After being married a little more than twenty-three years, there’d be no silver anniversary for the Pedersens. We couldn’t have afforded it anyway.
A few days after the divorce was final, I woke to find an empty cave at the end of the hallway. In the same manner that political enemies in totalitarian states disappear in the middle of the night, the movers (or possibly the EPA) had taken Dad at dawn.
The house had always been quiet except for the two typewriters clacking away and the dog barking at passersby. Now it was eerily silent, with Dad gone and Mom working until midnight.
It took four coats of primer and three coats of yellow paint to cover the telltale stains from decades of smoking. While Heather and I painted, the radio played “Summer, Highland Falls,” from Billy Joel’s new album Songs in the Attic. As I slopped paint across the walls the piano man crooned, “These are not the best of times, but they’re the only times I’ve ever known.” By the end of the second week, the nicotine had seeped through all the layers of paint.
Dad transplanted himself to a small apartment a few blocks away, where he never bothered to unpack. The silver lining in all this was that as soon as my father had a new address, I was presented with a golden opportunity to end all contact between parents and school under my own version of the Privacy Act, though I preferred to think of it as saving my folks from undue stress and unnecessary paperwork. Not that they’d become overly involved in my education to begin with, but I just didn’t care for the idea that particulars about my life might be freely circulating between parents, teachers, and administrators without my approval.
As soon as I had Dad’s apartment number, I filled out a change-of-address card at the school office, and from then on everything was sent to his place—referrals, report cards, sign-up sheets for parent-teacher conferences. Now my parents would get their information when, how, and if I chose to relay it to them, which was basically not at all.
Without being asked, Dad automatically handed over anything that arrived from the school, envelopes still sealed, which my mother never would’ve done, since she’s intrigued by everyone else’s mail (and phone conversations), describing herself as “naturally curious.” Mom’s autobiography will most likely be titled Too Nosy to Die.
Going forward, holidays meant half a day with my mom’s family and half a day with Dad and his girlfriend, who eventually became my stepmother. There were good things about the arrangement: my stepmother has six terrific daughters, and we had lots of fun together. And there were bad things: someone had to drive me to my next gig, and if the meal was running late then that person either had to leave in the middle or else we’d be delayed, thus gumming things up at the other end. On Thanksgiving I had to eat twice to be polite, and when the matriarchs began plate-gazing they’d suspiciously inquire, “Why don’t you like the stuffing? Why don’t you want ice cream with your pie?” I wanted to say, “Because I’d just had stuffing, pie, and ice cream an hour ago.”
In the weeks and months that followed Dad’s departure, we realized he’d taken a few things in addition to his typewriters. It was like the story of Abiyoyo that Pete Seeger used to perform in the sixties, about a boy with a magician father (who was also a practical joker) who goes around town making things disappear exactly when people need them. For instance, a man would go to sit down after a hard day’s work, and the chair would disappear. We went to plug in a radio and, zhoop! the extension cord was gone. We’d go for a hammer to pound a nail into the wall, and the toolbox was gone. We’d go to play a song on the record player, and the record was gone. At Thanksgiving dinner we went to carve the turkey, and there was no carving knife. It occurred to me to use a saw, but that was gone too.
It wasn’t that my father didn’t technically own most of these things. It’s just that we didn’t have two of everything. The only item that raised a question as to who actually bought it was the Neil Diamond album
featuring a duet with Barbra Streisand titled “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” which even they had to admit contained a certain amount of irony.
In retrospect, my parents should have gone to a mediator. There were no villains, just victims. The lawyers’ bills exceeded half the value of the house. What people often don’t realize when it comes to divorce is that they can’t make two out of one. It’s just not possible to go and create two households that are similar to the one they shared before, unless they’re extremely rich or else an amoeba.
***
Our modest brick ranch house was never what one would describe as a showplace. Who could compete with Germans manicuring their lawns to putting-green perfection using nail scissors, Italians who draped everything in plastic, and Poles scrubbing out the stains on their garage floors with acid? Having grown up in this melting pot, I can’t imagine where slurs about the sanitary habits of immigrants arose, because I’ve never seen anything so sparkling clean as the toolshed of a carpenter from Bavaria.
Even when Dad was home, we were the worst-looking lot on the block, with overgrown shrubbery, paint chipping off the trim, and rust-encrusted gutters. It didn’t help that the Stankos across the street and the Zavarellas next door were compulsively mowing, weeding, watering, and pruning every day.
Actually, Jenny and Victor Zavarella, the neighbors to our left, were operating an Italian home and garden fit for royalty. Victor worked at the local Ford plant, and his wife was a freelance seamstress. Their place was beyond immaculate. One could have performed surgery in any room of the house, including the garage and basement. Even their two pet rabbits were pristine. When I went over there with my mother, she always warned me ahead of time not to touch anything—not the walls, statues, or even the floor if I could possibly help it. And under no circumstances was I to ask about using the bathroom or accept any food or beverage that may be offered.
But don’t take my word for it. The Roman Catholic Church designated the Zavarellas’ house as the cleanest and most free from sin in the New World, and thus Our Lady was kept in their basement, complete with paper money tacked all over her white silk gown. I’d never seen anything like Our Lady and thought it was the biggest Barbie doll that Mattel had ever made.
Meantime, our bushes covered much of the windows and a good half of the front porch. Roots from the willow tree were marching on our water system and began making cameo appearances in the sump pump and toilet. The subsistence vegetable garden in the backyard disintegrated into a Darwinian weed patch where only the most pugnacious tomatoes and zucchinis made it to the kitchen. Our roof was blowing off one shingle at a time, while the driveway sank like the Titanic.
Once the divorce proceedings were under way there was actually an incentive not to make any improvement to the house or grounds, as this could raise the appraised value, and why pour money into something they might lose, or lose half of. At the start of the divorce there was no way of knowing it would take almost four years, so in the meantime the house just collapsed around us.
When an assignment at school called for students to draw their dream homes, kids sketched Spanish haciendas, Italian villas, and palaces by the sea. I drew the Marriott hotel that had recently been built at the end of our street. It was truly my dream home: contractors to do maintenance and landscaping, food delivered to the room, housekeeping service, cable TV, and a pool. Home sweet heaven.
However, the fact that we were a commercial for Dogpatch, USA, didn’t bother us. Mom and Dad and I were nocturnal typists and readers, not sun worshippers or members of any garden club. With everyone preoccupied by work, school, and divorce, we hardly noticed the state of our decaying homestead. The way to locate our house in August was to look for the one with the Christmas lights still strung up and the gutters hanging down. The cracks in the driveway, front porch, and garage were quickly becoming crevices, chasms, and then canyons. That didn’t include the hole in the garage wall where Mom had created a low, oblong window onto the backyard with the ramming end of the Oldsmobile.
One task that Dad did und
ertake was to cover the mailbox with grease in an effort to keep away vandals. Blowing up and ripping down mailboxes was big back then—the suburban version of drive-by shootings. Ours was on a corner and made a good target, only it was usually the snowplow and not disaffected youth that destroyed it. Also, Dad finally had to give the heave-ho to the weeping willow tree, which had become a wandering willow, and then a full-out marauding willow. Despite its great shade and beauty, the tree had metamorphosed into something out of The Little Shop of Horrors, with paramilitary gangs of roots threatening to commandeer the pipes and water supply for the entire town.
After Dad left, Mom and I really skidded down the slippery slope of homeownership. With our fair skin, we simply chose to stay indoors rather than take notice of what needed to be done outside. And even if we had wanted to tackle the great outdoors, we didn’t have the money to do so.
By this time our lives were completely jerry-rigged. One had to know exactly how to jiggle the doorknob to enter the house, push the oven door to close it all the way, and yank the fireplace screen to get it unstuck, and the sink taps required a surgical touch. The car door only closed with the correct velocity and style of swing, and to turn on the windshield wipers we dialed the radio knob. To go up, my window shade needed three tugs in quick succession, hard, but not hard enough to pull it down. The toilet only flushed with the correct lever pressure, and to get the hot and cold water running properly in the shower, we needed to be qualified mechanics. We knew exactly where to hit and kick everything, while visitors were flummoxed to so much as flush a toilet or close a door. Christmas ornaments were attached to the tree with paper clips, and I used masking tape to mend my clothes. Mom and I could both sew a hem easily enough, but when standards are dropping like the mercury in March, seeking shortcuts becomes habit forming.
The doorbell hadn’t worked in over a decade, and since Mom had wallpapered over the chimes, it couldn’t be fixed. But we didn’t really care since we assumed that anyone who didn’t know the bell was broken probably shouldn’t be ringing it in the first place. On the plus side, it had put an end to being awakened by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and their extensive presentation, complete with visual aids, on entering the kingdom of Jesus Christ. The downside was no Sunday morning doughnuts, sold door-to-door by high school sports teams to raise money for uniforms and equipment.
The good thing about a house going to hell is that it happens incrementally and doesn’t hit all in one day. Sure, there are small things like the rusted wheelbarrow and pitchfork that could pass for yard art. But sometimes the compulsively tidy Italian neighbors couldn’t stand looking at the lawn anymore and came over to mow, edge, and weed the entire property. Embarrassed by this charity and feeling contrite about our laziness, we’d sneak into the car through the garage or wait to leave until the Zavarellas were safely tucked inside their shipshape house. A suburban shame spiral.
In retrospect, our gardening policy was rather environmentally forward-looking. We were naturalists, not the kind who study nature so much as the ones who leave it alone, thus taking the “Don’t mess with Mother Nature” adage literally. We didn’t weed, prune, water, or use pesticides. We just grew what we needed with as little impact on the ecosystem as possible. We figured that tall grass did a nice job of hiding the dandelions, weeds died at the end of the growing season along with everything else, and dead leaves eventually turned to mulch.
Nor were we a great family of shovelers, like the folk in and around Buffalo who view snow as a personal challenge. The way that caring for grass is the Summer Olympics for many men, snow removal is Buffalo’s competitive winter sport.
No, Mom and I took a much more holistic approach: that the sun would eventually melt the snow one flake at a time come spring. In the meantime we just had to back the Oldsmobile out of the driveway at about fifty miles an hour in order to pack down a good hard track. As for the sidewalks, we were on a grammar-school route, and the first hundred or so kids trampled that down just fine.
During the winter months we didn’t bother with the front door at all, because this meant digging out the front stoop and the front walk. However, we did like to send the dog out through the front door rather than traipse through the cold garage on a winter night. So we’d put our aging poodle, Fifi, out into the snow on the porch, she’d go to the bathroom, and come back inside.
The problem with this scheme was that by April we had a lot of fertilizer on the front porch and front walk. It was actually a minefield of dog debris until the spring rains did their job, and by June or July we had a fully functioning front walk again. In the meantime, friends and family knew to go around to the back door. And the Jehovah’s
Witnesses skipped our house entirely.
The only person who braved the front walk every day was Mike, the paperboy. He was exceptionally bright and athletically talented, and we were in the same class at high school. After graduation, Mike would attend Princeton and land a tryout for the Washington Redskins.
Mike had an assistant named Jimmy who was slightly retarded and eventually took over the paper route. The first week that Jimmy did the route on his own, we didn’t get a paper. My mother phoned and was told that we did receive a paper. It was the middle of winter, and she assumed it had blown away. However, the next day she found the paper tucked inside the back door that exited from the garage, which we never used in winter because it was more or less snowed and iced closed from October to June.
The following day, when we saw Jimmy approaching the house with his wagon of papers, my mother said, “Jimmy, would you please deliver the paper to the front door so I don’t have to go through the cold garage?”
Jimmy shook his head and my mother assumed that his mental problems left him uncomprehending of her directive. She explained again, this time very slowly. Jimmy shook his head. He pointed at the front walk and said, “Dog shit!”
From that day forward we shoveled the front walk every day during the winter.
Twenty-Nine
Are Red and Green Making You Blue?
Catholic Charities posted the above title on a billboard along the expressway on the way into downtown Buffalo every December. To which my mother, who’s been known to put the dark in dark Irish answered back, “Merry Fucking Christmas.”
Christmas at our house had always been a subdued affair, even before my father moved out. We’d have a tree, real or plastic, depending on how much the cat had peed in the box while the latter was stored in the basement. And my mother would light bayberry candles and cook dinner for us and her two siblings.
However, the Christmas following my dad’s departure was particularly bleak. Between the ever-present dismal economy and dividing the household, spending was drastically curtailed. If that wasn’t bad enough, the hospital employing my mother was about to retrench and hundreds would be laid off.
Mom can sometimes be one of those glass-is-half-empty people. If we saw a person my age smoking, she offered to take me over to the nearby Roswell Cancer Institute and show me patients with emphysema puffing cigarettes through tracheotomy tubes. And whenever a motorcycle roared past she reminded me that this was a one-way ticket to a head injury and, most likely, permanent brain damage. The thinning of the herd, if you will. In her book, these foolhardy motorcycle enthusiasts represented a constant stream of organ donors to the more evolved of the species.
And she hasn’t mellowed with age. A few winters ago, in subzero weather, Mom was at the public library when a flasher rapped on the window and, after getting her attention, exposed himself. She turned, looked him up and down, mouthed, “You’re going to contract bronchial pneumonia,” and went back to her book.
Anyway, two days before the dreaded Yuletide, Mom arrived home from work and unloaded a box of handmade drawings, paintings, and sculptures that her patients had presented as gifts—crazy-looking stuff, which would be added to a growing pile of psychiatric art projects.
And that’s when she unveiled her Christmas austerity prog
ram, her subcontract with America. The red arrow on the thermostat was pushed down to fifty-eight, which she insisted would be good for our complexions.
The next morning, in the shadow of our two-foot-tall aluminum tree, absent of presents, Mom announced her Christmas wish: “To keep my job, buy a self-cleaning bathtub, and not have the crappiest car in the hospital parking lot.” The pine aroma came from a ninety-nine-cent aerosol can, a lot cheaper than a genuine blue spruce. She wasn’t in the best of spirits, having just trapped me drinking milk directly out of the carton and unmoved by my argument that I was saving wear and tear on the drinking glasses. After all, the whole point of being an only child is to be able to drink out of milk cartons. I couldn’t resist asking, “So am I an only child due to an earlier budget cut?”
The night before, I’d parked a brownie for Santa next to the fireplace. When it wasn’t there the next morning, I noticed a trail of crumbs leading to Fifi’s bed. Of course, I had stopped believing in Santa around the age of eight, after I received a check from the tooth fairy. Still, I figured chances for receiving more presents were better by playing along. Was I ever wrong. I hadn’t banked on the seriousness of our plight until I saw Mom crisping the free turkey she’d gotten from the hospital in a brown paper bag because aluminum roasting pans cost too much. Any gifts I might want, she told me, would have to wait until the after-Christmas sales.
We were expecting the usual crowd for dinner: Mom’s sister and brother, his current girlfriend, and a string of people who were the
parents of his former girlfriends, who had somehow settled in as regulars at our place despite their offspring having moved on.
I spent the morning making Lauralogs out of old newspapers and twine, in lieu of the more festive and costlier Duraflames with their artificial color crystals.
As I would first be visiting my father at his girlfriend’s house for brunch on Christmas Day, Mom asked me whether I could cadge some leftovers to serve later, at our shindig.
Buffalo Gal Page 29