Buffalo Gal

by Laura Pedersen

  The idea of a custody battle seemed rather silly, since I was an extremely independent teenager by this point. On weekends, Pete and I would go to the Laundromat together. My next-door neighbor was the librarian at school, and I can only imagine what she thought of a teacher pulling into my driveway and me dashing out with a bag of clothes.

  After the Laundromat, Pete and I would return to his apartment where he’d fire up his deluxe steam iron while we watched Grey Gardens for the umpteenth time. It’s the true story of the crumbling mansion that was home to the reclusive aunt and cousin of Jackie Onassis, Edith Bouvier

  Beale, and her daughter, Little Edie. The two women camp in a single bedroom of a twenty-eight-room East Hampton estate gone to ruin while accusatorily rehashing memories of opportunities and lost chances. Little Edie does some unusual things with turbans fashioned out of sweaters, and they have quite a few cats and raccoons. Pete loved how the mother keeps telling the daughter that she isn’t talented, and the daughter argues how she would have made it in show business if it hadn’t been for the mother.

  As best I could figure it, the lawyers were using me as a pawn in their battle. The only thing we had of value was our house, originally purchased for $20,000 in the early sixties and worth about $65,000 in the early eighties. The down payment of $2,000 had belonged to Mom, which she’d saved from working at the unemployment office. But typical of the times, the house was put in my father’s name alone, as were the cars and the credit cards (thus, she had no credit history and had difficulty applying for new cards—take a lesson, women). It stood to reason that whoever landed the child automatically won the house.

  Though Mom and Dad weren’t exactly hands-on parents, they loved me like crazy. I’m not saying that I was any great prize as a child, because I was as energetic, strong willed, and annoying as any sugared-up kid could be, probably more so. I’d make a mess, aggravate, and remain vigilant for logic traps and double standards. I was a wiseass. Mom and I would have fights. I’d pick up the phone and threaten to check myself into Gateway, the group home for troubled adolescents. I assumed they’d have food there, maybe even a cafeteria. My mother would tell me not to be ridiculous—the court had to sentence a teenager to live there.

  But I was the only game in town. It wasn’t Star Trek; there was no next generation, no nieces, nephews, cousins. If all went as nature intended, I would be selecting their respective twilight homes. In the meantime, I knew that they’d take a bullet for me, exchange themselves as prisoners to secure my freedom, and if I needed a vital organ, one of them would hop on the table. In fact, I was confident that if I needed a heart one of them would give me theirs, and life along with it. (A sweet thought even though it’s obvious that Dad is never going to be an approved organ donor, unless it’s to science fiction.)

  I called for a conference and announced that I wasn’t taking sides. The lawyers told me that eventually I’d have to testify in court, and the reason for meeting beforehand was to make sure I’d be comfortable with that. In other words, they wanted to influence my testimony.

  At the end of the day, I didn’t care much whom I lived with, since we all did our own thing anyway. Neither of my parents ever asked where I was going or what I was doing. Having custody of me as a teenager would have been like having custody of an escaped chimpanzee. I was everywhere at once and always one step ahead of the zookeepers.

  That said, I didn’t want to go on record as selecting one parent over the other and have Laura’s Choice hanging in the air for the rest of my days. Being asked to choose between parents, both good people, knowing they would be informed of the decision, and that it would be a matter of public record was incredibly icky, to say the least. The message I sent back to the lawyers was that I wasn’t singing, not to them, and not to a judge.

  By doing this I was, by default, agreeing to stay with my mother, based on precedent at the time. But at least it was the law making the decision, not me. My refusal to caucus only set into motion another round of attempted talks by lawyers.

  Otherwise, the holiday curse continued. Mom’s credit cards were cut off that Thanksgiving. When her time in the house came to an end, it was put up for sale the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Best of all, the final divorce decree was granted on April Fool’s Day.

  After resisting the entreaties of lawyers from both sides for almost two years, I was finally summoned to the courtroom. By now I was fifteen. The jingle-jangle morning of my court appearance, I sat on the end of my bed and stared in the mirror and promised myself that no matter what happened I wouldn’t cry. We’d learned in school that Native Americans used to train young braves to be strong by making them stand in a freezing cold stream for hours at a time without flinching or complaining.

  It didn’t help that before the courtroom appearance I had an early morning appointment at the orthodontist to have my braces tightened. By the time I arrived downtown, my teeth and gums were aching so much that I could barely speak properly. Since I only needed to be in court for an hour, my parents had arranged for my godmother to pick me up at half past eleven and bring me from the courthouse in downtown Buffalo to my high school out in the suburbs.

  The judge decided I’d be questioned in her chambers rather than sit in the courtroom where my parents had been testifying. However, when Mom and Dad came out for a break, I peered inside the spacious wood-paneled courtroom that was nicknamed the Crystal Ballroom because of its palatial chandelier. As I walked toward the judge’s chambers, I saw my father racing toward the men’s room. He was pale and looked very ill. My mother’s lawyer was taking her over to his office to lie down because she had a headache.

  ***

  The judge presiding over the case was named Delores Denman. At the time, she was in her midfifties, had a bleached-blond helmet coiffure, sported a reverberating red, double-knit, permanent-press pantsuit, and had a throaty voice that could probably find a smoke and a drink if they were buried underneath the county jail. When I entered her office, she greeted me with a handshake that I mistook for a karate move and then introduced me to the court reporter who’d be documenting our conversation. I already knew him from skateboarding up in the reporters’ common room.

  In her raspy, authoritative baritone, Judge Denman explained the purpose of the court reporter and said that whatever we spoke of would be confidential. I replied that I knew what he did since my dad was also a court reporter. And I’d been around the corrupt city of Buffalo long enough to know that anyone else who wanted access to this “confidential” conversation could easily find a way to get it.

  Judge Denman cut to the chase pretty fast. Whom did I want to live with—my mom or my dad? Which translates to any child as: whom do you love more—your mom or your dad? I had a prepared statement ready, but the morning’s orthodontic procedure, my parents’ unglued states, and the specter of a tomato-red Delores Denman shooting questions like machine-gun fire in that whiskey-and-soda voice unhinged me. My answers were evasive.

  Judge Denman was not about to be put off her mission by a fifteen-year-old with a mouth full of taut metal. “You must like one of your parents better than the other,” she continued.

  I felt tears behind my eyes and made them recede by envisioning that freezing cold stream and defiantly crossed my arms in front of me. “No. I’d just like to stay in my house.” This last line was to become my refrain.

  She looked through some notes on her desk. “It says here that your mother was a Brownie leader.” She looked up at me like the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, trying to lure me into her net with a delicious-looking lollipop.

  “I just want to stay in my house.”

  Judge Denman returned to her secret files. “It says here that your father played chess with you.”

  Guilty as charged. I confessed. We had indeed played chess together. He usually let me go first.

  After a few more rounds, she looked up and said it was her opinion that I was blocking out my parents’ divorce, that I needed psy
chological help, and she was going to recommend that I receive it.

  I guess I should have been relieved. After all these years of my father saying my mother was crazy and vice versa, it had finally been confirmed by a professional that they’d raised a perfectly crazy child.

  I was dismissed. In the marble hallway, Dad was sitting on a bench looking very upset. It’s pretty hard to imagine him shooting people in the Korean War when he tears up at the opening of a salad bar. My mother was already back in the courtroom, where they were about to resume battle. It was a quarter to twelve, and my godmother was nowhere to be found. She showed up an hour and a half late. It was pouring outside, or raining cats and dogs, as she liked to say.

  I should have just gone home, but I wasn’t thinking straight. Originally the plan had been to arrive at school before noon. Betty dropped me off at ten minutes to two, right before the final period of the day. My last class was biology, and we were dissecting a perch (a truly disgusting fish). My lab partner was terrific, one of those smart pocket-protector guys, so all I had to do was show up and make jokes while he did all the work. However, if I missed the class I’d have to take the revolting thing apart on my own one day after school.

  If I’d had my wits about me I never would have gone to the front office. As an expert on truancy, I knew full well that we couldn’t sign in after noon. This was because the school could no longer claim state aid for us (their daily government payment), and we weren’t covered by their insurance. Had I been thinking clearly, I would have gone directly to the biology lab where my filleted perch awaited me. Mrs. DiCenzo, the bio teacher, wouldn’t have noticed that I’d already been marked absent for the day.

  But I was in a trance with the song “One (Is the Loneliest Number)”

  clogging my brain, accidentally used the front door, and was spotted from command central. I drifted into the office with a note saying I’d been to the orthodontist. I didn’t think it was any of the office ladies’ business that I’d been taking part in the judicial process. The clock on the wall said two. The attendance czars gave me the business: “Why did you come at all? Why didn’t you make the orthodontist appointment for after school?” Finally, I grabbed my note from the counter, took off, and snuck up the stairs to the science wing.

  By the end of class, we’d finished slicing and dicing the ugly fish and Mrs. DiCenzo tested us individually. I somehow managed to name a gizzard here and a stomach there, thanks to coaching by my partner, who is most likely the head of a billion-dollar biotech company today.

  It had stopped raining by the time school let out. My parents arrived home much later. I released a statement explaining that I’d stuck to my party line and didn’t choose between the two of them. Aside from that, no one said anything else about the day. Dad went into his office, and my mother went out.

  ***

  The Saturday morning after the divorce proceedings was the start of a glorious Indian summer weekend. It was the kind of day where it seemed impossible that the brilliantly colored landscape would soon be gray and white.

  Rising early, I rode my bike the six miles down to Pete’s apartment on Gates Circle in the city of Buffalo. He was aware that I’d had my day in court and wanted all the details. Even though I normally told Pete everything, I knew I’d cry if I told him the story and replied, “It was so horrible I can’t talk about it.”

  However, Pete is nosier than any kid is stubborn. He kept grilling me. I started with Delores Denman, and he loved the bit about the spray-starched hair and the flame-red pantsuit. Pete made me demonstrate the gravelly voice and jujitsu handshake. I told him about the judge’s use of esoteric details regarding my parents’ involvement in my life to prompt me into choosing one over the other.

  Like most theater directors, Pete had a particular affinity for blowsy grande dame characters. As soon as he’d worked up the script, voice, and attitude, he had me play myself and he assumed the starring role of the judge.

  Pete played Judge Denman splendidly, better than she did herself. And this made me laugh like crazy. He was having so much fun with his new routine that we did it over and over until he started ad-libbing funny activities from my distant past when I had no details left to offer. Pete couldn’t resist adding a fake cigarillo, pretending he was smoking during the interview.

  We went for our usual walk, had something to eat, and went shopping. Pete was breaking into his Judge Denman character when talking to waitresses and salespeople. Soon he was Delores to shoppers in the aisle of the grocery store, the cashiers, and even strangers on the street.

  In the afternoon, we went over to Russ’s house, as we did most weekends, since he’d just be arriving home from the tag sales. Russ would show us the array of jewelry, paintings, lamps, and hats he’d picked up that morning, tell us how much he paid and what he thought he could sell each one for. Though he worked full time as an art teacher at my school and was a well-known local collagist, Russ ran a booth out at Hickey’s flea market on Sunday. He had hilarious stories about the other “pickers” fighting over items and haggling over a lamp priced two dollars that he knew was worth more than a hundred. There were often unusual brooches or feather boas that he’d unearthed, and Pete would model these and do some characters and we’d all laugh. Or Russ might perform the opening of The Glass Menagerie, where Amanda Wingfield is desperate to sell magazine subscriptions and people fob her off or else hang up the phone. The two also specialized in a lively rendition of the opening song to The Patty Duke Show.

  Russ would make lemonade, and we’d sit on his front porch discussing all the funny things that people had said and done that week. We’d fight over the butterfly chair, since it was considered to be the most comfortable. Russ had some wacky neighbors, and he’d tell us hilarious stories about his encounters with them, such as the woman who managed to burn her middle finger while taking a casserole out of the oven, and every time she showed it to Russ she’d accidentally give him the finger.

  Once we were all settled, Pete unveiled the Delores Denman routine, which by now we had down to a one-act play. I was supposed to act more girlish and innocent than I really am, and Delores would coax and wheedle and then break into this horrible smoker’s cough and ask for a shot of whiskey or some bizarre drink like a Grasshopper or Pink Squirrel. Russ laughed so hard that his chair almost toppled off the porch. We had plenty of sketches in our repertoire that we’d built up and enhanced over the years, but this one, although brand new, was already a favorite.

  That evening the three of us went to a local restaurant we enjoyed, largely because in the summer the proprietor claimed to have air-

  conditioning but said it was broken, and in the winter she said the heat was being repaired. Only it had been like that since opening five years before. Pete and Russ and I didn’t believe they had either a cooling or heating system, but we’d always politely inquire how the repair work was going and nod understandingly, as if we empathized with the difficulty of finding a good handyman.

  Pete broke into his Delores Denman character with the waitress and continued cracking us up. We went down to the waterfront, walked along the pier, and ate ice cream cones while talking and laughing about school and some of the teachers we all knew. A favorite was the home economics instructor, who fancied herself a part-time clairvoyant; she’d invited Pete and Russ to a séance the week before, during which she experienced tremendous flatulence and insisted it was the spirits calling to her.

  Finally, I rode my bike home. It had been the most perfect day. It struck me that there are some situations where we have to be responsible for our own happiness. My parents were depressed and upset, and there didn’t appear to be anything I could do to remedy that. I tried not to think about the divorce anymore. Same with red pantsuits.

  Twenty-Eight

  Disappearing Act…The Walkway Less Traveled

  Accompanying the conclusion of the trial came a recommendation that I undergo a full psychiatric evaluation at a local mental


  institute known for specializing in the treatment of the criminally insane. It didn’t seem very crazy to me to avoid going on record as preferring one of my parents over the other. However, a receptionist began calling the house with telemarketer regularity in order to schedule an appointment. Because this was something proposed by the court, I feared that if I didn’t go, it was grounds for packing me off to reform school or maybe even jail, since I was now sixteen. Did they not realize how stressful it would be for an only child to have to join a gang?

  I queried Dad about the possibility of getting charged with contempt if I dodged the funny farmers. He asked, “Do you want to go?”

  “No way.”

  “Then tell them to go to hell,” he said. It was the only time I’d ever heard him swear.

  Amazingly, all that time my parents spent in the courtroom didn’t result in a divorce, but rather a decision—a decision that slightly favored my mother, and so my father’s lawyer immediately appealed. The case was now sent to the appellate division in Rochester, New York. And so we all continued to live together!

  However, I was not summoned to testify again. And by this time the custody battle was asinine. I roamed about like a fox, wherever and whenever I pleased. In less than two years I’d move out and live on my own.

  The final divorce decree is dated April 1, 1982. My mother had done okay in the first settlement, but this one largely favored my father. The proceedings took place before the enactment of the equitable-

  distribution law in New York State, which would make settlements more favorable to long-married women by awarding them closer to half the marital assets in a divorce.