Buffalo Gal

by Laura Pedersen

  Thus the scene was set for Pete’s soirees—candlelit dinners with classical music playing in the background. There’d be shrimp cocktail, usually some sort of chicken with rice and vegetables, and a fancy dessert from the bakery. My job was to take coats, serve cocktails, get the food heated and on the table, then clear and clean up afterward.

  Although Pete paid me for my Felix Ungering, the best part about these dinner parties was the free food. When I cleared the appetizers and later the dinner table, I spirited the dishes off to the kitchen and ate every last bite that remained. Not even teeth marks could stop me. Quite the contrary, they were an indication of freshness. Therefore, the strategic part of the night for me was not making sure the food came out at the right time, but sizing up guests upon arrival, trying to determine the clean-plate club from those who might leave me a meal, perhaps even a full dessert. I lived for the lactose intolerant, the dieters, and those with sugar problems.

  I never told Pete exactly how I was cleaning the plates, and when he’d stop in the kitchen to instruct me on storing the leftovers, I’d always say, “They ate every bite.” He’d look a bit puzzled, as if he could have sworn there should have been extra food. “It must have been really good,” I’d say. Then he seemed pleased that the guests had enjoyed everything so much.

  ***

  When not serving at parties and assisting on school plays, I helped Pete study to become a guide at the nearby Albright-Knox Art Gallery. While we ate at Burger King, I’d hold up homemade flash cards of all the works of art so he could tell me about them while I checked the information against what was written on the back. Pete gave the best art gallery and museum tours, second to none. He passed the test with flying colors, one of the highest scores they’d ever had.

  However, Pete was soon asked to leave under a Tiepolo-colored cloud for giving too much information about certain objets d’art. For instance, there was a painting of a young boy who’d guide the upper classes home through dark alleyways from the theater, lighting the way with a torch. Pete added that it was possible the artist intended the boy to have a slightly sinister rather than angelic expression on his face, since occasionally these street urchins would club their wealthy customers over the head with their torches and rob them. To appreciate another painting, Pete felt it was necessary for gallerygoers to understand that the artist, Amedeo Modigliani, had embarked on an affair with South African writer Beatrice Hastings and on one occasion threw her out of a window. And that another Modigliani mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne, walked backward out of a window a day after the artist died, killing herself and their unborn child with whom she was almost nine months pregnant.

  So ended Pete’s short time as a docent. On the bright side, I learned the meaning of the word defenestration and could actually use it in a sentence.

  One adventure led to another, and my teenage years were like those of Mary Poppins’s young charges, who arrive at Uncle Albert’s to enjoy a tea party on the ceiling and then follow Bert the chimney sweep and jack-of-all trades through a magical cartoon paradise, complete with dancing penguins. Years later, when a reporter asked Pete if he’d been my mentor, he replied that, like Athena from Zeus, I’d sprung from his head fully formed.

  Throughout Pete’s forty years of teaching, thousands of students stopped back to tell him he was their favorite teacher of all time. Then one day we were having lunch at a diner when the owner, a former student, came over and exclaimed, “Mr. Heffley, we all just loved you!” Pete smiled and graciously thanked the woman. He was very used to this. She continued, “You were one of my…(long pause)…top five favorite teachers!” Pete looked as if he’d been hit with a stun gun. To help him process the remark, I quickly added, “I guess if you’d been her fourth favorite teacher she would have said top four, huh?”

  Twenty-Two

  Down on the Farm…Doing Time…Beat It

  The result of Irish and Scandinavian skin combined, my pallor is that of someone who has been living under the basement stairs for several decades. On my mom’s side of the family, tanning means four minutes the first day, seven minutes the second day, and so forth, until we’re the dark pink color of a medium-rare steak. By the end of every summer, I looked like Heidi, if she were half Cherokee. Especially since sunblock wasn’t waterproof during my pool, pond, and sprinkler years.

  No amount of bug spray could keep the bees, mosquitoes, fleas, and deerflies from administering chomps and stings that instantly swelled to the size of communion wafers. At the end of a day, other kids would have one or two bites, and I’d have two dozen, as if the insects understood that with me they were getting the most bang for their bite. Sure, I knew what poison ivy looked like, and I remembered the popular adage “Leaves of three, let it be.” But I didn’t have to touch poison ivy to have my arms and legs turn bright red with welts; I only had to see it through a window.

  I’m the first to admit that I never did a lick of housework throughout my childhood. I never turned on the vacuum cleaner, loaded the dishwasher, or ran the lawn mower, not once. My mother never asked me to clean anything. As best as I can tell, she was rather obsessive about cleanliness and felt that anything my father or I touched would only be made messier and she’d have to rewash it anyway. After a day of playing outside, she made me hose off in the backyard before even entering the garage. And there was no way my mother the nurse was going to let me chop off my fingers and toes with a lawn mower (she’d memorized the statistics on yard-work injuries, and they were right up there with riding a motorcycle). Besides, every time I was outside when the grass was being mowed, I started sneezing, my eyes swelled shut, and my lungs shuddered.

  Though I may have enjoyed a chore-free domestic life, I worked outside the home, as many females began doing in the seventies. I can’t remember a week when I didn’t have some job or another, and usually I had two or three. I’ve been paying Social Security since age eleven. It was taken out of my first real paycheck, for being a camp counselor, which offered an unpretentious two-digit salary. Although my constitution rejects the ungreat outdoors, there weren’t many full-time jobs for a preteen girl to pursue, and so, as with most career trajectories, I had to make sacrifices to get started. Sometimes one must dig down to climb up.

  It’s true that in Buffalo we joke about having three seasons—almost winter, winter, and construction. But it’s also true that we have the best summers in the world. Summer usually hits around June 30, so we didn’t want to sleep late or else we might miss it. The gray clouds suddenly clear, the snow melts, and we actually have to fill the gas tanks in our cars, rather than just shift into neutral and hydroplane on the ice.

  During the summer, I worked at a children’s day camp called

  Acadian Farm, located twenty minutes outside of the suburb where I lived. When I was a child, we only had to drive fifteen minutes from the heart of downtown Buffalo to be in the burbs. Fifteen minutes farther out and we were in farmland. A few miles more, and we were in The Shining. By the time the tank ran out of gas, we’d reached Deliverance.

  The small farm where I worked boarded horses year-round and operated as a children’s day camp in the summer. Kids learned to ride and care for horses, played games like capture the flag and crack the whip, had chicken fights in the pool, and set up tugs-of-war across a man-made pond with a horse-manure bottom. We entertained each other with skits, rowed boats in the pond, went on hayrides, and made the standard camp crafts—boondoggle, god’s eyes, macramé belts and bracelets, and macaroni picture frames.

  In the mornings and late afternoons, we performed chores—haying the horses, weeding the garden, sweeping out the tack room, and tending to the smaller animals, such as pigs, goats, rabbits, and guinea pigs. I was in charge of giving the pigs their water and slop. Campers would regularly throw into the slop bucket perfectly good sandwiches, apples, and bananas, and so, lazy about bringing my own lunch, I’d share with the pigs.

  Once a month, the blacksmith arrived in his specially outfitted van
filled with peculiar objects. We all gathered around, fascinated as he trimmed the horses’ hooves and banged away at their shoes atop the metal anvil. After he nailed on the new shoes, we were given the old ones to hang over our beds for good luck. More than once a horseshoe fell off its nail in the middle of the night and bonked someone on the head.

  A number of the riding horses had previously belonged to circuses. However, we didn’t know the commands to make them perform their routines, and we didn’t have a list of the tricks they knew. So sometimes we’d yawn and stretch our arms in the riding ring and suddenly one of the horses would kneel down as if praying, and a surprised six-year-old camper would slide down the horse’s neck to the ground.

  One scorcher of an August day, I was bringing a horse around for a bath when an eight-foot black rat snake slithered out from underneath the barn. There’s only one mammal that hates snakes more than I do, and that would be a horse. The mare reared and came down on my toes. Sadly, counselors didn’t carry disability insurance in those days.

  Aside from the constant rope of snot hanging from my nose and swollen silver-dollar-sized insect bites covering my arms and legs, the farm was lots of fun. It was the place where I learned that puking and crying are contagious among children, just like the giggles. And that the words booger and fart should be used as a main source of inspiration when trying to amuse bored campers through a long, rainy day.

  For several years I had the youngest children, aged five and six, while my friend Debbie had the oldest kids, eleven and twelve. People would occasionally slip four-year-olds into my group, especially if they had older brothers and sisters and the parents wanted to get rid of the whole brood at once. Sort of a reverse Little League, lying to make your kids older.

  One summer I received a quiet and slightly peculiar child. The first few days he kept wandering off. And I mean wandering off—a half mile away. Terrified that he’d get lost for good and I’d be held responsible, I took some baling twine from the barn and attached the rambling camper to my belt. He now had a circle with an eight-foot radius in which to operate. That worked fine for the first week. I could keep a close eye on him, and he didn’t seem to mind being my little prisoner, I mean shadow. I’d untie him for riding, games, and swimming, or if we were in an enclosed area such as the indoor ring. However, in the middle of the second week he began to cry. I untied him, and within an hour he’d disappeared again. I panicked because this time I couldn’t find him and was running all sorts of scenarios through my head about how to explain this one to the camp director, not to mention the boy’s parents. I finally located him in the hayloft, communing with the pigeons. I brought the twine back out, tied it around me, and gave him the other end of the leash so he could pretend I was his dog. That got us through the rest of the summer. It was only when a friend of his parents came to visit on the last day that I found out he was a year underage and also autistic.

  When Debbie and I grew bored, we’d organize a troll hunt. My little campers would be taken on a hike in the woods and instructed to watch out for trolls. They were told that if they carried a purple flower, then no evil could befall them, and we even issued purple flowers, which they held in front of them like Olympic torches while tiptoeing through the woods. As I worked my little guys into a full lather about the possibility of trolls—by now every branch that snapped or bird that flew out of the brush caused them to scream and practically wet themselves—Debbie’s twelve-year-olds were in the art room painting themselves brown and green to resemble trolls. They took a shortcut to our designated meeting place in the woods and more or less ambushed us. Most of the kids loved it, just like they wanted to hear ghost stories, even though they knew full well they would end up peeing their pants and not sleeping.

  There was always one kid who had nightmares, and a concerned parent would phone the next morning. If we didn’t get at least one call we figured we really weren’t doing our jobs as counselors, and it was probably time to organize a vampire hunt—didn’t the kids know that the entire camp was once a graveyard and that some pretty grisly murders took place in this area, and those who escaped the murderer often fell into the waiting jaws of wild animals? In fact, there was once a child just about their age who became lost from the group…

  ***

  Junior high ended after eighth grade, and it was off to Sweet Home Senior High, another brick building with turd brown accent panels and turquoise trim executed in the school of Soviet construction known as functionalism. It made the Bauhaus architects look like designers of Las Vegas hotels.

  One winter, the snow on the roof was so heavy that there was danger of a collapse, and anyone on a varsity sports team was asked to arrive armed with a shovel. The reward was doughnuts and pizza. We thought it was a great deal.

  The school was experiencing a transformation from the loosey-goosiness of the swinging sixties and seventies, complete with student lounges, back to a more conservative environment. When we arrived in the fall of 1979, smoking on school property had once again been banned, though we could see burn marks in the burnt-orange carpets covering the deconstructed learning spaces. These good-karma areas, filled with modular tables and chairs, had supposedly been more conducive to information flowing into the mind than traditional classrooms, with their rows of individual metal desks and attached chairs facing a teacher. The free-range learning spaces were being divided back into regulation-style classrooms with blackboards, while the faculty were putting down their bullhorns and breathing a collective sigh of relief. Apparently they felt there had been a little too much openness employed throughout the sixties and seventies, when students would light joints in the hall, wear unisex fishnet tops, attend lectures according to their biorhythms, walk out of class whenever they pleased to set up lawn chairs in front of the school to catch rays, hand-tool leather wallets, strum Neil Young songs on a guitar, and practice free love rather, well, freely.

  Yes, the students from those earlier years had done all the heavy lifting when it came to breaking the rules, boundaries, and barriers, not to mention the wills, of their teachers. The dress code had been whittled down to exactly that: be dressed. There was no more “yes, sir,” “no, ma’am,” or corporal punishment, just the beginning of students threatening to call lawyers if they felt browbeaten, damage to their self-esteem, or deprived of their constitutional rights.

  Gone were classes in civics, geography, and grammar. We’d learn about politics from jokes on late-night television shows and become versed in geography by seeing maps on TV whenever the United States government decided to bomb some faraway country. Apostrophes were forevermore destined to pop up in inappropriate places, if at all; colons would only be dealt with much later in life—in hospitals, with proctologists. Our parents, with their forties’ public-school educations, were the last generation to correctly use whom and not end their sentences with prepositions. They knew their verb types well enough to properly state that people were “lying on the beach” as opposed to “laying on the beach,” though when it came to the hedonistic sixties and seventies, in most cases the latter was probably also correct.

  Our teachers had been firsthand witnesses to the collapse of syntax during their careers, and by the time we arrived, they were immune to double negatives and hearing “ain’t.” Misuse of the English language no longer jarred their ears, jangled their nerves, and made them cringe. After weathering the hippies, they were too physically, mentally, emotionally, and grammatically exhausted to go around correcting anyone about anything. Our teachers were suffering from PSSSD, post–sixties-and-seventies stress disorder, along with a severe case of chronic student fatigue syndrome. These tired survivors were counting the days until retirement, when the hard-earned pension checks would start arriving.

  Our predecessors, with their platform shoes, pink-tinted sunglasses, puka-shell necklaces (consult seventies’ photo of teen idol David Cassidy in Tiger Beat magazine), and hip-hugger jeans had worn these once idealistic educators into the academic gro
und. The favorite phrases of those students had been “You can’t make me” “So what?” and “Who cares?” Well, they got their wish, because a lot of teachers did stop caring,

  and you couldn’t exactly blame them. Sure, they may have been old-fashioned and square with their short, thin neckties, Life magazines, and Dean Martin albums, handing out boring written assignments on colonialism and saying the pledge with hands placed firmly over their hearts, but they certainly hadn’t gone into teaching for the money. If you think the pay is bad now, it was a pittance back then.

  Most eventually lost interest in trying to force-teach long-haired kids reading copies of Rolling Stone and listening to Jimi Hendrix—not so much because of how their students looked, or what they read, or what music they liked, but because their young charges would no longer pay attention to the Man. It’s understandable that students were disgruntled by society, and some may have effected change through protesting and petitioning, but their high school teachers weren’t drafting boys or refusing jobs to minorities. On the receiving end of so much abuse, more than a few teachers probably took secret pleasure in reading that emergency rooms were overflowing with teenaged girls who’d broken their ankles tumbling off six-inch rainbow-colored wedgies. Maybe disapproving instructors even chuckled about the bad acid circulating at Woodstock and wondered if a groupie could drown in bong water.

  A handful of teachers took the can’t-beat-’em-join-’em attitude toward the hippies. Mr. Russell told us how he used to leave the door to his house open and students would hold drum circles in the living room to raise group consciousness. Sometimes he would eye meditate on his front lawn, and once a high school senior thought he was Jesus Christ. With his patchy beard and doleful eyes, Mr. Russell indeed looked as if he’d raised some serious consciousness. He told us to call him by his first name, Phil, because it meant “love” in Greek.