Chapter 2 Why?

I guess I’m headed deep into the middle of the nature-nurture controversy here. Whence arose my addiction to cigarettes? Perhaps I can trace it to the insecurities of the second child syndrome. I’ve met a number of second children in my life and all seemed to have a strong thread of inferiority, self-image problems, running through their natures. But in the 50’s we didn’t know from self-image.
Maybe sinister corporate strategies were at work, turning us into chimneys, as current information suggests. We didn’t know from additives in the 50’s either. Glamorous women in Hollywood films smoked. The post World War II spirit of liberation for women, “the Rosie the Riveter” hype I guess you could call it, had all my adult female relatives (with the exception of my mom), and half our female neighbors puffing away.
Modern science, as far as we can tell, since it changes every five minutes, suggests that addiction is in the genes. You either have the marker for a particular addiction stamped into your DNA or you don’t. As long as you never touch the object of you beastly predilection, you never push the biological button. Once you do turn the switch on though, it will be a bitch to turn it off.
You can sense that my childhood was a good one. Two responsible, upright parents; plenty to eat, drink, wear. My father, nicknamed Brain, pushed us to academic achievement and there were plenty of opportunities for childhood pursuits, role-playing, mischief, and plenty of companions. We made an ice rink in the winter, snow forts, pelted each other with snowballs, did homework, squabbled, and giggled. We dressed up every Halloween and marched around the neighborhood carrying huge sacks of candy. Our Christmases were shiny and tinselly enough for anyone. And our summers were spent outdoors with lemonade stands and baseball games and putting on plays and playing 'dolls' and 'house' and 'wedding' and 'war'. There were also endless games of “Hill Dill” and ”Red Rover” and “Hide and Seek”, tramps through meadows to catch fireflies, and being packed in the back of the station wagon in our jammies to go watch planes take off at the runway three blocks away.
It wasn’t perfect, of course, it never is. Money was always a problem and we all knew it. Privacy was nonexistent, and disorder reigned indoors. Clothing, books, dishes, shoes, and toys covered every available surface. Space had to be cleared before any meal could be eaten or any homework done. Décor had no place in our lives. Our house always looked sloppy and ragged, but not dirty.
By the time high school rolled around we were starting to crave our own little corners. I made a bedroom in the back of the attic for a while, but after several fat lips from spider bites I had to abandon that plan. Once I moved out of Felicity ‘s and my room, it became impossible to move back in. I had a rollaway bed in the front foyer for a while.
Then there was the issue of boys. They all liked Felicity; none of them liked me. She was slender and blonde and pleasant, I was chubby and shy-eyed, giggly and full of energy, and had mousy brown hair. If I even looked at a boy he ran like hell in the opposite direction. This doesn’t do a lot for your self-image. And she got all the best clothes that came into the house from the neighbors across the street who had three girls and an aunt who sewed beautifully.
I forgot to mention church. My sisters and I spent a lot of time at church when we were in high school. We were in the junior choir and Bible study and Youth Fellowship. No one smoked there. These boys also liked Felicity better.
From early on I felt that my mother had gotten the shit end of the stick in the marital partnership between my Mom and my Dad. She was always with us kids for one thing. She never got to leave like my Dad. She never even got to sit down, unless it was to feed somebody. From five in the morning until ten or eleven at night she had more jobs to do than any one person could possibly accomplish. And they were all menial, repetitive jobs like doing dishes, changing kid’s clothes about a hundred times a day and putting out the sprinkler to run through, then cleaning up the water from the floors when we all had to run to the bathroom, and pushing her hair, flying our of her pin curls, out of her hot, sticky face, and on, and on, and on. Her life was nothing like Doris Day.
I did not want to be her, although she didn’t mind being her, most of the time. There was the day she just walked out, we didn’t know where, desperate to get away. We knew she couldn’t get far, because she didn’t drive, and we no longer stood on the school bus corner believing the yellow bus would scoop us up anytime we stood there and take us to places unknown. So we just called around and tracked her down at the new K-Mart that had just opened across the highway, and we had her paged. She was not happy. I don’t know how she did it but usually she was cheerful and comforting and kind. I still did not want to be her.
I decided I would never get married or have children because it was just a trap. You didn’t get to do anything important, like go to plays, or eat out, or travel, or have a career. All you got to do was have your husband look down your blouse once in while or snap you with a dish towel and have more babies and cook more meals and have huge backyard cookouts, until your hair turned gray and eventually you died.
Now looking back, I can see that this was a rather jaundiced view of my mother’s life, and an especially narrow view of what could be accomplished by a woman with perhaps fewer offspring and a higher standard of living. But I didn’t live with those other mothers. I thought that what you see is what you get.
So I decided I wanted to go to college and be somebody, maybe an architect, or a writer, and live rich in NYC and have beautiful things around me all the time. I wanted to be Doris Day, but I wouldn’t marry Rock Hudson because eventually, sure as hell, I’d just get to be a housewife, when I really wanted to be Emily Brontë, or Jane Austen, or even Emily Dickinson.
A friendly school dental hygienist decided to take our family on as a charity project and broaden our horizons. She took us one at a time to various events. Felicity missed out on this for some reason, but I got to go to the ballet, and out to lunch, the art museum, to a play, to the zoo. She was a very tall, very slender, very rigid lady with perfectly erect posture, and a very creepy, nerdy son. I always felt a little icky going off with them, but I loved the things we did. She, of course, did not smoke.
When I got into high school the staff had decided to try something new called tracking. They looked at your elementary grades (there were no middle schools or junior highs yet) and decided if you were 'basic', 'average', or 'above average'. If you looked like you fell into the above average category, they called you in individually and gave you an exhaustive IQ test involving blocks and spatial relationships, and even fact questions, everything timed. Felicity missed this by one year, but I was tested. I testing right on the borderline between average and honors, so it was decided that I could sign up for honors classes. This was a very lucky break for me.
Honors classes were excellent, especially honors English. I struggled with math. These students did not really misbehave. Even when someone made a joke, it was witty rather than thuggish. Someone made up jokes from trig equations (I wish I had copied them down, because to this day I cannot imagine how they did this) and wrote them on the board in “Bullwinkle’s Corner”.
I read and read and read. It was my privacy and my adventure. I could disappear into the world of a book and I would not even hear when someone called my name. I was on my way. Maybe I’d become a famous New York hostess and hold fabulous soirées in my Manhattan high rise.
Or maybe I’d hone the talents my sister and I had developed for designing outfits for our paper dolls and become the new Edith Head. She wasn’t a pretty woman and look where she ended up.
I graduated from high school in 1963. Everyone I knew was still living like the 50’s would go on forever, with people just stockpiling more and more affluence, and appliances, and better cars in the garage, now that many families had two. I still wasn’t smoking, had never touched a cigarette all through high school.