The Vietnam War went on and on, a constant buzz in the background that could at any moment erupt into World War III. My memories of it are isolated jigsaw pieces from a much larger puzzle that I didn’t understand at the time. Convoys of army jeeps rumbled along the New York State Thruway as we made our way to Long Island to visit my father’s parents for a week every summer. Children might suddenly be silenced with a ferocious hush when the radio was turned to certain newscasts; the names of the dead were read on the radio in the morning, during which time grown-ups were silent and had a faraway look or tears in their eyes. Afterward, they might glance at their young sons and take a deep breath. At the end of the lists were usually the names of journalists who’d recently been killed while covering the war.
Additionally, I recall an awful lot of talk about birds. Supporters of American intervention were “hawks.” Critics were labeled “doves.” Senator George D. Aiken of Vermont insisted that the country needed more owls. Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington declared himself an American eagle. And political humorist Art Buchwald admitted to being a bird as well, specifically a chicken.
Antiwar protests peaked on November 15, 1969, with 250,000 people marching through Washington, DC. The chant “Hell no, we won’t go!” entered the lexicon. On the evening news, things were constantly on fire—tires, draft cards, flags, and even people. Although bra burning was often discussed, I don’t recall seeing any cups going up in flames. However, I do remember plenty of fiery arguments breaking out over politics, people exiting parties and family gatherings in a huff, doors slamming and tires screeching as they roared out of the driveway. Before leaving the house, women cautioned their men, “Remember, don’t talk about the war.”
I regularly heard discussions about a lottery, only it wasn’t the kind where someone won money or a new car. And the draft wasn’t the usual type that blew through the windows, causing us to catch bronchitis. David Lance Goines, a student active in the free speech movement at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote to his draft board in 1966, “Gentlemen: Please remove my name from your mailing list, as I am no longer interested in your organization.”
The older boys known to my family were classified as 1A or 4F, and they all had numbers, but I didn’t understand what that meant. Same with “Going to Canada,” where 50,000 to 100,000 Vietnam protesters headed since that government refused to extradite draft resisters; I thought they were planning a vacation. On the other hand, one could say I had access to as much factual information about the war as the government was willing to provide the American public at the time, which is to say, not very much.
Nine
A Full House
When not in school, I played with my neighbor Mary Pyne. We sometimes phoned or hollered over the fence, but usually we just walked into each other’s houses as if they were our own. Mary was half German, half Irish, and twice as wild as her wild red hair. She was ten months older and scheduled to start kindergarten the same fall; thus we would serve out our school sentence in tandem.
Mary was the older sister I didn’t have and taught me everything worth knowing about growing up. She happened to be so well-informed as a result of having four older brothers and four older sisters. These eight siblings had read every page in “A Child’s Garden of Tricks.” Through the trickle-down effect we learned how to escape school by placing a thermometer near the radiator or under a light bulb, the right way to put tape over locks so that after sneaking out we could get back in again, and which classes to avoid because the teachers were tough. When it came time to learn how to drive, Mary explained that if you have to hit a car while backing out, make sure to pick the one without anyone in it.
If we took all the large families in the neighborhood into account, there was an endless pipeline of information fueling future generations. They instructed us how to prepare for prank day—where to get the thousand marbles that would be dropped down the stairwell of the science
wing and to tell everyone to put alarm clocks in their lockers, all set for noon, right in the middle of a class. They knew how to get into the school through the air shaft in order to rearrange the furniture. Teenage boys
could jimmy most locks and hot-wire cars, trucks, and even earth-
moving equipment at local construction sites. Parents and teachers didn’t stand a chance.
Mary’s home contained eleven people (two parents and nine children), two dogs, and a cat. Upstairs were five bedrooms: one for her parents, two rooms with two boys apiece, one with the two oldest girls, and a room added on over the garage for the three youngest girls. Mary’s room reminded me of something out of a storybook because there were three twin beds, three dressers, three closets, and three desks, all exactly the same, evenly spaced, in a neat row. Mrs. Pyne sewed the bedspreads and curtains, and they all matched. She also made clothes, tablecloths, pillows, and even wedding dresses for a few of the girls, despite Mary and me ruining at least one cutting board by employing it as a sled to fly down the stairs, and several pairs of pinking shears by fashioning snowflakes out of cardboard.
The myriad Pyne children often had friends over. Mary’s dad would occasionally glance at a child and not be able to recall who was in front of him. In these situations he’d start at the top of the list, saying, “Diana, Melinda, Barbara, Kathy…” and either he’d eventually arrive at the bottom, or to hurry things along my friend would chime in, “I’m Mary.”
In Mr. Pyne’s defense, Mary and Kathy both had red hair, Kathy and David were twins, Barbara and Melinda both had long dark hair, and people regularly said that Mary and I were easily confused for one another. Mr. Pyne was also somewhat hard of hearing from gunfire in World War II, and this worked enormously in our favor when planning any sort of escapade.
I particularly enjoyed when Mr. Pyne attempted to instill order on those late June evenings when it stays light until nine at night and we kids were recovering from being winter-worn and snow-shocked. The charge out the front door would begin as soon as the dinner plates were cleared, and Mary’s father, who was a burly six foot seven and worked as a detective for United States customs, would stand on the porch and make a vain attempt at crowd control.
“Kevin, stay in and do homework!” Kevin had graduated the year before.
“Melinda, stay in and do homework!” Her parochial school had already let out for the summer.
“Mary, stay in and do homework!” We were starting kindergarten in the fall. There wasn’t any homework.
Eventually he’d give up these attempts at discipline, rub at the red rivers of capillaries etched into his nose, and shout, “Dammitol!” This was Mr. Pyne’s favorite exclamation, and when he bought a boat and asked all the kids to vote on a name, they were unanimously in favor of The Dammitol.
However, Mr. Pyne did have one significant weapon in his arsenal, and that was access to government files, which he’d regularly employ to perform deep background checks on any boys who might come
a-courting. This substantial database turned up everything from traffic violations to an arrest record to unpaid child support. Next, the suitors experienced a full interrogation, during which he might casually leave his badge lying on the coffee table. Though my favorite use of the badge was the time he was cut off in the church parking lot after Mass at Saint Leo’s and flashed it at the driver who’d committed this sin.
In my opinion, large families had several advantages. If a vase is broken in a house with many children, it’s very hard to pin the blame on anyone. Furthermore, teachers tended to give the same tests year after year, and these could be passed down like a favorite sweatshirt. Best of all was the school science project. The Pynes had a plaster
volcano painted to look real and wired to produce smoke. While other students toiled away for weeks on their projects, the Pyne children dug this old standby out of the basement on the morning of their presentation and lugged it to class, along with the two note cards taped to the base explaining how volcanoes work. It was p
retty beat up by the time Mary brought it to school, the smoke nothing but a wisp, though still good for an easy B.
In charge of feeding and clothing such a large brood, Mary’s mom was an energetic saver. She sewed most of the family’s clothes and made as much food from scratch as possible. Several bushels of McIntosh apples would remain in the Pyne garage throughout the year, and any child who complained of hunger was instructed to eat an apple. The remainder would become pie filling, preserves, and canned fruit to sustain the family
through the long winter months. Fresh fruit of every variety wasn’t flown to supermarkets around the country on a daily basis back then, and what wasn’t in season, if available at all, came with a hefty price tag.
When a grocery store advertised an especially good sale, Mrs. Pyne would load as many of us as she could find into the station wagon. Sitting behind the wheel of the car was perhaps the only time I saw her sit down—ever. The seat in the back pointed toward the cars behind us, and was convenient for making faces at other drivers while not being seen by our own chauffeur.
These sales were almost always one per customer. Mary’s mom would marshal the troops outside the supermarket entrance and hand us each a dollar along with the coupon. We’d go in one by one and purchase the item, more often than not a half gallon of milk. Sometimes she’d send six of us through the checkout three times, and by the end of the maneuver we’d have eighteen half gallons of milk. This supply lasted nine kids between the ages of five and nineteen about four days, then everyone had to drink powdered milk until shopping day the following week. In my neighborhood, shopping day was synonymous with payday.
When Mary and I were small, we’d sometimes play in the mountains of laundry in her basement. Our families weren’t clothes conscious, and kids under ten didn’t care what they put on, so long as it was warm in the winter and cool in the summer. For a period of time when all the Pyne offspring were young, there weren’t many individually owned garments so much as a boys’ pile and a girls’ pile, and you grabbed something that looked to be about the right size.
When a child angled for a new coat, shirt, swimsuit, or Scout uniform, she was usually sent to the hand-me-down bag. The objective became to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that nothing in that bag could possibly work, that the coveted article was nothing that Mrs. Pyne could possibly sew, and that a trip to the store was absolutely necessary. Mary, being the youngest, had the odds stacked against her, and I doubt she wants to hear about the hand-me-down bag ever again.
One day a week Mrs. Pyne baked bread, and when we arrived home from school, a dozen loaves were spread across cooling racks on the kitchen table. The entire house smelled delicious, like an enormous bakery. At the time, kids looked down on homemade bread and instead wanted store-bought bread. Wonder Bread, to be specific. It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized we’d enjoyed the best bread in the world, fresh from the oven.
Mary’s mom was a terrific baker. And it was a good thing because there was a birthday almost every month. She regularly made delicious cakes, cupcakes, and cookies, even if they didn’t last more than a few minutes. We learned fractions by dividing up the beaters after she finished with the icing. We’d get to lick one-quarter of one beater under strict surveillance from the others, to make sure our tongues didn’t “accidentally” slip onto their section.
Everyone in our neighborhood knew the saying “Eat what you can and can what you can’t.” It was especially popular during the seventies, when inflation had sent the cost of groceries soaring. Most people planted a garden and went fruit picking in local orchards and then canned a portion of it to be used throughout the year. That way, in the middle of winter, we could enjoy tasty creamed corn and glazed carrots, freshly baked apple crumble, and for breakfast, smear some strawberry jam across a thick slab of homemade bread. The pantries of the most adventurous canners also contained tomato sauce, corn relish, and watermelon pickles.
Folks with any sort of a yard grew lettuce, tomato, radishes, peppers, and cucumber for salads, and then peas, beans, corn, onions, and carrots for the table, followed by zucchini and broccoli for quiches, watermelons for dessert, and of course, pumpkins for the kids to carve into jack-o’-lanterns at Halloween. The surplus cucumbers were loaded into jars of brine along with some white vinegar and various ingredients that hinted of voodoo practices—celery seed, turmeric, ground cloves, and dry mustard—and miraculously transformed into pickles.
However, the excess zucchini would meet a less-glamorous fate. When the prolific squash started overtaking the yard and creeping in through the windows, as it always did around the middle of August, the wayward zucchini would be gathered up in large shopping bags and surreptitiously abandoned in the middle of the night on the front porches of neighbors without vegetable gardens. This practice was known as “zucchini dumping.”
Also collected and sent to the kitchen for canning were buckets of raspberries grown on trellises next to the shed or against the fence in the backyard, and the apples and peaches from nearby pick-your-own orchards.
Mary’s mom regularly took us apple and berry picking. By patrolling the fields and issuing regular reprimands, Mrs. Pyne attempted to keep her platoon focused on the task at hand. But the day would grow long, the sun fiercely hot, and inevitably a fruit war would break out. The strawberry patch was particularly susceptible to uprisings, with tangled vines that made ideal ramparts and tiny green unripened berries not all that different from BB-gun pellets. Meanwhile, their overripe counterparts had fallen to the ground and become mushy and bug infested—perfect for splatball.
Peak canning time at Mary’s house was early September, and amazingly there was always a zero absentee rate from school during those two weeks. Because unless you were dead and had a certificate to prove it, you’d get stuck cleaning fruit, leaning over steaming pots, and stirring vats of gucky jam until it was ready to be put in jars and sealed with wax. The kitchen was over a hundred degrees, every surface covered with sugar, pectin, funnels, strainers, Ball jars, Mason jars, brass lids, and red rubber rings. Canning even had its own lingo—we “put up” or “put by” vegetables and preserves. If you were planning to feast on peach melba in March, you packed the fruit in halves in widemouthed jars with a light corn syrup. People liked to joke, “You can’t put peaches up yourself.”
If a child did get conscripted into the canning brigade, there was at least one exciting scenario to contemplate—it was common knowledge that a tiny error could lead to the dreaded botulism and the entire family would die slow, horrible deaths. Only mothers were two steps ahead of bacteria, and in addition to keeping the process sanitary, twenty-four hours after canning they checked all the seals by pushing down on the flat metal lids; the top was supposed to be slightly concave and not move when pressed in the center. To be extra safe, they’d test the seal by tapping the lid with the bottom of a teaspoon to make sure it made a high-pitched ringing sound. If there was a dull thud, then the jar wasn’t sealed properly, or the food was in contact with the underside of the lid. In this case, the jar went into the garbage and a shout went up the back stairs: “Who sealed the peach halves?”… Silence.
Mr. Pyne was a large, gruff-voiced Irishman, so we all toed the line whenever he was around. But that was only during the evenings and some weekends, since, in addition to working downtown from nine to five, he was also in the Army Reserves. Mary’s mom was petite, about five foot nothing, and yet the offspring all inherited their father’s genes, absolutely towering over her by age twelve, girls and boys alike. So she was constantly swatting at us with spatulas, hairbrushes, and frying pans, especially for sneaking into the pantry and eating applesauce that was supposed to last until spring. Mrs. Pyne used to hide the keys to the pantry and the spare freezer, but we were constantly finding them or sneaking them from out of her purse. One of the older boys could pick the pantry lock, while another had an actual copy of the freezer key.
Mrs. Pyne didn’t have the time or necessary hidden vid
eo equipment to determine who was responsible for such infractions, and, like the Irish Republican Army, no kid was about to tell on another. Thus, if something went missing, such as three gallons of ice cream meant to go with that night’s birthday cake, then everyone was going to get it. A shout would go up and we’d all race down the stairs toward the front door, neighborhood kids included, and Mrs. Pyne would be standing on the landing with a wooden spoon in hand. We’d fly out the door like a flock of excited birds, shrieking and laughing, knowing there was safety in numbers. Mary and I had the least to worry about since we were the smallest and not only viewed as low on the responsibility chain, but hardest to catch in a crowd. To discipline the boys, who often raided the freezer for hamburgers and steaks, Mrs. Pyne would stand on a chair and twist their ears. But even this only made them wince slightly or laugh.
Had the Pyne household not been Roman Catholic and strictly antievolution, it could best be described as survival of the fittest. Playing the card game bloody knuckles with Mary’s brothers meant that’s exactly what I was going to end up with. The loose tooth of a younger sibling was extracted by attaching it to the garage door with fishing line and then slamming the door shut. Belching contests were a serious matter, and some Olympic burpers were brought up through the ranks at that long wooden kitchen table. I remember being challenged to a soup-eating contest, and after the word go was hollered, I was the only idiot to reach for a spoon. By that time they’d all gulped their soup in one swallow and slammed the bowls back onto the table. I learned. The best food went to the swift and the tricky. Fights broke out, bones were broken, and favorite objects could fly out open windows, sometimes with small children still attached to them.
Buffalo Gal Page 9