I moved in with my new roommates just before school started, the only great decision I made. If I was still trying to deal with Lena’s nonsense, along with getting through that first disheartening year of teaching, I probably would have been certifiable.
Linda had the front bedroom, which was obviously built to be the master. It was the largest of the three bedrooms and she furnished it with some style from second hand furniture stores. Linda was from an eastern suburb (Smithvale was north of the city) known for its affluence and good schools. Her family, however, was not well off. They were a big Irish family with seven children and she was the oldest. She had long hair and a thin angular face and a little boy’s body, straight up and down, but she still managed to look confident, stylish, and arrogantly intelligent. She had heavy Modigliani style upper eyelids, which were her best feature. She was brisk and practical and wittily waspish, hard to warm up to. She had to wear thick-lensed glasses much of the time. She had an architect boyfriend who had the upstairs flat in the house next door. Most of these houses had been built within the same era and were almost identical except for the exterior color and landscaping.
The architect’s name was Peter. He was older than we were, in his thirties. He had long hair, which was just becoming the style at the time, and a stocky, very slightly overweight body. He was always brushing his hair off his face, but he had very kind eyes, and although he had the same dry wit as Linda he also had an air of languid ennui that seemed very mature. He was usually fatherly and friendly and stayed out of our roommate squabbles. He loved jazz, had a very expensive sound system. He used a bed for a sofa and covered it with a genuine cowhide throw and with many huge pillows. He loved to prop you comfortably among the pillows with some excellent headphones and select some John McLaughlin or Miles Davis for you to listen to. He was never called Pete. Some people are nickname people, some aren’t. Peter wasn’t.
I had the middle bedroom, which, like the first bedroom had two huge windows that started about 12” off the floor and went almost all the way to the ceiling. The windows were in the center of a wall with about 6” between them. On the opposite wall was a built-in dresser with bookcases built in on either side, all painted white. There were hardwood floors and the woodwork was stained dark. It was the most beautiful room I had ever possessed.
Annie had the third room, in the back, off the kitchen. Annie grew up in the back of beyond, way out past the northern suburbs, in farm country, although her parents were not farmers. Her grandparents were farmers, but her dad sold real estate and also bought real estate, which he subsequently sold or rented. Annie had ten kids in her family, of which she was the oldest. She was a natural beauty with high cheekbones and long, shiny, straight brown hair, and although she was short, she was perfectly proportioned. Linda liked to imply that Annie had no brains whatsoever, and since Annie had never had much opportunity to value her intelligence, she was an easy target. “ She’s inane,” Linda said. Linda sometimes referred to Annie as “Innie”, which,of course, made Annie very angry. Linda and Annie certainly needed a buffer. Although they worked for the same stockbroker, they had nothing else in common and did not get along very well. As Annie usually got the worst in any encounter, she avoided Linda’s company as much as possible, which was fairly easy given that Linda was usually with Peter.
In spite of the subtle hostility between these two I was happy with this new arrangement almost as soon as I moved in. Annie and I got along very well, and Linda, who should have gone to college, respected my degree and my job enough to prevent me from being a target for her sharp tongue.
Annie was a social girl; she still had a number of friends from high school who occasionally came into the city to go out to the bars with her. Annie wanted a husband, and not one from the sticks. She wanted a handsome husband from a good family. She combed the bars every weekend, especially the college bars hoping to meet one.
I was so busy with my first year of school, that at first, I was content to stay at home in the quiet flat to work on lesson plans and mark papers. Luke came to see me a few times, when he could catch a ride, but I was distracted, considering all the problems I was having in the classroom.
Eventually Annie lured me out of the house with her a few Friday and Saturday evenings. She was a 'hit and run' partier. We would go to a bar, park, walk in, get a drink, and walk around, scoping the place out. We would always walk through and around the whole bar. If no one looked interesting by the time our drink was gone we would immediately leave and go to the next bar on the list. If a bar looked promising to Annie, for some unfathomable reason, which I never did decipher, we would settle in. My favorite way to go to a bar is to go with friends, get a table, so I can chat to, and dance with, the friends I came with. Annie never sat down at a table in a bar, although once in a while she perched on a high barstool with her back to the bar. She liked to stand around and wait for a handsome stranger to ask her to dance. Sometimes we met two guy friends who would ask both of us to dance, but often I was left standing by myself. If I didn’t want to go, Annie shamed me into it by making me feel like a bad friend, and a social dud. We played out this whole scene weekend after weekend, except when someone had a house party we were invited to. Annie waited all week for the weekends. I tagged along because it was better than staying alone in an empty flat.
Annie met a handsome Southern boy once at a bar. After Annie had been seeing Tad for a while, Tad set up a double date for Annie and him, his college roommate and me. We all met for a few drinks at a bar and ended up at the pool in the park near our apartment, after hours, playing chicken in the dark water with all our clothes on. We were having a very illegal good time until the police kicked us out. They did not give us tickets, just a warning. After changing clothes we went back to their apartment, supposedly to eat. They each went into their bedroom and turned off all the lights, leaving us in the living room with a bowl of popcorn. I guess we were supposed to follow them into their bedrooms and screw them silly, I was still a virgin, and I was with a guy I didn’t even know. I stole an umbrella, since it was raining by then, and Annie and I walked home. They did call to apologize the next day, but I never trusted that Southern boy. Annie thought he was great, and he was charming, but I felt he had a dark side. Even after he stole some jewelry from Linda and a book from me she defended him to the skies. He disappeared and we never saw him again, but Annie brought him up from time to time as her ideal and could never be dissuaded. She insisted that Linda chased him away.
Whenever Annie got a fairly serious boyfriend, Linda would flirt with him and exchange witty, sparkling repartee, until Annie would lose her happy nature and confront Linda. Sometimes Linda slept with the men that Annie liked and ruined the whole relationship. Linda and Peter had an “open” relationship, so she was free to do as she liked. She never met her own men though,, she had too much fun stealing Annie’s. It was amazing and disturbing to watch someone steal from a beauty by using her wits. And the men seemed quite surprised that in the end they lost both the beauty and the wit.
Of course, my unhappiness and frustration at school spilled over somewhat into my private life, but not as much as you would think. When I got home, I was in my haven and the cares of the day gradually fell away. I would think back over the day and try to analyze what I had done wrong and what I had done right and then I would square my shoulders, vow to do better the next day, and let it all go for a while. A kind of hope would bubble up as I planned lessons or graded papers that the next day would be better and sometimes it was. It took too much energy for my students to be terrible every day.
Then it would be the weekend and Annie would be ready to roll and that would take my mind off the classroom for a while. She was trying to turn me into a social animal. I was her project, along with the soul mate hunting thing. We also went to the park sometimes for a swim or a walk, or went shopping, something we both enjoyed. My first year of teaching I made $6,200 so I wasn’t exactly rich, but our whole flat only cost $120, ($40) plus utilities. I actually felt quite affluent.
Luke turned eighteen and I guess he decided that it was time to do the deed. It was winter and the flat was cozy and somehow we had it to ourselves. It was probably one of those days in winter break when teachers have a day off, but stockbrokers don’t. Of course, I could see the irony of losing my virginity to someone who was only one or two years older than some of my students, but we had been pussyfooting around this huge hunger for a long time. Luke decided that before we “did it”, we should get high. Marijuana had appeared in the flat from time to time, it was still somewhat unusual, but was getting to be more and more common everywhere around the university area. Students smoked joints right outside in the open at concerts.
Luke sat me down in the living room. I remember we had an old green leather couch, large and very comfortable. He set the joints on the coffee table and we lit one up. He took a hit and passed it to me. I shut one eye and took a puff and blew out the smoke.
“You have to inhale,” Luke said, my Marlboro man.
So in 1967, the same year the Surgeon General put the first warning on cigarette packs, Luke set out to teach me to inhale. He decided not to waste the marijuana until I got the hang of it.
“Go get your cigarettes,” he said. “I’ll show you how to inhale a cigarette first.”
Now I wanted Luke bad. We had been anticipating the deed since last June. We had the music. We had the incense, we had very little light on that snowy winter day. It looked pretty romantic with the soft brown light filtering through the curtains and the fireplace going. It was now or never.
“OK, here’s the cigarettes,” I said as I arrived back at the couch from the bedroom. “Now what?”
Luke took out a cigarette for me, lit it, took a drag, and handed it over. I puffed.
“No, you’re not inhaling,” he said. “There’s a little catch in the back of your throat. You have to relax your throat muscles and just let the smoke go down.”
I tried that a few times. Nothing.
“Turn around,” said Luke. He started to massage my shoulders. As he continues the massage he said, “Now try it.”
I tried again and the catch dissolved. The smoke went through and I started to cough. I tried again, no cough. I sat back on the couch and inhaled pensively until I felt a little light-headed.
“Now you’re ready,” he said.
He lit up the joint once again and sucked the marijuana far down into his lungs and held his breath, his lips in a straight line. After a few minutes he exhaled.
I copied him exactly and after several more coughing fits started to feel what I knew must be a buzz. I felt sort of floaty and light and silly. My brain cells were firing ideas, which spun out and then just disappeared. We started kissing, each kiss deep, seeming to last a long, long time.
“Give me your hand,” Luke said, and he pulled me after him into my dark bedroom. He took his time, he undressed me slowly, kissing my neck and mouth. I was opening the snap on his jeans, touching softly whatever was available. After a while there were no more clothes to take off and we moved to the bed. We lay down on tops of the cover.
Luke said with some urgency, “get a towel.”
I went naked through the empty apartment and got one of my old towels from the linen closed. It sort of broke the mood though. I spread the towel and dutifully laid myself upon it. We kissed some more. I was warming back up quickly. I was enjoying the wonderful silkiness and completeness of bare skin on bare skin for the first time, something I would never lose a taste for.
Luke moved my hand downwards and gave me his penis. It massaged it and it grew bigger and harder and our breathing grew faster and louder. Then he was on top of me. I liked his weight. He was pausing at the door of me. My body did not seem to want him to gain entrance, but my chemicals did. I pushed towards him and felt the pain and, vaguely, underneath it, the pleasure. I did not experience any heights of ecstasy, but when Luke was finished, he held me close for a while and we slept a bit. Then it was time for him to leave, he had to return the car he borrowed. My roommates would be home soon. He didn’t want to see them.
“It’ll be better next time,” he promised.
I put on a robe and walked him to the door, gave him a kiss and he was gone.
I was finished cleaning my mess and myself before anyone came home. When Linda came in, I was sitting in the corner of the green leather couch with my feet underneath me, tight against my tender privates, inhaling a cigarette and crying. I couldn’t stop. The tears just kept coming. Linda came in and sat in the easy chair across from me and asked me if I wanted to talk. I spilled my guts, of course, and she was actually very sympathetic and understanding. She said it was like that for her the first time.
“He didn’t hurt you did he?, she asked.
“No more than he had to,” I said, “I don’t know why I’m crying,” I said.
“It’s just that after he left I felt so sad.”
“Let me change my clothes,” Linda said, “You go wash your face and put on some makeup. We’ll go out and celebrate your first time.”
“Where’s Annie,” I asked.
“She had to work overtime,” Linda answered.
We went to the best Chinese restaurant and soon the table was covered with footed stainless steel dishes with silvery covers. Linda told me all about her first sexual encounter, which happened to her at a much younger age than mine had. She had fallen for a painter, much older than her, who lived an unconventional life in an old church in her hometown. After that first experience they had quite a long affair, which ended badly. She was so nice to me that my heart started to warm to her a bit, without forgetting some of her transgressions against Annie. By the time we left (we also had a couple of drinks) I felt much more festive and ready to get back to planning for Christmas with my family and at the apartment, and to planning lessons for the new semester. I decided I would not think about the reality of school, just the logistics. I didn’t want to begin to dread going back until I absolutely had to.
So I lost two maidenheads in one day, one in my throat, and one, you know where. From that day on I have never stopped inhaling tobacco smoke. It became a terrible addiction for me. I lost my psychological equanimity without my nicotine. And some of you will think I became a sex addict too, although I don’t really know about that. Fortunately, although marijuana became a fixture in my life for a while, I was never addicted to it. This combination of sex and cigarettes was enough to bring about my ultimate downfall though., and addicted or not the drugs played a part too.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Friday, August 6, 2010
Chapter 12 - Augusta
Now I know that so far my portrait of my mother has been less than flattering, but that’s just because I have different goals from my mom. Her goal in life was to marry and have a family. She accomplished exactly what she wanted to accomplish. I can’t help it if it looked to me like the third ring of Dante’s Inferno,
She met my dad when she was nineteen through a group of mutual friends. From the beginning he was the only one for her. It was the middle of the Depression. Neither of Dad’s parents had jobs, Dad supported them. He didn’t know how to stop. My mother waited six years to marry my dad. As soon as they married, Dad’s parents got divorced and went to work. He probably should have cut them loose sooner.
Augusta was working in an office as a secretary. When Hobart married her she was twenty-five years old. Hobart was thirty. She worked days; he worked nights. For the first two years of marriage Augusta, on her way to work, waved from the bus window to Hobart as he drove home from work in the early morning. After two years of hardly seeing each other, as soon as they were in the same place at the same time, they started their family. They had one, two, three, four babies right in a row, two not even a whole year apart. Two years later the fifth baby appeared and they made the move to Smithvale.
Our city apartment seemed to be always neat and well organized. In our pictures we wore starched and ironed dresses and hair dos with ribbons. Mom told us that she did not know how to cook at all when she married, that she burned the pan the first time she tried to boil water. I remember when the pressure cooker blew up and spat potatoes all over the ceiling. I don’t know how cooking could have eluded her because she came from a very poor family, but apparently her mom did all the cooking. Although she lost track of what was cooking on the stove and burned things, by the time the oldest of us were in our teens, when she could pay attention, she was a pretty good cook.
In Smithvale, for some reason, Augusta’s housework often got the better of her. Having three more babies certainly could have done it. She just could not keep up with it all. Her floors were mopped or swept, her sinks, toilets, etc. were clean, but she just did not seem able to throw anything away. Things piled up.
Having a spotless house, however, is not necessarily a hallmark of great mothering. Augusta was a great mother.
When they tarred our road one hot summer day, after we all walked in the tar with our bare feet, Mom lined us all up on the back stairs and patiently cleaned our feet with Lestoil and then filled a tub with water for us to rinse our feet in. She didn’t rant and rave about her floors, none of us even made it inside. She didn’t spoil our fun. Our moods were just as good with clean feet as they had been when we were glorying in hot tar. We liked our clean feet and didn’t go back out to the tar either.
When anyone was sick, they got to lie in state on the living room couch all day and Mom made sure there was ice cream and/or ginger ale if they were up to it. If everyone was sick she was a tireless nurse. Her hand on your forehead felt like healing. We had measles, chicken pox, whooping cough, and some of us had mumps. It would take a long time from the time the first child got sick until the last child got well. In those days they felt it was good to expose everyone while they were young and let them get over it, not they we had any space to isolate someone anyway. We all made it through all of those childhood diseases.
Sometimes all the other neighborhood mothers came over and sat around in the back yard or the dining room. We couldn’t help hanging around to listen to them. The discussion always got around to childbirth, each mom trying to outdo the other with length of time in labor and other grueling details of blessed nativity. Augusta had a hard time competing. Once she was in labor for twenty minutes. She tended to have very small babies, 3 lbs 10 oz, 4 lbs 3 oz. When she had a six pounder it was considered huge. Even the small babies were completely formed and healthy although two of her babies had to stay in the hospital for at least a month after they were born. She wasn’t just a great mother; she was a lucky mother.
Hobart was a practical man. He handled all the money. If we needed something and he knew we didn’t have enough money, he believed we would just have to do without. Augusta, who had gone without more often than not, didn’t agree. Shoes were always a big issue and Augusta saw to it that we always got them. Hobart was forced to perform lots of budgetary magic over the years but he generally came through, or Gustie would nag him to death.
Augusta found time to join the PTA, to make cookies and cupcakes and cakes to send to school, to assist in a Brownie troop, and to take in extra kids to baby-sit for when money was tight, which was always. Even when we were grown we called Mom several times a week and everyone came back home every Sunday with husbands, kids, dogs, and relatives.
The girl across the street, Carrie, who was Robert’s age and had only one older brother, hated to go home. She had a spotless, beautifully decorated house to go home to. She also had a mom who never stopped yelling. And her mom and dad never stopped fighting. They drank and, of course, they smoked and screamed, a lot. We had to practically throw her out of our house. And Augusta hated to do that, but was more afraid of a tongue-lashing from Carrie’s “straight-talking” (“b” word) mom.
I guess I would have to say that Gustie had a gift. It was a gift for making a family and for making anyone who visited us feel like a temporary member of the family. When we went on a picnic, we always made a huge group with softball games and lots of food and laughter. Even when we went somewhere as simple as the Little League baseball field (which took the place of the old barracks the fire fighters used to burn) everyone we knew came along, like a long neighborhood parade, the biggest “family” at the ballpark.
They say about daughters that we all become our mothers. Even though I swore that what Augusta wanted was not what I wanted, even though I still did not want to be a housewife and a mother, I spent the next twenty years of my life trying to mold all the disparate groups of people who populated my life into one family after another. And because of Augusta’s excellent example, I was often able to succeed in creating or joining close nurturing groups of strangers, in spite of the fact that I had no idea that this was my goal.
She met my dad when she was nineteen through a group of mutual friends. From the beginning he was the only one for her. It was the middle of the Depression. Neither of Dad’s parents had jobs, Dad supported them. He didn’t know how to stop. My mother waited six years to marry my dad. As soon as they married, Dad’s parents got divorced and went to work. He probably should have cut them loose sooner.
Augusta was working in an office as a secretary. When Hobart married her she was twenty-five years old. Hobart was thirty. She worked days; he worked nights. For the first two years of marriage Augusta, on her way to work, waved from the bus window to Hobart as he drove home from work in the early morning. After two years of hardly seeing each other, as soon as they were in the same place at the same time, they started their family. They had one, two, three, four babies right in a row, two not even a whole year apart. Two years later the fifth baby appeared and they made the move to Smithvale.
Our city apartment seemed to be always neat and well organized. In our pictures we wore starched and ironed dresses and hair dos with ribbons. Mom told us that she did not know how to cook at all when she married, that she burned the pan the first time she tried to boil water. I remember when the pressure cooker blew up and spat potatoes all over the ceiling. I don’t know how cooking could have eluded her because she came from a very poor family, but apparently her mom did all the cooking. Although she lost track of what was cooking on the stove and burned things, by the time the oldest of us were in our teens, when she could pay attention, she was a pretty good cook.
In Smithvale, for some reason, Augusta’s housework often got the better of her. Having three more babies certainly could have done it. She just could not keep up with it all. Her floors were mopped or swept, her sinks, toilets, etc. were clean, but she just did not seem able to throw anything away. Things piled up.
Having a spotless house, however, is not necessarily a hallmark of great mothering. Augusta was a great mother.
When they tarred our road one hot summer day, after we all walked in the tar with our bare feet, Mom lined us all up on the back stairs and patiently cleaned our feet with Lestoil and then filled a tub with water for us to rinse our feet in. She didn’t rant and rave about her floors, none of us even made it inside. She didn’t spoil our fun. Our moods were just as good with clean feet as they had been when we were glorying in hot tar. We liked our clean feet and didn’t go back out to the tar either.
When anyone was sick, they got to lie in state on the living room couch all day and Mom made sure there was ice cream and/or ginger ale if they were up to it. If everyone was sick she was a tireless nurse. Her hand on your forehead felt like healing. We had measles, chicken pox, whooping cough, and some of us had mumps. It would take a long time from the time the first child got sick until the last child got well. In those days they felt it was good to expose everyone while they were young and let them get over it, not they we had any space to isolate someone anyway. We all made it through all of those childhood diseases.
Sometimes all the other neighborhood mothers came over and sat around in the back yard or the dining room. We couldn’t help hanging around to listen to them. The discussion always got around to childbirth, each mom trying to outdo the other with length of time in labor and other grueling details of blessed nativity. Augusta had a hard time competing. Once she was in labor for twenty minutes. She tended to have very small babies, 3 lbs 10 oz, 4 lbs 3 oz. When she had a six pounder it was considered huge. Even the small babies were completely formed and healthy although two of her babies had to stay in the hospital for at least a month after they were born. She wasn’t just a great mother; she was a lucky mother.
Hobart was a practical man. He handled all the money. If we needed something and he knew we didn’t have enough money, he believed we would just have to do without. Augusta, who had gone without more often than not, didn’t agree. Shoes were always a big issue and Augusta saw to it that we always got them. Hobart was forced to perform lots of budgetary magic over the years but he generally came through, or Gustie would nag him to death.
Augusta found time to join the PTA, to make cookies and cupcakes and cakes to send to school, to assist in a Brownie troop, and to take in extra kids to baby-sit for when money was tight, which was always. Even when we were grown we called Mom several times a week and everyone came back home every Sunday with husbands, kids, dogs, and relatives.
The girl across the street, Carrie, who was Robert’s age and had only one older brother, hated to go home. She had a spotless, beautifully decorated house to go home to. She also had a mom who never stopped yelling. And her mom and dad never stopped fighting. They drank and, of course, they smoked and screamed, a lot. We had to practically throw her out of our house. And Augusta hated to do that, but was more afraid of a tongue-lashing from Carrie’s “straight-talking” (“b” word) mom.
I guess I would have to say that Gustie had a gift. It was a gift for making a family and for making anyone who visited us feel like a temporary member of the family. When we went on a picnic, we always made a huge group with softball games and lots of food and laughter. Even when we went somewhere as simple as the Little League baseball field (which took the place of the old barracks the fire fighters used to burn) everyone we knew came along, like a long neighborhood parade, the biggest “family” at the ballpark.
They say about daughters that we all become our mothers. Even though I swore that what Augusta wanted was not what I wanted, even though I still did not want to be a housewife and a mother, I spent the next twenty years of my life trying to mold all the disparate groups of people who populated my life into one family after another. And because of Augusta’s excellent example, I was often able to succeed in creating or joining close nurturing groups of strangers, in spite of the fact that I had no idea that this was my goal.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Chapter 11 - Teaching
America was going wild. Everywhere was protest and upheaval, boundaries being pushed past their limits in heady growth spurts of positive energy and negative energy, a tug of war for the future of the American culture. It was a rush, and many of us seemed swept along with a current of change that was exhilarating or crushing, depending on the issue and your previously held beliefs.
Guilt was bubbling over the fire of America. End the war, end American “apartheid”, end the raping of the earth, and stop pigging out on the earth’s finite resources.
No more women as “second class citizens”, we were freed by the birth control pill to take charge of our destiny. Once our bodies were free we could free our minds and our spirits. We could become cultural warriors, along with our men, like our Amazonian forbears. We could go out and conquer the canyons of our great cities.
But danger was also afoot. While heroes were being made, our greatest leaders were being assassinated, right here in America. When Kennedy was shot, I was downtown in our little northern college town shopping with my roommates. We were just about to enter the jewelry store, which was broadcasting a radio station in the entryway near the display windows. When we heard the so shocking news we left downtown immediately, in tears, and arrived back at the dorm to sit with all our friends in the lounge and see the fifties end in 1963 on national television. The pink and navy suit that Jacqueline wore – the funeral cortege – John Jr., manly little toddler, holding his mother’s hand and saluting his dad. Our president murdered.
Yin and yang – who knew that we Westerners would suddenly need the comfort of Eastern religion to understand events in the “land of the free”, the “home of the brave”. Black panthers, right fists knuckled and raised proudly, “Black Power”, sent shivers down the spine of white America, both of fear and of pride.
Buses were loaded to go to Washington to protest the war, more buses to protest segregated schools or school bussing, more buses to fight for the rights of women, and even more buses to protest the protesters. The buses rolled out with the brave radical or reactionary souls to fight the good fight or protect the status quo. There was fear in this. Something could go wrong, you could end up in jail or dead. There was camaraderie in this, solidarity with a community of like-minded contemporaries. Usually Martin Luther King’s example of peaceful civil disobedience held sway, perhaps diverting serious bloody rage-outs. We owe him.
The SDS, college campus heroes staged sit-in, be-ins. Our fathers and mothers who were in charge of our institutions were stunned, uncomprehending, angry. They fought back, and when slammed by massive outrage, reluctantly agreed to change.
Music was also gone mad, Bob Dylan, who could have said it better? It was all happening to a beat,: from Motown, “Baby Love, Oh Baby Love’, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”, from space, “Light My Fire”, from Liverpool, “Eleanor Rigby”, “Norwegian Wood”, from the west coast, “I Get Around”, and from another planet, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The beat was the bass that underlined each day and pounded the whole glorious adventure into our “collective unconscious.”
In the midst of this I had to move into my new apartment and start my first year of teaching. But I had smelled marijuana, I had seen our president shot, I had seen Tyler off to war in Vietnam, and all my 50’s security was toppling.
Two weeks into my first semester of teaching I knew I was in deep shit. It wasn’t going well. I had two classes of ninth grade English and two of tenth. These were not the goal-oriented, studious young people I had invented. They drew the battle lines. Last year they got rid of two teacher, they said, this year they were shooting for four. I planted my high heels. I wasn’t going anywhere. It was war. But I didn’t have a discipline gene.
We did study English, but I took such an academic approach that I lost them, or maybe they were just too intent on sabotage. We did some good stuff, we did anti-utopias, Animal Farm and an offshoot writing assignment. We did “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “The Sniper” by Liam O’Flaherty. We did poetry, haiku, Shakespeare and grammar. We did a unit on Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau and Gandhi, but my classroom was unusually chaotic. We had a whirl-I-gigs siege which involved the construction of dozens of notebook paper whirl-i-gigs which somehow appeared mysteriously on the ground under my windows in the courtyard.
I often had to shut my classroom door because other people complained about the noise. Once my tenth graders planned a B-B attack. Ten minutes into the class I was bombarded with copper B-B’s. I was rolling around on them. They were pinging against the blackboard. I did, at least, stand in front of the classroom door just before the bell rang and tell my darlings they couldn’t leave until the B-B’s were all picked up. I had to write a lot of passes, which I refused to do. I eventually had to relent because students without late passes had nothing to do but roam the halls. I should have reported them all, called their parents. No one had given us an arsenal of techniques for dealing with classroom war. I was embarrassed. If I gave detention, then I had to manage the perpetrators in the after school detention room. There was obviously more to this teaching stuff than knowing your subject matter.
My department chair, Mitchell Gerard, was a distinguished gentleman and a beloved teacher. He called me into his office several times. He summarized for me what was going on in my classroom , which I already knew quite enough about, but he gave me no ideas about where to go from there. Teacher’s classrooms are their domains. Perhaps he didn’t want to interfere. There was also a social studies teacher, Mr. Boyd. He tried to convince me to relax and not take it all so seriously. He spirited me away to a local cider mill during my first period each day, which was a planning period, for coffee and donuts. We weren’t supposed to leave the building, but no one really cared. He sort of bucked me up to face each new day. My mom sometimes shared her Librium with me, when I totally lost courage. I had never failed before at academics.
Part of the problem, I reasoned, was that my students were way ahead of me emotionally. Their parents were young and had way too much money. They worked a lot and they went out a lot. The kids would meet at a home where parents were absent and they were free to drink, smoke, party, and experiment with sex every night.
The girl’s classroom attire was outrageous. They wore short, short skirts with garters which showed below their hemlines and which were fastened to their stocking. I had never encountered this style of dress before, and have not since. The school did not disallow it. They were not at all ladylike about the way they sat. I tried to talk to them about the pitfall of living their lives to please men, but they weren’t buying it.
The boys were flirtatious and pretended to be in love with me. I finally did several lessons on courtly and unrequited love. I received several illuminated medieval love scrolls. I complimented the artists and this trend died out.
I had one young student who, although bright, would not hand in any assignments. He would only hand me, each time, a sheet of paper that read “I’m Jimmy Carl Black, I’m the Indian of the group.” This, I eventually learned could be credited to the Mothers of Invention of “Boobs-a-lot” fame. He said he did this to get his father’s attention. It wasn’t working with his father. He certainly had my attention though. Although we talked to his parents, threatened to drop him from the football team and eventually did drop him from the football team, he stubbornly remained “Jimmie Carl Black” for the entire school year. Except for his refusal to complete a single school assignment he had a delightful personality and was very popular.
I made it through the year and then resigned. I though that perhaps my lack of “life experience” made it difficult to manage a classroom with the perfect blend of compassion and sternness. I was relieved, but also deflated. Perhaps if I wasn’t still a virgin when the year began, perhaps if I had learned to inhale sooner?
Guilt was bubbling over the fire of America. End the war, end American “apartheid”, end the raping of the earth, and stop pigging out on the earth’s finite resources.
No more women as “second class citizens”, we were freed by the birth control pill to take charge of our destiny. Once our bodies were free we could free our minds and our spirits. We could become cultural warriors, along with our men, like our Amazonian forbears. We could go out and conquer the canyons of our great cities.
But danger was also afoot. While heroes were being made, our greatest leaders were being assassinated, right here in America. When Kennedy was shot, I was downtown in our little northern college town shopping with my roommates. We were just about to enter the jewelry store, which was broadcasting a radio station in the entryway near the display windows. When we heard the so shocking news we left downtown immediately, in tears, and arrived back at the dorm to sit with all our friends in the lounge and see the fifties end in 1963 on national television. The pink and navy suit that Jacqueline wore – the funeral cortege – John Jr., manly little toddler, holding his mother’s hand and saluting his dad. Our president murdered.
Yin and yang – who knew that we Westerners would suddenly need the comfort of Eastern religion to understand events in the “land of the free”, the “home of the brave”. Black panthers, right fists knuckled and raised proudly, “Black Power”, sent shivers down the spine of white America, both of fear and of pride.
Buses were loaded to go to Washington to protest the war, more buses to protest segregated schools or school bussing, more buses to fight for the rights of women, and even more buses to protest the protesters. The buses rolled out with the brave radical or reactionary souls to fight the good fight or protect the status quo. There was fear in this. Something could go wrong, you could end up in jail or dead. There was camaraderie in this, solidarity with a community of like-minded contemporaries. Usually Martin Luther King’s example of peaceful civil disobedience held sway, perhaps diverting serious bloody rage-outs. We owe him.
The SDS, college campus heroes staged sit-in, be-ins. Our fathers and mothers who were in charge of our institutions were stunned, uncomprehending, angry. They fought back, and when slammed by massive outrage, reluctantly agreed to change.
Music was also gone mad, Bob Dylan, who could have said it better? It was all happening to a beat,: from Motown, “Baby Love, Oh Baby Love’, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”, from space, “Light My Fire”, from Liverpool, “Eleanor Rigby”, “Norwegian Wood”, from the west coast, “I Get Around”, and from another planet, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The beat was the bass that underlined each day and pounded the whole glorious adventure into our “collective unconscious.”
In the midst of this I had to move into my new apartment and start my first year of teaching. But I had smelled marijuana, I had seen our president shot, I had seen Tyler off to war in Vietnam, and all my 50’s security was toppling.
Two weeks into my first semester of teaching I knew I was in deep shit. It wasn’t going well. I had two classes of ninth grade English and two of tenth. These were not the goal-oriented, studious young people I had invented. They drew the battle lines. Last year they got rid of two teacher, they said, this year they were shooting for four. I planted my high heels. I wasn’t going anywhere. It was war. But I didn’t have a discipline gene.
We did study English, but I took such an academic approach that I lost them, or maybe they were just too intent on sabotage. We did some good stuff, we did anti-utopias, Animal Farm and an offshoot writing assignment. We did “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “The Sniper” by Liam O’Flaherty. We did poetry, haiku, Shakespeare and grammar. We did a unit on Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau and Gandhi, but my classroom was unusually chaotic. We had a whirl-I-gigs siege which involved the construction of dozens of notebook paper whirl-i-gigs which somehow appeared mysteriously on the ground under my windows in the courtyard.
I often had to shut my classroom door because other people complained about the noise. Once my tenth graders planned a B-B attack. Ten minutes into the class I was bombarded with copper B-B’s. I was rolling around on them. They were pinging against the blackboard. I did, at least, stand in front of the classroom door just before the bell rang and tell my darlings they couldn’t leave until the B-B’s were all picked up. I had to write a lot of passes, which I refused to do. I eventually had to relent because students without late passes had nothing to do but roam the halls. I should have reported them all, called their parents. No one had given us an arsenal of techniques for dealing with classroom war. I was embarrassed. If I gave detention, then I had to manage the perpetrators in the after school detention room. There was obviously more to this teaching stuff than knowing your subject matter.
My department chair, Mitchell Gerard, was a distinguished gentleman and a beloved teacher. He called me into his office several times. He summarized for me what was going on in my classroom , which I already knew quite enough about, but he gave me no ideas about where to go from there. Teacher’s classrooms are their domains. Perhaps he didn’t want to interfere. There was also a social studies teacher, Mr. Boyd. He tried to convince me to relax and not take it all so seriously. He spirited me away to a local cider mill during my first period each day, which was a planning period, for coffee and donuts. We weren’t supposed to leave the building, but no one really cared. He sort of bucked me up to face each new day. My mom sometimes shared her Librium with me, when I totally lost courage. I had never failed before at academics.
Part of the problem, I reasoned, was that my students were way ahead of me emotionally. Their parents were young and had way too much money. They worked a lot and they went out a lot. The kids would meet at a home where parents were absent and they were free to drink, smoke, party, and experiment with sex every night.
The girl’s classroom attire was outrageous. They wore short, short skirts with garters which showed below their hemlines and which were fastened to their stocking. I had never encountered this style of dress before, and have not since. The school did not disallow it. They were not at all ladylike about the way they sat. I tried to talk to them about the pitfall of living their lives to please men, but they weren’t buying it.
The boys were flirtatious and pretended to be in love with me. I finally did several lessons on courtly and unrequited love. I received several illuminated medieval love scrolls. I complimented the artists and this trend died out.
I had one young student who, although bright, would not hand in any assignments. He would only hand me, each time, a sheet of paper that read “I’m Jimmy Carl Black, I’m the Indian of the group.” This, I eventually learned could be credited to the Mothers of Invention of “Boobs-a-lot” fame. He said he did this to get his father’s attention. It wasn’t working with his father. He certainly had my attention though. Although we talked to his parents, threatened to drop him from the football team and eventually did drop him from the football team, he stubbornly remained “Jimmie Carl Black” for the entire school year. Except for his refusal to complete a single school assignment he had a delightful personality and was very popular.
I made it through the year and then resigned. I though that perhaps my lack of “life experience” made it difficult to manage a classroom with the perfect blend of compassion and sternness. I was relieved, but also deflated. Perhaps if I wasn’t still a virgin when the year began, perhaps if I had learned to inhale sooner?
Friday, July 23, 2010
Chapter 10 - Falling in Love Inappropriately
You would think that graduating from college with high honors, as I did that summer of 1967, would mean that I was mature and smart. I did have a head full of knowledge and a heart full of the desire to be an excellent high school teacher. I also had a job in September at a high school in a well-to-do neighborhood where I expected to find ambitious dedicated students.
Okay, we’ve already established that books aren’t everything, but I was so inspired, so bursting with the beauty of language and literature and the cosmic connections between human history, art, music, and language, that I felt as if I had swallowed the Milky Way. My excitement beamed from me. I was incandescent. We didn’t know “Emotional IQ.” Mine was probably about equal to that of a sixteen year old.
And that’s who I hung out with that summer after college ended and before I started teaching, sixteen year olds. My brother Robert had a new friend, Luke, who was attracted by the drums that Bobby banged away on in the basement next to the washing machine and dryer. Luke looked like a Liverpool, England boy with dark blond hair fringing his handsome face. He was a naturally smart kid, but destined for blue-collar physical labor. Many a woman’s life has probably been derailed by an inappropriate love interest. Not a new story, but for someone who was supposedly headed out into the wide adult world, it can bring progress to a screeching halt, make you want to stay in the moment. That June I spent many hours talking to Luke while we sat in my turquoise Chevy Impala convertible at the end of my parent’s street, watching the planes take off and land. We talked about what we wanted and what we believed, but it was really all about attraction, hormones, pheromones; chemistry. I don’t know what Luke felt, I never asked. I assumed the pleasure he took in my company was not purely intellectual, was visceral and chemical, like mine. I think the attraction must be mutual for it to generate this much energy. I waited all day for the evenings in the car watching the smoky blue lights that lined the runways and feeling pretty smoky blue myself.
That June I was only alive when we were together and I was oblivious to social embarrassment, parental disapproval, all of it. It was all pretty innocent after all. In spite of my obsession I was passive, waiting for the first move to come from Luke. All we did was talk.
In July Luke suggested that I could get an apartment with his sister Lena, who was ready to move away from her parents and needed a roommate. I liked her, she was alive, somewhat witty, and so full of self-confident energy that she was positively loaded with an earthy charisma. She had not gone to college and she had already been married and divorced. Even so she was younger than me. She also had blonde hair, and a full, sensual face and figure. There were whispers that she was a “homosexual”. I was incredulous, never having given a thought to such a predilection. (I didn’t even know about Rock Hudson.) I decided it was just small town gossip. I hated gossip. It was like those tacky “True Confessions” magazines we all passed around in our teens that recounted the tales of the million ways an unsuspecting girl could lose her reputation. “My Baby’s Father Beats Me”, My Baby’s Father is My Father” and other horrific permutations of the victimization of women by men. It never dawned on me that a woman could be victimized by another woman. That’s how sheltered my beginnings were.
So the adventure began. We moved into the “city,” the same city my family had left thirteen years earlier. The city had a university, so it had a university neighborhood. How hip. The apartment was at the top of an older apartment building that had five other apartments. It was a gray clapboard structure and the apartment was not awful, a one bedroom with a nice porch off the living. The rooms were good sized, there were lots of windows. I felt good about it. Then Lena introduced me to her girlfriend, Ivy, and I understood that the rumors were true. I would be tolerant, I decided. I wanted to experience everything life had to offer and I wanted a place to visit with Luke away from prying eyes. It would be good to learn about lesbians. It shouldn’t make any difference who we love. I didn’t want to have a “lesbian experience” of my own, but this should not be a problem. Lena was obviously in love with Ivy, who was a thin, shy likeable young black woman. Luke would be around a lot too after all, and school would keep me very busy.
It was a disaster. Lesbianism was the tip of Lena’s unconventionality iceberg. She did not have any serious career plans. She did sort of want to play house with Ivy, but that did not mean she wanted to make curtains, or buy knickknacks. They were always in the car off to somewhere, usually Lena’s mom’s house. I wasn’t really clear about why she left her mother’s house to begin with. I guess it was because sleepovers weren’t allowed. Lena was also into drugs. She smoked cigarettes, of course, but she also smoked marijuana. She had some kind of menial job, at a potato chip factory or something. When she got home, she got high while she waited for Ivy and then took off. Sometimes Luke would come over with his boys and they would also get high. I puffed my cigarettes, but I would not smoke marijuana.
Lena, it turned out, was an expert at abuse and manipulation. She knew how to take a weakness and tweak it. If you had an insecurity, she knew how to use it to her advantage. God help you if she wanted something from you and you were unwilling to give it. She was ruthless in her pursuit of absolute personal satisfaction.
Fortunately for me, she didn’t concentrate on me. She had Ivy. Ivy was not “out”. Her family had no idea of her inclinations. She had some big bruiser brothers who would not be happy. They even daunted Lena. This did not keep her, however, from exploiting Ivy’s fears of discovery in order to keep Ivy at heel. Ivy was very unhappy. Lena was way more than she bargained for, noisy, aggressive, not at all into nesting. I think Ivy wanted to settle down, come home from a day of nursing, put up her feet, and bask in the glow of someone who loved her. Lena loved her possessively and assertively, but had no immediate interest in settling down.
They fought constantly, Ivy quietly and stubbornly, Lena raging off into the night. Before the summer was even over I had had it. I told Lena I was moving out. I found an ad in the paper. Some girls in a flat needed a roommate. I went for an interview. Beautiful old flat on a tree-lined street right outside of a green city park with a big pool and a rose garden. The middle bedroom was empty. The living room had a fireplace, the kitchen a breakfast nook. There was a deep front porch along the front of the house. Two local girls who worked for downtown stockbrokers lived there already. We all liked each other. I could move in at the end of the month. Lena and I had a month-to-month rental so I did not have to worry about breaking a lease. Once Lena and Ivy broke up, Lena didn’t mind moving back home again.
I had to go to my roommate’s wedding on Long Island. Lena wanted to see her ex-husband and her uncle in New York City. She wanted to get some money from her uncle and her ex. Luke would go too, they would stay with their uncle while I went to the wedding. Lena and I still got along. This was OK with me. I liked to be anywhere Luke was. I just didn’t want to live with Lena.
Her ex-husband had decided that he was a musician. He was so hip he was scary. Thin, with spiky black hair and a leather jacket, he did reveal a continuing fondness for Lena. He lived in a disgusting apartment on Avenue C in the Village, crawling with cockroaches, with a dirty bathtub in the kitchen. A lot of joints were smoked, but there was no money here to spare. We went uptown to Uncle Chet. He lived in a rent-controlled building on Lexington. The elevator smelled like strawberries, it smelled like patchouli everywhere else. He was Lena’s gay uncle and his place was beautifully decorated in a toned-down mod style. He was an educated and amusing man, just nearing middle age, living on his own at the moment. He was “somebody” and he knew “people”.
It was hard to contain Lena’s energy in such an upholstered space but her uncle was genuinely fond of her and indulgent. I left to go to my exotic roommate’s wedding.
From all this immense culture shock I took enormous, although not uncomplicated, pleasure.
The paradoxes in my life totally parallel the extremes in this trip to New York City, from sleazy, to artsy, to upscale, my life would run the gamut. After the “moseltov” at the wedding I found myself at a huge banquet restaurant in Rockaway, mingling with Long Islanders in long dresses and their best coiffures at table after table of hor’d’oeuvres. These appetizers, which I thought to be the whole wedding spread, proved to be a prelude to a luxurious sit-down dinner followed by a dessert cart from nirvana. We danced the Hora, I saw all my old friends from college, and the beautiful bride who never married the Kentucky boyfriend at all, but ended up marrying a podiatrist from Chicago.
I did not crave her life, or think about hanging on in Long Island. Of course I had my teaching job to go back to, but you would think, given my big dreams in life, I would have tried to hitch my star to these winners. Never gave it a thought. Their background was too different from mine. This was their world. I was off back to mine. I couldn’t wait to begin. I was scared to death to begin. Summer was over. I had a new place to live. I was out from under the cloud of Lena (I thought) and could just enjoy the energy of Lena. I was ready to go. I still didn’t inhale.
Okay, we’ve already established that books aren’t everything, but I was so inspired, so bursting with the beauty of language and literature and the cosmic connections between human history, art, music, and language, that I felt as if I had swallowed the Milky Way. My excitement beamed from me. I was incandescent. We didn’t know “Emotional IQ.” Mine was probably about equal to that of a sixteen year old.
And that’s who I hung out with that summer after college ended and before I started teaching, sixteen year olds. My brother Robert had a new friend, Luke, who was attracted by the drums that Bobby banged away on in the basement next to the washing machine and dryer. Luke looked like a Liverpool, England boy with dark blond hair fringing his handsome face. He was a naturally smart kid, but destined for blue-collar physical labor. Many a woman’s life has probably been derailed by an inappropriate love interest. Not a new story, but for someone who was supposedly headed out into the wide adult world, it can bring progress to a screeching halt, make you want to stay in the moment. That June I spent many hours talking to Luke while we sat in my turquoise Chevy Impala convertible at the end of my parent’s street, watching the planes take off and land. We talked about what we wanted and what we believed, but it was really all about attraction, hormones, pheromones; chemistry. I don’t know what Luke felt, I never asked. I assumed the pleasure he took in my company was not purely intellectual, was visceral and chemical, like mine. I think the attraction must be mutual for it to generate this much energy. I waited all day for the evenings in the car watching the smoky blue lights that lined the runways and feeling pretty smoky blue myself.
That June I was only alive when we were together and I was oblivious to social embarrassment, parental disapproval, all of it. It was all pretty innocent after all. In spite of my obsession I was passive, waiting for the first move to come from Luke. All we did was talk.
In July Luke suggested that I could get an apartment with his sister Lena, who was ready to move away from her parents and needed a roommate. I liked her, she was alive, somewhat witty, and so full of self-confident energy that she was positively loaded with an earthy charisma. She had not gone to college and she had already been married and divorced. Even so she was younger than me. She also had blonde hair, and a full, sensual face and figure. There were whispers that she was a “homosexual”. I was incredulous, never having given a thought to such a predilection. (I didn’t even know about Rock Hudson.) I decided it was just small town gossip. I hated gossip. It was like those tacky “True Confessions” magazines we all passed around in our teens that recounted the tales of the million ways an unsuspecting girl could lose her reputation. “My Baby’s Father Beats Me”, My Baby’s Father is My Father” and other horrific permutations of the victimization of women by men. It never dawned on me that a woman could be victimized by another woman. That’s how sheltered my beginnings were.
So the adventure began. We moved into the “city,” the same city my family had left thirteen years earlier. The city had a university, so it had a university neighborhood. How hip. The apartment was at the top of an older apartment building that had five other apartments. It was a gray clapboard structure and the apartment was not awful, a one bedroom with a nice porch off the living. The rooms were good sized, there were lots of windows. I felt good about it. Then Lena introduced me to her girlfriend, Ivy, and I understood that the rumors were true. I would be tolerant, I decided. I wanted to experience everything life had to offer and I wanted a place to visit with Luke away from prying eyes. It would be good to learn about lesbians. It shouldn’t make any difference who we love. I didn’t want to have a “lesbian experience” of my own, but this should not be a problem. Lena was obviously in love with Ivy, who was a thin, shy likeable young black woman. Luke would be around a lot too after all, and school would keep me very busy.
It was a disaster. Lesbianism was the tip of Lena’s unconventionality iceberg. She did not have any serious career plans. She did sort of want to play house with Ivy, but that did not mean she wanted to make curtains, or buy knickknacks. They were always in the car off to somewhere, usually Lena’s mom’s house. I wasn’t really clear about why she left her mother’s house to begin with. I guess it was because sleepovers weren’t allowed. Lena was also into drugs. She smoked cigarettes, of course, but she also smoked marijuana. She had some kind of menial job, at a potato chip factory or something. When she got home, she got high while she waited for Ivy and then took off. Sometimes Luke would come over with his boys and they would also get high. I puffed my cigarettes, but I would not smoke marijuana.
Lena, it turned out, was an expert at abuse and manipulation. She knew how to take a weakness and tweak it. If you had an insecurity, she knew how to use it to her advantage. God help you if she wanted something from you and you were unwilling to give it. She was ruthless in her pursuit of absolute personal satisfaction.
Fortunately for me, she didn’t concentrate on me. She had Ivy. Ivy was not “out”. Her family had no idea of her inclinations. She had some big bruiser brothers who would not be happy. They even daunted Lena. This did not keep her, however, from exploiting Ivy’s fears of discovery in order to keep Ivy at heel. Ivy was very unhappy. Lena was way more than she bargained for, noisy, aggressive, not at all into nesting. I think Ivy wanted to settle down, come home from a day of nursing, put up her feet, and bask in the glow of someone who loved her. Lena loved her possessively and assertively, but had no immediate interest in settling down.
They fought constantly, Ivy quietly and stubbornly, Lena raging off into the night. Before the summer was even over I had had it. I told Lena I was moving out. I found an ad in the paper. Some girls in a flat needed a roommate. I went for an interview. Beautiful old flat on a tree-lined street right outside of a green city park with a big pool and a rose garden. The middle bedroom was empty. The living room had a fireplace, the kitchen a breakfast nook. There was a deep front porch along the front of the house. Two local girls who worked for downtown stockbrokers lived there already. We all liked each other. I could move in at the end of the month. Lena and I had a month-to-month rental so I did not have to worry about breaking a lease. Once Lena and Ivy broke up, Lena didn’t mind moving back home again.
I had to go to my roommate’s wedding on Long Island. Lena wanted to see her ex-husband and her uncle in New York City. She wanted to get some money from her uncle and her ex. Luke would go too, they would stay with their uncle while I went to the wedding. Lena and I still got along. This was OK with me. I liked to be anywhere Luke was. I just didn’t want to live with Lena.
Her ex-husband had decided that he was a musician. He was so hip he was scary. Thin, with spiky black hair and a leather jacket, he did reveal a continuing fondness for Lena. He lived in a disgusting apartment on Avenue C in the Village, crawling with cockroaches, with a dirty bathtub in the kitchen. A lot of joints were smoked, but there was no money here to spare. We went uptown to Uncle Chet. He lived in a rent-controlled building on Lexington. The elevator smelled like strawberries, it smelled like patchouli everywhere else. He was Lena’s gay uncle and his place was beautifully decorated in a toned-down mod style. He was an educated and amusing man, just nearing middle age, living on his own at the moment. He was “somebody” and he knew “people”.
It was hard to contain Lena’s energy in such an upholstered space but her uncle was genuinely fond of her and indulgent. I left to go to my exotic roommate’s wedding.
From all this immense culture shock I took enormous, although not uncomplicated, pleasure.
The paradoxes in my life totally parallel the extremes in this trip to New York City, from sleazy, to artsy, to upscale, my life would run the gamut. After the “moseltov” at the wedding I found myself at a huge banquet restaurant in Rockaway, mingling with Long Islanders in long dresses and their best coiffures at table after table of hor’d’oeuvres. These appetizers, which I thought to be the whole wedding spread, proved to be a prelude to a luxurious sit-down dinner followed by a dessert cart from nirvana. We danced the Hora, I saw all my old friends from college, and the beautiful bride who never married the Kentucky boyfriend at all, but ended up marrying a podiatrist from Chicago.
I did not crave her life, or think about hanging on in Long Island. Of course I had my teaching job to go back to, but you would think, given my big dreams in life, I would have tried to hitch my star to these winners. Never gave it a thought. Their background was too different from mine. This was their world. I was off back to mine. I couldn’t wait to begin. I was scared to death to begin. Summer was over. I had a new place to live. I was out from under the cloud of Lena (I thought) and could just enjoy the energy of Lena. I was ready to go. I still didn’t inhale.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Chapter 9 - Robert
Felicity was the first child, me, Zoe, the second, Tyler, the third, and Gertie the fourth. Robert was #5. Before puberty Robert was a victim to Tyler, and a baby doll to Felicity, Gertie and me. We felt bad when Tyler tortured him with the old “smotheration” routine. At first we told mom, who did the “wait until your father comes home” bit. Dad always did his duty in these situations, but his heart wasn’t in it. And afterwards Tyler might torture Robert even more with psychological insults against his courage or his gender. Tyler didn’t torture Robert everyday anyway. There were lots of days when they got along great, but because of the age difference Robert would always be the follower and Tyler the reluctant and twisted mentor.
Felicity and Gertie and I just loved Robert. He was our first baby. He came along when we were old enough to do some nurturing, holding a bottle, watching Mommie change his diaper, or finding “blankie” (Robert rubbed the satin on a certain blankie until he was about five and it consisted of only a few threads, crisscrossed and fuzzy). Next thing you know he was a toddler waddling along behind us with blankie, and so cute. He had a little tough face and a blond crew cut, and he smiled with his whole face. He would do anything we asked, even be the groom when we played wedding with the youngest of the three sisters from across the street. He was our pet. Tyler had Pete, the dog, but we had our cat Bootsy and we had Robert.
After puberty Robert was never a victim again. He discovered beer early and was addicted early. He had an informal posse of cohorts, all boys, who also pledged allegiance to beer and to feats of drunken courage. Most of Robert’s friends were nice boys from around Smithvale, who appreciated his creativity and Bobby was truly inspired, leading his merry band from one humorous and borderline illegal adventure to the next. Their deeds were legendary and sometimes noisy. Robert had a whole room to himself by his teenage years because the rest of us older siblings were no longer in the house. I was still in college and came home for weekends and school breaks and summers.
Robert’s room in our house was called the “Sin Den”. If you opened the door, which you did only after gaining clearance, clouds of cigarette smoke would greet you, along with crashing music, beery exhalations and an explosion dirty underwear. State your business and go. But Robert also had a roguish charm that allowed him to pass all this off as just testosterone, high spirits, and boyish humor.
Robert also had a corner of the basement for his drum set, which was the height of generosity and parental love on the part of my mother. She had never appreciated music of any kind, to her it was all noise, and the drums were parked right next to her escape hatch, her laundry area. The boys knew how to get around Augusta though. They flattered her and teased her, made her laugh, and flirted with her. It wasn’t even just a strategy to get away with things. Those boys truly loved her, sort of adopted her. They often stayed to dinner; they ran away to our house, slept off drunks at our house and hardly ever went home as far as I could see. Sometimes their moms were jealous but they certainly knew my mom wasn’t trying to steal their children.
Robert and his “posse” did things like sneak into the E. J. Strodel Warehouse, take cases of beer out into the woods behind the warehouse, and get someone to take them back later to load up the beer and take it to wherever they hid it. After I got my car, I did a couple of beer runs when I was home from school, but I had no guts for this kind of caper at all.
A few times I accompanied the boys to Scruples Bridge, a tall truss bridge over a local river. They would climb to the very top, bolstered by alcohol and jump into the river. After I heard that, historically, boys had died when they hit rocks hidden under the water, I didn’t take them anymore. I’m sure they just found another ride.
Robert was the first Taylor to attract the attention of the police. This is the only thing that he did that really devastated mom. The idea of having a police car parked in our driveway for the whole world to see was more than she could bear. I guess Bobby had been talked into being lookout for a new friend whose misdeeds went well beyond those of Robert and his friends. He got off with a warning, went back to his old friends, and was never in trouble with the police again.
Bobbie was elected president of ZEUS fraternity in high school and the rumors of their exploits made him the darling of the high school for at least his senior year. One exploit apparently involved no pants and a snow bank. These same exploits were probably to blame for the demise of sororities and fraternities at our high school. Robert was extremely shy about girls, but my younger sisters reported that girls were forever trying to catch his attention at school, waving coy “hi, Bobbie’s” in his directions.
The dark side of Robert, however, was the way he passed on the Taylor male tradition of torture to my younger sisters. He and his boys would often fill up the living room and my sisters, who arrived home later, had to run the gauntlet in order to enter the house. The guys had long derogatory nicknames for each of my sisters. Emily, Rebecca, and Morgan still remember these long chains of derision and can recite them to this day. For the boys, the entire object of the exercise was to entertain themselves and to force the girls from the living room so the guys could have it. Although my sisters tried to hang tough, eventually someone would run crying or in anger from the room and the rest would follow to give comfort. Emily was the one most frequently reduced to tears.
My younger sisters did many of the same fun things the rest of us had done in their early childhood years, and they got to go places with my parents more often, because there were no more babies, but their youthful pleasures were marred by the torment they had to endure to get through the living room each day, or anytime the guys wanted to evict them from any space, or anytime those bozos wanted to boost their egos with a little bullying. To realize that some of this was payback for the times Robert was tortured by Tyler would not exactly require the services of a psychotherapist.
I witnessed several examples of the dreaded “dinner table torture”. My dad was working nights at this time. He went off to work before dinner. My brother hoarded all the food and would not pass it until you either asked for the item in Spanish with an accent that perfectly matched his original pronunciation, as in '?Pase me le leche por favor', or sometimes he made up an arcane enunciation that had to be duplicated, like gra-VEE for gravy. My mother tried to control him, but he would turn on his charm (he could be very funny) until he made her laugh, or they would get into a mock slapping fight and mom would eventually crack up and retreat. Dad would hear about an incident, but it just sounded like horseplay to him. Robert never did any of this when dad was home.
Once Emily, Rebecca, and Megan hit high school age, the boys did not tease them as much and some of them started flirting with the girls, especially Becky, who was our family’s only long-legged blonde. But it was too late. My sisters despised Robert’s friends, although later, as adults, they forgave them.
I think you can guess that Robert smoked, a lot. He smoked until his late twenties or early thirties. When he started to cough up blood, he stopped. He had to choose between the beer and the cigarettes. His beer addiction won out over his cigarette addiction
Felicity and Gertie and I just loved Robert. He was our first baby. He came along when we were old enough to do some nurturing, holding a bottle, watching Mommie change his diaper, or finding “blankie” (Robert rubbed the satin on a certain blankie until he was about five and it consisted of only a few threads, crisscrossed and fuzzy). Next thing you know he was a toddler waddling along behind us with blankie, and so cute. He had a little tough face and a blond crew cut, and he smiled with his whole face. He would do anything we asked, even be the groom when we played wedding with the youngest of the three sisters from across the street. He was our pet. Tyler had Pete, the dog, but we had our cat Bootsy and we had Robert.
After puberty Robert was never a victim again. He discovered beer early and was addicted early. He had an informal posse of cohorts, all boys, who also pledged allegiance to beer and to feats of drunken courage. Most of Robert’s friends were nice boys from around Smithvale, who appreciated his creativity and Bobby was truly inspired, leading his merry band from one humorous and borderline illegal adventure to the next. Their deeds were legendary and sometimes noisy. Robert had a whole room to himself by his teenage years because the rest of us older siblings were no longer in the house. I was still in college and came home for weekends and school breaks and summers.
Robert’s room in our house was called the “Sin Den”. If you opened the door, which you did only after gaining clearance, clouds of cigarette smoke would greet you, along with crashing music, beery exhalations and an explosion dirty underwear. State your business and go. But Robert also had a roguish charm that allowed him to pass all this off as just testosterone, high spirits, and boyish humor.
Robert also had a corner of the basement for his drum set, which was the height of generosity and parental love on the part of my mother. She had never appreciated music of any kind, to her it was all noise, and the drums were parked right next to her escape hatch, her laundry area. The boys knew how to get around Augusta though. They flattered her and teased her, made her laugh, and flirted with her. It wasn’t even just a strategy to get away with things. Those boys truly loved her, sort of adopted her. They often stayed to dinner; they ran away to our house, slept off drunks at our house and hardly ever went home as far as I could see. Sometimes their moms were jealous but they certainly knew my mom wasn’t trying to steal their children.
Robert and his “posse” did things like sneak into the E. J. Strodel Warehouse, take cases of beer out into the woods behind the warehouse, and get someone to take them back later to load up the beer and take it to wherever they hid it. After I got my car, I did a couple of beer runs when I was home from school, but I had no guts for this kind of caper at all.
A few times I accompanied the boys to Scruples Bridge, a tall truss bridge over a local river. They would climb to the very top, bolstered by alcohol and jump into the river. After I heard that, historically, boys had died when they hit rocks hidden under the water, I didn’t take them anymore. I’m sure they just found another ride.
Robert was the first Taylor to attract the attention of the police. This is the only thing that he did that really devastated mom. The idea of having a police car parked in our driveway for the whole world to see was more than she could bear. I guess Bobby had been talked into being lookout for a new friend whose misdeeds went well beyond those of Robert and his friends. He got off with a warning, went back to his old friends, and was never in trouble with the police again.
Bobbie was elected president of ZEUS fraternity in high school and the rumors of their exploits made him the darling of the high school for at least his senior year. One exploit apparently involved no pants and a snow bank. These same exploits were probably to blame for the demise of sororities and fraternities at our high school. Robert was extremely shy about girls, but my younger sisters reported that girls were forever trying to catch his attention at school, waving coy “hi, Bobbie’s” in his directions.
The dark side of Robert, however, was the way he passed on the Taylor male tradition of torture to my younger sisters. He and his boys would often fill up the living room and my sisters, who arrived home later, had to run the gauntlet in order to enter the house. The guys had long derogatory nicknames for each of my sisters. Emily, Rebecca, and Morgan still remember these long chains of derision and can recite them to this day. For the boys, the entire object of the exercise was to entertain themselves and to force the girls from the living room so the guys could have it. Although my sisters tried to hang tough, eventually someone would run crying or in anger from the room and the rest would follow to give comfort. Emily was the one most frequently reduced to tears.
My younger sisters did many of the same fun things the rest of us had done in their early childhood years, and they got to go places with my parents more often, because there were no more babies, but their youthful pleasures were marred by the torment they had to endure to get through the living room each day, or anytime the guys wanted to evict them from any space, or anytime those bozos wanted to boost their egos with a little bullying. To realize that some of this was payback for the times Robert was tortured by Tyler would not exactly require the services of a psychotherapist.
I witnessed several examples of the dreaded “dinner table torture”. My dad was working nights at this time. He went off to work before dinner. My brother hoarded all the food and would not pass it until you either asked for the item in Spanish with an accent that perfectly matched his original pronunciation, as in '?Pase me le leche por favor', or sometimes he made up an arcane enunciation that had to be duplicated, like gra-VEE for gravy. My mother tried to control him, but he would turn on his charm (he could be very funny) until he made her laugh, or they would get into a mock slapping fight and mom would eventually crack up and retreat. Dad would hear about an incident, but it just sounded like horseplay to him. Robert never did any of this when dad was home.
Once Emily, Rebecca, and Megan hit high school age, the boys did not tease them as much and some of them started flirting with the girls, especially Becky, who was our family’s only long-legged blonde. But it was too late. My sisters despised Robert’s friends, although later, as adults, they forgave them.
I think you can guess that Robert smoked, a lot. He smoked until his late twenties or early thirties. When he started to cough up blood, he stopped. He had to choose between the beer and the cigarettes. His beer addiction won out over his cigarette addiction
Friday, July 9, 2010
Chapter 8 - Gertrude
Gertie, as I have said, was a different kind of Taylor altogether. She did not care about excelling in school. She was content to do OK in basic courses. She didn’t bother to join our sorority. She just wanted to have a good time. She would lower her lashes and smile until her dimples showed and make everyone around her feel, with happy certainty, that some flirty mischief was about to take place.
In childhood she played the same things we all did. She was best friends with the two younger sisters across the street and usually did not bother to tag along with Felicity and me. She liked “jump rope” and “hopscotch” and “Mother-May-I”. She liked roller-skating and dresses.
As soon as puberty hit she got a shape that was designed to make boys crazy, with large breasts and a tiny waist. She wasn’t perfect. She had the bad complexion we all had either from heredity or poor nutrition.
Gertie’s best friends after puberty were not the popular kids, they were the rebels, the James Deans, the hood types, the boys with leather jackets and duck tail haircuts, the girls with reputations for being fast. They didn’t do wild and anti-social acts, but they were into action. They loved to play records and dance and probably smooch, although I can’t be sure because I didn’t hang out with them very often. Smithvale had grown into the type of small town where teens took long evening walks and met friends or went to the little league ballpark to hang out near the Babe Ruth game. Gertie met her friends at street corners, enjoying herself so much that she didn’t want to come inside. Her gifts were social.
Gertie was also very earthy, didn’t mind coming home with a hickey now and then, or talking to anyone about every detail of her bodily functions. Probably Mom and Dad worried about Gertie the most. She was the most likely candidate in the family so far to end up in the dreaded “pregnant out of wedlock” state. They didn’t worry too much though because, for the most part, it looked like she just knew how to party, something the rest of us were not particularly good at.
We all had our little square cases with musical notes on the sides to organize and carry our 45’s- our “Teen Angel”, “Bye-Bye Love”, Wake Up Little Suzie”, Blue Suede Shoes”, and “Love Me Tender”. Felicity kept hers in alphabetical order. No two records could go in the same space and every title was written into the appropriate space on the index card inside the cover of the box. The front section held those little plastic adapters that had to be snapped into each record so it could be placed on the skinny record player spindle. I wasn’t quite so neat about my little record box, but I was neater than Gertie. She put her records in order from most favorite to least favorite, but since the order was always changing, she couldn’t write anything in the index or on the tabs at the top of the dividers. You could never find anything in her 45 box, but she knew all the new dance steps. She knew how to slop and jitter bug, and how to do the mashed potatoes, and the jerk, and the twist. And she knew how to do the dog, which Felicity and I considered too gross to even look at.
Gertie’s values were somewhat different from the rest of us also. Once amid a succession of older station wagons, Dad, in an attempt to find a car that would fit the whole family comfortably, fell heir to an antique extended-body Packard in black. It had about 3 feet of carpet between the front seat and the back seat. On the back of the front seat were two small, upholstered seats that folded down and held extra passengers. This car had obviously once graced a life of affluence and luxury. It still looked really good. Most of us appreciated the luxurious provenance of the car and enjoyed riding in it. Especially since we didn’t have to have two layers of kids in the back seat and for some reason throwing up was no longer an issue. This voluptuous old Packard, however, mortally embarrassed Gertie. To her it was just a monstrosity. The car did have one serious flaw. It had a cracked engine block, which soon made its presence known. If we went too far or climbed too many hills the car would overheat and we would have to pull over and wait until the engine cooled before we could complete our outing. Then we would all pile out of that car like clowns from a Volkswagen. Gertie knew what was cool, and this humiliating routine, on top of the unusual look of the thing was too much for her to accept. After my father had to order her into the car a few times, and after several episodes of impassioned, tearful refusal, Dad gave up on the Packard, which would never have made it through the winter anyway, and got a more conservative and more modern junker. A few of us were quite disappointed to see the old Packard go though.
Gertie married right out of high school. She “picked up” her husband-to-be at a downtown movie theater. He was stationed at the local air base, which still existed, but was much smaller than it had been just after World War II. He was with a friend and he started pestering my sister and her girlfriend. I made the two of them move to another seat. The young men followed. Finally I left the four of them giggling and chatting and sat in another part of the theater. After the movie we waited out on Main Street. Gertie was still at it, flirting and dancing the dog, right there on Main Street. I told Dad when he came to pick us up. I’m sure Gertie did not love me very much at that moment. Jason, the young air force guy, invited himself to dinner at our house and proceeded to charm Dad, who never did feel he had enough sons. They had a fairy tale marriage through fourteen years and two sons until Jason’s philandering ways became too obvious to ignore. He broke Gertie’s heart, big time. Actually he broke all of our hearts.
Gertie never smoked, (well she may have tried it once or twice). Jason did.
In childhood she played the same things we all did. She was best friends with the two younger sisters across the street and usually did not bother to tag along with Felicity and me. She liked “jump rope” and “hopscotch” and “Mother-May-I”. She liked roller-skating and dresses.
As soon as puberty hit she got a shape that was designed to make boys crazy, with large breasts and a tiny waist. She wasn’t perfect. She had the bad complexion we all had either from heredity or poor nutrition.
Gertie’s best friends after puberty were not the popular kids, they were the rebels, the James Deans, the hood types, the boys with leather jackets and duck tail haircuts, the girls with reputations for being fast. They didn’t do wild and anti-social acts, but they were into action. They loved to play records and dance and probably smooch, although I can’t be sure because I didn’t hang out with them very often. Smithvale had grown into the type of small town where teens took long evening walks and met friends or went to the little league ballpark to hang out near the Babe Ruth game. Gertie met her friends at street corners, enjoying herself so much that she didn’t want to come inside. Her gifts were social.
Gertie was also very earthy, didn’t mind coming home with a hickey now and then, or talking to anyone about every detail of her bodily functions. Probably Mom and Dad worried about Gertie the most. She was the most likely candidate in the family so far to end up in the dreaded “pregnant out of wedlock” state. They didn’t worry too much though because, for the most part, it looked like she just knew how to party, something the rest of us were not particularly good at.
We all had our little square cases with musical notes on the sides to organize and carry our 45’s- our “Teen Angel”, “Bye-Bye Love”, Wake Up Little Suzie”, Blue Suede Shoes”, and “Love Me Tender”. Felicity kept hers in alphabetical order. No two records could go in the same space and every title was written into the appropriate space on the index card inside the cover of the box. The front section held those little plastic adapters that had to be snapped into each record so it could be placed on the skinny record player spindle. I wasn’t quite so neat about my little record box, but I was neater than Gertie. She put her records in order from most favorite to least favorite, but since the order was always changing, she couldn’t write anything in the index or on the tabs at the top of the dividers. You could never find anything in her 45 box, but she knew all the new dance steps. She knew how to slop and jitter bug, and how to do the mashed potatoes, and the jerk, and the twist. And she knew how to do the dog, which Felicity and I considered too gross to even look at.
Gertie’s values were somewhat different from the rest of us also. Once amid a succession of older station wagons, Dad, in an attempt to find a car that would fit the whole family comfortably, fell heir to an antique extended-body Packard in black. It had about 3 feet of carpet between the front seat and the back seat. On the back of the front seat were two small, upholstered seats that folded down and held extra passengers. This car had obviously once graced a life of affluence and luxury. It still looked really good. Most of us appreciated the luxurious provenance of the car and enjoyed riding in it. Especially since we didn’t have to have two layers of kids in the back seat and for some reason throwing up was no longer an issue. This voluptuous old Packard, however, mortally embarrassed Gertie. To her it was just a monstrosity. The car did have one serious flaw. It had a cracked engine block, which soon made its presence known. If we went too far or climbed too many hills the car would overheat and we would have to pull over and wait until the engine cooled before we could complete our outing. Then we would all pile out of that car like clowns from a Volkswagen. Gertie knew what was cool, and this humiliating routine, on top of the unusual look of the thing was too much for her to accept. After my father had to order her into the car a few times, and after several episodes of impassioned, tearful refusal, Dad gave up on the Packard, which would never have made it through the winter anyway, and got a more conservative and more modern junker. A few of us were quite disappointed to see the old Packard go though.
Gertie married right out of high school. She “picked up” her husband-to-be at a downtown movie theater. He was stationed at the local air base, which still existed, but was much smaller than it had been just after World War II. He was with a friend and he started pestering my sister and her girlfriend. I made the two of them move to another seat. The young men followed. Finally I left the four of them giggling and chatting and sat in another part of the theater. After the movie we waited out on Main Street. Gertie was still at it, flirting and dancing the dog, right there on Main Street. I told Dad when he came to pick us up. I’m sure Gertie did not love me very much at that moment. Jason, the young air force guy, invited himself to dinner at our house and proceeded to charm Dad, who never did feel he had enough sons. They had a fairy tale marriage through fourteen years and two sons until Jason’s philandering ways became too obvious to ignore. He broke Gertie’s heart, big time. Actually he broke all of our hearts.
Gertie never smoked, (well she may have tried it once or twice). Jason did.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Chapter 7 - S-E-X
When puberty hit everything changed. Once the hormone switch turns on, there’s no turning it off again. My sister and I still played paper dolls, mostly we designed clothes for them, but instead of Betsy McCall paper dolls, we now went in for movie star/model types. We all still played football and baseball and shot baskets in the back yard, and we still played outdoor games. The difference is that we now preferred games where a boy had to touch you, or tackle you, or wrestle you. We much preferred to play after dark and we dropped “Hill Dill” for “Hide and Seek”. We were very aware that these were coed activities. All of a sudden I became very self-conscious around neighbor boys I had taken for granted for years.
This is when I began to realize that, although I got some great “birth gifts”, physical beauty was not one of them. I had to shop for my dresses in the Chubby department, a nomenclature that, thank goodness is now obsolete. By the time I was fourteen I wore a 36C bra.
I was the only one in my gym class who wore a bra, so I hid almost inside my locker when we changed our clothes so that my ugly bra would not stand out among all the pretty undershirts. Probably everyone saw me and my bra any way, but I didn’t know because I didn’t look. I felt sloppy and awkward and clumsy. I spent hours looking in mirrors and picking at pimples on my face. I didn’t have terrible acne, but I had the normal run of blemishes and blotches, some of which swelled to gargantuan proportions. Mostly I told myself over and over how ugly I was. Since that time I have learned that this is a teen-age rite of passage, but not every teenager suffers these symptoms to the same degree. I bet my sophisticated Long Island roommate never did. First of all, she was beautiful. Second of all she had a handsome, solicitous father who treated her like she was his princess.
When I was fourteen, I read Peyton Place, which I found at the library where I volunteered, and which I hid in a bottom desk drawer, under many papers, until I finished it. It was the first time I started to think about the sexual act itself, how it was done, how it felt, etc. I loved reading this book, but hated reading it too. While I was reading I would feel a certain heaviness, lassitude. My body would become hot and flushed and I would become extraordinarily aware of my body against the seat of the chair. If anyone entered the library, and very few people did, I would hide the book away in the desk drawer and pull myself back into the world of human interaction. At first I would resent them for interrupting my illicit biological moment, then I would gradually feel lighter and friendlier, the fourteen-year-old self I recognized.
After that I discovered my joy button and I spent a lot of private time at home pushing it. But I did not get any opportunities to have s-e-x with real boys. First of all, I was not ready for that. Although the idea of being kissed appealed to me, having sex with an actual man or boy did not occur to me. Second, no boys tried. I did not go out with any boys in high school at all. I was terribly shy at school. I did not even talk to boys except the ones in the neighborhood, and I spoke to them less and less frequently. I watched them; I developed a few long distance crushes, but none that were returned. I didn’t even miss it yet, having a boyfriend. Apparently I would be what is known as a late bloomer.
When I wanted a partner for my sexual activities (such as they were), I just closed my eyes and a faceless man would appear. He was really just a vague male figure, broad shoulders, nicely dressed. I could not really undress him except for his shirt because I had never seen a grown man naked. I was still determined not to get married and ruin my life. But I did want to fall in love and I did want to know all about s-e-x. I had a long crush on Marty Zeferelli, but my best friend at the time decided she did too. She would embarrass me by writing notes to him. She told me that she told him that I liked him and I got so angry with her. Or we would gaze at him and giggle in the lunchroom. How junior high is this? And that’s the age we were. We were only in eighth or ninth grade. Marty didn’t like either one of us. He let us know by his nonverbal reactions that we were just an embarrassment. We were lucky he didn’t decide to get revenge. And thus, without ever actually being in love I managed to have my first broken heart.
Books – now I love books and reading, don’t get me wrong. I could immerse myself so completely in a book that it truly was like a time machine or a “place” machine. My present world and its circumstances would disappear. And in some ways this is a good thing, especially for a poor child. It definitely broadens your horizons and very inexpensively too. But in other ways it can be unhealthy. For one thing, it can turn you into a sort of passive observer of life, one who stands back and watches, describes and analyses others, a person who is not a live-r of life. For another, it kind of makes you believe that things will happen to you with little or no effort on your part. Fictional characters can become more real then actual people. Everyone including one’s self can become an archetype. Instead of learning your actual self, you may imagine and re-imagine your self. Life can happen like a story plot. Each “story” or segment of life can seem self-contained, with a beginning, middle, and an end. It can seem as if the events from one “story line” cannot affect the events in the next episode. Wrong!
I imagined myself as a heroic character, struggling to be larger than life. I would be as independent and smart and self sufficient as Jo in Little Women, for example. Instead of working on me, I bemoaned my inability to be my heroine of the moment. Books and movies affected me so strongly. A book or a movie could move me to hysterical sobs and righteous anger about some injustice or personal pain experienced by a character. Or it might move me to tears of joy and brain waves of sunny optimism. I grew used to living other’s lives instead of my own.
People gave our family boxes and boxes of books. Some were classics; most were bestsellers or Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. I read more than anyone in my family and we were a family of readers. I read everything I could get my hands on, good, bad, or indifferent. I also saw every movie I could get to, except horror movies. After Tarantula I didn’t bother with any more movies that I could only watch with my hands in front of my eyes. I don’t even remember most of what I read. I do remember the Bobbsey Twins, which I read about a million times when I was seven. I remember Nancy
Drew. I also remember Heidi, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and “Archie” and “Superman” and “Spiderman” and Treasure Island.
I became aware of the world’s injustices. When I read The Diary of Anne Frank and Exodus, I was aghast at the Holocaust. From Inherit the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird I learned about narrow mindedness and prejudice. West Side Story, the sound track, which I learned by heart (and which everyone else in the family also learned whether they wanted to or not) brought Romeo and Juliet, ill-fated love, and gangs to life. My uncle had a book The Last Days of Pompeii, a chilling account of what it was probably like when the volcano buried Pompeii. Here was the awesome and malevolent power of nature. Life was deep. Everyday life, even s-e-x with real boys, could not hold a candle to this.
Not everyone in the family was so standoffish about S-E-X. I think by the time Felicity had graduated from high school and started in the community college, she was “doing it”. And right upstairs in her new little bed-sitting room too. Tyler, I’m sure was doing it, and Gertie, well; we’ll talk about that late. She was a whole other type of Taylor. But I wasn’t anywhere near to doing the deed. Although I was privately titillated by it, I didn’t even like to talk about it.
Then there was the whole issue of getting your “friend.” I guess someone thought up that euphemism to put a positive spin on a sometimes-yucky fact of life. I got my “friend” when I was eleven, Felicity must have too because she already had hers when I got mine. And Gertie followed a couple of years later. There were no mini-celebrations in the Taylor household when you became a woman. Instead you inherited the “Welcome to Maturity” booklet (or whatever it was called) from the Kotex box to read, and Mom took you aside to communicate the hygiene essentials.
My father did all the shopping and he would bring home the giant economy sized box of Kotex. He must have been embarrassed, but he never mentioned it. We used paper lunch bags for disposal, so when you saw someone sneaking into the bathroom with their little lunch bag in hand you knew exactly what time of the month it was for them. Gertie loved to talk about her “friend” in excruciating detail, but I felt that it was not an appropriate topic for casual conversation. The less said about it the better.
I thought a lot about how nice it would be if women didn’t have to have a period every month just so they could get pregnant if they wanted to. It seemed like overkill, biological redundancy, and a sad state of affairs for the female of the species. Not to mention that you could get pregnant when you didn’t want to and that this could be very, very bad. It would be nice if there was an on-off switch that you could make event specific, not the switch that turned on at puberty and off at menopause, but a switch that could be turned off and on at will. Maybe the switch could have a food trigger, off with chocolate, on with a jalapeno pepper, something like that. Of course you’d have to avoid chocolate when you wanted to get pregnant. That would be hard. But I assume that once the baby was planted you could go back to eating chocolate. I never did work out the fine points. Maybe someone has a better idea.
Anyway, with all these raging female hormones around the house, Tyler’s injection of testosterone kind of got lost in the shuffle, except for some talk about facial hair and shaving and his rigid, zealous drive for privacy he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
In college, my sophisticated Long Island roommate had a boyfriend who went to school in Kentucky or Tennessee or somewhere south of the Mason/Dixon line. She ran up huge phone bills talking to him with her blankets pulled over her head. The college was crowded; we were three to a room. But I never heard a word of her romantic conversations. With 500+ girls in one dorm and the Beatles playing top force up and down the hallways, girls dancing, talking, setting or ironing each other’s hair, or arguing, it was impossible to hear much. I didn’t mind it, I was used to chaos, but when I had to study I usually had to leave the dorm. Did you remember that Audrey Hepburn smoked? So did most of the girls in my dorm. We didn’t know from second-hand smoke.
I went out on my first dates in college. I was thinner, I had fashion consultants now, and I had my hair colored blonde and cut in a new mod style. One of my memorable dates was with a very cute guy with a suction kiss. He was a great kisser; he connected right from the mouth to the joy spot. I only went out with him once. He never asked again. Probably he had expected more from his hard work. But it taught me what I could expect from a good kiss. It raised my standards. By senior year I had met my Irish folk singer and my best friend had hooked up with his actor friend, and the four of us hung out. We went to the coffee house a lot so Ian could play and sing with the other folk singers. Ian’s uncle was our Irish Lit. professor and Ian took us to his uncle’s house sometimes, where we could sit in front of the fire and drink Irish coffee. I loved the idea of Ian.
The World’s Fair was in Montreal that year so we went. Ian flirted throughout the trip with my best friend. We had arranged it so I would spend the night at Ian’s apartment instead of at the dorm, but I was so angry (?scared) from all the flirting that I wouldn’t. Thus ended my first real relationship. I fled home where I was treated to a mini-makeover and antidepressants and arrived back at college in time to graduate. Still a virgin.
I’m sure you’re wondering what all this has to do with my cigarette addiction. Well I will tell you that my initiation into the mysteries of inhaling and sexual intercourse happened at almost the same instant.
This is when I began to realize that, although I got some great “birth gifts”, physical beauty was not one of them. I had to shop for my dresses in the Chubby department, a nomenclature that, thank goodness is now obsolete. By the time I was fourteen I wore a 36C bra.
I was the only one in my gym class who wore a bra, so I hid almost inside my locker when we changed our clothes so that my ugly bra would not stand out among all the pretty undershirts. Probably everyone saw me and my bra any way, but I didn’t know because I didn’t look. I felt sloppy and awkward and clumsy. I spent hours looking in mirrors and picking at pimples on my face. I didn’t have terrible acne, but I had the normal run of blemishes and blotches, some of which swelled to gargantuan proportions. Mostly I told myself over and over how ugly I was. Since that time I have learned that this is a teen-age rite of passage, but not every teenager suffers these symptoms to the same degree. I bet my sophisticated Long Island roommate never did. First of all, she was beautiful. Second of all she had a handsome, solicitous father who treated her like she was his princess.
When I was fourteen, I read Peyton Place, which I found at the library where I volunteered, and which I hid in a bottom desk drawer, under many papers, until I finished it. It was the first time I started to think about the sexual act itself, how it was done, how it felt, etc. I loved reading this book, but hated reading it too. While I was reading I would feel a certain heaviness, lassitude. My body would become hot and flushed and I would become extraordinarily aware of my body against the seat of the chair. If anyone entered the library, and very few people did, I would hide the book away in the desk drawer and pull myself back into the world of human interaction. At first I would resent them for interrupting my illicit biological moment, then I would gradually feel lighter and friendlier, the fourteen-year-old self I recognized.
After that I discovered my joy button and I spent a lot of private time at home pushing it. But I did not get any opportunities to have s-e-x with real boys. First of all, I was not ready for that. Although the idea of being kissed appealed to me, having sex with an actual man or boy did not occur to me. Second, no boys tried. I did not go out with any boys in high school at all. I was terribly shy at school. I did not even talk to boys except the ones in the neighborhood, and I spoke to them less and less frequently. I watched them; I developed a few long distance crushes, but none that were returned. I didn’t even miss it yet, having a boyfriend. Apparently I would be what is known as a late bloomer.
When I wanted a partner for my sexual activities (such as they were), I just closed my eyes and a faceless man would appear. He was really just a vague male figure, broad shoulders, nicely dressed. I could not really undress him except for his shirt because I had never seen a grown man naked. I was still determined not to get married and ruin my life. But I did want to fall in love and I did want to know all about s-e-x. I had a long crush on Marty Zeferelli, but my best friend at the time decided she did too. She would embarrass me by writing notes to him. She told me that she told him that I liked him and I got so angry with her. Or we would gaze at him and giggle in the lunchroom. How junior high is this? And that’s the age we were. We were only in eighth or ninth grade. Marty didn’t like either one of us. He let us know by his nonverbal reactions that we were just an embarrassment. We were lucky he didn’t decide to get revenge. And thus, without ever actually being in love I managed to have my first broken heart.
Books – now I love books and reading, don’t get me wrong. I could immerse myself so completely in a book that it truly was like a time machine or a “place” machine. My present world and its circumstances would disappear. And in some ways this is a good thing, especially for a poor child. It definitely broadens your horizons and very inexpensively too. But in other ways it can be unhealthy. For one thing, it can turn you into a sort of passive observer of life, one who stands back and watches, describes and analyses others, a person who is not a live-r of life. For another, it kind of makes you believe that things will happen to you with little or no effort on your part. Fictional characters can become more real then actual people. Everyone including one’s self can become an archetype. Instead of learning your actual self, you may imagine and re-imagine your self. Life can happen like a story plot. Each “story” or segment of life can seem self-contained, with a beginning, middle, and an end. It can seem as if the events from one “story line” cannot affect the events in the next episode. Wrong!
I imagined myself as a heroic character, struggling to be larger than life. I would be as independent and smart and self sufficient as Jo in Little Women, for example. Instead of working on me, I bemoaned my inability to be my heroine of the moment. Books and movies affected me so strongly. A book or a movie could move me to hysterical sobs and righteous anger about some injustice or personal pain experienced by a character. Or it might move me to tears of joy and brain waves of sunny optimism. I grew used to living other’s lives instead of my own.
People gave our family boxes and boxes of books. Some were classics; most were bestsellers or Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. I read more than anyone in my family and we were a family of readers. I read everything I could get my hands on, good, bad, or indifferent. I also saw every movie I could get to, except horror movies. After Tarantula I didn’t bother with any more movies that I could only watch with my hands in front of my eyes. I don’t even remember most of what I read. I do remember the Bobbsey Twins, which I read about a million times when I was seven. I remember Nancy
Drew. I also remember Heidi, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and “Archie” and “Superman” and “Spiderman” and Treasure Island.
I became aware of the world’s injustices. When I read The Diary of Anne Frank and Exodus, I was aghast at the Holocaust. From Inherit the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird I learned about narrow mindedness and prejudice. West Side Story, the sound track, which I learned by heart (and which everyone else in the family also learned whether they wanted to or not) brought Romeo and Juliet, ill-fated love, and gangs to life. My uncle had a book The Last Days of Pompeii, a chilling account of what it was probably like when the volcano buried Pompeii. Here was the awesome and malevolent power of nature. Life was deep. Everyday life, even s-e-x with real boys, could not hold a candle to this.
Not everyone in the family was so standoffish about S-E-X. I think by the time Felicity had graduated from high school and started in the community college, she was “doing it”. And right upstairs in her new little bed-sitting room too. Tyler, I’m sure was doing it, and Gertie, well; we’ll talk about that late. She was a whole other type of Taylor. But I wasn’t anywhere near to doing the deed. Although I was privately titillated by it, I didn’t even like to talk about it.
Then there was the whole issue of getting your “friend.” I guess someone thought up that euphemism to put a positive spin on a sometimes-yucky fact of life. I got my “friend” when I was eleven, Felicity must have too because she already had hers when I got mine. And Gertie followed a couple of years later. There were no mini-celebrations in the Taylor household when you became a woman. Instead you inherited the “Welcome to Maturity” booklet (or whatever it was called) from the Kotex box to read, and Mom took you aside to communicate the hygiene essentials.
My father did all the shopping and he would bring home the giant economy sized box of Kotex. He must have been embarrassed, but he never mentioned it. We used paper lunch bags for disposal, so when you saw someone sneaking into the bathroom with their little lunch bag in hand you knew exactly what time of the month it was for them. Gertie loved to talk about her “friend” in excruciating detail, but I felt that it was not an appropriate topic for casual conversation. The less said about it the better.
I thought a lot about how nice it would be if women didn’t have to have a period every month just so they could get pregnant if they wanted to. It seemed like overkill, biological redundancy, and a sad state of affairs for the female of the species. Not to mention that you could get pregnant when you didn’t want to and that this could be very, very bad. It would be nice if there was an on-off switch that you could make event specific, not the switch that turned on at puberty and off at menopause, but a switch that could be turned off and on at will. Maybe the switch could have a food trigger, off with chocolate, on with a jalapeno pepper, something like that. Of course you’d have to avoid chocolate when you wanted to get pregnant. That would be hard. But I assume that once the baby was planted you could go back to eating chocolate. I never did work out the fine points. Maybe someone has a better idea.
Anyway, with all these raging female hormones around the house, Tyler’s injection of testosterone kind of got lost in the shuffle, except for some talk about facial hair and shaving and his rigid, zealous drive for privacy he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
In college, my sophisticated Long Island roommate had a boyfriend who went to school in Kentucky or Tennessee or somewhere south of the Mason/Dixon line. She ran up huge phone bills talking to him with her blankets pulled over her head. The college was crowded; we were three to a room. But I never heard a word of her romantic conversations. With 500+ girls in one dorm and the Beatles playing top force up and down the hallways, girls dancing, talking, setting or ironing each other’s hair, or arguing, it was impossible to hear much. I didn’t mind it, I was used to chaos, but when I had to study I usually had to leave the dorm. Did you remember that Audrey Hepburn smoked? So did most of the girls in my dorm. We didn’t know from second-hand smoke.
I went out on my first dates in college. I was thinner, I had fashion consultants now, and I had my hair colored blonde and cut in a new mod style. One of my memorable dates was with a very cute guy with a suction kiss. He was a great kisser; he connected right from the mouth to the joy spot. I only went out with him once. He never asked again. Probably he had expected more from his hard work. But it taught me what I could expect from a good kiss. It raised my standards. By senior year I had met my Irish folk singer and my best friend had hooked up with his actor friend, and the four of us hung out. We went to the coffee house a lot so Ian could play and sing with the other folk singers. Ian’s uncle was our Irish Lit. professor and Ian took us to his uncle’s house sometimes, where we could sit in front of the fire and drink Irish coffee. I loved the idea of Ian.
The World’s Fair was in Montreal that year so we went. Ian flirted throughout the trip with my best friend. We had arranged it so I would spend the night at Ian’s apartment instead of at the dorm, but I was so angry (?scared) from all the flirting that I wouldn’t. Thus ended my first real relationship. I fled home where I was treated to a mini-makeover and antidepressants and arrived back at college in time to graduate. Still a virgin.
I’m sure you’re wondering what all this has to do with my cigarette addiction. Well I will tell you that my initiation into the mysteries of inhaling and sexual intercourse happened at almost the same instant.
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