Buffalo Gal

by Laura Pedersen

  My holiday presents worked basically like this: Mom would tell my aunt something I wanted, such as the dune buggy for Malibu Barbie, so that Barbie, with her porn-star physique, and sexless Ken could go for chaste drives along the California coast. My aunt would dutifully go shopping, and then she and my uncle would have a drug-dealerlike transaction in the corner of the living room that resulted in his name being included on the card. As for gifts from my parents, I’d have ordered those from the J. C. Penney catalog back in November, using my dad’s credit card. They’d be delivered to the house, where I’d wrap them and place everything under the tree. On Christmas morning, I would pretend to be surprised by what I received, while in actuality they were. This system also worked well for my birthday and buying prom dresses.

  When I was eleven years old, Uncle Jim took me to the horse-

  racing track for the first time. It was in Fort Erie, Canada, just a few miles (excuse me, kilometers) from the Peace Bridge. Batavia Downs was in the opposite direction and featured harness racing rather than thoroughbreds, but we never went there. Back then, rumor had it that the jockeys were so crooked they had to screw their socks on in the morning and the owners would steal the dimes off a dead man’s eyes.

  Theoretically, one had to be eighteen to place a bet at the track, so I always found a grown-up to translate my wheels, exactas, and daily doubles from cash to racing tickets. However, I soon realized that the window tellers didn’t care if I was twelve or twenty-two. I was never once asked for proof of age. Off-track betting, on the other hand, was another story altogether, and they almost always asked for identification. Thus, when I wanted to play the horses all day, I had to ride my bike over the Peace Bridge to Ontario in order to bet at the actual racetrack.

  My only run-in with the law during those years was a citation from a University of Buffalo campus police officer for riding my bike no-handed. “You must have at least one hand on the steering mechanism at all times,” I was informed, rather unsympathetically I might add. Obviously he’d never tried bike riding while suffering from unrelenting allergies. My hands were usually fully occupied with blowing my nose and trying to keep the tissues from flying away.

  ***

  If anything in addition to playing poker and handicapping the horses helped to develop my interest in stocks and trading, it was my love of games. In particular, those that employed numbers, strategy, and probability, such as gin rummy, chess, checkers, and backgammon. My father and uncle regularly played chess with me, and the rest I played with friends, neighbors, and babysitters. As it turns out, the skills used to succeed in these pursuits are all rigorously employed in trading on Wall Street, particularly probability—the science of determining the likeliness of one event happening over another. And my freewheeling libertarian lifestyle (a dearth of TV channels, and the Internet still twelve years off) afforded me unlimited opportunity to play games with odds and then translate that knowledge to gambling and investments and, equally useful, determining what questions would be asked on tests.

  Of course, it seems that no matter what hand one is dealt in life, the pasture’s always greener across the street. As a young person I was well aware that I was leading a Pippi Longstocking–like existence, especially compared to the routines of my suburban friends. I occasionally overheard people whispering about “the Pedersen child” in a tone that suggested dark forces at work in the universe, and I caught their sideways glances.

  Almost all of my friends had rules, curfews, mealtimes, chores, rewards for good grades, and regular allowances. If I needed extra money, I simply said, “Dad, can I have a couple bucks?” It didn’t matter what day of the week it was. I suppose he assumed that I didn’t have a hundred-dollar-a-month Godiva chocolate habit, or that I wasn’t just hoarding his money in numbered offshore bank accounts.

  However, occasionally I’d gaze longingly at these well-regulated families surrounding me and find them all very appealing. I’d surrender to brief romances with “normal” life, perhaps inspired by afternoon reruns of The Brady Bunch.

  Unlike such TV families, we were a nocturnal clan and could be found eating, working, reading, or watching television at all hours of the night, though not together. Dad was in the habit of taking a break from his typing around midnight and boiling franks and sauerkraut, or else making an open-faced sandwich. If my mother was in the middle of a good mystery, there was no stopping her until four in the morning. I often went on late-night bike rides or to the twenty-four-hour store for a sugar fix. Back then, most television stations stopped broadcasting around one in the morning and the best we could get was a striped

  pattern or sometimes the Canadian national anthem.

  One day when I was about nine, I asked Mom, “What’s my curfew?”

  She was sitting in the living room reading the newspaper and glanced up with a perplexed look and replied, “What do you mean?”

  I explained that all of my friends had curfews and also bedtimes. “What are mine?” I clearly remember my mother staring at me as if I’d been visiting with the fairies.

  “Just come home when you’re done and go to bed when you’re tired,” she replied matter-of-factly.

  But on that particular day I was not to be satisfied by this laissez-faire answer. “I think we should agree on a curfew and a bedtime,” I said. I explained how it worked with my friends. They negotiated these times. The parents tried for earlier, the child argued for later, and they eventually split the difference. However, my mother wanted to discuss something sensible or else go back to her newspaper.

  “Fine,” she eventually capitulated. “Tell me what time you want as a curfew and a bedtime and that’s what they’ll be.” Of course, that defeated the whole purpose. I could have said one in the morning and she would have agreed.

  Eventually, I abandoned my case. The few times I did stay up until two or three in the morning on school nights, I felt so exhausted the next day I could hardly move. As a result of those sleep-deprivation hangovers, I went to bed by eleven-thirty almost every school night, right into adulthood.

  The next child-rearing issue I sunk my teeth into was monitoring academic performance. There was no doubt I’d been a slow starter when it came to education, aside from that period in kindergarten when I was a no starter. I have vivid recollections of cerebral chaos right through the end of elementary school. A good day for me would be to tell a knock-knock joke without screwing up the punch line.

  In junior high school I finally began to locate my academic balance. By eighth grade, I was bringing home the kind of report cards that were earning my friends ice cream sundaes, money, kudos, and other positive reinforcements. One day in junior high school, I came home and posted my first straight-A report card on the refrigerator—not that this was exactly a thoroughfare since most nights my dad went to the diner for a late dinner and I ate at a neighbor’s house. But they had to pass the fridge to get to the coffeepot and, thus, would eventually

  collide with my report card. It was the only thing up there, since we weren’t a fridge-magnet family, didn’t have a shopping list, and rarely left notes regarding our whereabouts.

  After two weeks passed without a word, I couldn’t stand it anymore. When Dad came out to refill his coffee mug, I pointed to the report card and said, “Look, I got straight As.” Dad was always juggling several pairs of glasses, and it’s doubtful he had the correct ones necessary to see anything but the coffeepot. “Don’t you think that’s good?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s your report card, and so it doesn’t matter what I think. It’s whether or not you’re happy with it that counts.” He disappeared with his coffee.

  My parents were never subscribers to the popular child-rearing tools of threats and bribery. And I eventually realized that my dad was right. Although the report card presentation had not been the Norman Rockwell moment I thought I was craving, it was my report card and did not represent my worth as a human being. And it was mine alone, whether the card was good or bad.
We had no family crest, and our accomplishments would not be published in a society register. It didn’t make much sense to strive for academic achievement just to receive praise. In certain areas there’s a need for self-validation and, likewise, self-redress.

  That was the last of my parenting experiments. Otherwise, my childhood was filled with friends, activities, modest athletics, and interesting experiences. Life in Amherst was becoming particularly exciting as homes were starting to crumble and sink into the earth, the town having been built on an old lake bottom, which was turning out to be part clay and part primordial ooze. No bedtime story could compete with the prospect of going to sleep on the second floor with a teddy bear and waking up in the basement surrounded by silverfish.

  Seventeen

  Everyone Was Groovy…Stardate 1965

  In the seventies, both of my parents enjoyed a certain amount of popular music. Dad liked Simon and Garfunkel, Gordon Lightfoot, and Harry Chapin. My father was a talented folksinger and often led rounds at our church, accompanying himself on guitar, and he also did sing-alongs with the Sunday school. These included a number of tunes written or popularized by fellow Unitarian Universalist Pete Seeger, such as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “We Shall Overcome,” and “If I Had a Hammer.”

  Mom’s tastes ran more toward Don McClean’s “American Pie,” the Moody Blues, Bette Midler, and Fleetwood Mac. They both liked Neil Diamond. Neither of them listened to Barry Manilow.

  The seventies were the heyday of the eight-track cassette player, terrariums, mood rings, fruit-striped gum, and the Big Wheel. Pet Rocks—a regular gray stone weighing about a quarter pound in a cardboard box with some straw in it—were launched in 1975 and immediately 1.5 million were sold. In 1976, red M&Ms were discontinued for eleven long years because the FDA banned Red Dye number two (even though M&Ms didn’t contain this dye). Fortunately, the candy maker left the green ones, which everyone knew worked as an aphrodisiac, or, in the parlance of the times, “made you horny.”

  Speaking of mood enhancers, on winter weekends we often spent hours making candles, using everything from sand to ice cubes for

  special effects. It’s hard to explain so many decades later, but it was a craze that swept the nation on the magnitude of the hula hoop in the late fifties and reality TV shows in more recent years.

  Otherwise, girls made latch-hook rugs, beaded jewelry, and string art, while boys had ant farms, chemistry sets, and baseball cards. Girls who weren’t tomboys played the Mystery Date Game, wore Blue Jeans perfume, used “Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific” shampoo, and accumulated Bonne Bell Lip Smackers in such tantalizing flavors as Good & Plenty, Tootsie Roll, Dr. Pepper, Hires Root Beer, 7-Up, Orange Crush, Bit-O-Honey, sour grapes, grape jelly, and sugar plum.

  We all went ice-skating. And we all wore clogs, even throughout the winter.

  Boys hung posters of sexy Farrah Fawcett from Charlie’s Angels in their bedrooms, while girls had their hair cut and blow-dried to resemble her famous feathered blond locks with flipped sides. Those of us who slaved over this look cannot deny it—the curling iron burn scars remain on our necks, ears, and foreheads. The less boy crazy of the girls wore their hair in a wedge like Dorothy Hamill’s, the 1976 Olympic gold-winning figure skater known as America’s sweetheart. In theory, this short and sassy bob was supposed to gracefully float upward when the girl spun around quickly, creating a halo effect, and was rigorously put to the test on playgrounds and skating rinks across the country. As to color, girls under eighteen did not tint or highlight their hair back then, except for temporary streaks of green, purple, or neon pink

  created with Jell-O, which was sticky and would soon start to smell (and not necessarily like the flavor we’d used).

  September 20, 1973, was the big day for girls and women in America, as the Battle of the Sexes was fought and handily won by the distaff half. This contest involved a court, but not the usual one, where women petitioned for equality. At a time when women’s tennis was not nearly as prestigious as men’s, male champ Bobby Riggs challenged female Billie Jean King in order to prove that men were better athletes. Meantime, it was a sore spot with King that professional women athletes were paid poorly compared to men.

  I was in third grade, and this was all anyone at school talked about that week, the girls firmly lined up behind Billie Jean King and the boys backing Bobby Riggs. The match was held at the Houston Astrodome and drew what was the largest-ever live audience for tennis, and also merited prime-time TV coverage. Riggs egged on the crowd by entering the stadium in a carriage pulled by women. King arrived in a red velvet litter carried by University of Houston football players in short togas. Then King beat Riggs in three straight sets by wearing him down with long rallies (he was fifty-five and she was twenty-nine). The next morning the boys in my class mumbled excuses. However, by lunchtime they’d recovered their bravado and were back to lobbing spitballs at our necks.

  When Bobby Riggs died in 1995, Rosie Casals, who had been a commentator for the famous match, said, “For a male chauvinist, he did a lot of good for us. We’ll always remember him in the best possible way. I always said he did the most for women’s tennis.”

  Favorite movies in the midseventies were Young Frankenstein, The Godfather, Rocky, and Jaws, which was the coolest thriller to come along since The Exorcist two years earlier and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho fifteen years before that. I was nine when the sharkfest was released (in the summer!). For children my age, this marked the end of ocean swimming. For those under ten, the fear of sharks carried over to swimming pools and even the bathtub, where they now kept a close eye on the spout and drain at all times.

  Laverne and Shirley was the top TV show throughout my junior high years (1977 to 1979). Dad liked Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Carol Burnett Show. Mom never missed The Irish Rovers or All in the Family. I remember watching one episode where Gloria forgets to take her birth control pill; for many years after that, I was convinced a woman became pregnant solely by not taking a pill every day.

  The TVs in my friends’ living rooms were often set to soap operas or game shows like Password, Family Feud, and The Gong Show. We were particularly fond of The Incredible Hulk, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Bionic Woman. If we weren’t going to be given the opportunity to make money on national television, then having superpowers was the next best thing.

  For commercials, we had Tom Carvel droning away in that gravelly New York voice, hawking Fudgie the Whale and Cookie Puss. Poor beleaguered Mr. Whipple was spying on people in order to reprimand them for squeezing the Charmin. And, as always, the Maytag repairman was the loneliest guy in town.

  My folks didn’t care how much television I watched. Other than some requisite bedtime reading when I was younger, neither parent monitored my leisure activities. However, my father dumped tons of books on every subject imaginable onto my bed. Sometimes he’d go to the bookstore and buy whatever was on the teen shelf, and other times he’d go to a garage sale or the closing of a library and come home with tomes on wacky stuff like spelunking, treasury-bill auctions, gymnosophists, and reflexology. His explanation for this eclectic assortment was that a certain amount of overexposure was necessary to develop one’s true interests. And to Dad’s credit, I must say that although I wasn’t much of a reader at the time (and I’m still not exactly sure what a gymnosophist does), those books on the bond market and real estate caught my eye, and I read them from cover to cover.

  My mother is a lifelong bibliophile and had her nose in a novel whenever possible. One of the reasons no one was too upset when she threw in the spatula was that she had a tendency to remove dinner from the oven only upon completion of a chapter in whatever book she happened to be reading. Because Mom was very aware of the dangers of salmonella, and food poisoning in general, she always went for that extra chapter to rescue us all from an early and potentially painful demise. As a result, Mom finished books faster and dinner was usually not just well done, but in fact ready for
carbon dating. The smoke alarm was our oven timer.

  Which leads to the revelation that my mother didn’t exactly quit being a housewife. She just started doing things extremely poorly that she’d been really good at up until I was eight years old. The new slogan in the kitchen became, “Where there’s smoke, there’s dinner.” Food started to taste better before she cooked it rather than after. Not only were formerly white T-shirts coming back tie-dyed, but also in toddler sizes. So my dad and I just finally retired her, like a run-out racehorse, which I think is rather what she was aiming for in the first place.

  Only, she didn’t exactly head out to pasture. Mom went on to earn a bachelor’s degree, an RN certification, and then, at age fifty-one, a master’s degree from the University of Buffalo. From there she landed an excellent job as a psychiatric nurse for New York State and was able to resume the benefits she’d accrued while working at the unemployment office before I was born.

  The only domestic area that continued to be of interest to her was that I regularly cracked open my head, eventually racking up five sets of stitches by age twelve.

  ***

  The cultural lingo was rapidly expanding. In the United States, we seem to have a penchant for categories and labels: Baby Boomer, Hippie, Yuppie, Generation X, Y, and so forth. Historical and cultural reference points are important in shaping our values and perspective. It matters if one is a child of the Depression, World War II, or Vietnam/Watergate.

  My school class was born between December 1964 and November 1965. The Baby Boom Generation (1946 to 1964) included everyone flanked by our parents and us, while Generation X (1965 to 1980) was the group born right after us. However, we didn’t fit into either category, numerically or characteristically. On the early end, we weren’t around for the Kennedy administration, later referred to as Camelot, and can hardly remember Vietnam, also known as McNamara’s War. As fourteen-year-olds, we had Rubik’s Cubes rather than Sony PlayStations. We didn’t participate in the hallmarks of Generation X—computers and coffee shops—at least until college or afterward. Likewise, we were slightly old for grunge rock (though most of us had worn flannel since childhood). Nor did we start any dot-com companies in our twenties.