Course Correction

by Ginny Gilder

  When she first arrived in this country, Mom worked as a masseuse, a waitress, and a nanny. She moved up to secretary in an office when she and Dad were first married, then quit when she got pregnant because the doctor told her she would lose the baby if she walked up stairs. Her office was on the fourth floor of a brownstone in Queens, and the elevator was reserved for the executives. One day, many years later, she confided to me, “I didn’t tell my boss I shouldn’t use the stairs. I didn’t tell your father about the elevator. I wanted him to take care of his family, earn the money. He had to do his job.”

  From then on, she and Dad divided their duties along traditional lines. Mom took care of all things household and kid-related. Not much for warmth, with a record short on kisses and hugs, she conveyed her love by honing her family management skills. She was in charge of it all, from laundry, dusting, and vacuuming to hosting parties and serving the nightly dinners she concocted.

  Meanwhile, following his graduation from Yale and a one-semester fling with law school, my dad landed a job in the investment business. To me, my father’s world was a box of mystery, filled with taking care of clients, hiring secretaries, traveling to visit companies, reading boring paperbacks called prospectuses, and buying things called stocks. Occasionally we four kids accompanied him to check out the companies he invested in. Denny’s and Dunkin’ Donuts were my favorites because Dad never skimped on product testing.

  But when we behaved badly, he morphed into the bad guy who wielded the belt and strapped us bare-assed or knocked our heads together to thrust us back on course. I learned the importance of staying in line and keeping him happy, whether that meant whispering on Sunday mornings to let him sleep undisturbed or doing what he told me to avoid an argument.

  By the time I was eleven, Mom had relocated us to our fourth—and most lavish—apartment, edging us out of Queens’ Forest Hills neighborhood where I lived as a baby into progressively larger abodes, landing us on the southwest corner of Park Avenue and 81st Street on the topmost floor, in what I assumed would be our family’s permanent home. A toddler when we moved from Queens to Manhattan, I didn’t register my parents’ march up the wealth scale. Moving to the Upper East Side, right off tony Park Avenue, didn’t mean anything to me. The next move didn’t mean much more, but of course my father was successfully making his way, building a base of clients and figuring out how to negotiate the stock market, buying long, selling short. With the last move, once Mom was done with her remodeling, the evidence of his financial success beamed from every room of our new apartment.

  By then, Mom had mastered running our family, ruling with a sure hand and occasionally an iron fist. Collectively, we were a well-oiled operation, our days ordered, the details addressed. She did a bang-up job crafting a home from the maze of nineteen rooms, linked by hallways and connecting doors, she had convinced Dad to purchase.

  Although I got lost the first several times I ran through the empty apartment, chasing my big sister Peggy, by the time Mom finished knocking down walls and decorating rooms, I knew exactly what was what and where I belonged. In attending to the myriad of minutia that effects the transformation of space into safety, Mom created magic. From the décor of our home’s most public spaces to our family’s most private nooks, she made room for all of us. We ended up with a home that impressed the snootiest of guests, secured privacy for her husband, and allowed us kids to roam freely, a refuge filled with sparkling sterling silver, a baby Steinway grand piano, Oriental rugs, European paintings, and durable furniture that could survive pummeling and spilled milk. She paid equal attention to the design of my father’s closet with its row of neatly pressed suits and folded underwear, dark socks with garters, and multiple versions of his trademark V-necked navy cashmere sweaters tucked into built-in dresser drawers; the wallpaper design and paint colors of the private bedrooms she selected for each child; the polka-dotted couch in the kids’ sitting room; and the gym at the back of the apartment with Swedish bars, a trapeze, and a rope ladder.

  Our home was made for the high life, for preening and partying, strutting and showing off, and my parents took full advantage. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Dad’s birthday offered ready-made excuses to stage fancy celebrations to showcase their home and broadcast Dad’s growing success, and Mom manufactured additional reasons to party. Holidays included children, but not the other occasions. I spent my share of evenings peeking out from the kitchen, awed by the formal table settings, heavy with ornate sliver and linen waiting for their moment to shine, watching the waiters serve drinks and hors d’oeuvres from fancy trays, ogling the parade of colorful dinner dresses, and tracking our mother’s regal progress from room to room, cigarette smoke enveloping every huddle she joined as she kept the party’s excitement going. Glitz and glamour governed my parents’ social life; they were the king and queen, and it all looked so good.

  But, my mother found herself in the wrong world at the wrong time. Postwar America in the 1950s was eager to live happily ever after, which translated into a renewed focus on family and domesticity. While many women had worked in traditionally male jobs during the war as mechanics, engineers, and factory workers, once the men returned from overseas, women were fired or pressured to quit so their male counterparts could resume their proper roles as breadwinners. The smartest choice for an intelligent woman was to find a husband who would be successful and focus on raising a family, as her career options were nearly nonexistent.

  In 1954 , in an environment marked by nonstop tension with the Soviet Union as the Cold War escalated, Dwight Eisenhower, a World War II general and hero, won the presidential election. The world’s entry into the atomic age, with the ever-present threat of nuclear attack, as well as the rabid anti-communism that pervaded the American political sphere, helped promote a cultural emphasis on security and family. It was patriotic, the American ideal, to raise resilient and prepared children who could handle the uncertainty that pervaded the world. This was not the best time for a single woman to pursue her own dream, and no wonder my mother capitulated, not even realizing at the time what was happening, as the power of a cultural imperative washed over her and pulled her into its current.

  My mother fell in love, hard and long, to the point that when she woke up over a decade later in the waning 1960s, she had given her future to a man who was steadily making his way in the world, expected she would handle all the child-raising as a solo act, and yet demanded her full attention. Somehow, her private dreams for her own life had slipped away somewhere, a package that couldn’t be held in arms that were already overloaded.

  I was too young to understand the bargain my mother had to make, forced by an era that preceded the birth of the women’s movement. Ten years following the end of WWII, American culture embraced women who used their smarts for interior decorating and party planning, who dedicated their energy to tackling challenges no more daunting than clean rooms, sparkling silver, and well-behaved children. By the time the sixties arrived, my mother was in deep, and her private dream had faded into the dining room’s woodwork that had to be kept polished along with the silver.

  Thankfully, I knew none of that. I loved my life. I loved my siblings, divided since time immemorial into the Littles and the Bigs. My baby brother, Dixie, and my younger sister, Britt-Louise, nicknamed Miss Muffet, constituted the younger pair. Peggy and I were the Bigs. Three years separated me and Britt-Louise, a divide I regarded with pride tinged with haughtiness and a sense of responsibility, as the Littles deferred to us Bigs who called the shots. Peggy lorded her twenty-two months of seniority over me and christened me her sissy sidekick. I tried to stay out of trouble, an extremely tough balancing act given my big sister’s penchant for mischief; outright disregard for anything that smelled like a rule, instruction, or prohibition; and her relentless attempts to inveigle me to follow her lead.

  Then, there was school, all-girls, replete with stodgy, vomit-green uniforms, bloomers included. So much to love: diagramming sentences, learning abo
ut gerunds and dangling participles, and listening to Mrs. Clauss read us The Yearling in English class (I couldn’t stop sobbing at the end); unwinding the trail of details in just the right order to solve complicated word problems in math class; and competing with Fritzi Beshar and Dorinda Elliott for a nod of satisfied approval from stern Miss Trembley. I belonged there, known by all my teachers and accepted by my many friends.

  Mom and Dad even took us abroad to Sweden, where I met my only female cousin, Annica, along with aunts and uncles and, of course, my rumpled Mormor, Mom’s mom, so gently welcoming with her soft folds and warm embrace. No one mentioned the MIA Morfar, Mom’s dad, and by then I knew my questions would yield only irritation. Everyone spoke mostly Swedish, while I could speak only English, but hugs and smiles translate across all cultures.

  All mighty fine, but our summers trumped everything. According to family lore, Mom and Dad met just off the beach in the Atlantic Ocean one summer day, when Mom was swimming and her bathing suit top came off. Dad was the on-duty lifeguard, his summer job in Ocean Beach, Fire Island, during his college years, and, misinterpreting her distress, swam to her rescue. The rest, as they say, is history.

  Our lives may have been orderly and matter-of-fact during the school year, but when school ended for the summer, our daily routine evaporated without a trace. Mom transformed into the queen of laissez-faire, dropping our city life rules like a handful of graying coals on the barbecue. She squeezed our entire household—four children, luggage, bicycles, and Chocolate the cat—into Blackwood, our sturdy Pontiac station wagon, and headed to Long Island, leaving school, homework, early bedtimes, and Central Park’s postage-sized concrete playgrounds and the grubby dirt of the Great Circle in the dust. We left Dad to fend for himself during the lonely workweeks and grab a train on Friday afternoons to join us every weekend for his own hit of summer.

  We spent our first summers in Ocean Beach where Mom and Dad first met. Cars were banned and rusting red wagons reigned, so I ran barefoot everywhere, often stubbing my big toes on the concrete slabs of sidewalk so badly they bled. My usual attire was a bikini bottom sans top. I learned how to ride a bike on the narrow walkways and helped my dad tend his row of tomato plants that lined the sunny side of the house; I controlled the hose at watering time and helped pick the juicy ripe balls when they turned orange red.

  But just as she had in her quest for the perfect city home, Mom didn’t settle for good enough, setting her sights beyond Fire Island. She took years to locate the perfect summer corollary to our Park Avenue apartment, which she found on the far eastern end of Long Island, in East Hampton. Heaven turned out to live at the end of Briar Patch Road, where the road dwindled to a narrow single lane and the asphalt petered out to a scruffy mix of dirt and sand. There, Mom set us free to scamper unfettered in the sunshine, nose about in the woods, explore the abandoned barn and catch baby mice, play in the meandering field below our graveled circular driveway, and splash in the shallows of Georgica Pond, tucked in front of the endless stripe of the Atlantic Ocean, which extended across the far horizon like an ear-to-ear smile. We claimed the seemingly endless acreage that comprised the property, where we all ran free like gazelles, speckled brown by the sun and gaily light-footed as we danced through the freedom that defined the season in our household.

  We ventured away from our rental property daily, passing countless hours at the beach, riding waves, building sand castles, prowling for shells. We frequented the duck pond, where we sprinkled molding bread on water dappled by pollen, and we wandered the aisles of the public library, seeking books to browse and borrow. But many of the best moments occurred at the end of Briar Patch Road, and Mom made them possible. A master at finding the right ingredients, she created the conditions for summer perfection. Yet, for all her researching and planning, seeking and finding, when it came time to enjoy the fruits of her labors, she missed the boat. Spending time with us wasn’t at the top of her list. Expert at the logistics and details, setting the stage for action, she remained behind the scenes she created. She was long on duty, short on presence, and it all worked just fine, until it didn’t.

  Although the rest of the family loved the ocean and she found a house that allowed easy access to its waters, Mom was not a beach person. She loathed sand. She found the perfect solution, college-aged mother’s helpers to ferry us there and to our many other adventures, guaranteeing fun for us and peace for her. Coming home, usually tired, damp, sandy, and hungry, we nearly always found Mom in her favorite sunny corner on the far end of the big wraparound porch, lying on a chaise lounge in her two-piece bathing suit, her wrinkled tummy, courtesy of four children and one emergency appendectomy, lying flat and exposed. She would be smoking one of her trademark Lucky Strikes, eyes shaded by a pair of enormous dark glasses, deep into one of her beloved mysteries.

  Once bathed, we would spend the end of the day nipping at her heels, as she prepared our supper, often grilling steak and burgers on the back porch behind the kitchen. After dessert, as twilight ushered in the day’s end and the stars twinkled their first hellos of the evening, she occasionally treated us to her own version of games. Sometimes she devised treasure hunts, hiding wisps of paper scrawled with age-appropriate clues around the property. She sat in a rocking chair on the front porch smoking, a gleam in her eye as we scampered here and there, sorting through her meanings and solving her riddles. When we presented our crumpled clues for inspection, Mom meted out our just rewards: trinkets from Woolworth’s and miniature chocolate bars.

  More rarely, Mom herded us onto Blackwood’s opened back gate and gave us her version of a joy ride, bouncing the station wagon onto the grassy field and driving slowly over the rutted ground. I loved her homemade roller coaster. As I clutched Peggy beside me while we flew over the bumps and occasionally lifted into the air, my joy of speed commingled with my terror of falling off.

  The summer I turned eleven would be our last on Briar Patch Road, but no one knew that at the time. Peggy’s and my usual ten weeks of summer freedom got cut to two that year. I could always recount the names of our mother’s helpers, starting with the first, dark-haired BG, who worked for Mom two consecutive summers; followed by Julia and Francie, a package deal; and then Susan. But I didn’t know that summer’s girl, with long, wavy dark hair and heavy thighs, well enough to remember her name. Mom sent us to Camp Four Winds in who knows where, way too far away, in northern Maine. Being packed off provided us the first obvious clue that something was off, but we missed its significance while we slept in unheated cabins, swam in frigid lakes, learned how to paddle canoes, and ate institutional food, pining for our usual summer routine of waking up and doing whatever we wanted.

  When we finally arrived in East Hampton for the last two weeks of August, the night air had lost its softness, replaced by a crisp note of chill, an early calling card of fall. The time was too short to cram in all our favorite activities, and, vaguely unsettled, I bid adieu to summer.

  “Peggy, Ginny, Miss Muffet, Dixie, come here!”

  It was late September, mid-afternoon on a Sunday, and I sat in my bedroom at my desk with my sixth-grade math workbook open, solving extra-credit word problems. My first impulse was to hide, but I knew that would solve nothing. If Mom wanted to find me, she would. Had she found the mutilated Barbie doll Muff and I stashed in the cabinet or maybe the broken plate I hid in the garbage? Nothing seemed major enough to match the volume and tenor of her voice.

  Peggy appeared at my doorway. “What we’d do?” I started to ask, but saw her bewildered shrug and stopped.

  “Come on, let’s see.”

  I followed Peggy down the hall to the master bedroom. Miss Muffet and Dixie sat scrunched together at the foot of the bed, their feet dangling above the carpet. Muff’s eyes were downcast and her forehead furrowed, and Dixie leaned right up against her, as if to shield himself. Mom wordlessly pointed us to take our places beside them, brandishing the hairbrush she held in her hand.

  Peggy and I snuggl
ed close to the Littles. It was as if the four of us made a silent pact; if one of us was going down, we’d all go down together.

  We sat for a long moment, waiting, watching Mom glare at us. She looked furious, madder than she’d ever been, and, being kids, we made her mad often. Her face was a giant snarl. Even her hair seemed wild. I wanted to cower and hide behind Peggy, and could feel my body trying to shrink itself into extinction. Peggy, however, showed her big-sister colors.

  “Mom, what’s wrong? We haven’t done anything.” Her defiance wavered at the end of her sentence as Mom took a menacing step toward us and raised the hairbrush.

  “I have told your father to leave.” Mom’s voice was so strained, her accent so thick, it sounded almost as if she was speaking Swedish.

  Leave? Leave where? He often departed on Sunday evenings, flying out the night before a Monday morning visit to a company in another city. Fear trumped confusion. I said nothing.

  “He’s having an affair with BG. That slut.”

  Peggy slumped beside me as if she’d been shot. “No way!” Her words suggested disagreement, but I heard disbelief. Muff and Dixie, only eight and not yet seven years old, respectively, unsure of Mom’s meaning but not immune to her upset, started whimpering.

  Mom leaped to defend herself. “I told him he had to choose between that whore and me and …” She gestured at us with the brush, including the entire family in Dad’s rejection.

  Shocked into silence, no one moved. I stared hard at my lap, overwhelmed, not wanting to see anyone else’s reaction. I felt dizzy, watching my life detonate so suddenly. A rogue wave had washed in and wrecked our solid family like a sand castle. Now I really didn’t want to look at Mom, because I heard her sniffling. She had started out sounding so angry, but when I snuck a look at her—still waving the brush, smacking the air—her makeup was smudging.