Bornfamous

I couldn’t decide at first which fantasy I liked better: “My Dad, Johnny Cash” or “My Father the Ghost”. Eventually, I went with the ghost [easier to believe] and kept Cash in reserve for those times when I needed to actually see and hear a father figure. His songs would always give me comfort.

My ghost father floated about five feet over my right shoulder, just a bit behind me, watching everything I did. It made me feel good to believe that he was keeping an eye on me while my mother worked long hours to support us. I imagined him smiling indulgently at my foolishness and minor misdeeds, but his presence created conflicts I didn’t expect.

Sitting on the toilet one night, I realized that it wasn’t appropriate for a man to be in the room, even if he was a ghost. I had no choice but to turn out the light. Soon I was undressing and bathing in the dark to preserve my privacy. I was sure that my father appreciated my clever solution to an embarrassing situation.

—

At Gramma’s house, after Grampa died, there was a hush. When I raced into the living room toward the door to my attic room, I stopped. Gramma was sitting in the rocker reading her “books” - the Bible and Science & Health - with their fine paper and ribbon bookmarks, numbered tabs for every chapter, blue chalk to mark the verses. Gramma was very quiet for a long time.

This was our routine: up in the morning, Rice Krispies in warm weather, Cream of Wheat or oatmeal in winter, then off to school. I would come home at three and be outside playing until dinner. In the summer, I was simply outside all day, until I discovered books and comics. Then I was in my upstairs room, reading like a starving child allowed at last to eat. In the bitter Minnesota winter, I was at the park skating rink two blocks away, skating until my toes and fingers ached from the cold, walking home in the dark on the blades of my skates, to hot cocoa with butter floating on the surface.

Gramma kept house while Mom worked. It was almost like a normal family, except Gramma didn’t like me and the feeling was soon mutual. She disapproved of my laziness, mostly.

A place for everything and everything in its place.

My mother had moved to the back bedroom on the main level so I had the attic room to myself, the entire second floor, and I loved it. Except in summer when it was too hot to be up there until bedtime, the attic was my play room, my imaginary castle, my secret sanctuary.

I was Doris Day in a slinky red-sequin evening gown, lip-synching “Ten Cents a Dance” to a full-length mirror. I was a brave princess on a quest to save a prince. I was a surgeon - no, an actress playing a surgeon - saving lives and falling in love with Humphrey Bogart/Jimmy Cagney/Gary Cooper.

There was a year or two when my mother and I had our own apartment. She worked as a cook in a big downtown building while I was in school. I came home and watched the “Matinee Movie With Stuart A. Lindeman” [and later, Mel Jass] until Mom got home for dinner. The movies were always from the thirties and forties, and I became more familiar with the stars of my mother’s generation than my own. Watching Bette Davis take charge, I knew what I wanted to be some day: an actress. No — a Movie Star.

So, at Gramma’s house later, in my secret attic sanctuary, my imaginary lovers weren’t the teen idols of the day - I didn’t even know who they were. When I hugged my pillow at night and practiced kissing on it, I was kissing someone old enough to be my father, maybe even my grandfather.

Then I got a real lover - Horton Racette, 13, pudgy and tall with straight black hair and dark eyes like my mother’s. I was nine but I felt wildly grown up when he taught me how to kiss. I sat on his lap and kissed with mouth closed because that’s how they did it in the movies and I’d never heard of any other way.

We were sitting like this in the basement laundry room when the door opened at the top of the stairs. From Horton’s lap, I peered up the stairs, unashamed.

“Hi, Mom.”

“What are you two doing?” Her voice was stern as she stalked down the stairs.

“We were just kissing,” I said. Horton was curiously silent.

“Yes, I see that,” said Mom. “Horton, I think you’d better go home now.”

He stood up, sliding me rudely to the floor, and was gone in a second.

“But we weren’t doing anything wrong,” I said.

“I know you weren’t,” said Mom, “but he’s way too old for you–”

“–no, he’s not!”

“LaVonne,” she said in a patient voice, “there are things you don’t understand yet.”

“What? What don’t I understand? I love him!”

“I know,” she said, taking me in her arms. “I know.”

“No, you don’t!” I broke away and ran up to the attic.

Horton dropped me like a stone after that. He wouldn’t answer the phone, wouldn’t even look at me when our paths crossed at the park. Months later, he taunted and humiliated me in front of his friends.

My heart hurt. My pillow, which had transformed from Gary Cooper to Horton Racette, was now just a pillow again, wet with tears.

—

My room was always an obstacle course of clothes and books, dolls and toys. Mom didn’t have any problem with this but Gramma did.

“I can’t even bring myself to look any more,” she said, and that was fine with me.

“Lazy,” she said, disgusted. “You are the laziest girl I’ve ever seen!”

It was true. I saw no need to clean my room. I could find whatever I wanted because it was all out in the open, spread out on the floor where I could see everything.

“How can you get from the bed to the dresser?” Gramma stood in the stairwell peering at the eye-level mess in amazement.

“Easy,” I said, walking the route to demonstrate. “See? There’s a path.”

She shook her head and stomped back down the stairs. “Lazy!”

Cleanliness is next to godliness.

I loved my laziness, cherished and nurtured it, and felt hurt and angry with Gramma for disliking my favorite part of my self.

There had been a time when she seemed to enjoy having me around, back before Grampa and my father died, when Mom and I first came to live in her house. When I came home from kindergarten on bitter cold afternoons, the house was empty except for the two of us. Everyone else - Mom, aunt Ruth, Grampa - was at work. Gramma was at the kitchen sink silently peeling potatoes. I sat at the table drinking my cocoa.

Outside the frosted window, the world was white. I thought about the western show we had seen on TV the night before.

“Gramma, what was it like in the olden days?”

“What?” Her voice sounded startled.

“Were you a little girl back then? Before cars?”

She laughed. “Yes, I was a girl then. Before television too. And radio. Even before electricity.”

I brought my cup to the sink and leaned on the edge, chin on my arms, looking up at her in awe.

“Did you have a horse?”

“Yes, we had horses.” She smiled down at me.

“What was it like?”

“Well, on the farm where I grew up, my father had a team of two spirited horses. They were black, beautiful, and very hard to handle. Not even my two brothers could handle them… but I could.”

“How old were you?”

“Thirteen. My brothers were in college but my father allowed only me to drive the horses.”

Gramma’s eyes sparkled with satisfaction.

“Wow,” I murmured, lost in the 19th century, where I was young Sara Hedback driving a beautiful carriage to town while my older brothers sat in the back, fuming.

After that, the kitchen sink became our private story place where the two of us would leave our bodies and travel through magical time to the olden days, when Gramma was a girl.

She liked me then, maybe even loved me a little. But children become harder to love as they get older and less cooperative. Mom and I got our own apartment on the other side of the city and by the time we returned two years later, unable to pay our rent after my father died, I was a different child.

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