Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir Read online

  She starts chuckling and then we chuckle too, and all we ever end up doing is giggling together so Miss Bowie tells us she is seeing no progress and if she doesn’t see progress in another week, she will have to abandon the experiment and try something else. Maybe she will ask Mr. Freedman if Miss Collins, a teacher who knows some Spanish, can tutor Magdalena with her lessons after school in her own language until she learns enough English to manage and therefore not fall behind in her studies. (Miss Bowie’s logic, based on experience, is the practical, educationally sound philosophy behind bilingual education before it became a political football.)

  Gail, Susan, and I huddle with Magdalena and tell her with a lot of sign language and props that our English lessons with her get us out of extra workbook assignments. Therefore, we must make progress. Magdalena nods. She understands. We clamor up to Miss Bowie and tell her Magdalena can’t talk English yet but she understands English. Miss Bowie is skeptical. I turn toward Magdalena, scrunched down in her seat.

  I say, Magdalena, stand up.

  Magdalena senses in my voice that I really need her to do this. She stands.

  Gail is so enthusiastic she doesn’t really think before she commands: Magdalena, lie down!

  Magdalena collapses and sprawls on the floor.

  Miss Bowie says, Susan, do not tell Magdalena to roll over. Then Miss Bowie says, Magdalena dear, please get up.

  Magdalena gets back in her chair.

  The class cheers except for three die-hard bullies who laugh at us, and try out the new word they’ve picked up: Spic.

  Miss Bowie sends them to Mr. Freedman, which is exactly what she does on the first day of school when they say, regarding Stonewall, I ain’t sittin’ next to no nigger.

  Out on the playground after lunch, Gail, Susan, and I play jump rope with Magdalena. One day, Susan is absent so we need a fourth but no one will play with the spic. It hasn’t taken long for the majority of the Mary M. Hooker students to learn to hate, which is the theme of a song from the Broadway hit musical South Pacific—Miss Bowie makes a point to play “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” from the original cast recording on our classroom record player.

  Gail asks Irene to jump rope with us. Irene is so shy no one ever asks her to play with them. She protests, not because Magdalena is a spic, but because she is shy. Gail does not give up and Irene finally agrees.

  Magdalena can’t speak English but she sure can jump rope. She is an expert at ducking in, taking the transfer of the rope hand-to-hand without missing a beat, and then easing the other person out. We assume kids who live in Puerto Rico must jump rope all day long. We already know Irene can jump rope because, often, she brings a jump rope to school and jumps way over in the corner of the playground by herself. Once Magdalena has proven herself, I—as leader of this particular pack—suggest we go on to Double Dutch. We tie Gail’s rope together with Irene’s, and then take a minute to practice. Once we’re in tune, we take up a classic jump-roping chant while Gail and Magdalena are first to man the ropes, and I the first to jump. We chant:

  Pom, pom, pom the girls are marching,

  Calling Irene to my door,

  Irene is the one who is gonna have the fun

  So we don’t need Mary-Ann anymore.

  I skip out and Irene skips in and we chant some more:

  Pom, pom, pom the girls are marching,

  Calling Magdalena to my door,

  Magdalena is the one who is gonna have the fun

  And we don’t need Irene anymore.

  Magdalena passes the ropes to me, jumps in, Irene skips out, and on we go chanting and jumping until the bell rings. As we coil up our ropes, it dawns on us that Magdalena has been singing the Double Dutch chant. We dash back into the classroom and announce joyously, Miss Bowie! Magdalena can speak English!

  We shove Magdalena in front of us and Gail, Irene, and I start chanting, Pom, pom, pom, the girls are marching . . . But up goes Magdalena’s hand to cover her mouth and down goes her head. Giggle, giggle, giggle.

  We finish the song without her and Miss Bowie can see how disappointed Gail and I are so she says, Well, at least you girls got Irene to singing. Irene smiles shyly.

  The next day everything changes. The world will be tampered with and won’t ever be the same again.

  twenty

  ON DECEMBER 9, an overcast day in the mid-forties with evening rain predicted, Bob Malm left Cedarcrest Sanatorium to head into downtown Hartford for the premier of Gun Belt, starring George Montgomery and Tab Hunter. Bob had seen to getting Wednesdays off because Wednesday was the day Hartford movie theaters changed shows.

  As he walked to the bus stop in the center of Newington, he was picked up by a pair of fellow workers. He told them he was going to Hartford to catch a movie after attending to a little business downtown. They dropped him at the bus stop, where he only had to wait a few minutes. His bus left Newington and traveled to Hartford via New Britain Avenue, past Hillside Avenue, my neighborhood stop, past the Beaufort Street neighborhood, where Bob had gotten off two weeks earlier, and on to Main Street, Hartford.

  Bob stepped off in front of Fox’s, and went to the credit department to settle a bill, which he claimed he had already paid. The credit department agreed there’d been a mistake, apologized to Bob, and he went on his way. He needed white undershirts, the uniform of dishwashers. Rather than buy them at Fox’s, he hunted out places along Main Street that sold the cheaper brands, the five-and-ten’s. Woolworth’s, Grant’s, and Kresge’s. But he couldn’t get the price he’d counted on and decided to wait for a sale. Besides, his movie would start in fifteen minutes.

  Walking south on Main Street he took a right one block from Fox’s, onto Allyn Street, where he went into the Allyn Theater. He didn’t catch the first movie on the bill but was just in time for the main feature, Gun Belt.

  twenty-one

  Mickey in navy blue coat, Easter Sunday, 1954

  ON DECEMBER 9, Miss Bowie’s fifth grade concludes the study of electricity with a field trip to the Hartford Electric Light Company. Hartford was the first city in the United States to have electricity for all the residents. I don’t learn this in the fifth grade but rather in high school while touring Mark Twain’s house on Farmington Avenue. Hartford is a very chi-chi place at the time electricity becomes a practical way to bring light to homes, and Hartford’s influential, elite citizens—not only Mark and his next-door neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, but others like Samuel Colt, the inventor of the repeating handgun, and Oliver Winchester, whose company, the New Haven Arms, outproduces Colt when it comes to rifles. They see to it that their city is first to be wired up. Hartford is electrically illuminated while Manhattan still depends on gas, and Connecticut produces more guns than any other place in the world. (This latter is still true although the manufacturing end of the business is outsourced.)

  All the kids in Miss Bowie’s class look forward to the field trip because it marks the end of studying not only science but everything else, since the trip also signals the beginning of daily rehearsals for the school Christmas pageant. And every afternoon we will build sets and paint posters. Our principal, Albert I. Freedman, is Jewish, so our school’s Christmas pageants always feature a dusty cardboard menorah stuck off to the side of the living crèche.

  Except for Mary, only boys are in the living crèche. The boys get to be Joseph; they get to be the wise men; they get to be about five dozen shepherds. The most beautiful girl in the sixth grade plays Mary. I am always chosen to be one of the narrators, standing in the dark in front of a microphone reading from Matthew about how there is no room at the inn. None of us know what an inn is aside from the fact that there is never any room in it. I imagine it to be a restaurant with a long line at the door because once a year at Chalker Beach we go to Luigi’s Restaurant in the center of Old Saybrook. One year, Luigi says he doesn’t have any room so we go to the docks at Old Saybrook Point, stare at Katharine Hepburn’s house in case she comes out, and then go back
to Luigi’s where Luigi has now made room for us.

  We also don’t know a stable is a barn—imagine it more of a zoo—otherwise we would not be so enamored of Joseph.

  I do my narration job thinking the whole time that I am not even pretty enough to be included in the one other role for girls—the Heavenly Host. Before I come to learn the many meanings and grammatical permutations of the word host, I think host is short for hostess. There is no room in the inn for Mary and Joseph, and there is no room for all the hostesses on the stage, so they face the audience in a long line on the floor in front of the stage. In front of me. They each hold flashlights inside of toilet paper rolls painted red to look like Christmas candles. Illuminated from below, their faces are ghoul-like, their nostrils appearing as black walnuts. This means that many of the kindergarteners sitting up front on the floor have to be taken out, traumatized.

  On an overcast morning, Miss Bowie’s class sets off on the field trip, piles into the chartered bus, and zips through Hartford passing through neighborhoods we’ve never seen before.

  Once inside the vast electric plant, we fifth-graders are led to a dingy corner where a man sits at a desk, his space cordoned off by two sheets of plywood braced to the floor. This is the vice president. When we first hear our guide will be the vice president, we are thinking along the lines of the new vice president of the United States. But instead of Richard Nixon, we get a fat, pockmarked guy in overalls. Clean overalls, though, so as to differentiate him from the scores of other men wandering around outside the plywood purportedly bringing electricity to our homes.

  All thirty of us fifth-graders, plus Miss Bowie, crowd into the vice president’s cordoned-off corner within the plywood. He winks at Miss Bowie a lot while he explains things about electricity to us, but we pay no attention because our eyes are riveted on a girlie calendar nailed up on one of the pieces of plywood behind him. We fidget and snicker and elbow each other. The vice president thinks we are laughing at his jokes and he keeps snickering, too, besides winking at Miss Bowie. I guess the calendar is a fixture to him so its existence probably doesn’t register except when he turns to a new month.

  The pinup girl for December is wearing a Santa hat and is in profile, one knee up on a chair, her hands stretched out holding the back of it. She is naked except for a filmy nightgown with white fur around the cuffs and hem. Her huge jars are shaped like torpedoes, a piece of ammunition featured prominently in Jane’s Fighting Ships. I can’t take my eyes off them, wondering how a flat human chest can, over a short period of time, develop such incredible appendages.

  The vice president and Miss Bowie lead us through the plant. We are bored out of our minds, biding our time till lunch. Shy Irene will be my lunch partner; we will sit across from each other. Miss Bowie has paired everyone up in hopes that no one will get lost when we are turned loose for half an hour at noon to eat and then play cards. Lunch will be undertaken in a dingy room on a long wooden table that is gouged and stained. We climb onto benches on either side of the table across from our partners and take out our lunch bags. The Hartford Electric Light Company provides the milk, which is warm. There is extended talk of puking.

  Except when she is sitting, Irene looms over all of us. She is tall for her age and a year older than everybody else besides. I have come to understand that Irene and I have something in common—we both shouldn’t be in fifth grade. I am nine though everyone else is ten. This is because my mother took me to the principal of the Charter Oak Terrace Extension School when I was four and had me recite the names of all the states and their capitals. This was to show that I should go to school a year early. The principal agreed to the plan. Irene, on the other hand, repeats first grade, the dreaded result of not keeping up. Which means she is eleven instead of ten. And when you stay back, you’re not only shy, you’re humiliated and probably depressed, the latter a word no one knows in the fifties. Instead we say, blue. I remember my Auntie Yvonne saying to my mother, I’ve been feeling blue lately. I’m eavesdropping and wishing Auntie Yvonne were feeling blue right then so I could watch her skin become a brilliant aquamarine.

  Irene’s big dark eyes are exactly like Loretta Young’s, except Loretta’s sparkle with merriment and Irene’s are lackluster. I understand completely that the embarrassment I often feel about such things as improperly buttoned dresses and having a crazy brother even doesn’t hold a candle to Irene’s shame.

  I finagle my way into sitting between my two best friends, Gail and Susan. Magdalena Rodriguez from Puerto Rico isn’t on the field trip because she doesn’t have the two dollars we are required to bring in to Miss Bowie to pay for our chartered bus. On the day the money is due and Magdalena doesn’t have it, Miss Bowie goes to the intercom and calls Miss Collins, a second grade teacher.

  Think you can translate a note into Spanish for me? she asks. We hear Miss Collins’s scratchy voice: I’ll give it a whirl. Then Miss Bowie scribbles a note and selects me to bring it to Miss Collins. At the end of the day a new note comes back. Miss Bowie gives it to Magdalena and says to her, For your madre.

  The next day Miss Bowie goes over to Magdalena and asks quietly, Did you give your madre the note? Magdalena nods. What did she say?

  She say no.

  Miss Bowie pats her shoulder and says, Magdalena, I think your madre will let you go on next year’s field trip when you are a bigger girl.

  Miss Bowie does not correct Magdalena’s grammar; her feeling being one step at a time.

  IRENE AND I both have bananas in our lunch bag. We have a race to see which of us can eat our bananas the fastest. Gail, who wears a Bulova wristwatch, times us. Irene beats me by three seconds but Susan protests.

  Susan says, Irene swallowed after Mary-Ann’s last swallow.

  I haven’t a competitive bone in my body so I say, It doesn’t matter who won.

  One of the boys informs me that I’m actually a sore sport.

  I say, Okay, Irene won. Then I say to the boy, Mind your own business, Bozo.

  Gail says, Yeah.

  Susan says to him, So just shut up.

  Irene doesn’t say anything. Instead she takes out a bag of Oreos and shares them with us, even the Bozo.

  Irene’s cookies are the part of our field trip we enjoy most.

  The bus arrives back at Mary M. Hooker School after the final bell. Mr. Freedman has to call everyone’s parents to tell them we will be arriving home late. My mother decides not to wait for me, to leave Tyler alone since he’s sleeping anyway, so no one picks up the phone at my house. She has put a pillow over the phone to muffle the ring; taking the phone off the hook is no longer the solution to risking Tyler’s being awakened from his daytime sleep because in the primitive telephone system of the fifties, this screws up a lot of lines in addition to ours and we get a call from the phone company telling us not to do that.

  I say to Mr. Freedman, My mother works.

  No one picks up the phone at Irene’s either. Irene says softly, My mother works, too.

  I meet Irene’s Loretta Young eyes.

  Mr. Freedman says, Who watches you girls after school?

  Irene says, My brother.

  Your brother?

  Irene speaks more softly yet: Fred. He’s in high school. He’s probably outside.

  Mr. Freedman looks to me. Mary-Ann?

  My brother.

  Is your brother in high school?

  He’s fourteen.

  Mr. Freedman doesn’t know my brother is crazy and not allowed to go to high school or any other school. This is before we become a litigious society so no one has ever thought to sue the Hartford Board of Education for denying Tyler his constitutional right to a free education. In the fifties, no one goes around applying the Constitution to life.

  Mr. Freedman lets Irene and me walk home by ourselves. Irene heads down the hill to Charter Oak Terrace and I head up toward Nilan Street.

  That night, when I am getting ready for bed, a dog down the street won’t stop barking. Tyler is up
stairs in his bed. Soon he will wake up for the night. Just as my father gets into his jacket in order to go out and find the appropriate neighbor and tell him to stifle his dog, the dog stops barking. Good. Now Tyler won’t wake up biting his wrist before he’s even had breakfast.

  twenty-two

  ON DECEMBER 9, Bob Malm left the Allyn at six forty-five and had dinner at the White Tower restaurant, a burger joint. Bob finished his meal, walked south on Main Street, then took a right on Asylum Street. Crossing streets to the west and heading south between them, he was aimed in the general direction of Newington though he could have chosen a more direct route, staying on Main until he reached New Britain Avenue. But he preferred residential areas, streets packed with quiet little homes on eighth-acre city lots, full of children.

  He walked across the Trinity College campus, along Fraternity Row, until he reached Zion Street, bordering Trinity on the west. He strolled along Zion until he saw a lighted storefront just down Ward Street. It was the Lincoln Dairy.

  He went in. There were no children there, no young girls. He had a cup of coffee. Maybe he sat on Tyler’s stool.

  He paid for the coffee, left the dairy, and continued down Ward until he came out at Hillside Avenue, the street he’d been looking for. He took a left on Hillside and headed south knowing he would eventually come to New Britain Avenue, his bus route. He knew there was a bus stop at the corner of Hillside and New Britain Avenue, my neighborhood stop, two and a half blocks from where I lived on Nilan Street.

  Directly across New Britain Avenue from the stop itself on the northeast corner was a drugstore where, as a teenager, my friends and I would order a soapsuds, a concoction made of milk, syrup, and soda water, known as an egg cream in New York City.

  Across Hillside and kitty-corner to the bus stop was a small grocery store called Jack’s. Its real name was the United Food Store, but no one knew that. The owner’s name was Jack and so the store was called Jack’s. Every year Jack strung a clothesline from his ceiling. Hanging from the clothesline were the pictures of the Miss Rheingold contestants. This was a promotion for Rheingold Beer and you had to be eighteen to vote for Miss Rheingold but Jack lets us kids vote anyway.