by Linda Zercoe
“Why do you want to be on the gun squad and not play the piccolo in the marching band?” What I wanted or thought didn’t matter. By then all questions were rhetorical except for “Where were you?” while she pointed a finger in my face.
Throughout the winter I complained of a sore throat. When I was finally taken to the doctor I had a severe case of mononucleosis and an enlarged spleen. The doctor said I was not to go to school for two months, and arrangements were made to send all my schoolwork home. I wasn’t allowed to do any physical activities; we were told that my spleen could rupture. According to my mother, however, “He didn’t say you couldn’t do your chores.”
Soon after my delayed diagnosis, my boyfriend Glen wound up in the hospital with the other half of the “kissing disease.” I was forbidden to see him, and that was the end of him and me.
Nancy hung in through my times with a Tom, Chad, a real George, and Bradley, who spanned the next year and a half. She had a few boyfriends as well—one gave her a hickey in the center of her forehead. When my mother saw Nancy and asked her what happened, she didn’t answer. Later my mother snickered, “You kids think I was born yesterday.” As I rolled my eyes, she went on, saying that Nancy was bad news and I was forbidden to see her anymore. I didn’t listen.
In between boyfriend dramas, Nancy and I practiced line dancing. We howled the songs of Carole King’s Tapestry album, songs of Jethro Tull, Elton John, or Carly Simon’s Anticipation album as we walked to the creek to smoke or to the Jack in the Box in town after school, where I forced her to try a burger with cheese. Sometimes at my urging we stomped on several to-go ketchup packets I had previously thrown on the floor. It was just like bloody firecrackers. Nancy was the “good girl”—the one without the rules. I was the troublemaker, breaking all my mother’s rules and then some.
Beginning in the fall of my sophomore year I learned to sew. I started by making hot pants, then vests, dresses, and eventually whole outfits, using my babysitting money to buy the patterns and fabric. I also began to excel in school. At the end of a quarter I would share my excitement with my mother, proudly showing mostly As, but of course she would focus on the one B I got in physics. Most of the time, though, thankfully, Mom was out, working at Dad’s store all day.
One day after the mono and the ho-hum report card reaction, I drank a ten-ounce glass of mixed rum and whiskey. Not yet a drinker, I vomited all over the turquoise-blue nylon pile carpeting in my parents’ room. Alane found me there, passed out in a puddle of puke. She helped me clean it all up, being very motherly. We finished up just as Mom pulled into the driveway. I didn’t know whether she suspected anything, nor did I care.
Every Saturday I would dress up and then would have to wait for Dad to drive to open the store—and it wasn’t even my store. There I worked as a salesgirl and ran the cash register for $1.65 an hour. At lunch, Dad would give me money to go across the street to the Hickory Tree deli and buy sandwiches. Once I caught someone stealing a record album, hiding it under his coat, stealing from Dad. When I said, “Hey, what are you doing?” he dropped the loot and ran out.
By then, though, I wasn’t an angel either. Before this, one Saturday night Nancy and I were nabbed by store security for shoplifting in the Two Guys department store while my parents were in the store shopping. After a verbal lashing, including threats of having my parents paged and being turned over to the police and charged with a crime—and the resulting explosion of tears and pleading—we were let go. After being on both sides of the crime, I vowed to myself, no more shoplifting.
In early March of 1973, our family finally moved to our newly built home in New Vernon, part of Harding Township. Nancy and I were tearful about the move but vowed to stay best friends. Dad’s business was doing all right, he said, but on Saturdays I noticed the traffic into the store had started dwindling. The receipt of my little pay envelope became erratic. I didn’t think about it too much, since I was absorbed in adjusting to a new school in the middle of the tenth grade.
The first time I noticed Dave was on the abbreviated school bus, the short one, I took to Morristown High School. Harding Township didn’t have a high school, so I had to be bused to Morristown. After about a week of riding the bus I noticed the mirror above the bus driver Mabel’s head, which she used to monitor the activities of the rowdy horde of pimply teenagers on the way to and from school. I could see this guy with long, straight, thick brown hair staring at me in the mirror while chatting with Mabel like they knew each other. Who, I wondered, was this guy sitting behind the driver, leaning over the round silver bar, practically hanging off of her—the woman I thought looked like a witch. I immediately looked away, but occasionally my eyes drifted back, only to see the same eyes staring at me. This guy was creepy; in my head I called him Witch Boy.
I had already set my sights on Cuffy Coutts, the cute blond guy that played the trumpet in the band. (I was still just a piccolo player.) It was just a matter of time before he would ask me out, since we had spent the whole bus ride home sitting together in our Morristown Colonial uniforms after marching in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City. We talked and laughed. He touched my arm. He asked for my phone number.
At school the next week, while thinking about Cuffy, I noticed “Witch Boy” casually leaning on the wall next to my locker between classes. Thank God, he didn’t say anything. The next day I was excited because Cuffy and I had band class together. Then I noticed Witch Boy waiting for me outside the band room. This is crazy, I thought, does he know my whole schedule? Meanwhile, Cuffy never called.
It eventually registered that the guy who seemed to be the son of a witch was at least six feet tall. His long, thick hair parted down the middle. He had turquoise-blue eyes with long eyelashes. He had a cleft in his chin and big arm muscles, and he wore biker boots. Still, he was definitely not my type. It was easy to dismiss him without even one word spoken to each other.
After Cuffy failed to call, my sights were set on some football player in my English class.
As the school year drew to a close, Witch Boy was still staring and following me around like a puppy. One day he smiled, and I smiled back. He moved closer. He talked! I laughed and laughed and laughed. He was so funny. Some little comment like “So” could cause a burp of mysterious chuckles in me for the rest of the day. Jokes turned into little paper notes—scribbles of “Hi” with a doodle or whatever.
It turned out his name was Dave and the bus-driving witch was his aunt. On the last day of school, Mabel announced that the Barkmann Bus Company was offering its annual trip down to Seaside Heights on the Jersey shore in a few days. I didn’t really think about it, but someone else did, figuring it was now or never, time to make the move. Dave asked me if I wanted to go. I told him I had to think about it and would let him know. I had to ask my parents.
They said OK, so on June 23, 1973, I was wooed into a first kiss on the boardwalk. We played the machines in the penny arcade, games of chance, did the cliché photo booth shots, went on the scary rides, and kissed well and often.
Dave and I started dating. Living out in the middle of nowhere, that summer I read Gone with the Wind. Scarlett became my role model for her strength and perseverance. I saw how she used her feminine ways to her advantage and how she was different from her mother, who was different from my mother. I definitely preferred Rhett over Ashley. Dave was more like Rhett.
Dave loved to work on cars and had a motorcycle and a snowmobile. He fished and hunted deer and pheasant. He had many friends. He had everything my mother hated, and I loved him for it. For some reason my troublemaking stopped.
Deer hunting season was during the first week of December our first year together. At the end of the week, after the hunting was over, Dave picked me up at home. We drove to his parents’ house, a converted barn which was part of the salary his father received as the grounds manager for a wealthy family’s estate. Their home seemed comfortable enough, though you had to open the sliding barn door to enter.
Inside, I met Dave’s uncles, all unshaven with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. After they said hello, they continued recounting their hunting stories and guffawing about the success of this season’s deer haul. Everyone was happy.
The men then left to butcher the deer meat, coming back with roasts, legs, and other cuts, some with hair, some sprinkled with shot. Dave’s mother led the wives in wrapping the meat and marking up the packages, which were then put in boxes for each family to take home. The women talked and I sat and embroidered between meat boxes while hearing booms of laughter rising through the floorboards from the basement. After the butchering was done, there were toasts and shots of the hard stuff. They were all manly men, rugged.
After drinking a beer from a bottle and taking a bath, as there was no shower, Dave took me home in the light blue metallic 1963 Nova SS with “three on the tree” that he had just finished restoring. Along the way, we parked on the side of the road and steamed up the windows, necking. I decided then I was falling in love.
One weekend during my senior year, Mom was sitting in her usual post in the kitchen when I arrived home from a Friday night date. As I climbed the two sets of stairs in our split level, Mom spit out venomously, “Get in here!” She was sitting at the table in her black negligee with a carafe of wine and an empty glass, her face all red and splotched from picking the hairs out of her face. As I approached, she snarled, “Sit down,” and smacked the table while flipping her solitaire cards. Then she looked up at me and started going off about Dave and how I was getting too serious with him. Receiving no response, she stood up and pointed that finger at my face and snarled, “I didn’t move here for my daughters to marry the help of the millionaires.” She abruptly stated, “You are nothing but a tramp and a slut.”
I stood up to leave. She erupted, “I didn’t say you could get up.” I got up and left anyway. As I made my way down the hall she screamed, “You’re grounded.” Yeah, right, I thought.
I didn’t know at the time that Dad was losing his business and our family was in financial trouble. On my Saturdays at the store, I had seen that customers would come in and pick my father’s brain about the audio equipment he sold, but they wouldn’t buy. Apparently they’d go to a warehouse store like Crazy Eddie’s down on Route 22 and buy their equipment for less.
Dad was heartbroken.
“We would be rich if you didn’t throw our inheritance away on that damn store!” my mother would constantly remind him.
When I shared this turn of events with Dave on the phone, he went to my father’s store the next day and bought an eight-track player and speakers for his car.
Shortly after the “slut incident,” Mom went back to work as a secretary at a chemical company down the road. I got a job after school at a puzzle factory as a clerk typist in the business office five days a week, and was soon told I had to pay my mother board.
College was never discussed until the day my mother shoved in my face a tear-off application to William Paterson College, a state college located in Wayne, while I was sitting in the kitchen under the large portable hair dryer with my big smooth-out rollers. I looked at the application for this school that I had never heard of and noticed that the deadline had passed more than a month before. Earlier in high school, I had taken a career-interest personality test and it showed that my top two careers were either a fighter pilot in the Air Force or something to do with home economics. I’d given some thought to becoming a nurse in a branch of the service, and traveling, but then there was Dave.
I opted to apply to County College of Morris (CCM), the local community college, and was accepted into the nursing program. I could get an associate’s degree and become a licensed registered nurse in two years, after passing the state boards.
Soon after starting college, I got a big abscess in the crack of my backside. I shared this with Mom, who told me I should wait until it exploded before going to the doctor. She explained that Dad had a pilonidal cyst early in their marriage and this was what I had, in her opinion. A few weeks went by. I had to take a bed pillow with me everywhere just to sit half-assed. Finally, belatedly remembering that I was now 18 and unable to bear the pain one more second, I made a doctor’s appointment.
The evening of the appointment, I announced that I would be taking the car. Mom asked me where I was going.
“To the doctor,” I said, grabbing the keys, going out to the driveway, and starting the car. As I was pulling out of the driveway, Mom ran out of the house and threw herself on the hood of the car.
“You’re not going anywhere without me!”
Just to piss her off, I lit a cigarette as soon as she got into the car. Even though she’d never seen me smoke before, somehow she knew now better than to mess with me. Reaching around while backing out of the driveway, I told her, “Keep your mouth shut!” As I shifted the car from reverse to drive to go up the hill, the ash fell off the cigarette that was clenched between my teeth and burned a hole in my white pantyhose. I was still in my nursing school uniform.
The doctor said I had a perirectal abscess and had to take care of it immediately. The next day I was admitted to the hospital for emergency surgery, involving an incision and drainage of the abscess, which was about the size of a banana. My white blood cell count was so high I was in the hospital for a week on antibiotics.
Dave visited every day, sitting at my bedside with his blue puppy dog eyes. He brought flowers, teddy bears, candy, and a different card each time he came. I wondered if he was he afraid he was going to lose me. Mom said nothing. I expected nothing good from her anyway. I had Dave.
Dave was my best friend, funny and easygoing. He was the knight who rescued me every weekend in his shiny muscle car. He loved me. The summer before I graduated from nursing school, he proposed, and we made our plans to be married in a year. We smooched like crazy but never went all the way, saving ourselves. I knew God was watching and I didn’t want to deal with an accidental pregnancy—and worse than that, Mom.
On the night before our wedding, Dad knocked at my bedroom door. He kissed me goodnight and said “I love you” for the first time. The little girl in me cried all night thinking, I don’t need to get married—Daddy loves me. The next day Dad walked me down the aisle of the Church of Christ the King in a pure white gown. There I met Dave standing tall in his powder blue tuxedo, so handsome with his dark hair now cut in a sexy style and his incredible blue eyes. So at age 20 we were married. The reception was at a mansion. Nancy, who I had remained friends with, was a bridesmaid, as were my sisters. I was truly happy. The wedding night was worth waiting for. And after four years of waiting, we could have sex anytime, and it was free, especially free of head garbage.
The next day we left for Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard in our 1973 Firebird Formula 400. When we weren’t coupling, seeing the sights, or listening to the nonstop radio and television reporting on the death of “the King”—Elvis—I was battling a raging urinary tract infection, the notorious “bride’s cystitis.” It involved spending excessive amounts of time in the bathroom and trying to get an antibiotic prescription from another state over the telephone.
We rented from Dave’s parents an old farmhouse, in Harding Township, that had been in his family since the 1800s, and furnished it from top to bottom like a doll house. I started working as a registered nurse. I started as a general medical/surgical nurse but soon progressed to neonatal intensive care, the newborn nursery, and postpartum. I really enjoyed the challenge of being a nurse, the problem solving, prioritizing, constant learning, and connecting with my patients. But my favorite part of the experience was being part of the patient care team and the camaraderie of that.
Dave was a professional landscaper, welder, and heavy machinery operator. Our life was simple, very provincial. For me contentment came from cooking, doing laundry, the silkiness of my legs after shaving them, tending the vegetable garden, sewing, doing crafts, Wilton cake decorating for every occasion, going for walks or bike rides. After
work, Dave was on call as a volunteer fireman in our little unincorporated village. For him, there was also hunting season—shotgun, doe season and bow season, fishing season, motorcycles, snowmobiles, trucks, reloading shotgun shells, painting cars. Typically, on Friday nights we went out for pizza or McDonald’s, picking up this or that at Bradlees or the mall after driving to the bank to deposit our paychecks using the pneumatic tube at the drive-up window. Saturday, I wrote checks to pay our bills. We had no credit cards.
In the late summer of 1980, after three years of marriage, we went to have a Sunday barbeque at my parents’ house. Dad and Mom were having their usual pre-dinner cocktails out on the second-floor back deck off the kitchen. Dad fired up the barbeque, and as we were waiting for the grill to heat up I announced, “We are going to have a baby!”
Mom choked on her cocktail. After catching her breath she shrieked, “I’m too young to be a grandmother! You have ruined your life—it will never be the same!”
Dave and I held hands, taking turns staring off into the yard while I tried to bite back the tears that brimmed if our eyes met. Dad waited until Mom went inside, congratulated Dave, shook his hand, and gave both of us a big hug.
When we told Dave’s mother the following week, she shrieked too, but with delight. She giggled with excitement for the rest of the day. After dinner she brought out bags of baby afghan patterns and set out wool to begin crocheting the first baby blanket. Dave’s father gently whacked Dave on the back saying, “Way to go, Buck!”
Kimberly was born after the New Year. Dave and I were a little overwhelmed but still in baby heaven. One afternoon, after finally getting her down for a nap in the port-a-crib we kept in the living room, I got cozy on the sofa with relief. I was just starting to fall asleep after being up all night when my mother abruptly flew through the back door, having left work at lunch for a visit without calling to let me know.
