by Robin Green
In five months, in spite of the turmoil Ira Green had going on at home, the constant financial and emotional drain of it, he married my mother. Caroline Parnas eloped with this handsome, graceful man with his seeming worldliness, his to-the-manor-born airs, his half ownership of a thirty-foot sailing vessel, and his thousand-dollar debt (a fortune in those days) at the posh Biltmore nightclub downtown where he’d taken her on their first date and where the band, who knew him well, played “Hail to the Chief” when they walked in.
My mother’s parents took the newly married couple in, and in a few years they had a son, and now my mother was stuck there, maybe forever, for the foreseeable future certainly, with a little boy who might never know his father, a boy who toddled around, the story goes, gripping a handsome headshot of my father in his army uniform and kepi. I know it’s a true story because the very photograph my then two-year-old brother clutched in his hot little hand now hangs framed in the office on Main Street in Hanover, New Hampshire, where today he practices psychiatry, and you can see the disintegrated top corner of the photo where his fingers had grasped it all those weeks and months a lifetime before.
The morning of July 31, 1945, when my mother began having contractions, her father dropped her off on the steps of Lying-In Hospital on his way to work at his liquor store on South Main Street. Her mother, Rose, stayed home to take care of my brother. I am told that I was born quickly and without trouble.
My mother was not pleased with me. Oh, she had been hoping for a girl to complete the set, so my being a girl was fine (though she liked to joke she’d known I’d be a girl because I’d made her fat as a cow when she was pregnant with me, whereas with my brother she’d had only a neat baby bump in front). She wasn’t pleased because my brother had arrived picture-perfect—towheaded and blue-eyed, a regular Gerber baby who looked like a goy, a WASP, what my mother had always wanted to be and tried to pass as—so I wasn’t what she was expecting. Because now here’s me, an Oscar Wilde/George Eliot/Lena Dunham of a baby.
In professional photos taken on my first birthday, I can see my mother’s sad attempt to prettify and feminize me: dressing me in a frilly white dress, slicking my thin, dark hair neatly to the side, cladding my feet in stiff little white shoes. Still, even though this child’s mother’s heart sank at the sight of her, the toddler in the photo looks like the happiest little girl in the world.
The reason was my father, who, luckily for everybody but especially for me, came home from the war and loved me from the start. For one thing, he’d won fifty marks in a bet on my sex and birth date—I still have the German bills, encased in Plexiglas on a shelf in my office—and the timing of my birth got him home from Germany weeks sooner than he’d expected.
But more than that, when he came home, he had been completely and brutally rejected by my big brother. This was not the handsome soldier in the photo he’d been carrying around—this man was pockmarked, careworn, and haggard! This was not, my brother wailed, his father!
In my forties and into my fifties I spent eleven years in therapy, seeing my therapist through her training at the Wright Institute in Los Angeles, her master’s, and her PhD and into her private practice in Glendale. Twice a week for eleven years I sat across from her and wept. The only exception was October 3, 1995, when I heard the O. J. Simpson not-guilty verdict read over the car radio on the forty-five-minute drive from my office in Santa Monica to my appointment and for the first time wanted to talk about something larger than myself.
We came, my therapist and I, to the basic conclusion that these were tears accumulated over the years that my childhood had trained me not to shed—not with anyone else around to witness or be bothered by them, that is—and that I had been permitted into my parents’ presence only when I was clean and pleasant, not when I was a whiny, noisy little monster with tears and snot running down her face.
“Don’t whine!” my mother would wail. “I can’t stand it!” And “Fine, but if you hurt yourself, don’t come running to me.” Along with “Don’t make faces or you’ll end up like Cousin Evelyn,” which meant being a baby-talking spinster living with her mother and selling dresses in a little shop on Wayland Square. There was also “Don’t be so sensitive” and the weird “Don’t touch my face!” This last because my mother was worried that the germs on my fingers would give her pimples.
Where was my father in all this? He colluded. Sure, he loved me and lit up whenever I walked into the room (with the much later exception of when he was dying), but I’d better be cheerful and funny and bright. My brother and I didn’t sit at dinner with our parents until I was seven, my brother nine; that was when we moved out of the two-family house my mother’s parents had bought to accommodate their daughter’s growing family (they lived in the upstairs flat, we, down) and into a single-family home of our own.
Before that, we ate at the kitchen table with Beatrice, the young, light-skinned, soft-spoken Cape Verdean my mother had hired right off the boat at ten dollars a week to take care of me and my brother. Beatrice shared a room with us, unfolding and folding her rollaway bed night and morning. When I was little, she changed my diaper (my mother didn’t like that mess either) and at two years old, I tried to teach her English (“Dess,” I told her, meaning the dress she was buttoning me into). In later years, she combed and braided my hair and got us dressed for school. On Sundays, she’d go to stay with her father in Fox Point, which in those pregentrification days was a modest enclave of Portuguese fishermen and their families.
My father didn’t want the commotion of children at the dinner table that parents now seem to find so charming. He wanted to come home from a day at Mickler’s Department Store where he’d chain-smoked three packs of unfiltered Chesterfield Kings and sold stockings and cheap underwear to the ungainly and ill-dressed, wanted to leave all that behind as he washed and shaved at the bathroom mirror for the second time that day, emerging for a martini in the living room with his wife and thence to the dinner table, where she’d serve the expected three-course meal: a half grapefruit, say, or wedge of melon in season, then a broiled protein, a green vegetable, and a starch, followed by dessert and coffee.
Beatrice would send us out in our pajamas, teeth brushed and faces washed, to say good night. There was no crying. And really, what was there to cry about? We had food on the table. We hadn’t been through a depression or a war.
Upstairs, Grandma and Grandpa had the first TV on the block, a black-and-white, of course, since color hadn’t been invented yet, in a blond-wood cabinet, a Philco with rabbit-ear antennas and a screen that looked like a milky convex porthole that we’d stare into, transfixed, me and my brother sitting close and cross-legged on the carpet, watching anything—fat old Kate Smith singing “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain,” John Cameron Swayze with the news and Timex commercials (“It takes a licking and keeps on ticking”), and The Howdy Doody Show with Buffalo Bob and Princess Summerfall Winterspring.
Sometimes Grandma let me come into her bedroom with its old-world mahogany furniture and heavy flowered drapes. She let me sit on the bed and watch while she patted powder on her armpits and between her thighs and dressed, let me help her lace herself into the pink-satin boned contraption that was her girdle, and once let me sit on her lap, lift one of her pendulous breasts, drape it over my head, and smile up at her, at which she only threw her head back and laughed. Once, on a summer afternoon, on the front steps of the house, she held me in her lap and I saw a rose beetle crawl into the cleavage between her breasts.
“Grandma, a bug!” I cried.
But she had already felt and seen it. She reached in, plucked it out, and flicked it away, saying, “Oy, oy, oy!” and laughing so that her whole soft body shook.
There was tension in the house. My mother began to notice that the thick cream layer was missing from the top of bottles the milkman delivered each week. She confronted Beatrice, who admitted she’d been drinking it to soothe her stomach. It was determined that Beatrice had developed ulc
ers.
My mother wasn’t happy either in that house or in that neighborhood. She wanted away from what she called the area’s schmaltzy Jews; she wanted me and my brother away from their schmaltzy kids. The sight of hairy-chested Mr. Malevsky in the second-floor flat next door eating dinner at the kitchen window in his wifebeater undershirt ate at her.
And she particularly didn’t want to live downstairs from her parents anymore. She wanted a house of her own, which, ironically, was now in her reach because of the money she and my father had managed to save from the break my grandparents gave them on the rent. She thought Grandma and Grandpa should move too. To Florida.
“The winters here are terrible,” she told them. “All your friends are dying. There’s nothing for you here.”
My own life was elsewhere. I loved school. My hand was always in the air. I ached to be called on. I knew all the answers. One Saturday morning my mother drove me to school, where I’d been called, along with the other two smart kids in my class and some kids I’d never seen before, to take a follow-up to a regular IQ test we’d been given a few weeks before.
The parents were suppressing prideful smiles. The teachers were exchanging glances. It was clearly a big deal. I finished the test. Days passed. Nothing more was said. It seemed to me my teacher didn’t look my way anymore. My mother never spoke of it again. All of which told me I had failed to prove myself a genius.
Working on an essay in class one day on what I’d done on summer vacation, I got up and went to the pencil sharpener on the wall near the windows to sharpen my pencil. In a little while, I got up and went to the pencil sharpener again.
The teacher looked up from her desk. “Well,” she said, “somebody wants us to notice that she got a new dress today.”
I felt myself burn with embarrassment. Because it was true. It was a new dress.
The evidence against me was mounting: I was a show-off, I was no genius, I wasn’t pretty. There was also the matter of the drawing with the black sky I’d made. And my mother’s discovery that I’d been flushing my underpants down the toilet when I went to the bathroom. Clearly Beatrice wasn’t the only one in that house with symptoms.
Then, when I was seven, a new beginning: we moved to our new house on Wayland Avenue on the East Side of Providence, a leafy district of fine homes bordered by the Providence River to the east, Brown University to the west, déclassé Pawtucket to the north, and Portuguese Fox Point and the harbor south. It was the toniest part of Providence, populated mostly by Mayflower-type WASPs—until most of them fled to the outskirts, to Barrington and East Greenwich, in the 1950s when second-generation Jews started making enough money to move in.
Ours was the smallest house in the nicest neighborhood, just like in a Jane Austen novel, a fourteen-thousand-dollar, thirteen-hundred-square-foot, six-room white Dutch Colonial with black shutters, an apple and cherry tree in back, elm trees in front. There wasn’t enough room for Beatrice, my parents said, and with the mortgage, we could no longer afford her anyway. She was gone and I never saw her again.
Gone too were my grandparents. They had sold the house and a block of land they owned on Main Street for sixty thousand dollars and bought a four-plex in Miami Beach near Ninety-Fifth Street and Collins. (Bad timing, because not so many years later my grandfather’s plot of land sold for a cool million and is where the Providence Marriott now sits.)
I suppose I could have cried about the loss of Beatrice and my grandparents, but I didn’t. I loved the new house and our new life there. My mother was happy. I had my own room. And I had Ronnie.
Ronnie was my best friend. She was born two weeks and six days before me, and our parents were friends so I had known her since the crib. She hadn’t lived very far away before, but now her family moved to a house just two blocks from us and we saw each other constantly. We walked to and from school together, spent our free time in each other’s houses, day after day, year after year, a lot of it in her older sister Leslie’s bedroom listening to Broadway musicals on the record player, dancing around and singing along to West Side Story, Pajama Game, and South Pacific at the tops of our lungs.
Ronnie could really sing. She could sing and dance and act, and when she came to my house and I played a Mozart étude that I’d labored on for weeks on my father’s mother’s grand piano (which now took up half our living room; it was so big you had to crawl over the piano bench or go around through the kitchen and dining room to get to the stairs), Ronnie could sit down and pick it out on the keyboard by ear and, in a matter of minutes, be playing it herself.
Ronnie’s family was rich. Her father was vice president of an advertising agency downtown. All my parents’ friends were rich. One owned New England’s IGA markets. One was a radiologist. Another was a dentist (the one who took the photo of me on the beach). None of the wives worked. They had their hair and nails done, their homes professionally decorated, and played golf at Ledgemont, the Jewish country club.
My mother didn’t work either—she didn’t want to and my father didn’t want her to. My family didn’t have funds for beauty shops or decorators or the club. We weren’t exactly poor—we didn’t live like we were, anyway. What we were was in debt: mortgage, credit card bills, overdue utilities. My father said he spent half his life digging a hole and the other half climbing out of it. Still, it was to our modest little house on Wayland Avenue that everybody came because that was where the fun was.
My father would make cocktails—the only time he went into the kitchen or opened the refrigerator door, my mother observed, was to get ice. The men told stories, the women laughed, everyone played badminton in the backyard under floodlights on summer nights, ice-skated in a rink my father made layer by icy layer with the garden hose in the dead of winter.
Under the floodlights, Ronnie and I would sing duets for the adults, belting out “We are Siamese if you please” from Lady and the Tramp and Irving Berlin’s “Sisters, sisters, there were never such devoted sisters…”
Our whole family loved Ronnie. Her personality was so big and dominant that, though my older brother’s name was Ronnie (from Ronald, though today he prefers Ron), we all referred to him as Ronnie Green; only my friend Ronnie was just Ronnie.
She was, in her own mother’s words, full of the devil. Her green eyes, set too close together, gave her an impish quality. And she was an imp, was always getting us into trouble. We were kicked out of Hebrew school for talking. Called to the counselor’s tent at Girl Scout camp for telling dirty jokes in the bunk. Summoned to the school principal’s office, separately, for making fun of a chubby classmate.
“You’re a good girl,” the principal told me, “this is not at all like you. Did your friend Ronnie put you up to it?” To my everlasting shame, I just looked away and didn’t deny it.
Through our childhood and into our teenage years we were inseparable, learning to swim in the salty waters of Buzzards Bay at Mashnee Village on Cape Cod, where our parents vacationed for a week each summer, staging elaborate squid burials on the beach, and, in later years, listening to Elvis Presley. By thirteen, we were shoplifting his 45s, his and the Everly Brothers’; at fourteen we were riding our bikes to smoke cigarettes at Swan Point Cemetery (where Ronnie’s ashes now reside in an urn); at fifteen we were drinking inches off my parents’ gin and replacing it with water until one evening Dr. Summer took a sip of his martini and told Dad, “Ira, this thing is water.” My father only laughed. He tried to chastise me but couldn’t keep a straight face. I agreed not to steal any more gin.
He wasn’t much of a disciplinarian. After I’d committed some infraction or other, he’d come to the door of my room and, with a serious expression, manage, “I’m very disappointed in you, young lady,” and this would be enough to make me writhe with contrition. My mother did spank me once when I was four and we were living in the old flat. I’d crossed the street to play in a small forest of trees behind the corner house at the bottom of the hill and when she found me, she dragged me home and right the
re in the living room put me over her knee, pulled down my underpants, and paddled me with the back of a hairbrush.
She’d told me not to cross the street alone! She hadn’t known where I was! She’d been worried sick!
I wriggled off her and marched toward my room, then stopped, whirled, and pointed a finger at her.
“Don’t you ever do that again!” I said, and I stomped off.
She never did and liked to tell this story about me. This and another one about picking me up from first grade for a dentist appointment.
The teacher brought me out to her in the hallway. “Do you know who this is?” the teacher asked me.
I looked at my mother and deadpanned, “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
The teacher blanched. “You…what?” she said.
My mother gasped. “Robin, tell her who I am!”
Now the teacher seemed terrified.
“Tell her!” my mother snarled.
“She’s my mother,” I said.
“Are—are you sure?” the teacher asked.
I told her I was sure, it just—it had seemed like such a silly question, that’s all. I didn’t know that there had recently been a child abduction and murder in Michigan and now schools across the country felt they had to be more careful.
It was different at Ronnie’s house. Her father took a hard line on everything, which only served to create a contest of wills between them. When Ronnie was young, it was easier to please him. At Mashnee Village one summer, Ronnie swam a mile clear across the bay, her father rowing a boat alongside her, and, once they were home in Providence, he had the ad agency’s art department fashion a trophy out of a rock he’d brought back, commemorating the swim with her name and the date, place, and distance.
