CHAPTER 3
HORROR, HOLIDAYS, AND HORMONES
Toward the end of the '50s, when a little more money started coming in, Daddy embraced the latest craze and built a fallout shelter under our house. When the threat of the Cold War eased, he expanded it to a "rec" room, decorated with a fake leather couch and matching chairs featuring bucking broncs stitched on the seat backs and wooden wagon-wheel arms. The new wallpaper had a lovely cowboys-massacring-Indians motif. The floor was an array of multicolored individual linoleum tiles, and of course there was the all-important bar that my parents had adorned with bathroom-style pink mosaic tiles and lined with shelves stocked with every imaginable type of booze.
Liquor was a big deal in my family. Many of my relatives were alcoholics, but nobody called them that back then. They just liked to drink. When we went with my parents for family drives in the mountains on weekends, which we were frequently forced to do, it was normal for Daddy to have me drink the top third out of his Coca-Cola so he could fill it with Jim Beam while careening down the mountainside on cruise control. I couldn't wait for him to fling the empty bottle from the window, because I knew what was coming—more Coke! I love those cute emails that used to circulate on the Internet about how great it was to grow up in the '50s, before there were rules about drinking and driving or wearing seat belts. It's a miracle anyone survived.
Beginning in junior high, because my room was in the basement right next to the rec room, which gave me easy access to the bar, I took a cue from my dad and uncles and used the contents to regularly top off my orange juice or soda pop.
My parents were very big on entertaining and threw lots of parties, inviting relatives and my dad's coworkers. My mom rarely drank alcohol, but at these parties, she let her hair down. I wish she had drunk more because she was always so much nicer after she'd had a Tom Collins or two. They laughed, danced, smoked, and drank long after we kids were sent to bed. I can still hear the sounds of Nat King Cole's "Stardust" wafting up from the rec room through the heater vents as I drifted off to sleep.
The holidays were almost always a good time for me and my family. At Christmastime, my mom wore her "outside face" because there was always company around. As far as I could tell, she had two completely different and separate faces: her mean "inside face," reserved for us kids and Daddy; and her nice outside face that she presented to most relatives and all strangers. People were always telling me how much fun she was to be around and how lucky I was to have her for a mom, which confused the hell out of me. Were they were talking about the same person I lived with?
Christmas Eve festivities were usually held at our house and relatives would come from all over the Midwest. Because Grandpa Peterson was Swedish, we always celebrated Christmas with spicy sausages called potatiskorv (or "potato carve" as we called it), a long, coiled sausage that we cut into bite-size pieces and speared with toothpicks. The main course was lutfisk, creamed dry cod served over boiled potatoes. I was the only kid in the family who would eat the stuff.
My sisters and I loved Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We were allowed to eat whatever we wanted and didn't have to clean up afterward because there were so many aunts there to do the job, and my mother was distracted cooking, serving, and gossiping, so she paid no attention to us at all.
I remember only one bad Christmas, and that was when I was five and we still lived in Randolph. Mother and Daddy had been running around the house all day, cleaning like maniacs and making last-minute preparations before the onslaught of relatives began. The highlight of Christmas Eve was always Santa showing up with his big pillowcase full of toys for me, my sister, and my cousins. Santa always knew our names and exactly what was on our Christmas lists. He always seemed vaguely familiar, but it took me a few years to realize he was really just one of my uncles dressed in a cheap Santa suit and fake beard.
I'd been waiting weeks and weeks for this night and had been as good as I could stand to be, just so Santa didn't pass us by. I'd made my list and asked him for a Terri Lee doll. My parents had gone to great lengths to get a Christmas tree. I stood before it, gazing up at the star on the top, and I remember thinking it was the biggest, most beautiful tree I'd ever seen—and it was in our living room! My mother had spent much of the day hanging the brand-new, shiny ornaments on the tree and stringing the multicolored bulbs. Melody and I weren't allowed to do that part because the balls were so fragile, but we did get to toss sparkling silver tinsel on the branches after the ornaments were hung.
As my mother put the finishing touches on the tree, I heard a plaintive "meow" outside the front door and looked out the window to see my poor kitty-cat standing on the stoop in the snow, looking pathetic. I opened the door a crack, just enough to let him in and keep the cold air out, and he slipped into our tiny living room. "Don't let that filthy cat in!" Mother snapped.
The fat, gray-striped tomcat skittered across the newly waxed wood floor and made straight for the Christmas tree. He batted a paw at a sparkly red ornament. Mother hollered, "Get away from that tree, you damned cat!" She rushed forward and just missed grabbing hold of his tail. He darted under the branches and before I could register what was happening, he shot up the trunk of the tree to the very tippy top and clung there for an endless second. Mother stood stock still, her hands covering her mouth. Her hair was still up in rollers and wrapped in a scarf that had little pictures of red and blue sailboats scattered across it. She wore her handmade turquoise apron, the one with the rows of rickrack, tied over her red, short-sleeved "Christmas dress." Time seemed to stand still as the late afternoon light reflected off the snow and bathed the living room in an eerie, bluish glow.
The presents Melody and I bought with our allowance at the Woolworths dime store in Manhattan for aunts, uncles, and cousins were tucked under the tree on the candy cane–striped tree skirt my mother had made. A lone strand of silver tinsel draped itself along the edge of our big, oval rag rug. For a moment, the room was dead silent, except for the hum of the furnace droning in the background.
Crash! Down came the cat, the tree, the ornaments, the lightbulbs, and the tinsel. I held my breath as I looked from my mother's face to the mess of tangled branches and broken glass on the floor. "That's it!" Mother shrieked. "Christmas is cancelled!" She stormed down the hall and a moment later the bedroom door slammed so hard the floor reverberated under my feet.
I have absolutely no recollection of what happened after that, whether Christmas went on that year or not, just the vivid memory of that moment and the aching feeling in the pit of my stomach as I pictured Santa Claus flying over our house without stopping. And it was all my fault.
My parents were hard workers and extremely upwardly mobile, so they were always able to come up with new resources for making money. Daddy went to people's houses at night after work to repair, or sometimes repossess, sewing machines, washers, dryers, and vacuum cleaners, and my mom opened a day-care center in our home. During my grade-school years, in addition to my baby sister, we had anywhere from three to five screaming infants at our house every weekday. This led to me putting off having a child until I was forty-three.
With not only my mom, but several crying babies at home, I stayed away as much as possible. I usually went to my best friend Marilyn's house, right across the back alley. She was the first "latchkey" kid I'd ever encountered, and I thought it was really neat that both her parents worked out of the house, because that meant we had free rein until they got home at night. It was like living an exciting scene from one of our favorite books, Lord of the Flies.
We could pretty much do whatever we wanted without getting yelled at, like create science experiments using chemicals from under the kitchen sink, take off all our clothes and play nudist colony just like in the magazines we'd found under her dad's bed, or just peel off our unlimited scabs and add them to the extensive collection we kept hidden in a milk bottle in the pantry. With the money Marilyn "borrowed" from her mom's savings jar, we bought our favorite snacks: various flavors of Gerber baby food. Our favorite toys were thermometers, which we bought and broke open so we could play with those fascinating little silver balls that ran every which way—m ercury—h ellooooo?!
At my house you ate whatever my mother put on your plate, whether you wanted it or not, and stayed in your chair until you finished every last bite. (I once refused to eat something—I think it was liver and onions—and woke up the next morning still sitting at the table when it was time to go to school.) When I got the lucky opportunity to have dinner at Marilyn's, I couldn't believe that each person was asked whether they'd like a particular dish and how much!
On Halloween, we were allowed to create a haunted house in her basement and invite all the trick-or-treaters in to roam through the darkened hallways and sit in an "electric chair" (a vibrating massage cot), dig their hands into the guts of a recently departed convict (a bowl of spaghetti), and hold his eyeballs in their hands (peeled grapes).
I yearned for adventure and spent a lot of time in my head creating elaborate fantasies. Marilyn and I referred to each other as Nyliram and Ardnassac (our names spelled backward, in case you hadn't figured that out) and spent our summers with the other neighborhood kids in the alleys, streets, and creeks that were the perfect setting for bringing these fantasies to life. For months, we played "flying horses," inspired by the movie Fantasia, building large nests out of sticks and leaves down by the creek. We staged elaborate circuses for the neighborhood kids and charged admission, of course, and with her mom's eight-millimeter camera, we made movies that we played backward, so we appeared to be superheroes, able to leap up into trees or magically produce food from our mouths.
Nyliram and I also collected Breyer scale model horses. She had many more than I did because her older sister, Corliss, was already off at college, so she was treated like a spoiled only child. Later on, our obsession with horses paid off. We said to hell with the toy horses and made up our minds that we wanted the real thing. Marilyn's parents got her a big, gray Appaloosa she named Blue, and, after much begging and expressly against my mother's wishes, Daddy bought me a beautiful buckskin Indian pony I named Apache.