Next morning in the Buffalo house. Daddy home after working the graveyard shift. Breakfast. French toast. Sharp rectangular delineations of sunlight on the floor. Playing, eating, Gail and I were unaware of the escalating voices until our mother’s usual growl of stubborn annoyance hiked itself to a soprano pitch, and our father’s yapping descended to a lung rattling bass. The hefty Scotty dog we thought he was like and the big unflappable setter we thought she was like had reversed and become monstrous. They were not like dogs anymore, but like canine horrorsaurs. He was pushing her toward the open cellar door and she was screaming, “Ted, Ted don’t do it!” and he was panting the clear, individual, disconnected words “I’ll…kill…you.” As his broad workshirted torso filled the doorway, she backed down the cellar stairs. He prodded her collarbone with his pointer finger. Then he pushed her again. “Ted, not in front of the kids!” was her signal to us and we ran, Gail tiny enough to squirm between his legs to get to her, me sliding past them on the stairs. Then Gail and I were below them, straining up against our mother’s legs as he bore down on her. It was a tangle of legs and stairs, his workpants and boots pushing down against her bare calves and slippers, while Gail and I pushed up against her, trying to hold her up and save her, and in saving her rescue our lives. Her face as she twisted toward us was drained an almost painted white. She looked like a geisha girl beneath her black hair. “Ted, watch out! The kids!” she screamed, diverting his attention. The cunning girls having brought the dragon to his senses, he blustered back up the stairs.
—
My mother read to escape so many things. I’ve often thought that I became a writer in order to have her read my words. Though it’s hard to imagine a positive picture of a family if the one already drawn for you is negative, I did develop other ideas about families, because as soon as I could read I loved to learn about them. The voice of that childless author Louisa May Alcott parented me. Of course I fantasized I was an orphan. My fantasy life was composted from the emotional peelings and scraps of my parents’ lives put out to rot in the backyard of literature. Perhaps my authors would come and take me away.
“Here’s Hazel.” Polly stopped the Dodge by the paddock fence. Hazel raised Morgan horses. She wore jeans permanently creased at the thigh tops underneath her belly. She was old! Her steely hair bobbed when she barked her laugh. She lived all on her own and had a crowd of teenagers for hands. Astride her Morgan she ordered them to do this and that, and they all did whatever she said, too. (“Every kid dies to work for Hazel,” Polly had said reverently in the car.) I fed her horse a sugar cube that Polly had put in my pocket and waited while they talked. (“We won’t stay long,” she had said. “Hazel doesn’t have time to dillydally.”)
“That house is a wreck!” The old woman jerked her finger toward the unpainted farmhouse. (“Well, it must have been painted once upon a time,” Polly said later.) Shutters hung half off their hinges, like a Halloween card. “All I’ve got time for is the barn.” Hazel looked down at me. “No time for little girls! Or men!”
“Hazel’s got the life,” Polly said in the car. “All on her own. No family. Doesn’t need one. She’s got those kids to keep her company. And her horses.” Anybody knew that animals were much better company than humans. “Nobody to tell her what to do. That’s the life.”
We whizzed past the silvery oat fields. We were “home.” When we were all making the trip to La Grange to see Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Gillie, my mother announced it in the same way: We’re going Home today. She always surprised us. Without apparent planning, we up and went, Ted too, uncomplaining, out past Bethlehem Steel and the coal heaps of Niagara Mohawk Power Company and Dunlop Rubber Tire into the cool emptiness of field after field and house, then nothing, then house.
“But aren’t we already home?” I asked one morning when she said it again.
“Oh, Molly, you know what I mean!”
“Don’t be stupid,” Gail said, holding a Kleenex to her nose. She got terrible nosebleeds. And she sneezed and sneezed around horses, just like my mother’s little sister, Roberta, so that’s why Gail and Ted stayed at Aunt Roberta’s when we went to visit Hazel. Roberta also had the life. “She gets anything she wants from him,” Polly said. “From your uncle. She won’t take no for an answer. Look at her Pendleton suit!” And Aunt Roberta had her own car. “She gets what she wants and she drives where she wants. It’s as good as being single!”
Polly lapsed into silence. Then, “She’s selfish, that’s what she is. Berta and Hazel both. They’re selfish to the core.”
Buffalo Corners loomed up. “Hah! That’s where we turned over Lizzie Palmer’s outhouse!” Polly recounted her peccadillos. “I graduated high school when I was only sixteen. I’d learned Latin. Then I worked at the mill and met Flo and Ann Louise. I bought my own car. Was your grandfather surprised! ‘Oh, Pauline!’ he said. He couldn’t say a word but my name. I made the only money that ever came into that house. Bought your grandmother her couch and chair when I was eighteen years old. Flo and Ann Louise and me had the Model A all packed to go to California the morning they bombed Pearl Harbor. Your grandmother cried so hard we only went to Buffalo. Then I met your father.”
The one-room schoolhouse loomed up. “There’s where I tied up my pony. He was piebald and blind.” Piebald. Must be the hair was rubbed off him. “Your Great-grandma sent me off to school on Paint every morning. He was so smart he knew the way there and the way home. And in the afternoon she sent that pony down to pick me up, and what do you know, he was right there at the schoolhouse door! When Paint died I cried and cried.”
“He died!” I’d never expected so heroic a piebald horse to die.
“Then Great-grandma Molly, that’s the Molly I named you after, she came out to the stream where I was reading, and she said I could have Shep, the plow horse with a star in his forehead, and then I rode Shep. He was big! And I rode him bareback. All us kids rode bareback.”
“If you named me after Molly McMann, who’d you name Gail after?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t name her anything. Your father named her. We figured that was only fair, cause I named you.”
“Oh,” I said. That must be why Gail did everything with Daddy and I did everything with Polly. Gail must be just like him.
La Grange Garage appeared out of orchard land. ESSO it said, high above Route 246. There was the store full of candy bars and flour and oil cans and newspapers and old men in overalls and the garage connected to it with the guard dog. Pal, the dog, was blind. And my grandmother was nearly deaf. My grandfather had no teeth. “Gum my food,” he said. Inside was the piano and all the patchwork squares and triangles and tiny octagons for the quilts my grandmother made with her friends. There were always people there, and they could sew.
“Ugh,” Polly said. “All those church ladies and their piles of thread!”
Embroidery floss was everywhere, silky and variegated, strewn among the sheet music and the seed catalogs on the sideboard table. Polly couldn’t sew and wouldn’t bake.
“I hated it here!” she said as we turned into the parking area. The house was a little jut off the store, and the garage part for fixing cars was a big jut off the other side of the store. There were five flower beds and a vegetable garden all around the oddball building my grandfather built by himself.
“Your grandma would pack me a lunch and I’d go with Grandpa and hand him the nails while he pounded. Took him three years to build it. Didn’t want to be a farmer. But I hated it. I loved Great-grandma’s farm and I stayed there and went to school from there. Came here on the weekends. I was a selfish girl. I got what I wanted.” Polly sighed as she pulled up the hand brake of the Dodge with the force of both her arms. “Then you have kids, and you can’t be selfish.”
“But Aunt Berta has Howie, and she’s selfish.”
“That’s because she only has one kid. When you have two you can’t be selfish.” Polly was wrenching open the stuck door of the Dodge and my grandmother was comin
g down the cement steps with a pie for some lady who was just leaving with her quilt trailing. “I hope you get to be selfish all your life, Molsie,” my mother said.
Polly went into the garage with Grandpa Gillie while I went to the rain barrel with Grandma Ruth. We got buckets of rainwater and sloshed to the beds by the pine trees and dumped rainwater on the nasturtiums. Then we went in the kitchen and stuck our hands in the molasses cookie dough. It was heaven and it was as Polly defined it: home. My idea of home meant grandparents, people who had their children so long before that it was as if they never had any.
Sex and babies. Five neighborhood girls all jumped up and down on our twin beds, squealing and tickling one another in the silky, rabbit warren mess of sheets that smell of childsleep between their crumpled ridges. When I burrowed into Gail’s bed, I sniffed the Gailsmell while the others used my bed as a trampoline. Before Gram, alarmed at the squawk of the springs, had hauled us all downstairs, I’d stuck my finger up my underpants and found the hole, finger sized, then saw a color in my mind, blackish red, brought my finger out and smelled it, Ah! The whiff of me.
“All right now, all of you girls have to go home when you finish your oatmeal cookies. Come on now, girls, let’s get a move on.” My city grandmother had the quality of a business-like Shetland sheep dog nosing at the heels of the lambs she ushered out the door. “I’m glad to sit down!” Five girls, ages four to seven, were a handful. From her chair Gram leaned toward me and put her arms loosely around my waist. “Oh, you naughty kids! I’ll have to make those beds all over again.” She used “naughty” with benign acceptance. I knew she thought we weren’t really bad.
“Hey, Gram, look what I found,” I dared to say. I stuck my finger up my underpants into my vagina and brought my finger out, thrusting it under her nose. “Smell this!”
“Eeewwwhhh!” she exclaimed in delight. “What a cupcake smell!” Her eyes glistened with a kind of excitement, surprise, curiosity, and wonder. I searched her face for whether this was all right. I’d found the secret place she also knew about, and as far as Gram was concerned it was fine. “Let’s go remake the beds,” she said, corralling me and Gail up the stairs.
Because Polly had Gail by cesarean section, I thought all babies were born by emergency operation. It was only when Polly overheard me magisterially explaining this to Gail that she corrected me. I couldn’t imagine a baby coming out of my vagina. It was only big enough for my finger! “Oh, you expand,” my mother said. Expand?
When I was mad, I felt my whole body blowing up until I was the size of a wrestler. Did expanding feel like that?
One day Gram and I drove out to see Agnes, who shouldered open her ripped screen door while holding a hot iron in her good hand. Gram was on a scouting mission for Niagara Neighbors, and I was the excuse to stay just long enough to eye the mess Agnes was in and report back to other interested parties. Agnes had had a baby out of wedlock and lived on welfare. Watching her was hard because her withered arm hung loose as she pushed her good arm across the ironing board.
Her baby slept politely in a wicker laundry basket I myself wouldn’t have minded curling up in. I was tired of being dragged around by Gram. Agnes lived in welfare housing, a kind of barracks where nothing was planted to obscure the cement foundation, and the grass was cut down to a yellow stubble, and there was no sidewalk leading to the ripped screen door. This was what happened when you got in trouble. Worse, people like my grandmother would come and throw old baby clothes on your ripped davenport and humiliate you with a lot of judgmental questions. My grandmother was someone I could ask questions of, and I did a substantial amount of quizzing on Agnes who was so skinny that her apron wrapped around her one and a half times. Her eyes were red, and her hair was thin and frizzy from a home permanent that had gone wrong. “It’ll grow out,” my grandmother said dryly.
“I’m going to marry a collie,” I announced to Gram on the way home. You couldn’t have babies with a dog, and that would insure my not ending up like Agnes. “Lassie,” I stated, “I’m going to marry him.” (But how would I ever meet such a celebrity as Lassie? I knew that, though they said it was a girl dog on TV, Lassie was really played by a male. Did such animals ever come to Buffalo? Would Lassie be dead by the time I needed to get married? I had heard there were replacement Lassies, a ghastly fact I could barely assimilate, though they might be useful.)
Now when asked whom I would marry, I could simply reply, “A collie, I am going to marry a collie.” There on the windswept moor I would stand with my husband, a big, sandy mammal with its foreleg casually, protectively around my shoulder.
“So what kind of children are you going to have with a dog?” Gram asked, then answered her own question, “Puppies!”
“Maybe we’ll have puppies,” I said primly, “or we won’t have anything. You can’t have babies with a dog.” If only my parents were born as dogs. Oh, to be a feral child, brought up by wolves. And never have to continue the generations of fighting.
Is it strange for a girl of eight to be thinking about motherhood—or avoiding it—with such intent? But motherhood is what some girls only think of. When we came home I changed into my Annie Oakley outfit with my holster and gun. Soon Ted would be home and we’d have dinner, so Gail and I played in waiting. I sat and watched her maneuver Marilyn, her platinum blonde doll. Now and then I lazily shot the air with my pistol.
“I’m a bombshell!” Gail said in Marilyn talk. “I’m the blondest girl in Hollywood!” Gail strutted Marilyn down the carpet. “Vavoom! Va-va-va-voom!”
When Ted came in, Gail dumped Marilyn under the end table. “Daddy, Daddy,” she whooped, “let me ride on your shoe!” Ted shuffled over in his workboots and Gail climbed on, her tiny bare legs wrapped around the thick, foot-molded leather.
“Gail, tuck your feet in! Daddy could step on you!” I yelped.
“Nah, I ain’t gonna step on her.” She rode his foot, giggling, around the living room while Annie Oakley watched.
“Can I? Can I ride now, Dad?” Annie asked.
“Nah. We gotta eat.”
Out of the Scallop shell of a weekend, Venus-like, Polly’s friend Flo Skrypnyk rose to take me to a double feature, eat Creamsicles, and leap into the bushes behind a bus stop. Flo deeply desired to avoid the driver who had a crush on her. When we peeked out from the bushes, the bus had gone, and I was miserable to have barely glimpsed the black-haired bus driver, and tired, having had a day of five hours at the movies.
I wanted to go back to her apartment and rest (my mother would have had me resting hours before). How strange it was to wait for a bus when everybody I knew just went to the parking lot and got into their cars. Yet there was Flo, making us wait for the next bus because she was avoiding the driver, and also because she was not a mother and could not recognize when I was tired. I understood this, and felt a little scared and a little exhilarated because her ignorance of what I needed physically was more than balanced by being treated, regally, as an adult.
At last we returned to the little apartment where Flo lived alone, and I ate the dinner she prepared for us, nothing like the meat and potatoes Polly dished up. We ate salad and something called lasagna. Then she handed me a grapefruit which she expected I would cut up for myself. How amazing! Somehow I figured it out, getting a few scoops of the fruit for dessert. Weren’t there any cookies? Flo produced a chocolate cookie from a package with a little gold stripe.
“I’ve earned my stripes,” she said. “I’ve got my little place here, and my job.”
“And you have Jacques,” I said. Jacques was Flo’s toy Pomeranian.
“Yes,” Flo said, her muscled arm extending from the cap sleeve of her dress. Flo worked at Lackawanna Steel, beneath the smokestacks. She stood in a dark fiery place on the line and wore a protective mask, like blinders on a horse. She was strong as a horse, too, and as beautiful. (“Looks just like Jane Russell,” Polly confided to me one day in the Dodge, “including the boobs!”)
“And you
have Wayne,” I said boldly. Wayne wore a suit and paced past the assembly line. I knew because Flo arranged for my whole fourth-grade class to visit the plant and we all saw the molten steel and brought home free miniature steel cars. Wayne said hello to me because sometimes on Thursdays he drove to our house in his Thunderbird to pick up Flo.
“Yes”—Flo eyed me—“I have Wayne every Thursday.” (“Once a week,” Polly said, “like clockwork.”)
“Never on any other day?”
Wayne once a week and cookies with a gold stripe. (“She makes more money than your father!” Polly said in awe.)
Flo got up to do the dishes so I was completely free to think up more questions. “Flo, do you really make more money than my dad?”
“That’s none of your business,” she said, flipping a little dishwater at me off her long fingers.
“How come you don’t have kids, Flo?”
“I don’t have a husband.” She was wiping the stove off now.
“But you have Wayne!”
“He’s not my husband.”
“Do you want to marry him?”
“Molly,” Flo said, turning round from her clean burner, “I like my life just the way it is.”
She had Wayne every Thursday till he died, decades later. She had money to buy a house and retire. She had a muscle that flexed beneath her sleeve. And the bus driver, and double features.
“Really, Flo, don’t you want any kids?”
“Here, catch.” She threw me a tangerine. I’d never had one before. She showed me how to peel it and separate the wings inside so they looked like butterflies on the rind. “You’re nice to have around every once in a while,” Flo said.
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 2