My Mother Was Nuts (6 page)

We shared everything. Our different backgrounds melted away. We were bunkmates and friends for the rest of our lives.

I recited the Sabbath prayers on Friday nights like everyone else, and learned the history of the Onibar Indians who had first settled the area. Eventually we figured out that Onibar was Rabino spelled backward. Many years later, my brother wrote for Jack Paar and he
did a bit called “Letters from Camp,” which included the joke: Dear Mom and Dad, we found out Camp Nehoc is not an Indian name. It’s Cohen spelled backward.

Dear Mom & Dad,
How’s Nanny? How’s Grandpa? I hope everyone is good.
I love camp. Send chocolate.

Love,
Penny

Each session included an athletic competition known as the Color War. It lasted a week, and all the campers, girls and boys, divided into teams. On the boys’ side, you were either blue or buff, and on the girls’ side, you were green or buff. During Color War, you had to sing to your color. We sang to buff. “Buff is the team with the gleam of victory in its eye … B-U-F-F is the team! Rah-rah-rah …” It was hard to get excited about singing to buff.

There were also weekly shows featuring original songs and dances. Every bunk did one, as did the older staff, the counselors, and the waiters and waitresses. These performances were taken seriously, and the bar was extremely high. Mark “Moose” Charlap, who wrote the music for the Broadway production of
Peter Pan
, had been the musical director for several years, and he was succeeded by seventeen-year-old Juilliard student Marvin Hamlisch. He wrote new songs every week.

At thirteen, I took a year off to attend Camp Edgemont, a horseback riding camp in Deposit, New York. My mother was upset. “It’s not kosher!” she said. What did it matter? We weren’t even Jewish. I spent the next two summers back at Geneva, working as a waitress. It was a coveted job; you received tips and didn’t have to pay for the summer session.

Even better, I was assigned the staff table. That’s where I got to know Marvin Hamlisch. He sat at my table. I knew all of his food allergies.

Midway through that summer, the waitresses’ bunk burned down.
My mother thought it was my fault. By this time I was smoking cigarettes, and she assumed that I’d left one burning. It shows how highly she thought of me.

Eventually, though, one of the other waitresses confessed to setting the fire. She turned out to be a pyromaniac.

We all were just grateful that drama didn’t get in the way of the even more exciting end-of-summer musical. My friend Caren from back home was the dance counselor. She worked all summer on the choreography, much of which she credited to my mother, whom she adored. She took lessons in the ballroom for years. As testimony to the regard she had for my mother, she used Marvin as her rehearsal pianist but insisted on having my mother play the piano for the actual show. In fact, her parents drove my mother to camp.

It’s mind-boggling to think that she trusted my mother’s playing more than she did Marvin’s. What can I say? I think it was because my mother knew how to jump around in the music if someone made a mistake. Most Julliard students can probably play that way, too. But they don’t.

At the end of camp, my parents picked me up and we caught up during the long drive back to the Bronx. Everything was the same, my mother said, nothing was new, that is until I asked how my grandfather was doing.

“Oh, he died,” my mother said.

“Excuse me?” I said, shocked.

“He died,” she said.

“When?” I asked.

“Around the beginning of the summer,” she said.

“But in my letters I asked how he was doing, and you said he was fine. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We didn’t want to ruin your summer.”

Penny at Camp Geneva in 1954
Marshall personal collection

I
N
1952,
MY BROTHER
started at Northwestern University. Garry was eager to get out in the world and away from my parents. However, he was concerned about leaving Ronny and me behind. Before departing for Chicago, he asked us to meet in his bedroom. When we were all together, he shut his door and stood in front of us looking as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. What was on his mind was a topic that would occupy the three of us for the rest of our lives: family.

“As you may have realized,” he said, “Mom doesn’t understand much about life beyond her ballroom, and who knows where Dad is most of the time. Nanny’s walking into walls, and Grandpa is living across the hall.”

Ronny and I nodded.

“Basically, we got no shot with these people,” Garry continued.

He paused to let his thoughts sink in, and after a moment of silence he leaned forward.

“If something goes wrong, they aren’t going to be there for us,” he said. “That’s just the way it is. So as we go forward in our lives, we have to stick together. We’re the only ones who are going to understand each other.”

After Garry finished, we all stood up and hugged. At nine years old, I didn’t understand everything he said. But I knew his assessment was accurate. In fact, two years later, Ronny followed him to Northwestern and I realized Garry’s worries had been prophetic. Once my brother and sister were out of the house, my parents quit pretending to like each other. Whatever pretense they had maintained for our benefit disappeared.

She layered her sarcasm on even thicker. Hearing his key in the door at night, she would turn to me and sneer, “Better get up and give
him
a kiss if you want your bank money.” Sometimes she dragged Mildred or one of her other friends into their bedroom and pointed to his closet where his clothes hung neatly. “Look at that,” she’d say with disdain. “He’s such a pansy.”

My father thought that my mother was holding him back. His business was thriving, thanks to the commercials he made for the American Medical Association, the biggest and best of his clients. “He’s such a phony baloney,” my mother said. “He thinks he’s such a big shot.” He wanted to move to Sutton Place, an affluent neighborhood on Manhattan’s East Side. But when he brought home floor plans, my mother said, “And what am I going to do there? What am I going to do in Sutton Place?”

I wondered the same thing.

Did he not know this woman?

At least I had my own room now. It was Garry’s old bedroom. After Ronny left for school, my mother painted the walls turquoise, installed new closet doors, added a bookshelf, and bought me a white, Danish-style bed, which I liked. Even better, I didn’t have to share a room with my grandmother anymore. I had privacy. I stayed up at night, reading Nancy Drew and Dana Girls mysteries, as well as stories about animals and kids running away from home. I kept a diary. Sometimes I snuck down the hall and secretly watched whatever TV show my mother had on in the living room while she waited up for my father to come home.

My brother once observed that when you watch our home movies,
you see me grow progressively more depressed, and it’s true. I suppose that’s why my father came home one day with a dog, a cocker spaniel that I named Mr. Belvedere. My mother loved him, and my father walked him at night, and he kept me company. After about a year, though, I woke up one day and he was gone.

“Where’s the dog?” I asked.

“He went to a place in the country,” my mother said.

“He’s gone?” I asked.

“He’s much happier where he is,” she said.

My parents let me replace Mr. Belvedere with two parakeets, Charlie and Pete, and two goldfish, Charlie and Ebenezer. I was into the name Charlie. After a while, the fish stopped swimming and floated on their side. I thought they were resting.

Every few months, I considered running away to Arizona. Don’t ask me why Arizona. I don’t know. After I started junior high, my parents got me another dog, a beige mutt I named Nickel. He stuck around for a few years before being shipped off to the country, too. By then, though, I had turned into a typical teenager. I was a member of the Elvis Presley Fan Club (I still have my membership card), collected all the latest 45s, and thought constantly about boys.

When my friends referred to the Marshall Plan, they were talking about my interest in getting boys to pay attention to me, not the United States’s effort to rebuild postwar Europe. I would hit boys on the Junior High School 80 schoolyard and run, hoping they would catch me. But they couldn’t. I was too fast.

One day I snatched Jeffrey Strauss’s baseball mitt and sprinted away, taunting him to run faster. He couldn’t. My mother told me to slow down. It was the only advice she ever gave me about boys. “You have to let them win,” she said. “They don’t like it when you’re better than them.”

That turned out to be true. Then Ronnie Kestenbaum let me carry his mitt. I thought he loved me.

At thirteen, I had my first real kiss. My friend Tema Aaronson and I were baby-sitting and Stuey Seltzer and Lenny Cohen came over to keep us company. We were so lonely, you know? After talking about homework, we asked if they liked The Five Satins and The Del Vikings, and then pretty soon we were all French kissing. As soon as they left, Tema and I hurried to the bathroom and rinsed out our mouths. Laughing, we called them “the water boys.”

I never liked the way I looked. As an adult, I was once asked what my least-favorite feature was. I said everything. I always wanted to be prettier. All the girls in my neighborhood were Italian or Jewish and they had brown or blues eyes. Mine were green. One day I came up with a cockamamy theory that my grandmother’s glaucoma eye drops would turn my eyes brown like everyone else’s. They didn’t. They nearly blinded me.

“What did you do?” my mother asked.

“Nothing,” I lied.

“What did you do?” she asked again.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just woke up like this.”

I had to stay home from school, which wasn’t the worst thing in the world. I tried to skip school as often as I could. Every week I would go through the
TV Guide
and circle movies I wanted to see. If enough of them were on the same day, I would hold the thermometer up to the lightbulb and tell my mother that I had a fever. “See, one-oh-two.” By three o’clock, I would feel better and run out to see my friends and ask what had happened at school.

All of my friends hung out at the same place: the Parkway. The Parkway was the center of my social life—of my life, period. It was a stretch of fence that started directly across the street from JHS 80 and ran for a good distance along Jerome Avenue. The high school kids gathered around the Mosholu Cafeteria. They didn’t want to be around the younger kids. Every group had their own piece of real estate. Even the loose Rocky girls—the cool girls—had a spot.

I went there every day as soon as school let out and met up with
Tema Aaronson, Irma Gottlieb, Carol Cohen, and other friends. There was a reason my friends joked that one day I would have a permanent dent in my ass from sitting on that fence: I was always there. I didn’t want to miss a thing. I snuck there at night, too. After dinner, I would volunteer to take the garbage to the incinerator, run to the Parkway, see my friends for ten minutes, and run back home.

“What took so long?” my mother would ask.

“There was a line,” I would say.

On Saturdays we’d race home for fifteen minutes to check out
American Bandstand
. We would want to see the latest new dance. Then we would race back and talk about what we’d seen. Our world revolved around weekly dances. The school hosted a dance every Friday afternoon and the Jewish Community Center had one on Saturday nights. Those were important social occasions. They were fraught with drama. Everything revolved around who you’d danced with the previous week, and who you hoped to dance with at the next one.

At the dances, the girls went on one side and the boys stood on the other side, and eventually the music lured those of us more confident about our ability into action. Calvin Klein, the future fashion mogul, was one of the boys who liked to dance. He was good, too. He was a year older than me and later married my friend Jayne Center. When I was in seventh grade, my sister gave me a diary for Christmas and I filled pages with concern and speculation about being asked to the Valentine’s Day dance. “I hope either Joel, Ronald, or David asks me!” I wrote. Two weeks later, I was still waiting. “Please make one of those boys ask me to the V. dance,” I added hopefully.