1982, A Snapshot
At some point between my sixth-grade graduation and my grandparents’ divorce, our family had fallen apart. Before the big move from Los Angeles, there was an epic family vacation in Cape Cod, where my grandfather rented a large beach house with a deck that led to the sand. It was a two-story classic New England style cottage with windows overlooking Hyannis Harbor, spacious enough to fit us all.
We were celebrating my Aunt Denise’s wedding in Manhattan, and afterwards caravanned over to Cape Cod, where we spent an entire luxurious month on the beach in Hyannis Port.
I can still remember everyone in our family crowded around the long picnic table on the deck, feasting on buttery lobster, as the setting sun cast a pinkish glow. My mom was especially euphoric over the lobsters, her slender fingers covered in garlic butter, cracking claws, digging for tender meat. Her wine glass next to her was filled to the rim with Chardonnay shimmering in the light among all the shells strewn upon the table.
A few of us went for a drive after dinner to get ice cream from a local ice cream parlor. I’m in the back seat, watching the last few minutes of the sunset make indigo silhouettes of the pine trees along the highway. I felt my cheeks radiate from the sun, lapping creamy swaths into my melting scoop of Rocky Road. A cold trace of ice cream dripped from the end of the waffle cone to the tip of my elbow, as I licked up and crunched the last bits.
As I saw the reflection of my face in the window against the pitch darkness outside, I searched to see something beyond the tangible. I’d often wish upon stars, hoping for something, feeling incomplete, for a mysterious unknown part of me. At this age, I felt happy enough, but a shadow grew. Invisible clues could be found anywhere, even in the reflection of my face upon the glass.
These random thoughts drifted from the happy events of that particular summer day, as I sensed something elusive run through me. I tried to hold on to whatever it was in the pit of my being, but soon lost it again. There was this melancholic reverie within me, a deep sadness, and it continued to haunt me, after that idyllic summer vacation and years after that. I couldn’t tell what it was, but something changed, a shadow blocking the light, an unexpected rain cloud.
I often go back in my mind to retrieve that missing puzzle piece, and all I can see is the beach house, how it filled with sunlight and laughter and salty ocean air, and the peaceful nights spent sitting out on the deck watching the water melt into liquid silver upon the sandy dunes, the bluest midnight blue, colored sand and oceanic wave shapes inside a Wham-O Magic Window.
And the warmth of that happy moment was the next to last of those years when we were all together as an intact family.
My grandparents threw lots of parties when I was a kid. Their house way up on Shannon Road was packed with at least two dozen of their friends, many of them married couples they’d known for years. When they threw a party, the house buzzed with funny stories shared over cocktails, crescendoes and howls of laughter echoing loud enough as far out as the backyard, where I sat happily daydreaming, perched on a swing, dangling my bare feet into the damp grass.
I overheard lots of grownup talk like “Hey George, how’s it going with that timeshare?” and “Oh Betty, you gotta come here quick, Bob’s telling that story again!” and “Ellis, you make the best martinis!” and “Francine, tell Ella about the couple that was doing it in the elevator at the salon…” all while I‘m having the time of my life, snacking on deviled eggs, and bite-size quiches loaded with bluish clumps of Roquefort cheese, sipping down at least three Shirley Temples.
They all started pouring in from the front of the house once the time came, gathering in the living room, and the parlor with the billiards table, where a few of the men that I called Uncle Bob or Uncle Harry stood, prepping their cues with a cobalt blue cube of chalk. I’d gather the stripes and solids from the netted pockets, and they’d let me rack them all up inside the triangle.
Our house was up in the winding hills of Los Feliz, just down the street from my grandparents on Shannon Road. We lived in a 1930s Tudor, and it took just about eight full minutes for me to run from my door up to theirs.
The neighborhood was where many of old Hollywood film noir was filmed, situated snugly against the green sprawl of Griffith Park. I walked home along Franklin Avenue, and as I came to the corner of Vermont, I recalled a line in Double Indemnity, “Vermont and Franklin,” conjuring up the 1940s with each step on that historic spot. I liked 40s noir, Agatha Christie, British shows, and carried around a bunch of trivia in my head like the jangling quarters in my pocket. I’d count how many I needed for a Nestlé Crunch bar, even though I intentionally saved the quarters for a few games of Pac-Man at the roller rink.
The streets had tarry cracks like veins in the concrete from earthquakes. It was a two-minute drive down Shannon Road to Los Feliz Boulevard, where William Mulholland Memorial Fountain stood in all of its art deco majesty. I’d come rolling down one of those hills on my pink Schwinn bicycle, legs up on the handlebars, screaming wildly as the wind blew my long hair out of my face.
Outside on the street, I’d play with a few of the kids in my neighborhood, daring each other to ride down a steep hill and let go of the handles, or take our feet off the pedals, just to see if we could do it, and go even faster. I took a few spills, scraped up my hands, skinned my knees, and once, the jagged metal foot pedal caught my ankle and ripped it wide open. There I was, in the middle of the road, blood gushing from my foot, smack dab in front of my house. My mom’s first date after her divorce pulled up in his black Mercury Cougar. They ended up racing me over to the hospital where I had two layers of stitches for that incident. The hand sewn sutures were done by my girlfriend’s dad, who was also my pediatrician, as well as my mom’s employer, known as Doctor Jerry. He joked that he was going to make my stitches in a needlepoint design of Princess Leia holding a light saber around my ankle.
We’d run through other people’s backyards, see how many fences we could climb over, and how many doors we could ding-dong ditch. Thankfully we didn’t come across any dogs, but once I made one of our neighbors angry by drawing a rainbow on his front wall with colored chalk. I may have written something to go with the drawing, I can’t remember what. The whole idea was that I was making the houses on my street colorful by my chalk murals. He chased me up to my front door and told my mom. I suffered punishment for my artistry and went a whole week without watching Happy Days.
One of my girlfriends got into horseback riding, and began English riding lessons, so we’d go to the stables. How she managed to arrange staying overnight in the stables office was unbeknownst to me, but we did it, equipped with a bag of apple flavored Jolly Ranchers, two sleeping bags, and a portable radio because I had to listen to The Beatles A to Z that night.
I’d say that my despite my parents fighting and breaking up every other week, I had a close bunch of family around me. I felt loved enough. No one beat me. I was praised for my piano playing and drawings. It never occurred to me that my mother was in emotional pain from losing her first baby, and that’s why she drank. And that’s why she never told me the truth.
Shannon Road, as we called my grandparents house after the street it was on, looked like a small version of a castle, with its Spanish style facade and Moorish turrets. The roof was crowned with curved terra cotta tiles, and it stood like a fortress, with a cluster of leaning palm trees to its side, and two shaggy-headed palms in front. A stone path led to the main entry from the driveway, with a row of hibiscus trees, up to the arched wooden door, complete with a hefty brass knocker and a peep window.
We had a towering grandfather clock in the entryway which gonged on the hour, then again at noon and midnight, ringing every quarter with the Westminster chime. Somehow I learned to sleep through the rattling of the chains pulling its weights, winding up for the next set of twelve hours after the midnight toll.
My grandfather sat at the head of the dining table during Passover seder. He fondly called me Pitzeleh, or Pitzi, a Yiddish term of endearment, meaning little one. One particular night after the seder dinner, with his gefilte fish jar in front of him, my grandfather said something I’ll never forget. “Pitzeleh, don’t ever try to search our family tree, all that you’ll find is that we were horse thieves and gypsies.” You could never tell if he was serious or joking, but the sentence lingered through my mind, an enigma.
Both of my aunts were chattering about their boyfriends. Pam, with her bright soprano laughter, goaded my other aunt, “Oh yeah, sure, come on, Neese, why not?” Denise smiled, her wrists jingling with silver bracelets, stating in her so-what manner, “Yeah, but it’s true, I wanna marry Jimmy, but he’s short,” her hands emphasizing her point with a salute to her chest, “and I’m too tall for most guys, they stare right at my boobs. Ya know, like that Randy Newman song, don’t want no short people.” Nana gave a roll of her green eyes with a head shake and shot up from the table, clearing dinner plates for the live-in maid, Irene, who was in the kitchen, scrubbing pans.
The English tea set was brought out to the table upon a polished silver tray, coffee served to those who wanted. I said yes to dessert, a heaping plateful of lemon chiffon pie.
The family recipe for “Best Kugel Ever!” was written in Nana’s handwriting, taped inside the tattered hardback cookbook, A Treasury of Great Recipes, by Mary and Vincent Price. This cookbook became the keepsake holder of all of the family favorites. Zucchini & Mushroom Salad, Zucchini Chocolate Bread, Apple Tart, Manicotti Crêpes, Cheese Soufflé, Crème Caramel, String Bean Casserole, Strawberry Shortcake, Sicilian Mostaccioli, and of course, the Best Kugel Ever. There were a few recipes taped inside the cookbook pages from Nana’s Chinese cooking classes with Madame Wong.
That last summer vacation together in 1982 changed me. No longer the awkward girl with glasses, or the tall girl who won the game for the other team in basketball, or the girl with nervous stomach cramps around other kids at school. I was becoming a young woman. Somewhat well-read, I clutched a variety of novels in hand by E. M. Forster, Jane Austen, or D. H. Lawrence, sometimes the poetry of Anne Sexton or Jack Kerouac, and I thought I knew an awful lot about grownups.
Perhaps I only thought I knew all about what grownups knew and did, the grown up things they wanted, and the dreams they wished for, as living in the 1970s gave us such adulthood information from sappy tv sitcoms like The Love Boat and Fantasy Island.
There was a huge doorstop-sized book perched on our bookshelf, The Joy of Sex, that piqued my curiosity one late afternoon. I treasured the entire library of my own World Book Encyclopedias to reference for all of the Greek and Roman myths I was obsessed with mapping out on a yellow lined pad of paper. But that book about sex tempted me from the living room shelf. So it became a secretive habit for a short period of time: I’d unload my backpack of yellow Pee-Chee folders stuffed with schoolwork after the uphill climb to my house, and plunk myself down to study the curious positions illustrated in hand drawn details. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the couple entwined in various poses of the Kama Sutra. It was fascinating. I turned each page with a sense of amusement, as the couple, artfully depicted, looked like a typical 70s couple, or maybe my friend’s parents. My stomach gave a squeeze and I almost didn’t want to know. It gave me, a girl turning into a woman, a keyhole look into the honest vulnerability of human intimacy, where nobody really knows what the hell they are doing, because obviously there are instruction books for how to have sex. Did the Egyptians illustrate theirs in hieroglyphics? I knew from reading the Romans had pleasure quarters, and erotic art on coins, drinking vessels, and artifacts. I’d take a quick flip through the pages before homework and giggle at the sex manual until I was over it.
There were also the stacks of Playboy magazines that a friend’s father kept stashed inside his nightstand cabinet. My friend and I had our fun sneak peek, being curious young girls. Of course, we made absolutely sure we put them back exactly as we found them, keeping mental and visual notes that the May issue went underneath September, in some horny male version of the not-so-Dewey decimal system.
Aside from my budding intrigue to know more about the birds and the bees, I was content to learn from the pages of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and leave it at that. I had a few unrequited crushes in elementary school, one of which had the idea that he could tease me relentlessly. Let’s not forget that most boys my age were way more interested in playing Atari video games and collecting Star Wars action figures, not quite the romantic leading men in Georgian era novels attempting to court and woo for their lady’s love.
There we all were in the year 1982, and I was just a twelve year old girl full of dreams, and hopes, and the idea that someday my heart would be fulfilled. I had not yet written or received a love letter, nor had I inspired any interest from a boy.
A year and a half later, in a sweltering classroom in Memphis, Tennessee, my wish for a handwritten love letter came true. It was from an older boy a grade ahead who discreetly handed me a carefully folded note. In his meticulous cursive handwriting, he described my brown eyes “as dark as space, the final frontier.” Rather than Atari, this boy was clearly into Star Trek.
That summer I wore a white eyelet sundress for my elementary school graduation. The dress itself felt significant to me, how I loved the way it fit, how the hem swung as it billowed around my long tanned legs. It gave me the feeling of being beautiful, like a princess. I’m sure I had insisted on wearing it to my aunt’s wedding, and my mom probably succumbed rather than go through the trouble of finding another dress. I wore a lavender silk sash around my skinny waist to style it into something more appropriate for a flower girl.
Nana took us all to get mani-pedis at Elizabeth Arden in the city the day before the wedding. She wasted no time in cleaning me up from wanna-be new wave girl to a proper lady, as she carefully instructed the manicurist to “take off that gangrene and paint her nails mauve.” In those days my uniform was a favorite t-shirt of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe paired with denim culottes that had rainbow stitched pockets, knee-high glitter socks, and beat up Vans. You couldn’t get me to change out of that Marilyn tee.
Nana’s proper English accent was pronounced when she was acting as the grand dame, which made it all the more effective when she swore. She’d say something dainty like Mary Poppins, and then throw in the occasional sucker punch of fuck, followed by a riot of laughter. I noticed her elegant hands, well manicured with a classic red polish, the diamond wedding ring on her finger. I always thought she was an Audrey Hepburn sort of beauty: neatly tailored clothing, a string of pearls, a gold necklace. I didn’t blame Nana for her strong opinions about my “gangrene-colored” fingernails, with the frosted blue polish worn and chipped from practicing an elaborately frustrating Bach invention on the piano.
Blue was my second favorite color. My most favorite color was any shade of purple: including lilac, lavender, or hyacinth blue. I wore the blue polish because I wasn’t allowed to dye a single blonde sun streak of my hair blue, as I wanted, just because it was the style. Nana didn’t approve of the blue polish either, and felt that mauve was a much better choice. I accepted the color without argument.
The day after I graduated sixth grade, I was told we were moving from Los Angeles, most likely, Arkansas. It was decided upon months earlier. My mom popped into my bedroom one afternoon and asked a quizzical phrase: “Africa or Arkansas?” I was reading a book at that moment, and jumped right from the page to imagining wild animals roaming the safari. I replied, “Um, Arkansas?”
That night, I overheard my mom’s hushed conversation in the kitchen with both my aunts. It was about the move. I heard the words hell, and rednecks, then a burst of laughter, and something like why a small southern town next to the Mississippi River?
I never questioned a thing about my family. I even had the same bump on my nose —a Roman nose, as Nana called it —the same as my mom. We even looked like mother and daughter, so I would’ve never imagined it not to be true.
When we moved to Helena, I was plucked entirely out of city life and put back in time when segregation was still an invisible line. At that time in 1982, Arkansas, especially Helena, was unaffected by modern cultural changes. Helena, — or as I kept calling it in my head, “hell-in-a-handbasket” — was a small town, a stark contrast from the melting pot of Los Angeles.
After our idyllic family vacation, my grandfather relocated all of us to this podunk blip on the map. “Helena,” he said flatly, “it’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.”
Little did we all know my grandfather’s ulterior motives for uprooting us from Los Angeles to this hell of a town, aptly named. The one reason we were well aware of was his new position as the chief radiologist at Helena Hospital. The other reason for the move to Helena, as we discovered later, was that my grandfather was having an affair with another woman, of course, another woman other than my very faithful Nana.
My grandfather had prestige among his colleagues. As a new member of the Phillips County Medical Society, he was a doctor with quite a reputable background, well accepted by his peers. Any prejudices the other doctors may have had towards Jews were either waived or hidden behind a facade of smiles and handshakes.
To get adjusted to our new lifestyle, Nana and I took a drive around. The busiest area was Cherry Street in Helena. It had a few shops along its main road, and that’s about it. The general store was owned and run by the Mayer’s, one of the few Jewish families. Their store boasted stacks of Levi’s, rows of button-up shirts, topsider shoes, Timberland boots, and various sundries. Nana was used to shopping at Neiman Marcus and Saks, going to lunch in Beverly Hills, and taking a walk on the beach. Here, there was little to compare to her former lifestyle, so she’d drive me to my Saturday piano lessons an hour away in Memphis. After my lesson, we went to the most glamorous hotel in the city to have lunch, The Peabody. She was used to living a particular sort of lifestyle, unaccustomed to the less elegant forms of dining and shopping.
Cotton and slavery ran deep in Helena, a small port on the Mississippi. Time had forgotten this dreary locale, saturated in the oily smell of cotton gins and humidity. Home of the King Biscuit radio show, Helena had no other raison d’être. There was nothing remarkable there except a ghost town of musty antebellum buildings, vestiges of a time when slaves picked cotton in the unbearable Southern heat.
That first school semester come September was uncomfortably spent at De Soto High School, Home of the Thunderbirds.
“I don’t like anyone that ain’t from Arkansas,” snorted the porky redheaded boy sitting in the front row of Science class. He wore an Arkansas Razorback letterman jacket around his massive body. Just as he plopped his Razorback duffel bag next to his desk, he looked back at me with a snide grimace, his porcine face covered in freckles. The entire classroom sniggered as he said it because we all knew he was talking about me. I was seated in the middle of the class, my belly twisted in knots. The teacher, Mrs. Pace, swept back into the room from the hallway, just as the first-period bell rang.
My science teacher looked like, and I really hate to admit this description, as if E.T. and Edna Mode had a baby. She wore big round glasses that framed her wide-eyed stare, and a helmet of black hair surrounding her odd face. Thin lizard-like lips and a long neck, Mrs. Pace wore the dowdy attire of your basic schoolmarm.
I became friends with the youngest daughter of the Mayer family before they moved from Helena, which left me with slim pickings to find at least one friend. Girls tend to be catty even in the best middle schools, but especially to new girls from California. To make matters worse, I was placed in eighth grade after testing, so everyone was older than me. I didn’t dress like everyone else in school either, which I considered a good thing. I wore Vans, ringer tees, colorful culottes, and glittery knee-high socks, not boring starched khakis with an Izod shirt. It was all about being preppy and football and cheerleaders. I had no idea what planet I was on, but it couldn’t have been any more opposite of what I came from.
The GE digital flip clock radio that sat on the nightstand by my bed tuned into R&B and gospel stations based in nearby Memphis. My inner longings for KROQ deejays like Jed the Fish and Rodney on the ROQ spinning vinyl hits by The Clash, Blondie, and Missing Persons were squashed by the velvety vocals of Luther Vandross. I spent a lot of time with that radio when I wasn’t rollerskating at the rink, and had never fallen under more of a spell than when I listened to Luther sing ‘A House is Not a Home’ one rainy afternoon.
The mechanical humming of the clock radio, the flip of each numeral every minute, made a click, a shuffled noise, like a deck of cards. Its red artificial glow at night, each number flip, one in front of another, a heartbeat of sorts. I’d fall asleep to music, and the whir of digital time.
I dreamt of planets, solar systems, a giant spinning Jupiter with its eye swirling in a constant whirlpool of stormy clouds. I woke up to the jarring beep of my alarm one morning, with Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper playing on the radio. As my bare feet sank into the shag carpet, I knew I was very much on earth instead of roaming the universe.
