TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 119

[Tobie Shapiro]

January 13, 200000000007


Dear Y'all,

	My mother has flown off to Seattle to be 
present at the great grandchild's birthday party. 
One year old.  He is already walking.  My mother 
says that my brother was walking early, and she 
was scared to death of this mindless little baby 
aiming himself through the house.  He even fell 
down the basement stairs once.  There were diaper 
marks, big poofs of powder where his tuchas hit 
the step.  I remember that one.  She came flying 
downstairs to scoop him up.  He was fine, just a 
little tossed.  Hard heads.  We have hard heads 
in my family.



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Egg whites and sugar

	The summer between graduation from high 
school and going off to the University of 
Washington in Seattle, I spent at home mooning 
over Bruce Haynes, the son of Thomas Haynes, the 
conductor of both the Berkeley High School 
Orchestra and the Young Peoples' Symphony 
Orchestra.  I was waiting for his letters from 
Amsterdam, hanging around the mailbox.  Every 
day, I'd take a trip down the front stairs to see 
if there was any news from abroad.  If there was, 
I was all nerves and anticipation.  I would tear 
open the letter, devour it, then go back over it 
for innuendo, inference, subtext, hidden 
messages, anything between the lines.  Oh, for a 
secret decoder ring!  Then I'd make myself 
miserable over my discoveries or I'd kvell in the 
warmth of communication with one of the major 
crushes of my young life.

	At this same time, Yvonne had gotten 
herself a job in the basement of the Claremont 
Hotel, that venerable old palace a couple blocks 
from my house.  She was working for the Bay Area 
Rapid Transit District, BARTD, which would become 
the major public transit system in the bay area, 
a new fangled series of train lines that went 
above and below ground and through the trans bay 
tube, under the San Francisco Bay, connecting 
disparate sectors of the bay area and changing 
the demographics forever.  But at this stage in 
1965, Yvonne was sorting through big computer 
cards and making tallies on sheets of paper, a 
dumb job that somebody bright had to do.  It was 
not yet the age of computers.

	I would go visit Yvonne on her lunch 
break every day.  We'd spend the time sighing and 
laughing.  Those were our strong suits.  Then I'd 
go back home to the empty house.  Daniel was 
usually outside playing and my sister was already 
off to college.  I'd mill around waiting for my 
life to begin.  And in the meantime, I'd whip up 
meringue.

	Yes.  Three egg whites and a whole lot of 
sugar is what meringue is made of.  And I would 
mix this in the Sunbeam mixer until it was stiff 
and fluffy.  Then I'd eat it.  Yes.  I'd eat it 
raw.  I got used to the three egg whites version, 
and graduated to a double recipe: six egg whites 
and twice a whole lot of sugar.  Then I'd consume 
it.  My mother wondered why there were all these 
egg yolks accumulating and why she kept having to 
go to the store for more eggs.  This was my way 
of celebrating if I were happy, or mourning if I 
were unhappy.  I never slathered the meringue on 
top of a pie and baked it.  But then I found the 
recipe for meringue cookies which required cream 
of tartar as well, and quite a long time in the 
oven.  Then I began baking trays of meringue 
cookies.  I'd pack them in a tin and Yvonne and I 
would go to the movies to see something heart 
wrenching with subtitles.  We'd sit there eating 
the cookies and weeping over the very moving 
movie, or laughing at the very funny movie.

	"What are these?" Yvonne asked in a 
whisper, while we were watching, "Sundays and 
Cybelle".

	"They're called, 'Angels' Turds'," I 
answered.  And we nearly got kicked out of the 
theater.



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When  "Sorry" just doesn't do it

	When my sister was 22, she was trying 
very hard to get pregnant.  This was with her 
first husband, Fred, a nice guy, but 
unfortunately not a very good husband.  Dana had 
been on the pill for a number of years and that 
can make getting pregnant a little harder to 
achieve once you remove yourself from them.  Dana 
was wanting so badly to be a mother at twenty two 
that it nearly frightened me.  I was still 
determined never to be a mother.  Never.  As it 
turned out, never isn't a long long time.  But 
Dana was bent on getting pregnant.  They were 
doing some very serious fucking, but it had been 
six months, and there was no sign of a zygote.

	My mother was taking me to my cello 
lesson with Herman Rheinhardt in the city.  And, 
that day, Dana had come along.  She was in the 
front seat and I was in the rear with my cello. 
All the way back from San Francisco, Dana turned 
her frustrations on me.  She criticized me for 
whatever she could think of, made up a few 
stories about people not liking me, about my 
general inadequacies as a sister and a human 
being.  I knew, yes, I knew, that this was all 
because she was desperate to have a baby and 
wasn't achieving pregnancy.  I was the next in 
line, and shit, as they say, rolls down hill. 
So, I was being used as the dumping grounds for 
all Dana's fears and anger.  I told her to stop, 
but that didn't do any good.  Why my mother 
allowed this to go on without even a comment 
escapes me.  It takes about a half hour to forty 
minutes to get from San Francisco to our house in 
Berkeley, and for the whole trip, I was treated 
to an ongoing vicious attack on every particle of 
me.  My thoughts were to get back home, and get 
away from Dana, go to my apartment that was 
messy, but inviting, a safe haven where no one 
was turning on me, no, not even my room mates who 
had to put up with me night and day.

	As soon as we got back to the family 
home, I ran as far from my sister as I could. 
Here's the amazing thing.  She followed me.  She 
actually chased me down to tell me how awful I 
was.  I was just not human, it seemed.  In a bid 
for freedom, I headed for the front door, but 
Dana rushed ahead of me and, with her back to the 
front door, spread her arms wide to bar my way.

	"No!  You have to know the truth!" she hollered.

	What truth?  What truth was there here? 
I turned around and ran into the dining room. 
She got on one side of the table and I was on the 
other.  She excoriated me once again for being 
the sub human, sub atomic particle that I was, 
that no one in his or her right mind could like, 
and that inspired disgust in so many.  Finally, 
I'd had it with the whole scene.  I screamed, "I 
hope if you get pregnant that the baby has three 
heads!" an innocuous, far fetched rejoinder.

	Dana's face turned purple.  Her fury 
crested.  She leaped over the dining room table 
and came at me with her hands shaped in readiness 
for a choke hold.  I did not stay around to see 
what would happen.  I ran to the entrance hall, 
my shoes slapping on the ceramic tiles, and I 
nearly made it to the front door, but Dana caught 
me by the hair, threw me down on the ground,  and 
began banging my head on the tiles.  I saw white. 
Then everything disappeared.  When I came to, I 
saw Dana hanging over me, her fists still 
clenching my hair, but her face gripped by 
astonishment.  As soon as I woke up, I scrambled 
to my feet, and Dana lit out for her house where 
her husband was, no doubt, waiting to impregnate 
her.

	I was woozy and disoriented for at least 
twenty four hours.  No one suggested I see a 
doctor to figure out why I was nauseated, dizzy 
and confused.  Where exactly was I?  And which 
direction was I facing?  How old did I say I was? 
The next day, my mother made a trip down to my 
flat on Parker Street, 2208 A.  It was a surprise 
when I let her in.  She had in her hand, a square 
white cardboard box.  She said it was from Dana. 
I opened it.  It was an oversized baked enamel 
peace symbol, red on pink background.  It was 
hanging on a long leather thong.  My mother said 
that Dana wanted me to accept her peace offering 
as an apology.  I looked at the cheap adornment, 
and the events of the previous day went through 
my addled mind.

	"No," I said.  "I really don't forgive 
her.  That was too much.  And this is too easy." 
I had never refused an apology before.  I felt 
strong and vindicated.  I felt it was a step 
forward for me to turn down this facile shrug of, 
"I'm sorry.  Now can I do this again some time 
soon?"  However, this did not go over very well 
with my mother.  She told me I was hard, and 
unforgiving, selfish.  It turned out that it was 
I who was queen shit.



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net