Until we got too heavy, at bedtime my father carried us two at a time from the basement TV room up two sets of stairs. We gathered on someone’s bed to hear my father spin stories about Sammy Beetlebug, Danny Dragonfly, and Irving Spider, who battled the Oak Street gang, my father wearing different hats to act out characters. In bed we shouted to him, “Bring me some cold, cold, cold, cold water,” all of us chanting, a cacophony, making sure we wouldn’t be forgotten, which was always the danger. After my father made the rounds with the same cup refilled many times, he’d play the piano downstairs to lull us to sleep, someone calling for another song: “I’m not asleep yet!”
Sometimes Joanne, my roommate, and I sang in bed, at least until she drifted off. I’d lie awake wondering when I would fall asleep, knowing that as long as I was wondering this, I wouldn’t, not knowing how to stop waiting for sleep to envelop me like a wave at the beach. In the dark I’d trace my finger on the embossed ballerinas on my wallpaper as if I were reading Braille like Helen Keller, one figure in arabesque, another en pointe.
One summer night when I couldn’t sleep I heard voices outside. Standing at my window, I watched my parents walk across the street to the McGraths’ for a late-night dip in their pool, my father with a towel wrapped around his waist like when he stepped out of the shower. I concluded that they were skinny-dipping. I stood for a long time trying to catch a glimpse of a silvery naked body, eavesdropping in the hope of snatching some exotic adult word that I could take back to bed and mull over, wonder about its portentous meaning, like the word seduction, which I’d seen on a gag gift someone gave my parents, a miniature four-way street sign showing the stages of coupledom: seduction, love, marriage, divorce. I didn’t understand that divorce was the punch line. Or the word abandon, which I read in my father’s Time magazine, a story about a mother who dropped her children at a park and never returned. I asked my mother what abandon meant, but I couldn’t fathom it. “But why did she leave them?” Until then I thought that trouble came from outside, like the kidnappers I imagined lurked outside my window.
We traveled as a pack, moving through time and space together, connected by an invisible tether, bound by rituals of pleasure. In winter, legs wrapped around each other, we tobogganed the giant hill behind the high school. We skated on Memorial Pond downtown, my father kneeling to tighten everyone’s laces one at a time. Sometimes on Friday nights we ate pizza and fried clams at Tee-T’s, cramming into a booth on the restaurant side, the jukebox twanging through the thin wall that separated us from the garrulous men smoking and drinking on the bar side. On summer weekends we went to the Braintree twin drive-in theater, dressed in pajamas at twilight, playing on the swings with other kids in pajamas, like being awake in a dream. When the sky darkened and a cartoon flickered on the screen, we raced to our car to watch True Grit or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or Planet of the Apes. Once in a while, because of someone’s poor planning, the second screen of the twin drive-in showed a film meant for adults. I’d crane my neck to see enormous close-ups of lips and faces pressed together, flesh projected large onto the silver screen, an alternative narrative to the one allowed by my parents, a silent sensual story.
On Sundays after church we sprawled belly-down on the living room carpet eating glazed doughnuts and reading the funnies in the Boston Globe, my father in his easy chair with the boring sections, my mother in the kitchen cooking a roast. Out of the blue my father would say, “Let’s go to the beach!” We’d change into bathing suits and flip-flops, stuff towels into our beach bags. My mother would wrap the whole roast beef, still warm in its Pyrex baking dish, and lug it across the sand as if it were an eighth child. Sitting on blankets at Duxbury Beach, we ate sandy roast beef sandwiches on white bread pinkened by blood. Years later I asked my mother why she insisted on portaging a roast to the beach. “Was it so important to have Sunday dinner?”
“That wasn’t my doing,” she said. “I’d be cooking a roast like every Sunday, then halfway through the day your father would get an idea in his head to go to the beach. So I packed up the roast and took it with us.” I glimpsed the woman my mother was, a woman happy to put her husband and children first, to accommodate and please no matter how impractical, a woman I could never be.
My father tried to instill some culture in us, taking us to museums and shows, like a Clancy Brothers concert: four Irishmen in off-white cable-knit wool sweaters, looking exactly as they did on the album covers at home. One year he took the four older girls to a play, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, at the Wilbur Theater. From our seats on the floor, I craned my neck at the balconies and chandeliers as the lights dimmed and the curtains whisked open to Charlie Brown and Lucy onstage, but my excitement dissipated into disappointment, then guilt, since my father had driven us all the way into Boston, was so excited for us. But Charlie Brown wasn’t short and bald with one squiggle of hair and dot eyes. He was an adult man, which was weird. The stage was not a lawn where Lucy yanked the football away but an arrangement of geometric blocks. Soon my disappointment evaporated as the characters, Peppermint Patty, Linus, Snoopy, acted characteristically.
Later, in fourth grade, I was cast as Sally in a Charlie Brown play at school, probably because I was tiny. If I had been cast based on my personality, I’d be Lucy, bossy and controlling and critical. (“We critical people are always being criticized,” Lucy says.) Lucy was my least favorite character.
One Saturday we drove into Boston to see the Cowsills at the Hatch Shell beside the Charles River, a free concert that attracted 30,000 people. The Cowsills had seven kids, like our family. The band included the mother, Barbara, with WASPy good looks and au courant frosted hair, and five of her six sons—Paul, William, Barry, Robert, and John—handsome boys with cleft chins and mops of hair, and Susan, a year older than me, with a pixie haircut like mine, who made her live-concert debut that day. The Cowsills were the ideal American family, good-looking, clean-cut. In my memory, I linked the Cowsills with milk, the image of scrubbed wholesomeness. I thought this association was because of the cow in their name, but I’d forgotten that the Cowsills promoted milk in ads for the American Dairy Association.
For a brief moment my mother dreamed that we, too, could be a family band, like the Lennon Sisters, who were nine, twelve, fourteen, and sixteen when they debuted on The Lawrence Welk Show in the mid-1950s. My mother sat us on the piano bench in the living room. “Sing!” she implored. “You could be the Lennon Sisters.” She didn’t know how to train us, how to teach us to harmonize, but she’d done her part, bearing four girls in four years, so by dint of that feat we should take it from there. “Sing,” she beseeched.
In Boston we parked a mile away, it seemed, and held hands as we weaved through the crowd, the paper-doll chain of us traipsing through the city streets to the field, where my mother spread a blanket and unpacked lunch. When the band played, the audience roared. My father lifted us one by one to his shoulders, and from that vaulted view I saw tiny Susan Cowsill way up on the stage tapping her tambourine as the speakers blared the hit song that everyone recognized, the crowd cheering as the Cowsills sang, flowers in her hair, flowers everywhere / I love the flower girl, the family band and our family that day, as the song promised, happy happy happy.
On Saturdays my father took us to the library or to the park, or my mother took us to the town dump to pick “perfectly good” castoffs, or to Walpole Prison, the Hobby Shop, where inmates sold crafts. We’d park in front of the prison, walk up the main steps, and pass through two tall wooden doors. To the left of the lobby—if that’s what you called the entrance; it seemed a little casual, like the lobby of a theater—was the Hobby Shop, crowded with bargain-priced furniture and dusty glass display cases, like waterless aquariums, filled with leather crafts, belts and wallets. On top of the cases were ceramic figures and things made from Popsicle sticks—two-foot-tall Popsicle-stick lamp bases and Popsicle-stick bowls. The heinous prisoners, the worst in the state, murderers and rapists, practiced leatherwork
and ceramics, arts and crafts, like we did in school. In spite of my mother’s warnings, I thought that prison must be like art class. I couldn’t reconcile the image of scary bad men holding tiny paintbrushes and squeezing tubes of glue, licking all those Popsicles to get the sticks.
At the store one day my mother bought a cheap nightstand, a bookshelf, and, for Patrick’s room, a Batman lamp, which I coveted. I loved Batman, though I was frustrated by his ineptitude; he was always almost defeated, tied to that conveyor belt pulling him ever so slowly toward the buzzing circular saw. Batman’s power was punching. Pow! Bam! Zonk! To save the city, Batman had only rope for scaling and rappelling, his fists, a fast car, a young friend, Robin, who didn’t contribute much, and a butler. Mainly Batman had money. Money was his most powerful superpower. Batman didn’t have to work or cook or clean. Alfred the butler did all that and so Batman had time, time to fight crime.
Catwoman was my true hero. She was a criminal, but she couldn’t have been that bad because Batman had a crush on her. I wanted to live in Gotham City, where girls could be criminals, where the good guy could secretly love the bad girl. Who didn’t want to be Catwoman in that skin-tight black bodysuit, sexy, living on the other side of the law, an outlaw?
When my grandmother, my mother’s mother, visited from New York, we took her to the prison, a sightseeing stop. In the Hobby Shop one day my grandmother struck up a conversation with the inmate working at the counter. “Why did you do something bad to get in here?” she said. “Why didn’t you get a job?” My grandmother—a roly-poly four-foot-ten-inch Italian woman with a sixth-grade education, widowed at thirty-six, who always wore thin cotton print dresses and nylons with clunky black orthopedic shoes for her arthritic feet, who from the age of twelve to seventy-five cleaned other people’s houses, scrubbing floors, ironing, washing laundry for people far wealthier than she’d ever be—my grandmother couldn’t understand why someone would steal or rob or commit crimes.
The man working in the Hobby Shop that day was most likely Ronald “the Pig” Cassesso, a Boston mobster sent to Walpole for a gangland slaying. For many years Cassesso ran the Hobby Shop, which was outside the prison’s secure area; Cassesso even had his own office in the lobby. If Cassesso responded to my grandmother, it’s lost to memory, but she couldn’t let go of her inquiry. She turned to a woman in the shop. “Why can’t they do this instead of going to prison? Isn’t it a shame? All that talent,” my grandmother said, looking at the furniture, the leather crafts. “Can’t they make a living doing this?” A bell rang in the Hobby Shop, and the woman with whom my grandmother had been chatting left to visit her son.
At the Hobby Shop my mother said I could choose something, but the store didn’t seem to carry many items for girls. There were fancy dollhouses—the craftsmanship so fine they were sold in FAO Schwarz, too—but I knew not even to ask for something so expensive. I must not have seen the choker necklaces with earrings to match, handmade by Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, who was incarcerated in Walpole Prison during the years my mother took us to the Hobby Shop.
DeSalvo was accused of viciously raping and murdering by strangulation thirteen women in eighteen months, though he was convicted on unrelated charges of burglary and rape. DeSalvo confessed to being the Boston Strangler after he’d been caught as the Measuring Man, a rapist who knocked on women’s doors posing as a model’s agent, telling the women he’d noticed their shapeliness and asking if he could take their measurements. He was also identified as the Green Man, a rapist in green work clothes who knocked on women’s doors and said the landlord had sent him to fix the plumbing. The Boston Strangler was the first televised serial-killer case of the twentieth century, so it was international news from the time of the killings in 1962 and 1963 and throughout the three-year manhunt.
In February 1967, when I was seven, DeSalvo was caught and sent to Walpole, bringing infamy to the prison and the town both. Everything the Boston Strangler did was of intrigue, deemed newsworthy: his first breakfast in Walpole Prison (scrambled eggs, toast, bacon, coffee, orange juice); a lawsuit, brought by his famous attorney, F. Lee Bailey, seeking millions from 20th Century Fox for portraying DeSalvo as “vicious” and “depraved” in The Boston Strangler (though DeSalvo was pleased that Tony Curtis played him); DeSalvo’s bid to be tested for a chromosomal abnormality, which might explain his violence; his dance with an elderly woman, Mrs. Mary Monroe of Jamaica Plain, at a picnic in the prison meant to unite two “neglected” groups, senior citizens and inmates; the 45 rpm DeSalvo recorded in prison, “Strangler in the Night.”
I’d heard vague child-whispers about a killer and his sex crimes. The Boston Strangler choked some victims with their own nylons, and though this was not the ligature used to strangle all the women, it became his signature, at least in my mind. I couldn’t lose the image of flesh-colored stockings around a neck, silky beige stockings like the ones in my mother’s top dresser drawer. There was a confusion in my mind of murder, sex, rape, especially since the handsome, sexy actor Tony Curtis was cast as DeSalvo in the movie.
Whenever I heard about an escaped prisoner, I imagined the Boston Strangler, because he was the only prisoner I’d heard of in Walpole. One summer night Sally and I and some neighbor girls slept out on our screened-in porch. In the early misty morning as we walked around the front yard in our nightgowns, our feet wet with dew, we spied a figure walking down the road toward us, a silhouette emerging through the fog—a man, an escaped prisoner. The Boston Strangler! We ran inside the house and grabbed a carving knife from the kitchen drawer, then crept onto the porch. We peeked into the street and there he was in front of our house! We screamed and in a panic piled onto each other. When we stood up, the knife was underneath our heap of bodies, the man gone.
That was 1969, the year the Rolling Stones released “Midnight Rambler,” based loosely on the Boston Strangler, who, as Mick Jagger sang, would stick my knife right down your throat, baby, and it hurts.
Our games were tinged with darkness, the prevailing mood as the 1970s began. Sherry Stewart had her own room and a record player, so we played DOA at her house, inspired by a song with that title. We pulled the shades to dim the room, and I lay on Sherry’s bed as she set the needle on the 45 rpm, faint sirens whining through the scratchy speaker. I remember / we were flying along and hit something in the air.
Sherry, the nurse, tickled my stomach to mimic blood trickling, but she didn’t touch my arms because they’d been blown off. Sherry placed a towel over my legs because they were gone, too. I conflated this song, “D.O.A.,” with Johnny Got His Gun, a paperback I’d read about a World War I soldier who woke up in a hospital as a quadruple amputee, and with the Vietnam War, ever-present in the background of my childhood. I stared at photos in my father’s magazines—a naked girl screaming, people on fire—but in school we didn’t talk about Vietnam. On our street the fathers were too old to be drafted, their sons too young. The only person I knew who went to Vietnam was Arnold Logan, who’d babysat us a few times at our first house in East Walpole. One day suddenly Arnold Logan was our mailman, walking down the street in slate-blue shorts, carrying a bulging leather satchel, after our regular carrier, Mr. Mancini, had been caught with a cache of samples in his basement, cartons of tiny detergent boxes and mini-toothpastes meant for postal customers.
One morning Arnold knocked on our door and asked for my mother. She and Arnold chatted while I hovered next to her. Arnold seemed nervous, unable to hold my gaze. He seemed frightened. When he left, I asked my mother what was wrong with Arnold, and she said he’d just come back from Vietnam. Arnold had all his arms and legs, but Vietnam, I thought, had hurt something inside him.
Sherry Stewart’s father called me Bunny, but I didn’t connect the nickname with the Playboy magazines he turned cover-down on the coffee table, or the game that Sherry invented for our Barbie dolls, Playboy Bunnies. For this game we left the dolls topless as we walked them around saying, “Cigars? Cigarettes? Or me?” Then we mash
ed their faces into the Ken doll. I hated that game but indulged Sherry so we could play one of her many board games, like Mystery Date, in which you turned a doorknob to discover which of five men would take you on a date. If you got the garbageman, you lost. The blond man was the date you were supposed to want. Secretly I desired the grunge, the dark-haired man, the underdog. The men were distinguished by their attire, which indicated the type of date: picnic, surfing, skiing, a formal, and a guy wearing work clothes, who I thought was a garbageman but who could have been any blue-collar worker.
Sherry Stewart and I locked ourselves in her upstairs bathroom and flipped through her brother’s Penthouse magazines. Although we couldn’t tell from the close-ups of women’s crotches, Sherry and I agreed that the man put his thing in the woman’s hole, but we didn’t know what he did once it was in there, how long he kept it there. Sherry thought he peed in there, but that sounded wrong. Why would he pee in there? Sherry wanted to try peeing like a boy, so she tied a string around her pink hairless labia and stood in front of the toilet, but urine sprayed all over the seat and dribbled down her leg.
At Carole Kraus’s slumber party in sixth grade, five girls sat in a circle in Carole’s screened-in porch and one by one kneeled and pulled down their pajama bottoms. I was secretly thankful that I was not as underdeveloped as Sheila Barton, and astonished at the womanly body of Amy Phelps, her thick dark patch of hair. We told sex stories we’d heard from our older sisters. Eileen Gomes told us that her sister, who thought she was pregnant, stuck a hairbrush up herself to “get rid of it.” This was 1971, two years before Roe v. Wade.
Body Leaping Backward Page 4