by Liza Rodman
On the longer drives, she’d forget we were in the back seat and would sing along with the radio, partly to keep herself awake, partly because she loved the sound of her own voice. I sang along too, but not out loud; that would have just made her mad. I learned to memorize the lyrics just like I memorized her stories. One she loved to tell was about the night I was born. It always began with Mom shivering on her gurney as the nurse wheeled her into the hallway of the obstetrics ward at Brockton Hospital, patted her shoulder and then disappeared. Mom lay there, cold, miserable, and alone, wanting a cigarette in the worst way. The hallway was empty except for other women in labor, screaming and moaning on their gurneys.
Why in hell am I waiting out here in the damn hallway? she wondered.
As one of her contractions ebbed, Mom leaned over the edge of the gurney and vomited her dinner onto the gray linoleum floor. Her head spun, and her eyes wouldn’t quite focus.
Where the hell is everybody?
The next thing she remembered I was born.
She called it “the worst night of her life.”
I never knew why she loved to tell that story so much.
* * *
My mother named me after herself, Elizabeth, but everybody—Mom, Dad, my sister, grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins—called me Liza. I asked her why she named me Elizabeth but never called me Elizabeth and she shooed me away, saying, “I don’t know. I don’t remember.” But come to think of it, she was never called Elizabeth either. Everybody always called her Betty.
I think she assumed she was going to love me when I was born, but by the time she realized she didn’t, it was too late to take her name back. Not everybody automatically loves their babies, you know, I once heard her say to a friend. The words scared me; doesn’t everybody love their babies? She didn’t hate me, but I don’t think she liked me very much. And she certainly didn’t show me any affection—hugs, caresses, a kiss on my cheek? Never. I didn’t know why, but it felt as if Mom had it in for me right from the start. She loved to tell people that when I was born, I looked just like Bob Hope—Bob Hope with a bad case of eczema. She always laughed and laughed telling that story.
As I grew older and taller, she said I looked like Bambi because my legs were too long and skinny for my body.
“You’re too tall for a girl,” she’d say, as if I could do anything about it. Or, “Can’t you do something about that hair? It looks like a mess of steel wool.” She also said my ears stuck out “like your father’s… But don’t worry, Elizabeth Taylor had hers pinned back, and we can pin your hound-dog ears back too if we have to.” I didn’t much like the sound of that. But I knew her real problem with me wasn’t my Dumbo ears or my tall, skinny Bambi legs, or that I had been an ugly baby with a bad skin rash; it was that every day I became a little bit more like my father. I was even beginning to laugh like him.
5 TONY
Tony Costa assumed all women, including one as young as Avis, ironed their sons’ and husbands’ clothes, right down to their boxer shorts, and kept an immaculate house, where pets were only allowed in the basement—like his mother did. But unlike Cecelia, Avis hated housework. Nonetheless, early in their marriage she reluctantly bowed to his demand that there never be so much as a dirty dish in the sink; otherwise, he often threatened, she could always return to her mother’s house. “Dirty dishes make him mad,” she later confided.1 Cecelia was no help; rather than offer a hand to her overwhelmed daughter-in-law, she criticized everything about Avis—her appearance, her housekeeping, her mothering, and mostly her care of “my Tony,” as Cecelia always called him. When Avis and a girlfriend would see her walking across Conant Street, they’d groan, “Oh no, here she comes.”
Avis learned to cook and sew and wash the laundry on a scrub board in the bathroom tub, but as hard as she tried to keep a clean and tidy house, Tony was never satisfied. He found fault with just about every aspect of her, berating her privately and in front of their friends and family, calling her a simpleminded ding-a-ling, a neglectful mother, and an abysmal wife. Their bickering soon devolved into violence; Avis reported to a family doctor that Tony had hit her and the baby more than once. Within a year of their wedding, they consulted a lawyer about a divorce but were told they couldn’t just say they didn’t love each other anymore and end their marriage. It didn’t work that way, particularly with a young child already in the picture. Not only had they both grown up Catholic, but the no-fault divorce was yet to come; in the 1960s, a couple had to have cause and proof that the marriage was over.
So they soldiered on in their sad and volatile dysfunction, but Tony was determined to bring some excitement back into their sex life. It had been a long time since their dangerous and delicious lovemaking in the back seat of his car out in the Truro woods.
He had heard about a “wild” book, full of pictures and instructions on different sexual positions. It was called the Kama Sutra. He found a copy in Molly Malone Cook’s East End Bookshop on Commercial Street and quickly tucked it into his jacket, lest the salesgirl know he was into “some kinky shit.” After looking through the pictures, he screwed a thick metal hook “not meant for hanging plants”2 into his and Avis’s kitchen ceiling. He told her that hanging by her feet would get her high from the rush of blood to her head and heighten her sexual pleasure. Panting with the effort, he fastened her into the rig, but it only made her dizzy to the point of passing out, and he let her down. Then with considerable effort, he pulled himself up, secured the rope, and masturbated as he swung at the end of it. Avis watched as Tony hung on the hook. She felt “ready to puke, for something I had loved was there, dead, hanging like a gutted deer, turning slowly in the lamplight. After that I had only pity for Tony, and that is the worst thing that can happen between two married people—pity. I found that out.”3
He put her on the hook two or three more times before that “thrill” paled, and then he tied her to their bed and burned her with a cigarette.4 Thankfully, that “game” was also short-lived.
Next, he told Avis that he had gone to parties in Somerville where the boys would put pillows over the girls’ faces until they passed out so that they could “then do whatever we wanted to them.” He insisted that he and Avis do the same thing and put a plastic bag over her face until she lost consciousness.5 At least once, he demanded that she beat him with a belt while he masturbated. He also inserted a wooden phallus into her vagina, insisting she was “too tight.” Avis found that “just plain silly” because Tony’s penis was smaller than the phallus. Still other times he had her “finish him off” after he’d masturbated almost to the point of orgasm, or he’d kneel on the floor by the bed and rub her naked body while he masturbated. All of this she did with a growing weariness.
Tony was probably engaging in hypererotic sex because he was becoming numb to stimuli and had to have ever more dangerous and volatile sex in order to be at all aroused, let alone reach orgasm. As odd and unsettling as it was, fifteen-year-old Avis had no idea this wasn’t what every married couple did, particularly with Tony insisting it was.
“I learned everything I knew about sex from Tony, including birth control, which is how I got pregnant,” Avis said.6
One friend later said, “She was just fourteen or fifteen—a baby having babies. What did she know?” But without achieving any sexual satisfaction herself and missing what had been their more normal lovemaking during their dating days, Avis soon became depressed over the pressure and guilt Tony applied to get her to take part in his increasingly perverse sex acts.
Night after night she lay awake, sleepless with anxiety. While their sex (most of which was his masturbation) left him momentarily satisfied, it left her drained and disillusioned. She realized Tony seemed to be able to perform sexually only if she was unconscious or doped to the point of near catatonia from chloral hydrate, a powerful sedative now known more commonly as a mickey, or the date rape drug, which Tony kept in his taxidermy kit.7 Avis asked him why he wanted to have sex with her only when s
he was unconscious, “like I’m dead, Tony.” While she wished there was an adult she could talk to who’d “listen and understand,” at the same time she also didn’t want people to know there might be something wrong with Tony.8 She was left alone with her burgeoning fear and anxiety.
After her last time hanging on the hook and desperate for sleep, Avis opened Tony’s taxidermy kit and took out his bottle of chloral hydrate. She sat on the edge of their bed where Tony lay sleeping, unscrewed the cap, and swallowed the entire vial. She passed out, pitching headfirst onto the floor with a loud thud, waking Tony. Unable to rouse her, he wrapped the baby in a blanket and Avis in her robe, and drove them to their family physician, Dr. Daniel Hiebert, frantically ringing the nighttime emergency bell until the doctor came to the door. For the next several hours, the men pumped Avis’s stomach, forced coffee down her throat, and walked her back and forth through the office until the drug had cleared her system.9
While the police ruled the overdose a suicide attempt, they told Tony if she had died he would have been charged with manslaughter. Afterward, she refused to engage in his increasingly bizarre sex acts, and as a result they all but stopped having sex. But there was at least one exception to the abstinence, and in the spring of 1965, their second child, Michael, was born. Tony was not yet twenty-one, and Avis only sixteen.
6 LIZA
My mother had big dreams and fancy tastes; she wanted to travel, spend her summers on the beach, and, mostly, find a handsome man who would put a huge diamond on her finger. But her regular job as a home ec teacher at Stoughton High School didn’t provide the money or the lifestyle for any of those things. So in the spring of 1966, when Auntie called to say there was a summer job at a motel that Auntie’s husband, Uncle Hank, co-owned and had just finished building on the Cape, Mom was thrilled. It was a first step toward all of her dreams, especially meeting a rich man, even though her father, Grampa Georgie, said only whores and circus freaks lived in Provincetown. Or maybe he said Hyannis. Didn’t matter which. Mom ignored him and got us ready to leave.
I found her in her bedroom packing.
“How long will it take us to get to Provincetown?” I asked as I plopped down on the bed to watch her pack.
“Get off-a there,” she said, pushing me off the bed. “I just folded that.”
Her push was hard, so I had to take a few steps to catch myself from falling. I stood in the door a safe distance away from her hands and feet, watching her resmooth the blouse I had sat on. Without knowing I was doing it, I started scratching at the angry red welts in the crooks of my arms and behind my knees. Mom told me the eczema I’d been born with only got worse after Dad left, spreading to my belly and the insides of my fingers and wrists. Some days it was worse than others, and my scratching left streaks of blood on my arms, legs, and clothes. Sometimes Grampa Georgie would run a bath with Epsom salts—he had a cure for everything, and for eczema it was a warm bath. For a while it helped the itching but not the rash; still, the baths always made me feel better.
“Stop that scratching!” Mom said, looking up from her packing. “You’re only making it worse.”
I forced my hands to my sides, even though the rash was bad that day with tiny bubbles of oozing pus on my arms and hands.
“So how long do you think it will take us to get there, Ma?” I tried again, fiddling against the itching burn on my arms.
Her hands slowed as she the folded the sleeves of the blouse, and I instinctively took another step back. She turned to me, her lips pressed together and her eyes narrowed to slits.
“How many times have I told you to call me Mummy?” she said through clenched teeth. “Ma sounds like something some half-breed dimwit would say.”
Half-breed. It would be years before I understood that if I sounded ignorant then she too sounded ignorant, or worse, low-class. To her Mummy sounded highbrow, like something the Kennedys would say.
“How long will it take to get there, Mummy? Will we be there by dinner?”
“For Christ’s sake, how should I know?” she said, putting the perfectly folded blouse into the suitcase on the bed and reaching for another to fold. “What do I look like? A road map? Go ask Grampa.”
Nana and Grampa Georgie lived next door to us in West Bridgewater. He had built a little two-bedroom house on his land for Mom and Dad when they got married, and we’d lived in it ever since. I found Grampa Georgie where I usually did—in his basement, where along with a set of encyclopedias he had a shelf of little nip bottles of booze with white screw caps. I often wondered if Grampa Georgie didn’t like his nips too much. Sometimes he tripped when he was only walking across the room, and other times he’d get mad at a tool and throw it across the barn yelling Goddamn it! Sometimes he’d yell at the car in front of him on the road: LEARN HOW TO DRIVE, YA CHOWDAHHEAD! And his breath usually didn’t smell very good, kind of sour and a little like vomit.
Everybody knew not to make Grampa Georgie mad on account of something called his Irish temper. I didn’t know what that was and I didn’t want to find out. But Mom knew. When she was about thirteen, she had sassed her mother, my nana, and before Mom knew it, Grampa had her over his knee, pulled her pants down, and spanked her like a toddler. She said that Grampa Georgie pulling her pants down and spanking her bare bottom at thirteen years old was just about the worst thing that ever happened to her. Unfortunately, Mom’s shame at being spanked by her father didn’t stop her from doing the same to me when it was her turn as a parent. I guess that’s why Grampa Georgie and Nana never stopped her when she backhanded me. They’d taught her everything she knew about being a mom.
* * *
I came down the cellar stairs and saw Grampa Georgie leaning back in his chair with his big work boots propped on his metal desk. He had never gotten around to finishing his basement “office,” so instead of walls there were just studs, and I loved to play between them. When he heard me on the stairs, he quickly took a last swallow of his nip and threw the empty bottle toward the trash can in the corner. It hit the metal can with a clank but bounced off the side and skittered across the floor.
“Hey there, Tootsie, whacha up to?” he said, smiling and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
I asked him how long it would take us to drive to Provincetown.
“Place is full of goddamn chowdahheads!” he muttered as he got up out of his chair. “I don’t know why your mother is dragging you girls to the ends of the goddamn earth for the entire summer!” He went over to a rusty filing cabinet, pulled a map out of a drawer, and brought it back to the desk.
“Come over here, and I’ll show ya,” he said, switching on the light and clearing a space on the desk to smooth out the map.
“There, right there,” he said, putting his finger on the map, “is P’town. And here”—he moved his finger slowly across the map—“right next to the Hockomock Swamp is West Bridgewater, where we live.”
I looked at the route from West Bridgewater down to and over the Sagamore Bridge and then all the way out to the very end of Route 6 on Cape Cod—Provincetown. I thought of all the headlights I’d count along the way.
“Looks like a long way. How long will it take to drive there?” I said.
He thought about it as he studied the map. “I dunno. ’Bout a hundred miles. Shouldn’t take ya mother longer than two, two and a half hours, depending on traffic. Especially the way she drives,” he added with a chuckle. “She learned that from me.” Betty drives like a bat outta hell, just like me, he loved to say.
He was right. We were there in a little over two hours. After we’d crossed over the Sagamore Bridge, I don’t think she hit the brakes once.
We arrived a couple of days before the start of the Memorial Day weekend, the official kickoff to the summer season on Cape Cod. Mom’s new job was head of housekeeping, which I knew was a fancy title for someone who changed beds and cleaned toilets. Still, she was thrilled to be working at the Royal Coachman Motel on Route 6A, just north of the Truro t
own line. It was so new it sparkled.
It was a motel unlike any other on the Outer Cape, where most motels were a handful of one-room, weather-beaten clapboard cottages along the two-lane highway. But the RC, as we called it, had 168 rooms on three floors, indoor and outdoor Olympic-size swimming pools, tennis courts, and a restaurant and cocktail lounge. The glossy brochures stacked on the front desk boasted, “None larger, newer or finer. Dancing and entertainment nightly.”
It also promised a summer of fun for me and Louisa playing with Auntie and Uncle Hank’s two kids, four-year-old Gail and six-year-old Geoff. Our mothers were the kind of best friends who were practically inseparable, so we four had grown up together, and Gail and Geoff were more like our cousins or even our siblings. We spent so much time together that Louisa even started to think that Uncle Hank was our father. I stopped telling her she was wrong because it seemed to make her feel better to believe that he was.
* * *
Mom and Auntie’s first order of business was hiring a small army of maids to clean all those rooms. One was a short, plump woman with rounded shoulders and sad, deep-set eyes who spoke with a slight accent, Portuguese or Italian, I didn’t know which. Her name was Cecelia, and she was only fifty-six but she was already bent by years of scrubbing toilets and floors in other people’s houses and motels. Along with her pale yellow sweater, every day she wore her white imitation-leather shoes, half loafer half sneaker, laced so tight her ankles swelled over the tops.