Mary’s father installed an aboveground pool in the backyard, and during the summer gleeful shouts from all of us kids splashing around echoed throughout the neighborhood. The pool wasn’t heated, and to dive in during the month of June could cause one to momentarily lose consciousness and then hallucinate about being aboard an icebreaker in the North Atlantic. But we passed many joyful hours playing Marco Polo and other games, jumping out every once in a while to go and pee in the grass.
When the pool became grimy with leaves and dirt, we’d move clockwise around the edge and create a giant whirlpool that would bring the debris to the center so it could be easily scooped out. However, the whirlpool always became so strong that we little kids couldn’t even cling to the stairs long enough to climb out before getting sucked around again. Much like a roller coaster, it was terrifying but fun. Similarly, we were supposed to wait a half hour after eating lunch to go back in, but never did. This served to add another element of exciting danger: that a child would suddenly get a cramp and drown, or vomit all over everyone.
When winter arrived, Mr. Pyne made an outdoor skating rink by flooding the backyard. We’d play tag, broomball, and, if Mrs. Pyne wasn’t on the lookout, we’d bowl with the frozen chickens she’d picked up on sale and stored in the freezer, or play hamburger hockey using frozen beef patties as pucks. True, when she did catch us it was harder to escape the yard wearing skates, but out on the safety of the ice, it was also more difficult for her to clock us with that frying pan.
Ten
Egg Salad Days…Beads of Paradise
Sweet Home is a school district about eight miles northeast of Buffalo in the town of Amherst, where the suburbs melt into farmland. At least they did when I was a kid; now it’s all strip malls, office buildings, multiplexes, and Hooters. Even my old jawbreaker and Slurpee dealer, 7-Eleven, home of the brain freeze, has become a medical center.
As for the name Sweet Home, it’s obvious that someone inhaled too much eraser dust. The surrounding school districts were mostly named after their respective towns: Kenmore, Williamsville, Cheektowaga, Maryvale, and Tonawanda. An Amherst school district already existed, and the Armory, which would have been a suitable name, based on the bunker-style construction scheme, was also taken. Fortunately, a person couldn’t beat up an entire student body for its name, or else I’m certain we would have all graduated to the morgue. Though at basketball games, “Sweet Home Sweeties” was not used in a complimentary fashion by the opposing teams.
Sweet Home High School and Junior High were, at the time, fed by six elementary schools. I attended the one in our neighborhood, Maplemere, walking the quarter mile from home every day to warnings of “step on a crack and break your mother’s back.”
Although the name Sweet Home conjures up a picture of a cozy Frog and Toad–type dwelling, most buildings in this peculiarly named district were Cold War–inspired tributes to the functional brick architecture of the sixties. This included a brave use of turquoise and mud brown as accent colors, and grayish white asbestos icicles that hung down from the ceilings. Most of the roofs leaked, and we became adept at jumping over puddles and zigzagging around buckets in the hallways, while the windows seeped air to the point where snowdrifts were inside the classrooms. In 2005, long after I’d graduated, a student would plot to blow up the high school, though it turned out not to be an architecturally motivated crime, as I immediately assumed, but rather inspired by the Columbine school shootings in Colorado several years earlier.
The Northeast was hit hard by the utilitarian movement, and industrial cinder-block structures became the cornerstone of the “What Were They Thinking?” school of architecture, where old-world charm meets reinforced concrete. The nearby north campus of the University at Buffalo, just a Molotov cocktail’s throw away from my home and school, was fast becoming another funereal example. There’s apparently a fine line between the Prairie School and the penal system, one that was quickly crossed after the riots of the midsixties.
The area was still home to prominently displayed yellow-and-black fallout-shelter signs, which had started appearing in 1963, as the Cuban missile crisis heated the Cold War up to a full boil. These were originally placed outside any building that possessed what the Army Corps of Engineers determined to be the proper amount of radiation shielding. Every day, the TV and radio stations interrupted programming and played a recorded announcement: “This is a test of the Emergency Broadcasting System.” In the event of an emergency (translation: nuclear war), they were supposedly going to tell us what to do and where to go.
This was shortly after the rage to build home bomb shelters had swept the nation. These concrete dugouts covered with two feet of pit-run gravel still existed on the properties of the middle and upper classes. In addition to stockpiling provisions and converting a covered garbage pail to serve as a toilet, many bunker owners also opted to have a gun on hand. What to do about a pesky nonshelter-owning neighbor wanting to escape the radiation and play pinochle with your family while snarfing all your pretzel rods? The editor of the Jesuit magazine America advised shooting him, just like you would any trespasser. Hence the birth of the eleventh commandment: thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s bomb shelter.
Consequently, the Cold War was still being felt, and, in keeping with the Communist decor, schoolchildren were regularly marched through duck-and-cover drills as a way of preparing for nuclear Armageddon. Ticktock went the doomsday clock. We were informed that nearby Niagara Falls, power source for the Northeast Corridor, was the number one target for a Ruskie bomb. Later I found out that kids in Pittsburgh were being told the same thing because of their steel plants, and Detroit children for their truck and automobile manufacturers.
Best I could figure it, if we did survive a bomb by hiding beneath our partly wooden desks (translation: kindling) or under the hall coat-rack, we’d be spending the next hundred years in school, waiting for the radiation to subside—much like the prospect of an endless Thanksgiving. Or as Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev put it, “The living would envy the dead.” But if we didn’t survive, the bright side, at least for our organization-minded teachers, must have been that we’d perish in alphabetical order.
Although the risk of bombings and nuclear accidents only increased over the years, for whatever reason, the drills stopped in the late seventies. At some point, an official must have figured out that the hall coatrack might not in fact operate as the defense mechanism they originally thought it to be.
We also had frequent fire drills, which I never understood since all the buildings in that school district were going to be the last things left on Earth after the Apocalypse, along with the cockroaches, pet rocks, and my mother’s homemade rolls. During a fire drill on a sunny day, it was safe to say we’d lose about 10 percent of the school population, especially if the exercise came after lunch. There was a low fence at the edge of the playground, making it a simple matter of up-and-over followed by cutting through a few backyards. Winter fire drills posed a challenge because we weren’t allowed to stop and pick up our coats; thus 10 percent of the students would still be lost, only in this case to hypothermia.
However, if you showed up at home without a coat in winter you were going to hear about it, usually in a loud sentence containing your full name. While my mom was angry didn’t seem the right moment to point out that shouting “Laura Elizabeth Pedersen!” when I was the only other person there was obviously a bit silly.
When it came to naming children, none of our parents ventured far from what was standard issue for the day. There were about three of each of the following in every class: Linda, Susan, Lisa, Wendy, and Amy for girls; Jim, Mike, Mark, Paul, and Bill for boys. Being a Catholic town we also had our fair share of Marys, Virginias, Matthews, and Johns. It was the previous generation who had changed their names to Sunbeam and Starshine, and it would be those hippie parents who’d give birth to the plethora of Rainbows, Jasmines, and Moonglows that would follow us.
There were plenty
of twins in my school—fraternal, identical, and Irish. None were the result of fertility treatments, which didn’t exist back then. A woman wasn’t even aware that she was having twins until the first one was born, she was about to hop off the table, and the doctor called out, “Whoa, not so fast!” Nor did people know ahead of time what sex their baby was going to be. Though a multitude of old wives’ tales existed about how a woman was carrying the baby (high for a boy, low for a girl), it was a big guessing game. Paint stores sold plenty of primary colors, and parents could never go wrong with the circus wallpaper.
My school was a vibrant mix of Northern European blonds,
Irish redheads, and Eastern European and Mediterranean brunettes. Reginald Sutton was the only brown child in my first grade class. He was friendly and smart, and in the middle of the year he gave all of us chicken pox. When I was born, people with dark skin were going from being called “coloreds” to “Negroes.” During my school years, they became “black,” and sometime after high school graduation it was changed to “African American.”
Students weren’t allowed to wear shorts or sweatpants to school, and sneakers were only supposed to be for gym day. Kindergarten was largely about tying shoes bunny ears–style, forming lines, and learning letters, none of which I was capable of accomplishing (where were the shoes with Velcro?). I was the last to comprehend whatever was happening, if I caught on at all, and thus remained silent most of the time. Another battery of tests followed—a jumble of shapes and pictures that I was supposed to connect or arrange, only I ended up randomly coloring
them in (and not very well). The results were clear: big dummy with coordination problems, despite normal vision and hearing.
It was suggested that my difficulties could be the result of my left-handedness, or that perhaps my unruly hair was impairing my vision. Polar bears are left-handed, survive in cold climates, and have thick, woolly hair. They might have considered testing to see if I was a polar bear.
My mother had to meet with another counselor who, once again, attempted to help her cope with raising a mentally challenged child. And once again, she completely rejected such conclusions and informed the doctors that I was simply operating on my own timetable. (Perhaps one dating as far back as the Julius Caesar calendar.) But that was the good thing about being of Irish descent—Mom had a sizable capacity for denial. Sigmund Freud once said about the Irish, “This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.”
In first grade, we were told to raise our hands when the teacher called out the month of our birthday. Finally, an instruction that I could understand. My birthday is October 8. It transpired that most birthdays were in September and October. Obviously there’s nothing like only three TV channels combined with a long, cold winter and the high cost of heat to feel the love.
When leaving elementary school at the end of each day during the winter, kids were checked to make sure they wouldn’t die from exposure on the way home. And when Buffalonians talk about exposure, we don’t mean streaking or attracting publicity. If we didn’t have a hat, scarf, mittens, and boots, we were sent down to the lost-and-found trunk near the main entrance to borrow the necessary articles. After a half hour of fumbling with zippers and snaps, wrapping scarves so as to be protected but not completely blinded, and fastening rusty metal boot buckles, we were lined up for a final inspection and then shoved out into the blowing snow looking like an army of Michelin midgets.
We weren’t proprietary about our winter garments. Any ski mask would do the job. Even in a house like mine, with just three people, the hallway was a jumble of outerwear. In large families, kids didn’t have their own stuff for long and eventually just grabbed from the heaping pile underneath the stairs. Boots didn’t always match, and neither did mittens. It wasn’t unusual for a child to have a mitten on one hand and a glove on the other, or a coat a few sizes too large.
It was always possible to borrow something if the weather turned nasty, or if we arrived at a friend’s house unprepared to go outside and play. At the bottom of every winterwear heap were the colorful accessories knitted and crocheted by elderly aunts and well-meaning grandmas who were lying around with broken hips and had become unstoppable handicraft mills. These collections always included hats made of multihued wool yarn that looked ridiculous on anyone. And not only did they give us hat head, but also static head. The thing to do was yank the brim down low and wrap a scarf over your face so as not to be recognizable, other than as a one-person Village People.
The dreaded dickey also managed to weave its way into the tapestry of daily life. A dickey is the top part of a shirt, usually a turtleneck, with no fabric for arms, nothing below the chest, and was less expensive than a real turtleneck. The biblike garment is tucked into a sweater, and supposedly no one can tell it’s not a full turtleneck, especially if they can’t see the very obvious half-moon outline across the chest. Children wearing dickeys were routinely tortured by having them yanked over their heads while walking down the hallways at school, resulting in demented shouts of “Give me back my dickey!” The dickey was flung atop the lockers, where it was impossible to retrieve without a ladder. I never went after one but can only imagine that it was a regular dickey graveyard up there.
While kids in Kansas were being trained to make a run for the root cellar in case of a cyclone, we were taught what to do if caught in a blizzard. According to our teachers, this entailed digging into the lee side of a snowbank and then removing our clothes and using them to insulate the “igloo” in order to survive on combined body warmth. In second grade, a question immediately arose: “How can we remove our clothes if we’re trapped in a storm with boys?” It was a time when spraying for cooties was commonplace, and often required, and that was when the boys in the vicinity were fully clothed. However, by junior high, most girls were trying to arrange to get caught in a snowstorm with the boys of their choice.
Elementary school was an enjoyable time of making things out of colored construction paper in sync with the seasons. Most classes had several paste-eaters and magnifying-glass bug-burners. The teacher gave me lefty scissors with green plastic handles, but there was still no telling my snowflakes from my leaves.
As a left-handed writer, I was classified as a “pusher”—one who clutches the pen between thumb and forefinger and smears as she goes. The slant travels anywhere from left to straight up and down to a hard right, and changes every inch or so. For some reason this style of writing looks physically painful, though it isn’t, and strangers often ask pushers if it hurts them to write. Lefties can alternatively be “hookers”—they hunch over and curl their hands around a pen so they’re practically imitating the right-handed slant. For the most part, hookers and pushers alike smudge their work, can’t see what they’ve written, and have an uneven scrawl. This being the case, calligraphy with a steel-tipped pen and a bottle of India ink is not a good pursuit for the lefty. Perhaps the nuns were right.
Somewhere around the third grade, my academic classification was upgraded from probably retarded to below average. And though slow of wit, I was not faint of heart. I became convinced that I could fly like the superheroes in my Saturday morning cartoons and loved the sensation of being airborne. By age five, I was regularly donning a blanket as a cape and taking flying leaps off the stone bench in front of the fireplace. At seven, I was jumping off rooftops at nearby construction sites or from the branches of our oak tree, sometimes holding an umbrella above my head. I’d like to blame it on peer pressure, but that wasn’t a factor, since I often leapt alone. Eventually I managed to crack my head open five times. With such an accumulation of scars, my scalp now resembles a map of the moon. Or, as Dad likes to say, my head has eight corners.
It was obvious I wasn’t going to win any beauty contests, talent shows, or athletic competitions. Family members were willing to consider themselves fortunate if I became semiliterate. By the end of third grade, my teachers were exasperated that I still couldn’t tell time.
It was the year before digital watches arrived on the scene, and if Debbie
hadn’t become tired of me constantly asking her the time, I still wouldn’t understand the little hand to this day. One afternoon she took me up to her room and explained the process by using an alarm clock. It was no easy task, but she eventually prevailed. If you really want to teach something to an eight-year-old, find another eight-year-old.
Thus, I didn’t distinguish myself in elementary school, other than to garner a membership in Monkey Club, which meant I’d climbed a rope to the top of the gymnasium. Basically anyone with two arms and legs could do it.
When it came to socializing, I was incredibly shy and had two friends: Mary, who lived in the house behind mine, and Debbie, from the next block. In fourth grade, our teacher, Mrs. Franz, asked Heather Osgood to be my friend. The woman should have been a matchmaker, since more than three decades later, we’re still great friends.
My favorite memory from elementary school would have to be of my third-grade teacher, who was fond of stopping at the Scotch ’n
Sirloin on the way home, tossing back a few gin rickeys to dull the pain of explaining long division, and then making late-night Nixon-like phone calls to parents. It was a small school in a small town, and people tended to overlook such idiosyncrasies, especially as it went without saying that only working at a nuclear power plant could be more stressful than teaching third grade. However, one night my spirits-addled instructor made the mistake of dialing Debbie’s mom. No-Nonsense Nina took education seriously, particularly when it was mixed three parts to one with inebriation and given a twist. That was the end of the phone calls.
***
When I began elementary school it was the early seventies, and I have vague memories of flowers as fashion accessories, Afros like cater-
pillar tents, peace signs, tie-dyed clothes, headbands, striped bell-
Buffalo Gal Page 10
