* * *
The summer I was twelve I became a cripple. I had broken my ankle at camp, but the grown-ups decided to go ahead with my month-long trip to West Virginia. When I arrived at Granddad Fought and Grandma Bess’ house in Forest Hills, set high in the hills outside of Wheeling, they expected a low-key visit with me resting my cast on a pillow, reading to my heart’s content and hanging around the house. Kids were not entertained in those days, but expected to fend for themselves. There were no playgrounds or jungle sets, no extra-curricular field trips or soccer schedules. There were curfews, rules and expectations. There was nowhere to go. Families listened to the radio, read the paper and played cards.
Every morning Grandma Bess and I sat in the built-in breakfast nook, drinking juice out of opaque red glasses and looking out at the woods together. She handed me a red napkin, kept my glass filled from a rose bubble-glass pitcher, and sat quietly, smiling at me. Her gray hair lifted off her face in short curls, and the light from the window softened the pale, translucent white of her skin. The deep lines that gathered under her eyes gave her a wise, weathered look. Gentleness radiated from her short figure, and I was fascinated by the studied way she moved her hands.
Grandma Bess stood at the door as I set off to explore the neighborhood. I swung on my crutches into the woods and through the yards, climbing any accessible tree and becoming adept at dragging my broken ankle over the branches. The neighbors called Grandma Bess in horror, reporting they had seen me swinging up in the tree tops, brandishing my leg with the plaster cast. In a tentative voice Grandma warned me to take it easy. With no children of her own she was unused to administering discipline. I paid no heed. No disrespect, but I had to do something.
My bedroom was upstairs next to Grandma Bess’s room. One day while she was dressing she asked if I wanted to see the scar where she’d had a breast removed. Curious, I nodded. She pulled open her robe and there, where a breast should have been, I saw the flat surface of her chest, almost concave, crossed with bumpy pink and blue streaks that looked like a dried mud bed after rain. Shocked, I tried to imagine the knife slicing through her body to remove the white lump of flesh, like sawing through a plump turkey. I couldn’t conjure it. Grandma was regarding the scar gently. She didn’t seem at all disturbed.
I tried to find something to say. “Does it hurt?”
She smiled. “Not anymore.” Seated on the bed in her violet robe and matching feather slippers, she described the trip to the hospital and flowers that filled the hospital room with spring perfume. “The surgery saved my life. I had lots of good care from the staff to see me through.”
“What’s it like missing a breast?” I ventured.
“Oh, I’m used to it. It had to be done, that’s all. I’ve got another one. That’ll do me.”
“What does Granddad think?”
“He’s glad I’m alive.”
I was thrilled that she showed me her scar, her marred body. The interest she took in me, in her soft, unobtrusive way, and her confiding openness felt like a great compliment. Instinctively, I related to her. As Granddad’s second wife, she was an outsider in the family, a latecomer, excluded from childhood memories of the other relatives and kept at bay by Granddad’s unrelenting harshness. The two of us formed an instinctive understanding. But I didn’t get a chance to know her. Her sojourn in my life was short and she remained in the background, a mild, solitary figure.
One morning when the threat of a summer rain was darkening a low, striated sky, we set off to visit Grandma and Grandpa Bradford in Pennsboro. The two sets of grandparents had been friends for years, since the days when Granddad owned and ran the Pennsboro News. Granddad Fought loved visiting his old homestead and was eager to inspect Granddad Bradford’s new Graham Page automobile. The three of us sat in the front seat of the car as it weaved steadily along a two-lane road winding through the green West Virginia hills, Granddad at the wheel and not another car in sight.
Grandma Bess chattered on about some altercation she’d had with one of the neighbors and how she’d invited the woman to tea to work it out and the woman had stormed out in a huff.
“That was a poor way to handle it,” Granddad scoffed. “What’s in that empty head of yours? You should find some way to get a brain inside it.”
Granddad kept up a barrage. She had blundered, as usual. She was inept, a fool. He was sick of it. He resurrected other occurrences of her stupidity. The criticisms continued without letup. Grandma’s low-voiced explanations fell ignored into her lap. She became silent as his sharp voice continued to reverberate through the car. Would he never stop? I was frozen to my seat between them, unable to move. I glanced over at Grandma. She was staring straight ahead, her lower lip dangling, her hands clutching each other in her lap. She didn’t say a word or move, or acknowledge the tears inching silently down her cheek. The anger in Granddad Fought’s voice filled the car like a black cloud.
A sickening chill ran down my back and I grew rigid, straining against the back of the seat, frozen into silence. I couldn’t think or rationalize what was happening. It wasn’t the first yelling I’d heard, but I felt it the most, his voice close to my ear, with me sitting between them like a conduit. I leaned closer to Grandma until I felt her warm shoulder, until it seemed I was sitting in her place, a part of her, disappearing into her and I felt her silence in my own heart.
I was sad when Grandma Bess died of a heart attack a few years later. Her interest in my stories encouraged me. I let her read one. “Keep it up,” she’d said with warmth. “You’re doing something special.” The word special resonated. She understood, had some knowledge of what it was like to be me.
Chapter 5: Neighborhood Antics and Learning to Love Cows
When I heard the words “we don’t hire girls,” I hung up meekly. But as the words sank in, I felt a surge of angry protest. What? How could that be? My older brother had carried a paper route for two years; now it was my turn! I was tired of my brother flaunting his five-year advantage over me, always way ahead, always older and a boy. My mouth tightened—something must be done! A sudden fury locked me into place and I stared out the kitchen window where the ground lay flat and barren under the gray autumn sky. I craved a real paying job. The idea of prowling outside in the semi-dark cover of early dawn was enticing. Digging a paper and envelope from an upper drawer of Mother’s desk, I trotted upstairs, settled myself on my bed and composed a letter to the Minneapolis Morning Tribune. The idea was to be straight and businesslike so it wouldn’t sound like a twelve-year-old’s letter. I introduced myself, gave my address, and stated that I was seeking a position as a paper carrier and would appreciate an answer as soon as possible, signing it Paul Beckman. The next morning I slipped the letter in the mail slot in the front door, careful not to be observed.
Five days passed, six, ten—no reply. The rush of expectation slowly ebbed. I had nearly forgotten about it when one day my mother’s distant voice floated up the stairs. “Judy, are you in your room? Someone is here to see you.” I skipped down, bursting with curiosity. Standing at the door was a middle-aged man with cringing eyes and a bulging overcoat, carrying an official-looking brown briefcase.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m from the Tribune. Are—are you Paul Beckman?”
My mother was looking on, a combination of puzzlement and wariness on her face.
“Yes, that’s me!” The man hesitated. “But you got it wrong,” I added. “My name is Judy.”
The rep from the Tribune looked confused. I assured him I would have no trouble walking up to the bus shelter on Highway 12 or pulling the wagonload of newspapers up and down the hills, even when the days shortened, and I would have to find my way in the dark.
After a series of questions, he gave me the route. I ran upstairs and threw myself across the bed, kicking my legs and thumping my chest in glee. The crafty plan I’d carried out without any outside in
tervention had worked. I was a working girl!
Heady with success, I felt my blood racing through my body. I didn’t know if my height or eagerness or craftiness won the Tribune rep over, or the fact that Harold had carried the same route. What he didn’t know was that I had two buddies, Mike and Smitty, to keep me company. After the first two days of responding to whistles, they showed up at the back door at 5:00 a.m. every morning when I emerged into the darkness, prancing with impatience. The only visible creatures alive, we traipsed along accompanied by the odor of moist grass and tangy autumn flowers. It was a human-less world, just the three of us. I folded each newspaper into a bundle and tossed it against the garage doors, while Mike and Smitty streaked across the lawns with their tails lifted, poking their noses into every bush and crack.
After six months boredom set in. I kept the job awhile to try to win a free helicopter ride by ringing doorbells and drumming up more subscriptions, but I didn’t get enough to win. Without protest from any quarter, I quit.
* * *
In seventh grade I acquired a best friend. Jean McIntyre joined our class of ten at Meadowbrook. At last someone my age within walking distance! It wasn’t long before I was at her house constantly. Not allowed to bike on Highway 12, I walked along Highway 12 and just before Highway 100 turned left and continued past the fenced Wilhelm Held farm and on for another half mile to the small bungalow where Jean lived. She balked at coming to my house, preferring to stay at home with her parents and little brother. She thought the two-mile walk to Tyrol Hills was too far. This attitude was baffling, as all I wanted was to escape my boring existence.
Jean and I were opposites. She moved deliberately, sat quietly in her chair and looked at me with calm brown eyes. Part Irish, with a dash of Mexican thrown into the pot, she wore her black shoulder length hair pulled back from a wide forehead. Sensible but fun-loving, her twinkling laugh rang out easily, especially when her dad cracked one of his jokes. We listened to the radio in the living room, with her dad relaxed in the easy chair smoking Pall Malls and her mother sewing on the couch.
Jean’s parents rarely went out, except sometimes on Saturdays nights to an aunt’s house. The bedrooms circled off the living room so that family members slept close to the main hub of the house. There was always the resonance of something going on at her place, the comforting sensation of having people around. When I spent the night we played marbles in the dirt in her back yard and gin rummy at the kitchen table and bossed her little brother around. Or we listened to records lying on our backs on Jean’s bed, feet propped against the wall.
A favorite game was dialing random numbers from the phone book and pretending we were marketers and had a great deal on Hoover vacuum cleaners. Or we might claim our target owed us insurance money and there would be consequences if they didn’t pay up. The reactions of our victims, incredulous, worried, then skeptical, caused us to roll on the bed, hugging our sides with muted laughter. We ended the calls on a vague note, assuring them we would do nothing now, but they had better do some thinking.
One call was answered by a young boy.
“I’d like to talk to one of your parents.”
“You can talk to me.”
“How old are you?”
“Old enough.”
“You’re not more than eight or ten.”
“So? I take all calls of this nature.”
“You don’t know the nature of this call.”
“Just tell me what you want.”
“I want to talk to your mom or dad, kid.”
“I’m an orphan.”
“Go back to your blocks, kid. Goodbye.”
After dinner we shut ourselves in Jean’s room and gossiped about the kids at school or some strange thing Timmy had done—Jean had quickly replaced Timmy as my sidekick in school. Once he brought a pubic hair of his to school in a jar, which we found disgusting and refused to speak to him for a week. But we were getting interested in male/female functioning. Putting our noses together, Jean and I tried to figure out how sex worked. We decided that if a man and woman kissed long enough, the seed of a baby would be produced. Then without an explanation, Jean said she wasn’t interested in that junk and didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
Once settled in her double bed with the lights out and kissed good night by her mother, we played “guess-the-movie star.” This consisted of one person outlining with a finger two initials representing the name of a movie star on the other’s back. The receiver would guess what movie star the initials stood for. When I drew DD on Jean’s back she correctly guessed Deanna Durbin. I fooled her with the initials BK, as she didn’t know that Boris Karloff played Frankenstein—I wondered how could she be so ignorant, but she stumped me with Buster Keaton. The beauty of this game was that it didn’t require much talking, so we weren’t in danger of hearing a reprimand called out from the other room.
Mornings we were awakened in bed by the voice of Patti Page crooning The Tennessee Waltz from the gramophone in the next room, and I could hear Mrs. McCollum’s high voice singing along.
I introduced him to my loved one,
And while they were dancing,
My friend stole my sweetheart from me.
I lay on my back, waiting for Jean to wake up beside me, staring at the wall streaked with golden slivers from the window blinds and the patches of errant sunlight flickering on the mirror. It felt good to hear the familiar household sounds beyond the door, the smell of bacon, a soft voice, the raising of blinds, the signs of breath and movement close by, waiting for her mother to call us in to breakfast. I relaxed into a lazy feeling of contentment.
Once up and about I was consumed with an itch to make things happen. On one occasion I talked Jean into sneaking out to roam the neighborhood after dark. She was hesitant, but I assured her I had done it many times and that there were wonders out in the darkness she couldn’t imagine.
“I’m not sure. It’s winter. What will we do?”
“The temperature’s not bad—over twenty degrees. Look, I’ve some great ideas. I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. I’ll be at your house at six.”
That’s how it began. I showed up at her door, and as dusk descended we announced we were going for a walk. Slipping on our parkas we made our way down the back road that connected to Highway 12. On one side a row of houses crouched in the dark and on the other a wooded area gradually faded into a deepening blackness. Once it was dark enough that we blended into the shadows—crucial to our plan—we prepared a pile of snowballs, rounding them into smooth, hard bullets. When a car approached we’d rip out of the woods and pelt it with snowballs as it passed and retreated down the road. Our aim improved with practice, and we got some pretty good hits directly on a side window. Sometimes an irate car screeched to a stop and a man leaped out, jerked his head in all directions, then popped back in and roared away. But most cars didn’t slow down, even when we hit a front window straight on. When a car did stop, we disappeared into the underbrush.
There were variations. With a moon throwing a yellow haze over the ground, one of us would lay on the roadside, just far enough out of the lane to be missed by a passing car, hands spread-eagle over our head, sunk face-down into the dirt, motionless. A few heartless souls would pass right on by, but most often the car would continue a few hundred yards and slam to a halt. We would hear the brakes squeal and the car door open, and by the time the frantic figure had emerged from the car and panted up to investigate, we had both fled into the trees. Occasionally we heard mumbled cursing as the driver reentered the car, or a yell would follow us, “You creeps should be sent to reform school!”
But after a while Jean lost interest in these diversions. I think she was afraid of getting caught, although she wouldn’t say so. I was disappointed. Too bad Timmy wasn’t available, but the tight construct of his home life, where he lived within a strict schedu
le, didn’t allow such capers, as I was soon to find out.
* * *
Not long after the end of the eighth grade, my nocturnal escapades came to an abrupt end. It all started when I got permission to sleep in the vacant maid’s room. This became my private hideout until the night of my downfall. The maid’s room was on the first floor, a tiny room next to a half bath, set at the end of a short hall between the kitchen and the door to the garage. These three doors, bedroom, bathroom, and garage, clustered at the end of the hall. By commandeering this corner, I could escape to my own never-land. My parents gave in to my whim, probably figuring I wouldn’t last long downstairs by myself. I immediately snuck a willing Debby from the basement into the single bed with me—not allowed—and snuggled under the covers close to her warm body, her angular legs and paws thrusting in all directions. Eventually we settled in, Debby’s yellow head resting next to mine with an air of patience and a “I know a good thing when I’ve got it” look on her face.
As soon as I heard the newscaster’s voice clicked off in the living room and my parents’ footsteps thumping up the stairs to bed, I turned on the small radio on the night stand—not allowed—and snuggled in for a delicious hour of listening to Inner Sanctum, The Shadow, Dr. Kildare, Hallmark Hall of Fame, or The Lux Radio Hour. A thrilling shiver passed through me when I heard the slow, squeaking door and Orson Welles’s deep, breathy voice intoning, “The Shadow Knows.” I hugged Debby close.
The rush of being scared lifted me into a delicious alertness. As my nervousness dissipated, I began to enjoy the freedom of being alone and doing exactly as I wanted, singly responsible for my own little ship. Closing my eyes I imagined commandeering a winged craft and streaming full sail out into the ocean into black waters teaming with monsters that I easily subdued. After a while Debby got hot and wiggly, and her lumpy body became a bit of a nuisance. The next morning I found her lying on the oval throw rug next to the bed. Whether she had needed her space or I had pushed her out, I wasn’t sure.
A Penny a Kiss Page 8
