In my grammar school there
were mean girls and quiet girls and one who couldn’t sit still and jiggled her
leg all the time who became a dancer and one I called my frenemie and another
who I rode one afternoon under her sheets and then she rode me and we kissed
and my tongue touched her braces and shrank back. I had glasses then – I think
I was born with them – and put them on her bedside table, next to a clock that
had green florescent numbers and her gold diary with a pen that exploded into
pink feather-down at the end. I used it to tickle her and she shrieked and fell
out of bed and in revenge took my cat’s eye glasses and put them on and
stumbled around the room like she was dizzy from the magnification.
Then we would be in her
mom’s kitchen sneaking ice cream from a freezer the size of a mausoleum, only
to be caught by her grandmother who had come to check the kugel in the oven. It
was filling the air with sweet cinnamon smell and making me wish my mom was
Jewish. With a wink and a slap and a big bowl of warm sweet noodles with
vanilla ice cream melting on top I’d stuff myself and then be off to have
dinner at my house, where boys reigned supreme and I never ate fast enough to
get seconds. I’d dash home, running round the corner, past the International
House where women in jewel-colored saris were tugging dowdy brown overcoats
over their splendor as they walked or sailed or floated down the stone steps
into the chilly evening, getting darker and colder every day as we came close
to the end of the year here on the South Side of Chicago.
Home then to my brothers,
who, with their friends, were falling down in great smoldering piles of leaves,
daring each other through their coughs and teary eyes to get closer to the sad
and lonely bit of flame that remained as we tried to burn the oak and elm
leaves we’d raked into soggy mounds. The whole street was asthma inducing grey
smoke, acrid and pleasant by turns. It made our hair and clothes smell like we
were a fireman who’d rushed into a burning house and come out dripping sweat and
soot, carrying a small child who would be revived by tearful parents waiting
anxiously just beyond the police tape.
We came tumbling into the
warm kitchen. It smelled of lemon chicken – yum - or liver and onions -yuck. No
matter. We were hungry, as teenagers always are, and fought for the places
beside the mashed potatoes and not close to the bowl of green beans. Mom would
be placing glasses of milk on the table and we would spit on our hands and say
they were clean and she would give us a look and we’d dash to the sinks
upstairs and down so we could be first back to the table and claim the best seat.
The kitchen table was a piece of plywood, big enough to make a whole house,
that tipped slightly this way and that because it balanced on boxes of books
we’d brought with us when we arrived seven years ago. The bottom boxes were
smushed into pleats as they’d shrunk down, and they had many a milk/coffee/ beer/wine/hot
chocolate stain on them. Some day we would have the beautiful mahogany table my
dad was making in the basement; someday - but not really until we were months
away from selling the house and leaving. But that was the dream, like the
bathroom he was renovating, the one next to my bedroom that only had a curtain
the whole of my adolescence. They fought over the unfinished-ness of the house,
my mom and dad, but I think they were really fighting over getting it done at
all (mom) versus getting things done beautifully (dad). There were five kids,
one small paycheck, and he wanted things to be just so, perfect, the way his
dad made things – his dad the rich engineer.
So the bathroom was never
finished and the table tipped dizzily if you sat on the edge but it didn’t
deter the wild and carefree and sometimes hurtful and careless conversations
that flew around the table at dinner and beyond. There weren’t many tables in
our town, or any other in the 1960’s, where you could and did discuss death and
sex along with pass the gravy please. As the decade went on the conversations
included how to transport an exhibit to the science fair, the merits of learning
Russian as a second language, whether the Tower of Babel was real or metaphoric
- as well as the qualities of highs from peyote, psilocybin, LSD and weed. No
one was more brave and experimental than my mom when it came to psychedelics,
which was exciting until it wasn’t and made me feel like an outcast as she and
my dad and my boyfriend and the girl next door swapped recipes for their mind
altering weekends and set up scenarios for sex swaps. My rebellion was to rail
against the drugs and multiplying partners who joined “The Nest,” which met on
my parent’s bed on the weekends. They came to touch each other and imbibe and inhale
things I wasn’t supposed to see since I was babysitting my little brothers.
There were many plates to
keep afloat besides my family: high school, waitressing, getting arrested at sit-ins
with students from the University, dancing with my new boyfriend who didn’t
want to sleep with either of my parents or get loaded or debate the finer
points of brewing a heady psychedelic. I stayed away from home as much as I
could. I was always tired. I didn’t want to go to college, since I was sick of
school, but I desperately wanted to leave home. My high school was one of the
ones white flight had shifted so it was almost all black; being one of the few
white kids I got a pass on everything. My grades weren’t great but good enough
to go to college, though the first college I went to let in anyone who could
pay because it was experimental and in Denmark and only had twelve students the
day I arrived a few weeks before my seventeenth birthday.
It was a magical place,
in the farmer-tamed wilds of Jutland, overlooking fjords that led to the North
Sea and on to the east coast of Scotland. The school had moved into newly
renovated barns which overlooked rolling fields punctuated by mysterious mounds
called kæmpehøj: ancient burial mounds. The tractors that harvested the
wheat made spirals around them as they scythed the yellow stalks with their
industrial blades. The townspeople were curious about us, a bunch of
draft-dodging or otherwise outcast Americans, but in typical Danish style they
quietly and politely assessed us from the shelter of their sensible brick homes
and their sweet smelling bakeries, birthplace of clouds of airy sweetness we
know as whipped cream.
I didn’t know what I was
doing there, but everyone else was a bit lost too. One couple had come so they
could have their baby far away from disapproving parents, one guy didn’t want
to kill strangers in the war in Vietnam, one girl had eczema so bad she had
worn a mask most of her childhood. The founder, Aage Nielsen, believed in a
radical form of education where teachers paid more than students because you
always learn more by teaching. There were no classes – you had to create your
own program. Having never lived in the country I was bored, lost, confused. I
gained 20 pounds in a few months, stuffing baguettes into my mouth until I was
sure they were coming back up my throat. I watched clouds. I listened to the
guy in the room across from mine - Phil, a former steel worker from Pittsburg -
beat his wife Elaine, who always looked apologetic as she came out bruised. We
all heard it. Aage told Phil he really probably might not want to do that
maybe sometime if he chose to perhaps lighten up. When I finally emerged
enough to give a lecture at the only scheduled academic event, Saturday Morning
Lecture, I spoke about the oppression of women from the perspective of Simone
de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. That was more than anyone at this radical
school could take and they all walked out.
Then my parents showed
up, drugs and anger intact, having sold their house and begun the
disintegration of their marriage for reals this time. My father hit on a local
college student, then got in a fist-fight with my brother Davey. They brought
their psychedelics and were popular, and I faded into a shell, the self who was
emerging lost in the spectacular show of Littlewoods On Parade. Just as my former
boyfriend/mother’s lover was going to show up I escaped: my grandmother was
dying. I arrived in Maryland a few hours after her funeral and stayed to keep
my grandfather company.
We were a sad couple – me
18 and lost in every way and him 68 and lost without his lifelong companion. We
traveled that fall to friends of his, and family, and came back to his estate
on the Chesapeake as lonely as before. Grampy was broken hearted, and on
December 6th he had a massive heart attack, slipped off his lounger,
and died while I tried to hold his head up so he wouldn’t crack it on the
floor.
My parents came back from
Denmark and began tearing my grandparent’s house apart, the one I loved, the
one they found disgustingly bourgeois. They were happy for the cash thank you
very much but not the petti-point footstools, Willow-ware plates, or the grand
piano. My smarmy former boyfriend showed up and moved in, with his girlfriend,
the same dope dealing girl-next-door I despised years ago. The weed and psychedelics
and emotional dramas began again. I applied to colleges – I knew if any
accepted me I would go because my family couldn’t follow.
Bennington, in January,
is the perfect place to study poetry, ancient Greek and art history. That
winter, in 1968, I might have studied those, slept a lot, thrived as I started again
at a real college. But I don’t think I understood that life could be this
simple. Nobody having a bad trip? Dying in my lap? No dad hitting on my friends
or smashing my brother’s face? I hated the ritual line-up of pimply guys from
Dartmouth who descended each weekend and stood in sniggering elbow-stabbing
nudgenudgewinkwink groups watching us walk to the dining room. When I found I’d
been accepted at the University of Chicago for the fall I jumped at the chance
to return to where I’d grown up - someplace familiar. I had no worries my
parents might return as well: they were set on separating and making their way
to counter culture California.
__________________________________
In June I moved back to the
South Side of Chicago, got a job where I used to waitress, and started sleeping
with guys I met that day at the bar so I wouldn’t be alone. Sometimes I’d wake
up in the bed of one guy, go off with another in the lull between the lunch and
dinner crowd, and go home with a third. Anything to be touched. I also learned
you can be as lonely as a tunnel lying next to someone you don’t care about.
July 4th. I’m
staying with friends of my parents until the school year begins. On this night
I’ve been on a date after my shift. Don’t remember who. It’s about 8:00. He’s
walked me to the door and I lean in for a kiss as we stand on the porch. The
front door opens and my host, Ben, says I should come inside. “Please sit down,”
he says, walking into the living room. “I’m so sorry to tell you this but your
brother Davey is dead. Your father is on his way – he’ll be here tomorrow
sometime.”
Davey was my younger brother
by eighteen months - the one who looked up to me. The one I could boss around
until he grew taller and stronger. As my enmity for my parents had grown I’d
turned my back on everyone except him. He was my last thread of connection.
The day before Davey died,
July 3rd, my father had gotten on his BMW motorcycle, covered head-to-toe
in black leather, and roared off in a cloud of dust, leaving his family so he
could “find himself.” He now had the money to do so. He was off to lay hippie
chicks all across America, buy turquoise jewelry in Arizona and sugar cubes of
acid in San Francisco, dabble at art in Mexico. He must have been restless -
eager to end his life with my mother, his three sons living with her, and all
the people she attracted who were now burning their cigarette butts into the antique
furniture he hated. He was excited for the adventures ahead. So excited he couldn’t
stay at his parent’s estate in Maryland for family festivities planned for the
Fourth of July. It was the nation’s birthday of course, and, in addition, this
year, a special birthday celebration for the youngest in our family since
everyone still with my mom would be moving on his actual birthday, when he
turned six.
The Fourth being all
about explosions and fireworks, Davey had gone to the garage to make something
special. In this case, a smoke bomb, because young men do weird shit like this:
put gunpowder into an iron pipe and – if all goes well – ignite it so it makes
a crapload of black, smelly smoke. If all goes badly, and you’ve mistakenly
capped both ends, the powder ignites and the shrapnel pierces you. Davey
staggered the short distance from the workshop to the kitchen and died on the
floor.
My father had called home
after being on the road a day and heard of his son’s death. Knowing I was in
Chicago he drove 22 hours straight on his motorcycle and we caught the next
flight back to Maryland. He slept. I cried. And cried. And cried. I knew once I
got off the plane I could show no emotion around the people I now hated more
than ever.
And so it was. I stayed
frozen. So frozen it took me 40 years to remember crucial parts of this story. I
know people flew in from all over for Davey’s wake. I know my parents asked
people to share memories as we sat around the spacious living room, looking out
on a golf-course sized lawn that rolled to the waters of the Chesapeake Bay,
where Davey and I had watched horse-shoe crabs escape from our curious fingers
by burying themselves in sand. I know my ex-boyfriend was there and he would
write about this in his popular novel “Endless Love.” I know I didn’t speak
because I was a glacier of fury, paralyzed with pain and loss.
___________________________________________
The morning I was to
leave my brother’s wake I got up early for the cab coming to take me to the
airport. I opened the screen door and stepped into the soft, humid air of a
Maryland summer morning. As I came out I realized there was someone on the
porch: Kevin, a dwarf, my mother’s new friendloverwhatever. I’d hardly noticed
him all weekend and I didn’t want to start now. He was sitting on the built-in
bench on the porch, his short legs straight out on the old wood. I nodded and
he nodded and, as we heard the crunch of wheels on the gravel, he reached out
his hand and offered me a gold box. “You might need these someday,” he said. I
thanked him, put the box in my bag as I walked to the car.
Once the plane reached
cruising altitude on my flight back to Chicago I started to relax. Reaching
under the seat in front I pulled a sweater from my bag and with it came the
box. It had a bone closure. I pulled it up and opened the lid. Inside was a mother-of-pearl
encrusted pair of opera glasses. I was delighted at such an odd gift from such
an odd man. And then I realized where he got it. I thought about my grandmother
at the opera, feeling fancy in a hat with a hatpin and veil, bright jewelry, a sexy
dress. My next thought was about all the strange people my mother surrounded
herself with who had pawed through my grandmother’s treasures, mocking her
taste and her life as my parents did. I shut the box. I shut myself and didn’t
open again until now.
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