In March of 1974 I celebrated my seventh birthday. My Mother lay on her side in white levis and a green t-shirt that said ERA, no bra, her haired pulled back into a long high ponytail and her head propped up on her palm, smiling in as I grabbed at one present to open in a blur, ripping open wrapping paper and ribbon, a quick glance, and I dropped it beside me to move on to the next one. I was dressed in Sam’s old basketball shirt, as his clothes were always my favorite clothes, and flowered pants with patches at the knees, a tomboy child, active and scrappy with hair falling out of my long braids. My brothers sat quietly besides me, propped up on their knees with their feet tucked underneath them. Josh even had his hands clasped politely in front of the swell of his three year old belly. Both the boys were in dire need of haircuts. Their bangs brushed past their eyebrows and the ends almost touched their shoulders. The three of us look like little hippie children with our long hair and bare feet. Wrappings and new playthings are strewn around us. A new plastic bottle of bubbles. A pad of coloring paper. Colorful shoelaces.
This is the moment that my father’s camera catches. Sickness is a dim memory. You can see it in all of our faces. My Mother doesn’t have to worry about my undressing for the neighbors and discussing female fertility with them anymore. I have grown out of it, left it behind in some other space, like the space of my lost front tooth that shows in my happy and dazed drunken little smile.
Fresh Meadows, New York, our neighborhood of 1974 is still safe and innocent enough for us, and we were allowed to roam within reason. I had a steady route of neighbors to visit. The elderly ones gave me Stella Doro breadsticks to munch on. The young parents let me hold their babies. Mr. Simon had a calculator that I liked to play with. As soon as he let me in I made a beeline for his desk while he grabbed his golf clubs to swing at a few on his little patch of grass outside. I would sit beside him and push buttons while I updated him on the more important aspects of the lives of the Lubin family. Neighbors would stop my mother while she unloaded groceries and say,
“We hear you have new sheets,” or, “Has your husband’s rash cleared up yet?”
“Little chatter bug,” My mother would say to me as she soothed down those little wispy bits that always seemed to be seeping out of my braids.
“Look at our little mother Earth,” My Mother would say as I played with the next door neighbor’s baby or carefully lined up my dolls along the back of the couch.
“Our Little Girl.” She would say to my Father as I ran through the yard with eyes all glazed over, my entire being caught up in some imaginary game. We had a great gang of kids to play with in that neighborhood and so many places to explore, so many spaces under the bushes to build forts, two separate playgrounds within shouting distance, with swings and slides and dirt to dig in. We were the kind of children who kept our mother on her toes. We were particularly prone to running away. Any perceived slight from our parents could send us packing, although we usually didn’t make it much further than halfway down the block and I’m fairly certain that most of our staged protests went unnoticed. We got sick in stages instead of all at once, subjecting our mother to six weeks of chicken pox. It was winter when I got began scratching. By the time Josh was recuperating he was able to lay out back in a lawn chair covered with a blanket. Our vomit was always projectile. Milk was spilled at every meal. Our Mom made us chocolate pudding for deserts and we would spin the little bowl around with our spoons chanting,
“Chocolate chip and chocolate mush Johnny baby!”
I loved the skin of the pudding the best because you could suck on it, with it’s hard crust on top, and the creamy pudding underneath. Sometimes Jell-O molds came wobbling out of the kitchen, two-tiered two-toned two-types of Jell-O with mandarin oranges and banana slices caught frozen the red shivering sea. There were Mom’s graham cracker crust pies too, that she made by beating the crap out of an innocent box of graham crackers in a plastic bag. I loved to watch. It gave me a thrill to watch her go to town and beat down some crackers and then pour the crumbs into a pie tin. She would fill it in with mint chocolate chip pudding, or lemon meringue, or apples and peaches. She would place her creation in the middle of the table with a flourish and accept our gasps of “Ahhhh!” and then cut tiny little slivers that I swear you could see through. Our Father could sum up our distress with one sentence,
“Louise, stop with the cheap pieces of pie!”
We had so many rituals living near New York City. A favorite Chinese restaurant on Mott Street in Manhattan that we went to so often that Bing, our waiter, knew what to bring us before we even ordered. I would watch the older wives roll wontons while I poured sugar into my tea. They didn’t have teacups, but short glasses and we had to keep stirring up our tea with a spoon or all the sugar would seep to the bottom, where our Mom would see the sodden lump that lay on the bottom of the glass. If we put in too much sugar, she would take our tea away. It was all very much a game of Chinese Cat and Mouse.
We liked to drive up Broadway so we could look at all the lights blaring out from the theaters. Our Father knew every song from every show and could sing like an angel as my brothers and I sat lined up on the couch, a captive, hushed audience of three. Songs from “West Side Story” and “A Chorus Line” were our childhood lullabies. Our parents didn’t take us on vacations to Disneyland. They saved up for tickets to Broadway shows. The first one that we all five went to was “Pippin” with Ben Vareen. We sat front row center, rock star seats, and when the dancers leaned over the lights and whispered, “Join ussssssss.” I was enthralled but Josh, four, arched his back against the plush velvet of his seat like a scared cat and yelled, “No!”
The sexy dancers who seduced Pippin embarrassed me. Their bras had slits in them to make it look like you could see the flesh of their breasts.
Jones Beach was close too, and in July and August when it reached triple digits we could pile into the Bug and drive to the ocean. Sam and Josh and I would begin to chant in the car when we reached the Tower that marked the turnoff to the beaches. We would sit in the backseat all piled over each other like puppies and say all in rhythm together, “I see the To-wer, I see the to-wer, I see the to-wer,” and so on, until we could see actual ocean, and then with no notification between us would immediately switch to “I see the wa-ter, I see the wa-ter, I see the wa-ter,”
Until we pulled into the parking lot (beach # 6 was a favorite but we also loved Beach# 9) and commenced chanting, “I see the saaaand, I see the saaand, I see the saaand,” until our parents parked. They never asked us to be quiet. I like to think that they enjoyed the chanting.
Jones Beach was a peanut butter sandwich with a light dusting of sand eaten on a scratchy blanket in a damp bathing suit, followed by Oreo cookies, always Oreos at the beach, and in later years, Double Stuff Oreos. Then our father would jump waves with us and hold our hands and pull us up and over the tops of swells before they curled over and crashed on the sand. It was a lightheaded, dizzy feeling, to be lifted up like that, and later, after the beach, when I was in bed and falling asleep, I could still feel the movement of the ocean. Our Mom bathed us with baby powder back at the car, rubbing all the sand off with a clean towel in a little private area she made by opening the drivers door and standing next to it, shielding us as she wiped sand out of the creases in our groins and our butt cracks. She would dress us in fresh clothes and place us one by one into the backseat, where we would feel so sated with warmth and sunshine, our faces colored like summer and our bodies feeling smooth and clean, and ready to doze off on the way home.
We could fly to the beach too. Our Dad had his pilot’s license and belonged to a group that could rent Cessna’s out of Tetorboro Airport in New Jersey. He would slowly do his pre-flight exam while Sam and Josh and I walked along the docked planes. They sat on cement that was cracked, but soft if you touched it, and the wire fences had weed like grasses that grew all tangled through it. You had to walk on the wing to climb into the plane, and there was a strip of black that was scratchy so you wouldn’t slip. Josh wore a baby harness in the plane but Sam and I had seatbelts. I felt completely at peace when my Father flew us somewhere. He controlled the entire universe from his pilot’s seat and I never felt safer. He was like a benevolent God when he flew, serene and at total peace, controlling all our orbits with a slight flick of his hand. He and our Mom wore thick headsets and their words were blurry from the noise of the engines, like listening to people speaking underwater. Our destination could be anywhere. East Hampton. Martha’s Vineyard. Provincetown. I can remember landing at an airport on the Cape and all of us walking over a huge sand dune to the ocean, laden down with sand toys and towels and a cooler with lunch. It seemed long. I made up a story in my head about a march across the desert and felt thirsty and like whining. But we were rewarded with a shimmering perfect blue Cape Cod ocean, and a sweeping low tide that left us with miles and miles of sandbars to play on. Back at the plane our Mother would bathe us in powder, change our clothes and place us in the backseat to wait for takeoff. In the moment when the plane lifted off the runway I felt perfect and happy, as if life could never get any better than this, my entire family encapsulated in a warm little metal shell, all of us flushed with sunburns and salt water, with my father flying us through the air towards home.
We had Massachusetts, two hours away, where in one small town there were more Uncles, Aunts and cousins than you could count on both hands. There, we had permission to walk alone down the three long blocks from our grandparents house to the little store where we would fetch our Grandpa Max his paper and cigar, and ice cream bars were a dime and our Uncle Walter would surely be holding court with his cronies at the deli next door and he would call out to us as we tumbled through the door. He would pull me up on his lap and call me Charlie and tilt his head down to my ear to tell me one of his famous stories while Sam and Josh sipped hot chocolate. On the walk home Sam would proudly hold Grandpa Max’s paper and tell us, “When I grow up I’m going to live here.”
While Josh took larger steps to keep up, I would hold the cardboard box of costume jewelry from Uncle Walter’s store, our “diamonds” he called them, and think about Pittsfield, Massachusetts and how it seemed like it inhabited a different decade than Fresh Meadows, New York and not just because my grandparents lived here and they were old. There was certain quaintness to the town, to the entire environment. My grandparents’ house had wastepaper baskets instead of garbage pails and window shades instead of window blinds and beds with pretty flowered sheets and knitted blankets instead of Mickey Mouse comforters. They had an attic that housed not only our baby clothes but our Mother’s toys and Nancy Drew books from her own childhood. My brothers and I would sit on the wide planked wooden floor and look around at the old chalkboard, and the doll carriages and ancient suitcases and the clear plastic garment bag that held our mother’s wedding dress and feel completely surrounded by our own history. It was a wonderful feeling of awe, and a little scary, because we thought perhaps that the attic might be haunted, but we felt almost safe if we were all there together. And in those years. the three of us were always together.