At the beginning of June, the school nurse examined us for head lice. Most of the year it was too cold for ringworm and insect-related problems, and so she dealt with extremely chapped lips, windburn, and the dry, itchy patches of frostbite that would appear on our wrists and ankles where chunks of snow had managed to sneak inside mittens
and boots and remained unnoticed for an hour or so.
When the glorious summer vacation finally arrived, kids burst out of their houses by eight every morning and didn’t come in contact with parents again until bedtime, except for a quick lunch provided by somebody’s mom. That said, the neighborhood was a honeycomb of stay-at-home moms rarely too far out of reach, most able to recognize the sound of an M-80 being dropped into the sewer or an eyeball splattering against a tree trunk. Nannies were unheard of and babysitters a rare extravagance. If younger children weren’t being watched by older ones, then they went into the playpen. (Suburban secret: On a pleasant day, the playpen could be moved to the backyard and flipped over, making a nice outdoor cage.)
Staying indoors was not an option in the seventies. First off, if we weren’t sick, and if we attempted to stay around the house, our parents would likely find some horrible chores for us, like edging the lawn or cleaning the basement. Second, remaining inside was thought to be injurious to a child’s health. Third, large broods in close quarters resulted in brawls that began with the innocent-enough sounding “Mom, she won’t stop looking at me.” When siblings started knock-down, drag-out fights in the house, moms would say, “Go and murder each other outside so I don’t have to clean up the mess” or “Don’t get blood on my carpets!”
Parents attempted to annihilate their children on a daily basis, and it was perfectly legal. In the morning we’d hear: “Eat your bacon and fried eggs! Go out and play in the sunshine!” There were no helmets or knee pads or wrist guards for cycling and skating. After the first nighttime bike wreck, we usually took safety into our own hands by inserting yellow tennis balls between the spokes of our wheels. Seat belts in cars were either nonexistent or buried under the seat with old gum, loose change, and melted chocolate. We didn’t have car air bags, just windbags—older people who wouldn’t stop blabbing about growing up in the economic ashes of the Depression.
No one wore hats or sunscreen. We inhaled gasoline fumes from corroded pumps, model-airplane glue, and helium (to make our voices sound high and funny). Our cribs were covered with brightly colored lead paint. When a thermometer broke, parents gave kids the mercury to play with. There was no bottled water as an alternative to the stuff that had killed all the fish in Lake Erie. The only health directive we were given was that if we sat too close to the television set we could go blind. And when the first childproof medicine caps, with two barely visible arrows that needed lining up, arrived on the scene, kids were the only ones able to open them, especially if the grown-up had the tiniest bit of arthritis or vision trouble. It was not uncommon to hear an adult instructing a seven-year-old to “open Mommy’s quaaludes.”
Good friends became blood brothers or blood sisters by making a cut in a finger with a needle or knife (preexisting wounds were not okay) and rubbing them together. Today this is certainly viewed as being not only disturbingly vampirish but completely unsanitary.
Otherwise, childproofing our homes meant letting the kids get burned by a hot stove and shocked from sticking a knife into the toaster; they did it once, learned not to do it again, and the house was officially childproof. Maximum childproofing meant making sure the kids were raised right so they didn’t return home after graduation and the parents wouldn’t suffer from full-nest syndrome.
We’d climb trees in the nearby woods, build forts down by the creek, and walk or ride bikes to the school playground to use the swings, the slide, and the merry-go-round. In addition to ball games, we played Mother, may I, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, red light/green light, king of the castle, and statue. There were cutthroat games of red rover, the patron saint of dislocated shoulders. During hide-and-seek, when we reached home base we shouted, “Olly, olly oxen free!”
Caucasian children turned a riot of pink, red, and peach—a combination of too much sun, calamine lotion slopped across bug bites, Band-Aids pasted over cuts, and scrapes painted with Mercurochrome (a vivid red antiseptic mixture). These were set off by chalky-white casts applied at the local emergency room to heal broken bones. And I was doomed to wear a skunklike stripe of stark white zinc oxide down my nose to try and prevent an already brightly hued snot locker from veering off in a Ringling Brothers direction.
On hot days we’d dash back and forth through the sprinkler, have water balloon wars, and if we knew someone with a pool, there was swimming, or else we could go to the public pool a few blocks away. There were hours of shouting and splashing, and everyone knew that the time to pee in the public pool was right before the thirty-minute adult swim. Then we wriggled on the hot pavement to dry off.
For girls, entire afternoons could be whiled away sitting on the curb or up in a tree with only a piece of string for entertainment, fashioning it into cat’s cradle, witch’s broom, and Jacob’s ladder. Then they’d move on to clapping games that went with songs such as:
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
Down her back, back, back
She asked her mother, mother, mother
For fifty cents, cents, cents
To see an elephant, elephant, elephant
Jump the fence, fence, fence.
He jumped so high, high, high
That he touched the sky, sky, sky
And he didn’t come back, back, back
’Til the Fourth of July!
Girls also jumped rope into the twilight, and their singsong rhymes echoed throughout the neighborhood as the mosquitoes emerged in hard-driving, bloodsucking platoons.
Baby, baby in the tub
Mama forgot to pull the plug
Oh what sorrow! Oh what pain!
There goes baby down the drain!
And…
The King of France
Wet his pants
Right in the middle
Of his wedding dance
How many puddles did he make?
1, 2, 3…
The fun only stopped when the come-home whistles started to blow and the cowbells rang. Kids didn’t have watches because they were still expensive, so large families like the Gundermans, Rudewiczes,
and Pynes answered to a police whistle recognizable by a particular
signal—two longs and a short, three shorts and a long. Mrs. Greenan was a coloratura soprano who’d let a couple of notes fly out across the neighborhood. The sounds of summer.
Standing atop the hill at Cindy Park, I watched as kids cupped hands to ears in order to determine who was being called in. If the bell or whistle went three times and they weren’t inside, a paddle-wielding parent was often waiting by the door. After the first round, the rest would follow within ten minutes, as if the parents had phoned one another and conspired to end the fun. I had no bell or whistle, or time to be in. However, once my friends had all been requisitioned home, there wasn’t anyone left to play with.
***
Meantime, back at the ranch house, the late sixties and early seventies constituted my mother’s frantic-housewife period. She cooked and sewed and gardened. Mom attended adult education classes that enabled her to fashion scarecrow centerpieces out of Styrofoam balls, arrange dried flowers, and make stew in a Crock-Pot. This was closely followed by the homemade-pickle phase, where one couldn’t move through the house without tripping over a vat of brine.
She became a Girl Scout leader and for a while I was a Brownie, though not a very successful one. My indoor pallor and allergies did not serve to generate any enthusiasm for huddling around campfires or marking a trail. Group activities in general rarely succeeded in holding my interest.
The rest
of the time, Hurricane Ellen papered walls, stained kitchen cabinets, laid floor tile, and lined shelves with contact paper. She sewed all of my clothes until I went to elementary school, and many of her own. For the house she made bedspreads, dust ruffles, drapes, and pillow shams. In the bathroom, she not only sewed the shower curtain, window treatments, and toilet-seat cover, but, using matching fabric and adhesive, she covered the scale, tissue box, and toilet-paper holder. Basically everything was given some sort of treatment, except for the disposable Dixie riddle cups, which she declared to be more sanitary than drinking glasses.
However, Mom appeared increasingly frustrated with every Halloween costume, trip to the craft store, and new McCall’s pattern. It all came to an end when I was eight years old, probably the result of three incidents that happened in quick succession.
The first was when Mom accidentally made two left sleeves for a dress she was planning on wearing to a party. When she went to buy more of the expensive fabric to correct the error, they’d run out. The dress and the pattern went into a bag. She folded up the cutting board, unplugged the sewing machine, let the garden go to hell, abandoned the kitchen, closed the laundry, and applied to college.
The second episode was when she invited her family over to dinner to celebrate my uncle’s birthday. We were sitting around the dining room table in the faux forest munching salad when we heard a thumping down in the basement. It was winter, so we assumed the furnace was making its usual haunted-house noises. But when it was time for the main course, Mom went to get the roast from the kitchen table and it was gone! Our cat, Spaz, had dragged the roast down the basement steps (thus explaining the thumpety-thump) and begun feasting at the bottom. Without a word to our guests, Mom quickly scooped up the roast, sliced off the section he’d been devouring, turned the oven on high, and put it back in for another twenty minutes. She quietly explained to me that this would kill any germs.
The final, and most pyrotechnically satisfying, event occurred when Mom decided to make fruitcakes for Christmas. After excessive basting with Bacardi rum, they literally exploded, blew off the oven door, singed Mom’s eyebrows, and took out the kitchen light. However, like the unflappable Julia Child, Mom pronounced the survivors edible. I actually heard several guests announce it was the best fruitcake they’d ever tasted. So at least she went out with a bang.
It was around this time that my first romance occurred. His name was Bill Alleyne. At the drinking fountain in elementary school, he “asked me out.” Bill wrote me a poem, and that was about the end of it. In fact, technically, since nothing has ever been done to dissolve this contract, even though I haven’t seen him in over thirty years, we’re still going out. Likewise, I’m pretty sure that some of Mary’s brothers and sisters are still grounded, even though they’re now in their fifties.
It’s safe to say that I went right through junior high school without attracting the attention of any scouts for television quiz shows. On the
contrary, my academic output served to demonstrate that I had fewer talents than most. I’d finally learned to read, but my comprehension wasn’t good. When first introduced to the alphabet as a toddler, I could see that one day it might be useful when it came to reading street signs and the like. But later, when teachers suggested adding the letters together along with numbers, that’s where I parted ways with Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land. To this day I can’t figure out how many square feet of carpet are needed to cover a room.
Science—what were they talking about? I’m still not sure if the moon rises in the south and sets in the north, or if the Earth revolves around space junk or space junk revolves around it. And why don’t we fall off the bottom during half the year? If gravity is holding us to the ground, then why don’t we at least feel as if we’re upside-down, with blood rushing to our faces and bad sinus headaches? I can’t make out one single constellation or find the North Star. The only thing I’m convinced of as an adult is that the rings around Saturn are made up of my lost luggage.
The extracurricular activities in school turned out to be an even greater disaster. I was a total failure in art. In addition to having absolutely no aptitude, my hands shake like a junkie on the first day of rehab. My mother claims that I inherited this “benign tremor” from her dad. I’m wondering if I inherited the D.T.s from my grandfather. Mr. Schmidt, the art teacher, decided it was dangerous to put X-Acto knives and skinny garrote-style paintbrushes into my trembling hands and substituted a harmless lump of clay for me to work with during these sessions.
It was the same story with music. I was tone-deaf, pitch-deaf, note-blind, and unable to warble anything. There would be the select chorus, the training chorus, and those of us who stood in the training chorus and mouthed the words so as not to throw off the actual singers. I attempted playing the clarinet and quickly gave that up. I sawed away on the guitar for several years because it came so easily to my dad, and now use it as a doorstop. During tap dancing lessons, while everyone was doing step I was doing ball change. Similarly, a series of ballet and tumbling classes did nothing but perhaps accentuate my sheer gracelessness.
My mother and I soon made a pact to abandon the arts altogether. Whatever we would slave away to learn, whether it was painting,
calligraphy, or woodworking, my father would waltz in and do it like a professional, without ever having tried the thing before in his life. My mother was the first to bring home a guitar, planning to take lessons. Dad picked it up and played by ear. Forgot your chess set? Give Dad some cedar, polyurethane, and stain, and inside a few hours he’ll whip one up that can later be exhibited at a folk-art museum. Mom came home with some oil paints, and Dad knocked out a terrific portrait of a friend’s daughter.
This phenomenal hand-eye coordination carried over to his driving. Dad could balance his twin addictions of nicotine and caffeine while steering with his knees for miles, occasionally employing his elbows for tight turns, all while simultaneously operating a butterfly window (the small triangular window that could be found in cars with long front doors) so the freezing air and sleet wouldn’t come in (much) and the cigarette ashes wouldn’t blow into the backseat and set me ablaze (much). Raymond Carver described himself as a cigarette with a body attached to it; Dad was a cigarette and a coffee mug with a body attached to it.
However, the magnitude of Dad’s natural talents was not only unnatural, but downright discouraging. It wasn’t the kind of innate ability that excited me with the thought of how he could help on school projects; in fact, it made people want him to go live in the woods by himself, since it was obvious they’d always be rank amateurs in comparison. Even Dad has learned not to pursue artistic activities anymore because it only loses him friends.
Along with everything else, I got off to a slow start in physical education and was unable to comprehend the rules of games or execute a simple play. Through sheer fearlessness and a love of being airborne, I managed to survive tumbling between ages eight and eleven. However, I soon became too healthy (as we politely say about big-boned girls in the Midwest) to be a dainty gymnast. Also a certain lack of natural poise made the balance beam into a nerve-wracking tightrope walk over Niagara Falls. Roller derby would have required a cool nickname like Luna Chick, and so I turned to soccer. How much trouble could I get in running and kicking?
As it turned out, not much. In four years as a fullback, I never scored a goal, but I possessed enough speed to clear a ball out of our end zone and enough bulk to briefly stun forwards on the opposing team. Being a sweeper or a fullback is not so much about being an athlete as it is about being a security guard. And it’s not entirely true that I never scored a goal. I did score one. Only, it was for the opposing team. The ball got behind me, and, with my heel, I accidentally tapped it between our goalposts.
I was equally klutzy at home, and after I upset a table, broke a glass, or knocked over a lamp, Dad liked to say, “You’re the banana peel on the doorstep of progress.”
The school natatorium was an overch
lorinated Dante’s cave that I managed to avoid all the years of my academic incarceration. This was accomplished by cultivating athlete’s foot—not because it was unsightly or itched uncontrollably, but so there’d never be the suggestion of a group swim or entrance into the equally skanky showers. The real trick wasn’t keeping the highly contagious athlete’s foot from causing toe decomposition so much as hiding it from my mother, Nurse Ellen. Aside from avoiding her fungus-sensitive gaze, it wasn’t a difficult condition to keep under wraps. Having had my feet frozen several times as a kid, I’ve always been a sock person, even on the hottest days of the year. When swimming ended in senior year of high school, my graduation gift to myself was a team-sized container of Tough Actin’ Tinactin antifungal spray.
Several friends employed another good dodge to avoid having to swim laps. At the first session, a teacher asked if there were any nonswimmers. A few authentic landlubbers raised their hands, but a number of very competent swimmers also claimed to be strokeless. For the next two months, they stood talking and laughing in the shallow end, pausing only to use a kickboard if the instructor looked over. During the last class, these impostors were tested, and by the grace of God they had learned to swim! Fortunately, the gym teachers were Catholic and believed in miracles. Some still insist that those contested waters were a regular Lourdes.
Likewise, I dodged home economics after the first year. This was accomplished by taking refuge in the industrial arts room. However, I turned out to be one of the few students whose mechanical drawings had wavy lines, even when employing a ruler and T square. Unfortunately, this was just before Frank Gehry brought his curvy architectural style into fashion. Furthermore, you don’t ever want a lefty using a power saw, trust me.
Buffalo Gal Page 13