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It was a Saturday afternoon in early Spring. We had made it through a difficult winter – severe snow storms, power cuts, my mother becoming obsessed with making her own pasta (imagine boiled bread), the paterfamilias taking a life-unenhancing dislike to consumerism and my sister being especially unreasonable – and here we were, waiting for the first buds to open and the sweaters, scarves and parkas to be packed away.
The telephone rang in the living room.
My father was in Milwaukee, doing whatever it was he did. My mother was on a ladder in the kitchen, repainting the ceiling after the Great Pressure Cooker Explosion. The GPCE had taken place on Thursday, not long after my father left on his business trip. The idea was to remove all traces of Hungarian goulash before he got back. My sister was in the living room, recuperating from a cold and watching a movie. I was also in the living room, half watching the movie while I dried my hair, enhanced my complexion under a cleansing mask and did my nails. I had a Big Date.
“Somebody want to get that?” called my mother.
Bringbringbringbringbringbring…
Just then the egg timer beside me went off.
“Would somebody get the phone?” she repeated, slightly louder this time.
“I can’t!” I shouted back. My twenty minutes were up. “I have to get this stuff off my face...”
Bringbringbringbringbringbring…
“Somebody better answer that!” roared my mother, that edge in her voice that reminded you that women can also be warriors. “If I have to climb down from this ladder to answer that phone you’re both going to wish you’d been born to someone else!”
“Oh I guess that means me!” bellowed my sister, her voice slightly shrill with martyrdom and indignation. My sister, a slender, sprite-like creature, got up and marched the few feet from the sofa to the phone as if she had cement boots on her feet, making the floor tremble and the pictures rattle on the walls. “I have to do everything around here!”
“If it’s for me, say I’m busy and I’ll call them back,” my mother ordered.
“Yeahyeahyeah…”
Bringbringbringbr—
“Hello?” The shrillness and the bellowing had vanished, replaced by a sweet, delicate lilt, so that whoever was on the other end could be forgiven for thinking he or she had misdialed and been connected to heaven. “Oh, hi…
No, I’m sorry, but she’s really busy right now…”
I headed for the bathroom.
My big date was with Richard Schaeffer. He sat in front of me in English. We were reading Hamlet that semester. Richard Schaeffer was more a Raymond Chandler than a Shakespeare kind of guy. It was my job to kick the back of his chair if he started to doze. So it was possible that he’d asked me out not because he liked me but because he was grateful. But I didn’t care. If you didn’t count Lisa Mackle’s cousin from New Hampshire – which I didn’t – this was my first real date. We were going to a movie. After the movie we were going to the diner for burgers and fries (“So, you know, don’t eat a big supper or you won’t want anything later”), and then his father would pick us up and drive me home (since the night she mistook the Ingrahams driveway for a road my mother avoided driving in the dark as much as possible). I had no problem talking to Richard in school, but I was worried that I might not know what to say to him when we were by ourselves. I didn’t want to talk too much, but I didn’t want to talk too little either. When I’d gone out with Lisa Mackle’s cousin (for pizza with Lisa and her boyfriend Luke), the conversation between us had pretty much stopped after “Hi, nice to meet you.” My main memory of the evening was of smiles as rigid as stone and chewing. He told me seven times that the pizza was really good, and I agreed nine.
It took me a while to get all the goop off my face, take a shower, do my hair, do my make-up and get dressed. When I finally emerged from the bathroom, instead of telling me how great I looked, my mother said, “Thank God for that. I’d thought you’d drowned.” My sister didn’t say anything.
It had been over a month since I pushed my sister into the artificial pond at the mall, but she still wasn’t speaking to me. Stubbornness is a trait on both sides of my family. I’d pretty much gotten used to it. If I did need to say something to her I’d go through one of my parents or whoever else was around (“Could you ask my sister if she’s seen my bead loom?” “Would you please tell my sister that I wasn’t the one who finished the banana cake?”), but most of the time we both acted as if the other one didn’t exist. It was like being an only child in the sense that I didn’t have anyone to argue with all the time.
I was meeting Richard in front of the theater, and because of this I’d told my mother I was meeting him at six, which was actually fifteen minutes earlier than we’d arranged. I didn’t want him to see her in her overalls with Mediterranean Gold paint in her hair.
So at six o’clock sharp my mother left me off in front of the old movie house in town. I watched her do one of her legendary U-turns in the middle of Main Street, and waved her goodbye. It started to rain. I moved into the foyer. Couples started arriving for the six-thirty show. The six-thirty show started. The ticket booth closed. The rain got heavier. I continued to wait.
You have to remember that this story takes place a long long time ago, in the primitive days when a phone was either in your home or in a booth. They didn’t go with you wherever you went, ready to be used whether you were on a bus or at the dentist’s. Which meant that you couldn’t just text your date and say WHR R U? That if a truck full of sheep had turned over on Clay Drive and blocked traffic for the next two hours he wasn’t going to be able to call you to tell you to go in without him, he’d meet you at the diner. So I continued to wait.
At seven-fifteen, though it hadn’t occurred to me yet that he had rung while I was drying my hair to say that he’d sprained his ankle jumping out of a tree and couldn’t make our date, I finally figured out that Richard wasn’t coming. It was three miles from our house to town. They were long, dark miles even when it wasn’t raining in a vengeful kind of way. There was a phone booth down by the bank so I turned up the collar on my non-waterproof jacket and made a dash for it. I had just enough change to call home to beg my mother to come and get me.
My sister answered the phone.
“Hi,” I said. “Can you get Mom?”
My sister hung up.
My sister stopped speaking to me after the incident at the James Fennimore Cooper Mall. (That would be the incident where, berserk with rage, I pushed her into the artificial pond.) Even though I was the one who got dragged off by the security guard and banned from the mall for the next hundred years, I’d been made to apologize to my sister as if I were the one in the wrong. “I’m sorry I shoved you into the water,” I’d said, sounding about as sincere as I felt. “I was in a blind rage. You know, because you stole my new skirt and were wearing it like it was yours and getting it all dirty and sweaty.” My sister refused to accept my apology. “You weren't blind,” said my sister. “You knew it was me your were pushing into the pond.”
Obviously, it wasn’t the first time my sister had stopped speaking to me in all the years of our close but complicated relationship. The silent treatment was something that, like dusk and dawn, happened with a certain amount of regularity and inevitability. But my sister liked to talk. Even as a small child, she fell asleep in the middle of one sentence and woke in the middle of another. My father, himself a man of few words, used six of them to sum of my sister: “She always has something to say.” This meant that the periods of silence between us never lasted that long. Half a day. A day. Two days the time I kidnapped her cat. But this time my sister was Really Serious.
The first I knew that she wasn’t speaking to me was that same night at supper when I asked her to pass me the salt. She kept talking to my mother about how she might as will move to Siberia if she couldn’t have her own phone. [NB: this was years before everybody not only had their own phone, but carried it around with them twenty-four hours a day.]
“Excuse me,” I said. “Could you pass me the salt?”
“Everybody I know has their own phone,” said my sister. “It’s like having your own toothbrush.”
Since I could tell that she wasn’t talking to me, I repeated my request. And again. And again. And once more.
My father finally heard me. “For Pete’s sake,” he muttered. “I’m trying to eat my meal in peace. Will you let your sister have the salt? She sounds like a broken record.”
My sister looked over at him with the same sweet smile she’d given him the time he fell off my uncle’s boat. “Oh, I’m sorry, Dad. Did you want the salt?” She handed it to him, and then went back to her conversation with my mother.
My father passed me the salt.
Disbelief moved in next to indignation as I stared at the side of my sister’s head as she continued to entertain my mother with the gruesome details of the destruction and devastation not having her own phone would bring into her life.
“Wait a minute!” I snapped. “Does this mean that you’re not speaking to me? Is that what this means?”
“Even Amie Schneider has her own phone, and she doesn’t have any friends,” said my sister.
“Hey!” I leaned over and gave her a shove. “Are you not speaking to me? Is that what’s going on?”
“Mom,” said my sister, “could you tell your other daughter not to touch me? Because I really don’t want her germs on me.”
“Tell her yourself,” said my mother.
“I don’t believe this!” I stood up, taller than usual. “You’re not speaking to me!”
“Dad,” said my sister. “Could you tell your other daughter that I’m not speaking to her, and that I’m never speaking to her again as long as I live. That even if we were alone in the house and it was on fire I wouldn’t tell her?”
My father cut a porcupine meatball in half. “No,” said my father. “I won’t do that. You tell her.”
“You’re not speaking to me?” The parakeet started screeching and pacing back and forth on his swing, making the bell ring. “You can’t be serious! After what you did? You're not speaking to me?”
My sister stood up, too, facing but not looking at me. “Tell her that’s right! I’m not speaking to her.” These instructions were either meant for the parakeet, who seemed to be having a nervous breakdown, or for the dog, who could be seen curled up on my father’s chair in the living room, snoring gently. They certainly weren't meant for our parents, who had picked up their plates and moved into the kitchen. “Tell her that this time she’s gone way too far!”
“I’ve gone too far!’ My voice crackled with indignation. “What are you talking about ‘I’ve gone too far’? I’m the innocent victim here!”
“Remind her that she tried to drown me. If there hadn’t been people around to help me out I would be another tragic statistic. A headline on a supermarket tabloid: Girl goes to watery grave while shoppers look on in horror. Hand of Death belonged to her only sibling.”
“You were never in any danger! You were in the mall! There were like hundreds of people there. And it was an artificial pond. Not the Atlantic Ocean.”
“Remind her that people have drowned in puddles!” screamed my sister.
“But you’re the one who thieved my skirt!” I roared. “Remember that? Remember the part where you thieved my skirt?” “I didn’t steal her stupid skirt,” bellowed my sister. “I borrowed it.”
“Don’t worry about not speaking to me,” I informed her. “Because I wouldn’t speak to you if you were the last person on earth. I’d rather wear a girdle! I’d rather spent the rest of my life walking on my hands!”
That was the kind of taunt that should have provoked a response like, “I wish you’d go to Australia and spend the rest of your life walking on your head” from my sister. But not this time. She clamped her mouth shut and said nothing, picking up her plate and following my parents into the kitchen. The Really Cold War had officially begun.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little melodramatic?” asked my mother. Her arms were folded across her chest and her expression suggested that she was being diplomatic, but only with a lot of effort.
I raised the drill, ready to finish putting the screws in place. “No, I don’t think I’m being melodramatic. I think I’m being practical.”
She raised her voice to be heard over the drill. “Putting a padlock on your door.” It wasn’t a question but it sounded like it was.
“That’s right. If I can’t leave my room for ten seconds without having it burgled, then I’m being practical.” I stepped back to survey my handiwork. There were a few more holes than there needed to be, but it wasn’t too bad. It would do the job. I smiled. “It’s either this or hire a security guard.”
My mother gave me one of her you-don’t-have-to-be-crazy-to-live-here-but-it-helps sighs. “I don’t know what people are going to think when they come to the house and see you’ve got a your room locked up like it’s Fort Knox.”
“They’ll think I live with a thief, that’s what they’ll think,” I snapped back.
Right on cue, my sister’s door opened and her head appeared. “Just make sure you tell them how you tried to kill me!” yelled my sister.
It was an ordinary Saturday afternoon. The James Fennimore Cooper Mall was filled with people of all ages, sizes, shapes, colors and religious beliefs happily buying things they didn’t need and in many cases would never use. There was laughter and smiling. There was music. The artificial waterfall splashed into the artificial pond. The colorful plastic bags bobbed along like party balloons. Bored looking men stood outside of stores, bags of shopping clumped around them like presents around a Christmas tree, glancing at their watches every few seconds. Small children dripped ice cream and soda. Huddles of boys sat together on benches or strolled the walkways with their hands in their pockets, telling each other bad jokes. Small herds of girls, the special endorphins only generated by shopping making them shine, moved from store to store like grazing cattle moving across a field. Except for a few bickering couples and crying children, all was peaceful and content in the James Fennimore Cooper Mall.
But suddenly this scene of tranquility and domestic bliss was shattered by a heart-piercing scream. People looked up, frozen in the moment like startled gazelles. Only the three teenage girls over by the pond, engrossed in deciding where to go for lunch, didn’t hear the scream.
Which, as it turned out, was unfortunate.
Another scream, closer and even more piercing than the first, echoed through the west side of the first floor. Even the girls debating the merits of pizza over pastrami heard that. The very pretty one with the pin-straight hair and eyes the same shade of cornflower blue as the skirt she was wearing looked up just in time to see someone in a perfectly aged but tragically stained denim jacket charging towards her, hair flying and face contorted in rage. “Stop!” shrieked the girl. “Wha-”
But her words were lost in a mighty splash as she toppled backwards into the pond.
I hadn’t planned to go to the mall that weekend.
Kammy’s parents were away and I was staying with her to keep her company and to stay up half the night watching old movies and eating junk food. Mrs Cole had taped notes to what she considered Danger Points around the house. [DO NOT USE DISHWASHER on the dishwasher. REFILL ICE CUBE TRAYS on the ice cube trays. DO NOT FLUSH GALLONS OF POP CORN DOWN The TOILET on the toilet. Etcetera…] Besides the notes, she left pages of typewritten general instructions on what we should do, what we shouldn’t do, and whom we should call when, despite all her advice, we messed up.
“Is she unbelievable or what?” thundered Kammy. “You’d think they were going away for a month and she was expecting war to break out. We aren’t children, for God’s sake. I think we can make it through the weekend without any of this stuff happening.”
And Kammy, of course, was right. We didn’t lock ourselves in the attic, we didn’t set fire to the dryer and we didn’t blow all the fuses. In fact, none of the possible disasters envisioned by Mrs Cole occurred.
We turned the kettle into charcoal.
We put it on to make coffee and forgot about it. It had a whistle, but we didn’t hear the whistle because we were playing The Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the right volume (loud enough to wake the dead). The Coles had a smoke alarm, but it had been inactivated weeks before when Mr Cole made blackened fish.
Kammy and I stared at the charred remains of the kettle, the handle flopped over to one side like a fence that’s been hit by a heavy wind.
“Oh, Gawd…” groaned Kammy. “She’s going to murder me.” She used the fire tongs to lift the kettle into the sink. Just in case it suddenly exploded and pieces of hot metal flew around the kitchen like leaves in a storm. “You’d think she’d’ve had the sense to put a note on the freakin’ kettle, wouldn’t you? She’s put notes on everything else.”
“I guess she figured we knew this one.” This had happened before. Which is how we knew about putting the kettle in the sink and how much like leaves in a wind exploding metal can be.
“Well, she was wrong, wasn’t she?” said Kammy.
I tried to look on the bright side. “At least we didn’t spill Dragon’s Blood nail polish all over her denim jacket.”
My sister was always borrowing my things. That is, she called it borrowing. I called it taking without permission, which, according to Webster, is stealing. Shoes, socks, dresses, jeans, skirts and blouses, music, books, jewelry - everything that belonged to me was fair game. It was as if my room was the jungle and she was the illegal logger or the poacher after bush meat.
And as if it wasn’t enough just to help herself to MY PERSONAL POSSESSIONS, she would shorten my skirts and stretch out my tops. She’d lose my earrings and loan my albums to people who also never gave them back. She put holes in my socks.
She dumped half a bottle of Dragon’s Blood nail polish all over my denim jacket. My beautiful, washed-out jacket with the fraying cuffs. It had taken me ages to get that jacket to that state of perfection. And it had taken her approximately thirty seconds to destroy it.
My sister, of course, was sorry. She just wanted to wear it bowling because it was so cool. She was going to put it back in my closet before I even noticed it was gone. The nail polish was an accident. It wasn’t like she did it on purpose.
“Stay away from my things!” I’d screamed. “I mean it. If you so much as lay one finger on anything of mine unless it’s to get it out of the way of a herd of stampeding wildebeest I’m going to make you wish you were born to slaves in ancient Rome!”
My sister promised. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve learned my lesson.”
But not for long, it seemed.
Because as Kammy and I rode down the escalator with the new kettle from Happy Home Housewares, what did I see but my sister standing there with her friends, wearing MY NEW SKIRT. What a fool I’d been! Naïve! Trusting! I’d actually believed that I could go away for an entire weekend and my sister wouldn’t jump at the chance of plundering my room.
I, like you, had heard the expression “I was beside myself with rage”, but it wasn’t until that moment on the escalator that I realized what it meant. I really was beside myself. There I was, a regular teenager in a ruined jacket only a few steps away from the main plaza – and beside me, huge and demented, was the Terminator, programmed to destroy the girl with the pin-straight hair in the blue skirt without question or thought.
It was the Terminator who screamed.
It was the Terminator who leapt the last few steps and sprinted towards the pond.
It was the Terminator who shoved my sister into the water.
But I was the one who had to be picked up by my father from the security office of the James Fennimore Cooper Mall.
“What on earth got into you?” asked my father as we got in the car.
I shrugged. “It’s a long story.”
You may remember that my mother, my sister and I had declared war on the oppressive, irrational and authoritarian regime of my father because he had decreed that, following what he’d taken to calling The Consumer Bloodbath that Is Christmas, we weren't to buy a single new item of clothing (or accessories) until Easter. [Negotiators had established that should every pair of socks we owned go up in flames, or thieves break in and steal our shoes, we were permitted replacements, but this was comfort as warm as the freezer.]
Our house was like Colonial America during the Revolution. We were alight with the spirit of justice and rebellion. Even when my father was home, we would meet in dark corners, whispering our grievances and plots. My father would look up from his book on Tibetan mysticism. “What are you three up to?” he’d ask. And we’d all smile that enigmatic Barbie smile that could mean something or nothing and say, “Nothing.” My father would come into the living room, looking for his razor, and blink in the sudden silence. “What are you three cooking up?” he’d want to know. And my mother, used to thinking on her feet, would murmur something about “somebody’s birthday’s coming”, and we’d all disappear into our rooms like Algonquin warriors vanishing into the forest before he’d realize that if someone’s birthday was coming it wasn’t his.
Give me Liberty, or give me death…! No taxation without representation…! Better to die on your feet than live on your knees…! These were the words that inspired us during the dark days of that winter.
After my father outflanked us by having had the foresight to hide a copy of his terrible inventory (listing every item of clothing, belt, bracelet, necklace, pin, hat, scarf and what he referred to as “hair doodads” we possessed) my mother called an emergency meeting one night while my father was at band practice. [Note: We called it a band because we liked to humor him, but it was really just him and Ernie Rossman, their guitars and Ernie’s dog, Seagull, who spent most of his time sleeping in Ernie’s guitar case but would occasionally come in on a chorus that required howling.]
“Okay, girls,” said my mother. “I think you both agree with me that this intolerable situation has gone on long enough.”
We agreed. It was a week and a half. One precious Saturday at the mall had already been lost to the depthless ocean of time. Another was coming up. Not only that, but my mother’s quilting circle was having its yearly Down Home Dinner on Saturday, my sister had been invited to Danielle Sargassi’s birthday party that same night (the middle school equivalent of being invited to Martin Scorsese’s Oscar party), and the following Monday I was appearing in a special assembly sponsored by the history department: The Bread and Cheese Hollow First Annual Constitution Bee. These events required new clothes. My mother could not be expected to eat pot roast with her fellow quilters in a dress they’d seen before. My sister could not be expected to attend the birthday party of the year in something she’d already worn. And I couldn’t possibly stand up in front of the whole school to answer questions about the Constitution of our great nation in just anything I happened to find in my closet. (My father, of course, begged to differ, and refused to give us a special dispensation on the grounds that his mother, Grandma Becky, had in her entire life only had One Good Dress that she wore to every wedding, funeral and church service she ever attended. “If Grandma Becky could do it,” said my father, “so can you.”)
“But we’ll never be able to go shopping on Saturday,” argued my sister. “We’re practically under house arrest.”
If we said that we needed to go somewhere on the weekend – the library, for example, or that great hardware store across from the new shopping center – my father would not only drive us there, but accompany us inside. It was like having a bodyguard, but one who only let you go where he wanted.
My mother was ahead of her. “I’ll pick you up on Friday right after school. Better yet I’ll give you each a note that you have to leave early for a dental appointment.”
“But what about the inventory?” asked I. “If we buy anything he’ll see that it’s not on his little list.” It was like the Mikado, but without the songs.
“Only if he finds what we bought,” countered my mother.
“But you saw him,” protested my sister. “He knows all our hiding pla-”
“Correction.” My mother was shaking her hear and drumming a cheerful tune on the table top with her fingers. “He knows our old hiding places.” My mother had been thinking, and all I can say is that the world lost a major military strategist when she decided to turn her talents to making porcupine meatballs and hassocks out of coffee cans. “You’ve heard of the Underground Railroad, haven’t you?”
I had, but I couldn’t see how it helped us. I gazed back at her appraisingly, wondering if the strain was beginning to get to her. “You mean the London subway system?”
“Not that Underground Railroad,” said my mother.
My sister tilted her head to one side. “You mean when runaway slaves were smuggled into the free states and Canada through a network of safe houses?”
“Bingo!” cried my mother.
We would hide our new things at other people’s houses. I would store mine with my best friend Kammy. My sister would keep hers with the twins, with whom she spent so much time we called them the triplets. My mother, who prided herself on getting more Christmas cards than the Pope, would leave things all over town.
“You know,” I said, “sometimes I really think you’re touched with genius.”
“So do I,” said my mother.
For some reason, even though it can’t really be considered a political issue, politicians make a really big deal about ‘the family” – especially around election time. It’s all ‘the family this’ and ‘the family that’. They want to pay people to get married. They want to pay people to stay married. They want to punish people who aren’t married. They often blame single mothers for everything that is wrong with society (though I have yet to meet the single mother who led the nation to war, wrecked the economy or invented the nuclear bomb).
But still, you can see their point. Families are, on the whole, a really good idea. Strength in numbers. Everyone pulling together. Someone to cook the supper, someone to do the dishes and someone to pay the bills. Someone to laugh at your jokes. Someone to make jokes you can laugh at. Someone to give you a ride to the mall. Shared values. Shared goals. Shared problems. And let’s not forget that wise old saying: A midlife crisis shared is a midlife crisis quadrupled.
Within weeks, if not days, my father’s midlife crisis had grown from a minor scuffle about dancing snowmen into a full-scale war. My father controlled the money (which, as every head of state on the planet will tell you confers an incredible amount of power), but my sister had her seasonal lawn work money (shoveling snow in the winter, mowing lawns in the summer), my mother had her seasonal baking business (pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, fruitcake at Christmas, hot-cross buns during Lent, bunny cakes at Easter) and I had my non-seasonal babysitting money so we could exist for a while without funds from the Family Bank. Besides which, my mother, my sister and I were a formidable guerrilla army. When my father developed an allergy to leather, we waged and won the No Shoes in the House War. When my father turned against the gentle cow and anything truly delicious that she produced, we waged and won The Toffee Swirl War. Ditto the You Call that Music?, That Skirt Isn’t Short, It’s Invisible and The Hair Cut wars. We were trained, we were fit, and we were fighting on our own turf. George Washington would have commissioned us all.
My mother, being the more devious of the three of us and the one with greater access to the enemy, was in charge of sabotage.
‘I don’t see how you can do it,’ said my sister. ‘He’s locked the inventory in his toolbox.’
This would be the inventory of every item of clothing (plus accessories) owned by my father’s beloved wife and daughters.
‘And the toolbox is where?’ inquired my mother.
Recognizing the Socratic method of teaching, my sister’s brow puckered thoughtfully. ‘In the basement, of course.’
‘And what happens in the basement?’ persisted my mother.
My sister’s brow was still puckering. ‘Dad hides out from us down here.’
‘The laundry,’ said I.
My mother’s smile was gentle but firm. ‘And what else?’
My sister and I looked around. There wasn’t that much going on in the cellar. My father’s workshop. The chair where he sat when he was pretending to be building something but was really reading a book. The shelves where he stored his canned vegetables that year. The washing machine, the dryer, the double sink where the dog reluctantly took his baths. The boiler. The large damp patch on the floor.
“Floods!’ shrieked my sister. ‘Floods happen!’
I pointed out that hurricane season had passed.
‘Oh, tuttuttut.’ My mother’s head slowly shook back and forth. ‘Storms aren’t the only thing that have made the basement flood.’
My sister and I gazed back at her with a certain amount of awe. We knew she was devious. We knew her talents were wasted on domestic chores, she should have been running the FBI. But his – this was staggering.
‘You’re going to break the washing machine?’ we gasped.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said my mother. ‘And have to do the laundry in town till he fixes it?’ It had taken a month the last time the washing machine collapsed under the strain. She picked up the toolbox and put it in the sink. ‘We’ll just tell him it flooded.’
On Saturday morning my father went down to get his inventory to make sure that we hadn’t added anything to our wardrobes while he was out earning out living. He came back faster than a boomerang.
‘What happened?’ He was waving the sodden inventory, its pages blurred and more or less welded together. ‘My toolbox looks like it was on the Titanic!’
If the caption was ‘Shocked sympathy’, my mother’s face was the illustration.
‘Oh dear,’ said my mother. ‘Did I forget to mention that the washing machine flooded again?’
But, as my father himself often said, you don’t live in Seattle without owning an umbrella – and he’d lived with the Seattle that was my mother for quite a few years.
He smiled. ‘Thank God I have a copy of this in the trunk of the car.’
You may recall that my father had a Moment of Truth in the mall one Christmas (later described by my mother as “That time your father saw the Virgin Mary picketing the five and ten”), which lead him to think deeply about the meaning of that holy day. The result of all this thinking was that things like singing chipmunks, dancing snowmen and serial spending were banished from our celebrations. But those of us who hoped that a few homemade presents and a modest Christmas dinner would mark the end of my father’s Crusade against Constant Consumption were sadly mistaken. Not satisfied with taking Santa Claus and a supporting cast of cartoon characters out of Christmas (and putting Christ back in), in the New Year he declared a Ban on Clothes Shopping until Easter. Nowadays a lot of people are reforming their shopping habits - buying things secondhand; joining groups that exchanged unwanted goods; scrounging through garbage cans for food; going for months without spending any money except on the barest necessities - but back then the idea of not ceaselessly buying new things whether you needed them or not was virtually unheard of, and when it was heard of it was considered insane if not incontestable proof of a Communist Conspiracy.
Needless to say, my mother, my sister and I didn’t see my father for what he was - the Advance Scout for the Anti-consumerism Army that would come decades later - but as a reactionary killjoy; a man who only got new clothes when we gave him socks for his birthday or someone accidentally burned one of his three dress shirts and who, therefore had no understanding of how the real world worked.
Not that we were overly worried. Not at first. My father might be the Head of the Household, but in many ways this was an honorary title that had very little to do with how the house and family was really run. He had his rules – If you take one of my tools, put it back where you found it; Don’t ever use my razor to shave your legs; Don’t borrow anything of mine without asking; No eating in bed unless you’re paralyzed from the waist down; Don’t buy anything from catalogues, newspapers, or magazines - and we would listen patiently as he set them down, nodding seriously as though we had every intention of obeying. But we didn’t. We knew how to work around them. Don’t tell your father… Dad’ll never notice… and He doesn’t need to know… were our watchwords. We sent away for everything the catalogues, newspapers and magazines had to offer, we mislaid his tools, we used his razor, we borrowed the few things he had that a wife or teenage daughter might feel an overwhelming need for (and on one unfortunate occasion put the image of a hot iron on the back of his favorite shirt) and covered our sheets with ketchup stains and crumbs - safe in the knowledge that he was too tired by the time he got home from work to count his screwdrivers, spot the new cat and dog egg cups, or wonder at how quickly his razor blades went dull. “There’s nothing to worry about,” we assured each other after the Mall Moratorium announcement. “He can’t tell a tank top from a T-shirt. How’s he going to know if we buy something new?”
But on the day after my father’s chilling declaration he answered that question himself.
“What in heaven’s name are you doing?” My mother stood in the doorway with her arms folded in front of her protectively, eyeing my father with the same suspicion she had shown the summer before when she went out to get the mail and found Mr Capriniano next door (wearing a shower cap decorated with ducks and a plastic raincoat) painting his house Pepto Bismol pink.
Confronted by my mother, Mr Capriniano had explained that he was camouflaging his split level so the aliens wouldn’t find it when they landed at the full moon.
Confronted by my mother, my father, a pencil stuck behind one ear and a clipboard in his hand, stopped in the act of opening their closet door and said simply, “I’m making an inventory.”
“An inventory,” repeated my mother. “An inventory of what?”
“An inventory of every item of feminine apparel in this house,” replied my father. He waved the clipboard at her, revealing that many of the pages it held were covered with the details of the contents of my and my sister’s dressers and closets. He’d been saving the best for last. “And that includes shoes, slippers, socks, tights, scarves, hats and belts.”
“I knew it!” cried my mother. “You’re just like Mr Capriniano! You’ve completely lost your mind.”
“I’m nothing like Mr Capriniano.” My father wrote the word “dresses” on a clean sheet of paper and underlined it. “I’m not doing this because I invested my life savings in a company that manufactures electric rocking chairs and I’m having a nervous breakdown. I’m doing it because I know how you three operate.”
My mother, my sister and I all exchanged a look. It was a look the late President Richard Nixon would have recognized instantly. Shifty. Wary. Ready to lie. Exactly how much did he know?
“And you’re going to what?” My mother smiled in a way President Nixon would also have recognized: the bluff. “Count every article of clothing we own every night before you go to bed?” She laughed her I-don’t-think-so laugh.
“Once a week should suffice,” said my father.
“You can’t be serious!” If my sister was accomplished at something besides optimism, it was indignation. “We’re not criminals.”
“That’s right!” I chimed in. “The way you’re treating us, we might as well live in a totalitarian regime where all the phones are bugged and the secret police is always breaking down the door to search the house!”
“And that’s another thing,” said my father. “Don’t think you’re going to buy things without me finding out. I know all about your hiding places.”
Now the look the female members of the family exchanged said: attic… toy chest… bottom of the hamper…
“Well, girls…” My mother was smiling again, but now more like Crazy Horse getting ready to meet Custer and his men at Little Big Horn. “I guess you’re father’s got us over an empty barrel. It looks like we now live in a no-shopping zone till Easter.”
“I told you I was serious about this,” said my father.
My mother, my sister and I all nodded. “We know… We know…”
The war had now officially begun.
This month I’m not going to talk about my life. Instead, I would like to take this opportunity to offer my own small tribute to the teacher, humanist, writer, activist and pioneering historian Howard Zinn, who died suddenly on the 27th of January. He was a man of enormous intelligence, courage, integrity and passion. A truly good man who stood up relentlessly for what he believed; who always spoke the truth as he saw it; who had an unshakeable belief that people can make the world the way they want it to be. In a long life of extraordinary productivity, he never slowed down; never stopped lecturing and writing; never gave up.
People who knew Howard Zinn also speak of his humour and compassion, his generosity of spirit and his patience. I only knew him through his work, but his death has saddened me greatly – I feel as though I’ve lost a close friend. I know the world has lost a man it can ill afford to lose.
[As a bit of an aside, Howard Zinn is best known for the groundbreaking A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. More recently, however, he published the two-volume A YOUNG PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES – a book that might just make you change your mind about how you feel about history.]
My father said, “No.”
My sister and I gazed back at him with hopeful, this-has-to-be-a-joke smiles.
“No?” My sister’s laugh was also hopeful. “What do you mean ‘no’?”
“I mean no way, Jose. I mean not in this lifetime. I mean nein, nyet, N-O, NO.”
Even at the tender age of fifteen I’d mastered stating the blindingly obvious. “Are you saying you won’t give us any money to go shopping?”
My father nodded. Slowly. Thoughtfully. As if seriously considering every nuance of my question. “Yes, I think that just about sums it up. There will be no finance for fripperies. No cash for cologne or cosmetics.”
My sister, inheritor of every Optimistic gene our ancestors had to pass on, said, “Do you mean just today, or do you mean like tomorrow, too?” She was still smiling.
The head of the house puffed on his cigar. “I mean your chances of getting money out of me for shopping until the Easter Bunny comes hopping down the Bunny Trail are considerably less than the chances of survival of a butterscotch sundae in hell.”
Through my sister’s veins coursed the DNA of women and men who thought that the ice would melt by Spring; that everyone in their village had no more than a bad cold; that what turned out to be the 100 Years’ War would be over in a week. She didn’t give up easily.
“But it’s January,” said my sister. “The sales are on. You always give us money for the sales.”
Rings of smoke floated between my father and us. But today those rings didn’t look like doughnuts or halos; today they were obviously zeros. “Not this year, I don’t.”
My sister and I exchanged baffled looks. What had we done? Nothing. Nothing that he’d caught as at. He hadn’t lost his job, so we weren't suddenly really poor. The roof hadn’t been blown off the house in the night requiring masses of money to repair it. My mother hadn’t emptied his bank account and run off to Mexico. What could possibly have caused him to make such a cruel and unfair decision?
My mother, passing through the living room with a bucket of papier mâche for her winter crafts project (a bust of Eleanor Roosevelt), came to a stop. “He’s having a midlife crisis,” she informed us.
“If I was having a midlife crisis, I’d buy a sports car and a toupee,” said my father.
My sister and I weren't the only ones who would have preferred the sports car. “So what is it then?” inquired my mother, her voice edged with sarcasm. “Is this because you saw The Virgin Mary in the mall last month?”
“I didn’t see the Virgin Mary,” corrected my father. “I simply had a realization that Christmas is about celebrating the birth of Jesus, not about seeing how much money you can spend before the 25th of December.”
“But now it’s after the 25th of December,” argued my sister. “Why won’t you let us go shopping now?”
He tapped his cigar against the ashtray, dislodging a gray slug of ash. “Because you don’t need anything.”
This was a statement so totally ridiculous and absurd that for at least thirty seconds both my sister and I were stunned into a highly unusual state of speechlessness. Don’t need anything? We? We went shopping every weekend. We always needed something.
My father disagreed.
He flung wide the doors of our closets. “Look at that!” He pointed to the crowd of blouses, skirts and dresses. “What do you call that?”
“Clothes,” muttered my sister.
“A lot of clothes,” said my father. “What you have in there could last you the rest of your life, never mind a couple of months.”
I groaned and rolled my eyes. “You mean so long as we don’t grow or wash it too much.”
My father ignored me.
“You have enough things in there to clothe an entire village in the Third World.”
“Not unless everybody in the village is the same size as me,” snarked my sister.
This time he ignored her.
“And this?” he demanded, pulling open dresser drawers. “What do you call this?”
“Jeans?” I ventured. “Sweaters?”
“You can wear how many pairs of jeans at a time?” asked my father. “How many sweaters?” He pointed to the row of shoes on their racks. “And you have how many feet, ladies? Six? Ten? Are you really centipedes and not human girls?”
With almost divine patience, my sister and I explained that a person couldn’t be expected to wear the same thing every day, or even once a week.
“It’s okay for you,” said my sister. “You just go to work. But we go to school. People notice what we wear.”
My sister and I didn’t always agree - full-scale wars had been waged over the right way to tie a shoelace or butter a potato - but this time we were as one.
“She’s right. And we can’t just wear anything.” I pulled a handful of hangers from my closet. I yanked a wad of tops from my dresser. “Everybody’s seen me in this stuff like a zillion times, Dad. I have to have new things to break up the monotony.”
“No you don’t,” said my father. “I’m declaring a moratorium on buying.”
My sister and I exchanged worried looks. Moratorium sounded suspiciously like mortuary. Was my father killing shopping?
“You’re taking a break from this endless consumption.” Whether we wanted to or not, apparently. “There will be no new articles of clothing in this house until Easter.”
My sister wasn’t just the girl who looked at the glass and, unconcerned with what was in it, declared it Half Full! She was the girl who was usually shrewd enough to figure out how to get someone to fill it up all the way. “You mean unless we pay for them out of our own money.”
My father’s head shook slowly back and forth, in the way of someone about to give you really bad news. “No, that’s not what I mean. I don’t care if some guy comes to the door and gives you a cashiers’ check for a million bucks. You’re not buying any new clothes until the Spring. And that’s final.”
“But what about this?” My sister shook several pairs of socks in the air. “I have to have new ones. They all have holes.”
“Then darn them.”
“Darn them?” It was I who laughed, my sister was too surprised. My father, like many parents, was frequently unreasonable – but now he seemed to have taken leave of his senses. “People don’t darn socks any more, Dad. That’s like so Nineteenth Century.”
“No,” said my father. “Washing your clothes by hand is so Nineteenth Century. And if you don’t want to be transported back there you will not only start darning your socks, you’ll start patching your jeans and mending your sweaters and learning how to take down a hem or two.”
My mother, who often couldn’t hear you when you asked for pizza or a lift into town but who actually had the hearing of a bat, materialized in the doorway of her workroom.
“And who’s going to be darning your socks?” she asked my father.
This time it was my mother that my father ignored.
In case you don’t live in London, you might like to know that (surpassing even the year the Bird’s-Eye logo hung over our major shopping street to represent this joyous religious season) the lights of Oxford Street this year are an advertisement for Disney’s A CHRISTMAS CAROL.This had been kept something of a secret from me, so I came to an abrupt halt as I turned out of a side street and was confronted by the illuminated image of Jim Carey as Scrooge. And not for the first time, I wished my father was with me.
Of my parents, my father was the least dedicated Christian. My mother was a Protestant and went to church every Sunday, to Bible Class on Thursday evenings and to the Women’s Circle on Mondays. She participated in all church events and outings, kept her well-thumbed weekly religious magazine on her bedside table in case she needed help or comfort in the night, knew exactly how tall Jesus was (six feet), was forever reminding us what the Bible had to say about our behavior (more than you’d think), and called her minister Reverend Bob. In contrast, my father, a Catholic, went to church every Sunday, but did so largely because it was a sin not to and, having experienced war, he didn’t particularly want to go to hell. And although often commented on the irony of people who had been praying five minutes ago trying to beat each other out of the parking lot with a noticeable lack of goodwill, he had very little to say about Jesus or the Bible. The priests in our church didn’t have first names, and the only time my father was known to actually talk to one was at his yearly confession (because if you didn’t receive Communion on Easter, that was a sin). So it was a surprise to all of us when it was not my mother but my father who turned his back on the commercial bloodbath that is Christmas and, like Jesus casting the money-changers from the temple, decided to cast the money-grubbers out of our yuletide celebration.
We were in the mall. Carols played over the sounds of screeching children and bickering couples. Santa’s elves (tall Santa’s elves in mini skirts and leotards) passed through the throng handing out Have Your Picture Taken with Santa forms.
My mother had the list of presents we had to buy for aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, neighbors, Santa’s pals, and anyone who might conceivably either buy one of us a gift or expect one. It was a long list, and getting through it redefined the meaning of tedious. Could we buy all six girl cousins the same thing, or was that too impersonal? If we couldn’t (which was my mother’s eventual decision), then what on earth were we going to get each of them for exactly the same price? Didn’t we give Aunt Lottie bubble bath last year? Didn’t we give Aunt Cerise eau de toilette? Who was it didn’t have pierced ears? Was it okay to get the uncles socks again? Did the fact that Mrs Hollander, next door, had given us a jar of homemade jam last year mean that we should give her something this year? Would a dozen home-baked cookies be enough? And could we just wrap them in Santa paper or should we buy a festive tin to put them in, to balance out the mason jar she’d given us? Since Aunt Macy’s presents to me and my sister the year before were clothes pins with artificial flowers glued on them (the exact purpose of which was never discovered) did we have to buy her something from a real store or could we get away with a crocheted toilet roll cover from my mother’s church’s fair? You can see why it took so long.
My father had plunked himself down on a bench by a mini-waterfall, shopping bags at his feet like wretched masses huddled round the skirt of the Statue of Liberty, while my mother, my sister and I went into Sweet Dreams to pick out a pair of pajamas for cousin Lulu (who didn’t read, didn’t listen to music, had no hobbies and wasn’t interested in anything, thus limiting the gift-giver’s options).
When we re-emerged thirty or forty minutes later my father was gazing about him like someone who’s sight had suddenly been miraculously restored.
“Look at this!” He swept his arms open to include the stores, the burdened shoppers, the tinseled palm trees, the dancing snowmen lights and even the plastic reindeer suspended over the waterfall. “Just look!”
My mother’s eyes were on the Italian deli. “What am I looking at? The olives? Because I don’t really think anyone we know likes olives that much. I mean, a few of those black ones from the can in the relish tray are all right, but-”
“No, no! Not the olives. I mean everything. Just look at it. Santa Claus… Rudolph… snowmen… polar bears. For the love of God – could someone tell me what polar bears have to do with Christmas?”
“Because they live at the North Pole?” guessed my sister.
“Did the Baby Jesus live at the North Pole?” bellowed my father. Heads turned. “Did he put chilli pepper lights around his crib? Did he keep reindeer in that manger?”
My mother perused her list. “Are you staying here?” she asked him, ticking off Lulu. “Because I have to go to Sternman’s to see if they have that footbath for your sister Millie.”
“Oh no you don’t.” My father had had it with all the cheap decorations and useless presents. He was done with the gluttony and greed. We were going to take back every present we’d already bought, estimate how much more we would have spent, and give all that money to Christian Aid. We would give presents, but we had to make them ourselves. We would have a Christmas dinner, but it would be a much simpler, pared down affair (the money we would have spent on the rib roast, the olives, the pickled watermelon rind, the salted nuts, the eggnog, the chocolates and the three desserts also went to Christian Aid). My father rose to his feet. “We, as a family, are putting Christ back in Christmas!” he declared.
In front of the five and ten, one of Santa’s elves applauded.
“Thank God we have an artificial tree,” said my mother, “or I suppose we wouldn’t be allowed that either.”
My sixth grade teacher was Mr Sutcliffe. We were the first class he’d ever taught, which meant that, unlike the other male teachers at Bread and Cheese Hollow Elementary school, he was young enough to remember his own childhood and had a full head of hair. It also meant that he hadn’t had his idealism, passion and enthusiasm sucked from his soul by hundreds of eleven-year-olds whose favorite period of the day was lunch. In fact, I believe it’s fair to say that Mr Sutcliffe pretty much glowed with enthusiasm, idealism and passion. Mr Sutcliffe had a mission. He didn’t care if we became doctors and lawyers or secretaries and plumbers; he cared that we thought and didn’t just let life happen to us. He encouraged us to be questioning and creative. He wanted us to love learning as much as he did. “Education isn’t about memorizing dates and facts,” he’d say. “A computer can store dates and facts. Educations about opening your mind and heart. It’s about thinking. Think! Think! Think!” At which point Ted Grosky or George Hubbard would shout out, “I think I want to go home!” Undaunted, Mr Sutcliffe would join in the laughter. “And I think you should think again,” he’d say. “Or I’ll think about keeping you after school.”
Despite his idealism, passion, enthusiasm and demands for conscious and creative thought, we all liked Mr Sutcliffe. He wasn’t fusty or dull, or drone on worthily for what seemed like whole lifetimes the way some teachers did. Oh contraire! Mr Sutcliffe was funny, interesting and kept us awake even through the most tedious hours of the syllabus. His enthusiasm was contagious. The boys thought Mr Sutcliffe was especially cool because he was a war hero and rode a vintage Harley, which sat in the parking lot among the compact cars of the rest of the staff like a lion in the middle of a purr of tabby cats. The girls thought he was especially cool because he was extremely cute, played the guitar and Emily Gonzales had seen him in the supermarket wearing a necklace (“Not a St Christopher’s medal,” she assured us, “a real necklace with beads.”), which was a historic first for our town, and possibly a historic last as well.
Every year, besides collecting canned goods to distribute to the deserving poor, our school put on a special Thanksgiving pageant to celebrate the founding of the New World. The band played, the chorus sang, the dancers danced, the children with special skills (being able to twist yourself into the shape of a pretzel or play Roll out the Barrel on the accordion) performed and, to tie it all together thematically, there was always a skit commemorating The First Thanksgiving. As it happened, that autumn our class was doing a project on Colonial America. Perhaps unaware that Mr Sutcliffe believed that history was “always told by the winners” and had decided to change that, Mr Lupino, the Principal, gave us the task of putting on the Thanksgiving skit.
Few people in America may know about the massacre of the Pequot in 1637 (though Class 6A did), but there probably isn’t anyone over two who doesn’t know the story of The First Thanksgiving in 1621. It’s pretty straightforward. The Pilgrims came to America to escape religious bigotry and repression. The Wampanoags, who’d been living in the area for quite some time and were unaware that it was really New England and the property of the English Crown, helped them settle in and showed them what to plant and hunt and stuff like that so they didn’t starve to death. To thank God (and, possibly, the Indians), the colonists made a feast to celebrate their first harvest. This event not only showed their gratitude but created an enduring symbol of the cooperation between the English and the Native Americans. What could be easier to depict in the few minutes allotted to us? It was a no-brainer. Unless, of course, you were being taught by the enemy of no brains. “Don’t parrot history,” Mr Sutcliffe instructed. “Interpret it.”
The auditorium was decorated with cardboard turkeys and cardboard pilgrim hats taped to the walls. Out front the audience gathered. Since this was a daytime production, there weren't any fathers in the crowd, but there were plenty of mothers. My own mother, resplendent in her royal blue coat with the fur collar, sat dead center, her program on her lap and an expectant smile on her lips. Back stage, the cast of The First Thanksgiving gathered. Our study of Colonial America had approached the subject not from the perspective of the Colonists (the winners) but the Native Americans (the undeniable losers). We were ready to interpret.
Our first break with the traditional version of the Pilgrim’s story happened when the colonists finally landed after their arduous journey.
“Hark!” cried Pilgrim One, spying the Wampanoags watching not quite cautiously enough from the trees. “Have we made a mistake? Did we take a wrong turn? This land is already occupied.”
“Not by white people!” said Pilgrim Two. “So it doesn’t count. This is our land now.”
As one of the Wampanoags I didn’t have any lines, so I was free to see the smiles fade from the face of just about every mother in the room.
“But maybe they can give us some seeds for the crops that grow here and show us where the best hunting and fishing is,” said Pilgrim Three. “We could really use the help.”
“And maybe they could lend us some food if we run out of supplies before our first harvest,” said Pilgrim Four. “We probably won’t make it without them.”
Cut to the following autumn.
The Pilgrims were gathered around a table, in the center of which was a basket of corn and squash. The Pilgrims had empty plates in front of them and were holding their knives and forks at the ready.
Pilgrim One looked stage left. “I wonder where our guests for The First Thanksgiving are. It’s getting late. ”
“I’m getting really hungry,” said Pilgrim two. “They should have been here hours ago.”
“You don’t think the few who survived the measles, smallpox and mumps epidemics we gave them have died, too, do you?” wondered Pilgrim Three.
“Well that would be something else to be thankful for, wouldn’t it?” said Pilgrim Four. “At least we won’t have to shoot them later when we want more of their land.”
From the wings where the Wampanoags waited, I saw Mr Lupino marching towards the door to one side of the stage.
Cut to the surviving Wampanoags in their lodge.
“I feel a little bad about not going to dinner with the Pilgrims,” said Wampanoag One. “I mean, we did promise.”
“Are you kidding?” Wampanoag Two laughed hollowly. “They take our land, give us diseases, make us worship their God, murder, kidnap and enslave us - and you want to have dinner with them?”
“It’s not really that,” protested Wampanoag One. “I just think that they owe us something. Some recognition of all we’ve done for them.”
I turned to the audience. That was my cue.
But as I opened my mouth, the curtain suddenly started to close in front of us. Mr Lupino, looking a lot redder in the face than any of the Wampanoags, was in the wings, tugging on the cords.
Unprepared to miss out on delivering what I considered the best line in the skit, which I’d written myself, I bolted through the narrowing opening in the curtains to stand alone at the front of the stage.
“Don’t worry!” I said, my voice loud and clear. “They’ll give us something. A few hundreds years from now they’ll start naming cars and RVs after us.”
There was a silence that could have drowned out the sound of a million bison stampeding over the plains.
I looked out into the audience, searching for the face of my mother, beaming back at me with maternal joy and pride.
She was hiding behind her program.
It took my sister a day to notice that her laces were missing.
“Are you sure you didn’t take them out yourself?” My mother often managed to sound as if there was little on the planet that could ever truly surprise her. “Maybe one of them got some dirt or a drop of juice on it and you couldn’t use it any more?” Or maybe it was just the oddities of her own children that couldn’t surprise her. She knew us well.
“I think I’d remember if they were ruined,” sneered my sister. “I think I would have got some new ones right away.” She turned to me. “There’s only one person in this house who would stoop low enough to steal my shoe laces.”
I widened my eyes in innocent surprise. “Are you talking to me?”
“Well, I’m not talking to the dog,” snapped my sister
I, of course, (as she had) denied all knowledge.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I sounded bored. “Why would I take your shoe laces?” I sniggered. “I mean, that is like sooo pathetic.”
My sister twisted her face into what any half-decent painter would recognize as the picture of contempt. “That’s exactly how come I know you did it,”
Later that night, while my sister was sprawled on the sofa, doing her homework and watching TV, I de-arranged her socks. One cat sock paired with a dog sock; the other paired with a giraffe sock. One polka dot sock paired with a striped sock; the other polka dot sock paired with a heart sock. One green with a blue; one blue with a black. And so forth.
She marched into kitchen the next morning with a shopping bag in her arms.
“Why aren’t you dressed?” asked my mother.
“Because I can’t go to school!” My sister dumped the contents of the bag (every sock she owned) onto the table. “Look what she did! She’s mixed them all up! Now I don’t have any socks to wear today. It’ll take me hours to sort them out.”
“What in heaven’s name is wrong with you?” asked my mother.
Head bent over the history homework I was conscientiously double-checking, I chortled into my cereal bowl. And then I realized that she wasn’t speaking to my sister.
“Me?” I was shocked. Insulted. Hurt. “Why are you blaming me? I didn’t do it. Why would I do a dumb thing like that?”
“I don’t know,” said my mother. “I wish I did, but I don’t. Instead of doing a doctorate in abnormal psychology I married your father.”
“Well I’m sorry, to disappoint you” I said with as much haughtiness as someone eating branflakes can be expected to muster, “but I have a lot better things to do with my time than mix up her socks.” I gave my sister a smile as sweet as a gallon of corn syrup. “Maybe the ghost did it,” I purred.
“Ghost?” My mother looked at the pile of socks with new interest. “You think Nellie did that?”
“Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it?” I said. “She’s been in that graveyard a long time. It would give her something to do. She must be humongously bored.”
My sister, throwing a pair of socks (one yellow, one orange if I remember correctly) in the air as if it was a ball, started whistling Dixie.
The next day I hid one of my sister’s shoes in my father’s toolbox, where she would never think to look for it and he wouldn’t find it till next autumn when he traditionally spent a couple of days “getting the house ready for winter”.
But instead of yelling and screaming and throwing things at me, my sister calmly invited my mother into her room to examine the gap in her shoe rack. “Look what Nellie did this time,” she announced.
“But why would she only take one shoe?” mused my mother. “It looked to me like she had both her feet.”
I shook up my sister’s jewelry box so that everything was tangled together. But instead of ranting and raving, she presented the box to my mother as if was some kind of trophy.
I de-alphabetized my sister’s tapes. “I guess she was trying to figure out what they were,” she said to my mother. “She’s just curious, that’s all.”
My mother came back from the library with two books: The DICTIONARY OF GHOSTS and GHOSTS OF LONG ISLAND: CASE STUDIES.
The next morning when I went to get dressed I found that every skirt, dress and blouse I had, had been taken from its hanger and dumped on the floor of the closet.
My mother reached for her book of case studies. “That’s very interesting,” she murmured. “There’s a similar incident in here.”
“It’s not the ghost,” I protested. How could it be? There was no ghost.
“Of course it’s the ghost.” My mother flicked through pages. “She’s obviously transferred her focus from your sister to you. You’re probably closer to her in age.”
“It’s not the ghost, it’s her!” I howled, pointing an accusing finger at my sister, who at that moment was immersed in feeding toast to the dog. “It’s her cheap form of revenge.”
My sister glanced over, smiling like an angel who’s just done a good deed. “Revenge for what?”
The next day I found wet sand in the pocket of my jacket.
“That could mean that Nellie drowned…” murmured my mother. “We are near the beach.”
My math book disappeared.
“Are you going to do something?“ I demanded. “I can’t do my homework without my book. I’ll get a detention. Is that what you want?”
“I’ll write you a note and explain about Nellie,” offered my mother.
That was all I needed, a note from my mother to Mr Hirsch explaining that I couldn’t do my homework because the ghost hid my textbook. I might as well give up any dreams of happiness right then.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll go over to Kathy’s and do my homework there.”
I discovered stones in the bottom of my book bag. I opened the sandwich I’d made for my lunch the night before to find that the peanut butter had turned into liverwurst. My hairbrush had been smeared with Vaseline. Every button on my blouse fell off while I was changing for gym. I thought I might lose my mind.
Those were the buttons that broke the camel’s back. That night I went to my sister and admitted defeat.
“You win,” I said. “I can’t go on like this. What will it take to make you stop?”
“A written apology and ten bucks,” said my sister.
“Only if you give me my striped shirt back.”
“Deal,” said my sister.
On Saturday morning all the toilet paper disappeared.
“You know, almost the same thing happened to that family in Wampaugh,” said my mother.
My father, who, because he’d only just returned from his business trip the night before, hadn’t yet been told about the haunting of our humble home, said, “What family in Wampaugh?”
“The one that had the ghost of an 19th-century sea captain living in their attic,” said my mother.
My father put down his coffee cup. “What does that have to do with out running out of toilet paper?”
My mother explained that we hadn’t run out of toilet paper, Nellie had hidden it all.
“Whose Nellie?” asked my father.
My mother made her you-never-listen-to-a-word-I-say face. “Our ghost,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten about Nellie.”
Rather than admit that he had, my father said, “So where does the sea captain come into it?”
“He flooded the house,” my mother explained. “You know, because they weren't paying enough attention to him.”
My father’s eyes were narrowed in concentration. He’d been away from us for nearly two weeks. It was clear he could have used a debriefing. “So you think whatever her name is took our toilet paper because she’s not getting enough attention?”
“She could get violent,” said my mother. “The sea captain did. We may have to call the priest to have her exorcised.”
My mother left right after breakfast to have her hair done. As soon as her car pulled out of the driveway my father turned on my sister and me. “I can’t turn my back on you two for a minute, can I?”
This was, of course, a rhetorical question but we both answered it anyway.
I clamped my hand to my heart. “I swear I didn’t do it!”
“Me neither,” said my sister. “Reallyreallyreallyreally.”
“Then who did?” my father, not unreasonably, wanted to know.
“The ghost!” we answered as one.
My father sighed. “The only consolation I have in my life is that neither of you was twins,” said my father.
My best striped top (red and blue with a devilish thread of yellow round the collar and cuffs) was missing. I’d taken it out of the clean laundry, folded it meticulously and put it away in the middle drawer of my dresser, right at the top. I knew that this was what I’d done because: A. It was obviously what I should have done; B. I remembered doing it; and C. I’d planned to wear it to the movies on Saturday afternoon. But when I went to the middle drawer of my dresser on Saturday morning the top wasn’t there. I rummaged through the drawer but it hadn’t wiggled its way down to the bottom. I pulled every single thing out, but it hadn’t hidden itself in a sleeve or a turtleneck or a pocket. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I hadn’t put it in the middle drawer but the first or the third. It was possible. I was a teenager; I had a lot on my mind. I rummaged, I pulled out, I sifted through. I searched with the thoroughness of Sherlock Holmes examining a drop of cigar ash, but my very best striped shirt wasn’t in the dresser. It hadn’t fallen down the back, either.
“Mom!” I hollered. “Mom! What happened to my red and blue top?”
My mother sighed as if she was three thousand years old and for all of those three thousand years (on the average of approximately sixteen times a day) someone had been asking her where her red and blue top was. “I thought you put it away.”
“I did.” Like a fly on the salad, an injured note settled into my voice. “But it isn’t there, is it? It’s disappeared.” I was righteous and indignant. This kind of thing wouldn’t happen if I were an only child.
My mother was at the kitchen table, making a bouquet of roses out of pink and yellow Styrofoam egg boxes. Normally my mother’s arts and crafts projects (which were wide-ranging and often frightening) were done in the basement where my father had built her a customized workroom to reduce the possibility of our finding foreign objects like sequins or broken glass in our food. But my father was away, and his absence had the same effect on our household that the sheriff taking a vacation would have had on Dodge. A certain lawlessness prevailed.
She didn’t look up as she said, “Are you sure you looked thoroughly?”
“Yes, I looked thoroughly. I took every single thing out of my dresser. It isn’t there.”
This statement finally made her glance my way, one penciled eyebrow rising accusingly. Her lips were pursed.
“I am going to put it all back,” I snapped.
My mother picked up another petal. “Make sure you do.”
“You’re missing the point!” I wailed. I would have defied anyone to spend two minutes in my family and not realize how unfair the world really is. “It didn’t just walk out of my room by itself! It’s not a shape-shifter! Your daughter took it!”
She calmly glued the petal into place. “You’re my daughter.”
It always amazed me that though she had no sense of humor my mother still tried to make jokes.
“The other one.”
My sister had history. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d “borrowed” something of mine without going through the formality of asking me first. My brown corduroy skirt. My snowflake socks. My Eric von Schmidt album. To name but three things she’d felt entitled to help herself to simply because we shared a gene pool and had rooms next to each other.
“I thought she promised not to do that any more,” said my mother.
And the President promised not to raise taxes.
“Oh, Mommmm….” I groaned. How naïve could one woman be?
“Well, did you ask her if she took it?” My mother picked up a tiny, sparkly yellow bead with a pair of tweezers. “Why don’t you ask her if she took it before you start jumping to conclusions.”
“Fine!” I huffed. “I’ll do that, shall I?”
My sister said she hadn’t touched my stupid top. “I’d rather have lice that wear that,” said my sister. “It’s like so uncool.”
Of course, she was lying. Only my mother would have expected her to tell the truth.
“Well if you didn’t take it, who did?” My mother couldn’t fit into my clothes and as far as any of us knew my father didn’t cross dress. “You may not have noticed this, but we don’t have any other sisters.”
My sister smiled the smile that punched every button I had at exactly the same moment with the force of the explosion needed to launch a missile. Boomboomboom.
“Maybe the ghost took it,” said my sister.
“Don’t think you’re getting away with this!” I hissed.
The door slammed behind me. But not so loudly that I didn’t hear my sister laugh.
Only my mother had ever seen the ghost.
According to my mother, she was a young woman wearing a long, summery print dress with an apron over it and a bonnet. She may have been wearing gloves. Her skin was as pale as moonlight on water and she smiled like the Virgin Mary. My mother called her “Nellie” for no reason other than she’d always liked that name. My mother had seen Nellie twice. Once on a hot and humid August day my mother had woken up in the hammock in the backyard and seen Nellie walking through the kitchen wall. And the second time, the following winter, walking through the snow on the road in front of our house (and through several telephone poles and stranded automobiles as well). Nellie didn’t belong to our house – before we’d had it built there was nothing on our property but trees – but, according to my mother, came from the Colonial cemetery in the nearby woods. My mother (whose own mother had told fortunes and read tea leaves and raised her with a deep belief in The Other World) said it stood to reason.
“She’s either lost or just taking a walk,” said my mother.
My sister, being younger and more impressionable, had been scared of the ghost, and had gone through a phase of thinking that every clanking pipe or branch scraping against the house was Nellie, trying to find her way back to the cemetary. I, on the other hand (who, with my father, represented the logical, rational side of the family) had always been skeptical about the ghost (if not actually scathing, cynical, sarcastic and doubled over with infantile laughter). Indeed, until my sister leered at me like that and said Maybe the ghost took it, I’d forgotten about Nellie completely. My sister, obviously, hadn’t. Now that she was old enough to wear make-up and steal my clothes she was also acting as if she was too old to believe in ghosts. But I knew better. She still always slept with a night-light on and jumped at unexpected noises. I figured that even if Nellie couldn’t help me get back my very favorite top in the entire universe, she could help me settle the score.
As soon as my sister left the house, I tiptoed into her room like a cartoon fox heading for the chicken coop. Although I knew beyond even the slightest shadow of a doubt that my sister had taken my striped shirt I searched her room before I set my plan in action. My sister believed in neatness and order and a certain amount of perfection. Her closet and drawers were all color coordinated (blues together, whites together, etc), which made my job easier than it would have been if I’d been searching my room. But – if further proof was necessary (which it wasn’t) - there was no sign of the top. Secure in the knowledge that I’d more than bent over backwards to be fair, I removed the laces from my sister’s turquoise high-tops, and buried them in the garbage.
The haunting had begun.
There was a flying water bug in the showers. More specifically, the flying water bug was in the shower occupied by my sister. Her screams, which could not only curdle blood but had undoubtedly curdled every container of milk within a ten-mile radius of the campsite, brought two rangers, a vacationing policeman, and a very large man with a knife thundering into the ladies’ washroom, thinking (not unreasonably) that someone was being murdered. Because of the delay the ensuing chaos, hysteria and pandemonium caused, we were late setting off for our evening meal.
By the time it was becoming obvious that we were not going to arrive at our destination within the next twenty minutes, dark had fallen over what was left of the ancient woodland. Night birds called, crickets chirped, and bats swooped over the fields like phantoms. Like nicks in the forest, the lights of distant cabins shone – assuring us that, contrary to how things seemed, we weren't the last people left alive on the planet. Inside the car, where polite conversation had long since ceased, my mother peered through the windshield like a cavalry scout looking for Sioux war parties, the dog snored, my sister rhythmically kicked the seat in front of her, my father rhythmically told her to cut it out, and I wondered, as I sometimes did, if there was any chance that my Aunt Georgia, who taught Art and lived in Greenwich Village, would be willing to adopt me.
Suddenly my mother straightened up. “What’s that? What’s that?” shrieked my mother, jabbing the air in front of my father and narrowly missing his nose. “Look! Up there! It’s a gas station!”
My father didn’t glance over at her, or slow down. “We don’t need gas.”
“Pull in there,” ordered my mother. “Pull in there and ask for directions.”
“We don’t need directions,” said my father. “We aren’t lost.”
Among the many things my father was known for (the honeymoon salad joke, his gag of pretending someone was choking him from behind the door, the horse shadow puppet he could make with his hands) was a pathological refusal to ever ask for directions. Even if we’d been driving for several hours, had been over the Brooklyn Bridge five times, a hurricane had started up and one of his children was crying and the other was throwing up out the window, my father would not ask the way. It was his version of the Code of the Samurai.
On this occasion, after the unprecedented success of our canoe ride (no major arguments, no tears and less than twenty mentions of Disney World) and my mother’s miraculous cure (she couldn’t have gotten back to the rental dock faster if she’d had an outboard), we were on our way to the slap-up “real” meal (nothing from a can) at the “real” restaurant (no burgers, no pizza) recommended by the owner of Charley’s Bait and Tackle. We’d been on our way there for over an hour, but, despite the fact that it was only “a few miles straight up the road after the boulder that looks a lot like a raccoon”, we hadn’t found it yet.
“Do you know where we are?” demanded my mother. “Because if you don’t know where we are, then we’re lost.
Recognizing from her tone of voice that if my mother had been the commander of combat troops she wouldn’t be taking any prisoners, my father eased his foot off the gas. But not happily. “This is ridiculous,” he grumbled. “I bet you it’s just around that bend up there.”
“Five bucks,” said my mother.
Because of the time in Philadelphia when my father went into the news store and pretended to ask for directions when all he did was buy two packs of gum and a Hershey bar, my mother insisted on going with him. Seeing this as an opportunity to at least get a soda, I insisted on going in, too. The dog needed the rest room, so he came along. And my sister, still traumatized by her water bug experience, wasn’t going to sit alone in the car even for a few minutes, so we all trooped into the station with my father.
While my mother stood beside him with her arms folded in front of her and a scowl on her face, my father put four cans of soda on the counter and said, conversationally to the man at the till, “You wouldn’t know where the restaurant is around here?”
The man behind the counter rang up the sodas. “Which one?”
“Well, that’s the thing…” My father chuckled. “I can’t remember the name. But I think it looks like a log cabin.”
The man chuckled. “Everything up here looks like a log cabin.”
My mother sighed.
“Guy at the lake said it’s on the same road as the boulder that looks like a raccoon.”
“Racoon?” The man frowned. “You sure he didn’t say coyote?”
“Racoon,” repeated my father. “I’m sure he said raccoon.”
The man was shaking his head. “Racoon, huh?”
Aware that, beside him, my mother was starting to paw the ground, my father searched his mind for some other relevant information. “Oh, I know!” He snapped his fingers. “He said there’s a stuffed bear outside the entrance.”
“Oh, stuffed bear! Why didn’t you say?” The man handed my father his change. “That’ll be Links. Best darn steak house in the state. Big as a platter. Melts in your mouth like butter on a griddle. Then there’s the onion rings and the scalloped potatoes… I’m telling you, you haven’t tasted onion rings or scalloped potatoes till you’ve had the ones at Links. And if you don’t like steak, there’s the chops - chops to die for – or the chicken….” He shook his head. “Well, the chicken’s just out of this world.”
“Considering how long it’s taking us to find this place, it probably is,” muttered my mother.
The man beamed on my sister and me. “And wait’ll you see the desserts… People come from miles just for the homemade ice cream and blueberry pie.”
“Well, I can believe that,” said my mother.
“It isn’t far, is it?” My father’s voice was bright with hope. He pointed out the window. “I bet my wife it’s just around that bend.”
“Well kind of…”
You went around the bend, then turned right on Luke Skyler Road. About three miles later, when you came to all the mailboxes, you did another right onto Sagwa. When Sagwa forked you stayed on the left. About half a mile past the second white house on the right you made a right. You’d cross a stream and pass a church. The third left after the church was Shortcut. The restaurant was four miles down on the right.
My father’s head bobbed up and down, either with understanding or with the effort of trying to shake the directions into it.
“Thanks!” said my father. He turned to go, and we turned with him. “Right… right… left… right… left… right…” he mumbled as we all shuffled towards the door.
“I’m getting blue berry pie,” said my sister.
“You owe me five bucks,” said my mother.
“The chicken sounds good,” said I. “And those potatoes…”
“Steak. I’m having the biggest steak they have.” The car keys jingled in my father’s hand as he held the door open for us to file through.
“Course, it’s closed on Mondays,” called the man at the counter.
Desperate as a man who knows the crowd around is looking for a rope and about to get ugly, my father turned around. “Well what about one of the other restaurants?” He was close to begging. “One of them must be open.”
“Nah…” The man shook his head. Sadly. “There aren’t any other restaurants round here.”
My mother (claiming that she couldn’t take a turn with the paddle because she once strained her back rowing at summer camp when she was twelve) sat at the back of the canoe, the dog on her lap, her delicate skin protected by a large straw bonnet tied with a strip of bright pink organza.
“By the shores of Gitche Gumee….” she intoned. “By the shining Big-Sea-Water…”
Normally, on family trips, my mother sang. She usually tried to match the song to the locale. “Onward, Christian Soldiers” or the song about the church in the wild wood should we pass a party of knights or a religious building. “Old MacDonald” if we passed a farm. “We’ll Meet Again” when a cemetery hove into view. Today, however, as our canoes huffed and puffed their ways over the serene and woods-encircled lake, she was reciting Longfellow’s poem “Hiawatha” (the two verses that she remembered from school). Fortunately, my mother didn’t know any songs about Native Americans, and even if I could have paddled and sung at the same time there was no way I was going to fill in that gap in her knowledge by sharing the song about Running Bear and Lovely Little White Dove with her.
“Hiawatha” was bad enough.
“What’d I tell you?” shouted my father. “Didn’t I say this was going to be a vacation we you never forgot?” He and my sister were in the lead canoe. He was doing the paddling and she (having already dropped an oar into the water once) was sitting behind him, slapping the surface of the lake with her hand in a way that suggested she might be wondering how much force it would take to capsize the boat. “Look at that view. Isn’t it spectacular?” Water splashed over my father and his passenger as his blade pointed at the view. The jade-green, glasslike lake below us. The enormous, silent sky above us. The huddle of old-growth forest that encircled us. “This is what this country used to look like before we invented strip malls,” my father informed us. “Wild. Raw. Throbbing with life. Just as Nature made it.” He pulled up his oars, letting the bright red canoe (number 18) drift while he took in the untamed beauty all around us in our rented canoes with our life jackets on. “It’s like going back in time.”
“I’d rather go to Disney World,” grumbled my sister. My sister hadn’t been in favor of this vacation to begin with (well, no one was except my father), but since discovering that campsites didn’t have private bathrooms or TV, I’d rather go to Disney World had become my sister’s theme tune. “They have Frontier Land, you know.”
“Be that as it may,” my father placidly replied. “But it’s all pretend, honey. This is much better. This is the real thing.”
“I bet the real tribe that used to live here would be a little surprised to find all those white people swimming in their lake.” I was in one of my rebellious phases, which three twenty-four-hour days with my family was doing nothing to diminish. “Not to mention the speedboats and the café and the bar on the other end.”
My father looked back at me. “Cynicism is not attractive in one so young.”
“Stop giving your dad a hard time,” ordered my mother.
Which, if you asked me, was pretty rich since she’d done nothing but give my father a hard time since we left home – starting from when she threw the map out the car window. She not only refused to paddle, she also refused to help set up the tent, to blow up her air mattress or to cook on the ground, and usually stayed at camp, reading a book, while my father took my sister and me on walks to disprove her predictions that we would break out in poison ivy or contract lyme disease. But being ferried over what amounted to one gigantic scenic overlook obviously agreed with her.
This was a part of getting out in Nature she could go with. “This place is inspiring. Truly inspiring.” She peered over the tops of her sunglasses to be even more truly inspired.
“God’s country. That’s what they called it. God’s country.”
“No it wasn’t. They called it Algonquin country.” I told you I was in one of my rebellious stages.
My mother, however, wasn’t about to be baited. One of the reasons she was in a good mood was because tonight my father had agreed that we could eat in a restaurant instead of having yet another meal of canned beans and canned spaghetti (which, with canned soup, canned ravioli and boiled water, were just about all you could expect to make on our stove). Even Wilderness Dad had his limits of just how far back in time he was willing to go. “It’s so quiet and peaceful,” she went on. “It really makes you think.”
“All it makes me think is that I’d rather be at Disney World,” said my sister.
“It’d be cool if we could see an eagle or an elk or something like that.” I sighed. “But I suppose we exterminated all of them, too.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said my father. “The Ranger told me there’s plenty of wildlife left in these woods. Deer… raccoon… coyote… even bear.”
“Not down here with all these tourists around.” Rebels aren’t easily persuaded. “Somebody’d shoot them.”
“Let’s pull in over there and have our lunch,” said my father.
We pulled in “over there” and dragged the canoes up on the shore (my sister grumbling about not having to do this at Disney World and my mother and the dog, both exempt from this labor - she because of her old camp injury and he because of his paws – looking on.)
Interestingly, although a woman who considered crossing the supermarket parking lot a hike, it was my mother who suggested we go further inland to find a “sylvan glade” where we could have our picnic. “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou…” Still obviously inspired, my mother was on a poetic roll that day, even if she’d changed continents. She beamed at my father. “Wouldn’t that be romantic?”
My father (though more a piece of cake and can of beer kind of guy) said, “We’re not going too far in. We have to keep an eye on the boats.”
Without going too far, we actually found the perfect spot, secluded but unspoiled by the litter that dotted the shores of the lake. It was a small clearing in a natural circle of trees. There were logs to sit on and a leafy roof over us through which the sun streamed down in halo-like light. Around us branches creaked and birds sang and tiny forest creatures rustled in the undergrowth – just as they had for thousands of years. As we ate our bologna sandwiches and sipped our iced tea, I think I can say that each of us was touched and moved by the timeless grandeur of our surroundings.
“It’s so serene,” murmured my mother. “Like heaven on Earth.”
Even my sister went through the whole meal without any mention of Disney World.
And then, folding up his sandwich bag and gazing over my mother’s head, my father said, “I don’t want anyone to panic. The best thing is to stay calm. But if I’m not mistaken, there’s a black bear watching us from right behind your mom.”
My sister and I both screamed, “Where? Where?” and launched ourselves at my father. My mother scooped up the dog and ran.
My sister opened her eyes first. “I don’t see any bear,” said my sister.
I opened my eyes. Still holding tightly to my father’s arm I peered through the trees behind the spot where my mother so recently had been. “I don’t either.”
“Don’t you?” My father shook his head, gathering up the fallen picnic fare. “I guess maybe I was mistaken after all.”
By the time we got back to the boats, my mother was yards out on the water in the blue canoe, paddling with a speed and grace that would have made Hiawatha proud.
“You see?” My father winked. “I knew that shoulder must have healed by now.”
In the last several decades, the Family Vacation has become a fixture in our culture – as if, not satisfied with arguing for fifty weeks in the relative privacy of our own homes we want to give the rest of the world a chance to see us at our worst. It strikes me as somewhat ironic that a group of people who can’t go Christmas shopping together without shouting, tears and festive violence (i.e., my father throwing the Singing Santa onto Route 110) would want to go away together to someplace where they can’t lock themselves in their bedrooms and refuse to come out, but Life, as they say, is strange.
“But a family vacation’s supposed to be vacation the whole family enjoys,” wailed my sister. “Like going to Disneyworld or someplace like that.”
My father, who was wiping several years’ worth of dust and small insects off the portable gas stove he’d bought for power cuts in hurricane season, didn’t look up. “Exactly. The whole family. Which, I believe includes me.”
My father had put his foot down, and crushed firmly under its heel was Cinderella’s tiara. He was tired of spending his precious vacation driving from one child-friendly venue to another. Up and down the East Coast we went, my parents in the front seat (bickering) and my sister and I in the back (bickering), every night the four of us crammed into one cheap motel room with our electric coffee pot, a hot plate and an ice chest (so that the only meal we had to eat out was lunch) and arguing about what to watch on the TV that was bolted to the wall. We’d been to Storybook Land and The Mountain Game Farm. We’d been to Pioneer Land and Cowboy World. We’d been to Water World, King Arthur’s Realm and Fairy Town. He was drawing the line at Disneyworld. This year, said my father, he wanted to really relax and enjoy himself. He didn’t think that was too much to ask.
My sister, as you will have guessed already, disagreed.
“But everybody goes to Disneyworld,” she moaned. “All my friends have pictures of themselves with Goofy and T-shirts and really cool key chains and stuff. And they all say how great it is… They think we’re weird because we haven’t gone. They think there’s something wrong with you.”
My father, however, was impervious to the ridicule of eight-year-olds.
“A real vacation isn’t about T-shirts and key chains,” said my father. “It’s about experiencing all life has to offer. It’s about challenging yourself and pushing your limits.” This was why we were going camping. According to my father, life’s offerings included tents, sleeping bags and getting pretty intimate with nature. It would make us more rounded people, like Boy Scouts. “Wouldn’t you rather have your picture taken walking an old Indian trail than standing next to some college student dressed as a cartoon character?” he asked.
My sister said, “No.”
“My friends all stay in hotels,” said my mother. Wistfully. So long as we went somewhere, she didn’t care where we went but she would have liked to stay in a real hotel. The idea of room service appealed to her.
“Where’s your pioneer spirit?” demanded my father. “It wasn’t staying in hotels that made this country great.”
“It wasn’t sleeping on the ground either,” snapped my mother.
You may have noticed that my whining voice hasn’t yet been heard in this discussion. That’s because I was at the age when I would rather have gone to prison than go on another family vacation, and that went for one that included Mickey Mouse. If my sister’s ideal holiday consisted of spinning around in a giant teacup, and my mother’s of calling for a turkey sandwich and a bottle of beer to be brought to her room, then my ideal holiday would have been if they’d all gone to Timbuktu or even the Jersey Shore and left me home by myself.
Which is why I now said, “I don’t see why I have to go at all. I could stay home and look after the dog.”My mother made her mouth into a flat line. “Over my dead body.” In her opinion, I was of an age when the only way she would leave me at home by myself was with a police escort.
“The dog’s coming, and you’re coming, too,” said my father. Finished with the stove, he reached for the Coleman lantern (also bought for hurricane season). “You’ll see, we’re going to have a lot of fun.” He beamed on his own flesh and blood and their mother. “This is going to be a vacation you’ll never forget.”
It was already dark by the time we pulled into the Red Tree Falls Campgrounds. Or, to be slightly more accurate, it was already dark by the time we found the Red Tree Falls Campgrounds. Day one and counting.
Things hadn’t begun very well. Loading the car had taken roughly three hours more than my father had allowed for. Every time he’d tied what he thought was the last bundle on the roof or managed to close the trunk despite the laws of logic and physics, one of us would hurl herself from the house with something else that had to come no matter what. When we finally did manage to get out of the driveway, we were back in twenty minutes when my mother realized we’d left the dog behind. (My sister and I, hoping to break our father’s will, had agreed to wait at least two hours before sounding the alarm.) Then we got a flat. By the time that was fixed my mother needed a restroom and my sister and I needed food. Then my mother, who was navigating, sent us thirty miles in the wrong direction. Then she and my father had a fight about whose fault it was that we’d gone the wrong way and my mother (firmly establishing the new family tradition started by my father the Christmas before) threw the map out the window and told him to do his own navigating if he thought he was so smart. Then the dog threw up. And then (perhaps as we should have known) the Red Tree Falls National Campgrounds turned out to be a closely kept government secret, hidden away over wooden bridges and down nameless dirt tracks that were all as similar as crocodiles from any main roads or obvious landmarks - and even from the knowledge of locals (“Can’t say that I do…”), as though it’s whereabouts had to be kept from enemy agents. God forbid the Red Tree Falls Campgrounds should fall into the hands of the Soviets.
We arrived at campsite 48 (“You’re in luck!” the ranger congratulated us. “We have one tent spot left”) about five minutes before the rain.
“You can’t be serious,” said my mother as we staggered out of the cramped car and the first drops fell on us from a tar-black sky. “We can’t put the tents up in the dark and the rain.”
“Of course we can,” said my father. “The ground’s not mud yet, is it? I’ll leave the car lights on and we’ll be home and dry in no time.”
It may surprise you to learn that none of us had ever erected a tent before. Even more interesting, though, is the fact that it hadn’t occurred to my father that he might want to do a dry run (literally) in the warmth and comfort of his own house – rather than wait till nine o’clock at night in a storm to discover that he had no idea which pole went where. I have since seen tents that pretty much put themselves up, but ours weren’t like that. Ours needed human intervention. My mother (and the dog) refused to get out of the car, which left my father to grapple manfully with their tent on his own, which used quite a few words we’d never heard him use before. My sister and I would have happily stayed in the car, too, but we’d been packed in the back with the dog and the supplies for nearly ten hours by then, making stumbling around in a downpour blindly banging pegs into the ground seem almost pleasant.
Just to prove that miracles do happen, by ten thirty both tents, though listing noticeably, were up. Outside the rain poured down in what can only be described as a Biblical way, but we were snug and dry, happily eating peanut butter and crackers together in my parents tent by the light of the Colemans.
And then a new sound joined the thudding of the rain, and the dog jumped on my lap, getting peanut butter all over his ears.
“What was that?” whispered my sister. “Was that a wolf?”
“Of course not,’ said my father, with all assurance of a man whose experience of wild animals pretty much started and stopped with the rabbits who annually ate his vegetable patch. “There aren’t any wolves around here. It’s just the wind.”
Another new sound ripped through the night.
This time my sister nearly jumped in my lap. “Then what was that?”
My mother spread peanut butter on a cracker in a philosophical way. “I think you’ll find that was your tent being blown across the campgrounds.” The lantern light made the smile she gave my father slightly sinister. “This certainly is going to be a vacation we never forget.
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THE REALLY COLD WAR - PART 2 
THE REALLY COLD WAR - PART 1 
A CHRISTMAS STORY