A Penny a Kiss

by Judy McConnell

  I felt my world shrinking. Dad, I could see, wasn’t happy with the situation, either. I willed the door to open and suck the strange man out so our family of four could sit by the fire around Mother and be one. I wanted Dad to take us for a drive in the new Studebaker, down France Avenue and over to the seven lakes, stopping at Bridgeman’s for banana splits.

  Finally the stranger left, disappearing into the mountains of snow. I stared forlornly at the remnants of my pajamas hanging on the hall table, a little pool of water shimmering on the floor below.

  Mother at the piano at Wooddale Avenue house in Edina—circa 1940.

  Chapter 2: A Special Case

  My brother Harold, five years my senior, was a thin boy, freckled, with a swatch of straight reddish hair that fell over one side of his forehead. He had Mother’s good looks and gentle manner. He didn’t like me. He saw that I continually received the benefit of the doubt, as the youngest and a girl and all. He stood by cautiously, watching the dramas I created and the wealth of attention they produced. Unlike me, he was strictly disciplined by Dad.

  Bursting with high-strung antics and impulsiveness, at the age of five I began showing signs of nervous susceptibility. I never stopped. Climbing over the house furniture like a gymnast, I’d swing over the back of the couch and cartwheel across the room, legs crashing against the walls. Mother would clutch her hands together in desperation. “Stop that! Settle down.” When I ran to her with a fresh bruise, seeking her lap, she twisted away, drawn into the other room by some urgent task. “For God’s sake, don’t be such a cry baby.”

  I developed tics. When I lifted my chin and picked at my neck bone at the dinner table, my parents looked on in astounded silence. Mother lowered her fork slowly. “Judy, stop picking at your neck. Must you do that? You’ll damage yourself. Brad?” she called out helplessly. At the far end of the table Dad, a hazy figure in a brown business suit, sliced his knife back and forth over a crisp pork chop.

  “She should get outside, get more exercise. She’s got more energy than a newborn heifer.” Dad was fond of using country language, a humorous reference to his backwoods background that we later suspected was deliberate. When they could afford to attend cultural events, Mother lured him to an opera, and he left shaking his head and declaring never again; he’d heard enough hog calling back home in West Virginia.

  I looked down at the chunks of food swirling into each other on my plate as I jerked my finger around. My picky eating habits caused a continual dinner-time struggle. All attention focused on my difficult behavior. I sank down in the chair. If I could just bury myself under the fold of the table! As my parents conversed, my eyes shot up to a silver-framed print on the wall behind Mother’s head. It was the picture of a young girl standing in a garden under a flowering arbor, slender and impeccable in an icy blue frock. She exuded confidence, serenely at home in her starched dress and white ribbons. My explosive emotions could never be tamed like that, never molded into quiet shapes and smooth limbs. I could never be that girl!

  I knew that something about me was not right. I jerked; my shoulder, leg, mouth would tighten in quick little lifts from voltage shooting from some inner control center. The doctor prescribed rest and exercise and my brother was sternly warned not to aggravate me. My protection at his expense probably intensified his lifelong animosity. The days of enforced rest, a word I abhorred, had begun.

  At age seven, I was still taking afternoon naps. I dreaded them. Every day after lunch I had to lie down in my room, with blinds lowered and the door closed. No games, no distractions—just lie there. The idea was to learn to relax. This was a word I did not acknowledge. Nothing was worse than lying in a silent room with nothing to do. I rolled and squirmed on the bed, unwilling or unable to settle into the disarming quiet. I would peer under the shade at my friend Joanne’s house a few yards away and think of her as loose and carefree while I was forced to endure this torture. Joanne, who had quit napping three years earlier, must have thought I was something of a baby. This idea was insufferable.

  I complained—Mother called it whining—but in this one thing she was adamant. As soon as the doctor prescribed rest for me, Mother threw herself into the plan. This was something she could do, when so much of the time she at a loss with us. She guarded my rest periods and sleep time like the crown jewels. Occasionally she would come in and rub my back for a few minutes while sitting calmly on the bed, her gentle touch rounding on my shoulders. Sweet vibrations and the scent of White Shoulders perfume lingered in the room after she’d left. After this I lay more quietly, missing her, watching the minutes pass one by one, stretching and slowing down until they seemed to span the entire afternoon.

  When not under afternoon bondage, I was parrying with Harold. His main occupation, his ghoulish pleasure, was teasing me. Maybe he was bored. Or maybe, with my intense reactions, I was a tempting target. His antics drove me to boiling, and my defensive outbursts goaded more teasing. Mother’s fragile nerves were stretched to the breaking point. He was relentless and I was unstoppable. She was beside herself.

  I fell into Harold’s snares with naive regularity.

  “Judy, come down here, I want to show you something.” He would lead me downstairs, then dash up, slam the top door and lock it, leaving me crouching in the dark on the other side, the dank basement at my back.

  “You cannot get out,” he hissed through the crack. “You’re all alone. Watch out for monsters below. They’re coming up the stairs—look out!”

  One of his favorite tortures was to wrestle me to the living room floor, sit astride my stomach and tickle me by plowing his head back and forth on my chest, demanding that I say, “I’m a monkey.” For the first seconds I squealed with glee as his arms pinned my wrists to the floor. I loved the close contact and the playful thrusting, but as his weight dug into mine I felt my muscles crunch into tight fist-like nodules. The pounding on my chest sent jack hammer currents firing through my body. Whipped into submission, I lay defeated, tamed, primed for the kill. I clenched my mouth into a knot as long as I could bear it. Finally I spit out, “I’m a monkey,” and ran like a broken gazelle, crying and protesting to Mother.

  The only defense was to threaten to tell. The minute she heard my squeals, Mother’s forehead creased and she shook her head, a look of resigned endurance creeping over her face.

  “Stop this continuous squabbling! Your Dad will hear about this tonight.”

  “But Harold was tickling me!”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, he’s just playing.” And to Harold, “Stop it. She doesn’t like it. You’ll answer to your Dad.” Then, with a sharp sigh and look of desperation, she fluttered out of the room.

  Mother was at a loss. She had grown up among adults, listening to their conversations and sitting quietly at the corner of the card table while they played bridge. She was rarely with someone her own age. Her biggest treat was a summer visit with her cousin Florence Musgrave in Spring Park, where the two girls thumbed through picture books of the Adirondacks while the adults conversed in the parlor. Discipline in Mother’s household was twofold: her dad’s not-to-be-countered orders, administered in sharp phrases, and her mother’s non-interfering compliance, which amounted to no discipline at all. The powerful voice of Granddad Fought reverberated through the house even when he wasn’t there. Obedience was automatic.

  When Dad returned home, Mother briefed him on our antics and he either blew it off, saying we were bound to have spats, or stormed into the living room to confront us. Harold and I offered up our conflicting versions, and most often he grabbed Harold by the shoulder and sent him to his room. “You’re older. You’re the boy,” he’d say. “You’re supposed to look after your little sister.” And with a scuff on the neck from his powerful hand, Harold was sent upstairs. “And you, sister, you have to learn not to pay him mind,” was all I got.

  Those days Dad was in no mood for fooli
shness, especially since he was working days at Investors Syndicate and attending William Mitchell Law School at night. Dad hadn’t the time or patience to hold an examining court. He used his temper to keep us in line. Its heat would create a larger and larger circle of tense space around him as we all backed away from it and merged into the depths of the house. Back then it was Harold who took the brunt, who was the target of the fast one-shot discipline method, while the rest of us trembled in the background. Mother suffered silently, and reliving, no doubt, the explosive bouts of her father, she dissolved into the shadows. With maturity my father learned to manage his rage, but the terror I felt at the sound of his voice crashing against the walls stayed with me long after.

  Revisiting those years today, I see that power was used as a molding device in our family, a fierce, barricading male power that ruled by fear. As a dependent small thing I was overcome with fear—an accusing, crushing fear that threatened obliteration. I felt myself shrink, shrivel into timidity like a night creature trembling in the blindness of the forest. As I grew older, as if by some alchemy churned in my intestines, an­other feeling emerged and made its way to the surface, accompanying my teenage years and far beyond, eventually dominating all others: anger. As I got to know both my grandfathers, I saw the same temper that dominated our house. The men needed to get things done. The women took refuge.

  As we grew older, Harold endured consequences that, as a girl, I was spared. The harder Dad came down on him the more distant he became.

  Harold spent hours hidden away in his room, or I’d hear him slam out the back door. I saw enough to understand that he was popular with his friends, with whom he joked and laughed in a devil-may-care manner. If he and a friend locked themselves in his room, I lingered outside the door and listened to their mumblings. At meals he didn’t say much, just answered questions or responded with a slight smile. It was Mother who lightened the mood with rounds of small talk. Sometimes I saw across the table a glint of confusion in Harold’s eyes that sent a hot wave through me, streaks of wonder and gloom that I couldn’t bear. I was ready to do whatever he asked if it would only take away that look.

  His disdain only increased my longing to be included in his life. I worshipped him but the attachment was one-sided. As we grew up we never discussed things or did anything together, like throw a baseball or go on picnics. Often I watched him stride through the house with an elusive air, going off to do something that didn’t include me. I was banned from his room. With equal determination I wanted to be wherever he was and doing whatever he was doing. Often I heard him up in his room listening to the radio or buried in eerie silence. What was he doing in there? Evenings I watched him lying on the rug in front of the fire hugging Zip, our red Irish Setter who never left his side.

  Hearing blasts from the trumpet as he practiced in his room upstairs, I waited to catch a glimpse of him on his way out. “Where are you going?” “Nowhere,” was all Harold would say, and he’d vanish around the corner without a word, Zip at his heels.

  I delved into his drawers to inspect his treasured coin collection and the Red Sox or Dodgers baseball signed by a well-known pitcher. I didn’t care about his privacy—I’d do anything to get into his world.

  When I was ten Harold was sent to Shattuck Military Academy—presumably to dislodge the chip from his shoulder—and nearly got booted out for bringing girls to his room. After high school he joined the Eighty-First Airborne Division in Fort Benning, Georgia, where he took on parachute training “be­cause the pay was good.” Eighteen months later he entered Duke University, where I assumed he launched into his usual round of bar-hopping and girl-chasing.

  Looking back on those years, I wonder how my life-long yearning for his affection in the face of his indifference influenced my relation­ships with men. I seem to have absorbed his rejection with uncritical admira­tion—maybe I even grew to desire it. Was I weaned on a negative emotional relationship pattern with my brother that I was doomed to seek for all time because it was familiar? Did I harbor a need to confront and tame the unaccessible to resolve some need? Why didn’t I reach out for what contributed to me, instead of habitually attaching to people who were in reality absent?

  Harold.

  * * *

  When I was seven, Mother decided it was high time I was baptized. Not that religion played a prominent part in our lives, but with a minister grandfather, Mother guarded a serious religious strain. She selected Easter Sunday for my big day at the Presbyterian Church at the corner of Wooddale and France, the denomination of her youth in West Virginia.

  We spent the morning getting spiffed up for the occasion. Mother loved to doll me in Shirley Temple curls. This penchant of hers conflicted with my horror of having my hair combed and styled, which took a large part of the morning. After a shampoo in the bath tub, my wet hair was toweled down and I was seated on Mom’s dressing table stool in front of a gilt-edged mirror. Mother tugged a pearl-handled comb through the snarly strands of my hair. I endured every yank on my skull with loud complaints. “Stop, you’re hurting me! I don’t want curls. Get your own curls!”

  But Mother would not give in on this one. Her face was determined, if tormented. Her hands waved above my head while she wove the hair brush in and out, separating strands of my damp, permed hair, combing out flat sections and wrapping them tightly around the brush handle. She then dried each curl with an Eskimo hair dryer until set, and carefully withdrew the brush handle, allowing the curl to air dry for a minute. She admonished me to sit rigid, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t.

  “Hold still!” Mother implored.

  The curls were little works of art, perfect corkscrew swirls, cascading from a part running across the top of my head and encircling my crown like floppy lusters. When she had finished, Mother secured two blue ribbons with Bobby pins on each side above my ears.

  “That’s enough.” I said. “It looks fine.”

  “I guess so,” Mother responded, not stopping. “Just a bit here . . .”

  I looked at the mirror and caught her image raised above mine, like a sculptress bent over her carving. She was decked out in a rayon crepe lavender dress with scooped neck. As usual she looked impeccable, hair soft and freshly styled, with a tiny amethyst and pearl pendant set in gold hanging daintily from her neck. She wore matching pearl and amethyst earrings and bracelet.

  She looked worn under her makeup, her face tight. Our tug of war had exhausted her and left me pouty. We surveyed the result in the mirror. I faced a little girl in a blue-and-white print dress with a white lace collar, a single strand of pearls, and a head of fresh bouncy curls, looking big-eyed and sour. I raised my eyes to Mother’s satisfied smile above me. Her hand rested on my shoulder: she had done a good job.

  “Judy, where’s your other shoe,” she asked as I climbed off the stool.

  “Don’t know, can’t find it. I already looked.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, go look some more. And don’t forget your handkerchief and white gloves. We have to leave in a few minutes. Hurry.”

  She tapped downstairs to clear the lunch dishes off the kitchen table. I poked about my room. Nothing. I picked up a stuffed yellow Pooh bear and idly twisted its black eye in circles. A whiff of lemon hit my nostrils, the odor of an autumn flower. I let it flow in. . . .

  “Judy,” Mother yelled up the stairs. “Come and finish your lunch.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I yelled back.

  “You have to eat. For heaven’s sake, she hasn’t eaten her lunch yet!” I dragged down the stairs and stood in the kitchen doorway.

  “I don’t want it. I can’t eat.” I looked at the egg-salad sandwich and untouched glass of milk on the Formica table. My stomach tightened at the sight.

  “You have to eat or you’ll get cranky.”

  “I’m cranky now. I can’t find my shoe.”

  �
�What is the matter with you, child?” Mother groaned as she began to put away a row of gold-striped Tiffany glasses washed the night before. As soon as her back was turned I darted my hand out, grabbed one of the tall glasses, and in a frenzied attempt to grasp the milk bottle, felt myself falling. To my horror the glass splat against the white china sink and cluttered in sharp pieces to the floor, while a spray of while liquid flew out and soaked the skirt of Mother’s new lavender dress.

  She looked down at her dripping skirt.

  “Oh, my Lord!” she exclaimed, her forehead scrunched into a circle of deep ridges. “Can’t you ever do anything right?”

  “I’ll just get my white gloves.” I dashed upstairs and pulled out the top drawer of my bureau, where I found a mismatched pair of brown and blue suede gloves. The white gloves were missing and so was the handkerchief with the blue-and-white delphiniums stitched around the edges.

  My mother’s voice reached me from the living room as I descended. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with her!”

  When I came down Dad and Harold were seated on the couch, coats in their laps.

  “We’ll be late. We’d better go,” urged Dad with irritation.

  “Brad, Judy has lost her shoe. And her handkerchief.” She came in the living room and I saw a wet circle on her dress where she’d sponged the stain. “I certainly haven’t had time to look.” She jerked on her coat. “And what have you done with your gloves? I laid them here on the table an hour ago.” She threw a severe look at me.

  Everyone stood waiting by the door, staring at me. Dad’s stood by impatiently, a sour look on his face, and Harold scanned the wall with an eye-rolling expression. Mother frowned and her eyes swept around the room nervously.