My husband Robert said I’d love Eastmoor, that it would be a welcome change from the panhandle Texas farm where I grew up in the Depression. Shit, yeah. The house he bought for us had three bathrooms, a washer and dryer. My Texas friends were jealous as all hell of my kick-ass plumbing. And then, my God, he gave me a dishwasher for Christmas. There it was in the garage with a red bow on it. Guess what else? The milkman comes to the door. All I have to do is fill out the little form and put it in the mailbox and the nice man leaves me exactly what I want.
That’s how I figured out we, rather Robert, had some bucks, something I hadn’t realized until we got to Eastmoor. I left home for New York City right before Pearl Harbor, desperate to escape from dry, dusty Texas. Dropped out of high school, left a note for my parents and hopped on the bus. I wanted to be a Rockette. It didn’t seem crazy because I was as limber as all get out. I could do the splits from a flying leap. Made people gasp, then I did these novelty tricks like scratching my head with my toe or folding myself in half backwards. I showed my stuff to one of those traveling shows that comes through our town and they told me I could join them, but it turns out they wanted me to do some sort of contortionist act. I was aiming higher than a god damn freak show.
The Rockettes snapped me up immediately. From there I joined a USO troupe. During the war I traveled with Bob Hope to Europe and the Pacific. That war turned me into one tough broad. I had to fend off a lot of men, even Bob Hope. I let him pinch my ass, well because he was Bob Hope and what was the harm? Plus, I got to do a soft shoe with him at the front of the stage and then we’d sign autographs together. Boy did Bob Hope have bad breath, I mean a “wilt the roses’’ level of bad breath. He supposedly was a real ladies’ man, but I couldn’t see how with that stink-‘em-up coming out of his mouth.
I’ve gotta say, that war worked out well for me. I saw a lot of the world, even though it was a bombed out, bloody dump most of the time, but it was still the big fat world. Robert turned up at one of my shows three years later in Los Angeles. He still had my autographed picture, which was pretty dinged up. He had taped it to his bunk for the whole war. I was his guiding light. Hoo-Yah! That can turn a girl’s head.
All of us performers wondered what we were going to do after the war. I wanted to keep on dancing, but I wasn’t going to whore myself out to do it. I want to make that very clear. Yes, I was a dancer, but no, I was no floozy. The war wrecked a lot of girls who went cheap and easy. I admit that standards can slip a little if you think you’re about to die, but once I got stateside I became a good enough girl. Some of my friends settled to be someone’s best girlfriend, got set up in a nice house with an allowance, taken care of by a man when he wasn’t with his wife. “She really wriggled her ass into a tub of butter.” That’s a Texas expression. I had too much church in me to go that route.
Our president called it a return to normalcy, but I was looking for the opposite. Normal would be to get married to a Texas farm boy and work myself to the bone scraping out a living on some godforsaken scrap of land, praying for enough rain to grow some scraggly crop. I wasn’t looking for knock down, weak in the knees love, but someone who would like the look of me and would want to have kids with me. That didn’t seem like too much to ask.
Robert proposed after our fifth date and I thought, why the hell not? He would take me away from Texas, and frankly he was grateful because I made him look better. Let’s face it, he wasn’t a handsome man, soft looking, pear-shaped, thin hair that would soon leave him bald. He had these big puffy earlobes. People stare at them – that’s how big they are. When our daughter Becky was born, that was the first thing I checked, but her lobes were just fine. Our son Junior takes after his father, but I figure looks aren’t as important for boys. I’m not trying to brag here, but I was a real stunner, still am, a perfect figure with naturally blond hair – the drapes matched the rug – that’s an expression I learned in the war. People tell me I look like a blond Rita Hayworth. I can’t help it. When you’re compared to Rita Hayworth enough times, you might as well believe it. Anyway, when I’m on my husband’s arm, I make him look good, and that’s what he was looking for.
We got married in 1949 and Becky was born nine months later. Actually, it was only seven months. I was a bit pregnant at the altar, but we just told everyone that Becky was premature. I get a laugh thinking about the bump in 8-pound premature post-war babies. My parents didn’t say anything, neither did his, but they couldn’t have been that dumb. Nobody talked about shot gun weddings, nobody cared. That new normal was okay with me!
We moved to Eastmoor a couple of years later when he finished college. Becky was four and Junior was three. Robert almost got sent to Korea, but then a doctor discovered a cyst on his butt, so they didn’t take him. The Korean war was choosier than WWII, I guess. That’s what the war did to you – made you get down on your knees and thanked the Lord for a butt cyst you didn’t even know you had, even though Robert always did sit funny on a hard chair. He took a sales job selling widgets for his father’s company.
I thought the war would prepare me for anything. But Eastmoor really threw me. Big houses, every house different, all surrounded by tall shady trees. Both of our neighbors had pools. Robert said that we’d get a pool when he became sales manager. Any kind of lawn was a novelty to me, plus neighbors hired people to mow them. They’re called landscapers. Robert said we could get landscapers someday – and a maid too. There’s a train that stops at Eastmoor on its way to Chicago. First the maids get off, arriving from some sort of hard-luck town to the north, then the men, wearing suits and felt hats, get on to commute to their jobs in the city. The maids trade places with the men! How crazy is that?
The women all had the same look about them – carefully styled hair and make-up – the kind of beauty that looks better from a distance, particularly if you didn’t have much to work with in the first place. All the ladies got dressed up for everything, even wore heels to the grocery store. The grocery store had stuff I’d never heard of, like avocados, which for some strange reason are also called alligator pears and it took me a long time to figure out they were the same thing.
Robert was always on the road selling his widgets and I had the two little ones at home. I was lonely and missed my dancing friends. I could’ve joined a church community, but there aren’t any Baptist churches in town, and I‘d had enough of my strict, knuckle-rapping church upbringing. Also, seeing all the destruction of the war, it sucks the life out of church, you know? Thank God for Val, my next-door neighbor. She took me on as a project, taught me how to be a suburban housewife, introduced me to “beauty parlors.” For the first time I had someone else wash my hair. Hoo-Yah! Boy did that feel good. She taught me how to shop for clothes for different seasons, something that had never occurred to me. Val encouraged me to join her at the rummage sorting at the local Presbyterian church. A good place, she said, where I could meet the neighborhood women. Well, okay, I did want to meet the other women, but it seemed silly to get a babysitter to sort clothes when I had a stack of laundry waiting for me at home. A month earlier I’d asked Robert if I could get a babysitter so I could take some dancing lessons. He nixed that idea. He said it wasn’t in the budget, but then added, “I love you in leotards, but that skimpy outfit is just for the two of us. Nobody else.” But then he thought it was a great idea to get a babysitter to sort rummage. So off I went, happy to take what I could get.
I wasn’t sure what to wear. I assumed I didn’t need to wear a dress and heels to work in a basement. I put on some white capri pants and a fringed top. I wanted to look stylish, but not like a threatening Hoo-Yah sexy neighbor, which by the way, and again I’m being honest here, I could have pulled off no problem. I thought I had it nailed, but when I walked into that grimy basement, I had it all wrong. Peggy Carmichael, the organizer, sniffed and said, “you’re going to ruin those white pants and you shouldn’t wear sandals in a basement.” She handed me an apron and a pair of gloves and steered me to a pile of shoes. My job was to sort them out, find the mate for the fuzzy blue slipper or the cowboy boot. I had to ask about some of the shoes, like a bright white pair of men’s shoes. Why would a guy wear white shoes? Back on the farm, they’d get dirty in two seconds with cow shit, horse shit, chicken shit or even sheep shit. Val whispered to me, “those are white bucks. Men wear them to debutante parties.” I had no idea what a debutante was. I figured it was better to be stupid than look stupid so I kept my mouth shut, watched, and learned.
I eventually got the hang of my life. I always wore the pearls Robert gave me for our fifth anniversary. I wore shirt dresses and heels to the grocery store. I joined in on the usual gossip, who was pregnant again, who had a miscarriage and of course there was endless talk about kids, strategies about through-the-night sleeping, toilet training. I thought great, these women are doing the same thing as me, making breakfast, lunch, and dinner, doing laundry, changing diapers, wiping tears. I knew enough not to tell them about my mother’s sure-fire trick, a slug of brandy on the nipple – either the bottle or your own – makes children sleep better.
I became a celebrity of sorts when the ladies discovered I’d spent the war in the USO. They crowded around to look at my Christmas card from Bob Hope and his wife Delores, eager for every detail. They couldn’t believe that he had bad breath but found it perfectly believable that fresh limes were specially flown into a war zone for his gin and tonics. I told stories about Bing Crosby, Mickey Rooney, and Judy Garland, even though I hardly knew them. How many times did I have to demonstrate that Mickey Rooney only came up to my shoulder? Year after year, the stories got so tiresome. Nobody ever asked me about my own dancing.
Val and I drifted apart once I got up to speed in the community. We really didn’t have much in common. She was an intellectual. Whatever the opposite of an intellectual is, well that’s me. She gave me books to read. There was that book called The Howl by this poet named Allen Ginsburg who is part of the Beat Generation, whatever that is. Nursery rhymes were the only poetry I knew. And then I heard that the book was filled with porno and homo stuff. I couldn’t keep that book in my house. What would Robert think? I didn’t want it in the garbage either. It might fall out and the garbage man could see it. I took the book around the corner and stuffed it in the mailbox. Val gave up on me as her project. I don’t blame her.
Val made the other women nervous. She’d make these pronouncements at rummage sorting. Here’s one I remember. “Ladies, listen to what I did this morning. Made some toast but it got stuck in the toaster and burned up. Smoke everywhere. Put a bowl of unfinished cereal on the floor for the dog, who tipped the bowl over, washed the floor, found a dead mouse under the sink, thought I had thrown it out the back door, but a few minutes later the dog returned with the mouse in his mouth, got the children to the bus, but when I got back home, I saw that Becky had forgotten her homework, so ran to catch the bus at the next stop, and then I realized I’d forgotten to put the order out for the milkman, so now I have to make a separate trip to the grocery store when I just went yesterday. I also stepped in dog shit and tracked it onto the dining room rug.”
I heard a few titters. Peggy Carmichael said, “That sounds like a typical day for me.” Betsy Foster said, “Welcome to my world, what else is new?”
Val snarled like a rabid dog. “The point is – do you realize that everything I did this morning could have been done by an eight-year-old? Most of you went to college, right? You, Peggy, you went to Radcliffe. I went to Bryn Mawr. What are we doing with this education? What are we doing with our minds?”
The room went quiet, the kind of quiet that made me sweat a little bit, the anxious, nervous type of sweat – the kind that stinks and stains your armpits yellow. In the entertainment business we call it flop sweat.
When I sympathized with Val she laughed and told me she’d made some of the story up. “That bit about the dog poop was a great finish, wasn’t it? I keep trying to shake those ladies up, but I can’t get them to think even the tiniest thought. College was supposed to make us think, but there’s not much of that going on.”
I wanted to call her out on her whining. In my Texas world, half the point of having kids was having more hands around to do the chores. Val had an eight-year-old. Why didn’t she put her to work? My mother had me working at that age, sweeping, putting clothes on the line, taking care of my baby sister in the buggy. She was in charge of the bigger stuff, like scraping up enough money to put food on the table during the Depression. My mother never had a moment to herself. Val’s biggest problem was what to do with her brain in all her free time. God knows I couldn’t help her with that.
She grabbed my arm. “You wanted to dance, didn’t you? You’re just like me,” which seemed like a big stretch. “We both got the bait and switch. You know I’ve always wanted to be a college professor. You could have been a professional dancer. Now we’re just housewives.”
I agreed, but with one big difference. I wanted the bait and switch, to find a husband and get out of Texas. Maybe I’d be whining like Val in another ten years – she’d lived this life longer than I had, but in the meantime, I was a success. I got invited to teas and coffees that excluded Val. My brush with celebrity made me different than the other women, but just the right amount of different, interesting because of the USO, not scary different. Val wanted to be different, but didn’t know how, or the only way she knew to be different was to be scary, telling women their lives were meaningless. That was never going to work. Hey, how about that? I came up with that and I didn’t even finish high school.
Becky and Junior were finally in grade school. That’s when I discovered I was pregnant again. My gung-ho enthusiasm for mothering had fizzled. I couldn’t believe Val had been through this slog four times. Robert, of course, was ecstatic. He’d always wanted a large family and told me he was proud that I’d “done it again.” “I’ll get you a nanny this time. How perfect, another little one to keep you happy at home. I insist, no more working in a basement. Too many germs for my pregnant lady. Besides, you’ll need your rest.”
I wanted to slap his hand when he patted my knee. Frankly, I was getting tired of him chasing me around the house in my leotards, especially when I was trying to vacuum. It had gotten worse since he became regional sales manager and didn’t have to travel so much. I swear to God, his ears were getting puffier and bigger, or maybe they just looked bigger because now he was bald.
I returned to rummage sorting after my daughter Sally was born. The ladies were comparing the TV housewives, Donna Reed, and June Cleaver. Oh boy, did Val hate June Cleaver on Leave it to Beaver, always telling Wally and the Beav that they had to “wait until their father comes home,” as if she had no say-so. Val launched into one of her pronouncements. “Did you see last night’s show? Remember that dress June was wearing? I had the same dress. This morning I burned it up.” She stomped out of the basement.
I caught up to her outside. “You made that up, didn’t you?”
Val shook her head. “I’ll show you. Come home with me.”
Val led me into her living room and pointed at the fireplace. There was a weird smell, unnatural, not like wood or leaves. I stirred up the ashes with a poker. I saw a few turquoise flecks of fabric and then I heard the clink of a buckle. She’d really done it, burned up a dress. “Val, what the hell?”
“My husband says that we don’t have enough money for me to go to grad school, which is bullshit since he’s planning to build a pool. He knows that a PhD has always been my dream. And then he says that I won’t earn enough to make the investment worth it. I told him I’d make my own damn money for tuition. I could be a realtor. Then he said that women shouldn’t work, that I would make him look bad, like he’s not a good provider.”
Val slumped into the sofa, sighed, and dabbed her eyes. I looked around the room in the uncomfortable silence. Two half-filled glasses of wine sat on the coffee table; another was on the mantle. The ashtrays were overflowing. I recognized the crescent of Val’s lipstick on the cigarette butts and wine glasses. Val looked directly at me and started up again. “We really got into it – our biggest fight ever. Tell me, why is it okay for him to switch jobs whenever he wants, but I’m not allowed, that I have to stay stuck in a dead-end job.” She swung her arm as she ranted and knocked the wine glasses off the table. She kept going. “He told me that being a mother wasn’t a job, it was a privilege that I should be grateful for, that I should just shut up and be happy like everyone else in this town.”
I flinched when Val reached out to touch my shoulder. I wasn’t prepared to be her confidant. “Val, let’s get out of here, get some fresh air. I’ve got to run home and get Sally from the babysitter. I’ll meet you in your back yard.”
I thought the backyard would be better than sitting inside where we’d have to talk about something. Outside we could stare at the sky, or comment on a bird. In the USO I’d helped a couple girls get abortions. That was straightforward. Val’s problems were complicated. So were mine. I was scared to tell her that Robert insisted that I do private dances for him while he watched, sipping his scotch. Sometimes he directed me. That’s how he liked to get aroused. When I said it to myself it was big and ugly, and it would be bigger and uglier if I admitted it out loud.
I snugged Sally into her blanket and went back to Val’s backyard. Sally started her typical fussing, so I picked her up to rock her. When she didn’t settle, Val said she’d give it a try. Sally quieted down, so Val handed her back to me. Then she started fussing again, so Val took over. Without realizing it we began passing Sally back and forth. We had a rhythm. We weren’t saying anything beyond the odd comment – “landscapers missed a spot mowing” or “it’s warm enough to start organizing our spring clothes.”
At some point one of us took a step backwards and that’s how it started. It might have been me. Maybe I heard the Good Humor man coming down the street or maybe I startled at the sound of a busted muffler. But when I snapped out of it and looked back at Val, I swear she looked at me and took a step back completely on purpose. And then she threw Sally to me.
I’ve turned this over in my head so many times that I might be exaggerating. Honestly, it was less than a throw, more of a toss, but toss is still too strong a word but handing or passing doesn’t describe what happened. I need a word that describes that split second when our fingertips didn’t touch, when there was nothing but ground and the pull of gravity beneath my Sally. Robert likes to toss the kids in the air or swing them around – he calls it helicoptering. What we were doing was much safer than that, but it felt so dangerous. It was enough to scare some shit out of me. “Val, what the hell are you doing?”
She smiled at me. I remember that smile perfectly, can’t get it out of my mind. It was the knowing behind the smile and the slight tilt of her head. Believe me, I’m not proud and this is the part I’ve never told anybody. I smiled back, yes, I did. We both nodded. I took another step back, not a big one, but definitely a step. I tossed Sally to her.
I felt it, I embraced it. That desperate and glorious thrill of the dangerous, putting everything on the line, buried since my USO days. It felt good and important, that little twang of electricity running up and down my spine, sparking all my senses. I grabbed Sally and raced home, slammed the door, fell to the ground, my shuddering sobs alternating with hysterical laughter. I ran upstairs and ransacked the closet, throwing clothes everywhere until I found my tattered dancing leotards from my USO days. I turned up the Victrola as loud as I could and danced.
A fine bit of writing, Liza - I enjoyed it.