“Well,” he’d say, walking into the kitchen, “are you ready to loot Farmer Jack’s and A&P and Kroger’s for all the ice cream and Kleenex and chicken pot pie we can carry?”
Or my mother and I would take a walk after dinner, through blocks of identical houses, with identical shrubs planted in each yard, to a stretch of dirt road that led to a little cluster of stores, one of them a drugstore with an enormous fluorescent-lit candy counter. We’d buy Almond Joys, Mallomars, Mellomints, and licorice ropes and walk back in the dark as the street lamps winked on. Kids standing on the sidewalk in groups would stop talking and turn to watch us, their expressions dimmed by the evening.
When we got back to the house, my father would be sitting in the dark in the living room with a flashlight at his feet. We’d come in and he’d flick it on, shining it in our faces, momentarily blinding us. “Were they friendly at Baker Drugs?” he’d ask.
During these first weeks I saw very little of the other kids in the neighborhood because I almost never went out alone. They would sail by on bicycles, watching but keeping their distance whenever they saw us. Or I would hear them calling each other in a ritual singsong voice that scorned door bells and intermediary parents. The neighbors on either side of us (the old, grinning, big-nosed Sissels and the faded Catholic Kopeikins) had introduced themselves, but the Sissels had no children and the Kopeikins had only two squeamish myopic girls who wore matching flounce dresses, watched soap operas, and were given Saltines to eat when they were especially good.
One day when we’d been there almost a month, I was sitting in the front yard in a lawn chair reading Tarzan and the City of Gold when two boys pulled up on bikes and looked at me.
“Hey kid,” they said. “Where’re you from?”
“Cincinnati, Ohio.”
“Ohio’s a queer state.”
“What does ‘queer’ mean?”
“God!” They looked at each other in disbelief. “You don’t know what ‘queer’ means?”
I shook my head. Their voices were sarcastic, with a hard quality that didn’t allow for softness at all.
“It means retarded. Ohio’s a retard state.”
I felt my parents’ house behind me, and it felt vulnerable and weak. “Then what’s Michigan if Ohio’s a retard state?”
“Michigan’s a cool state. What’s your name, kid?”
“Dotty Footie.”
“God!” They looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “See you around, kid.” They got on their bikes and pedaled away.
I folded the lawn chair and went into the house. My mother was sitting on the hard new orange couch, reading a magazine, so I asked her what “queer” meant.
“It means odd, or unusual. Why?”
“Some boys came up while I was reading and said Ohio was a queer state.”
“That just means they don’t know much about Ohio.”
I didn’t go out and read again. But when I went with my parents for bargains or sight-seeing, I looked at the kids in the street more closely. I noticed that the boys and girls played separately, the boys standing in groups or walking with baseball equipment, the girls sitting on the concrete stoops with Barbie dolls, their blue plastic Barbie homes and accessories laid out in a format. I told myself that I was just the kind of person who liked to stay inside a lot.
“Territory is very important,” said my father. Somebody had thrown a paper cup on the edge of our yard, and he’d brought it in and put it on the kitchen table. “That’s why people have yards and fences and decorations and flowers in their yards. To establish a territory and mark it. Whatever bastard threw this on our yard has violated our territory, and if I see him do it again, I’ll kill him.”
Before the summer ended there was a serialized TV special on Anne Frank. We all sat in the basement and watched it in the dark, eating plates of cookies my mother made when The Wizard of Oz or something special was on. The Anne Frank show was a live play on a bare set of rooms with actors and actresses who had lines on their faces and pieces of hair hanging on their foreheads. It was preceded and followed by a man sitting in a chair talking about Nazis. They showed concentration camp footage at the end, as they were rolling the credits.
I loved the Anne Frank show. It made me feel something for other people, an awful connection with dead strangers more intimate than any relationship I had with my living peers. It made me feel vindicated and angry and self-righteous. The television presentation padded it enough so that it induced a mild feeling of sorrow and sensitivity instead of actual pain. After all, the actress who played Anne Frank had said in the end, “I believe people are basically good,” and the announcer had talked about the triumph of the human spirit, even though there were all those corpses.
In September I had to go to school. The trip to school was a gray sleepwalk through bathroom and breakfast, then through a neighborhood that was by now as familiar as a bad taste, surrounded by groups of other children who swung their lunch boxes and ferociously snapped their gum. In memory I see it from an aerial view; the square green lawns, the rooftops with the same chunk of space between them, the maze of sidewalks, the little human clusters progressing through the maze like disease moving through the body in a science diagram. The sight of myself—the lone toiling dot among the lunch box-swinging clusters—instantly recalls the fear and isolation that I took to be a normal state when among people other than my mother and father.
The school was a low concrete building surrounded by asphalt that had seesaws, swing sets and other iron instruments of play welded on to it. The halls were wide and monstrously echoed the shouts of children. We were assembled in the “Multi-Purpose Room,” given speeches, and told where to go. There were roughly thirty children assigned to big, full-skirted Miss Durrell, who had brown eyes and a burst of pimples arrayed across her forehead.
The days were defined by the tasks we had to accomplish such as making numbers jump over and under lines on the blackboard, reading about people on the Prairie, memorizing the imports and exports of Nicaragua, or why people in Turkey no longer had to wear fezzes. A map hung over the blackboard at all times to remind us that other countries were delineated by particular shapes and distinguished by different colors. At intervals we were made to go out on the asphalt where, for the most part, boys would run up and down screaming and fighting and girls would huddle by the door talking in low voices. The most formidable group was made up of big girls in short skirts that cut tight across their thighs and clung to their buttocks, who had hair that was teased and knotted until it stood straight up on their heads. I was afraid of them and I walked out to the edges of the playground and daydreamed until it was time to go in and memorize something else.
At the end of the day I would go home, strip off my dress and leave it on the floor of my room, put on pants, and go sit in the basement rec room watching Wagon Train, The Twilight Zone, and Hullabaloo until dinner was called.
During the first week I made friends with Eileen Iris, who sat next to me. She was a small, sedate child with long wavy brown hair who wore a pale pink sweater with white sequin leaves on it, which seemed the essence of femininity to me. Soon we were exchanging “friendship bracelets” made of fake shells, walking together on the outer reaches of the playground, collecting pretty pebbles, and eating the tiny strawberries to be found in the fitful undergrowth. She introduced me to tiny Darla Rice, a brown-skinned girl one grade younger than us whose short dark hair was set in a fashionable adult style. Her mother took the three of us to the wonderful Ice Capades in Detroit, to watch skaters in ballerina attire or grinning papier-mâché heads glide and leap to solemn recorded music as they were raked by mystic blue and white spotlights.
My friendship with Darla and Eileen did not, however, ease my feeling of isolation as I sat in class or walked home alone from school. It was like an aberrant pocket of comfort that could not emit enough warmth to extend into the coldness surrounding it.
I was still afraid to venture out of the hous
e into my neighborhood, although I didn’t think of it as fear. It felt more like a natural aversion; the very air outside our door seemed unbreathable, the voices of the neighborhood children, hard and bounding as rubber balls, cut into my sphere and left no space for me. Where were the friendly Michiganders my father had spoken about so confidently? I watched him and waited for an answer, which came in the form of a speech. “They’ve ruined everything that Michigan ever was,” he said. “They ripped down the old buildings and paved over the old roads and put crap up all over everything. It’s terrifying.”
He spoke in the dark of evening after dinner, from his vinyl reclining chair. My mother sat on the edge of the couch, examining her nails.
“It’s all part of the general trend,” he continued. “I thought Michigan would’ve escaped it, but I was wrong. We’re being destroyed, like the Romans.” He was answered by the tiny click of my mother’s thin nails being peeled into her cupped palm.
He said these things again on many other nights as he paced through the house like a soldier, rubbing invisible granules and making bitter comparisons between our neighborhood and the Michigan of his happy summer, sometimes punctuating his words by rushing out into the yard to seize a piece of litter or a crumpled beer can which he would bring in and hurl onto the kitchen table. His words seemed to hover over the house in a useless attempt to shield it.
Then it was October, and we found out about Devil’s Night. There had been a Devil’s Night in Ohio, too; the night before Halloween, teenagers could go around ringing people’s doorbells and throwing toilet paper over trees, and nobody would mind. In Chiffon, it wasn’t just one night. It started a whole week before Halloween, and it wasn’t just ringing doorbells and throwing paper. Gangs of kids would wander around, rubbing layers of soap onto people’s windows and walls, setting fires on front stoops and splattering the houses of unpopular people with eggs.
Our house was “egged” the first night, and my father screamed with rage. “These are the people who pick on old people, who terrorize the small and the defenseless!” The next night he turned off all the lights and, with me at his side, waited in the living room for the next pranksters. We hid behind an armchair together with a flashlight, some crackers and peanut butter—our “rations,” just like in the army. I was proud to be part of my father’s battle against juvenile delinquents. The first pranksters were a gang of doorbell ringers whose faces registered shock as my father burst out upon them with his machete, who scattered and fled in all directions as he chased them down the block shouting, “Come back and fight, bastards!”
By this time my parents had made friends with the neighbors on both sides of us, the Sissels and the Kopeikins. They had put on their bathing suits and gone to swim in the Sissels’ pool; my mother had many afternoon snacks with bespectacled, limply grinning Mrs. Kopeikin. But for me the friendly presence of these kind people was only a thin layer of civility that could be peeled away to reveal the gangs walking the streets on Devil’s Night, or, on the next layer, my father and me crouched behind the armchair, waiting.
My mother and I began having story times again, mostly on the weekends. Our favorite thing to do was sit at the kitchen table with paper and crayons, drawing stories for each other. If we couldn’t think of a story, we’d draw heaven. My mother’s heaven was blue and almost empty except for one or two angels with yellow hair, large silver stars, and a rainbow of many colors that she would work on for several minutes, slanting her crayons on their sides for more subtle hues. My heaven was full of grinning winged children, candy bars, cake, ice cream, and toys. When we were finished drawing, we would put our best pictures on the wall with Scotch tape and sit admiring them over dishes of cake and ice cream.
At night on Sunday, she would read me books like My Father’s Dragon, Little Witch, and Peter Pan. When she read Peter Pan, I stopped drawing pictures of heaven and began drawing Never-Never Land. Never-Never Land was pink and blue and green, it had trees with homes inside them, cubby holes and hiding places, tiny women in gauze robes, and flying children with rapiers in their elegant hands. Its very name made me feel a sadness like a big beautiful blanket I could wrap around myself. I tried to believe that Peter Pan might really come one night and fly me away; I was too old to believe this and I knew it, but I forced the bright polka-dotted canopy of this belief over my unhappy knowledge. And I tried to conform the suburban world around me to the world of Victorian London described in the book—which resulted in a jarring sensation each time I was forced to look at my true surroundings.
My mother’s presence protected me from these moments. Sometimes when we would go out on our drugstore errands—sailing forth in the car with our elbows thrust out the window, the radio playing cheerful music—we would encounter kids my age slouching in a group outside the store, teasing their hair, gnawing their gum, and they would turn to look at me, and I would see myself in their eyes, a fat girl wearing white ankle socks and heart-shaped sunglasses. If my mother hadn’t been there, they would’ve made jokes about me. But she was there and she bustled by them wagging her hips, saying, once we’d reached the store, “Do you know those girls? They look like gun molls!”
My closeness with my mother was physical as well as emotional. She washed my hair and rubbed my feet, and at night she would rub my back as I lay in bed. Occasionally, she would have me bend over her lap and, lifting my cotton nightie, she would spread my hips and check to see if I had worms up my ass. I could’ve questioned why she thought this was possible, but I didn’t. The certainty of her movements made it seem perfectly natural that I’d have worms in my ass and that she’d better check. It was to me as normal as the massages she gave my father almost every night.
I would often say good-night to them as my father lay in his reclining chair with my mother kneeling at his bare feet with a bottle of baby oil. Or he would be lying on his stomach on the floor in his pajama bottom with a sheet spread beneath him while she knelt over him in her nightgown with her bottom facing toward his head, rubbing his back, bending forward so that her long, loose hair brushed his hips.
Sometimes I would be allowed to take part, and we would both sit on Daddy in our gowns, massaging him with oil while he said, “Oh, that feels so good to the old father.” We would change positions often—I’d start at his feet and she at his shoulders, and then we’d switch. His skin would glisten with cheap oil, and he’d give off a hot, glandular smell that mixed with the smell of my mother’s light sweat and perfume. The little gold locket she wore around her neck swung back and forth as she moved, and her nightgown came away from her body so that I could almost see her breasts. I loved massaging my father with her.
When I started the sixth grade, our neighborhood was rezoned. Eileen and Darla now had to take a bus to a school half an hour away, and I was transferred to yet another school. The new school was filled with crowds of strangers with ratted nests of bleached hair, makeup, and breasts. The girls wore pointy boots and stood with their legs apart and their hips thrust out; the boys wore cleats and had faces like knives. I once saw two boys standing in the hall by their lockers, one boy passive and expectant, the other gently holding the passive one’s face with his palm, and then, with a sudden movement the touch turned to a slap, leaving the slapped face hot red. This caress/slap was repeated again and again, with varying gradations separating the caress from the slap, on one cheek and then the next. The slapped boy’s expression remained impassive, even insolent.
Both boys and girls covered their notebooks with drawings in hot Magic Marker and decals. Their drawings were of monsters with dripping fangs, long, roiling tongues, bugged-out veiny eyes, and short hairs all over them. The monsters were surrounded by Magic Marker words in huge ornate Gothic letters—“Cool,” “Eat Me,” and “Suck.” Almost everyone drew, with the same ornamental flourish and precision, a huge swastika or Maltese cross in some central place on his or her notebook.
It was pretty much the same situation as the last school except this
one had more audiovisual aids, and instead of the teacher giving the usual talk during science period, she’d have one of the boys wheel in a television, and we’d watch a program called Adventures in Science. It was awful, and during the first week, a girl behind me said “I’d rather fart than watch Adventures in Science.”
I asked my mother what “fart” meant, and she said it was “a vulgar word sailors use when they mean to say ‘poot.’”
Sometimes on my way home, I’d see the fart girl walking a block or so ahead of me. She was big, with adult hips brutishly packed into a tight skirt, large knees with raw bumps on them, and eyes that wandered blankly as she gnawed her gum. Her name was Barbara Van Bent, and I was surprised when one day she waited for me to catch up to her on the sidewalk and said “Hi.” She was the kind of girl I was naturally afraid of, the kind of girl who pushed me out of the lunch line. But she said “Hi,” her eyes avoiding mine in the guarded, deferential way some children have of making friends.
She lived in my neighborhood, and the next day she waited for me to walk with her. I went to her house, and she showed me her autographed pictures of pouting boy rock stars and television personalities. She showed me her collection of naked bug-eyed rubber dolls with stand-up hair, and she shared a bag of orange and pink candy with me. Her mother, a big woman with stiff hips in stretch pants, gave us sloppy Joes on paper plates. She came to my house, and my mother made us hot chocolate and gave us paper and crayons. Barbara seemed surprised by this, but she took her paper and made drawings of girls with breasts wearing white go-go boots and boys with big eyes in Nehru jackets. I drew a picture of Never-Never Land and explained it to Barbara, as she had never heard of Peter Pan. I think she said “Cool,” but I don’t remember.
B00768D9Y8 EBOK Page 8
