T<\/span>he summer of nineteen fifty-five in New York City was the season of the caterpillar.\u00a0 It was so hot they emerged from the ground like a slow moving army and advanced on the buildings, pavements, tree trunks, and cars.\u00a0 My mother, giving birth to me on a sweltering day in mid-Summer in the Brooklyn Women’s Hospital, could see them crawling along the screens of the open hospital windows.\u00a0 She watched them make slow progress as she suffered her labor pains and waited to be put under.<\/p>\n

Allen Ginsberg was writing Howl<\/span> as Disneyland opened and Albert Einstein died.<\/p>\n

It was summer in East New York, Brooklyn, and kids ran back and forth across Montauk Avenue, dodging cars to play freeze tag or iron tag or Hide And Go Seek.\u00a0 Everyone\u2019s mother was fussing around in an apartment, in a hot kitchen, making a bed.\u00a0 Old people dotted the pavement with their folding chairs.\u00a0 When you ran by them you could smell their Ben Gay and baby powder.<\/p>\n

My own grandmother worked in a factory, sewing the trim on dresses.\u00a0 When she came home she gave me a piece of Bazooka gum.\u00a0 By seven o\u2019clock we younger kids were called in for our baths and bed.\u00a0 By eight o\u2019clock I was under the cotton covers sniffing the bubble gum comic I had saved, while I listened to the older kids\u2019 voices drift in from the summer night, and watched the long slanted sunlight of dusk<\/p>\n

My mother still had her natural brunette hair and my father hadn’t yet become a school teacher.\u00a0 He was still selling Venetian blinds and table pads.\u00a0 He called himself “the table pad man” and told jokes about “How to make a Venetian blind.”\u00a0 He was still playing his ukulele and writing songs like “Seymour The Clumsy Plumber,” and “Arthur Godfrey Stole My Ukulele,” funny, maddeningly catchy tunes with silly lyrics.\u00a0 I was too young to understand that he and his song-writing partner had almost signed a deal for the movie, \u201cGidget Goes To Rome.\u201d\u00a0 Instead of my dad\u2019s song, \u201cSing A Little Song Of Love,\u201d it was \u201cIttsy Bittsy Polka Dot Bikini\u201d that became the movie\u2019s theme song.\u00a0 My father\u2019s passion to establish a career as a songwriter fizzled out as the pressures of three jobs and three kids squeezed him.\u00a0 Still, he managed to be there when we went to sleep at seven o\u2019clock and to spend a few minutes sitting on each of our beds, rubbing our backs and talking about our lives.\u00a0 I was going to be an actress like Ann-Margaret.\u00a0 I had her picture on my mirror (autographed) and had joined her fan club.\u00a0 My stage name would be Roxanne.<\/p>\n

Growing up in Brooklyn in the late fifties and early sixties was paradise.\u00a0 The streets belonged to us kids.\u00a0 Camp was something for rich kids.\u00a0 Sleep away camp was something I had heard of but never actually knew anyone who went.\u00a0 The one summer my parents could afford to send my older brother for a few weeks was a fiasco.\u00a0 He was so homesick they had to go get him.\u00a0 It was the same summer Alan Sherman\u2019s hit song, \u201cCamp Granada\u201d was popular, and I can recall being confused: Was he singing about<\/em> my brother or was it my brother<\/em> singing?<\/p>\n

Most days, if it didn\u2019t rain, I dug in the lot on the corner with a spoon.\u00a0 All done up in a frilly dress with a crinoline slip, I headed out for my day with the dirt.\u00a0 I was three or four years old and my mother didn\u2019t care if I got dirty.\u00a0 It was other mothers who cared, and even scolded me, \u201cYou\u2019ll get your dress all dirty!\u201d\u00a0 as I headed to the corner, spoon in hand.\u00a0 Of course they were right, but my mother didn\u2019t seem to care.\u00a0 She had a knack for understanding me even then.\u00a0 She appreciated that I liked pretty dresses and<\/em> I liked to dig in the dirt.<\/p>\n

My mother\u2019s entire creative spirit was bestowed on her children and her home.\u00a0 She wasn\u2019t itching for any career but housewife and mother.\u00a0 Later, when I got older, I learned that many mothers of that time were frustrated and depressed and often felt trapped.\u00a0 Not Winnie.\u00a0 She knitted clothes for my Barbie.\u00a0 She made construction paper hats for my entire class when it was my birthday.\u00a0 She hand-made our Halloween costumes every year.\u00a0 She redecorated my room as a surprise.\u00a0 She was organized and upbeat.\u00a0 She was doing exactly what she wanted to do: have a family and take care of them.<\/p>\n

My father taught us all to read music and play the Tonette or Flutophone by the time we were in the fourth grade so we could play duets with him.\u00a0 We would climb into my parents\u2019 bed on weekend mornings and stay there long after they arose, smelling breakfast being prepared in the kitchen.\u00a0 It was such a good life, idyllic actually, that I have often questioned my own memory of it.\u00a0 It ended when I was nine years old so I tell myself I was probably not old enough to really remember correctly.\u00a0 Yet, whenever I question the rest of my family or old friends, they agree.\u00a0 My family was a happy family.\u00a0 There were lots of friends and picnics on summer weekends.\u00a0 There were birthday parties and New Year\u2019s parties and retirement parties.\u00a0 We got presents on Hanukkah.\u00a0 We walked to school three blocks away and came home for lunch to a mother who was glad to see us and feed us, and talk about our day.\u00a0 My parents were loving, kind and self-sacrificial.\u00a0 I had friends and a street life.\u00a0 My mother played paper dolls with me and colored in coloring books and taught me how to stay inside the lines.\u00a0 I had dolls and toys and once a year I got a new box of 64 Crayola crayons.<\/p>\n

But somehow life wasn\u2019t easy for me.\u00a0 I was a tense and overly sensitive kid.\u00a0 I was afraid of disapproval.\u00a0 I wet my bed.\u00a0 When I wanted something, I wanted it deeply, passionately, and couldn\u2019t wait.\u00a0 I ground my teeth when I slept.\u00a0 My parents often had to give me my birthday presents early.\u00a0 I had nightmares.\u00a0 I took things very seriously.\u00a0 I was afraid of the dark.\u00a0 I was afraid to fail in school though I was a good student.\u00a0 I was afraid my mom would die or be snatched (like Anne Frank).\u00a0 I didn\u2019t like a lot of the kids on the block or the popular movies of the day, but to refuse to play with the kids or go to the movies with them made me an outcast.\u00a0 Looking back I think I was suffering from some kind of anxiety disorder.\u00a0 Back then they just called me \u201csensitive.\u201d\u00a0 Maybe both are right.<\/p>\n

It was my mother I went to over and over again with my wants, my problems, my fears, and my dreams.\u00a0 I can still see myself walk into the large square kitchen where she was cooking or talking on the phone or doing the wash, and crying to her.\u00a0 She never criticized me.\u00a0 Never said, \u201cWhy can\u2019t you be less sensitive?\u201d\u00a0 or, \u201cBe like the others.\u201d\u00a0 Instead she was always squarely on my side.\u00a0 \u201cYou can\u2019t be everyone\u2019s friend,\u201d she said.\u00a0 Or, \u201cWater seeks its own level.\u201d<\/p>\n

In all my adult dreams and fantasies of making it \u201cbig\u201d as a writer, fame never appealed.\u00a0 All my fantasies involved the sheer pleasure of sharing my work, of knowing that people would read and enjoy it.\u00a0 Of course I dreamed also of being paid <\/em>to do it so that I wouldn\u2019t have to do any other loathsome job ever again.\u00a0 The idea of \u201cfans\u201d never crossed my mind.\u00a0 It was a friend (and fellow writer) who pointed out to me that my mother had already fulfilled all my needs for a \u201cfan club.\u201d<\/p>\n

Was it Tolstoy who said that all happy families are alike?\u00a0 Do all happy families laugh as much as we did?\u00a0 My parents were blessed with having a similar sense of humor.\u00a0 My dad liked to play practical jokes and once phoned my mother from the downstairs apartment where his father lived (we lived upstairs) and told her he had been arrested and needed her to come down and bail him out.\u00a0 She was frantic and terrified and rushed out the door and down the steps only to find him waiting at the landing.<\/p>\n

On weekends we went out with other couples and their families.\u00a0 We drove all the way out to Eastern Long Island one summer weekend, to a place the adults confusingly called Shirley, Long Island.\u00a0 Were we visiting a person or a place?\u00a0\u00a0 (It must have been when I was in my early twenties that I became aware that Shirley, Long Island was actually a town.)\u00a0 I remember the long days of summer, the barbecues, the adult talk and laughter.\u00a0 I remember the endless car rides home, stopping at Carvel, falling asleep in the back seat next to my brothers and feeling entirely safe and content.<\/p>\n

Some time around 1960, when I was five, my mother\u2019s mother, Fannie, moved in with us.\u00a0 Her bed was put in my room.\u00a0 From then until I moved out when I was eighteen, we were roommates.\u00a0 Fannie had been deaf for many years but had always lived in the same building with some of her family.\u00a0 When the last of the family moved out of Brooklyn, my parents took her in.\u00a0 She was only fifty-five years old, quite healthy and she was still working in the factory sewing \u201ctrimming\u201d for ladies\u2019 dresses.<\/p>\n

Fannie would hang her ancient fur coat on our bedroom door each night and when I awoke to use the bathroom in the dark, I was terrified of the gigantic, furry creature standing against the door.\u00a0 I would try to convince myself it was just Gram\u2019s coat, but it didn\u2019t help.\u00a0 Ultimately the coat had to be moved.\u00a0 I would lie awake at night worrying about the stuffed toys my mom had washed that day (soaked with my own urine because I slept with them) that were hanging on the line to dry.\u00a0 I crept to the window, pulled the line in and rescued my teddy bear, hanging limply by its ears.<\/p>\n

I spent many evenings lying on our sofa, strewn across Fannie\u2019s lap, as she rubbed my back and hair.\u00a0 She smelled of Noxema.\u00a0 She would dot it on parts of her face where she had a blemish (or imagined she did) and leave it to dry out.\u00a0 It would harden there like grout.\u00a0 Years later I recall being surprised by the jingle that said \u201cWash<\/em> your face with Noxema\u2026\u201d\u00a0 I had always assumed it was supposed to be used the way Fannie used it.\u00a0 I guess for some kids the piney smell of Christmas trees reminds them of a happy childhood, for me it’s Noxema.<\/p>\n

As a young child I knew nothing of the relationship between Fannie and my mother.\u00a0 I had never heard them argue or even disagree.\u00a0 In fact, even my father liked his mother-in-law and his mother-in-law held him in a kind of reverence because he eventually went to college and became a teacher.\u00a0 To Fannie, an educated person was someone to respect.\u00a0 In her entire extended family the only person I ever heard about who went to college was one cousin who became a doctor.\u00a0 Everyone else worked with their hands as plumbers, factory workers, brick layers.\u00a0 One of Fannie\u2019s uncles was legendary to us kids because he became a building inspector and was clever enough to take bribes, thus making it into the middle class and no longer having to work with his hands.\u00a0 He was adored for having paid for Fannie\u2019s two children to go to summer camp exactly once for two whole weeks<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until after her divorce, when I was about eight, that I learned the details of my mother\u2019s unhappy childhood.\u00a0 Maybe if I had heard these stories as an adult they wouldn\u2019t have confused and overwhelmed me. But at the age of ten, with barely any history of my own, I internalized my mother\u2019s.\u00a0 It would take thirty years for me to unweave the sorrow of her youth from my own understanding of my own life.<\/p>\n

No one got divorced back in 1963.\u00a0 If they did, they sure as hell didn’t tell me about it.\u00a0 Which is how I knew that there was something very wrong with my family.\u00a0 It was a strange and uncomfortable feeling after a (short) lifetime of feeling perfectly safe and normal.\u00a0 Suddenly I was ushered into a world where my mother was no longer busily being the happy housewife and, instead, sobbed on her bed with me lying at her side.\u00a0 When I think back to my childhood, I compare myself to kids who grow up in bilingual households.\u00a0 Both languages feel completely natural to them and they can’t recall a time when they couldn’t speak both fluently.\u00a0 I learned my second language when I was nine: an alphabet of betrayal, a syntax of sorrow.\u00a0 I can\u2019t recall not speaking it.\u00a0 I still dream in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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