The following is the second of 15 blog posts I'll--fingers crossed--be posting in the month of November as part of the October Memoir Challenge.
We were talking about moving back to the city, my mother was
explaining to me. Larry suggested
Greenwich Village but I will never live there again because the worst years of
my life were there.
How could this be? My
memories of this same time were all wonderful.
We lived down the street from my Aunt Frances and within walking
distance of my school, the local library, and even Washington Square Park. My best memories were here. I had good friends at school: Dorie, Alexia, Nikki.
Dorie, who had a younger sister, lived in a building south
of Washington Square Park. Her father
was a dentist and her mother stayed at home, a rarity in my social world. Dorie was tall, with red hair and pale skin
and one time her father gave her a spanking while I was there spending the
night, something that confused me but I still envied her a “real family,”
especially her younger sister.
I envied Alexia because she was beautiful, with long brown
hair that reached below her waist. One
year, when we all went trick-or-treating together, my mother dressed me up like
a witch, with layers of black and even a bat painted on my forehead, while
Alexia was dressed as a princess. I had
wanted to dress like a princess but my mother said it was too cold. One year, Alexia had a birthday party at her
mother’s pottery studio and we made name bracelets with beads her mother had
made herself.
Nikki was smaller even than I with short dark hair and she
was often mistaken for a boy. Still, she
had an older sister and a mother and another woman and they all lived in a loft
apartment with impossibly high ceilings and drywall sheets that partitioned
sections off to create bedrooms.
Compared to the tiny apartment in which my mother and I lived, her space
felt like a mansion. And I adored her, even
though she was so quiet, almost invisible, because I didn’t care about anything
else in her life. She was wonderful.
There were, of course, other friends, and they came over
often. They loved our tiny apartment
because there were so many amazing things there. We had two bunnies and some guinea pigs in a
large aquarium tank in the hallway. We
had two long haired cats—a white with gorgeous orange eyes and a brown
tabby. We had a goldfish and
parakeets. At one point, I even had a
turtle and a mouse. For one brief time,
possibly because my mother lost her mind, we had a collie, a large male that
came and went before I could get used to having a dog.
How did we fit all of this into our apartment, so small that
the refrigerator was in the living room?
Why did we have so many pets? And
what about the gifts given to me, the too generous things that the Tooth Fairy,
the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus left in our apartment and in my Aunt Frances’
apartment too?
My life was good. But
what about my mother’s life?
I was so young and know so little. She had lied to me about my father. She was fired from a job which, when you’re a
single mother, must be just about the most frightening thing that could
happen. Her brother died in an
accident. She dated and eventually
married which is how and why we moved away from Greenwich Village for good.
The marriage is that ended our life in Greenwich Village
where I was so happy is telling, in that peculiar way that hindsight hints at
truths I can’t directly define. Had my
mother been happy, she never would have married this man. If she had loved herself, if she had been in
a better place emotionally, she wouldn’t have wanted a father for me thinking
that a man who could care for me could give us the home she couldn’t give us
herself, by herself.
She never would have married Larry B. I might have remained happy. Maybe my mother would have found a way to be
happy. We’ll never know. What we do know is that everything in our
lives changed. Years later my mother
asked me what the worst thing she ever did as a mother was and I said, “Married
Larry B.” She didn’t disagree but, at
the time, she thought she had no other choice.
I forget sometimes how much a product of her upbringing my
mother was (and maybe even still is) in spite of herself.