Flashback - to the Fifties

Life Lessons

So I was ten and gawky and shy but also pretty darned snotty, and when Anita Grintals and I got together we were naughty. Not juvenile delinquent naughty, but we liked to play pranks. We called drugstores and asked if they had Prince Albert in a can, then if they said yes, we’d shout, well let him out! And cackle like crazy.

But we didn’t stop there, we also did the is your refrigerator running, and yelled, well go catch it! Ha ha . And most fun of all, we’d dial randomly and when someone answered, one of us, the one not on the phone would shout out from the background “George. Get off of me!” That was a hoot. We loved that one, little snots that we were, until one day the person on the other didn’t hang up and the line stayed open and we were sure that he was having the call traced and the police would be at our door any minute.

We never did that again.

One day that year we were ten, Anita Grintals and I made fun of some teenage girls, heavy and coarse looking, three of them sitting on a wall near the school smoking. We probably said they were fat. We were ten, ok? Well, we ran off, thinking we were very clever, and oh, no, there they were, at the top of the hill, big, heavy girls, with sneers, ugly mean girls, they herded us back down behind the school, No one else was around. It was a Saturday. My house was over the hill, through the woods, a small copse actually, but who knew from copses in those days?

We were on our way home and didn’t make it. Lost ground, backed against the back brick wall of the elementary school. By three very large ugly mean, cigarette smoking teenage girls. The biggest meanest one took out after me. I knew she would kills me, she would smash me flat with her big meaty hands. Her friends would stand there laughing and Anita was helpless. The other two surrounded her; so big so huge and overarching were they, there wasn’t even room to take a breath. I’m lucky I didn’t pee my pants.

“What did you call us?” big mean no. one tough growled at me. I squirmed, looking for a way out, for a teacher, for the principal, a parent, another kid, anybody. There wasn’t anybody, not even a dog, I mean, who but us, would nag out by the elementary school on a Saturday?

“Well,” she was growing impatient. “Uh I don’t know,” Yes you d, you called us fat, didn’t you? You sad we were fat.”

The other two chiming in, their low voices menacing, “You’re a brat. You don’t know anything. We’re not fat. We’re big and hard and tough. We can beat you up.”

I think Anita did pee her pants.

We were cornered, alone in the school yard with the schoolyard bullies. These girls were way too old to be at the elementary school. Do they routinely hang around loking for little kids to beat up?

We were surrounded; we couldn’t run away, even if w weren’t so scared our legs turned to jelly. What would they do. The biggest one, the leader of the pack, the bully in chief, took pity on us, or so we thought, naïve little girls that we were. “Wait, girls,” she said to her pals, who were rolling up their sleeves to pound lumps on us. “Let’s let these kids go.” The other two looked really disappointed, like they were hoping to smash some prepubescent bones today.

“No,” the big one said, pinching my delicate little arm, “we’ll let hem go after this one,” she pinched harder, “kisses my big fat butt.”

Oh, gross, I thought, help, Mommy, let me out of here. Anita backed away; they weren’t holding her arm anymore. Another one grabbed me, as the big one turned around, bent over and then looking coyly over shoulder, said, ‘Well, I’m waiting. Or would you rather get beat up.” Why do these things always happen to me? I thought, giving up all hope of squirming out of this one. She spanked herself n the butt. “I’m waiting.” The other two were cackling like the demented teenage torturers that they were, as I took a deep breath and held my breath as I bent over and touched my lips, as delicately as I could, as if I was kissing the papery skin of my medicinal smelling grandmother, and vowed to wash out my own mouth with soap if I got home alive.

Me and Jesus and Bobby

Once I had settled into life with Bobby as my steady boyfriend, no more enamel rings, no more Kevin in the movie theatre, no more AJ's Pizza, I needed to get a good routine going.

Bobby was a regular in the church. He sang in the choir. I mentioned Bobby before. I mentioned the Church. It seems so unreal, so un-me, that I can't stop obsessing. Whatever happened to Bobby, the Church, Vicki, the girl down the hall in my dormitory who later married Bobby, but then I get ahead of myself and trip over my thoughts.

Bobby and I and Mary Ellen Pooters and Marine Hoogasian all hung around together and played folk music. We liked Bob Dylan, but called him Die-lan. We were so dumb.

We went to Sunday School and we all sang in the choir, where I was made to stand next to Mary Ellen Pooters and follow her lead, and not too loud, thanks.

And Christmas Eve we sang Christmas carols to the old folks at the old folks home, which is what it was in those days, the very old building where the very old folks went to languish. We were their only joy.

We also sang to my mother and little sister, because they didn't have a lot of joy either.

One day we found out in Sunday School that we each had to take a turn "preaching" a youth sermon to the whole congregation. We had to stand up before "God and everyone" and say we accepted Jesus as our personal savior.

What else? I don't remember. I practiced over and over, Jesus is my personal savior. What does mean? It means if you don't believe it when you say it, Jesus won't save you when the time comes, and after you languish in the old folks home, you languish some more while all your friends go up to Heaven and sit on the right hand of God, which must be a pretty big right hand or else they are not telling us how hard it really is to qualify for the right hand seat.

So I said to myself, not unlike Dorothy, "I do believe, I do I do, I do believe" that Jesus is my personal savior and etc. without crossing my fingers. It was a rite of passage, if I wanted to stay in the Church and eventually marry Bobby and so forth. Which I thought I did, but would have taken an out if one offered itself.

No out was in sight when it was my turn to stand up before he congregation and proclaim that I accepted Jesus as my personal savior.

Lightning didn't strike me, so I figured that was a good sign. I was always very superstitious.

Patience is a virtue

Mom was full of truisms. Patience is a virtue. All things come to he who waits. All men want (boys) want only one thing.

Never, ever, under any circumstances, even if you are bleeding by the side of the road, get into a car with a boy you don't know. Even one you do know if he's not a cousin.

Patience was not my virtue. Opposites were. Impatience. Standing by the side of the road with my thumb out tempting fate, but that was later. In high school, I seldom got into cars with boys because what self-respecting boy would want a scaggy, thick glasses wearing, dressed like a frump, pimply girl in his car?

Of course there were the disreputable ones, the ones to whom self-respect was a concept they had no concept of.

That's probably why I found myself in the back seat of Cheryl MacIntosh's Volkswagon at Salisbury beach making out with a very drunk Bobby Whittaker.

Bobby was cute, long blonde hair falling into his eyes, many of popular girls even had been known to get into back seats with him. Kissing was the most I would allow on this sultry summer afternoon just blocks off the boardwalk, with Cheryl leaning on the front bumper, such as it was, scarfing down fried clams and french fries out of greasy take away boxes.

We had been smoking. Cigarettes, not reefer. There were some places even I, the shoplifter, the cheating girlfriend, the loose one in the back seat of the car, would not go. Kissing was as far as I would go with Bobby, who was so drunk, he didn't even push for anything more.

After he fell out onto the ground and stumbled off, Cheryl said, with her been-there-done-that air of superiority, "That's the last you'll see of him, you know."

I didn't care. I had the mark of Bobby Whittaker stamped on my face permanently.

I had had a weakness for boys names Bobby before, and there would be many more to come.

Another time, Cheryl and I found ourselves at a party with some more Bobbies, only their names were probably something else They were from out of town, and we all decided to go for a ride in their car, some kind of 1950's rattletrap, big as tank, only made out of tin. not armor plate. We got to our destination, a club a few towns over, and then when it was time to leave, the car sputtered a few blocks down the highway and died completely.

One of the boys found a pay phone and called his mom, who wasn't especially thrilled at being roused at midnight, to come and get us. I had no choice. I had to call my mom, who I knew would be waiting in her chair by the phone, in the dark, no TV to keep her company, no comforting bottle of scotch. Maybe cold black coffee, waiting for the phone call from the hospital or police she knew she'd inevitably get one night.

I was supposed to be out with Cheryl at a girl's pool party; in fact, we had started out the evening at the girl's house, but those kinds of parties always turned coed, even if the parents assured my mom no boys were invited, just girls having a good time, gossiping and swimming and giggling in their new bikinis in the lawn chairs. The parents would be home, don't worry.

She worried. Rightly so in that boys were indeed present, once the parents left the chilling night air for their TV's, Milton Berle, or Ed Sullivan, or Bonanza, depending on the night of the week, and the girls and the paired up.

No dummies, we weren't interested in freezing by the pool either, so we grabbed our sweaters and loafers and paired off with the boys.

Our boys were from Leominster and they knew a cool place there for folk music. Believe me, I was still the most innocent of boy-crazy girls. And the boys were, in fact, perfect gentlemen. Square, college bound, this was as crazy as they got. Perfect for me, at my stage of arrested adolescence; Cheryl found them boring. But the poolside chatter even more so. So we went to the club, heard some wannabe Bob Dylan imitator, and at a decent hour, well before curfew, were headed home.

The sputtering car put an end to thoughts of slipping in under Mom's radar. I had no choice but to call her, since the boys parents weren't coming for several minutes; it was almost midnight; the car had to be towed and the parents would have to then drive these strange girls homes. They were not happy.

My mom was apoplectic, once she realized I was not raped in a ditch. She lost no time telling me, I was saved by a twist of fate this time, but if I ever did this again, not only would my limp body, misused and maybe even with the life crushed out of it, be the outcome, but a sure heart attack would fell my mother in her prime, leaving me motherless, and worse, in charge of raising my baby sister all on my own.

Naturally, car trips with boys were off my social calendar for a long long time.

One more digression. Shame in the pharmacy

It's interesting the way memories work. They say smell is the most evocative and one of the last senses to go. Smells remembered bring up sights remembered, sounds.

When I was six, maybe five, my father and I walked into the local pharmacy to get some mundane item. I held Dad's hand. As we entered the store, the pharmacist looked up and said "Hi there," in an enthusiastic tone of voice. "Hi," answered my Dad, just as enthusiastically.

"I wasn't talking to you," said the pharmacist, a man we had known for years, "I was talking to him," pointing to a man who had come in behind us.

Was there a smell, not that I can recall, but the feeling of deep humiliation, a word I did not even know, came over me at the time, and for years, I cringed ever time that scene played itself out in my mind. Shame, red corpuscles rising to the face, a sense of being less than, unworthy. My instinct was to turn tail and run. Like my puppy Babboo cowering under a chair when pursued by the larger dog Hanson in his puppy class.

Dad, laid low by the words of a pharmacist, not particularly hostile words, but dismissive words, my Dad dismissed and not even important enough to warrant a greeting by a tradesman. More than empathy, a personally felt rebuke to myself, even though I was not addressed.

What happened next I don't recall, but I'm guessing Dad made his purchase and left. Was he suffering the humiliation of his tiny daughter? Was there a history between this man and my dad, that made him not even say, "Oh Hi Bill, I was talking to Joe, there, but good to see you." Would that have made all the difference? Or would the shock of the "mistake" made by my Dad linger anyway, even if they pharmacist recovered his own equilibrium.

Funny, I never felt antipathy toward the pharmacist, just a sense of shame for my dad, myself.

The sense of deeply felt emotions, even ones unnamed and never felt before, are stronger than the strongest smell.

A digression beginning in the style of Gertrude Stein

A girl had a little brother. A little girl had a little brother. A littler little brother. When she was two she had a little brother and he had a tail. "Look Mom," she says, "Brother has a tail," and her mother laughed and explained it to her, what did the mother explain exactly? That little boy babies have tails? Probably because the mother does not say words like penis, and she certainly never did and never would say any other words for the right words. If she didn't say the right words, she would certainly not say the other words.

So, a little girl had a little brother and then she didn't, and this is the the story of that.

The little girl and her brother were best friends. You never have a friend like that again. Not ever, not even if the brother grows up, he is not a friend like that. I swear it. When you are small, you can do amazing things with your brother; you can climb into the front window of the butcher shop next door and eat baloney sliced by Mr. Shoudy's own hand, ad Mrs. Shoudy won't even get mad at you. You can pet the Shoudy's cat. That's before the health department shuts down the Shoudy's butcher shop for cats and so forth.

You can ride the arm of the fat green sofa and it is a horse, and you can say things in front of your mother's friends that otherwise, even a moment after they ar eout of your mouth, your mother scowls and chases you out of the room, so you know, you know, without anyone saying anything, that you have said something you can never say again, and your borther and you look at each other in waning innocence.

"Mom, boys have weiners (not tails, you know that now) and girls have buns (where did you hear about that?) and boys can put their weiners in the girls' buns" and you know that what makes so much 5 year old sense is wrong and you run out of the room and forget about it, but feel shame for the first time, shame, a word you do not know, you feel it.

Then you are 5 and a half or maybe 6 by now, it is very hot and you walk out the front door all by yourself, your brother is sick, he is very sick and cannot walk out the front door at all, but you can and it is the first act of betrayal of your life. Your mother gets very angry at you after you have a long walk, past the cemetery, past the purple Jewel truck in the last driveway before there aren't any more driveways and you have no landmark to turn around at, so you just do, you just turn and walk back the way you came, your mother angry and dark in the driveway, "Now I have to call the police back and tell them the naughty girl is home."

There were drives in the big car, there were drives past pass with care and do not pass and that's how the girl lerned to read, and her brother couldn't read, but she read the sings to him, pass with care, do not pass. They passed the time to the hospital, where the brother got new blood.

New blood for old, for young blood, bad blood, long drives, the father driving, the mother riding, the brother, the best friend, sitting beside you, laughing, tripping, going for new blood.

Sometimes the girl has to stay with the grandmother, the great-grandmother, who is very old and not nice, not at all, not one bit, though the girl can't say why. Then the mother and father and brother go alone in the car passing with care and not passing for more than a day and a night.

And so one night the mother comes for the girl and the brother does not. There is no brother. There is a mother and a father and no brother. The girl has a toy with suction cups on its feet and she is walking it up the window. Up and up, and does not look at the mother. The mother has left the brother and the mother is no longer the mother. She is the other. Only the other. The mother would never leave the brother. She is not the mother, this other. The girl has only her suction cup toy and the empty window; only climbing up and up. The mother, the other, the not-mother stands alone.

Garret Players and the Church

It is 1966 and my best friend is a gay guy named Sammy. (no we don't say gay; we don't say or even think anything.) Sammy and I go to the Garret players in a garret in a nearby town. They rehearse sultry Tennessee Williams plays in the sweltering New England heat. We drag chairs and rugs across the dusty floor. We watch. Afterwards we always stop at Howdy Beefburger. Sometimes our friend Lacy is with us; we call her "Two Two and One" because she always orders two burgers, two fries, one coke, large.

Sammy has the car. It is his father's. One day many many years later, Sammy will return to this small town from San Francisco, with his lover, because the house is his and his father dead. His father is fun to be around, not like the other fathers. He jokes with us kids and is like a big kid himself, running Cy's produce stand out on the road in front of the house. Across the street is the Merrimack River and I watch it float by with visions of Thoreau.

Because I have no Thespian ability, I always return to the church, for the pageantry, the weird primitive ritualistic quality. The St. George Primitive Methodist Church. Who are these primitive Methodists, I wonder. Our pastor is a blind guitar playing fire and brimstone preacher of the old school. His wife is plain as a board. I am here for the drama. It is why I stand up on youth day and proclaim Jesus as my personal saviour along with all the other kids

What a crazy notion, that some long dead guy can save you! But we get talked into being crazy and thinking it is normal. At least it does not interfere in our messy gropings on the back stoop, mine and Bobby's. If I can't get out of this town soon I will go all the way nuts, I am sure, and it has nothing to do with Jesus.

About the Church

What to say about the Church? The stained glass window, the sanctuary, the inside versus the outside. The safeness.



Well, in the beginning I didn't think about church. My parents never went except for the occasional wedding and funeral. My mother was downright hostile. Church was for dummies, was the message I got.



So church and I never met. The occasional sunrise service on Easter Sunday. Why? I don't know, my Mom liked the sunrise part, maybe? It had a magical quality, but the early morning always does.



So it came as a surprise that I decided to go to church with a neighbor girl. I wanted to go because the other kids went. It was the thing to do on Sunday morning. I was eleven. There would be boys. So off I went with Susan Burnham and her family to the Second (or Third or Fourth?) Methodist Church, on the theory that my father had been a Methodist as a child, so that seemed like the right church to attend. That and Susan Burnham's parents didn't mind stopping off for me on the way.



I don't remember anything about church in the early years. Time went by. I didn't meet any boys in church. The one boy I did meet was Clarence Hagar; he had red hair. he went to another church and he was in fifth grade when I was in sixth. we met in the playground at school in the mornings by the swing set.



It was his brother who intrigued me, Wayne the "hood," the bad boy. I should have been a church regular, maybe even s Salvation Army soldier, cuz it was my mission to save the bad boys, and keep them for myself.



So I went to after school Bible Study with Clarence Hagar in hopes his brother would be there. He never was. And what I learned about the Bible you can fit in the spaces between the words on this page.



The church would get me yet.