A Kick-Ass Fairy: A Memoir (2 page)

Chapter 2

1958–1965

A
pparently my mother and father never expected that their natural family planning method would fail. When I was 16 months old, my sister Alane was born, and then eighteen months later, my sister Diane. By the time I was 3, my mother was 25 and already had three children.

Soon after Diane was born, or maybe because of it, I ate most of a bottle of St. Joseph’s baby aspirin that had been left on the toy box in my room. My mother realized I had consumed a huge quantity of pills, so I was rushed to the hospital. After the tube had been forced down my throat in the black room with the bright light in my face, my mother was very angry at me, especially since my father was so mad at her.

Shortly after the arrival of Diane, who was annoying and cried all the time, our family moved into the other half of my mother’s parents’ house in Queens. As a toddler, Alane, whose nose was always running, looked perpetually sad as she dragged around her blanket and her thumb-
sucking stuffed bear, Boo-Boo. The sight apparently bugged my mother, who later nicknamed her Sarah Bernhardt, not meaning anything good.

After Diane was born, my mother was always yelling and for some unknown reason put Alane and her bear out on the front stoop and told her she had to leave and find another home. Both were rescued by my grandmother. My grandparents were always talking to my mother about her parenting skills. Alane became my playmate, my sister-in-arms. I was her overseer and protector. I was underweight for my age and had curly light chestnut hair. Alane was chubby at the time, with dark brown hair.

One night when Diane was about a year old and I was 4, my parents went out for a rare evening as a couple. Our grandparents babysat us upstairs in their apartment, which was decorated in heavy mahogany furniture and smelled like mothballs mixed with whatever was on the stove or in the oven at the moment. Not being closely watched, Alane and I scribbled with crayons all over the marble bathroom floor. When our parents returned home, Grandpa had to show them what we’d been up to. I knew we were in big trouble when the crayon wouldn’t come off the marble. Dad told us to get to bed in Grandma’s spare room with the twin beds and shut the door of the bedroom.

This was the first time we were left in the dark. Alane was very afraid and started crying. By the light of the moon, which was coming through the open venetian blinds and the gossamer white sheers hanging over the window, I began jumping on the bed, and soon Alane started giggling. Dad opened the door, poked his head in, scolded us, and shut the door.

I said, “Boinga-boinga,” and we started giggling all over again.

Later that same year at my prekindergarten physical, Dr. Cushing, a double-chinned, fat-handed, lady doctor with a white coat, glasses, and very ugly shoes, told my mother that I had two “beauty marks” or moles that were a little enlarged and might need to be removed some day to avoid any trouble, like cancer. One was on my shoulder, where she reasoned that it could be irritated by a bra, the other on my upper back.

The next thing I knew, I was in a children’s ward, in a hospital gown with a cap on my head. Then the bed was being wheeled through the crowded halls. They tried to suffocate me with a mask and this gross sickly smelling gas called “ether” that made me want to vomit. I think I did. I remember being scared and all alone, trapped within the bars of the bed, tied down.

That summer, right before I turned 5, it was time to go back to the doctor to have the stitches removed from the surgery. I was all excited because Uncle Joey, Mom’s baby brother and my godfather, was coming with me and Mom to the doctor. He was home from college for the summer. During the summer he also drove a Bungalow Bar ice cream truck and would swing by and give us ice cream or frozen rocket pops, which we all loved to eat while singing, “Bungalow Bar tastes like tar. The more you eat it, the sicker you are.” Also, Uncle Joey was cute.

I remember sitting in the back seat of my parents’ old green Plymouth. There was no seat belt. The velvet-velour of the seat was made of horse hair–like material that was scratchy on the back of my legs. Up in front, Mom and Uncle Joey were talking, laughing. I was alone in the back, ignored, rolling around and trying to stay seated. If I sat cross-legged, more of my legs got scratchy, but when my legs were out straight, I had to brace myself with both arms out to either side, and they got tired. It was hot, so hot that the air seemed orange, and my sweaty legs really itched.

Finally, when we were all at the doctor’s office and I was stripped down to my underpants, in walked a monster. An old gray-haired man with spots all over his face started talking to my mother, telling her that the other doctor was on vacation. I was really scared. He started chinking and clinking some metal things on a tray, and next I saw scissors and other sharp things. I started crying and then screaming.

The doctor told my mother that it was very important that I stay still. I didn’t want to do it.

“Stop it! You are wasting the doctor’s time,” my mother yelled at me.

I didn’t care. Then she called out to the waiting room for Uncle Joey.

“Joey, hold her down.”

The two of them pushed me down onto my stomach on the counter. I was being squished to death. I could hear my mother and Uncle Joey laughing and whispering to each other through the pounding of my heart in my ears. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I closed my eyes.

I heard my mother say, “It’s all over.” I didn’t like her anymore, ever again. I opened my eyes. But for some reason I knew I wasn’t me anymore.

That same summer, we moved to a new home on Long Island, in Farmingdale, across the street from Bethpage State Park. A few short weeks later, I was on my way to kindergarten wearing a new outfit, a swirling gray skirt with suspenders that had a wooly French poodle appliqué and a turquoise blouse, and a matching headband holding back my long banana curls. My mother walked with me to school, just her and me. She held my hand the whole way, and after she dropped me off for my first day, I felt like I was in heaven. I felt free and I loved school.

On a pre-Christmas trip to the new Walt Whitman Mall in Huntington to see Santa Claus, Grandma slipped in the parking lot on the ice, tripped over a parking stop, and fell and broke her teeth. Her face was all cut up. Grandma, who already suffered chronic migraines, convalesced at our house. During her recovery over the holidays, my mother dressed me as a nurse, using my starched, embroidered child-size apron and wrapping my head in dishtowels. I was sent into Grandma’s room with trays of food to help her eat, keep her company, and hold her hand. I loved Grandma, but she was very scary looking in bed with her cut-up face. I remember my mother proclaiming that she was too busy and, “I always retch at sight of blood or vomit anyway.” Grandma was very appreciative of my attention and kind to me. I was forever more called Linda, the nurse.

Shortly after the start of the new year, my grandfather Erich bled to death on the operating table while surgeons were trying to remove a cancerous laryngeal tumor. I had hardly known him since he had moved to Florida after his wife’s death. Now we had only one set of grandparents, the Italian ones.

The next summer I packed up my little, round white-plastic valise with the long looped handle and a picture of Barbie on the front to spend a week with Grandma and Grandpa in Queens. They picked me up, and Grandpa drove his new turquoise Chevrolet Impala very slowly. During the week, Grandpa, no longer a company owner, worked at a garment firm. Spending time with Grandma was special and very different. She was usually happy, especially when her women friends came over during the week to play cards, eat cake, and drink some clear liquid that smelled of licorice out of very small glasses. She introduced me to her friends as her nurse and gave me some soda in my little glass.

One of the days during my visit, Grandma pulled scarves out of her bureau and said, “Let’s be gypsies.” We danced ourselves into a frenzy to the music on the record player until Grandma got sweaty and flopped on the chair saying, all out of breath, “I want to just watch you.” Every day we’d go shopping, walking at times under noisy trains to get to the stores while dragging a wire shopping basket. I saw things like tongue, brains, and pickled things in jars at her favorite butcher. She’d buy pig knuckles and other assorted grossities that wound up in that night’s spaghetti sauce or the stew. Back in her kitchen, I stood on a chair next to her, wearing a makeshift apron, and helped her cook while listening to music and singing, while also receiving cooking instruction that I didn’t understand. As much as Grandma liked to cook, she loved to bake, and I got to sample everything. I especially liked the jelly or cinnamon-and-sugar rolls she made with leftovers from the pie crusts that she made with flour and lard. In the afternoons I would draw while Grandma watched her “stories” on the black-and-white television.

Too soon, it was time to go home. I knew my mother was expecting a baby, but now her stomach was really big. One hot, humid afternoon, while sitting in a lounge chair under the large oak tree in the yard, Mom called Alane and me over from playing on the swings to look at the ashtray on her belly. We could see it popping up and down as the baby inside kicked.

First grade started a few weeks later. Dad took Mom to the hospital to have the baby, but they came home the same day with a box of Dunkin’ Donuts instead. A week later, my mother really gave birth to our brother, Bruce. While she was in the hospital, my art class at school made congratulations cards for my mother with construction paper and crayons. Shortly after my parents arrived home, after warning my sisters and me that we could look but not touch him, my mother changed baby Bruce’s diaper on the dining room table. He wee-weed like a geyser, even getting some in my mother’s mouth.

We giggled. Mom yelled.

Dad was so very happy. He whistled while walking us to the bus stop, where he gave the bus driver a cigar with a blue ribbon that said, “It’s a boy.” I wondered to myself, Was Dad this excited when I was born? When Bruce was a little bit older, he became partly my baby, while my sisters practiced being mothers with their Thumbelina dolls.

In the wintertime, I complained to Mom of a sore throat.

“Hmm,” she said.

Eventually, Dr. Cushing came to the house. Alane and I were quarantined for scarlet fever that developed from untreated strep throat. We weren’t allowed out of our room except to go to the bathroom. Mom would bring us food, and Dad set up a television that we’d watch all day once the fever broke.

Once in a while we were allowed to stay up until 7:30 p.m. and watch The Flintstones. Against my mother’s protests, Dad, who was now working two jobs, allowed me to stay up late to see the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Shortly after this, Dad brought home the 45 record of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Dad was my hero.

After months of Mom’s furious sewing, we all had matching clothes for Christmas. This was the trend for all the holidays and events for the next few years. No longer believing in Santa, I had to pretend for everyone else. The magic was gone, except that for Christmas I got a rose-pink–and-white portable record player.

In the fall of 1964, I was seven years old. On the school bus on the way home from school, I was kneeling on the seat with the emergency exit window, three rows from the back. I was leading all the other kids that would be the kind to sit in the back of the bus in singing at the top of our lungs:

Great, green, globs of greasy grimy gopher guts,

Mutilated monkey meat, little birdies’ bloody feet.

All these things are very good for you to eat.

The bus driver forgot his spoon!

Then, in the drizzle of a dreary afternoon, the driver took a curve too fast and I went hurtling out the window. Outside the bus, I was hovering up in the trees above somebody’s front lawn looking down at my body curled up on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb, then watching as the bus continued down the street with my pea-soup colored beret that my mother had just crocheted hanging from the bus window, caught by the pompom. I don’t remember how I reentered my body. I just remember hearing my 6-year-old sister Alane screaming in the distance, “Stop the bus! My sister Linda just fell out the window!”

The bus driver came back for me. I could walk back onto the bus. He dropped off all the other children before he personally escorted my sister and me to the door of our home. All I could think about was how much trouble I was going to be in if anything happened to that pea-soup-green beret hat that I didn’t like but had to wear anyway. It was still hanging out the window, getting all wet and dirty.

I stared down at the milk crate on the stoop as the bus driver, with my hat in his hand, told my mother what happened. He was later fired and I inconvenienced my mother and my poor father with a wasted trip to the hospital to check for injuries. Other than a few scrapes and bruises, I was just fine.

The bills were not. I remember being asked, “How could you be so stupid?” and being punished for not being more careful and sitting properly on the bus. “Well, we’ll have to do without now, to pay the hospital bills. Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know.” The fact that I was alive didn’t seem to matter. When I tried to talk about what happened, especially the part about being in the tree and looking down at my body, which I didn’t understand, Mom said, “You’re fine. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

One morning I woke up before school and, instead of just getting the usual kinks in my neck that felt like fire and would sometimes cause me to see stars, I couldn’t move my head. My neck was frozen.

When Mom saw me she said, “What’s wrong with you?”

After Alane got on the bus for school, she drove me, my brother, Bruce—now over a year old—and Diane to the doctor. Dr. Cushing sprayed something smelly on my neck, pushed down hard on the top of my head, and tried to twist it back and forth. It barely moved. She told my mother that I needed rest and that it was from stress and not related to the school bus incident. On the way home Mom pulled into the parking lot at the butcher to buy pounded veal. She was going to make my favorite, breaded and fried veal cutlets for dinner. As another special treat for me, she signed up to come with my class to the Museum of Natural History in New York City the following week.