Love, Janis

by Laura Joplin

Janis practiced her scales regularly, with the typical errors and frustrations. Pop hated the intrusion of the raucous noise on his peaceful evenings. He loved piano, but he wanted the tunes of Chopin played by Rubenstein. He complained, and Dorothy agreed to sell the piano to avoid the potential argument in the house.

  Pop also wanted the piano sold because having it around was emotionally painful for his wife. Mom had recently had an operation to remove her thyroid gland. Something happened to her vocal cords in surgery and her voice was changed forever. She would never be able to command pure tones and full volume for singing, though her speaking voice was fine.

  Before Janis was six years old, Mom had two miscarriages. The loss of those babies made Janis even more special to her parents. Finally, in 1949, Dorothy gave birth to a second child, Laura Lee. With my birth, our parents decided to move to a larger home. They located a nice three-bedroom house on a quiet street across from a large pasture on the outskirts of town. The neighborhood was called Griffing Park. Kids were everywhere. The streets were laid out like spokes on a wheel, and the hub was a proud new elementary school, Tyrrell Public School. Four years later, our brother, Michael Ross, was born.

  The Griffing area owed its unique character to an experimental farm started on the site in 1896. It had been part of the town’s initial promotion, a method of demonstrating the soil’s fertility. The operators displayed potatoes, beans, peas, figs, oranges, lemons and limes, citrons, and pomegranates. Eucalyptus, camphor, pecan, and palm trees flourished among oleander bushes and roses.

  Our new house at 3130 Lombardy Drive was a redwood frame home that the contractor had painted white. My father cursed the unnecessary paint on the redwood every summer he lived in the house because it meant he had to spend most of his vacation scraping and painting the house’s exterior. Like most homes in the area, which was only four feet above sea level, it was built on brick piers about one and a half feet high. Port Arthur was subject to torrential storms and regular rising water.

  Our parents planted white gardenias outside the living room and azaleas outside the bedrooms. Purple wisteria grew on stubby treelike bushes, draping abundant and aromatic blossoms like clusters of delicate grapes. A mimosa tree cast its brilliant, feathery pink-tipped blossoms in the spring, followed by a dense layering of brown seedpods that we kids split open. Two conical evergreens marked the front corners of the lot, with a live oak given a prominent position in the middle of the front yard. Mother lined the drive with a changing display of annual flowers and Pop planted a large vegetable garden bordered with day lilies in the backyard. A pecan and two chinaberry trees completed the landscaping.

  Our parents were industrious, strapped for cash but creative. Our living room was set off by a rectangular panel over the couch. It was just a part of the wall that was painted a different color than the surrounding area. Over the years it was framed by wood and decorated with various trivets and brass plates. It had originally been created by a lack of money to buy sufficient paint to cover the whole wall. When there was an uncovered spot, they just called it art. Slowly it became a fixture and also a lesson. What seemed to be a problem was turned into an advantage.

  Janis was a bright, precocious child with a winning smile and a manner about her that charmed people. She had a full face, small, twinkling blue eyes, a broad forehead that Mother always said showed her intellect, and fine, silky blond hair that had a soft curl in it. For special occasions Mother fixed it in ringlets pulled and draped to the side. Otherwise, it was bobbed and left to its own tousled ways. People might have found her features plain if a buoyant spirit and zest for life hadn’t overshadowed her looks. She was a child who liked people. She always made strangers welcome. Her sensitivity to others showed in a considerate willingness to go out of her way to include others in play.

  Janis displayed an independence that pleased her parents when it showed her creativity and originality. At other times they gritted their teeth and were shocked by her blatant displays of disobedience and challenges to their authority. She excelled in the typical young child’s love of testing limits, whether at work or play. When she and her father played dominoes outside in the warm evening air, they would sit, he in a sleeveless undershirt and an old pair of suit pants and she in a playsuit, laying out the dominoes on a wooden stool he had made. When dark descended and the mosquitoes came out in force, they would hurry inside. One night after they had packed everything up and dashed toward the kitchen, Janis dropped the dominoes on the steps. Pop asked her to pick them up before they went inside. She clenched her jaw and defied his request. They sat amid droning and biting insects for a full two hours before she complied.

  In 1946 Benjamin Spock published The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. It became Dorothy’s ready resource. Spock said, “Trust your instincts and don’t be afraid to love your baby. Relax, cuddling is as important as cleanliness.” Parenting prior to Spock had been Victorian. Babies were kept on schedule and there was inflexible family discipline. With Spock, people saw children less as an extra pair of hands for farm work and more as the point of marriage itself.

  As psychology started to make inroads into the average person’s mind, mothers began to see their efforts as essential to the child’s development. Mom spent her efforts stimulating our minds and creative juices while teaching us the social rules. Pop set the final limits on acceptable behavior. He was in charge of the ultimate discipline in the household. If Janis disagreed with Mother’s limits, she often created some sort of scene to force Pop to ask, “What’s going on?” He was otherwise not willing to enter the fray. Most of the time he would support Mother, but not always. When it came time for reinforcing limits, Pop was the one stuck with the job. He did on occasion spank his children, but it often seemed to us that his soul ached more with each swat than our behinds ever did.

  As Janis grew older she began to play with the local gang of kids. We lived in a true neighborhood, with a large group of playmates of all ages within hailing distance. The climate in Port Arthur is temperate, with winters generally no colder than 40 degrees. We could play outside almost all year long. All day in the summers and on weekends, and most afternoons and evenings after school, a roaming mass of enthusiasm poked around the neighborhood, creating games and exploring the world.

  The windows were open most of the year, and at night, when the house noises had died down, you could lie in bed and listen to the neighborhood sounds. Janis and I slept together when I was young and talked in whispers as we lay. Off in the distance were the staccato voices of neighbors in their houses. A mother called a child to bed, kids argued with their siblings, or a married couple discussed the day. Few secrets were possible in those circumstances, so we learned to accept our neighbors as they were.

  Janis was sometimes a leader in organizing things, being one of the older kids. She often vied for power with the more powerful boy next door, Roger Pryor. He was a tall, muscular, quick-witted guy with bright eyes and sandy-blond, curly hair. He spent hours at our house because he doted on the attention our father gave to him. Janis resented their times together and so competed with Roger. She would challenge him in little ways, and when the game permitted, try to wrestle him to the ground and gleefully sit on him. Pop made them each a pair of stilts and instituted the great stilt race, a series of spontaneous challenges around the house or to the tallow trees and back.

  Pop enthralled all the kids because he was an engineer-tinkerer who invented and made playground equipment for our backyard. Who cares about swings when you have a homemade Giant Stride? We spent hours holding on to rings attached to ropes at the tips of a large X balanced in the middle atop a tall pole. We would run in a circle, swinging ourselves out when we got enough momentum.

  It was so like Pop, making wonderful toys that we used to the max, only to find that we had turned his ideas into ingenious ways of hurting ourselves. The Giant Stride was taken down after the older kids got too good at swinging us younger kids out at a 90-degree angle. We
couldn’t keep holding on, and sailed through the pecan tree, landing with bruises and tears. One of the neighbors even broke his arm. What was it about fun that was dangerous? Pop wanted to go beyond what he had been taught was the safe, reasonable way to live. But when he broke out of those limits, something always told him he had gone too far.

  The same thing happened with a seesaw he built that had a pivot in the center that allowed you to go around in a circle at the same time you were going up and down. That meant you could clobber a younger child who strayed in the path of your fast-moving arc. It was grand, until it was dismantled.

  He put up a tightrope between the pecan tree and one of the chinaberry trees. It was a taut steel cable about six inches off the ground that allowed us to fantasize about participating in high-wire acts. Pop would often come home from work and sit in the backyard and laugh and talk with the kids while he drank a beer.

  Sometimes we put on neighborhood plays, draping sheets on the clothesline to form two sides and the back of a stage. Janis was especially adept at impromptu planning and acting. Another game we liked, Annie Over, was played only at our house. It was a game of blind catch, with one person throwing a ball over the roof of a house to a player on the other side. If the other person caught it, then he or she could run around and try to tag the person who had thrown it. When I got old enough to demand to play but was too young to throw, my gallant sister made up a new category of team player, a cheater. Each side was allowed one cheater who would lie on the grass and peek under the house to see if the other person had caught the ball and was running or had missed the ball and let it bounce. There were certain advantages to houses standing on brick piers.

  Michael was ten years younger than Janis and four years younger than I. We liked to play with him as if he were a living doll. We would take him into Mom’s closet and dress him up, then trot him out for everyone’s laughter, including his own.

  We had an attic fan to cool the house off from the sweltering summer heat and humidity. For us kids it was powerful, magical, and fun. It was placed in the hallway off the living room that led to two of the bedrooms. We often played by pulling the thick cotton rope that opened the plywood covering the attic opening and feeling the sudden forceful rush of cool air. We were Marilyn Monroes with flying hair, holding our rippling clothes and laughing uproariously.

  Pop was especially ingenious at getting the gang of kids to help with the chores. Like Tom Sawyer trying to get the fence painted, he invited everyone over to help wax the oak floors. He cleaned out the living room and dining room and spread the floor with wax. Then he took any number of dirty bare feet and strapped clean towels on them. Off he would send us to skate and play bumper cars on the glasslike surface the new wax created. We never had so much fun.

  Sometimes we took the lesson of creativity too far. Once we took a dead boa constrictor from a neighbor boy’s snake collection. We tied a rope around its neck and put it in the ditch that ran beside the road in front of our house. We stretched the rope across the road and hid in the tall grass on the other side. Then we spied an approaching car and carefully pulled the rope to simulate the snake coming out of the grass and crossing the road. “EEEEIIIIIII!” the poor woman screamed, her tires burning so much rubber as she braked that we gasped for oxygen. We realized this act was beyond redemption, so we dragged the snake off, doused it with gasoline, and burned it.

  We spent a lot of time cooking at our house. Pop had been raised in a boardinghouse, with his mother making fresh desserts every day. He wanted the same service in his own home, much to Mother’s frustration. At least our grandmother had trained him to be an excellent baker. We liked his apple, cherry, or lemon meringue pies, chocolate or any other cake, sugar and peanut butter cookies, and Russian tea cakes. The last required pecans, and in Port Arthur that meant the kids were kept busy shelling the harvest from the local trees.

  Pop wasn’t as schooled a cook as Mom. Once he made a white sheet cake and was trying a new kind of burned-sugar frosting. When he brought the cake to the table, he found the frosting so thick, gooey, and tough that he couldn’t cut through it. Instead, we peeled the frosting off the whole cake and began to pull it like taffy.

  We ate American Southern food: roast beef, chicken, stew, ham hocks and pinto beans, vegetable soup, corn bread, and lots of vegetables. We kept an aluminum pot on the kitchen stove that had the word GREASE embossed on it and a lid with a painted red lemon-drop-shaped handle. It held the flavoring that made dishes taste yummy: bacon grease! That and Tabasco sauce were our primary flavorings.

  Mom tried to broaden our horizons with new recipes such as chicken curry and chow mein. We ate them up. She was a good cook. She prided herself on using Sophia Loren’s recipe to make spaghetti sauce from scratch. Biscuits were her specialty, and we could never get enough of them for dousing with honey after a meal.

  Our parents tried to be sensitive to our dislikes when planning a menu. Once they changed brands of mayonnaise, from expensive Hellman’s to cheaper Miracle Whip. I couldn’t stand it and protested vehemently. Dad said, “Oh, you can’t tell the difference. You’re just complaining.” Janis spoke up for me and suggested a blind taste test. They prepared samples of the two brands in the kitchen and brought them to me in the dining room. It was easy to tell the difference, and so the folks bought Hellman’s for me from then on.

  Mother presided over the holiday events. She baked cookies and annually made a turkey for Thanksgiving and a ham for Christmas. Each dinner had sweet potatoes, acorn squash, biscuits, dressing, and more. We always had a tree for Christmas, decorated with lights, tinsel, colored balls, and a few special ornaments—little carved wooden angels blowing trumpets, a plastic snowman, and a red metal Santa. One year, Pop took us kids for a drive on Christmas Eve to see the lights around town. When we returned, Mother was sewing, but Santa had sneaked in and placed presents under the tree. I couldn’t believe my mother was so dense as to have Santa in the house and not see him! Janis shook her head at my childish gullibility, but she didn’t say a word about it.

  Most Christmases we shared modest gifts. There was always one nice present for each child, plus an extra two or three smaller ones. Some years when money was tight they struggled to provide that. For our gifts to others, Mother took us to Woolworth’s downtown. She would hand us each a few bills and send us into the store to make our selections. She would sit out front and wait until we were through.

  Due to our semitropical climate, we had to endure the annual storm season, which fostered family togetherness as we made the most of the theatrics of Mother Nature. The storms came on suddenly. First, the sky darkened and the winds came up. If it wasn’t raining, we kids climbed up as high as we could in the tallow tree and rocked as the wind shook the tree. We screamed with excitement. Eventually we were hustled inside under indignant parental warnings that we were in danger. But we didn’t care. Then the real fury of the storm blackened the sky, and the house shuddered in the wind while the rain beat like tom-toms on all sides. By then we were huddled around a candle in the living room. Often we played games, the parental method of handling childhood stress. A favorite was musical chairs, fun at any time but more fun in the dark when you couldn’t really see the chairs you were trying to claim.

  In 1948, Janis experienced her first snow and made a snowman. About ten years later it snowed again. I was stuck in bed with the mumps and couldn’t get outside to play in the first snow of my life. I really put up a fuss with Mother, but she wouldn’t budge. My sister and brother made a snowman outside my window so that I could see it. Then Janis innocently came in to visit me. Checking to be sure Mom wasn’t looking, she said, “Laura, look at the snowball. Feel it.” I sucked in my breath and cried, “Oh, thanks.” I was a bit disappointed in snow. It wasn’t light and fluffy but cold and icy. I hid it under my pillow until it started to melt. Mother saw the problem and said, “That was nice of your sister. Let me put it in the freezer until you’re well.”

  Our h
ome might have been in Port Arthur, Texas, but we felt we were citizens of the world. Weekly, Pop brought us to the only building in town with tall Roman columns atop an expansive stairway—the public library. As a family we walked each short step, which made me feel the climb was ceremonial in nature, as though we were approaching the altar of a Mayan temple. We came to believe firmly in the unquestionable value of the knowledge stored within books.

  Our frequent sojourns to the library were also cause to bring up a parental pet peeve. Our folks had moved into a Southern society but did not favor the local dialect. They did everything they could to teach us to talk properly. Mother particularly harped on the word window because too many locals said it as “winder.” My father’s favorite was the word library. We had a tendency to call it “libary,” leaving out the first r. He would respond, “Now, I’ve had blueberries and strawberries, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a liberry.” We would laugh and say, “Okay, okay.” We learned their lessons so well, the kids at school sometimes yelled derisively at us, “Yankee! Yankee!”

  I grew up thinking that anything I needed to know could be found in the library. Other children reached full family recognition as adults through a Bar Mitzvah or a church ceremony. In our family, we gained respect according to the books we read. I grew a foot the day I finally convinced Pop, after much pleading and demanding, that I could read an adult book. My primary criterion was a visual one: The book had to have a plastic dust jacket, because children’s books never did. As we descended the steps from the library, slowly and ceremoniously, I held up my plastic-covered book so that all people ascending could see that the world had to reckon with a new mind.

  Books were more than ideas for us. They were alive. We read, learned, and shared thoughts with all the authors represented by the rows and rows of books in the library. The opinions that mattered—the printed ones—backed us in discussions we had in school. Since books were published in New York and Chicago, we believed those were the places where the best thinkers dwelled. Someday, perhaps, we would live among the people we then knew only on paper.