This is the 1970s. Everyone is seeking something: personal fulfillment, the meaning of life, cheaper gasoline in Fort Erie, Canada. Devout as my parents were (Southern Baptists), they were both under 30 for most of the 70s and they were pulled along by gravity toward Niagara Falls along with everyone else floating toward oblivion in the latter days of the Age of Aquarius.
As far as I could tell at the lucky age of 7, my parents’ mania for self-destruction seemed pretty normal, even tame, compared to others. It consisted of: family devotions, fondues, and a slimy, soupy, tomato, spinach and cottage cheese gruelcooked in a Crock Potthat was supposed to be a newer and more nutritious take on lasagna and that I refused to eat because it looked too much like our kitchen rug.
When I needed a snack and my grandparents were outI liked to share granola and yogurt with the harmless hippies who occupied a cozy second floor studio in the apartment house across the driveway. The narrow stairs and dark passages of that building reeked of incontinent old men and recently incinerated flying carpets, but their comfortably cushioned rattan and bead bedecked abode was always sunny. The syrupy atmosphere of love it exhaled into the hallway when they opened the door smelled of beeswax candles and cloves.
Like my parents, they were both in their 20s. They had no children. The man enjoyed an average-sized penis. His wife —I think it was his wife—possessed a boisterous bush of black pubic hair that contrasted very sharply with the milky curves of hips. She might have been a model if she had shaved her legs and armpits like my mother.
They used to walk around naked at night. Because of the size and the position of their bamboo shades, I could never quite make out their faces when they were naked, just their genitals. I pointed this curious fact out to my brother one evening, when my room was being wallpapered in Bicentennial red, white and blue bars. (My own demented color scheme.)
Kyle and me were sharing his pine-paneled bedroom with a cage full of pet rocks bound for Brother Johnson—a travelling evangelist—a gag gift cooked up by my mother and some other ladies from church. But Kyle seemed more interested in getting back to sleep than spying on the neighbors. I soon drew down the blinds and meandered off to Dreamland myself.
I forget the names of the hippies now. I was better friends with their half-breed poodle, Pepper, really. She taught me how to bark.
Maybe there was more going on behind the scenes than met the eye. I was barely 4 feet tall and missed a lot. The truth is that—apart from cartoons—much in the world fell beyond my comprehension. Things were constantly appearing, disappearing, and reappearing in our household with a random regularity that mystified my mother and probably would have astonished Einstein.
Take the box of Ayds.
Ayds—mom’s delicious little chocolate diet cubes—stated to metamorphose into crumpled up plastic squares whenever she went to look for them. Even though they were hidden in the highest, most oxygen-deprived region of our kitchen cabinets.
After that, my own math papers—marked “See Me” in red pen by Mrs. Miles—underlined twice—began materializing inside my toy box. Then, a golden trinket (a lovely thing, a precious thing decorated with a piece of pink coral, a souvenir of a dart game at a fair in 1965) I had noticed in my grandmother’s cedar chest turned up one Saturday afternoon sandwiched between the cushions of our living room couch, when we were vacuuming.
Or consider The Case of the Spectral Spatula. While she could always be depended upon to find something to use during a disciplinary emergency—a spatula, a thick black belt belonging to my father, the back side of a pink hair brush—mom could never be confident how her nuclear arsenal would be stocked at any given time.
My mother had an inquisitive mind, but she was not a budding physicist like me. She took night classes in the art of upholstery instead of melting crayons with a magnifying glass. She re-did the couch on the sun porch in a rough and rusty plaid fabric. She dabbled in ceramics with her friends, Angie and Rita.
While the three of them were seated at the kitchen table—chatting, glazing and sipping sweaty glasses of unsweetened instant iced tea—mom might easily be provoked into searching for a spatula. Especially if she heard me slam down the key cover on our upright player piano. On the fingers of my brother. (I wanted to play, too.)
Aroused by a scream, she boiled up like a volcano from the depths of the sea and began going through drawers. She found every spatula, wooden spoon, plastic spoon, slotted spoon, serving spoon, and runcible spoon in North America had evaporated.
Being short-tempered and Italian, Angie reacted immediately and decisively in these sorts of situations, like Mussolini. Besides an older boy, Freddy, Angie and her husband Dave had two daughters, the same age as us.
She said, “I would kill both of them, Kathy.”
Rita’s ancestors were less hot-blooded and more phlegmatic. They were Scottish. You could tell from her red hair. Rita took a swig of tea and made a face, I expect, expecting the tea to be sweetened. Rita was rather fat and loud and had a good sense of humor, as I remember her, but she understood the need for discipline as much as Angie and my mother. In addition to her own boys and girls, Rita and Tom took care of a crippled foster child named Charlie.
I imagine that Rita choked on an ice cube while she tried to maintain her composure and continued touching up her bust of Elvis.
Mom marched us upstairs and demanded that we explain—or at least account for—the missing spatulas and spoons and other artifacts. She promised ten licks from a doubled-up length of orange Matchbox racing track, if we did not. What could we say? She might demand we grow wings and wheel about the sky like angels. We were not angels. We were boys. What did she expect?
Why she turned to us for an explanation of quantum mechanics—Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle—I have no idea. Kyle could no more offer a solution to the problem of the missing spatulas than he could account for Schrödinger’s Cat. He pulled down his pants, bent over with his hands on the bed, and burst into tears, hoping the saltwater would dilute the sting.
I was under no such illusions. Crying made things worse, in my opinion. The best I could manage was a kind of sullen defense of the facts as I saw them. The deployment of spatulas was not in my department. I suggested that she ask dad, because he was bigger than all of us.
*SMACK*
I am not sure that she spoke to my father about the incident when he got home from work or what he might have said to her about the spatulas, if she had. All she discovered from me was that the more she required a spatula, the less precisely the coordinates of any particular spatula in Western New York could be controlled, determined, or known.
