TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 19

[Tobie Shapiro]

October 3, 200000000000000000006

Dear Hearts,

	My ex husband has made a list of the things he wants in the 
division of property.  He came by while we weren't here (that was the 
plan) and went through every little box, putting day-glo orange 
stickers with numbers on them on each doo dad he desired.  The house 
now is ablaze with little day-glo orange stickers with numbers on 
them.  He also made a list to correspond to the stickers.  You cannot 
imagine how petty he got.  His list claims, "light bulbs in boxes in 
hall in basement",  "extension cords and bungees".  Where there were 
two of something, say, two lamps, he marked both of them.  Yesterday 
I was passing through the kitchen and there was a spaghetti squash 
sitting on the counter.  It's been sitting there for a while.  You 
know how fruit and produce now come with little labels sometimes? 
The labels say things like, "Fuji Apple", or "Spaghetti Squash". 
Well this spaghetti squash had a label on it, an orange label, and at 
first glance, I thought villainman had tagged the squash.  I got a 
big laugh out of that when I realized what had crossed through my 
mind, and how close to the truth it was.


 
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The Stars in New York City

	For my seventh birthday, my parents asked me what I wanted to 
do.  And what I wanted to do more than anything else was go to New 
York City to the Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History.  I'd 
kept hearing about it and I wanted to go there.  So we all went.  My 
birthday is in the summer which made this possible, and my father had 
relatives all over New York City and New Jersey, which made it 
desirable for him.  It was an exciting trip.  I remember so much from 
it.

	On the way up to New York, we ate dinner at a Mexican 
restaurant in Baltimore that had neon lights wrapped around the 
perimeter of the ceiling.  When we got to New York, we stayed in a 
hotel that was taller than any building I'd ever seen, and our room 
was two rooms, actually:  one for my parents and one for my sister 
and me.  We slept on cots, and I found that to be a great new word 
with a crisp sound to it.  Sleeping on cots.  COTS.  COT, singular. 
Our cots had their heads toward the middle of the room and our feet 
near the coil radiators under the windows, which were of course 
dormant in summer.  On the morning of my birthday, my sister came and 
leapt on my cot.  Then she bounced around on me yelling, "Happy 
Birthday!"

	During the first day, we went to Coney Island.  My mother was 
very pregnant with my brother, and she walked along slowly, from side 
to side, shifting her weight thoroughly with each step.  So I clung 
to her and thought I was helping.  Probably not so.  The plans of 
children often leave out some important considerations.   On Coney 
Island, there was an exhibit that was housed behind a tall wall.  It 
was supposed to be about what could happen in another world war, 
World War III, with nuclear weapons, which were all the rage in the 
fifties.  My mother warned that we'd best not go there because of my 
delicate sensibilities.  It might scare me.  But Dana offered to 
scale the tall wall and look inside the exhibit so she could report 
to us whether it was safe for me to go in.  The wall had flames 
painted on it, and Dana's feet with her tennis shoes on them dangled 
cooly in the painted flames of hell on earth.  She looked in, her 
head going from side to side, and jumped back down.  "It's all right. 
It's just a bunch of cars and dummies."  So we paid our fare and went 
in.  The cars she'd mentioned were burned out hulks that had been 
scuffed and melted in the blast, and the dummies were simulated dead 
bodies strewn about here, there and everywhere.  If you compared the 
exhibit to what really might have happened in a nuclear war in the 
1950s, it was ludicrous, timid stuff, even insipid, certainly tame. 
But to my eyes, it was a horror beyond imagining.  I walked through 
as if in a sanctuary, quietly, nearly without breathing, observing 
the carnage as my insides turned and twisted and tied in a knot.  It 
wasn't until we got outside that I shrieked and cried.  My mother 
said she knew when she saw it that it wouldn't be good for me.  Dana 
made fun of me for being so scared, but I think she was trying to 
help.

	On this same trip, we took the ferry to the  Statue of 
Liberty.  What I remember from the Statue of Liberty is mainly the 
ferry ride on a boat that had a whole full sized snack bar, from 
which my father purchased a Sugar Daddy caramel on a stick for me. 
And this boat had actual real toilet stalls.  I did not notice how 
clean or dirty things were, just that we were sailing on water in a 
crowded boat, that I could walk straight up to the front, that there 
were white woven metal fences around the edges, that the lady in the 
green robes and the green skin with the green crown kept getting 
bigger.  Ah, symbol of freedom, gatekeeper to the threshold of the 
United States, protector of those huddled masses yearning to breathe 
free, ah woman from France, you have an exceeding number of stairs. 
You are hard to climb, even for an over sugared seven year old.

	From the boardwalk on Coney Island, we gaped at the ocean. 
My father and my sister wanted to go into the great salt water with 
the crowds, but my mother and I and my baby brother in utero stayed 
behind.  It was a sweltering day and the mob of people was so thick 
that there was very little space to sit down.  My mother, about as 
enamoured of heat as I am, found a patch of unoccupied sand in the 
shade, right under the Boardwalk, so that the wood slats of the grand 
walkway cast striped shadows on the hot sand: a stripe of blazing 
sunlight, a stripe of shadow, a stripe of blazing sunlight, a stripe 
of shadow.  We sat there while Dana and my father waded out into the 
ocean with a million other broiling humans.  Then some screaming up 
above us.  A poor little kid had dropped his ice cream cone on the 
Boardwalk.  And there it lay, melting in the sun, dripping down on 
our heads.  We leaned away to let it drip between us.

	It is odd what I remember from my birthday trip to New York 
City, because one of the prominent memories is not the Planetarium, 
the initial motivation for the whole trip.  I remember vaguely that 
there were chairs that we sat in that leaned way back, and that the 
room got dark except for thousands of dots of light on the domed 
ceiling.  I did not grow up to be an astronomer.  The stars I study 
are much smaller, close by, intimate.

 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net