ever let on. Mom tried to monitor my nutrition and sometimes talked to me about eating habits, but that was about it. Dad never said a word.

  My comfort eating was developing into a big, bad habit, and I knew it. After school my brother would take off to play kickball or tag with the neighborhood kids, but for me after-school time meant free access to food. I knew that spending every afternoon sprawled in front of the ABC 4:30 Movie with a tub of vanilla fudge ice cream and a spoon was only going to cement my status as the pudgy kid. But for those ninety minutes I felt relief as the sweetness melted on my tongue and slid down my throat. I was calm, and it was the closest I ever came to happy.

  My parents were a social couple and social drinkers in the ’70s, and it didn’t take me long to notice that at the parties they threw, the adults became happier the more they drank. People sometimes talked about the fact that my mother’s father had been an “alcoholic,” which sounded like a bad thing, but I never saw anything but smiling faces when booze was flowing.

  Our house was regularly filled with family and friends on occasions like New Year’s Eve, Super Bowl Sunday, and Kentucky Derby Saturday, but even the first day of summer, the anniversary of D-Day, or a full moon offered my parents good enough reason to host another bash. A four-bedroom, traditional center-staircase colonial, our house had the distinction of being the only private home in Bergen County with a regulation-size bocce court. It covered an entire side of our massive front lawn.

  The court was the brainchild of one my father’s oldest friends, whom we knew only as “The Dalai Lama,” a nickname that I understood had nothing to do with Buddhism and everything to do with a piece of headgear he wore one stifling hot day on the golf course. If the sun was shining on a weekend, a party broke out around the bocce court. “Harv!” the Lama announced one fall Saturday when I was about ten. He had walked unannounced into the kitchen from the back patio. The Lama smelled of soap and cigarette smoke as he hugged me. “Lisa! Good day for a game!” He had a booming, gravelly voice thanks to decades of smoking, and when he walked he hunched like a much older man.

  An air of mystery surrounded the Lama; we never went to his house, but he was a regular fixture at ours. Lou and I didn’t know where he lived or how he and our dad became friends, and there was talk of a wife, but we never met her. We heard he did some kind of “accounting,” but he didn’t seem to work for a company.

  It didn’t take long for my father’s friends and their wives to start appearing, old buddies from Lodi, the working-class, largely Italian town where they all grew up. Dad’s parents had owned a candy and newspaper store where he was put to work as a young boy starting at four o’clock in the morning, folding and then delivering the day’s papers. My dad was the only Jew in that neighborhood, the youngest of five kids and the only boy in his family. His buddies from Lodi called him “Meyer Lansky,” and they always greeted each other with firm claps on the back. Our neighborhood had a mix of families with dads whose occupations ranged from banker to butcher, and they all called Dad “Judge,” though he bristled at the formality.

  “What are we drinking?” my dad asked each new arrival. No one ever stood empty handed in our house or front yard.

  Once the game was set up, I zipped into the kitchen to fetch beers for my dad’s friends. But I’d linger in the kitchen because the inescapable smell from the pans of home-cooked lasagna and baked ziti and the fresh bread baked just that morning from “the best” bakery in Hoboken made me delirious. And the desserts!

  “Can I have one now? I’m starving!” I asked my mom as I pawed at the boxes of cannoli and Italian pastries sitting on the kitchen table in irresistible pink bakery boxes.

  “OK, one, just one for now. They’re for dessert!” my mother said. After she put on her oven mitts and carried a tray of lasagna out to one of the folding metal card tables set up outside, I piled four pastries on a paper plate and scrambled into the upstairs bathroom where I ate them behind the safety of a locked door.

  Italian pastries weren’t my favorites because they weren’t loaded with chocolate, but the cannoli and the zeppole gushed with so much sugary cream that they did the trick. I barely tasted them going down as I sat on the bathroom floor with my back propped against the tub, knees up. After I licked my fingers clean, I washed my sugar powdered face and hands, just in case I ran into anyone on my way back down to the party. At the time I didn’t know about the chemical reaction, the dopamine surge that was occurring in my brain thanks to the giant hit of sugar. All I knew is that for a little while I felt relief.

  While the bocce parties were mostly about the food and the games, the soirées my parents threw on occasional Saturday nights were mostly about the cocktails. On one such wintry afternoon I helped my father set up the folding metal card table in the den next to the brick fireplace. We threw a red-and-white checkered plastic tablecloth over it to smooth a surface for the bar.

  In a show of heartfelt hospitality, we laid out a full assortment of bottles and garnishes. I was in charge of arranging the booze and mixers, always excited to impress our guests with my bar table arrangements which usually consisted of alphabetized alcohol on one side and alphabetized mixers on the other. And of course I thoughtfully lined up cocktail napkins, toothpicks, sliced and twisted lemons and limes, olives, maraschino cherries, and “good” plastic cups, the clear kind that look frosted.

  Lou and I would peek through the curtains that covered the glass pane on our big wooden front door so that when guests arrived we’d be ready to announce them with great pageantry. One by one and two by two they’d cross the threshold as we bellowed their names in voices and accents befitting a Renaissance festival. Schoolteachers, construction contractors, politicians, housewives, real estate developers, lawyers, and judges all paraded in as my brother and I took their coats with the dramatic flair of a maitre’d at a fine restaurant. There were screeches of recognition to other guests across the room, hair tousles for me, and fake boxing moves for my brother. The air was electric and I jumped up and down as if I were on a pogo stick.

  The women wore hip-hugging, bell-bottom pants or maxi skirts that touched the floor, and as they strolled through the party crowd, they left scent trails of L’Air du Temps and Charlie perfume in their wakes. Several women piled their hair high and accented their flamboyant updos with faux flowers, headbands, or barrettes. Their hairstyles contrasted starkly with those of their husbands and boyfriends who sported “high and tight regular boys’ haircuts” as my dad referred to the military style that he himself preferred. Always swirling over the entire party was a cloud of smoke, courtesy of Virginia Slims and Winston.

  My dad, the evening’s bartender, stood behind the card table offering miniature pigs in a blanket with spicy mustard while his friends decided what to drink. He wore his bartender’s uniform, a special crushe
d navy velvet vest. It was a custom-made piece with his nickname, “Smitty,” etched into the left side in gold piping. I loved how the nickname seemed to hover right over his heart. The gold piping detail continued around the armholes and outer seams of the vest and made it suitable for duty at even the swankiest hotel bar. Whether he was in pajamas eating a bowl of cereal, in a flowing robe while deciding the fates of law breakers, or in a gold-trimmed vest shaking cocktails, I thought my father was the most elegant man in the world.

  Alcohol deserved ceremony. My dad took his role seriously and crafted each cocktail carefully, holding every drink up for inspection with the eye of a jeweler assessing the quality of a diamond. I mimicked him from my position next to the card table, not knowing what I was looking for, but thrilled by the happy ritual of it all.

  I was always curious about how the drinks were made and why they were so important to the drinkers. Why were some of them garnished with a wedge of lime instead of a lemon rind or perhaps three olives speared on a toothpick? Maybe the drinks with the olives were more substantial and called for some actual food as a garnish to help them go down. I wondered if the brown liquors tasted like Coke or root beer and the clear ones like 7-Up. I guessed that the brown drinks, the ones that smelled strong and were sipped slowly, were more appropriate for those in a downcast mood. Even the brown-booze bottles seemed more serious, and the liquid was generally served in smaller doses, either straight up or just over some ice. I preferred when someone ordered a more upbeat drink, like a sparkling, filled-to-the-brim gin and tonic with a floating wedge of lime in the shape of a smile. All of the adults I knew drank—at parties, at dinners, watching sports, during evenings while sitting on summer lawns—and there was nothing forbidden about it. The bottles at home weren’t locked up or stored out of my reach, and there was always beer and wine in the refrigerator.