Hi Everybody:
Sorry this is late. I loved the exercise and spent a long time making lists. I'll send this as an email attachment after I post it here. Thanks, as always, for reading!
Best, Becky
Independence Day 1962
I.
In the year of my birth, 1957, “I Love Lucy” aired
its last episode, JFK received the Pulitzer for Profiles in Courage, and Great Britain exploded its first H-Bomb
over Christmas Island. A century and a half earlier, Lavoisier was tried,
convicted and executed during the Reign of Terror. Fifteen years before the day
of my birth, the USS Lexington sank beneath the waves in the Battle of the
Coral Sea, one year after the Luftwaffe commenced its first bombing raids over England.
When my twin brother and I were born on May 8, 1957, my father had been home for
12 years from his two years as an infantryman medic in Belgium, England,
Germany, Holland and France. Bobby and I were the last of my parents’ five
children, born 8 years after the first set of twins (girls) and 10 years before
their eldest child, a daughter.
My two earliest memories are of light and dark. In a
patch of sun next to a white dresser, I stare at a lamb stenciled by my mother on
one of its drawers. Then look at, and recognize, the lamb crocheted on the
small white sweater I am wearing. My first remembered symbol, first glimmer of
language. And, a darkened room with two wooden cribs—my brother in one, I in
the other. Looking through bars to see him lying there, looking back at me.
Then we are both up on hands and knees rocking to scoot the cribs across the
bare wood floor until we were close enough to touch hands. Trouble is, I’ve
been interweaving memory with things I recall reading for more than 50 years
now, so how can I tell what really happened. And once I’ve adopted something as
memory, nurtured and cherished it, does it really matter?
II.
On Independence Day 1962, I am five years old, and we
are living in a new housing development near Highland Park in Altoona, then the
fourth largest city in Pennsylvania after Harrisburg and Philadelphia to the
East, and Pittsburgh to the west. The city nestles in a valley circled on all
sides by low, heavily wooded mountains that haze over blue in summer and in winter,
gray. Then blaze red, orange and yellow in the fall. The whole neighborhood is
new; between it and deep forest lays only a backhoed swath of raw dirt. Our
house is brand spanking new as well, designed on a blueprint torn from a
magazine and built, in large part, by my parents’ own hands. Mom laid the
floors board by board; fitting tongues into grooves and slant-nailing them into
place. Dad framed walls, put up drywall, taped and mudded seams. They both
painted the house ceiling by ceiling and wall by wall, and then the white clapboard
outside, up on tall ladders leaned against the eaves. Mom’s father , a bricklayer by trade, laid the foundation, the retaining walls, and
the decorative brickwork on the facade, finishing with a planter that
overflowed with petunias in summer and chrysanthemums in fall, “Mom’s mums,” we
called them. I was not around for any of this, or if I was, would’ve been
tucked into a laundry in a basket at their feet or with my brother, on a
blanket in the big metal play pen I’ve seen
in the home movies.
By that July of 1962, Dad has grouted the last tile
and mom run up the last seam of her curtains, and we are settled in. I am not
sure my memories of hot summer nights actually date from 1962—how do we ever
know any memory is not an amalgam of the actual event and then all the changes
we add when we each time we recall it?—but these will do: the sound of Don
Drysdale calling the Pirates game on the transistor radio Dad has set up
outside next to his lawn chair, mixing with the high, keening trill of crickets
and locusts. The yeasty smell of Genesee
beer mixing with smoke of charcoal grills fired for dinners eaten on picnic
tables, the sharp tang of tobacco always nearby. A brightness of parsley on my
tongue when I pluck a crisp frond from the plant that volunteers, year after
year, next to the kitchen steps. Air soft with humidity and, warm enough, even
at night, for shorts and sleeveless shirts. The whine of a mosquito, suddenly
right inside my ear, sound of a slap and “gott’um!” from where mom and dad are
sitting in the ring of light cast by a single light fixture over the cement slab
that serves as our back porch.
Fourth of July is a big social occasion because we
live at the top of a hill, and people from all over town come up to watch the fireworks,
setting up folding aluminum lawn chairs in the long grass of the vacant lot
next door. Cars line both sides of the road, and kids duck in and out of knots
of grownups drinking and smoking and talking. Many are playing games of boys-catch-the-girls,
statues, hide-and-go-seek, kick the can. Games that teach you, when touched, to
freeze.
It’s dusk. The mountains go purple first, then the
sky. Lights wink on, and what we call the evening wish-upon stars are really
planets hung low and heavy like lanterns. Then the stars emerge, a sprinkle at first, then so many you can see
why it’s called the Milky Way, a white stream poured out overhead, shedding a
strange, cool light that picks out each blade of grass.
Recently mowed, the grass where I am sitting,
cross-legged, is stubble that tickles the backs of my calves and thighs. I’m absorbed in the task of knotting a clover chain.
To achieve the longest possible stem for each ball of white blossom, I slide a finger
and thumb all the way down till I feel damp earth, then pinch, immediately rolling
the stem-end into a loop into which the next plucked stem can be fitted, then
cinched tight. Over and over, a repetition that yields something beautiful, a
long chain that can be tied off into a crown, or several strands of a necklace.
It gives me a way to be part of the crowd but also alone in it and allows me to
do what I love best, tell stories in my head without being interrupted.
The vacant field where people set up their aluminum
lawn chairs is part of a double lot belonging to the neighborhood’s wealthiest
family, owners of the Price Poultry farm. The Price house, like all the others
I can see, is a single-story ranch, but this one is built of a singular pale
limestone—not from local quarries—and boasts an indoor as well as an outdoor
above-ground pool built in the same pale stone. Like the neighbor house on our other
side, this house has a subterranean bomb shelter stocked with food, water, and
emergency supplies enough to last several months, on shelves lining walls of three-foot
reinforced concrete. I have been in both bomb shelters, playing hide and go
seek, and one has a shelter within the shelter, a passageway just wide enough
to stand between two more 3-foot thick walls.
I don’t really know what the bomb shelters are for,
not yet attending Baker School where I’ll join my classmates in weekly “under
the desk” drills—what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. No, this is the
June before I will start Kindergarten. The first atomic energy plant in Canada has
just gone online, but I would not have known about that. Nor that testing of
devices to detonate nuclear bombs has been going on continuously in the US
since the year of my birth. Or about the brewing Cuban Missile Crisis, or the CIA offering large sums of money to
organized crime to make a hit on Fidel Castro. No one in my family had been to
Cuba or even knew anyone who’d been to Cuba, a long way away from that small
suburban neighborhood landlocked by mountains; it was not on our map of the
world.
I’m afraid I am fudging, but the other things happened,
if not on the night I am trying to conjure. Maybe the snow cone “truck” powered
by a foot pedal bicycle comes around to serve shaved ice dribbled with cherry,
grape, or orange syrup in paper cones. Maybe the mosquito truck buzzes down
Second Avenue and gets chased by us kids, moving in an exaggerated slow-motion
ballet, weirdly delighted to find ourselves obscured and lost to each other,
even to ourselves, in the thick white chemical fog.
The Supreme Court’s decision (Engel v. Vitale) banning prayer in the public schools is still new,
and my parents are talking about it. And about the first of three excerpts of
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
published by the New York Times and
digested in our local paper, The Altoona
Mirror. A hundred fifty miles to the
east, someone in Centralia sets a match to the annual “dump fire,” and ignites
the labyrinth of coal mines below in a fire that still burns now and will continue
to burn for the next 250 years. Spider Man is born. The Beatles audition at Abbey
Road, and Marilyn Monroe gets fired from the set of her last movie, Something’s Got to Give. Lee Harvey
Oswald arrives back in the US from Russia.
Newspaper archives from the months just before July
1962 report at least three fatal crashes of commercial jet liners, and a triple
train crash near Tokyo takes 160 lives. Closer to home, a train derails at
Steelton, killing and injuring many fans en route to the Phillies / Pirates
game. The Minnesota Twins are the first MLB team to hit two grand slam homeruns
in the same inning. Thalidomide is withdrawn from the market, and my mother is
grateful that instead of Thalidomide, she was prescribed DES for her morning
sicknesses. In May 1962, the first severed limb is re-attached at Mass General and
the first piece of music generated by a computer—a string quartet called ST/10=1 080262—is performed.
My parents get their news of the world from The Altoona Mirror or from watching Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on
a 22” black and white TV with a rabbit ear antenna. “Goodnight, David — Goodnight, Chet” is heard every evening in our house, and
parodied by my mother and father before they go to bed in the room with thin
walls next to mine: “Goodnight, Bob —
Goodnight, Barb.” We watch footage of the building of the Berlin Wall,
rolls of razor wire that, in my memory, separate brother from brother, parent
from child. In News that I don’t hear about until now, 50 years later and perusing
the Internet, Corbello becomes president of El Salvador, a country even more
off our map than the island of Cuba. Rwanda and Burundi, alien as other planets
in other solar systems, gain independence. Charles de Gaulle recognizes
Algeria. Lawrence Olivier is still alive. Tom Cruise, whose face I will come to
recognize much more clearly than either de Gaulle’s or Oliver’s, is born.
Later in July 1962, the US will explode 1.4 megaton
hydrogen bomb called Starfish Prime, in outer space, creating a flash visible
in Hawaii and an electromagnetic pulse that burns out streetlights, blows fuses
and spews radiation over a wide area. And will conduct its first atmospheric
nuclear bomb test, successfully launching
“Little Feller;” Nuclear testing continues,
as it has for a decade, at Johnston Atoll off Hawaii. AT&T’s Telestar, the
world’s first communications satellite (designed by the man who will,
twenty-five years later, become my father-in-law) transmits the first image
between continents: a black and white photo of the American flag. The Rolling
Stones make their debut at London’s Marquee Club. The Unite Arab Emirates fires
four test missiles with range to reach Israel, leading Mossad to organize
Operation Damocles to target the German Scientists building the rockets. At the
end of the month, the Cuban Missile Crisis will come to full boil around the
same time the Soviets manage to launch Kosmos 7 to conduct surveillance
photography of the entire US.
I know none of these things that night as I sit on
the grass, weaving my clover chains. Or if I know them, it is as a timbre of
fear in parents’ voices talking together after the nightly news, the tremble I
sometimes see in my father’s hands. Here, the grass is cool, but not yet wet
with dew. The day has been hot and I can still feel the warmth of the ground
under the grass. When I look up, fireflies wink like birthday candles on a lawn
turned into a giant sheet cake. I do not, at this point, have a sense of myself
as other than: twin, sister, daughter. Part of a family, part of the house we
live in, Like Gaston Bachelard’s Emily who, in The Poetics of Space, invents her emerging childhood and who, until
she left her childhood home did not realize that “she was a she” could not
distinct from the story of her childhood, with its elements of setting, plot,
other characters.
On this July evening my thoughts are where they
always are, in the world of the latest story my mother has told, or in the
world in my mind makes by re-mixing parts of the stories in new combinations, with
me as a major character. I am not yet reading yet myself, but my mother reads
to me nightly and the real world—the world of my father worrying over columns
of figures at the kitchen table late into the night or slumped in a lawn chair,
his hand wrapped around a beer can or tumbler of scotch over ice, the world of
Mom and Dad arguing behind the closed bedroom
door, of one sister or another sobbing into her pillow, of my brother’s great,
splintered-glass epileptic headaches—has begun to recede. Or I to retreat from it
into the stories I’ve discovered tell the truth about where I’m from. The world
where what Mom calls my bad dreams (very few are actually nightmares) are real,
and the mother who sometimes turns on me with glazed-eyed ferocity is a fairy
godmother in disguise and the father who sits muttering in his chair is under
an evil enchantment that might—yet—be lifted.
I don’t know which fairy tales I am thinking about
that night, but I do have the book they likely came from, Vol. I of Young Folks Treasury published by the
New York University Society in 1921, part of my father’s set when he was a
child. Perhaps it is “One Eye, Two Eyes, Three Eyes” by the Brothers Grimm;
perhaps, the English story called “Tom Thumb.” In any event, my head is full of
fairies and princesses, trolls and hags, and I have to be called several times
to come up the hill so I will not miss the fireworks.
My brothers
and sisters are already there with my parents, part of a group setting off
their own pre-game fireworks displays. I smell gunpowder and hear the
pop-pop-pops of cap strips slapped against curbs. Sparklers carried by excited,
invisible children zigzag all over the hill below.
Mom and Dad kneel, each with a roman candle. The
sparks shoot up, up, up—twin geysers of ragged, coursing light that bend at the
top and merge to make a fiery arch, a portal. I can see what lies beyond the
arch—and I know from an interior place beyond all conviction that it is my real
home, the place where Mom is Glinda the good witch or Titania Queen of the
Fairies, and Dad the powerful King or Norse God, or Jason slaying Medusa. I
absolutely see it, and what I feel in that moment is conviction, anticipation, and
relief. Joy, wonder, and awe. Yes, there it is. There. I squinch my eyes tight
and run toward the light that streams between and connects my mother and
father.
III.
When I next open them, the room is very dark, and it
takes a while for my eyes to adjust. Back in the room I share with my brother, I
am lying face down on top of a white dimity coverlet shirred and puckered with rosebuds
made of French knots: each knot is a thorn, a burr. Am I the Princess, chafing
on her mattresses piled over a pea? No, this is what I have come to think of as
not-my room in not-my real home. In which my not-brother grinds his teeth from
the next bed.
Anquish. I did not make it through.
And something else—physical pain. Molten lead poured
on the back of my neck. I put up a hand and feel, with surprise, that my hair
is gone. Just a few stubs, strangely brittle and crinkled, but the long blond
tresses that distinguished me from my sisters are entirely gone. The skin on my
neck is corrugated, etched with sharp ridges, slathered over with some thick
herb-smelling unguent, slick to the touch, all the way up in back of my ears
and down to my collarbone.
I did not make it through.
Besides the salve, I smell rust, blood, and burnt
hair. At my window, the birch tree looks in with her little faces of leaves,
each one disappointed and sad. Somehow I failed to pass through the portal, and
the way so clearly marked.
Then my parents are beside me. Don’t touch, my
mother says. No matter how bad it itches, you must not pick or scratch. My
father, pacing back and forth, back and forth, whispers I’m so sorry, dearie, oh
so, so sorry. The army drilled it into us, ‘Stop, drop and roll’.”
I’d barreled right into my mother, tangling her roman
candle in my hair. My panicked father threw me to the ground, burning my neck where
the candle’s hot mouth fastened upon it. Second degree, the ER doctor said, and
lucky you are it was not on her face.
They leave, Mom for the attic for the Christmas
wrapping paper tubes she will duct tape around my arms, so I cannot bend them
to scratch, and Dad for another drink. I hear them talking in the kitchen, or
am I filling in? For God’s sake, Bob. Her hair was not even on fire till your
stop-drop-and roll got the candle good and pressed into it. You did this. You
burned her.”
I’m so sorry, honey. Christ, Christ, so sorry. Chink-chink
more ice in the glass. The screen door’s long spring groans, and the door slaps
shut. What is wrong with her, my mom calls out to him. What child does
something like this?
Before she returns I put my hands back to touch
where the flames have opened my skin. I loosen a stiff edge and warm fluid
streams through, easing the itching and bringing great relief. I want to peel
off all the hard parts, to feel what is inside there under the skin. What still
flowing and alive. I want to go back. I will always want to go back and get
through.
For a long time after I feel seared by shame. Not for
having done something foolish, but for having blundered, failed to enter a door
opened to welcome me in. The burns take
a few weeks to heal; the hair that will cover their scars takes a year to grow
back, and for the rest of my life I carry under the top layer paler section that
begins in the center of my nape and can only be seen when I pin my hair up.
I grow quieter and more careful. She’s a bookworm,
mom says to the school teacher who complains about my looking at an unassigned
book under my desk when I am supposed to be paying attention. And this: Make no mistake, if you discourage my
daughter’s reading, I will have your job.
I lose things, forget things, and misplace pair
after pair of glasses, each loss a minor financial catastrophe to a family
budget strapped with debt for a house it could not afford. When my pigtails
grow back, my mother plaits them so tightly that when I smile, my part hurts. Other
children mostly avoid me but I, sleepwalking across the playground with my head
in a book, don’t notice. When we do our under-the –desk drills, I make sure I
have my book. I have it on field trips, at lunch, on the playground. Afraid of
my mother, my teachers, leave me alone.
IV.
One morning Mom wakes me, clutches
me to her, trembling. I dreamt you were that little girl, she says. The one in
the movie. I know the movie she is
talking about—The Bad Seed, whose
angel-faced, pigtailed nine-year old, murders a classmate with her tap shoes
and an old alcoholic janitor by setting him on fire . In the end, the distraught mother drowns herself and her
daughter in order to prevent more killing.
And I know my mother has guessed my
secret. I am that girl, the girl who would murder my whole family, my whole
world by going through fire to a place my young mind envisions as
fairyland, my mirror world, where demons
are angels and trolls are fairies. Where true mothers are kind but have died, and
fathers are kings, strong and just. The knowledge is a secret shame that lodges
itself deep inside me and encysts there; the years accrete layers and make a
pearl. That world is still there, the place where homes are not lost to the
bank, parents not divorced, not alcoholic and then dying, each one of lung
cancer, alone.
Where everything is right and golden and flowing and alive. I
want to go there. Want to go back. All
my life, I will want to go back and get through.
