CHAPTER ONE

My childhood began on that day, for it is my earliest memory. It was mid May. The leaves on the trees were newly unfurled, a fresh lime green like Luna moths unfolding from their cocoons. Yet I could not have described the leaves like this on that day. I was only four fingers old. I didn’t have the words. I hadn’t even seen a Luna moth. I might have said, “Those trees are pretty.” I certainly remember thinking that they were. Most likely I said nothing at all. Most likely I simply looked up at them with the great wonderment of a child and let it all soak in, not knowing that some day my mind would replay those vivid memories; and I would be moved to write about them.

Looking back to that day, I know the metaphor of the Luna moths is accurate. I can still see the leaves of those trees in my mind’s eye…how startling green they seemed to me, how feathery like moth wings. Still words are inadequate to describe the wonder of childhood, poor compensation for what we have lost in the bargain, which is the real feeling, not just the memory of it. My grandmother, now diseased, never lost this feeling of awe about the world. At 82 years old, she still felt it deep within her soul when she studied the intricate pattern on a dragon fly’s wings, saw a blade of lightning slice the night sky, heard a chorus of crickets or watched fireflies dance in a field. She had the capacity for wonderment all her life and later the words.

She once told my mother that if you could get all the animals and mankind to cease movement and hold their breath at the same time, there is a day in spring when you can hear the trillium, the jack-in-the-pulpits, the wild violets and the maiden hair ferns push through the forest floor. She said it was kind of a low hum you could mistake for insects if you didn’t know any better. I was never able to get the world to cooperate so that I might test this theory, but I believe it must be true. After all, how could all those myriad green things sprout simultaneously without making a sound? It goes against everything we know about the natural world.

The day we moved to the house on Orchard Street where I would spend the better part my childhood may have been that day in spring my great grandmother talked about, but the racket we added to the world made it impossible to tell. On that day of my earliest memory, we followed my uncle’s raucous truck from the house we’d rented in Fox Trail to our new old house in Beaverton, Wisconsin. My uncle was a teenager then, cocky and invincible, and he liked to drive fast. The back roads we traveled were mainly gravel, barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass one another; and the pickup pinged small stones at my father’s windshield as we bumped along. My father squinted through the road dust boiling behind my uncle’s black rattletrap of a truck and tried to keep up so that my mother could keep an eye on her belongings, which bounced and thumped in the bed of the pickup like children tumbling on a trampoline.

I did what I always did on car trips—I rested the side of my head, the hard skull bone just above my temple, against the car door. The vibration from the stony road did funny things to my back molars that I found gratifying for some reason. I was the kind of child who could be entertained by this sort thing. I also counted the uppermost reaches of telephone poles, the part that looks like a crucifix, as they skimmed past the car window. Those and birds sitting on the power lines or swooping in the air beyond them were almost all I could see without kneeling on the back seat, which was not allowed even if you were pretending to pray.

Uncle Oscar’s truck was caved in on the passenger’s side. The former owner was a young farm boy who’d tried to race a train through an intersection. The only thing that saved the boy’s life was the engine’s cowcatcher that pushed the truck along the track instead of crushing it like a can of stewed tomatoes. It had sustained some engine damage along with the crumpled door, and my uncle picked it up for a mere $75 convincing the car dealer he was only purchasing it for the parts.

My uncle was a mechanical wizard and actually managed to get the engine running again. He never bothered to put on a new muffler though. You could get away with it back then. Noise pollution was not much of an issue when automobiles backfired like shotguns on a more or less regular basis anyway. Besides, he liked the raw noise of a motor, the teeth gnashing scrape of metal against metal the way teenagers today love head banger music.

For a while, he tied the door shut on the accident side with a length of rope so it wouldn’t fly open. After that, anyone who rode on that side had to enter on the driver’s side and slide under the steering wheel and over the shift stick to get in, not hard to do if you were wearing slacks, but awkward if you were wearing a skirt. I suppose it may have been a bit of a kick for my uncle to see his girlfriends navigate this obstacle course, but highly embarrassing for them when you consider that back then a ‘good girl’ was mortified if her skirt crept too high beyond her knees.

In winter, the crumpled door on the passenger side was a necessity, but as the weather warmed it became a nuisance even for my uncle. One day he unhitched the rope and let the door swing open like an injured wing on a black bird, then deliberately backed full throttle into a hefty tree at the side of the road. The tin wing ripped from its rotator cuff and flew over a fence nearly colliding with an unsuspecting cow.

After that, with the door gone, anyone who road on the passenger side had to be secured to the seat with a makeshift lap restraint or they’d soon wind up an unhappy statistic of my uncle’s crazy driving. My uncle fashioned the lap restraint from two or more old leather belts, which he hitched together and then bolted to the floor behind the back seat. I was never there to see it, but I suspect my uncle had as much fun buckling the belt over his girlfriends’ waists as he did seeing their skirts rise too high on their thigh—okay, maybe not.

With this whole leather belt contraption, Uncle Oscar had unknowingly invented the first seatbelt. It was an inconvenience none of my uncle’s girlfriends minded. If you had seen my uncle back then, you’d have understood. I think most girls would have allowed him to tie them to his front bumper just to have a date with him. He had this beautiful, nearly pitch-black hair and big blue eyes heavily fringed with lashes (the kind only girls should be allowed to have) and a swaggery cock-sure way of walking that was swoon-worthy. I was only four, and even I knew he was irresistible.

We arrived at our new old house at around noon that day. My uncle backed the truck containing our meager furnishings into the gravel driveway—a blue wooden kitchen set with three matching chairs, a highchair without a tray, a dresser my father had absconded from the curb on junk day, my parent’s bed, a sofa we inherited from my grandpa when he died and several cardboard boxes containing various domestic sundries. My dad parked his lime-green, jellybean 1947 Nash at the curb.

“We’re here,” he announced.

I’d known for weeks that we were moving and was so excited to see our new place, I could barely contain myself. Whenever I was excited I would pinch my pee-pee whether I had to go or not. ‘Pee pee’ was my mother’s name for a girl’s privates, ‘peeter’ or ‘wiener’ for a boy’s. Other body parts seemed to have just one name. A knee was always a knee, an elbow always an elbow, an ear always an ear; but there were many pet names it seemed for privates as though no one were quite sure what the correct words for those parts really were. The words ‘vagina’ and ‘penis’ were strictly forbidden in our household as were the words ‘pregnant,’ ‘sex’ or any other word that referred in anyway to those unmentionable parts of the body.

Anyway, pinching my pee pee had gotten to be a kind habit. I was a bed wetter, and I think I was always afraid I might have an accident during the day as well. My mother had promised my sister Julie a bed of her own when we moved to Orchard Street, because I’d pretty much peed up the double bed we’d shared in Fox Trail. Anyway, I was in constant fear I might have an accident during the day. I guess I figured it was more socially acceptable to pinch my pee-pee than to wet my pants. Now I know that neither one is a good idea.

When the car came to a full stop, I began to pull down on the door handle to open it. “Not on the road side, Jodi,” my mother said. “Get out on your sister’s side where the curb is.”

I slid over to Julie’s side and bumped against her several times before she opened the door. She could never move fast enough for me. At her heels, I hopped down from the running board and landed on my knees on the grass between the street and the sidewalk.

“A sidewalk?” I yelled. We hadn’t had one in Fox Trail. “I want some roller skates right now.”

I looked up at the house then. It was almost exactly as my dad had described it…a tall, gray, two-story house with a red roof and several dormers making it look as though it were wearing many hats at once. I ran up the three steps to the enclosed front porch and pulled on the door. It wouldn’t budge, and the wooden steps rocked as I strained to open it.

“I want to see the inside,” I said.

“In a minute,” my dad said. He sounded perturbed. There was some discussion between my parents then about who had the key to the house. My mother was rummaging around in her purse while my father was fishing through his pockets. They were both clearly tired from the packing and road trip, so some poorly-disguised bickering ensued about who was supposed to have taken charge of the key:

“No, Dear, I remember distinctly handing it to you and suggesting you attach it to your key ring along with the car key and the key to my mother’s house,” said my mother rather tersely. This seemed entirely logical to me since my mother hadn’t learned to drive yet, and my dad had the only key ring.

“Yes, Honey Dear, but if you’ll also recall, I had my hands full at the time; and I told you to hang on to it until we arrived at the new house at which time I would attach it to my key ring.”

“Yes, Dear Heart, but as you’ll also recall, since your hands were full at the time, I slipped the key in your shirt pocket for temporary safe keeping.”

My father patted his front shirt pocket where he also carried his cigarettes and said, “Well my Little Petunia Blossom, it doesn’t seem to be there now, which leads me to believe you never put it in there to begin with, so although you may have meant to place it there, something must have interrupted your train of thought at the time so that you never got around to it.”

“Well, Darling, I don’t know what that could have been that interrupted my train of thought.”

“Why don’t you check your purse and your pockets one more time, Honey Darling.”

“I did, Dear Heart, and they are not there…”

My uncle was standing next to his truck combing his hair with a metal comb and checking his reflection in the window at the driver’s side. When he was satisfied that all the waves fell in the right places, he slipped the comb back in his pocket and turned to survey the neighborhood no doubt sniffing the air for females in heat.

My parents were still solving the mystery of the missing key. I had given up on the front door or ever seeing the inside of the house in my lifetime. I heard a squirrel chittering somewhere in the branches above me. With my head thrown back so far my neck ached, I tried to spot the source of all the racket. I could see then that there was more than one squirrel. There were two actually, chasing each other in dizzy circles up and down and around the trunk, then manically from one branch to the other, from one tree to the other, rustling the leaves, snapping the twigs, leaping and somersaulting one over the other and squirrel giggling the whole time. One seemed to be the tease, the other the pursuer. The larger of the two, the pursuer, seemed bent on hitching a free ride on the back haunches of the other. They disappeared then somewhere in the green foliage and for a short time, maybe only seconds, the trees became very still.

My uncle exploded with laughter then.

“Those squirrels are screwing,” he said.

“What did you say?” Mother clutched her chest with both hands and began to wheeze and cough. I’m fairly certain my mother was a good girl.

“He said, ‘Those squirrels are screwing,’” I repeated, and my mother wheezed again.

“Around…screwing around. Those squirrels are screwing around,” said my uncle. My mother shot him a look, and he shrugged his shoulders.

I continued to stare into the recesses of the soaring oaks on either side of the narrow, paved street. They leaned gradually toward one another finally joining hands at their uppermost reaches to form a cathedral ceiling over the road. I tried to see the squirrels, but they had disappeared in the deepest part of the trees. My neck was weary so I lay down in the middle of the sidewalk and looked up. The sun glinting through the ceiling of leaves made me squint my eyes; and I found the more I squinted, the more the leafy canopy resembled stained glass.

“Mom, tell her to get up. People are watching. They’re going to think we’re odd before we’re even moved in,” my sister Julie said.

There were indeed women with scarves tied Aunt Jemima style, sneaking peeks at us. It was Friday—cleaning day in that neighborhood. Housewives were shaking dust rags out the front door. Back then it was imperative to put the house in perfect order before the weekend. Houses were cleaned from stem to stern, floors scrubbed and waxed to a high gloss, throw rugs shaken with a vengeance and left to air over a railing or clothesline.

Anyone might drop in unannounced over the weekend. People didn’t call first back then, nor did they wait around for an engraved invitation. Families simply piled in the car on a Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon and hoped that whoever they were driving twenty or thirty miles to visit would be home.

Back then, twenty or thirty miles meant a journey over mainly gravel roads at maybe 35 miles an hour if my mother was in the car; because she considered anything faster than that to be reckless and irresponsible. Needless to say, my sister and I were not allowed to ride with my uncle.

And it was true that braking on gravel roads at speeds beyond 40 miles per hour was treacherous because you had little hope of controlling the vehicle. You could drive headlong into a tree or another car or even wind up somersaulting and landing upside down in a ditch. Braking on gravel at those speeds was pretty much a death wish my mother said. There was a chance you might survive if you didn’t fly out the car window—something that actually happened with a fair amount of frequency because seatbelts were non-existent back then.

If it were summer, driving to see my cousins in Fond du lac meant a stifling hot 40-mile journey with the windows open, so that by the time you arrived well over an hour later, you wondered why you’d even bothered to comb your hair. And then my cousins might not even be home once we got there, and we’d have to turn around and go all the way back from whence we came. I used to imagine everyone going to visit someone else at exactly the same time on exactly the same day—everyone knocking on someone else’s door but nobody home.

“Mother,” my sister said again. “Don’t you care what people will think of us?”

My mother looked at me lying on the sidewalk pinching my unmentionable and didn’t say anything. I think she was always relieved when I was preoccupied with something that wasn’t potentially life threatening. I guess she considered my pee pee to be more or less in that category.

I remember screen doors squeaking open on several porches as I continued to lie on the grainy sidewalk, nosy women pretending to shake the dust from old underpants whose elastic waistbands had seen better days. Instead of throwing them out, ratty underpants were recycled to use as dust rags.

When one of mine ended up that way, I remember being certain that everyone knew whose it was when my mother shook it out the front door. Of course, this was much later when I’d actually begun to care what people thought of me. It was one of my worst nightmares—literally. In these dreams, my mother would be shaking a pair of ratty old underpants out the front door. The underpants were invariably the size of a parachute, and my name was always printed across them in large neon letters with an arrow pointing directly to a scorched hole over the butt area as though I’d blown them out with a humongous fart. This whole dream scene was always in a kind of surrealistic slow motion that went on and on while all the people I’d ever wanted to impress in my whole pitiful life gathered in front of our house and laughed their friggen heads off.

Nothing made of cloth was discarded back then. Worn out underpants and other articles of clothing became rags for cleaning or cloths folded into several layers to be used for women’s monthlies. The terms feminine napkin or, heaven forbid, the very concept of Tampax hadn’t been invented yet. When Tampax first came on the scene, I remember my mother and aunt saying how it would be the ruin of young virgins everywhere. I wasn’t meant to hear this, but I was eavesdropping—something I did quite often when I couldn’t find anyone to play with me. Eavedropping was how I learned there was a was a secret about Albert so horrible that no one should ever find out—a secret his parents were determined to keep hidden at any cost.

My sister expelled her usual sigh of impatience, walked over to where I lay on the sidewalk and nudged me with her foot. “Get up,” she whispered hoarsely, “and stop doing…. that! Those people across the street are staring at you.”

I didn’t budge. She jabbed me again with the toe of her saddle shoe and whispered through clenched teeth. “Get up, Jodi. Nobody around here is going to play with you if they think you’re daft.” ‘Daft’ was a word she’d heard my mother use many times when she thought our father had done something particularly stupid.

I guess you worry about things like that when you’re eight—first impressions and such. In the old neighborhood, she’d had to answer the question, “What’s the matter with your sister?” a few too many times. You can understand how she might have worried about history repeating itself now that we were in a new neighborhood. She was probably viewing our move as a chance to start over with a clean slate, a chance to leave behind all the baggage from the old neighborhood where I guess people really had considered me to be a tad retarded.

My father checked his pockets one more time for the allusive house key; and when he didn’t find it, he took the pack of cigarettes from his shirt and tapped it on the palm of his hand. A cigarette along with the silver key slid out of the pack. My mother had inadvertently stuffed the key in with the pack of cigarettes instead of behind it in my father’s pocket.

“I told you it was right there in your pocket,” she said. My father sighed and rolled his eyes.

“Get up!” my sister said again jabbing me for the third time with the toe of her shoe. She wasn’t whispering anymore. She was yelling. “People will think you’re daft just like in the old neighborhood. Maaaaa!” Well if the neighbors hadn’t noticed me before, they certainly did then.

“I’m not deaf,” I said. “I hear good.”

That last jab had been too hard. Now I really wasn’t going to get up. Now, just for spite, I remained flat on my back in the middle of the sidewalk a good five minutes longer. I continued to squint at the noon sun trickling through the branches. I began to see the animals that were trying to hide there—whales and seahorses, crocodiles and rhinos doing the backstroke in a pool of sun-splashed green water.

Those trees were magical to me, but not as magical as they would be that winter when a single storm dumped fourteen inches of solid packed snow overnight—snow so thick and heavy it filled in the spaces of sky between the branches and bent them so low the cars that passed beneath looked like giant beetles tunneling through confectioner’s sugar.

Over the years I would watch those trees change from season to season, from year to year. They were never the same, and they never disappointed me. They sheltered chattering squirrels, nesting birds; and in rains that poured down like glass curtains, they sheltered me. I remember standing under them and feeling only a trickle while the gutters along the street filled up with water knee deep. Even on Halloween night when a child’s imagination favors the grotesque, when barren trees can turn into ax murderers, they remained to me ancient angels standing guard.

Years later, we fought and lost the battle against the city council who voted to cut those trees down. Nothing was ever the same after that. It was that summer—the summer they murdered the trees—that seemed to mark the beginning of all the bad stuff that happened, as though those trees had been hiding our secrets.

CHAPTER TWO

Even more wondrous than the setting of my childhood, were the phenomenally eccentric and enriching people who inhabited it. I smile to think of them. My sister needn’t have worried about the neighbors thinking we were odd the day we moved into the house on Orchard Street. If we were, then we’d been plunked smack down in the middle of our own kind.

Of course, I would come to appreciate this only in retrospect. While I was living among them, I didn’t view them as particularly unique—they were just the people who lived on my street. Wasn’t every neighborhood like that?

At the far end of our backyard was a fenced in garden, not our own, but Mr. Gibon’s who we called Geezer to his back even though we liked him. He was a small, kind-hearted man whose only distinguishing characteristic was a voice like Mickey Mouse. He was grandfather to three rascally children on our block, and I think his forbearance of children was due to that. He was the person we went to when the tires of our bikes needed patching.

In his garden was a small orchard of cherry, pear and apple trees. He grew a large plot of strawberries as well, but they were never as tasty as Mrs. Kluges. Stolen strawberries were always sweeter. Along Mr. Gibon’s fence line at the back of our yard spilled vines of purple grapes and red currants which my mother claimed as hers without compunction saying that anything that draped over to our side of the fence was rightly ours.

There was a wire gate to the garden, which Mr. Gibon never locked; and we would play Garden of Eden when the trees were heavy with fruit: golden pears with rosy cheeks; round, shiny red and green apples. Because Mr. Gibson never complained, my mother let us play in that garden, and sometimes when we pretended Eden on a hot Indian summer day, we would strip down to our white underpants and run like pagan children through the small orchard.

The first time I saw Albert’s blurry face, he was leering at us from his loft window above our neighbor’s garage. Well, maybe not leering, but watching with great interest at the very least. But on that day, I paid no more attention to his face at the window than I might have paid to a bird hopping on the roof.

Abe and Mona Johnson were our next-door neighbors. They are integral to the story, of course, because they were Albert’s parents. Our back porches were directly across from each other, and our gravel driveways were adjacent with only a thin ribbon of grass between them. They had an unattached garage; we had no garage—attached or otherwise. With this sort of arrangement, we saw each other coming and going on a regular basis. I, more than anyone else in that neighborhood, had the time and proximity to observe this troubled family--especially Albert.

Sometime before we moved to Orchard Street, the Johnsons had a loft apartment constructed over their garage. It was designed to be Albert’s first home away from home so to speak, his halfway house to the real world. The outside stairway, which led to Albert’s loft, was directly across from my bedroom window, which also facilitated my observations of this nocturnal man. But for a long time, I would only know the overall shape and gate of him, the way he scurried from place to place in the daylight hours always turning his face from onlookers.

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