Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir Read online

  Since the odor of garlic is carried by your bloodstream for twenty-four hours, I go to school in the morning with not only my breath smelling like garlic, but my skin and especially, the roots of my hair. Though severely ostracized by my classmates holding their noses dramatically, I don’t care because the bagna cauda is worth it.

  Paul doesn’t care either.

  One Monday, my father decides to expand on this tradition of a yearly feast. We will have a second winter treat. He will make trippa.

  I say, What’s trippa? unable to roll the r the way he does.

  It’s the cow’s stomach.

  I think, Uh-oh.

  When my father unwraps it from the butcher paper, it looks exactly the way I imagine a cow’s stomach might look, a great white thing which is flat on one side and sort of honey-combed on the other. My father takes the next day off from work so he can watch the trippa, which has to be simmered for a long time in the same pot we take every summer to the beach to boil lobsters. He starts simmering the cow’s stomach after breakfast.

  Uncle Guido arrives just at five-thirty having rushed home from his job on the line at the Fuller Brush to grab Paul. Paul and I watch with anticipation as my father lifts the heavy organ out of the pot and plops it on the platter we use for the Thanksgiving turkey. He cuts a strip for each of us. But Paul and I watch and wait—this surely isn’t anything like Bagna Cauda. After a great deal of tearing and hacking with knives and forks, my father and my Uncle Guido each stuff a piece of cow’s stomach into their mouths. They look like two men eating the sole of a Converse sneaker, chewing and chewing to no avail.

  A few minutes later, my Uncle Guido, his mouth as full as when he first put the trippa in says, Yutch! When the hell did you start cooking this goddamn thing?

  My father speaks with his mouth full, too. He says, This morning.

  Uncle Guido chews some more and then he says, Jesus Christ, Yutchie. You were supposed to start it last night.

  My father chews some more, too, while he explains that my mother won’t allow anything to cook all night while they are asleep because she is afraid of a kitchen fire. Actually, she’d said, That thing’ll stink up the whole house. Cook it tomorrow. I’ll be playing golf all day. I have a nine A.M. tee time.

  Uncle Guido doesn’t respond to my father’s excuse for not cooking the trippa all night. He knows you don’t cross my mother. So he just looks down at his plate, looks up at my father, and then they both begin laughing as they continue to try diligently to chew until they are finally able to swallow the one bite. Then they throw the whole trippa into the garbage can, which is an especially out-of-character thing for them to do having come of age during the Great Depression. No scraps ever make it to a garbage can in my house.

  Then my father makes us all salami and provolone sandwiches with roasted peppers. Uncle Guido and Paul refer to them as sang-wiches.

  Before he leaves, Uncle Guido gives me one of the many brushes, combs, and magnified makeup mirrors that he’s picked up at Fuller over the years.

  fourteen

  BOB MALM’S SENTENCE was reduced to five years for good behavior and he was released from the prison in Wethersfield on April 5, 1953. He was given a job as dishwasher in the kitchens at the Cedarcrest Sanatorium, a tuberculosis hospital in Newington, a nearby suburb of Hartford. He lived at the hospital and resided in an on-site dormitory for employees.

  His parole officer met with him weekly and his every report described Bob as a diligent worker, and a reformed, upstanding citizen.

  After work, in the early evening, Bob prowled residential streets unable to suppress his hungers, knowing he’d have to wait until October when the clocks changed to Eastern Standard, when the streets would be dark at five o’clock.

  Fall arrived, and Bob Malm continued his after-dinner strolls around the sanatorium. But a lot of local people worked at Cedarcrest who didn’t live in employee dormitories, and many of them walking home from work spotted him and waved hello. He realized he’d have to move on to other neighborhoods, where people didn’t know him. So when he could get a ride to the center of Newington, he’d catch the Hartford bus taking it all the way to the end of the route at downtown Main Street. On the ride he noted residential areas, and soon began getting off the bus at different stops in order to scout the quiet streets including my own neighborhood stop at the corner of New Britain Avenue and Hillside Avenue.

  One November evening after work, he got his ride to Newington center, and then took the Hartford bus. He didn’t get off at my stop this time; he got off at another corner a mile farther down the route at Beaufort Street. He strolled along Beaufort toward Hartford’s Little Italy, anchored by St. Augustine’s Church, prospecting in the shadows of its elegant soaring double spires.

  fifteen

  Auntie Corana, the Belch children, and Mickey

  MY MOTHER IS ACCUSED, in whispers, of putting on airs. Her airs consist of having her hair colored, leaving one white streak in a wave above her forehead. Another air is seeing to it that I have dance lessons—tap, ballet, and acrobatics. Acrobatics is the same as the floor event in gymnastics but without mats and performed to tunes such as, “The Sunny Side of the Street.” Also the acrobat is not in a leotard but dressed up as a princess in the sultan’s harem or as Harlequin. A third air is managing with my father to rent a cottage every summer in Old Saybrook at the beach. The cottage we rent is called Burgey’s Barn.

  Constable Burgey once built a garage in the middle of a marsh he owned in Old Saybrook, a town on Long Island Sound between New Haven and New London. (Today the marsh is called wetlands and you can’t build on it.) He needed the garage for his two trucks and an abundance of generators, chain saws, other miscellany, and every hand tool ever invented. The building looked like a barn because it had a small window under each end of the peak of the roof and because it had a loft. The loft was actually his house; the loft was closed off and divided into four rooms heated by a woodstove. He lived in the loft with his wife and daughter. He eventually installed several mismatched, lopsided windows all around the loft, but people still called it Burgey’s Barn.

  Once the job of constable became a paying job rather than a volunteer enterprise, he made enough money to build a real house for his family up the road on dry land, whereupon he got the bright idea to rent out the four rooms above the garage as a summer cottage with the stipulation that he would continue to be in and out downstairs when he needed his tools and junk.

  My parents are his first renters. He wants a hundred and twenty-five dollars for the season—Memorial Day to Labor Day—but my father jews him down, as such negotiations are termed, to a hundred. My father asks him for the key, but Constable Burgey laughs and says, There’s no key because there’s no lock.

  Constable Burgey comes to visit us on our first day to see if we are settled in. He notices that I have to sleep on the couch in the living room so he goes to the front door, which is at the top of the two-story exterior flight of stairs, turns, and stands there thinking. Just inside the front door to the left of where he is standing is the bathroom, which contains a toilet and nothing else. The bathroom does have a lock of sorts, a small piece of wood loosely nailed to the inside edge of the door. Turn it to the horizontal position and the door is blocked.

  To Constable Burgey’s right is the kitchen. Straight ahead is a closet. He says, I’ll be right back.

  The constable goes down to his garage, gets some tools, returns, and proceeds to take the door off the closet. Off he goes again to put the door down in his first-floor cavern and then comes back up dragging a frame and a mattress behind him. He jams what will be my bed into the closet. He says to me, There you go, little girl, while he dusts off the mattress with a rag. He explains to my father that he won’t put the door back on because if it accidentally closes during the night, I will suffocate. Anyone who enters the cottage between 9 P.M. and 7 A.M. first sees me, three feet in front of them, pretending to be asleep.

  I brag to
everyone I know in Hartford that we spend all summer at a cottage near Katharine Hepburn’s house, which is true except for the “near” part. I am putting on airs. The community in Old Saybrook where Katharine Hepburn lives, Fenwick, is three miles away. The houses there are sprawling turn-of-the-century behemoths with wide porches, turrets, and gardens. Our cottage is in Chalker Beach, a community of seasonal shacks. When my father and I are in town buying salami at the butcher’s, sometimes we see Katharine and my father says, How ya doin’, Kate? And she says, I’m just fine, young fella. She is the same age as my father. She never really looks at him. She chooses not to see me either.

  In the summer I am free of my brother’s constraints. I swim all day and in the hour between lunch and swimming when I am not allowed to go in the water because digestion will cause stomach cramps and I will drown, I build elaborate sand castles. I also fish and catch blue crabs with my French grandfather. When Pippi visits us, my father drops him and me off at Oyster River, which passes under Route One. It is six in the morning and my father is on his way to work at the Abbott Ball Company. He commutes to Hartford every day, two hours in each direction. Pippi and I climb down the bank of the river, which is actually a wide salt water creek, carrying lines, sinkers, a long-handled crab net, a bucket of bait, and a bushel basket for the crabs. The bait is fish heads from the fish Pippi catches the day before from a charter fishing boat. I am not allowed to fish with Pippi when he goes out on the charter because no women or children are allowed.

  Pippi sits on a lawn chair in the shade of the Route One bridge wearing his old three-piece suit plus cap. I strip down to my underpants because it’s usually ninety degrees and humid. I ask my mother why Pippi dresses this way at the beach and she says it’s because he’s French, not American. All day, we use a slow-motion, hand-over-hand technique to pull in a fishhead tied to the end of a hand line with a blue crab tearing at it until the fishhead and the crab are in the net. Then we swoop the net into the air, the crab captured. Sometimes a crab will sense the net and let go of our bait. Pippi never criticizes me for pulling the line too quickly; he knows when we lose a crab it is because the crab is a smart one.

  It isn’t easy dumping the crab out of the net and into the bushel basket because blue crabs are wildly aggressive. They wave their large menacing claws crazily and entangle their thin legs in the net as they try to get out. Once in the basket, Pippi lays a wide piece of wet brown seaweed onto their backs, which calms them, or otherwise they’ll rip each other’s claws off.

  Once in a while, I go upriver and take a quick swim to cool off. Also, I observe the shenanigans of fiddler crabs skittering in and out of their holes on a sunny bank.

  Pippi and I don’t talk to each other because of the language barrier.

  My father is back to pick us up again at five-thirty. Wade Abbott, who owns the Abbott Ball Company, lets my father leave work an hour early in the summer with pay because he is such a valued employee. Also, the hardening room maintains a temperature of about a hundred and twenty degrees in the summer and Mr. Abbott cuts down production allowing the heat treaters to take breaks outside under a tree so they don’t die of heat stroke.

  We return to the cottage with our bushel of blue crabs. I am sunburned. I appreciate the pain of sunburn as it means I’m at the beach.

  When we arrive back at Burgey’s Barn, my mother has the water already boiling and my father dumps the crabs into the pot. Then we sit around the kitchen table cleaning the crabs—rip off the shells, break them in half, and pick out the meat, which we flick into a bowl placed in the middle of the table. Once all the crabs are cleaned, we spoon the meat onto toast. My mother calls this a feast. She speaks colorfully. Every spring she tells people she can’t wait to Shangri-la at the beach. She uses Shangri-la as a verb. The beach, along with C.G., the golf course, the bowling alley, Rose her hairdresser, and local card tables are the places that pull her back from the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  My mother and father drink ice cold Pabst Blue Ribbon. I get to have my favorite drink as a special treat since we’re having a feast—Tom Collins mix—and Pippi drinks the wine he makes. Both my grandfathers have grape arbors and make their own wine. My Italian grandfather always gives his visiting grandchildren wine. We hate it. But he insists. Unlike Pippi, Gramps speaks pretty good English though it’s heavily accented. He says: If you kids don’t drink wine every day you’ll be white like the sink.

  So we drink our little glasses of wine because we don’t want to look like sinks.

  My French grandfather, Pippi, doesn’t insist on anything.

  While we eat crab, Tyler is in his bedroom listening to Jean Marie Kabritsky belting out her signature hit, “Who Stole the Kiszka,” a polka about a missing sausage with the sausage owners shouting for someone to call the cops. Kiszka is a sausage made of internal pig organs. Tyler is also enjoying his can of Chef Boyardee now served in three small bowls with a side of three slices of Spam. His compulsions continue to multiply. Now, everything must come in threes. Along with his dinner, he has three glasses of A&W root beer.

  The next day at high tide, Pippi and I go eeling. After the killing of Fluffy’s kitten, eeling is my introduction to violence not counting the crucified Christ hanging over all our beds with Christ nearly naked and dying of his wounds: nails through his hands and feet; thorns poking through his head and out one eye; a blood-gushing stab wound to his side. The pièce de résistance to Christ’s suffering is when he begs for water and the miserable Roman soldiers hold a vinegar-soaked sponge on the end of a spear to his cracked lips. Once when I had a cold sore, I dabbed vinegar on it with a Kleenex and nearly went through the roof. I didn’t shout out, though, what with Tyler.

  Eeling doesn’t affect me as much as the kitten incident plus I actually get to take part in this violence. I am, in fact, expected to do so. First I learn to pierce a struggling sandworm with my hook following the demo by Pippi. Blood spurts out of the worm just the way blood spurts out of Jesus’s side. Then Pippi and I take up our sinker-weighted hand lines and spin them in the air before hurling them into the water. We wait till we have a bite and give a sharp yank in order to set the hook into the eel’s esophagus. We pull in the line, hand over hand, and the minute the eel is on the beach Pippi grabs him and swings him with all his might into the jetty, fracturing the eel’s skull. You have to do this or the twisting, twining eel will get all wound up and tangled in your line. If it’s a small eel, I get to smash its head against the jetty.

  Then Pippi cleans the eels on the beach, gutting them and slicing each one into three-inch lengths. Back at the cottage he pickles the eels in brine with a few bay leaves floating in it. If we catch a lot of eels, he gives a few to lurking Italian women who run off to toss the eels into their simmering sauce. On the rare crabbing occasions when we catch a soft-shelled blue crab, Pippi gives it to an Italian woman for her sauce and she acts as if she’s won the lottery. After a few days, everyone is feasting on pickled eels at Burgey’s Barn while drinking cold beer, homemade wine, and I, Tom Collins mix.

  When I am an adult, I will decide to carry on the time-honored eeling tradition. Out on the beach, I explain to my two children how we must first hook the sandworms. I hold up a black hook. The children look from the hook to the white box from the bait store with the sandworms all snoozing quietly amid the pile of shredded seaweed. My son seizes the box and he and his sister run down to the water’s edge and set the worms free.

  What the hell am I thinking?

  MANY OF MY AUNTS and uncles and cousins visit us at the beach. My favorite visitors are Auntie Corana and Uncle John Belch. He is always called John Belch to differentiate him from my Uncle John Tirone, who is married to my Auntie Kekkie. There are five children in the Belch family, three of them have names starting with R: Roger, Ruthie, and Richard. The sixth child, Rita, won’t be born until my Auntie Corana is forty-seven. The other two are Jackie, who is named after Uncle John Belch, and Billy, named William because my Auntie C
orana so loves the name.

  Jackie is the first person I ever know who dies.

  Jackie is a mongoloid. We don’t have the expression, Down syndrome. Until I am eighteen years old, I think Jackie was adopted from the wastelands of China.

  Jackie especially loves to come to the beach because he enjoys doing his imitation of a foghorn, which is right on. He tries to teach Tyler how to do it, and Tyler tries but can’t get the hang of it. Tyler has an affinity for Jackie; it’s as if Tyler understands that they are both crazy as loons. And Tyler tolerates the foghorn sound because, like the polka, it brings him back to that nice time in utero before his brain synapses derailed. The minute Jackie hits the sand, he runs off along the beach, squats behind the jetty, cups his hands over his mouth, and does his foghorn imitation in an extraordinarily deep voice. The second syllable of Beeeee-yawww is just the right number of decibels deeper than the first. Because he is able to throw his voice as well, his imitation is so effective that everyone on the beach looks out across the sound and comments on the approaching fog bank, which never materializes.

  When Jackie is twenty-one, he is looking out the kitchen window of his house and he sees his little brother Richard fall out of their maple tree. Jackie collapses with a massive heart attack.

  I ask, What’s a heart attack?

  My mother says to me, Richard scared Jackie to death. Jackie got such a fright, his heart stopped beating.

  Henceforth, I am perpetually terrified that I will have a heart attack. So far, though, Mary remains hard at work interceding.

  My father says, That poor Jackie! Dead before he even hit the floor. But at least he didn’t suffer.

  In those days, there is no surgery perfected that can mend all the physical anomalies of a child with Down syndrome so those children die at a young age. Twenty-one years is considered nothing short of miraculous.