“No,” I piped. “I just have a pair of singing canaries.”
Our first winter in Connecticut was the coldest the East Coast had experienced in fifteen years. The gale blowing off the frozen lake made it a chilling fifteen below zero. Ten-foot pointy icicles hung form my shingled eaves like frozen fringe, and solid snowdrifts blocked the doors from opening. I hadn’t noticed before, but some of the logs had spaces where the sealant had cracked, and the icy wind came howling through. It was a bona fide winter wonderland.
While my landlord was wintering in Florida, yachting around the keys, my son and I were snowbound at the North Pole. I didn’t know when I rented the place, this was basically a summerhouse, a rural vacation spot where New Yorkers came up for the summertime holiday. We may as well have been holed up in the far corners of Siberia, as there wasn’t a soul to be seen for miles. Still, I wasn’t deterred; I simply caulked the cracks with Fixall and stapled sheets of clear plastic on the outside of the windows.
There were all sorts of wonderful treasures in the attic. I dragged out an old chest stuffed with patchwork quilts from the 1800s, an old Mission dresser, and an oak Stickley bench, which I’ve lugged into the present. There was an ornate iron bed for Damian, and a huge pirate’s trunk to store his toys in. The heavy mattresses were stuffed with horsehair, which Perry insisted was the finest of stuffing.
Just when I thought I was getting the hang of winter, Fairfield County was besieged by yet another blizzard. After a freezing ice storm, the pines, brush, everything around, all looked as if they’d been dipped in a fragile coat of glistening glass. The wind howled like the moors of Wuthering Heights, and all of a sudden the power along with the furnace conked out, leaving us without heat and in silent darkness. I remembered a mound of stacked wood out in the back, and proceeded to build my best Girl Scout-style fire. At first the blaze caught on so well that the fames started lapping the Christmas cards right off the granite mantel top. The cabin began to fill with dense, gray smoke. I ran and doused the flames with pots of water and had to rip down my makeshift plastic storm windows before I could get the windows open to let the smoke out.
There we were, my little son and I, in the pitch dark. We were in the middle of nowhere in a raging blizzard with the windows wide open and flapping in the wind.
I soon learned how to open the flue cover and became an expert at wielding an ax. If the wood was damp, instead of blowing the flames and me into hyperventilation, I’d reverse the hose on the vintage Electrolux vacuum and stoke the kindling into glowing embers. It had taken twenty years, but I had finally gotten my dream: I had my three-year-old baby, and I was becoming quite the country girl. The only problem was, I was also next to penniless.
Out of a newspaper ad I found a babysitter and got myself a position as a cash register girl at the local Caldor chain store. Caldor was roughly two miles into town, and each morning I’d maneuver the wet, slippery snow in my Corky platform sandals, wearing them with knee socks to keep my legs warm. The concept of real winter clothes hadn’t yet occurred to me. When I discovered a simple pair of fur-lined gloves would keep my chapped hands from freezing off, it felt like Christmas.
The free Connecticut PennySaver paper was my salvation and lifeline to the outside world, and living in the woods, I definitely needed a car. I found a Volkswagen that looked pretty good for $150. The sellers were quite friendly and definitely had themselves a live one with an inexperienced California girl. I wasn’t yet savvy enough to check for things like rust and erosion from the salted roads, or if the heater even worked. All I knew was the bug started up okay, and the radio sounded good. I paid my 150 big ones, and was on my merry way back to Pocono Point, when I must have struck a slushy pothole. Out of the dark night heavens, it felt as if someone had tossed a brimming bucket of icy cold water straight into my face. The frigid road water had splashed up from the floorboard and completely drenched me. By the time I got home, my waist length hair was literally frozen stiff. I lifted up the floor mat and found a gaping hole the size of a crater; I could see clear to the gravel on the ground. The entire floorboard was rusted out, and the sellers had hidden the damage with cardboard and a flimsy rubber mat. I’d been had.
With a babe in arms and zero cash to spare, I was desperate for dependable transportation. I placed a simple ad in the PennySaver: WANTED: FREE CAR. I got several responses and chose the person with the Pontiac, because he lived in the nearest town and the car had an automatic transmission. I hired a taxi that took us the ten miles to New Milford, and there was my new car, sitting out in an open field. It was a silver bomb, the size of a boat, but in amazingly great shape. My good Samaritan, Mr. Forrester, was a nice-looking gent who appeared to be in his late thirties. He said he’d planned to donate the car and was happy I could have it. He seemed almost apologetic that some of the silver paint on the hood had lost its luster, but pointed out the new tires and the well-kept pearly gray leather interior.
When I had placed the ad, I fully expected to get a car, but now that I was actually here I could barely believe my good fortune. This was an amazing car, fully loaded with power steering, seats, windows, the lot! When I put the headlights on, a glowing silhouette of the Pontiac Indian head lit up on the dash in blue. As he signed the pink slip over and handed me the keys, I felt almost humbled. This was my very first car of my own. All I could think of to say was, “Thank you very much, I don’t have words to express how much I appreciate this.”
Driving off felt a little strange, but with a touch of merriment, I said an out-loud thank you to God, then looked over at my son on the cushy leather bench seat.
“Ask and you shall receive,” I said.
Working at Caldor department store wasn’t exactly a financial windfall, and it was incredibly dreary. After taxes the babysitter’s cut was more then I was earning. I also didn’t like being away from my son eight hours of his waking day. I needed an occupation that would allow me to bring my little boy along. I found another ad in the PennySaver that read: “Make three hundred dollars a week in your spare time, call Bob.” Bingo! That was for me.
The guy on the phone had a somber-sounding diction, like he was alone in a dismal, dimly lit room, but I decided to let him come to my house and give me the power pitch.
Mr. Bob was as mysterious as I’d imagined. He was an older man in his sixties, neatly dressed in a well-cared-for, dated brown suit and forties tie. His felt-brimmed fedora made him look like Philip Marlowe, fresh from an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It turned out he was the Fuller Brush Man. Not exactly what I had in mind, but I was close to bankrupt and decided to give it a go. He gave me a stack of order sheets and Fuller Brush catalogs, and I was ready to conquer Fairfield County.
Not yet twenty-one, I’d gone from living with Mick Jagger to door-to-door broom sales, and was actually doing quite well. I drove the Pontiac with little Damian by my side and canvassed the historic neighborhoods of Ridgefield. The first week I sold five hundred dollars’ worth of mops, brooms, and boar-bristle hairbrushes. Nothing compares to the feeling of knocking on strangers’ doors trying to interest them in a mop.
I was excited to get my first check, which turned out to be a lofty fifty dollars. Fifty dollars, how could that be?
Mr. Bob said, “Yes, ma’am, that would be ten percent of five hundred.”
Hmm, back to the PennySaver.
Next I found old Mrs. Wheeler, a Southern matriarch whose black cook, Olive Hercules, had died after forty-five years of service. In her Southern drawl she said she could tell by my voice that I wasn’t colored, but to come over anyway and they’d have a look at me.
Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler were lovely old Southern racists who lived in a colonial mansion on a horse farm in ritzy Ridgefield, Connecticut. Their land was so extensive the street was named Wheeler Road. The Wheelers took an instant liking to me and to my cherub, and hired me on the spot. As Mrs. Wheeler showed me around the mansion, she pointed out the two bathrooms on the parlor floor.
; “This one is for the servants,” she whispered. With her hand hushed to her lips, she said, “But we’d like you to use our bathroom.”
Over my twenty years on the planet I’d heard about racism but never experienced it firsthand. I felt strange agreeing to something so absurd, but went along with her archaic custom and used the appointed facilities.
Besides myself, there were Alice and Franklin, the Wheelers’ long-faithful black maid and trusted butler. Both wore crisp uniforms, and Franklin even wore white gloves while he served the meals I prepared.
I was a pretty good cook, but certainly not a professional chef. At the Wheelers’ home, everything had to be made fresh and from scratch. Alice picked apples from the tree in the garden, and I used Heather Daltrey’s fail-proof recipe for apple pie. Each morning the Missus would submit a menu, which included fresh grilled chicken or braised beef for Binky, their pampered miniature pooch.
Today the lunch entrée would be the Southern lamb pie topped with warm buttermilk biscuits. The only biscuits I knew how to bake came from Pillsbury, packaged in a blue-rolled container. I panicked and started searching the pantry for a fragment of a cookbook. On the top shelf in the very back I found a dusty old recipe book. For a brief moment I was relieved, until I realized that the edition was from 1892. Baking soda, yeast, lard? I didn’t have a clue. My biscuits came fresh out of the oven with the consistency of toasted dirt clumps, which Franklin delivered in an ornate sterling silver dish. Soon after dinner was served, the antiquated electric bell system summoned me from the kitchen. Mrs. Wheeler wanted to see me. She complemented me on my lamb “pah,” and kindly mentioned that the biscuits were a little hard. Sadly, the lumps in my Southern chicken pan gravy were not much softer.
As it turned out, it wasn’t my cooking that endeared me to the Wheelers. They delighted in having Damian and me for a bit of company. Edward Wheeler loved tooling around on his tractor with young Master Damian perched on his lap. They’d ride up to the stables to feed carrots and sugar cubes to the horses. Miss Elenore was getting too old and frail to handle the big Lincoln in the garage and enjoyed having me drive her to the shops in the village. I was used to speeding around in the cushy Pontiac, but in the Lincoln, and before seatbelts, just a top on the power brakes caused her fragile, light body to surge off the seat. I’d put my arm out across her chest like Mimi used to do when I was little, and push her back in the soft bench seat.
There was a mysterious little two-story residence on the far end of the Wheelers’ property that Elenore wanted to visit.
The cottage looked like a place in heaven. There was an inviting pair of Adirondack chairs flanking the entrance, and it was surrounded by a lovely garden afresh with wildflowers and newly blooming narcissus. The main room was a wide-open space with a comfy cabbage rose-covered sofa. In the corner sat an impressive grand piano laden with framed photos of a pretty dark-haired young woman. There were trophies, blue ribbons, and pictures of horses everywhere. It was the real deal Ralph Lauren paradise with the odd, still feeling of ghost town. The upstairs bedroom was full of light, with a four-poster bed, slanted ceiling, and dotted violet wallpaper. It was just heavenly. Elenore told me this house had been her daughter Jennifer’s home. She’s been killed in a horse-riding accident twenty years ago, at the age of twenty-one. I was the same age. Elenore and Edward had talked it over, and wanted Damian and me to come and live in the cottage, be part of their family.
This was all too amazing to be true. I could have the sweet parents I’d always dreamed of, and in return they’d have a daughter and the grandchild they’d dreamed of. It was a life-changing decision, like God was offering me an alternative, an easier path. I’d always thought that before I was born I was given the choice of a temperate life experience or the crash course, so I could get it all in one go. I had chosen the crash course, and always held steady on course. For some reason I wasn’t ready to give up the struggle; I was just getting started. I thrived on the challenge and loved my own little paradise on Candlewood Lake. I declined their generous offer, and they eventually employed a more experienced sauce chef and buttermilk biscuit baker.
Summer was nearing, and the ninety-mile lake had almost thawed. It had been one adventurous winter.
There were times when I couldn’t afford oil for the furnace, and it got so cold my son and I could see our breath in the frosty air. My canaries gave birth to three tiny delicate, dotted-blue eggs. When they hatched I’d tried to keep their featherless pink bodies warm with a light bulb close to their nest, but they didn’t survive the cold and died one after the next. I could have asked Mimi for help with the heating oil, but I was proud, I wanted to be independent, and I didn’t want her to worry about us.
Late in the night I often heard what sounded like an assembly up in the attic. Directly above my bed there were thumps, dragging sounds, and bed-frame coils rebounding. There was also a medley of rummaging sounds in the distance. My heart pounded like a sledgehammer as I listened, trying to decipher sounds in the dark. It turned out to be a family of raccoons, some sprightly mice nesting in the attic, and a few stray opossum shaking down the garbage cans, but I still felt uneasy. I was alone with a child, there were no neighbors, and the nights were as dark as pitch. Being alone in the woods with a child, I felt vulnerable. In case there were any real intruders, I mapped out an escape route. My simple plan was to gather my tot, scramble out the back, and wait by the pier at the lake till the coast was clear. Every jittery night I’d deliberate, should we move closer to town? My heart couldn’t take much more distress. When the sun finally rose, the lake and all its surroundings were so radiant, I’d reconsider and stay put.
One starless night all my imaginative visions were about to become a real-life drama. I heard a car in the distance, its horn blasting, barreling down my private, unpaved road. I kept the lights out and peeked out the curtain long enough to see a dark, four-door sedan turn around and careen up my lawn, almost crashing into my stone steps. When the passenger door opened the interior light came on, illuminating four threatening-looking young brawlers. As they neared my door I was sure I would go into cardiac arrest. No time for my rehearsed escape plan. Instead I ran to the phone and called the sheriff. By now they were throwing rocks at the house, and one of them was banging on my front door shouting, “Open up!”
My front door was pretty sturdy, with a wide wooden plank that slid vertically across and fit into a log casing
Now the intruders were trying to kick the door in, and the wood was beginning to splinter. I bravely yelled out, “You guys better go. I’ve called the police!”
The male on the other side growled,
“If anyone’s called the police, it’s gonna be for murder!”
Hearing that, I just about died on the spot.
The other three were in the distance, swigging from liquor bottles and howling like a tribe of drunken banshees. All I could think of was my innocent little son, who was miraculously still sleeping upstairs in the loft. I tried to reason with them saying, “There’s only one road out; the police are going to get you.”
Thankfully, I heard on of them say, “Come on, man, forget it, let’s go.”
But the buck at the door spewed, “I’m going in.
I was never more scared in all my life. I grabbed the ax that I split the logs with, ready to do battle; at least I’d have the first blow.
I was suited up, ready to take my best shot, when I saw the flashing red lights of a squad car descending down my street. My rowdy road warriors tried to make a run for it, but as I had warned them, there was nowhere to run. The four of them were quickly arrested and sent to the local lockup.
If I was going to continue living in a forest, I definitely needed some sort of security plan. A pistol was the obvious choice, but the mere sight of a gun had always made me feel woozy. If I’d had a gun would I have shot one of those guys?
What I needed was a decoy, I reasoned. A few more cars would help so I didn’t look like a lone sitting
duck. I still had the Volkswagen with the missing floorboards and the luxurious Pontiac. My next procurement was a Humber Super Snipe, courtesy of the PennySaver. The Super Snipe was an English postwar steel-gray tanker with the posh interior of a Bentley. The seats were soft gray leather with a burled rosewood dashboard. There were even quaint fold-down rosewood trays that flipped out on the back of the seats. My last and favorite car was a 1960 British racing green MGA convertible, which inevitably needed a push to get it started. Each day I’d rotate the order of the cars, like people were coming and going, and drive them around the lake to keep the batteries charged. The Pontiac was the most reliable and the best fun.
Near our house were two steep dips in the road. I found that if I got up enough speed on the straightaway, the car would become airborne, then softly land on the descent. When we’d get to that spot my four-year-old would urge me on, “Make the car fly, Mom!”
It was our little amusement. I’m not sure which one of us liked it more.
Toward the end of May, near Memorial Day, I found I actually had neighbors. The city people began to arrive, breathing life back into the handful of seemingly abandoned cottages dotting the shoreline. They were mostly families with kids, and a few older retired couples. My serene, unruffled lake was now jumping with sail- and motorboats, fishing vacationers luxuriating in water-skiing and barbecuing tasty-smelling burgers. It was a whole new summer movie, and my son and I were the talk of the block. I was the eccentric girl on the lake, the girl from Hollywood with an angelic four-year-old. At the communal lakefront I’d chitchat with the middle-aged housewives, who looked at me with suspicious, raised brows. A few of the husbands were a bit friendlier, and sometimes showed up at my cottage door like old stray dogs. I often awoke to find a stringer laden with slippery perch and whiskered catfish flopping around, gasping for breath on my screened-in porch. Damian and I would free the catch, removing the cordage from their gills and gullets; then we’d place the fish in our bathtub full of water and try to revive the poor sods. Half the fish would turn on their sides from the lack of oxygen, but if we kept pushing them around upright, they usually made a comeback, making our bathtub look like a thriving fishpond. Not wanting to appear ungracious for the humble offering, I’d wait till dusk, then load up the live cargo into deep roasting pans full of water. We would carefully slide the pans into the backseat of the vintage Humber and shuttle the fish to the other side of the lake to set them free. Damian and I spent half the summer transporting the slimy catches back to the lakeside. It was our secret undercover operation.
Dandelion; Memoir Of A Free Spirit Page 11