My role, it seemed, was to complain. One hot miserable day we were digging as usual, using frying pans to scoop soil since we had only two shovels, my mother tanned and muscular, sweating and powdered with dirt, wearing shorts and a bra. She began each morning dressed in a sleeveless tank top, but in the heat of the day she’d decide that a bra was equal to a bathing suit top. “How come Sally gets to make lunch and we have to dig?” I said. “How come Sue gets to leave?” My mother threw a shovel at me, dirt and all, which lightly grazed my thigh. It was more of a letting go of the shovel, her grip on the handle relaxed by my lullaby of complaints. I was sent to my room, where I read a book, trying to ignore the clink-clink of the frying pans ladling dirt outside my bedroom window.
Because the excavation was too shallow, our pool would be half in-ground, half above. With the pit cleared, we dug holes two feet deep around the perimeter to sink steel support posts. After we cemented the posts, my mother realized that they’d rust underground, so Barbie, the only one tiny enough to crawl into the holes, was given the job of painting each post with a viscous black sealant. After she finished the first post, Barbie looked up and saw post after post after post—one every three feet all the way around the pool, sixteen total. Just keep going, she told herself, just keep going. Barbie was the opposite of me—persevering without a grumble, covered head-to-toe in epoxy by the time she was done. “Tarbaby!” we called her.
A plumber installed a pipe from the filter to the drain at the bottom of the hopper, and then my mother ordered two tons of sand, which was dumped in the exact spot where Leroy Jones’s mountain of dirt had been; I was not happy to see another pile of dirt to be moved. We had to spread the sand evenly over the bottom of the pool, so for days we shoveled and tamped and leveled. While the rest of us slept off the work of the day, at three in the morning in the cool air my mother kneeled in the pool with her rolling pin, spreading and smoothing the sand like a giant pie crust. I imagine her insomnia was a result of the changes in her life: sleeping alone for the first time in fifteen years; her funds halved; a brood of kids to raise without the full-time help of a husband. But maybe those nights were rare moments of quiet for her, and the rolling and smoothing under the moonlight a soothing meditation.
After we bolted the corrugated aluminum shell to the posts, the last steps were to lay in the liner and fill the pool, but first we had to erect a six-foot fence as required by Massachusetts law. My mother rented a post-hole digger, but her arms were too short to work it effectively, so, using the long-handled frying pan, she and Patrick dug as far into the earth as the length of their arms, then sunk the fenceposts. We couldn’t afford expensive stockade, so we bought four sections of spaced-picket fence, like stockade with gapped teeth, a space between each plank, and installed these on the street-facing side. Around the sides and back we jerry-rigged chicken wire to the posts, purchasing lengths of stockade one at a time as we could afford them; it would be years before the pool was properly enclosed with stockade.
The final chore was laying in the liner. Mr. McGrath, the professional pool installer, had promised to help my mother with this tricky task. Occasionally that summer Mr. McGrath stopped by after work to check our progress, smoking a cigarette. I sensed his contempt at my mother’s quixotic project, installing a pool herself. Ha! On the filling day, all of the kids and Drew Peterson from next door were needed to hold the turquoise vinyl liner that we draped into the perfectly smooth hopper and over the top of the aluminum wall, like laying a pie crust into its pan. My mother sent me over to tell Mr. McGrath we were ready for his help. Sitting in his den watching TV, he said he’d be over after that inning.
We turned on our hose and slowly the water rose in the pool, inching upward as we clutched our sections of liner like a great blue quilt cut from a bolt of sky. My mother orchestrated the filling, directing each of us to yank tight or relax. The tension of the liner increased as the water deepened. Our fingers ached from gripping the vinyl. We waited for Mr. McGrath. My mother stepped delicately inside the pool to pull out wrinkles, trying not to leave heel-print craters in the packed sand underneath. With the pool half full the wrinkles were mostly smooth, except for one thick fold. But that wasn’t our biggest problem: the liner was dangerously uneven, hanging a foot over the edge of one side but only an inch on the other. If the liner slipped from our fingers, the water would rush in and ruin the painstakingly smoothed sand. We’d have to redo much of our work. My mother ordered all the kids to the short side to desperately hang on to that inch of vinyl.
Mr. McGrath finally showed up. “The way to remove wrinkles is to reverse your vacuum cleaner and blow them out,” he said, but it was too late. With the pool nearly full, there was nothing we could do about that one long wrinkle—the wrinkle my mother stared at, that irked her for years. Mr. McGrath lingered for a minute, pronounced our pool fine, then returned to his ballgame.
“Fat lotta help he was,” I said.
My mother wouldn’t indulge my sentiment. “I hope you become a critic when you grow up,” she said. “You always find something to criticize.”
Her comment stung. What I said was true, wasn’t it?
Immediately after we filled the pool the water turned chartreuse. We had to shock it with chlorine and wait patiently for three days until it cleared. The chlorine burned our eyes, but it was heaven to jump into the pool we’d spent all summer building. We didn’t have a diving board, just a wooden utility spool from the electric company. From that platform I practiced back dives, arms over my head, spine concave, striving for height and depth in one move, hurling myself backward.
I joined the town swim team. The first day I could barely swim one length of Center Pool downtown, but the coach, Dick, gave me tips during the early-morning practices, and by the end of the summer my time was fast enough to compete in the last meet of the season. After the season ended, Dick, a wiry handsome man who wore a Speedo in solidarity but whom I never saw in the water, chose five girls to represent Walpole in a mile race. Each night we practiced, lap after lap after lap, until my belly was full of accidentally swallowed pool water, until I burped chlorine breath. The race was held at Farm Pond, a half-hour from Walpole. Fifty girls aged twelve to eighteen bunched together on the shore, five swimmers from each of ten towns, and when the starting gun shot, we crashed into the lake.
On that windy day in that cold choppy lake, waves slapped my face and flooded my mouth when I raised my head to breathe. I was a crooked swimmer, but in the town pool I tracked along the blue lines painted on the bottom. In our pool at home I used the wrinkle in the liner as a compass needle, but Farm Pond was a greenish murk. Every few strokes I’d surface to sight the sailboat that marked the halfway point and correct my course, swim a few strokes, correct again, zigzagging along. Already three of my teammates had climbed into one of the boats that trailed the bodies bobbing in the water. On the home stretch I put my face in the water and paddled my arms and when my knees dragged on sand I staggered up the shore like a primeval creature evolving to a higher order.
One Saturday I joined a charity swimathon, collecting dimes for laps. Once I warmed up I felt I could swim for miles. I counted one hundred lengths and then lost track as I crawl-stroked down the lane, flip-turned, again and again until I was no longer in my body. I was dreaming and thinking. It was so pleasurable in the isolation tank of the pool that I never wanted to stop. After I passed the point of tiredness I felt only fluid, as if I were some sleek creature gliding through the water. If I kept swimming I’d develop gills on my neck like the Incredible Mr. Limpet and be able to live underwater, live in a giant pink nautilus like in my favorite book in third grade, Dr. Dolittle.
At the end of a lap as I was about to flip-turn, a hard tap on my head interrupted my reverie. It felt strange to surface, to remember where I was and why. A lady from the event crouched down and said, “I think you’ve done enough.” Her tone implied that I was greedy, swimming excessively, even though I was raising money for charity, e
ven though I felt as if I could swim for hours, for a week straight, swim into the next phase of my life, into adulthood, like Cheever’s character in “The Swimmer,” who swam home by dipping into his neighbors’ pools, swimming the length of one, hopping out and then into the next pool, looking back on his life, crawl-stroking through his past, but instead I wanted to crawl-stroke forward, swim through water like time, swim into my future.
3
Operation Pocketbook
One day at Fernandes grocery store, where everybody knew us, I watched my mother tuck a can of tuna fish in her pocketbook, the kind we liked, Geisha white tuna in water, not that oily rank cheaper brown tuna. In front of the refrigerator case, she slipped a package of ham in her purse. I glanced around anxiously, but nobody noticed. Who would suspect a tiny housewife-looking woman with a pretty face and rollers in her hair, wearing sneakers with Peds?
Once my father moved out and he had to pay for two households, we had no money—my father paid child support but no alimony. My mother must have felt desperate at our whining about nothing to eat. One night she cooked a bag of frozen ravioli and when the bowl got to Sue, there was only one left, so my mother ordered each of us to pass a ravioli to Sue, a reapportionment. We weren’t poor like Doreen Randall, the standard-bearer of poverty in my youth, or the Wests on the skinny street downtown, but my friends weren’t eating farina for dinner. My mother tried to pass off Carnation instant milk, but we complained loudly. We didn’t understand the economics of divorce.
What clicked in my mother’s mind the moment she crossed the line from who she’d been—a good Catholic, teaching Sunday school, working so hard on that dollhouse to raise money for the church, serving fish on Fridays, taking us to confession on Saturdays, Mass on Sundays—to break a commandment: Thou shall not steal? Years earlier, when Joanne was five, she stole candy from Woolworth’s one day, so my mother dragged all of us back to the store to witness a sniveling Joanne apologize to the cashier, her pudgy hands reaching up to place money on the conveyor belt.
Maybe Joanne had been confused by my mother’s rules or the sometimes ambiguous clauses. Before at Fernandes, if we found a bag of candy on the shelf that was already open, it was fine to take a piece. You must never open the bag yourself; that was stealing. The former was acceptable because the opened bag would have to be thrown away and it would actually be a waste not to eat that candy, which jibed with the lesson that we should never waste food because children were starving in Biafra. In the candy aisle of Fernandes, we’d search and search for open bags, which we almost always found, some reliable thief preceding us.
When I suspected my mother was going to steal something—she’d glance around casually, her hand surreptitiously opening her pocketbook—I’d walk away, pretend to be looking at something farther up the aisle. If I blinkered myself to the criminal act, then I was neither complicit nor witness. But I grew increasingly nervous when she shoplifted, in inverse proportion to her skill; she got good at it. Once, she slid windshield wipers down the leg of her pants and walked out of the store. Still, I worried she’d be caught red-handed and there would be a scene in the grocery store, not the scene we used to create before the separation, when my father was paid once a month and at Fernandes we’d push two carts heaped with packages, the line accruing behind us at the checkout, then fill the back of our station wagon with a dozen bags, a literal mother lode.
I refused to stand in the checkout line when my mother paid with food stamps. The ritual was attention-drawing and humiliating, separating the disqualified nonfood items—toilet paper, soap, toothpaste (as if those weren’t necessary)—to pay for with cash, tearing each perforated, colored Monopoly-money bill from the booklet as the line of shoppers behind us grew impatient and, I suspected, judgmental: potato chips with food stamps?
Our fall from the middle class to welfare coincided with a plummet in the economy—stagflation, a brand-new term: steeply rising costs, high unemployment, slow growth. In the months after my father moved out, the cost of meat, poultry, and fish nearly doubled. Millions of Americans protested the spike in prices, marching in picket lines as part of Operation Pocketbook and Housewives Expect Lower Prices (HELP). Food prices rose and rose as inflation hit 9.2 percent in the first half of 1973 and President Nixon ordered a sixty-day freeze on meat prices. By the end of 1974 the nation had suffered the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
The 1970s turned a lot of otherwise honest people into thieves. One day at Fernandes, where Sue worked as a cashier, a man filled his grocery cart with meat—roasts and legs of lamb and steaks, the biggest, fattest hunks of meat from the store’s refrigerated bins—and pushed the cart out the automatic door without paying, loading the meat in his car and speeding off before the cops arrived. The meat thief.
Shoplifting nearly became a national pastime, increasing 221 percent from 1960 to 1973 and then rising 20 percent annually until 1980, when stores installed electromagnetic tags and surveillance cameras. In 1975 shoplifting was the fastest-growing larceny in the country, according to the FBI. “It used to be poor people,” a Boston detective said in the 1970s. “Now we get doctors, lawyers, teachers, nuns, priests, ministers, rabbis, you name it.” The president of the Massachusetts Retailing Institute called shoplifting a sign of “a very sick society.” Everybody was stealing, it seemed, taking what they wanted, needed, or felt they deserved, a kind of delirious slow-motion looting.
If my mother needed clothes for herself, she shoplifted them—her own personal Operation Pocketbook. In the changing room she’d roll something into her purse. Building 19, a warehouse store for liquidation and fire-damaged goods (you could smell smoke on some of the clothes), with sister stores called Building 19½ and Building 19¾, was an easy mark. Dana Fontaine, the second divorcée on our street and my mother’s new friend, worked at Holt’s, a fancy clothing shop downtown. When my mother checked out, Mrs. Fontaine let a couple of items slip by without charging for them.
In her thievery my mother was a modern-day Robin Hood, like the Wild Colonial Boy. She stole dungarees for Sue’s boyfriend, Jeff, and Sally’s boyfriend, Kevin, both from divorced families, too, because they needed clothes. Does the functional imperative mitigate the criminal intent? When my mother finally found a job, she earned $4 an hour as a clerk in medical records at Norwood Hospital. She often borrowed money from Sue, from her job at McDonald’s, and later, when Sue worked at Fernandes, she’d pass a few items by as she rang up my mother’s groceries.
One day at Mimi’s Variety downtown, I pushed a Popsicle down the front of my hip-hugger corduroys, my stomach buzzing with nervousness as I walked out the door, the Popsicle lodged against my pubic bone, burning cold against my hot skin. My shoplifting began as a flirtation with danger but became a necessity, as it was for my mother. Child support and food stamps barely covered groceries and toiletries, gas and auto repair, other sundries; there was no money for clothes. Perhaps my mother was too proud to ask my father for more money, couldn’t stomach the indignity of asking, which felt like begging. Judging by my father’s shabby apartment, I’m sure he was broke.
When I needed money for school clothes, my mother told me to ask my father. I remember the night I asked—I can picture exactly where my father and I stood in the dining room, next to the table where we used to have family dinners, where my mother sewed the jailbird costumes, where she built that cardboard-box dollhouse—the moment distilled because it was the last time I asked my father for money. “How much do you need?” he said. My father, like my mother, had grown up poor, on the middle floor of a triple-decker cold-water flat, where he slept in a double bed with his two younger brothers until he was eighteen. Even as a kid I sensed his anxiety about money.
My father and I stood awkwardly in the dining room, his shoulders slumped as if he carried the weight of the world, his curly black hair grown out for the times, with longish sideburns, and always a five o’clock shadow. He reached in his pocket for his wallet while he waited fo
r me to say how much I needed. I had no idea what was a legitimate amount to request. “Enough for a pair of pants, I guess.” My father grimaced as if it were physically painful to pry apart the folds of his worn black wallet. My siblings and I called this expression “the Dad face,” which conveyed not disapproval so much as a queasy discomfort. He handed me a twenty. “Is that enough?” I couldn’t look in his eyes, downturned at the corners like mine, which lent a serious, even melancholy note to our faces. “Yeah,” I said, “thanks,” though I knew $20 would buy a single pair of pants, no shirts or underwear or socks or shoes.
I felt awkward asking for money, guilty almost, as if I owed him something in return; my father must have felt uncomfortable, too, our relationship sullied by financial transaction. I never again wanted to be in the position of having to beg. It was easier to steal. In the dressing room of the Levi’s store at the mall, I rolled up pants and stuffed them in an empty shoebox in a bag. I stuffed clothes up the sleeves of my giant snorkel coat—those dark-blue polyester military parkas with orange lining and fur-trimmed hoods, suddenly the coat of choice in the mid-1970s. Shoplifting didn’t feel like a crime; there was no breaking, no illegal entering. You walked into the store—they invited you inside. Stealing merchandise from a generic department store seemed harmless. Taking things felt more like helping myself—in all facets of that term.
Body Leaping Backward Page 6