7 Scary
Our mother didn't spend much time in the kitchen. Cooking for her was improvisational. Blair and I usually ate hamburger and peas. French bread with peanut butter, mayonnaise, and slices of red onion could be lunch. When we had dinner with our mother and George, we ate in the living room with candles on the table. Often my mother cooked calf's liver or tongue. They were inexpensive and full of protein, she said. When I chewed it, I imagined that the tiny bumps on the tongue could taste the inside of my mouth. The best thing my mother cooked was beef stew. If she put carrots in it, George Senseney had a temper tantrum. I was always afraid that he would hit my mother. As far as I can remember, he never did, but he certainly wanted to. "Just pick the carrots out," my mother said in a voice that muffled scorn.
George's anger came on in an instant. His face, usually so cheerful and friendly, would darken, and the skin around his mouth tightened. One night we were eating in the kitchen and he threw a Portuguese ceramic bowl against the wall. Salad fell all over the floor. The sound of the bowl shattering made me think all the light in the world was going out and I was going to die. The most peaceful meal was breakfast. Our mother put five or six boxes of dry cereal in the middle of the kitchen table. Rice Krispies was my favorite because of the snap, crackle, and popnoises it made when you added milk and sugar. Blair and I each made a wall out of cereal boxes so as to hide our cereal bowls. Then we ate as slowly as we could and whoever finished last would say, "Now I can just enjoy mine!" Blair and I had some real fights about food. Both of us were overweight. We were greedy, like baby birds with beaks open.
Our mother took us on visits to her friends, mostly in the city, but sometimes we stayed overnight with people who had country houses. One of our mother's favorite places to visit was the writer Jeffrey Potter's basement apartment a few blocks from 124 East Eighty-Fifth Street. He was ten years younger than my mother and at least as handsome as my father, maybe even handsomer in a movie star way. What I liked about Jeffrey was that there was no difference between the way he talked to children and the way he talked to adults. He had a parrot that sat on his shoulder and said, "Polly wants a cracker!" I was allowed to feed the parrot pieces of cracker. Jeffrey was having an affair with my mother, but I didn't know. When I was in my twenties, he told me that the only time my mother had an orgasm during intercourse was when, during a dinner party, she made love with him under a glass table. I wished that Jeffrey had not told me this. I am not sure I believe it anyway. My mother relished her own hauteur and rarely let down her mask of reserve. My father enjoyed telling about the time he came to see my mother at Eighty-Fifth Street and discovered that Jeffrey Potter was hiding in a closet. My mother had feared that it was George Senseney whom she had heard climbing the stairs. Both men made a hasty exit.
Jeffrey's older brother, an alcoholic painter named Fuller, was an even better friend. He and his wife, Cindy, had two children, Benny, who was one of two Dalton boys I had a crush on, and Mary Barton, who was, for all the years I lived in New York, my closest friend. In 1950, Fuller Potter became a drinking companion of Jackson Pollock and, inspired by Pollock, he turned to action painting, went to Mexico, and brushed wild strokes of paint onto petates(straw mats) instead of onto canvas.
The Potters lived in a ground floor apartment a few blocks east of us in a neighborhood that was a little bit slummy. Benny had friends from nearby buildings with whom he made carts out of wood attached to roller skate wheels. Mary Barton was feisty: she made the boys give us turns. There were almost no cars, and if one came by, we just drove our carts over to the curb. Mary Barton taught me hopscotch and how to jump rope. Thin, small, and agile, she could do double Dutch. When I tried, the rope got tangled around my legs, and I prayed that Benny and his friends wouldn't see how clumsy I was.
I spent a lot of nights at the Potters' apartment. Benny would turn the radio on to crime stories, and he and Mary Barton and I would lie on our stomachs in a big bed listening to the clunk, clunk, clunkof footsteps as a murderer approached a victim. I had to block my ears. Mary Barton pretended to be terrified, just for fun. Lying near Benny was exciting. I held in my stomach when he was around, but I do not think that he noticed I was there.
The friends that my mother saw most often were Zizi Sversky and his two "wives," Moute and Colette, both French and, I think, sisters. They lived next door in a building about eight feet from my bedroom window. Zizi played the piano and held musical evenings to which our mother sometimes took Blair and me. When we entered Zizi's apartment, he would kiss our mother on both cheeks and exclaim "Oh my beautiful Ondine!" My mother loved being called Ondine. She thought of herself as some kind of nymph or goddess. During these evenings, there was nothing to do and nothing to eat. I had to sit in one of the straight-backed chairs set out in two rows and not wiggle or make noise. To relieve my boredom, I focused my eyes on one small thing and then on another. It might be the corner of a Persian rug, the spout of a samovar, or the shine on wineglasses. Each detail was packed with mystery.
When George went to Zizi's with my mother and Blair and I stayed home, they didn't get a babysitter. After all, I could look out my bedroom window and see into Zizi's kitchen window. In fact, my mother never hired babysitters. I guess she trusted Blair and me not to get into trouble. It was fine if she was at Zizi's, but when she went other places I was scared. The five flights of stairs that led to our apartment were full of danger. A burglar could come down or up the fire escape and climb in through the kitchen window, or he could climb the alley wall and break my bedroom window. Alone in my bed, I would listen. Any noise sounded like a murderer's approach. I didn't dare move for fear that the rustle of bedcovers would give away my whereabouts.
It was not just murderers and burglars that scared me. It was wolves, packs of wolves that could rush out from under my bed. Sometimes, in order to get into the hall, I climbed from the top of one piece of furniture to the next without touching the floor. If I put my foot on the floor, the wolves would grab my ankle. Blair was afraid of wolves, too, especially the wolves under our claw-foot bathtub. When those wolves threatened to rush out at us, we would climb from the bathtub to the top of the sink, then onto the toilet from which we could leap out into the hall. One night when my mother and George were out, my crib broke. I do not know why I was still sleeping in a crib. Maybe there wasn't enough money to buy a bed. I must have been too heavy for the crib, because one end of the metal frame that held up my mattress fell to the floor and my mattress became a ramp with a pack of wolves rushing up to kill me. I got out of the crib, ran down the hall, and tried to open Blair's door. It wouldn't open so I screamed for her to let me in. No answer. I could not believe that my sister kept me out when wolves were about a foot away, panting with their shiny wet tongues hanging out over their teeth.
One way to avoid being scared was not to stay in bed. When my mother and George went out, Blair and I got up and played in the hall, which was so narrow that we could climb its walls by putting one foot and one hand on each wall. Our favorite game was called Wump. George taught it to us. We each covered ourselves with a blanket and, starting at opposite ends of the long hall, we crawled toward each other saying, "Wump! Wump!" When we bumped into each other, we pushed and pushed, blind as moles. Another game was tickling each other's backs. We made up stories to go with the tickling¡ªa princess walking in the woods in search of something, or maybe our fingers traced the path of a mother rabbit and her bunnies investigating a vegetable garden. The imaginary footsteps made the tickle. Sometimes we lay on the bed they bought for me after my crib broke. If we laughed hard enough with our heads hanging near the floor, we thought we would fly.
George taught us other games as well. Maybe he liked playing with us because he rarely got to see his teenage son, Conrad, who went to the Kent boarding school in Connecticut. Also, our mother hated games. She only liked to read. In one game George taught us, one person drags her index finger in circles around the other person's palm, while saying, "Round and round the garden goes the teddy bear." Then she walks her fingers up the arm and into the armpit, saying: "Step, step, step, step, and tickle you under there!" In another game George cut a row of sharp teeth out of a piece of white paper, stuck it under his upper lip and chased us down the hall growling like a wolf. Blair and I each tried to get ahead so that we would not be eaten first.
Once when they came home from a party, our mother and George caught Blair and me playing in the hall. George warned us that the next time they went out he would put a piece of Scotch tape on both our doors. If the tapes came loose, he would know that we had left our rooms. Blair and I hatched a plan: I was to climb on my bureau and jump out of the little window that led from my bedroom to the hall. Blair would meet me there. Later I could re-stick the tape on Blair's door and climb back into my room through the window. The problem was that I was too small to reach the window from the hall floor. When they came home and George saw me rushing to my room, he stood in the doorway blocking my mother's view and giving me time to vanish. George was on my side, I thought.
George Senseney was, like all of my mother's husbands except the fifth one, tall, dark, and handsome. The aura of power and danger around him was magnetic. Blair and I liked him except when he was mad at our mother. This was usually in the evening after he'd had cocktails and then wine at dinner. I didn't know it then, but George was an alcoholic. He almost never got mad at Blair and me. He was fond of us, actually too fond. Asked what it was like to live with Lybie, he told a close friend of my mother's, the photographer Hans Namuth, that Lybie was wonderful, but the little girls were fantastic.