I Don't Have a Happy Place (3 page)

The Narveys got themselves a new babysitter from an agency. Elicia was also from Trinidad and had asthma so bad they had to keep an oxygen tank near Sam's Barbie Dreamhouse in the basement, just in case there was an incident while vacuuming. She had a small color set in her room, and on Sunday mornings she'd let us watch church with her on TV. When Neil acted up, she'd pinch his neck skin with a maneuver she called the Clinch. I wondered if she swam.

The following year we got a sitter of our own to live full-time in the basement of our modest three-bedroom Spanish Tudor. Her name was Hortense. She was French-Canadian and wore this complicated hairdo, the likes of which I'd only see a few years later on Mrs. Garrett in
The Facts of Life
. Hortense was not winning any popularity contests with me, not only because she
spoke in clipped bossy tones and didn't like me, but also because she made me drink glasses of milk no matter how many times I tried to convince her it was against my religion.

Hortense didn't believe in television and wore a dental-hygienist–blue uniform even though no one asked her to. Eight months into her stay, when the phone rang at three a.m., I bet my mother fumbled for her glasses just before she picked up the receiver to hear the news that Hortense's sister had been murdered, somewhere near St. Joseph's Oratory, a landmark Montrealers called the Shrine. There were no screams or seaplanes or first-class tickets to the Caribbean. Just a starched uniform left on the bed, like a police chalk outline of a housekeeper, and a call to the agency for a new sitter.

Latchkey

• • • • • •

I
t was happening all over the neighborhood. Street by street, mothers appeared in kitchens wearing slimming slacks, announcing their news over the crunch and smack of Melba toast and cottage cheese. I like to imagine that the mothers decided upon the changes at hand conspiratorially at an outdoor meeting that took place shortly after
The Joker's Wild
. Weather permitting, they'd each show up wearing special garb, like zip-up jumpsuits or, even better, long black hooded robes. Sadly, we lived in a suburb heavily populated by Jews, not witches. There were no summits or secret convocations, but there was a leader. He spoke in dulcet tones and had a Muppety face. He called them to action and they got off the sofa. If I saw their captain today, I'd look him straight in the eye and say: “Fuck you, Phil Donahue.”

I was nine when it went down at my house. Up until then, I thought we were doing just fine with
The Mike Douglas Show
. The theme music was groovy, Mike was avuncular and sang to us daily, plus he didn't boss his viewers around. But Phil Donahue was positioning himself as the latest craze and my mother liked to keep up with the times. Back when it was customary for women to stay home
and keep house, you might find my mother perched on the chesterfield holding my brother as an infant, wearing a pencil skirt and a whipped-up lacquered beehive. As bras began to go up in flames, she made sure to have bell-bottom denims and long middle-parted hair the color of vanilla Jell-O instant pudding. And when Phil Donahue infiltrated our den, she remodeled her look once more. The hair shortened and pantsuits began filling the closet.

Women fought for equal rights and economic justice, and my mother joined NOW to get a lapel pin. Feminism was spreading through every ‘ville, town, and hamlet and there was nothing we could do about it. Phil Donahue murmured into his sticklike mic and women all over North America heard him.

Well, my mother mostly heard him. It's quite possible she stepped out for a handful of Bugles during part of his tutorial. But these were the fundamental tenets of feminism, as presented in my house:

1. Wear pants.

2. Do not let a man open the door for you (and if he does, make throaty sounds of outrage and disgust).

3. Veto the kitchen.

4. Have other people watch your children, or—better—have them watch themselves.

5. Barbie: You are not welcome here.

Now, tenets 1 and 2 were my mother's own business. If she wanted to practically knock my father over en route to the door, or dress like a fellow, fine with me. I think it was fine with my father, too. Actually, it was a boon to my father. All this business about my mother's slacks afforded my father undivided freedom to become the Cher of the household.

My father enjoyed a costume change more than any lady I knew, plus he had an outfit for every occasion. I wasn't exactly sure what occasion called for constricting banana-yellow jeans with matching shirt separated by a brown leather Gucci belt, but he had one at the ready, should the need arise. His closet was lined with deluxe cowboy boots he claimed he had to wear—something about high arches, which was in line with those girls at camp who were forced to get nose jobs due to their pesky deviated septums. The ultimate accessory in his wardrobe was a full-length raccoon fur coat he insisted was
“really in right now.” My father's 1970s look fell somewhere between European porn director and Jewish buckaroo.

Veto the kitchen, tenet 3, worked in my favor. Here, women everywhere relinquished their grandmothers' recipes and jilted the avocado green Amana Radaranges they would have once been pleased to win on
Let's Make a Deal
. This was dynamite news for my mother and, frankly, for the rest of us, seeing as her two specialties were meatloaf with hard-boiled eggs squished inside, and liver.

When my mother vetoed the kitchen, we traded our plates for compartmentalized aluminum trays. Out went homemade gray meats, in came Swanson's Salisbury steak (with the superstar apple cobbler, which was the best dessert they had). If my mother was too tired to heat something up, heaping bowls of Technicolor cereals were served. Suburban nutrition in the seventies was a free-for-all. Health nuts existed, sure, but they were usually to the tune of your great-uncle grinding his own peanut butter or your weirdo art teacher trying to share the squares of carob she brought to school in waxed paper baggies. Most of the homes I went to considered SpaghettiOs to be a respectable dinner as long as you'd had your Flintstones Chewables that morning.

Cooking was not the only thing my mother was tickled to give up; forsaking the supermarket was a golden side effect of feminism as well. Since fresh peas and carrot pieces were lumped together in the TV dinner tray, she didn't see the need to suffer all those aisles and push a cart in the name of fresh produce. Somehow, she found a tiny little deli-style market that delivered. Every Monday, a call would be made. We'd walk by and shout “Fruity Pebbles” at her, then she'd nod and bark it to the grocery guy. “Uch,
no
,” she'd say while placing the order, “that's
two
bags of Doritos and
one
box of powdered donuts.” And our groceries would show up a few hours later in a small cardboard box.

Things started to go sour for me at tenet 4. Here, mothers threaded keys onto brightly colored lanyards, then scattered out the door like the marbles from Hungry Hungry Hippos. If we're being honest, I didn't know where my mother ran off to in those early days and I didn't ask. No kid did—we were kids—all we cared about were Popsicles and our bikes. (Well, you cared about your bike. I was terrified of mine, convinced I'd fall off and get run over by a speeding truck.) Although most kids spent their free time roaming the hinterlands of suburbia, returning home only at the ding of the dinner bell, the kinds of outdoor pursuits I preferred involved attaching a long string to my oversized plastic yellow Slinky and taking a leisurely walk around the block.

If you loved tag or kickball, if you liked roller skates or Frisbee or fresh air, I imagine it was a pretty breezy time to be a kid. If you preferred watching
Hee Haw
, listening to Bobby Vinton albums, and pretending your Clue pieces were performers in your bedroom's production of
Mame
, well . . . childhood might just have been wasted on you. But no matter what kind of kid you were, chances are you spent a decent portion of your afterschool hours with a house key noosed around your neck and a
TV Guide
in your hands.

My mother broke the news about my latchkey status on a Sunday night, during a commercial break of
The Wonderful World of Disney
.

“When you get off the bus tomorrow, you can use the key to let yourself in,” she said, the lanyard pinched by her spikey nails.

“Where will you be?” I asked.

“I'll be back by dinner.”

My older brother, Ace, apparently would not be home either. I suspect there were batches of nine-year-olds who were fine with this arrangement—thrilled, even. I, on the other hand, had questions. Mostly about fire and emergency appendectomies and robbers and exploding furnaces and
It's coming from inside the house!

“Uch, don't be crazy,” my mother said. “Anyway, bad things don't happen during the day.”

“What if I get sick?”

“You won't.”

“What if the power goes out?”

“
Pffft
. It's still light out.”

“What if the doorbell rings?”

“Then don't answer it,” my mother said. “Just stay in your room if you have to.”

“What if they keep ringing? What if they look normal?”

“Do not answer the door. Remember,” my mother said, handing over her best advice along with the house key, “Ted Bundy was good-looking.”

3:15 p.m.

The red Plymouth Duster sat outside my house, a solid four feet from the curb. Wearing his usual navy sport coat and tie, Grandpa Solly sat at the wheel, his eyes focused on nothing ahead. My mother must have made the call the night before, sometime
between her Ted Bundy comment and the eleven o'clock news. I'm sure my pointing out all the potential dangers knocked some sense into her, so she enlisted my grandfather to wait outside our house, with strict instructions that the bus would deposit me at 3:15 p.m. and to not be late, which would never be a problem because Grandpa Solly showed up two hours early for everything. His crispy flaked hands positioned at ten and two even though the car was in Park summoned both comfort and dread in my empty after-school belly.

“How do you do?” he asked, hoisting himself out of the car.

“Okay,” I said. “You?”

“Fine and dandy,” he said. “Fine and dandy.”

How do you do
and
fine and dandy
were pretty much the only sentences my grandfather uttered in those days. He stood silent, hands in his pockets jangling keys, dimes, and a handful of those no-name mints with the liquid chocolate centers he always had. It bothered me the way he bit into those mints. You were supposed to suck on them until the chocolate seeped out, collecting under your tongue and around your teeth.

I struggled to get the key into the front door lock without strangling myself as Grandpa Solly stood behind me, unruffled. We were sausaged in the tiny vestibule and I stepped over the mail littering the floor, making a mental note to go back and collect both the
TV Guide
and Publishers Clearing House packet. Was I supposed to play with Grandpa Solly? Recite something? Give him a snack? It was a bonanza when he made his way onto the sofa in the living room no one used, settling in with an A&P circular by his side. I knew he'd be at that post, staring at our orange walls, until 5:30, when my parents released him.

3:25 p.m.

Quick pit stop in the kitchen to corral an unopened bag of Doritos, original Nacho Cheese flavor, not the gross Taco kind that Ace preferred. He was four years older and our tastes were as dissimilar as our characters, but without him pelting balled-up napkins at my head I didn't know what to do with myself.

3:27 p.m.

Five television sets anchored our small house. We had juice with
Good Morning America
and fell asleep to the sounds of Johnny's monologue. I learned my dance moves from
Solid Gold
, how to remedy misunderstandings from
Three's Company
, and how to solve crime from
The Hardy Boys
. Later on, I'd grasp how to drum up intrigue from the ladies of
Falcon Crest
and get a sex education from the tomfoolery on
Hotel
.

Television was the Grand Poobah, our religion. We never had much to say to each other but the house was always filled with canned laughter. And so I just assumed that for the first day sort of on my own, I'd settle in with my stories.

But I couldn't find the clicker, so I went upstairs to my room.

3:31 p.m.

I opened my desk drawer a smidge, peeking inside to make sure it was still there. The Silverberg's toy catalog came out annually but I was only interested in an old copy, one featuring the bright orange Barbie Country Camper (with vinyl pop-out tent) that I very well would have sold one of my eyes for. I'd study the beautiful camper whenever I was alone in my room. Sometimes I'd place the catalog in my math book and take it to school, like a stowaway in my backpack.

I knew the camper would never be mine, nor would Barbie herself, because tenet 5 stated that Barbie was not welcome in our home. This mandate was actually put into place before Phil Donahue barged in, some time after my mother traded in her strand of pearls for the heavy turquoise beads.

This duel was unfinished, spanning four endless years. The battles all sounded the same: “Pleeeeease,” I'd say. “Why not?”

“Because Barbie is a negative role model for girls,” she'd say, as if reciting from some brochure picked up at Dr. Resnick's. “She's not realistic. I don't want you trying to measure up later in life.”

“I won't,” I said. “I won't try to measure up. I promise!”

“Oh, stop it.” Throaty sounds of outrage.

“But Samantha has twenty-nine!”

“I don't care if Samantha has one hundred twenty-nine. Barbie makes girls feel bad about themselves,” my mother would say, struggling with her clothes or hair. “Uch, I look terrible.”

“I think you look great,” my father would say.

“Oh, please,” she'd answer, rolling her eyes.

When it sunk in that I was getting nowhere with Gloria Steinem, I was forced to call upon my street smarts. My Barbie desire was pretty modest. One. I just wanted one glorious plastic whore. How hard could it be to bypass my mother? I began my crusade close to home, approaching the one person I knew who could grasp my need to gussy up and accessorize better than anyone: my dad. He was a bit of a Ken doll himself. How could he say no?

Well, he said worse than no. He said he'd ask my mother.
Uch
. He was off the list.

Next up, four solid contenders: the grandparents. Why hadn't I thought of them first? Family members, yet out of the daily fray, always willing to bring gifts—they were ideal candidates. The answer to which of the four to choose came swiftly:
Nana
.
My father's mother. People pleaser, pillar of the synagogue, Nana just wanted everyone to be happy (and marry Jewish). Sweet as a Bartons Almond Kiss, possibly illiterate in a few languages, she'd ask the fewest questions. Plus, she lived across the street from the mall.

I decided that after getting the Barbie, I would leave her at Nana's, in the depths of the basement, where the cat lived and my mother refused to frequent. I drew a map in my diary, a diagram of where Barbie would be sequestered. I approached my grandmother with saucery eyes and smiled during the squeeze of the face by her slick-with-chicken-grease fingers. That's all it took. The job was done. I had sandbagged my nana.