American Childhood (20 page)

A
S A CHILD I READ HOPING TO LEARN
everything, so I could be like my father. I hoped to combine my father’s grasp of information and reasoning with my mother’s will and vitality. But the books were leading me away. They would propel me right out of Pittsburgh altogether, so I could fashion a life among books somewhere else. So the Midwest nourishes us (Pittsburgh is the Midwest’s eastern edge) and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And so we run to our bedrooms and read in a fever, and love the big hardwood trees outside the windows, and the terrible Midwest summers, and the terrible Midwest winters, and the forested river valleys with the blue Appalachian Mountains to the east of us and the broad great plains to the west. And so we leave it sorrowfully, having grown strong and restless by opposing with all our will and mind and muscle its simple, loving, single will for us: that we stay, that we stay and find a place among its familiar possibilities. Mother knew we would go; she encouraged us.

I had awakened again, awakened from my drawing and reading, from my exhilarating game playing, from my intense collecting and experimenting, and my cheerful friendships, to see on every side of me a furious procession of which I had been entirely unaware. A procession of fast-talking, keen-eyed, high-stepping, well-dressed men and women of all ages had apparently hoisted me, or shanghaied me, some time ago, and were bearing me breathless along I knew not where. This was the startling world in which I found that I
had been living all along. Packed into the procession, I pedaled to keep up, but my feet only rarely hit the ground.

The pace of school life quickened, its bounds tightened, and a new kind of girl emerged from the old. The old-style girl was obedient and tidy. The new-style girl was witty and casual. It was a small school, twenty in a class. We all knew who mattered, not only in our class but in the whole school. The teachers knew, too.

In summer we girls commonly greeted each other, after a perfunctory hello, by extending our forearms side by side to compare tans. We were blond, we were tan, our teeth were white and straightened, our legs were brown and depilated, our blue eyes glittered pale in our dark faces; we laughed; we shuffled the cards fast and dealt four hands. It was not for me. I hated it so passionately I thought my shoulders and arms, swinging at the world, would split off from my body like loose spinning blades, and fly wild and slice everyone up. With all my heart, sometimes, I longed for the fabled Lower East Side of Manhattan, for Brooklyn, for the Bronx, where the thoughtful and feeling people in books grew up on porch stoops among seamstress intellectuals. There I belonged if anywhere, there where the book people were—recent Jewish immigrants, everybody deep every livelong minute. I could just see them, sitting there feeling deeply. Here, instead, I saw polished fingernails clicking, rings flashing, gold bangle bracelets banging and ringing together as sixteen-year-old girls like me pushed their cuticles back, as they ran combs through their just-washed, just-cut, just-set hair, as they lighted Marlboros with hard snaps of heavy lighters, and talked about other girls or hair. It never crossed my mind that you can’t guess people’s lives from their chatter.

This was the known world. Women volunteered, organized the households, and reared the kids; they kept the traditions, and taught by example a dozen kinds of love. Mother polished the brass, wiped the ashtrays, stood barefoot on the couch to hang a picture. Margaret Butler washed the windows, which seemed to yelp. Mother dusted and polished the big philodendrons, tenderly, leaf by leaf, as if she were
washing babies’ faces. Margaret came sighing down the stairs with an armful of laundry or wastebaskets. Mother inspected the linens for a party; she fetched from a closet the folding felted boards she laid over the table. Margaret turned on the vacuum cleaner again. Mother and Margaret changed the sheets and pillowcases.

Then Margaret left. I had taken by then to following her from room to room, trying to get her to spill the beans about being black; she kept moving. Nothing changed. Mother wiped the stove; she ran the household with her back to it. You heard a staccato in her voice, and saw the firm force of her elbow, as she pressed hard on a dried tan dot of bean soup, and finally took a fingernail to it, while quizzing Amy about a car pool to dancing school, and me about a ride back from a game. No page of any book described housework, and no one mentioned it; it didn’t exist. There was no such thing.

A woman at our country club, a prominent figure at our church, whose daughters went to Ellis, never washed her face all summer, to preserve her tan. We rarely saw the pale men at all; they were off pulling down the money on which the whole scene floated. Most men came home exhausted in their gray suits to scantily clad women smelling of Bain de Soleil, and do-nothing tanned kids in Madras shorts.

There was real beauty to the old idea of living and dying where you were born. You could hold a place in a kind of eternity. Your grandparents took you out to dinner Sunday nights at the country club, and you could take your own grandchildren there when that time came: more little towheads, as squint-eyed and bony-legged and Scotch-Irish as hillbillies. And those grandchildren, like figures in a reel endlessly unreeling, would partake of the same timeless, hushed, muffled sensations.

They would join the buffet line on Sunday nights in winter at the country club. I remember: the club lounges before dinner dimly lighted and opulent like the church; the wool rugs absorbing footsteps; the lined damask curtains lapping thickly across tall, leaded-glass windows. The adults
drank old-fashioneds. The fresh-haired children subsisted on bourbon-soaked maraschino cherries, orange slices, and ice cubes. They roved the long club corridors in slippery shoes; they opened closet doors, tried to get outside, laughed so hard they spit their ice cubes, and made sufficient commotion to rouse the adults to dinner. In the big dining room, layers of fine old unstarched linen draped the tables as thickly as hospital beds. Heavy-bottomed glasses sank into the table-cloths soundlessly.

And sempiternal too were the summer dinners at the country club, the sun-shocked people somnambulistic as angels. The children’s grandchildren could see it. Space and light multiplied the club rooms; the damask curtains were heaved back; the French doors now gave out onto a flagstone terrace overlooking the swimming pool, near the sixth hole. On the terrace, men and women drank frozen daiquiris, or the unvarying Scotch, and their crystal glasses clicked on the glass tabletops, and then stuck in pools of condensation as if held magnetically, so they had to skid the glasses across the screeching tabletops to the edges in order to raise them at all. The cast-iron chair legs, painted white, marked and chipped the old flagstones, and dug up the interstitial grass.

The dressed children on the terrace looked with longing down on the tanned and hilarious children below. The children below wouldn’t leave the pool, although it was seven-thirty; they knew no parent would actually shout at them from the flagstone terrace above. When these poolside children jumped in the water, the children on the terrace above could see their shimmering gray bodies against the blue pool. The water knit a fabric of light over their lively torsos and limbs, a loose gold chain mail. They looked like fish swimming in wide gold nets.

The children above were sunburnt, and their cotton dresses scraped their shoulders. The outsides of their skins felt hot, and the insides felt cold, and they tried to warm one arm with another. In summer, no one drank old-fashioneds, so there was nothing for children to eat till dinner.

This was the world we knew best—this, and Oma’s.
Oma’s world was no likely alternative to ours; Oma had a chauffeur and her chauffeur had to drink from his own glass.

My forays into Oma’s world changed. I was working in the summers now. The summer I sold men’s bathing suits, I ate lunch alone in a dark bar and played the numbers for a quarter every week, right there in the underworld. I no longer went to the Lake with Amy. But for a few spring vacations after our grandfather died, Amy and I visited Oma and Mary in their apartment in Pompano Beach, Florida.

On my last visit, I was fifteen. Everything I was required to do, such as sit at a table with other people, either bored me to fury or infuriated me to a kind of benumbed lethargy. I was finding it difficult to live—finished with everything I knew and ignorant of anything else. I woke every morning full of hope, and was livid with rage before breakfast, at one thing or another.

Oma and I argued that year, over a word. Because something I was talking about seemed to require it, Oma said the word for padded, upholstered furniture was “overstuffed.” I wouldn’t hear of it, having never heard of it. “It’s not overstuffed; it’s stuffed just right.” Oma pointed out that it was just barely possible that she knew something on earth that I didn’t. I couldn’t quite believe her.

In Oma’s Pompano Beach apartment, I lounged on the bright print bamboo furniture and looked at the Asian objects she had been collecting all her life: gaudy Chinese cloisonné lamps, lacquered chests, sentimental Japanese porcelain figurines—women in whiteface with cocked heads and pink circles on their cheeks—gold, bossed mirrors, foot-long yellow ashtrays shaped like carp, and a pair of green ceramic long-tailed birds, which took up the breakfast table. It was years before I learned that Asian art was supposed to be delicate.

In Florida, Mary Burinda drove the machine. Oma rode in the front seat; Amy and I sat in back. That year, Oma’s current, roseate Cadillac had an extra row of upholstered seats, which folded against the front seat’s back—like, but
not very like, the extra seats in a cab. An especially long distance stretched between the front seat and the back.

One day, we were driving back from Miami; Oma had been “looking at shoes.” (Oma had announced at breakfast, “Today I want to look at shoes,” and I repeated the phrase to myself all morning, marveling, to learn what it might feel like to want to look at shoes.)

Without provocation, she broke down, grieving for our grandfather. She rubbed her round face in her hands. Mary, at the wheel, expostulated, shocked, “
Missus
Doak. Oh, Missus
Doak
.” She added, “That was two years ago, Missus Doak.” This occasioned a fresh outburst, which broke our hearts. I saw Oma’s red hair and her lowered head wipe back and forth.

Then she rallied and began defensively, “But you know, he was never cross with me.”

“Never once?” someone ventured from the depths of the back seat.

“Well, once. Yes, once.” Her voice lightened.

They were driving, she said, on a high mountain road. I saw the back of her round head swivel; she was looking up and away, remembering. The two of them were driving along a dreadful road, she said, a perfectly horrible road, in Tennessee maybe. Her voice grew shrill.

“There was a sheer drop just outside my window, and I thought we were going over. We were going over, I tell you.” She was furious at the thought. “And he got very cross with me.”

She had never seen him so angry. “He said I could either hush, or get out and walk. Can you imagine!”

She was awed. So was I. We were both awed, that he had dared. It cheered everyone right up.

The bird-watching was fine in the nearby Fort Lauderdale city park. Right in the middle of town, the park was mostly wild forest, with a few clearings and roads. Oma and Mary drove me to the park early every morning, and picked me up at noon. There I saw some of the few smooth-billed anis in the United States. They were black parrot-beaked birds; they
hung around the park’s dump. The binoculars I wore banged against my skinny rib cage. I filled a notebook with sketches, information, and records. I saw myrtle warblers in the clearings. I saw a coot and a purple gallinule side by side, just as Peterson had painted them in the field guide; they swam in a lagoon under sea grape trees. They seemed, as common birds seem to the delirious beginner, miraculous and rare. (The tizzy that birds excite in the beginner are a property of the beginner, not of the birds; so those who love the tizzy itself must ever keep beginning things.)

Often I was startled to see, through binoculars and flattened by their lenses, glimpsed through the dark subtropical leaves, the white hull of some pleasure cruiser setting out on a Lauderdale canal. Who would go cruising beside houses and lawns, when he could be watching smooth-billed anis? I alone was sane, I thought, in a world of crazy people. Standing in the park’s smelly dump, I shrugged.

Afternoons I wandered the blinding beach, swam, and read about tide pools in Maine; I was reading
The Edge of the Sea
. On the beach I found skeletons of velella, or by-the-wind-sailors. From the high apartment windows I looked at the lifeguards around the pool below, and wondered how I might meet them. By day, Oma and Mary shopped. Evenings we went out to dinner. Amy was as desperately bored as I was, but I wouldn’t let her follow me; I addressed her in French. Everyone knew this was our last Florida trip.

It was on this visit that Oma asked me, when we were alone, what exactly it was that homosexuals did. She was miffed that she’d been unable to command this information before now. She said she’d wondered for many years without knowing who she could ask.

Amy and I boarded our plane back to Pittsburgh. It would be softball season at school, and a new baseball season for the Pirates, whose hopes were resting on a left-handed reliever, Elroy Face, and on the sober starter, Vernon Law—the Deacon—and on the big bat of our right fielder, Roberto Clemente, whom everyone in town adored.

Flying back, looking out over the Blue Ridge, I remem
bered a game I had seen at Forbes Field the year before: Clemente had thrown from right field to the plate, as apparently easily as a wheel spins. The ball seemed not to arc at all; the throw caught the runner from third. You could watch, this man at inning’s end lope from right field to the dugout, and you’d weep—at the way his joints moved, and the ease and power in his spine.