we are stardust's picture

    Merry Christmas / Call the Police

     

    My father’s parents lived in Shaker Heights.  On Van Aken Boulevard, a wide street with a grassy strip in the middle for the Rapid Transit tracks down the middle.  The cars were powered through a metal rod that scooted along electrical wires strung on poles along the tracks as they clickety-clicked along.  Row after row of clean three-story brick apartment buildings with manicured lawns seemed to pass by as I sat in the backseat of the car.  Set back from the street, they were fancy, but boring, almost all the same except that every ten buildings or so, the shutters at the windows would change from white…to green… to black…then repeat.  So you wouldn’t get lost, maybe.  Upper middle class Cleveland, Ohio.  Alvin and the Chipmunks sang on the car radio in their helium-soaked voices:

    Christmas, Christmas time is near,
    Time for toys and time for cheer.
    We've been good, but we can't last,
    Hurry Christmas, Hurry fast.
    Want a plane that loops the loop,
     Me, I want a Hula-Hoop.
    We can hardly stand the wait
    Please Christmas don't be late.

      I loved Alvin; he’d jump at any chance for fun or to satisfy his curiosity, the little devil.  He could be naughty as he wanted, touch anything he wanted, and just had to put up with a scolding from Dave now and then.  No biggie; Dave always let him sing again in the end.

      I’d asked Santa for an Alvin for Christmas, the little fuzzy guy with a baseball cap and gold A on his shirt; you could wind him up and he’d play the song with his little music box hidden inside.  Wow.

      Gram and Backee lived at ‘The Drake Apartments’, 19606, and we were heading there for Christmas.  My great-grandma Nan would be there.  I loved her.  She’d send us little things all year that she‘d cut out of magazines or from the backs of cereal boxes, and tiny dresses she’d crocheted for my Ginny dolls.  Last year she’d given me my own can of ripe olives for Christmas; she knew how much I loved them.  She had a halo of white, fluffy hair and wore wide-skirted silky dresses in dark colors, and chunky, lace-up  medium heels on her feet.

      My sister had named my grandfather Backee (it was pronounced ‘Bah-key’), because she couldn’t say Grandpa at first, and the name stuck.

      He was a tall man with silver-grey hair, parted on the side and combed into order with some kind of stuff that kept it in place.  He looked just like the picture of his father in their hallway above the telephone.  A stuffy-looking guy with an ugly black suit and white shirt with a Herbert Hoover collar and a watch fob; he kind of looked like he’d been carved out of wax.  And he didn’t look all that nice, like the first thing out of his mouth might be A-hoom. 

      Backee had worked in management at Republic Steel, and was a no-nonsense man who could wilt you with a look; he looked like he thought he was important, and maybe you weren’t, so much.  He could smile, but it was an absent-minded sort of smile that didn’t last long.   Maybe the Important Thoughts in his head crowded out the nice ones.

      He had lots of cameras and lenses and light meters, and he took pictures when they traveled.  He also grew loads of flowers in the rooftop garden space he rented.  I never asked him how they got all that dirt up there.  The only good times I remember that he and I ever spent together were in his garden.  As he worked, he would tell me the names of flowers and I’d ask him questions, though I had to squeeze answers out of him the way you had to press on a slightly dried up tube of toothpaste.  He would sometimes pluck a snapdragon bloom for me to play with; a gentle squeeze to the part where its jaw would be, it sort of talked; wah-wahI liked that.  And sometimes it made Backee smile.

      Gram was short and chubby, with watery grey eyes that held some unknowable far-away pain; a little pinch of muscles between her eyebrows made them into an upside-down V, like she was always thinking, as she sort of slumped and sighed, “oh… poor, poor me.” Sigh.

      She had those bull-doggish deep crevices on either side of her nose that headed toward her mouth some old ladies get.  Her skin smelled kind of musty and chalky: Old Lady Smell. 

      My dad was their only child.  He was smart and handsome and huge as a bear, six feet and four inches tall.  Some kids were scared of him, just because he was so big.  He’d graduated from college, gone to the Coast Guard Academy, and was in the service for awhile.  He was company clerk, and didn’t even know how to type!

      Our mom said Gram and Backee were mean to him, and that during the Depression, Gram and Backee owned seven cars, but my dad only had one pair of jeans with a hole in the knee to wear to school.  That must have been awful, but they were mean to him in other ways, too, like they didn’t know how to love anybody. She had lots of bad stories.  Isn’t it a rule that parents are supposed to love their children?

      They didn’t really like me, either, and I didn’t know why.  My mom thought maybe it was just because Linda was born first, and maybe there just wasn’t any room for me.  Or something.  They gave her lots more presents, and it didn’t feel right. My sister must have been embarrassed, because my mom said she had tried to give me one of her presents once, but over time she got used to it, and seemed to think she deserved more.  They thought I wasn’t as smart as my sister, so Gram wouldn’t teach me how to knit or anything like that.   Other kids had grandparents who loved them; I knew that much.

      Backee called my sister Princess, so once in a while he’d call me Kitten, (Eww.) right out of Father Knows Best. 

      I was sort of a tomboy, and always had skinned knees and bruises and dirt-stained feet from going barefoot so often in summer.  Well, sure my dad had wanted a boy, but I liked baseball and fishing and everything.  And anyway, when the summer families came back to our island, it was great to have more friends than snotty Peggy Dallen next door.  If I wanted to play with the boys, I had to be ready for rowdy boy-games and adventures.  We were allowed to roam the whole island on bikes, and we did.  We’d make the rounds most days, and had favorite spots: this tree, that stone wall to walk atop, this long hill to ride up repeatedly, so that we coast down fast, our feet off the pedals, allowing them to spin as fast as they would.    

      We’d take graham cracker lunches into the woods and hunt for fossils, and make forts under huge fallen trees, their roots coated with earthy smells.  We carried our marbles in purple velveteen Seagram’s bags, and played string-circle marbles with puries (the best) and cat’s eyes; for keeps.

      Gram and Backee didn’t like my tomboy ways, but at least by then there was something concrete they could grouse about.  They were always telling me to wash my feet, as if the dirt weren’t permanent; jeez.  And to be a lady.  And you had to wear gloves to church!

      So there was all that tension with the Grands, but the larger problem lay beyond me:  they really didn’t like my mother.  Mom said they thought my dad had married beneath him, and blamed her for it.  They really meant she wasn’t good enough for him.

      My mom’s mother had been killed in an auto accident when my mother was twelve; she became the mother to her little brother and sister, and ran the house.  It must have been hard, and it had made her pretty bossy, even for a mother.  My cousins called her Auntie Alice, the Camp Director.  One snap of her fingers got your attention fast.

      When we got to Gram and Backee’s, we went into the little room we always slept in.  Backee had left a copy of Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus on the dresser for us to read.  Hmmm.  Here was old Francis Pharcellus Church giving Virginia a load of happy crap.  The way my parents and sister looked at each other whenever they mentioned Santa made me know he wasn’t real.  (When we got back home, I looked him up in our encyclopedia: Santa Claus, an imaginary being…)  But it was sort of hard to disappoint them all, so I pretended to believe again, just for this last time.

      Later I made a snowman (my sister didn’t want to help) outside in the courtyard of the apartments, and Backee gave me one of the corncob pipes we always gave him for Christmas to stick in its mouth.  We knew he didn’t really smoke them, but it was sort of a tradition by now to give him one.  His real ones were nicer.

      It was hard to sleep that night with the noise from the Rapid Transit trains, and the light from the streetlights that leaked around the curtains.  The time dragged.

      But finally it was Christmas morning, and Santa had been there in the night, and he’d   brought me an Alvin.  And a Deluxe Pillsbury Baking Set with its own light-bulb stove. (I think it was a hint.)

      A lot of sort of mean things were said that morning, mainly about gifts.  Thank you for the pretty beads, Virginia.  Beads?  Beads?  Those are the finest pearls money can buy…, like that.  Poor Grandma Nan.  She was so kind, and Gram was so mean to her; you could see it confused her.  Was this her daughter?  How did this happen?  And Gram and Backee never liked the things my mom picked out for them, so their forced smiles said it a lot, and the fakey way they said thanks said a lot.  My dad sort of tried to pretend he was there, but really wanted to flee to the teevee room.  So it didn’t seem all that Christmasy,if you know what I mean.

      Later, when the adults were in the kitchen getting dinner ready to serve, tension oozed out into the living room; maybe the tones of the raised voices alerted me.  I peeked in, but I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.  Gram and my mom were drinking, the men, too, in the den, and probably more than was good for them.  Old Fashioneds; you could tell by the colors and the shape of the glasses.  Finally dinner was served.

      We all sat at the big mahogany table covered in white linen and trays of food and candlesticks and flowers.

      Maybe someone said a blessing, or maybe someone poured some wine; I forget.  Had Backee carved the turkey?  I don’t know.  Nor do I remember what or who started the cascade of events that followed.  There must have been cross words, and louder voices,

    but suddenly my grandmother hit my mother in the face.  My grandfather stood up; my father stood up, and everyone was yelling.  Backee hit my dad.  And it must have been when my one of them stood up, the movement lifted the edge of the dining room table up and tipped it over.  Food and drink and china and silver and crystal crashed to the floor.  Our German shepherd, Q squealed; she was trapped beneath, but finally wriggled out.  Poor Nan was against the wall, looking frail and frightened and unbelieving amidst the pandemonium.  I panicked.  I didn’t know what to do, but we clearly needed help.

      So I ran to the telephone in the hall, and picked up the receiver to call the police.  Television, I guess, was my only point of reference for violence: surely this fight met the standards of police help, didn’t it?  But then I realized I didn’t know how to call the police; I called for my sister’s help, but she didn’t come; probably thought I was an idiot…  My mother came, though.  She put the phone receiver back in the cradle and held me, and said it would be okay.  Okay.  Soon it would be okay. 

      I remember nothing more about the aftermath, or the gathering of our belongings and getting ready to leave.  Someone had rescued Grandma Nan, and she sat in her favorite needlepoint chair, looking so tiny and fragile and wounded

      When we got to the door, my father told us to go out and wait by the car; I wouldn’t go.  I was terrified that the two of them might hurt my father again, and I wanted to help him, and begged him to come with us now, or let me stay.  No, he wanted to stay to talk to his father.  I finally let myself be sent to the street, carrying my little suitcase and new toys; I dumped my Pillsbury Bake Set all over the sidewalk, crying and shivering.  How had this happened to my family?  We weren’t like this. When at last my father emerged from the apartment door, I melted with relief.  He looked so far away.

      Backee was with him, and before my pop turned toward us: they shook hands.  Shook hands?  His face was waxen and he had tears on his face when he got to the car and saw us, he shook his body a little, and straightened up, attempting to move on, take charge…something.  I don’t remember the ride home, or much discussion about the hideous events, though there must have been some.  Maybe my parents talked softly; I probably slept, Alvin clutched against me...  ...Me, I want a hula-hoop... 

     It was good to be going home.

     .......... We wouldn’t see them again for more than a year.........................

    Comments

    Excellent storytelling star! I felt like I was right there in the middle of it all. Sorry you had to experience such a violent Christmas but it sounds like overall your childhood was fun and carefree. Merry Christmas!


    Well, not so much carefree, but there were lots of good parts.  My paternal grandparents weren't many of them.  ;o)   Merry Christmas to you; it was a good one here. 


    Real life can sometimes be a scary thing.


    You said that right, DD.  ;o)


    I don't know Smedes, chuck, but that was a brilliant quote.  Those grandparents had a remarkably toxic effect on me, and forgiving them was really hard.  It happened for me in dreams, one for each of them.  It shames me a little that I need such directed aid from Morpheus to free myself a bit from them, but I'm really grateful to have had the dreams and remember them so vividly. 

    Thanks ever so much for the quote; it's a keeper.  I hope you had a good day, and that you dream of catching a big ol' lunker tonight.  ;o)


    I remember wanting a Ginny doll. My mother told me Santa ran out of them.  My next door neighbor after Christmas took me to Woolworth's and we bought a small doll for $ .29 in the craft section.  The doll was designed to use to make coffee filter bed doll. She made me crocheted dresses and other cloths.  She taught me how to hand sew and crochet when I was small.   I spent a lot of time alone creating outfits for that cheap little doll.

    I still do fine thread Irish crochet lace and sew.  Sometimes Christmas disappointments turn into a life time of good stuff.     


    That was a fine thing your neighbor did, trkingmomoe, wasn't it? 


    Thank you.  God bless and a happy New Year!

    Chuck


    Amazing story, stardust. And your descriptions are incredibly well-crafted ("I had to squeeze answers out of him the way you had to press on a slightly dried up tube of toothpaste.") Wonderful!

    The story is painful, yet somehow redemptive. Humanity is messy. Families are messy. Yet, they shape us into who we are, and your experiences have blessed us all in creating the depth of character and personal integrity and passion you so strongly share with us in your writing.

    Thanks for this, stardust. It's a wonderful story. Merry Christmas! 


    Welcome, Jeezus.  I can't read your story; the right side chops the ends of every line off, though what I can read looks fantastic!  Crap.  I just had a thought: maybe it'll read through Firefox. 

    I love how much you and your sibs loved one another from your Fourth of July story.  And yes, families can be messy things.  I always told our kids that no matter how hard I tried to be honest and loving and involved, they'd probably be on some shrink's couch one day.  Damn: turned out to be true, too.  ;o) 

    Love to you on this Boxing Day morning.  Keep warm, friend.


    Wow, Stardust. That's an intense Christmas story. Quite a dose of reality alongside the hyper chipper chipmunks. All the more personal because of the unflinching descriptions.

    Deepens my respect for you, friend. Blessed be.


    Yeah, I think the juxtaposition of the Chipmunks and that grisly holiday nightmare was what started my incredible appreciation of irony, and that day and what, in hindsight, led to it led to the development of my strong bullshit/hypocrisy detector.  ;o)

    Over the years, both in my friendships and my career, I discovered how often monstrous stories lie beneath the sanitized narratives families will construct to appear healthy and perfect.

    Fun fact: I'm friends (mainly by email now) with the granddaughter of America's First Family (Ozzie and Harriet), and have been treated to what lies beneath all that.  We understand one another pretty well, but at least my family wasn't held up as an exemplar of all that's best in families; aarrgh!

    I'm pleased to be Virtual Friends with you, Watt.  ;o)


    Amazing. I've been thinking of Rick Nelson for the past couple of weeks while working on a column, especially his song "Garden Party."


     .......... We wouldn’t see them again for more than a year.........................

    But I feel sure that you won't make us wait a year till we hear what happened at that meeting. Right? Right?

    Did your parents stay together?


      Not long afterward, we moved away from the island, and left no forwarding address for the Grands.  Perhaps ‘making up’ was a useless proposition.  A couple years later, on a Sunday, my sister and I were sitting in the sunroom watching television.  On one wall was an enormous lithograph of the Grand Tetons; the Big Breasts, we’d giggle.  The glass wall to the south looked out onto an overly-sunny concrete patio and a neighbor’s fence behind an expanse of dry grass; ye gods, it was ugly, and we never went out there. 

      I must have sensed movement, and looked out the window.  Like a chimera, my grandfather shimmered out of the trembling air off the patio concrete and took shape.  He stood still and looked right at me, not smiling, and once I began to believe he was real, I panicked, but let him in.  It turned out that he had hired a private investigator to find us.  I went and got my parents, who were napping in their room.  Uh-oh.

      Somehow relations were re-established, some form of detente; some accord must have been reached, but my parents never explained things fully to us.  Whatever rules were made only operated on the surface; the underlying themes never changed, and they were a-holes until they died.  Both of them outlived my parents, oddly enough.

    My parents stayed together until we went off to college; my pop only lived another year after they separated, with plenty of Pat Conroy stories in the interim and afterward.  Many fine object lessons in aid of getting my own shit together, Seashell, though the jury's still out on that.    ;o)


    Stardust: During the past few weeks I've read a few books again I read a long time ago. Fascinating, as the images I see, now, are different from those I pictured, then. As are the messages to be derived.

    I read this powerful story of yours for the first time last year, and though the pictures in my head of what you describe are the same, today, the meaning of the story seems entirely different this year than it was last. So much has happened in the interim -- in the world, in our country, within our families and within ourselves. So I want to know: what does this experience you remember and describe so vividly mean to you, this year, that is different from all the times you've thought about the meaning of it before?


    Now that will take some cogitatin', wws!  I'll try to re-read it later today with an eye toward your interesting question.  One of my favorite diarists at FDL quipped that this piece was reminiscent of Stephen King; that sure did make me laugh!   ;o)


    Great story, Star. I'll jump in here because wws's comment triggered a thought. At least it was true in my family--a great deal of effort into what we might call "keeping up appearances", a kind of "class" thing which substituted, except in real emergencies, for expressions of feelings and personal talk. It's interesting to think of all that in the context of the two-class society we have now and the fact that something we thought would reverse under Mr. O is simply being reinforced. The rich and the non-rich--what more class distinction do we need than that. And knowing you through print type I'd say that two terms which are definitely disqualified are "Stepthen King" and "kitten".


    LOL, Oxy!  I think the Stephen King comparsion may have been that he saw this as horror genre, which did make me laugh, and it does appear that I'm no kitten.  Miaow... 

    As far as the issue of class, I'd say that in the case of my in-laws, they were equally as apt to want to appear perfect to the community at large, and especially to their fellow church congregants.  It's common as all giddy-up, and the operating silent agreement seems to be, "I won't dig under your mask if you don't dig under mine."  Another painful lesson for myself and others I've known up close is: Woe to the family member who attempts to find the truth of some of the conveniently distorted versions.  Many of our nieces and nephews over the years have seemingly intuitively known to come here to unload their versions of truth in attempts to heal from the family lies or things they were unable to express that would buck the famliy narrative, especially the uber-religious ones.  They often went back to the same situations later, and I wondered how they could, knowing what they knew.  Maybe just unburdening their persoanl monsters was enough respite for a time; I sure don't know.

    I do think you're onto something with Obama and especially Senators: they get a taste of power and uber-wealth and they are attracted to it like moths to a flame.  And woe is us.


    Stardust, I will echo all the other comments to this powerful story; you really put your readers right in that room with you. But I also am profoundly impressed by the depth of your observations at such a young age. I know it made an indelible impression on you, but not everyone can so eloquently capture the child's impotence and fears and do it with an adult's world view. Wow.

    Conventional wisdom has it that the less you remember of your childhood, the more there is to block.  I have different and more complicated beliefs on that, as you might guess.  ;o)  It is hard for me stay in the kid's eye view, really, and sometimes it can flop.  Some of the most horrid stories I can't use dialogue: they happen as underwater then and now somehow, unless the dialogue was crucial to advancing the story.  Gotta work on it.  thanks for reading, CVille, and the nice comment.


    Tough story, but nicely told Kitten.  ;)


    Thanks, Bud!    (Isn't she the most annoying little twerp?)


    Great storytelling, Stardust.  It's hard to tell a story so fraught with drama in the grown-up voice describing the child's emotions when the child was you.  You've done it exceedingly well.  This one will stick with me, for sure.  Bravo.


    Thank you.  ;o)


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