A Kick-Ass Fairy: A Memoir (4 page)

Chapter 4

1971–1981

W
ithin a day of arriving at our new home I met Nancy, who lived catty-corner to our house through our adjoining backyards. Nancy was tall and had the long, straight hair then in fashion. In that pre-mousse era, my curly-frizzy hair simply couldn’t compete with just Dippity-Do. Nancy also had long skinny legs, her own bedroom filled with the girly white furniture, and parents who were nice. She didn’t have to ask permission for every breath. She also didn’t have a chores list that took hours out of every day. She was free to be 14 and, as far as I could see, was probably free just to be.

Shortly after meeting Nancy, I stepped on a bee, which stung the bottom of my foot while I was walking barefoot on her front lawn. I hit the ground, rolling back and forth holding my foot, screaming in pain. Nancy laughed so hard that she joined me on the ground, rolling on the lawn as well. We became fast friends, spending what time I was allowed going to the town pool, hanging out at her house, or sneaking down to the creek, where we soon became addicted to Tareyton cigarettes as we shared the secrets of our souls and then laughed ourselves to tears.

When high school started we would talk on the telephone every day. She always asked the same question, “What should I wear tomorrow?” This was followed by my daily inquiry, “Do I look fatter?” We had pretend boyfriends, George and Harry, until shortly into the school year when I got a real boyfriend, a trumpet player from the marching band named Glen. After football games I learned to French kiss adeptly, though at first I just slobbered all over his face—not that he was much better. Just like band, it was all about practice.

I thought the Hanover Park Hornets’ Gun Squad was cooler than being in the band, and you could wear a dress uniform instead of the high suspender pants. So, without my mother’s knowing, I started to practice the drills in front of Nancy’s house using her sister’s wooden rifle. One afternoon though—whomp!—the gun hit my octagonal wire-rimmed glasses, popped the lens out, and cut a gash in my eyebrow that bled down my face. Nancy ran to get my mother, who eventually came around the corner hell bent to fury. She dragged me by the ear to the doctor for a butterfly bandage (in lieu of stitches), followed up with the requisite grounding and being held hostage for a weekend of verbal thrashing and chores.

“Why do you want to be on the gun squad and not play the piccolo in the marching band?” What I wanted or thought didn’t matter. By then all questions were rhetorical except for “Where were you?” while she pointed a finger in my face.

Throughout the winter I complained of a sore throat. When I was finally taken to the doctor I had a severe case of mononucleosis and an enlarged spleen. The doctor said I was not to go to school for two months, and arrangements were made to send all my schoolwork home. I wasn’t allowed to do any physical activities; we were told that my spleen could rupture. According to my mother, however, “He didn’t say you couldn’t do your chores.”

Soon after my delayed diagnosis, my boyfriend Glen wound up in the hospital with the other half of the “kissing disease.” I was forbidden to see him, and that was the end of him and me.

Nancy hung in through my times with a Tom, Chad, a real George, and Bradley, who spanned the next year and a half. She had a few boyfriends as well—one gave her a hickey in the center of her forehead. When my mother saw Nancy and asked her what happened, she didn’t answer. Later my mother snickered, “You kids think I was born yesterday.” As I rolled my eyes, she went on, saying that Nancy was bad news and I was forbidden to see her anymore. I didn’t listen.

In between boyfriend dramas, Nancy and I practiced line dancing. We howled the songs of Carole King’s Tapestry album, songs of Jethro Tull, Elton John, or Carly Simon’s Anticipation album as we walked to the creek to smoke or to the Jack in the Box in town after school, where I forced her to try a burger with cheese. Sometimes at my urging we stomped on several to-go ketchup packets I had previously thrown on the floor. It was just like bloody firecrackers. Nancy was the “good girl”—the one without the rules. I was the troublemaker, breaking all my mother’s rules and then some.

Beginning in the fall of my sophomore year I learned to sew. I started by making hot pants, then vests, dresses, and eventually whole outfits, using my babysitting money to buy the patterns and fabric. I also began to excel in school. At the end of a quarter I would share my excitement with my mother, proudly showing mostly As, but of course she would focus on the one B I got in physics. Most of the time, though, thankfully, Mom was out, working at Dad’s store all day.

One day after the mono and the ho-hum report card reaction, I drank a ten-ounce glass of mixed rum and whiskey. Not yet a drinker, I vomited all over the turquoise-blue nylon pile carpeting in my parents’ room. Alane found me there, passed out in a puddle of puke. She helped me clean it all up, being very motherly. We finished up just as Mom pulled into the driveway. I didn’t know whether she suspected anything, nor did I care.

Every Saturday I would dress up and then would have to wait for Dad to drive to open the store—and it wasn’t even my store. There I worked as a salesgirl and ran the cash register for $1.65 an hour. At lunch, Dad would give me money to go across the street to the Hickory Tree deli and buy sandwiches. Once I caught someone stealing a record album, hiding it under his coat, stealing from Dad. When I said, “Hey, what are you doing?” he dropped the loot and ran out.

By then, though, I wasn’t an angel either. Before this, one Saturday night Nancy and I were nabbed by store security for shoplifting in the Two Guys department store while my parents were in the store shopping. After a verbal lashing, including threats of having my parents paged and being turned over to the police and charged with a crime—and the resulting explosion of tears and pleading—we were let go. After being on both sides of the crime, I vowed to myself, no more shoplifting.

In early March of 1973, our family finally moved to our newly built home in New Vernon, part of Harding Township. Nancy and I were tearful about the move but vowed to stay best friends. Dad’s business was doing all right, he said, but on Saturdays I noticed the traffic into the store had started dwindling. The receipt of my little pay envelope became erratic. I didn’t think about it too much, since I was absorbed in adjusting to a new school in the middle of the tenth grade.

The first time I noticed Dave was on the abbreviated school bus, the short one, I took to Morristown High School. Harding Township didn’t have a high school, so I had to be bused to Morristown. After about a week of riding the bus I noticed the mirror above the bus driver Mabel’s head, which she used to monitor the activities of the rowdy horde of pimply teenagers on the way to and from school. I could see this guy with long, straight, thick brown hair staring at me in the mirror while chatting with Mabel like they knew each other. Who, I wondered, was this guy sitting behind the driver, leaning over the round silver bar, practically hanging off of her—the woman I thought looked like a witch. I immediately looked away, but occasionally my eyes drifted back, only to see the same eyes staring at me. This guy was creepy; in my head I called him Witch Boy.

I had already set my sights on Cuffy Coutts, the cute blond guy that played the trumpet in the band. (I was still just a piccolo player.) It was just a matter of time before he would ask me out, since we had spent the whole bus ride home sitting together in our Morristown Colonial uniforms after marching in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City. We talked and laughed. He touched my arm. He asked for my phone number.

At school the next week, while thinking about Cuffy, I noticed “Witch Boy” casually leaning on the wall next to my locker between classes. Thank God, he didn’t say anything. The next day I was excited because Cuffy and I had band class together. Then I noticed Witch Boy waiting for me outside the band room. This is crazy, I thought, does he know my whole schedule? Meanwhile, Cuffy never called.

It eventually registered that the guy who seemed to be the son of a witch was at least six feet tall. His long, thick hair parted down the middle. He had turquoise-blue eyes with long eyelashes. He had a cleft in his chin and big arm muscles, and he wore biker boots. Still, he was definitely not my type. It was easy to dismiss him without even one word spoken to each other.

After Cuffy failed to call, my sights were set on some football player in my English class.

As the school year drew to a close, Witch Boy was still staring and following me around like a puppy. One day he smiled, and I smiled back. He moved closer. He talked! I laughed and laughed and laughed. He was so funny. Some little comment like “So” could cause a burp of mysterious chuckles in me for the rest of the day. Jokes turned into little paper notes—scribbles of “Hi” with a doodle or whatever.

It turned out his name was Dave and the bus-driving witch was his aunt. On the last day of school, Mabel announced that the Barkmann Bus Company was offering its annual trip down to Seaside Heights on the Jersey shore in a few days. I didn’t really think about it, but someone else did, figuring it was now or never, time to make the move. Dave asked me if I wanted to go. I told him I had to think about it and would let him know. I had to ask my parents.

They said OK, so on June 23, 1973, I was wooed into a first kiss on the boardwalk. We played the machines in the penny arcade, games of chance, did the cliché photo booth shots, went on the scary rides, and kissed well and often.

Dave and I started dating. Living out in the middle of nowhere, that summer I read Gone with the Wind. Scarlett became my role model for her strength and perseverance. I saw how she used her feminine ways to her advantage and how she was different from her mother, who was different from my mother. I definitely preferred Rhett over Ashley. Dave was more like Rhett.

Dave loved to work on cars and had a motorcycle and a snowmobile. He fished and hunted deer and pheasant. He had many friends. He had everything my mother hated, and I loved him for it. For some reason my troublemaking stopped.

Deer hunting season was during the first week of December our first year together. At the end of the week, after the hunting was over, Dave picked me up at home. We drove to his parents’ house, a converted barn which was part of the salary his father received as the grounds manager for a wealthy family’s estate. Their home seemed comfortable enough, though you had to open the sliding barn door to enter. Inside, I met Dave’s uncles, all unshaven with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. After they said hello, they continued recounting their hunting stories and guffawing about the success of this season’s deer haul. Everyone was happy.

The men then left to butcher the deer meat, coming back with roasts, legs, and other cuts, some with hair, some sprinkled with shot. Dave’s mother led the wives in wrapping the meat and marking up the packages, which were then put in boxes for each family to take home. The women talked and I sat and embroidered between meat boxes while hearing booms of laughter rising through the floorboards from the basement. After the butchering was done, there were toasts and shots of the hard stuff. They were all manly men, rugged.

After drinking a beer from a bottle and taking a bath, as there was no shower, Dave took me home in the light blue metallic 1963 Nova SS with “three on the tree” that he had just finished restoring. Along the way, we parked on the side of the road and steamed up the windows, necking. I decided then I was falling in love.

One weekend during my senior year, Mom was sitting in her usual post in the kitchen when I arrived home from a Friday night date. As I climbed the two sets of stairs in our split level, Mom spit out venomously, “Get in here!” She was sitting at the table in her black negligee with a carafe of wine and an empty glass, her face all red and splotched from picking the hairs out of her face. As I approached, she snarled, “Sit down,” and smacked the table while flipping her solitaire cards. Then she looked up at me and started going off about Dave and how I was getting too serious with him. Receiving no response, she stood up and pointed that finger at my face and snarled, “I didn’t move here for my daughters to marry the help of the millionaires.” She abruptly stated, “You are nothing but a tramp and a slut.”

I stood up to leave. She erupted, “I didn’t say you could get up.” I got up and left anyway. As I made my way down the hall she screamed, “You’re grounded.” Yeah, right, I thought.

I didn’t know at the time that Dad was losing his business and our family was in financial trouble. On my Saturdays at the store, I had seen that customers would come in and pick my father’s brain about the audio equipment he sold, but they wouldn’t buy. Apparently they’d go to a warehouse store like Crazy Eddie’s down on Route 22 and buy their equipment for less.

Dad was heartbroken.

“We would be rich if you didn’t throw our inheritance away on that damn store!” my mother would constantly remind him.

When I shared this turn of events with Dave on the phone, he went to my father’s store the next day and bought an eight-track player and speakers for his car.

Shortly after the “slut incident,” Mom went back to work as a secretary at a chemical company down the road. I got a job after school at a puzzle factory as a clerk typist in the business office five days a week, and was soon told I had to pay my mother board.

College was never discussed until the day my mother shoved in my face a tear-off application to William Paterson College, a state college located in Wayne, while I was sitting in the kitchen under the large portable hair dryer with my big smooth-out rollers. I looked at the application for this school that I had never heard of and noticed that the deadline had passed more than a month before. Earlier in high school, I had taken a career-interest personality test and it showed that my top two careers were either a fighter pilot in the Air Force or something to do with home economics. I’d given some thought to becoming a nurse in a branch of the service, and traveling, but then there was Dave.