10
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my country, ‘tis of thee
As a handicapped seven-year-old with a depressed mother, I was numbly adapting to fatherlessness, which I experienced as a vague, lonely, gaping hole in my life. He was not there anymore when I came home from school. Daddy was not there at dinner, or on the weekends. No one whistled in the house or stole candy from the kitchen cupboard, rattling the bag so I’d chase him and our dog, Pluto, would chase me. No one was in the living room hugging Mama. There was no more sitting in his warm lap with white terrycloth bathrobe arms around me while he read the paper; no more the scent of his tanned male skin. Neither was there the considerable presence of his slightly husky body in his underwear, walking around the house during hot weather, Mama chiding him to put some clothes on or close the blinds. The joy was gone from our little family; losing him had decimated us.
Most days after school I’d let myself into the empty house, since Mama was now managing the milk delivery business and its two or three drivers. I’d be upset that no one was there, and that Mama didn’t arrange to be home when I got there. A couple of times I sobbed and beat my fists on my dad’s big easy chair, crying out, “Why don’t you come home?” I meant my mother, but now I see that unconsciously I meant my father as well.
Those tearful times, when I’d see her car turn into the drive, I’d run and hide. I wasn’t playing; I wanted her to feel concern that I was not there, to go through the same ugly sense of endless time being alone with no one to care for me. I didn’t know she already felt that, day in and day out. She found my hiding annoying, and always knew I was either there or at a neighbor’s house anyway. She depended on me to take care of myself, watch TV, find something to do. She may not have seen the pain I was going through, or that my attempts to manipulate her emotions were a cry for help, an act of desperation on the part of a little girl. Or, she did see these things, and felt the best thing was to pretend none of it was happening and just keep daily life moving along. In those days, therapy was only for crazy people. I was a latchkey kid, except that no one in our neighborhood locked their houses in the 1950s, so I did not have the status of owning a key to our house (and never did).
On December 8, 1955, my eighth birthday, I was sick with German measles, a three-week malady, complete with high fever and dreams while awake. I kept experiencing myself walking down a corridor of a hospital with its floor of large green-and-white linoleum tiles—a fever-induced conglomeration of the hospital where I was quarantined and the Santa Monica rehab facility. The floor would in some places suddenly be made of only newspaper, and I would start to fall through, be quite frightened, and then come to my senses.
I told my mother what was happening to me, and she said, “Oh, you’re just delirious,” a new word for my second-grade vocabulary. It was very clear to me what it meant. It’s interesting to me now that the sickness brought forth two of my worst fears: being in the hospital and falling. What the newspaper floor was about I don’t know, except that it represented flimsiness and conveyed a lack of support; I knew that wet newspaper tore easily, having used it for papier-mâché.
I recovered before Christmas, but didn’t have much time to enjoy it: all of Marysville and Yuba City were on high alert throughout Christmas week due to unrelenting rains, and around midnight on the 23rd/24th Mama woke me and told me we had to evacuate, because the over-full Feather River’s levee was starting to give way.
We spent a not very merry Christmas at the Sutter High School gym, seven miles away, where we slept on the floor with a lot of people we didn’t know, mostly from the Yuba City farm labor camp for migrant workers. I think Mama thought this was when I stopped believing in Santa, but in truth, I had recognized her handwriting on tags the Christmas before, the first one where Daddy wasn’t there. I hadn’t told her so she would not be disappointed.
I had received a little red diary with a lock and key the previous Christmas, and I wrote in it regularly. My diary entry for December 25, 1955, reads: “Today we had a flood, for the first time in my life, when I was 8.” I had developed the philosophy already that life was going to be punctuated by a series of huge mishaps. I thought everyone’s childhood, everyone’s life, was full of heartbreaking trouble. No wonder I was drawn to dramatic movies. No wonder when kids got mad at me, I was afraid it was the end of the friendship, or maybe the end of life as I knew it. No wonder I cried easily at harsh words—not that most little girls wouldn’t.
The drivers from our milk delivery business did not know where we were for two days and worried that we might have perished. No cell phones in those days, of course. One of the drivers lived in Sutter, and his wife came looking for us at the gymnasium, aghast that my mother was too proud to ask to stay with them. I had not known we had friends in Sutter and was equally surprised. After that we slept in their sons’ bedroom for a couple of weeks.
Mama went back to the house daily and returned morose each late afternoon. This was not an experience a single mom could easily face, especially while still grieving. She was starting the cleanup, and I kept asking to come back home as well. She told me over and over, “You can’t: it’s too dirty, the house looks terrible, and there’s nothing for you to do. Besides, it will make you cry to see it.”
Finally, two weeks into the process, she brought me back to the house with her. I then could see what “three feet of water in the neighborhood and a foot in the house” meant. I did cry when I entered the house my father helped build and saw the devastation, though it was already partially remedied by my mother’s efforts. I’m sure she had wept more than once, there alone. There was dried silt three-eighths of an inch thick on all the formerly beautiful hardwood floors. Surveying the rest of the house, this seemed to be the thing we could actually do something about. We got down on our hands and knees and proceeded to scrape off the river mud with metal kitchen spatulas, day after day. There was some talk of the silt being a potentially dangerous health hazard, but what else could we do? I remember doing the entire dining room, but maybe it just seemed like I did. At least Mama and I were doing something together.
All our furniture was essentially ruined, though the upholstered chairs were eventually recovered. The hide-a-bed sofa had to be replaced. I helped glue the moldings back on Mama’s inexpensive but precious walnut dining room set, the one that had displayed the spider and Miss Muffet doll just five years earlier. The walls had water marks and dirt a foot up from the floor. All of my toys and belongings that had been at floor level were ruined except for those that could be washed. If they could be salvaged, I helped wash them. Mama had packed my favorite dolls—my little family—into the car, so those were not harmed.
I never bit them again.
I’d felt stable and unchanged for the most part at school since my dad’s death, though perhaps a little depressed. (After the flood, everyone was depressed anyway.) I liked my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Palmer—the same considerate and practical lady who taught Eva and me to use a paper towel for nosebleeds. I also loved music class. Once a week, Miss Allen—a rotund, strange (in our childhood estimation), manly-looking woman with short, kinky, graying black hair—came in to teach us to read music and sing.
I always looked forward to this class immensely. Then, one afternoon, we were singing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and got to the line, “land where our fathers died,” and I looked around the room, immediately thought, I’m the only one in here without a daddy, and started to cry. This was the first time I had had a deep awareness that I was fatherless, and specifically that I was never going to see my own daddy again. For the first time, I was overcome with grief at my loss, though a year or more had passed since my dad’s death.
Mrs. Palmer got up from her desk, came and took my hand, and led me to the cloak room at the back of the class-room—the place where kids were taken for a good talking-to, reprimand, or sometimes a slap; the place where the speech therapist gave lessons to the kids with lisps. It was only coincidentally wher
e we kept our coats, rubber boots and hats, and a few school supplies.
I had never been “taken to the cloak room” before and didn’t think this boded well, but I knew Mrs. Palmer was always my friend. She squatted down so that her face was at the very low height of my own and quietly said, “Now Francine, what’s the matter?”
“We got to that line, ‘land where our fathers died,’ and my daddy really did die!” I blurted out. “Everybody else has a daddy but me!” I started to cry again, tears and sobbing just spilling out of me, the knowledge really sinking in that I would never see my dear, sweet, affectionate, funny, teasing daddy again. Never. That other children had fathers and I never would. That that part of my life was over, and I had only the painful, bittersweet memories of his scent, his arms, his laughter, his handsome face.
“Oh, you’re just being melodramatic,” Mrs. Palmer said.
I somehow instantly got the meaning of this new word. It was condescending, and my crying over my dad’s death was considered to be acting in some way, like on TV, not genuine, and inappropriate. I was so surprised, I didn’t know how to react.
“Now just calm down, stay here in the cloak room, and when the recess bell rings, go outside and play with the other kids.” With that, Mrs. Palmer left me there alone, stunned.
I’d been trying to be as adult as I could about my situation, trying not to be “melodramatic,” and I felt betrayed that Mrs. Palmer was not the warm adult friend I’d thought she was. My behavior must be shameful and childish, I thought, and I should not be acting like a child. After all, I had learned not to be childish already, in all those months in the hospital.
I was confused about how to deal with these conflicting feelings. But I did as I was told: I calmed down and went outside to play, embarrassed to now be a “cloak room kid.” I had not really felt sorry for myself before this, but I certainly felt pathetic now.
I have since forgiven Mrs. Palmer. People are uncomfortable with pain and sadness. They often want it to just go away, and are quick to suggest that others with acute pain or sadness just pretend things are okay and find some semblance of order and normalcy. This, I believe, assuages the feelings of the person who’s uncomfortable, and who may feel helpless to offer any words or actions of relief in the face of grief. There is an undeniable pathos in a handicapped child mourning the sudden death of her father. People also knew the financial hardship this was going to visit upon my mother.
Possibly Mrs. Palmer told my mother about that incident, but no one ever mentioned my breakdown again, and I kept my tears inside for decades.
I cried about the loss of my father again when I was in my forties and doing therapy about my relationships with men and my attraction to those who tended to be unavailable—like my father, though his “abandoning” me was due to a tragedy he could not have foreseen. In therapy, I took the opportunity to cleanse my heart of my loss and look at how it had affected my life. I could finally reclaim my full complement of emotions and no longer pretend I was tough. Nearly four decades after my father’s death, I finally allowed myself to grieve, to let in the real pain I’d been told was invalid. (The invalid girl has an invalid emotion. Too ironic.)
As an adult, with the help of counseling, I imagined that little girl I had been, saw her crying on her dad’s chair and in the cloak room, and invited her into my lap, held her close, allowed her tears. I told her I would never abandon her or judge her. That it was going to be all right now, she no longer had to pretend to be a grown-up. She was part of me, the adult me who saw how difficult it must have been, and she was safe now. But in 1956, I was eight, small for my age, precocious, and once again being forced by circumstance to learn to be a little adult.
After the flood, we ate more macaroni and cheese and hamburger and had fried chicken only on Sunday nights. I am sure that Mama could not run Daddy’s business as successfully as he had, especially since she could not drive a truck or do deliveries. She sometimes took me along when she went to the homes of past-due customers. I see now that this was so that they would see she was raising a handicapped child alone.
Step by step, month by month, we gradually fashioned our lives into a new normal in 1956.
11
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carol (francine) the christian girl
We belonged to the right church for that time. The Mormon hierarchy provided food and other needed goods, shipped in from Salt Lake City, where the tithings of the pious had purchased a tremendous warehouse of groceries and supplies. I’ll say this for the Mormons: they plan ahead and they take care of their own. We were eating Deseret Brand canned and dry goods for months. The Red Cross was also in town providing relief, and either they or the church came and sanded our floors and refinished them and repainted the house, inside and out, in the same white, pink, rose, and ivory colors my mother had originally chosen.
I don’t remember ever attending church until we got firmly planted in our own home on Brown Avenue in Yuba City, when I was almost four. There, our church was just three blocks away, so Mother and I walked on many Sundays, though we were often running late so usually we’d hop in the DeSoto and drive over. (Daddy didn’t come; he was a Methodist, but never attended church anyway.)
The first memory I have of Sunday school is of being in a class with other kids when I was five. The teacher was “Sister” Naomi Henry, who had short, sandy red hair, freckles, and a compassionate smile. Mormons called all adults by “Sister” or “Brother,” as in “Sister Hansen” or “Brother Matthews” instead of “Mr.” or “Mrs.”
“We’re going to go around the room and learn everyone’s names,” Sister Henry said.
“First or middle name?” I asked when she got to me.
She smiled—this was not what she expected from a five-year-old—and said, “First name.”
“Carol,” I told her. And this was true; but no one ever called me Carol. I always felt a little guilty, like I was pulling the wool over people’s eyes at church, when they called me Carol. In a way, though, this was appropriate, since in the long run this was not where I belonged. I did feel that when they called me Carol, they were addressing the Christian polio girl, and when people called me Francine, they were addressing the whole polio girl. So my relationship with the church was a little schizy from the get-go.
One Sunday, Sister Henry told us, “Today I would like each of you to make up a story and draw pictures on the blackboard to go with your story.”
We were near the Christmas season, so I had that in mind when it was my turn.
I walked to the blackboard, fairly nervous about the daunting assignment, and picked up the chalk.
“Once there were some trees in the woods,” I began. “Most of the trees were tall and straight and perfect.” I drew some symmetrical fir or pine tree outlines. Everyone was patient while I took my time. “It was Christmas time, so people came to chop down the trees and take them home.” I drew a smaller tree that leaned to one side and had a misshapen trunk. “But there was one little tree that was lopsided and crooked, and no one was picking it to take home. It was sad that all the other trees were going to someone’s house for Christmas. Then one day, right before Christmas, finally someone loved it and took it home to decorate with lights and ornaments!”
I drew a few ornaments on the tree. And then I sat down, pleased that I’d been able to think up a story.
Sister Henry’s face was tender with understanding when I finished speaking. Her look told me that I’d described myself unintentionally, and I was a little embarrassed. She said, “Thank you, Carol, that was a very nice story.”
I always gravitated to underdog stories where the least likely but most sincere characters somehow won out, and that’s all I’d done—make up a story like you’d see on Lassie, on TV. I hadn’t known where I was going with it until I started drawing on the blackboard.
Here’s what I loved about church: First, dressing up. I loved to look nice, like the other girls. Second, seeing my church friends. Thi
rd, gazing at the picture of “Jesus” at the front of the chapel. (I was at the church for Daralyn’s mom’s funeral reception in 2016, and they had taken the picture down; I’ve been musing on why this might be.) This was Jesus with the light brown hair who looked like some of the hippie guys I eventually hung out with in the 1960s and 70s. In the painting, he was gazing up toward his Heavenly Father. He was so handsome. How could you not love him?
The fourth thing I loved was the music, the singing. There was sometimes a performance of Handel’s “Messiah” at Christmas, which I loved. Talk about your alleluias.
What I didn’t love about church was sitting still with Mother. But the music led me to a greater appreciation of classical and especially choral music. Music was definitely feeding my soul early on and was inspiring to Christian Polio Girl. All those voices raised up to God! When a large group of people sings one beautiful song with harmony and dynamics, it truly is uplifting, making it easy to believe in divinity. Singing is also a heart-opening and physically exhilarating experience and creates a feeling of unity with the other singers. If the church had done nothing but sing and left out the sermons, I might have stuck with them a whole lot longer.
At some point in my childhood, I asked that question most people who believe in God eventually ask: “Why does God let bad things happen?” For instance, if there is a God, why did he let the Nazis kill all those Jewish people?
Not a Poster Child Page 8