Riding Fury Home Page 3

Ann’s mom was a school bus driver. On the days I went to stay with them, after school, I boarded her mom’s bus to go home with Ann instead of to my own house. Ann lived on a dairy farm out in the rolling land beyond the encroaching tract homes of Hillsborough. We would ride through the flatlands, dropping kids off at their pastel ranch homes until the bus was empty of all but Ann and me. Then it was like we got our own special ride in the big bus. I loved to watch her mom’s back as she drove, the decisive pull of her shoulder and arm as she reached for the long metal handle and opened and closed the squeaky bus door.

  At last, we would pull into their driveway and park the yellow bus in the roundabout in front of the barn, next to the green John Deere tractor. Ann and I spent the afternoons running and playing in the weathered red barn or in the sorghum fields behind their house.

  Once, we were exploring the barn. All the cows were still out grazing in the pasture. The pungent odor of cow manure and hay filled the dimly lit barn as we clambered among the metal milking stations. I climbed up on top of a metal gate. I sat on the top bar, one leg dangling on each side, and then I looked down, anticipating my descent. It seemed so high up. “Ann,” I whimpered, “I’m stuck! I can’t get down.”

  “Aw, come on,” Ann replied, squinting up at me.

  I started to cry. “Go get your mom, get her!”

  I can still remember her mom’s arms reaching up to grab me down, the salty smell of her neck as I clung to her chest, my legs around her waist. The feel of her hand, gently patting my back. “See, you’re fine now.”

  THE SCHMITZ GIRLS, all four of them, had long hair, and they all wore it in the same style: parted in the middle with a single long braid dangling down their back. They were a big family—four girls and one boy—and we loved to play hide-and-seek and tag in the woods behind their house.

  Sometimes, I stayed overnight. I shared a lower bunk bed with Nancy, who was my age. In the morning, Mrs. Schmitz placed a stool in the middle of the living room. One by one, she called each daughter in turn. They sat on the stool while their mother combed their hair with a bristly brush. First, Mrs. Schmitz would brush the hair, then carefully divide it in three sections, braid the three plaits together, and secure the end with a stretchy band with two colored balls attached. I watched from the living room doorway, my chest tight, silenced and riveted by the crackle of static and the repeated strokes of mothering.

  MY SITUATION WAS TABOO IN so many ways: a mother gone, and what had happened to her. I talked about it at first. Once, standing next to the metal jungle gym at recess, I repeated to a girl what Dad had told me. I told her matter-of-factly, “My mom’s in a hospital, but it’s not her body that’s sick, it’s her head. The doctors are fixing her.” She stared at me, her eyes wide, mouth open. I felt I’d made some terrible mistake. A chill of shame overcame me: Mom’s condition was not like having a broken leg; something bad was wrong with her.

  Over time, I would learn other words to describe my mother’s condition. No one shouted them at me. Instead, like radio waves, the words hung in the air, unseen and ever-present: crazy, nutcase, loony, mad, psycho, mental, wacko, bonkers. There was no end to the names.

  Chapter 7. Atlantic City

  THE SUMMER AFTER MY mother left, my father drove me to Atlantic City so I could spend the break from school with his parents. We drove down the Garden State Parkway, stopping for lunch at Howard Johnson’s halfway through the two-hour drive, where I devoured a plate of fried clams, slathered with ketchup. “Hey, Ketchup Kid! Ready to go?” Dad asked, when I was down to the last clam. I picked up the clam with my fingers and popped it in my mouth, nodding at him.

  Our lunch stop and the sights along the way were familiar from all the visits Mom, Dad, and I had made several weekends every summer. Only now, instead of Mom, I was sitting in the front seat next to Dad as he slowed the car to throw a quarter in the Garden State tollbooths. I gazed at the unending bank of oaks and maples and sycamores lining the road, until those woods finally gave way to the stunted South Jersey Pine Barrens, then the marshland and causeways leading to Atlantic City. As we approached the city skyline, I leaned my head out the open window and inhaled the sea air.

  My grandparents owned a kosher dairy restaurant a block inland from the famous wide Atlantic City boardwalk. I loved the sight of the pink neon sign blazing WILSON’S DAIRY RESTAURANT in the front window, as if we Wilsons were famous. In truth, that family surname was barely a generation old, since my grandfather had anglicized “Viloshin” after he and my grandmother arrived at Ellis Island, the end of their flight from the pogroms and upheaval of Bolshevik Russia.

  In America, things had not gone that well. Grandpa Isaac had studied to be a concert violinist in his hometown in the Ukraine, but in the United States, he could never find a job in an orchestra. Once, I had asked Grandpa to play the violin for me. We went into my grandparents’ bedroom and he took his violin down from a high shelf in the closet, gently opened the case, and began to move the bow back and forth across the strings. The notes had a rough, sawing edge. He put down the violin and wept. I never heard him play again.

  WILSON’S WAS IN A SMALL, narrow storefront with an apartment above it where my grandparents lived. It was a mom-and-pop operation: My grandmother was the cook, my grandfather the waiter. There was a second waiter for the lunch and dinner shifts, a man with a huge belly who always seemed to be sweating. During the summer, a skinny old Ukrainian man with a sunken chest sat outside the kitchen door on a stool in the alley, peeling potatoes for the latkes. Summer was the height of tourism at the shore, and my grandparents worked seven days a week. My grandmother rose at 5:00 AM to begin cooking huge pots of split pea and chicken noodle soup, and to make preparations for the breakfast rush. They ended their workday at 10:00 PM.

  During the day, I would be on my own. My grandparents were raised in a world where kids were expected to be independent. At seven years old, I was one year older than my father had been when he started taking the streetcar by himself in Philadelphia.

  Before Dad left, he made sure I knew how to walk the back way to the boardwalk. We traced the route together: out the back door of the restaurant kitchen into the alley, around the corner on the sidewalk, and up the ramp to the boardwalk. “You don’t have to cross any streets,” he said, “so you’ll be okay.” I stood on the sidewalk and waved goodbye as Dad drove away, my throat tight.

  IN THE MORNINGS, I WOKE in the upstairs apartment to the distant clanks of dishes from below. Opening the apartment door at the top of the stairs, I inhaled the warm buttery smells of frying eggs, potato pancakes, and cheese blintzes. I stumbled half-asleep down the stairs and into the small dark kitchen, where Grandma was furiously juggling fry pans, her tiny body dwarfed by the massive cast-iron industrial stove. She looked a bit like a bug: a round, thick middle with spindly legs and arms. I watched her hand beat some eggs and scramble them in a pan, or drop spoonfuls of potato latkes into sizzling oil. Then I wandered out to the restaurant. I sat at an empty table, and Grandpa came to take my order, just like I was a real customer. When he brought me scrambled eggs, he would solemnly plop down a bottle of Heinz ketchup without my asking.

  After breakfast, I would go out through the back alley to the boardwalk. I stayed there all day, just running back to the restaurant for lunch and dinner. I was forbidden to swim alone, so that left me the boardwalk to amuse myself. On the boardwalk, there was endless activity. The loud voices of the hawkers, selling cotton candy, popcorn, and saltwater taffy, were backdrop to the swirling mix of working-class tourists in shorts and T-shirts, and wealthy promenaders who came out of the massive grand hotels, the women wearing cardigans with rhinestone clasps and fox stoles.

  My father had taught me how the carny men who ran the penny arcade would drop the change in your hand, and then palm some of it back. His boardwalk survival tip was “always count your change.” Armed with this knowledge, I felt worldly and self-sufficient, unlike the dumb tourists. But because I had only a small allow
ance, I mostly stood and watched people at the carnival booths shooting guns at moving targets or throwing balls into point-bearing baskets and collecting their stuffed animals.

  Sometimes I would wander out to one of the amusement piers, the Million Dollar Pier or the Steel Pier. I’d watch the kids smash each other in the bumper cars, or look on as brothers and sisters clambered onto the Ferris wheel, aching with a terrible loneliness.

  Most local kids ran around together in groups and seemed completely unapproachable. Once, I played with a girl my age who was also by herself. We walked underneath the boardwalk and sat on the cool sand, using discarded Popsicle sticks as dolls in stories we created. She said she lived on Atlantic Avenue, just a couple blocks from the beach. After that, I looked for her every day, but I never found her again.

  I became a regular at certain arcade booths, just standing and staring. Often, I tried to look especially waiflike, mournfully frowning, eyes big with an unspeakable sorrow. I was sure that after days of this pose, one of the barkers would recognize me for the orphan I was. I imagined that he would suddenly lean over and say, “Do you want to play for free, little girl?” but no one ever did.

  When my dad came to pick me up at the end of the summer, I was wearing a grimy T-shirt and wrinkled, beat-up shorts.

  “You look like a bum,” he said.

  I grinned. That was close enough to an orphan to satisfy me.

  Chapter 8. Bellyache

  IT STARTED WITH A bellyache at school. My second-grade teacher sent me to the nurse, who took my temperature and called my father. He had to leave work since he was now my sole caregiver. Dad took me to Dr. Chase’s office, who immediately pronounced that I needed to be taken to the hospital.

  At the hospital, another doctor in a white coat pushed on my belly. “Does it hurt here, or here?” I almost threw up when he pressed on me.

  “Her appendix could rupture,” the doctor told my Dad. “We need to operate right away.” Dad squeezed my hand as I was wheeled on a gurney into a room with bright lights. A big black mask came down over my face. I woke with a horrible taste in my parched mouth. Dad leaned over and wet my lips with a washcloth. “I know you’re thirsty, honey, but you’re not allowed to drink anything.”

  During the night, I dozed and woke, startled in between nurses’ rounds by strange noises: beeps, feet scuffing the floor, wheels rolling down the hall, and the astringent smell of disinfectant. Light from the hall came in through my partially open door, and I clenched my free hand around the cold metal of my bed rails to brace myself against the pain.

  In the morning, Dad was there. “A special visitor is coming to see you today,” he told me. “It’s a surprise. Your visitor will be here at one o’clock.” Dad went off to work, leaving me to wonder. I had no idea who might be coming. Perhaps Aunt Rita or one of the neighbor ladies. At noon, a nurse brought my lunch of chicken bouillon and orange Jell-O. When she pressed the button on the bed to tilt me up, I yelped from the sharp stabbing in my side.

  After lunch, I watched the clock, ears tuned to the door, waiting for my visitor. Each minute of the afternoon pulsed slowly through sixty seconds as I anticipated who was coming. One ten, one thirty-three, two o’clock. At two thirty, I heard my door swing open.

  My mother stood in the doorway, “My baby, how are you?”

  My mouth fell open. I glared at her.

  She was wearing a heavy wool overcoat, and her hair was ruffled, like she’d been in a big wind. Her face was puffy, and she hesitated on the threshold. She staggered a little as she came toward the bed, bending over to peer at me.

  I was furious, could barely look at her. All that waiting. It had never occurred to me that she would come, that she could come, from the mental hospital.

  “Dad said someone was coming to visit at one!”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I had to get special permission. I had to take a train, but the driver didn’t get me to the station in time for that train.”

  I was mute with rage. I had no words, no understanding of my truncated heart, my child’s thwarted longing for a mom able to give comfort, or how I had clamped down against hoping for the impossible. I turned my face from my mother, would not look at her again. I could feel her hand on my brow, fluttering there briefly. I turned my head farther away. I heard the creak of the chair as she sat next to the bed, speaking words that did not penetrate.

  She sat quietly for a while. I may have drifted to a half-sleep. I startled awake to her deep sigh, her lips brushing my forehead, the whispered words “I have to leave now, sweetie; I have to go back,” and the sound of the door closing as she left the room.

  Chapter 9. Life with Dad

  ON WEEKENDS, DAD AND I made homemade TV dinners using aluminum pans we had saved from Swanson’s frozen meals. Often, we made meatloaf by squishing breadcrumbs into cold hamburger beef. We boiled and mashed potatoes, and defrosted a carton of peas. We’d slice the meatloaf and spoon the potatoes and peas into the triangular sections of the silver pans, cover the dinners with foil, and freeze the week’s supply. It felt good, helping Dad get ready for the week.

  Our groceries came free from Grandpa Isidor, Mom’s father. Every weekend he delivered a box of food from his corner grocery store in South Orange. Money and time were tight for Dad, with the hospital bills and being a single parent. I knew Grandpa was arriving by the heavy rumble of our driveway gravel churning under the wheels of his big green delivery van with its gold letters proclaiming BACHMAN’S GROCERY: QUALITY MEATS AND PRODUCE. Grandpa never said much, and he didn’t stay. He would just carry the box inside, nod at Dad, hug me with his thick butcher’s arms, and leave. One moment, I would be enfolded in his clothes, smelling of pipe tobacco, and the next he was gone.

  MOM FIRST WENT TO the mental hospital in spring. As the days warmed, in the evenings after supper, Dad and I would meander down the path through our backyard woods to the little Millstone River that ran along the back of our property. The river was narrow and muddy. Trees leaned out over the water from its banks.

  Dad had made a floating dock out of empty oil drums overlaid with planks, and guy wires tethered it to the bank. Our aging wooden rowboat was tied to the dock. Sometimes, Dad and I clambered into the rowboat, Dad at the oars, me in the stern, bailing the slow leak of water. We rowed jaggedly upriver a ways, then turned around and drifted back. I trailed my hand in the water and looked at the ducks skidding to a water landing.

  One evening, we pulled up to the dock. Night was coming, but I didn’t want to leave the river world. It wasn’t a thought, just a reluctance in my body. Climbing out of the boat and onto the dock, my feet dragged against going back to a house filled with the echoes of no Mom. The first fireflies blinked over the water. Dad lingered with me on the dock, shining his flashlight into the shallows, illuminating the tadpoles and minnows. There was a loud splash. “Look!” Dad said, pointing to just beyond the riverbank. A muskrat’s head, smooth with wet fur, poked above the water as he dog-paddled toward midriver in the quickening darkness.

  My father had taught me to swim in the river when I was five, holding me around my belly, showing me the churning movements of arms and legs, how to turn my head to breathe. Dad was a great swimmer, having grown up at the Jersey shore. His prowess led him to the swim team in high school, and he passed his confidence on to me. The river was my second home. Later, I was puzzled by my suburban cousins’ reactions as we stood in our bathing suits at the muddy water’s edge. I had led them proudly to my river. “Yuck! It’s dirty! You’ve gotta be kidding! We’re not swimming in that!”

  Dirty? To me the river was a living entity, its water rich with mud and water creatures and the animals who lived along its shores. They were part of that forest-river world, the other world behind our house that seemed so far away from the town. It was that magical place that me and Dad and the animals all inhabited together.

  IN SEPTEMBER, JUST AS Mom was transferred to a mental hospital in upstate New York, I started second grade and Dad
was elected to the Millstone town council, the first Democrat since anyone could remember. Dad said that since World War II had ended, times were changing, even in such a Republican stronghold. Some assertive part of my father had emerged when Mrs. Gifford, an ardent Democrat, had exhorted him to run. In fact, civic life was an arena where he was confident. To win votes, Dad had walked door to door, talking to the neighbors and shaking hands. He said the old-timer Republicans never did that, just figured they’d be reelected. Sometimes I went with him. Dad gabbed in a friendly, earnest way to whomever was home.

  The first Christmas after Dad was elected, we received an invitation to the yearly Christmas party at the Stevenses’ house. Mr. Stevens was some big shot at Squibb Pharmaceuticals, and his house was the grandest in town.

  On the day of the party, Dad and I walked through the gate in the white picket fence and up the snowy walk. We waited at the front door for someone to answer the doorbell, staring at a holly wreath with red berries. From inside came the muffled plunks of a piano and voices singing “We Three Kings.”

  The door swung open, and we stepped into the living room. We’d never been to anything like this, but it was a scene made familiar from picture books at my school, and Christmas advertising images. Christmas cards lined the Stevens’ fireplace mantel, stockings hung above a fire, and an enormous Christmas tree stood in one corner. The guests were gathered around the grand piano, where Mrs. Stevens was playing carols. Everyone held glasses of eggnog and was singing along. We joined the group.

  I loved to sing, and of course had learned all the carols in school over the years. My parents had never said I couldn’t sing them, but somehow I felt there was a line I shouldn’t cross: I would not say the word “Christ” or “Jesus.” This meant that I would be singing along with gusto, and then suddenly mumble or drop out on the forbidden word. Here, among all these tall adults, no one seemed to notice a child going mute in the midst of a song.