Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir Read online

  There is no one in the United States with the name Tyler except my brother. His name, like autism, is also rampant today. But then, my mother was psychic.

  The second response to crisis follows immediately upon the heels of the first; my mother assigns blame and then won’t forgive the guilty party even if it means carrying a grudge to the grave.

  The third response is for her to light up a Raleigh then light up a second while stamping out the first until the ash tray is overflowing.

  Until I am in first grade, I have no idea that when you are hurt, some people have the urge to hug and comfort you. In the first grade, my fingers get caught in the girls’ lavatory door and my teacher, Miss Wells, takes me in her arms and hugs me to her big bosom. I don’t understand what this is, a body surrounding mine, pressing sympathy from one heart into another. But my mother is the prototype of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  That is what I hear my aunts say to each other: Florence is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They are familiar with such verging because it is the fifties when women were either on the verge or actually having one. Two of my aunts have nervous breakdowns themselves. When I am five, my Auntie Mary, my mother’s only unmarried sister, has a nervous breakdown and then gets shock treatments after which she comes and lives with us for three months. She sleeps on a cot in the living room. My Auntie Kekkie has one too; first she goes missing and then my father’s brother, Uncle Johnnie, finds her behind the furnace and she won’t come out. He calls my father to come help. My father assesses the situation and calls for a doctor. The doctor sends my father and Uncle Johnnie out for all the ice they can get. Then he has them dump the ice in the bathtub, add cold water almost to the top, whereupon my aunt is wrestled into the tub and submerged. (Perhaps there wasn’t such a thing as a shot of tranquilizer back then.) Once subdued, Auntie Kekkie goes to the hospital and comes back a month later all better.

  As young as I am, when I am burned by the toaster I know it isn’t my father’s fault. I know it isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s the toaster’s fault and the toaster didn’t do it on purpose because it’s an appliance. After I’m burned, my father smears the WEA on my calf with Vaseline and then he makes me smile by lighting up a Dutch Masters and blowing smoke rings into which I carefully insert my index finger. His record is six smoke rings from one inhalation on the cigar. Sometimes, a friend will give him a special treat, a cigar from Havana. He passes all his exotic cigar bands along to me for my treasure box, which is actually a humidor distributed on the fiftieth anniversary of the Dutch Masters Company. I think the picture on the humidor—a lot of men in a jolly group and sporting pointy beards—are Jesus’s apostles only wearing pilgrim suits.

  My father tells me the girl and boy on my prize Havana band are Romeo and Juliet.

  He says, In Cuban, Mickey, that’s Romeo y Julieta.

  He tells me his rendition of the Shakespeare tragedy except he changes the ending and Romeo and Juliet get married and live happily ever after. I picture them dancing the polka at their wedding. I pretend my name is Juliet. After all, I have an uncle named Romeo, one of my mother’s brothers. When I’m an adult, I watch Dick Schaap interview Joe Namath on TV. Dick asks Joe what movies he’s seen recently. Joe says, Some broad dragged me to see Romeo and Juliet. I didn’t like it.

  Why? asks Dick.

  Because it was so sad.

  There’s a pause, and then Dick asks, You didn’t know how it would end, did you, Joe?

  No.

  Poor Joe. Poor me; when I read the play in high school, I figure I know how it will end, my father’s version.

  A few days after I am burned by the toaster, I am sitting in the closet with a flashlight aimed at my leg, enjoying the delicious solitary pleasure of peeling the paper-thin scab off my skin. I look at the pieces of scab in the palm of my hand. They are me, but they are no longer me, a phenomenon I wonder at. I save the scab in my humidor. For the next few days I will have raw pink letters on my leg—WEA.

  Each morning after my father stokes the furnace, I stand in the doorway and wave good-bye to him. He drives off in his black Ford coupe to the factory where he will keep many furnaces stoked all at once. He is a heat treater in the hardening room. The factory, the Abbott Ball Company, turns out millions of ball bearings punched from steel wire an inch in diameter, which are heat-treated in the furnaces and then polished to a high shine in huge vats of teeming chemicals, where they bounce up and down like Mexican jumping beans.

  The Abbott Ball Company also produces ball bearings the size of poppy seeds punched from twenty-four-karat gold wire the diameter of a silk thread. My godmother, Auntie Doris, works at the Abbott Ball Company as an inspector. When she has to inspect the tiny gold ball bearings, she must be guarded and then inspected herself. The inspector knows Auntie Doris isn’t a thief, but all the same he has to check very carefully under her fingernails, where the ball bearings might lodge without her even knowing it.

  Auntie Doris studied opera when she was a girl. At all our family weddings she sings the “Ave Maria.” (For my wedding, I ask her to sing the Miriam Makeba hit, “Kumbaya”; I have returned from Peace Corps service in an African country and I think it’s an appropriate choice. But Auntie Doris sings the “Ave Maria.”) As a child, I am convinced my godmother is an actual angel with her golden voice and the stray golden seeds lodged beneath her nails.

  Auntie Doris is actually my cousin, but she is twenty years older than me so I think she is my aunt. No one corrects this. I do not know that she is my mother’s third oldest sister’s daughter. My mother’s third oldest sister, Auntie Verna, whose real name was Zephyrina, died of breast cancer when she was in her early forties. My Auntie Mary, who is sister number three, tells me Verna was in so much pain she would lie on the floor and ask family members to jump on her. The pain of being jumped on is bearable while the cancer pain is not; the former takes her mind off the latter. I understand, then, why Tyler bites his wrist.

  I STAND in the doorway and wave good-bye to my father until I can’t see his black Ford anymore. One day, when I am three years old, I stand in the doorway whimpering because I do not manage to wake myself up in time to watch him feed the stove, or feed me my piece of toast, or worst of all, wave good-bye. He is gone and I must face the day without the ritual of his attention, which means a day without any attention whatsoever. It’s winter, and my mother comes downstairs with a sweater wrapped around her.

  Mickey, get in here and shut the door.

  I don’t move.

  Get in here, Mary-Ann! She calls me Mary-Ann instead of Mickey when she is angry.

  I still don’t move. I am hoping my father forgot something and will come back and I don’t want to take a chance of missing him. But it must be a morning when my mother is especially close to the verge of a nervous breakdown because she grabs my hand and yanks me in the door so hard my upper arm breaks. This is a pain I don’t remember.

  Mickey, age 4, in kindergarten

  What I do remember is my mother standing in the doctor’s office arguing with him that my arm is broken.

  He keeps saying, You can’t break a child’s arm by yanking her by the hand.

  My mother says, I’m telling you, I heard it snap.

  The broken arm is suddenly his fault. That is, until my father arrives, running into the examining room, Freddie Ravenel right behind him. Freddie is the colored man my father hired to sweep the floors at the Abbott Ball Company. The first colored man ever hired there. My father says on many occasions, Freddie Ravenel is the best man I’ve got. When my father becomes foreman, he promotes Freddie to stoker. My father’s real name is Maurice, which his family pronounces Morris, but everyone calls him Yutch. Freddie Ravenel, though, insists on calling him Mr. Mawse because Freddie feels it’s a due respect and my father can’t convince him otherwise.

  Freddie is so grateful for the job he is devoted to my father. When the news of my broken arm reaches the Abbott Ball Company, Freddie insists on
driving my father to the doctor’s office because he can see how upset my father is.

  My mother’s arms are folded across her chest. She says to my father, You didn’t wave good-bye to her.

  This is her explanation of how my arm came to be broken. I won’t be waving good-bye to my father for some time. At least not with my right arm.

  The doctor quits arguing with my mother and takes an X ray. Then he mixes a pot of plaster of paris. (In those days, there was no such thing as going to a specialist in orthopedics.) While he is soaking the strips of gauze, he is distracted by my brother, who is drawing a line of B-52s on the examining room wall.

  The doctor turns to my mother. Can you not do something about that?

  My mother says to my father, You do something.

  Freddie Ravenel, like everyone else, knows my mother is on the verge of a nervous breakdown so he goes to my brother and says, Tyler, come stand over here by Freddie. Doctor say not to draw on his wall.

  Tyler looks up in the vicinity of Freddie Ravenel, not directly into his eyes because that is something autistic people are unable to do, smiles his perfect Cheshire grin, and says, Blackie.

  He loves Freddie Ravenel, who rolls his eyes, slaps his knee, and laughs heartily. Then Freddie Ravenel says to me, Don’t you worry, Junior Miss, you be fine.

  His words have a similar effect to Miss Wells’s hug.

  When I’m an adult attending a dinner party, I’m sitting next to a specialist from Yale–New Haven Hospital, a child abuse expert. He is one of the doctors who determines that Woody Allen’s behavior toward his three-year-old daughter is inappropriate rather than sexually abusive. I find myself telling him about my mother breaking my arm.

  He says to me, It’s an accident when a child is yanked and her wrist breaks. But the humerus? You were treated very roughly. Today, that injury would be categorized as a direct result of physical abuse. The physician would be required by law to notify the police.

  I say, My mother didn’t really mean to break my arm.

  He says, Oh?

  She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  He’s quiet and then he says, No intent then?

  That’s right.

  He says, A nervous breakdown isn’t a clinical term. In most cases, it’s a psychotic episode of paranoia.

  Really?

  Yes, but the lay term conveys what a lay person might observe in the patient.

  Then he says, Was it a wake-up call for your mother? Injuring you like that?

  Yes.

  She never hurt you again?

  She never laid a hand on me.

  He says, Sometimes, that’s the case. I’m glad. He pauses before he says, Did she have a nervous breakdown?

  No.

  I’m glad for that, too. Then he says, My own mother had a nervous breakdown.

  I say, Did you find her behind the furnace?

  No. Up in the apple tree.

  I’m sorry.

  Thank you.

  I don’t explain to the doctor the reason my mother is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Explaining Tyler would overly monopolize the man and he wouldn’t be able to speak to the woman on his right.

  WHEN TYLER is eight and I am three, sporting a cast from hand to shoulder, he has over five hundred books on the subject of WWII because he is obsessed with the war; his books cover battles, defense, weaponry. My mother says to the child psychiatrist at the Boston Children’s Hospital, who deems him retarded, If he’s retarded, how come he’s reading Arms and the Covenant by Mr. Winston Churchill?

  The doctor gives her a withering look. But my mother will not wither. She raises her chin and storms out of the child psychiatrist’s office. This is how she fights people, storming out on them because, of course, she’s powerless.

  My mother learns she is powerless as a young woman at the Aetna Life Insurance Company where she is successful at a difficult job—processing data at a time when it is accomplished with a pencil. But this is during the Great Depression and the rule is that female employees are immediately fired upon marrying. Married men need work to support their families; how selfish for a woman to take up a job merely for frivolity.

  However, when my mother is about to get married she is asked to keep the marriage a secret because the championship Aetna girls’ basketball team is undefeated and they have been asked to take part in an exhibition game against the girls’ Olympic basketball team. My mother, a fine athlete and the youngest member of a national championship bowling team, is Aetna’s center, which today would translate to point guard. My mother agrees to keep her marriage a secret and gets to play in the big game. The center for the Olympic team is Babe Didrikson. The Aetna girls win. (Connecticut girls have been playing great basketball for a long, long time.)

  Then my mother is fired.

  two

  ON THE OTHER SIDE of the country, Robert Nelson Malm was born in Walla Walla, Washington, on November 23, 1923. His mother died eight days later. There were three versions as to what happened to his father: One, he took off never to be heard from again; two, he killed himself; three, he was no good and why should he be expected to care for his motherless new son and two daughters? He was never seen or heard from again.

  The children’s aunt took possession of the baby and his two sisters and brought them to her home in Oakland, California. Four months afterward, she either felt she was unable to provide the care they required, or maybe decided she didn’t want them after all. So she placed an ad in the Rotarians’ magazine saying she had three orphaned children available for adoption and a Mr. and Mrs. Malm responded to her ad. They chose to take the younger of the two daughters and brought her home with them to San Francisco. The little girl was five, and she cried and cried for her baby brother so the couple decided they might as well go back and get the other two children.

  The aunt told them she was sorry but the older daughter had been taken. The baby was still with her though. Would you want him? The Malms took him. They named him Robert Nelson Malm and called him Bob.

  Bob never saw his oldest sister again, never found out what became of her, and was not told about his adoption until he was arrested at the age of twelve for molesting a little girl who lived on his street.

  three

  Joseph and Cleasse Deslauriers with the first six of their dozen children, 1906

  MY FRENCH GRANDFATHER, my mother’s father, immigrated to Hartford from Quebec in 1910 with his wife and six children, making a brief stop in Vermont, where the sixth baby, fifth daughter, was born. The French Canadian diminutive for grandfather is Pipier, but we grandchildren, who are prevented from speaking French since we’re Americans, call him Pippi. He is a Working Stiff. Pippi mans the assembly line at the Royal; he puts typewriter keys into typewriters. (I will grow up to be a writer but I do not read anything into that coincidence as I am not psychic.)

  He and my grandmother, who will die long before I am born, have six more children. My grandmother gives birth every other year for twenty-four years except for a four-year gap between sister number six, Auntie Corana, and my Uncle Romeo because, as a Canadian citizen, Pippi is drafted by the king to go to Africa and fight in the Boer War. When I am seven, I learn in school that Canada has no king.

  I come home and say, Ma, how could Pippi have been drafted by the king of Canada? Canada doesn’t have a king.

  My mother says, after blowing two streams of Raleigh smoke out of her nostrils signaling irritation, The king of England.

  She means Queen Elizabeth’s father, who died a few years earlier.

  I can’t dope that out but the tone my mother takes with me teaches me to be content to just absorb what people say, and never question an adult pronouncement. So does my catechism priest, who tells us children that the greatest sin a child is capable of is to question his parents; to ask why is a direct refusal to obey the Fourth Commandment, Honor thy Father and thy Mother. So I absorb rather than question, and then go back to reading comic books.

&nbs
p; Tyler and I love comic books. His favorite is Blackhawk, which I enjoy, and mine is Archie, which Tyler never so much as glances at. In Archie comics, unlike in the real world, the brunette girl, Veronica, is the beauty; Betty, the blond, is ordinary. The brunette even has the pretty name; the blond, the plain name. My hair is black like Veronica’s. Every Saturday morning my father goes out to buy groceries and when he returns, he brings my brother and me one comic book apiece. My father, not my mother, does the grocery shopping and when he comes home she says, I wanted the large size peas.

  Same tone as with, The king of England.

  My French grandmother’s name is Cleasse. One day, when I come to have a daughter, I want to name her Cleasse because I think it is a profound name. But my husband says that when our daughter reaches middle school, all the kids will call her Clitoris. I do have a cousin named after my grandmother, the daughter of my Auntie Yvonne. Cleasse II is ten years older than me.

  Mother (second from left, front row) and her seven sisters

  I ask her if her school chums called her Clitoris when she was growing up and she tells me no one ever heard of a clitoris when she was growing up. She says, They called me Ass.

  My French grandmother died of having babies. My cousin Marietta passes this information along to me. Her mother is the eighth and final daughter, Auntie Margaret, my mother’s best friend. When Auntie Margaret is sixteen, she is my mother’s maid of honor. When Marietta is sixteen, she is mine. I love Auntie Margaret particularly because she introduces me to politics. She is chairman of the Democratic Ward in the south end of Hartford. When I am seven she brings me to a meeting. Instead of going into the building where the meeting is taking place, she parks under a tree away from the streetlight. She is wearing a babushka pulled low over her forehead. I want to wear a babushka too. She figures no one will know who I am but she lets me wear one of her ratty old babushkas, which she comes up with after rummaging around on the car floor. Auntie Margaret gives me a notebook and pencil and whispers names to me as people file into the building for the meeting. I write down the names. I ask her who the people are.