I Don't Have a Happy Place Read online

  Things started to go sour for me at tenet 4. Here, mothers threaded keys onto brightly colored lanyards, then scattered out the door like the marbles from Hungry Hungry Hippos. If we’re being honest, I didn’t know where my mother ran off to in those early days and I didn’t ask. No kid did—we were kids—all we cared about were Popsicles and our bikes. (Well, you cared about your bike. I was terrified of mine, convinced I’d fall off and get run over by a speeding truck.) Although most kids spent their free time roaming the hinterlands of suburbia, returning home only at the ding of the dinner bell, the kinds of outdoor pursuits I preferred involved attaching a long string to my oversized plastic yellow Slinky and taking a leisurely walk around the block.

  If you loved tag or kickball, if you liked roller skates or Frisbee or fresh air, I imagine it was a pretty breezy time to be a kid. If you preferred watching Hee Haw, listening to Bobby Vinton albums, and pretending your Clue pieces were performers in your bedroom’s production of Mame, well . . . childhood might just have been wasted on you. But no matter what kind of kid you were, chances are you spent a decent portion of your afterschool hours with a house key noosed around your neck and a TV Guide in your hands.

  My mother broke the news about my latchkey status on a Sunday night, during a commercial break of The Wonderful World of Disney.

  “When you get off the bus tomorrow, you can use the key to let yourself in,” she said, the lanyard pinched by her spikey nails.

  “Where will you be?” I asked.

  “I’ll be back by dinner.”

  My older brother, Ace, apparently would not be home either. I suspect there were batches of nine-year-olds who were fine with this arrangement—thrilled, even. I, on the other hand, had questions. Mostly about fire and emergency appendectomies and robbers and exploding furnaces and It’s coming from inside the house!

  “Uch, don’t be crazy,” my mother said. “Anyway, bad things don’t happen during the day.”

  “What if I get sick?”

  “You won’t.”

  “What if the power goes out?”

  “Pffft. It’s still light out.”

  “What if the doorbell rings?”

  “Then don’t answer it,” my mother said. “Just stay in your room if you have to.”

  “What if they keep ringing? What if they look normal?”

  “Do not answer the door. Remember,” my mother said, handing over her best advice along with the house key, “Ted Bundy was good-looking.”

  3:15 p.m.

  The red Plymouth Duster sat outside my house, a solid four feet from the curb. Wearing his usual navy sport coat and tie, Grandpa Solly sat at the wheel, his eyes focused on nothing ahead. My mother must have made the call the night before, sometime between her Ted Bundy comment and the eleven o’clock news. I’m sure my pointing out all the potential dangers knocked some sense into her, so she enlisted my grandfather to wait outside our house, with strict instructions that the bus would deposit me at 3:15 p.m. and to not be late, which would never be a problem because Grandpa Solly showed up two hours early for everything. His crispy flaked hands positioned at ten and two even though the car was in Park summoned both comfort and dread in my empty after-school belly.

  “How do you do?” he asked, hoisting himself out of the car.

  “Okay,” I said. “You?”

  “Fine and dandy,” he said. “Fine and dandy.”

  How do you do and fine and dandy were pretty much the only sentences my grandfather uttered in those days. He stood silent, hands in his pockets jangling keys, dimes, and a handful of those no-name mints with the liquid chocolate centers he always had. It bothered me the way he bit into those mints. You were supposed to suck on them until the chocolate seeped out, collecting under your tongue and around your teeth.

  I struggled to get the key into the front door lock without strangling myself as Grandpa Solly stood behind me, unruffled. We were sausaged in the tiny vestibule and I stepped over the mail littering the floor, making a mental note to go back and collect both the TV Guide and Publishers Clearing House packet. Was I supposed to play with Grandpa Solly? Recite something? Give him a snack? It was a bonanza when he made his way onto the sofa in the living room no one used, settling in with an A&P circular by his side. I knew he’d be at that post, staring at our orange walls, until 5:30, when my parents released him.

  3:25 p.m.

  Quick pit stop in the kitchen to corral an unopened bag of Doritos, original Nacho Cheese flavor, not the gross Taco kind that Ace preferred. He was four years older and our tastes were as dissimilar as our characters, but without him pelting balled-up napkins at my head I didn’t know what to do with myself.

  3:27 p.m.

  Five television sets anchored our small house. We had juice with Good Morning America and fell asleep to the sounds of Johnny’s monologue. I learned my dance moves from Solid Gold, how to remedy misunderstandings from Three’s Company, and how to solve crime from The Hardy Boys. Later on, I’d grasp how to drum up intrigue from the ladies of Falcon Crest and get a sex education from the tomfoolery on Hotel.

  Television was the Grand Poobah, our religion. We never had much to say to each other but the house was always filled with canned laughter. And so I just assumed that for the first day sort of on my own, I’d settle in with my stories.

  But I couldn’t find the clicker, so I went upstairs to my room.

  3:31 p.m.

  I opened my desk drawer a smidge, peeking inside to make sure it was still there. The Silverberg’s toy catalog came out annually but I was only interested in an old copy, one featuring the bright orange Barbie Country Camper (with vinyl pop-out tent) that I very well would have sold one of my eyes for. I’d study the beautiful camper whenever I was alone in my room. Sometimes I’d place the catalog in my math book and take it to school, like a stowaway in my backpack.

  I knew the camper would never be mine, nor would Barbie herself, because tenet 5 stated that Barbie was not welcome in our home. This mandate was actually put into place before Phil Donahue barged in, some time after my mother traded in her strand of pearls for the heavy turquoise beads.

  This duel was unfinished, spanning four endless years. The battles all sounded the same: “Pleeeeease,” I’d say. “Why not?”

  “Because Barbie is a negative role model for girls,” she’d say, as if reciting from some brochure picked up at Dr. Resnick’s. “She’s not realistic. I don’t want you trying to measure up later in life.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “I won’t try to measure up. I promise!”

  “Oh, stop it.” Throaty sounds of outrage.

  “But Samantha has twenty-nine!”

  “I don’t care if Samantha has one hundred twenty-nine. Barbie makes girls feel bad about themselves,” my mother would say, struggling with her clothes or hair. “Uch, I look terrible.”

  “I think you look great,” my father would say.

  “Oh, please,” she’d answer, rolling her eyes.

  When it sunk in that I was getting nowhere with Gloria Steinem, I was forced to call upon my street smarts. My Barbie desire was pretty modest. One. I just wanted one glorious plastic whore. How hard could it be to bypass my mother? I began my crusade close to home, approaching the one person I knew who could grasp my need to gussy up and accessorize better than anyone: my dad. He was a bit of a Ken doll himself. How could he say no?

  Well, he said worse than no. He said he’d ask my mother. Uch. He was off the list.

  Next up, four solid contenders: the grandparents. Why hadn’t I thought of them first? Family members, yet out of the daily fray, always willing to bring gifts—they were ideal candidates. The answer to which of the four to choose came swiftly: Nana. My father’s mother. People pleaser, pillar of the synagogue, Nana just wanted everyone to be happy (and marry Jewish). Sweet as a Bartons Almond Kiss, possibly illiterate in a few languages
, she’d ask the fewest questions. Plus, she lived across the street from the mall.

  I decided that after getting the Barbie, I would leave her at Nana’s, in the depths of the basement, where the cat lived and my mother refused to frequent. I drew a map in my diary, a diagram of where Barbie would be sequestered. I approached my grandmother with saucery eyes and smiled during the squeeze of the face by her slick-with-chicken-grease fingers. That’s all it took. The job was done. I had sandbagged my nana.

  I was finally in the Barbie game.

  And it wasn’t long before I was out.

  My mother caught me with Barbie and there was an exchange of words and instructions for Nana to bring that thing back from whence it came. I was inconsolable after that, moping around the house for weeks singing Barry Manilow ballads to ease my pain.

  That was two years before I became a latchkey kid. And even though I was now nine, an age at which one’s Barbie interest should start to wane, mine was more ramped up than ever. I flipped through the toy catalog, and just seeing the little blond girl models polluted with sunshine and bliss as they curled the hair on the ginormous Barbie Styling Head, sweeping electric-blue shadow across her eyelids, made me want to stick forks in my eyes. Women’s lib might have empowered ladies all over the country but it was ruining my free time.

  It’s not like I wanted much. Just Malibu Barbie, complete with fringy yellow towel and pink bulbous sunglasses, who could potentially hang out with Superstar Barbie in Cher’s dressing room, where they’d meet and befriend the Cher doll herself and argue over who gets to wear the Bob Mackie dress and who would sport the fancy Indian headdress and sparkly jumpsuit when they had a soiree at the exquisite Barbie Townhouse, the one with the yellow elevator (dolls sold separately), and home of the new, dashing tenant, the Six Million Dollar Man (with bionic grip), who was angling to date all the Charlie’s Angels dolls so he could have someone to make out with in the back of the orange Country Camper (with vinyl pop-out tent).

  Nine years old and twenty-eight minutes into this Phil Donahue–­imposed life of solitude, I made a decision: feminism was stupid.

  3:43 p.m.

  Ace’s wallpaper was hot dog mustard yellow with a continuous pattern of broad orange plaid squares. The brown shag was wall-to-wall and a KISS Destroyer poster hung on his closet door. I pretended to browse around the room like I didn’t know exactly where I was headed, but I knew full well what interested me in that room and it was in the closet behind a stack of Richie Rich comics. The briefcase was black, a Samsonite, with nubby skin and two slick silver locks flanking the plastic handle. I don’t know how he’d gotten that briefcase, but it wasn’t mine, and that was all the reason I needed to fish around in there any chance I got. Plus, I’d once overheard my mother call it an attaché case, which just made it sound even more like it should be mine.

  I’d been covertly visiting it for a month, if for nothing else than to delight in the clicks as I engaged the silver locks. If my brother was at hockey practice and my parents were deep into The White Shadow, I could be found placing the case on the bed, clicking open the locks, and saying something businessy, like, “I have the microfiche.”

  When I first began snooping inside, there was not much of interest in there. Some hockey cards, birthday notes from Nana, a Cheap Trick ticket stub. In years to come, I’d discover a sandwich bag filled with crunchy greenish leaves and a small wooden pipe shaped like a corncob, the likes of which I’d never seen before. For that reason, I felt it my duty to march downstairs and show my parents. Later that night, I’d hear my father say behind Ace’s closed door, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” followed by the whoosh and slap of the Gucci belt. After that night, Ace barely made eye contact with me. The case would be locked forever and my time with it done, but not before I made another discovery.

  There was no way Grandpa Solly would venture upstairs, so I seized the opportunity and opened the case. To my delight, there were two new items inside.

  (1) A book: familiar to me, because I had its companion squirreled away under my mattress. Recently, we’d found these illustrated hardcovers marooned at the foot of our beds, with no notes from our parents, no further mention or subsequent confab whatsoever. The point of my book, Where Do I Come From?, was to explain how babies showed up in the world so my mother didn’t have to. There was no shortage of cartoony penises and swimming sperm in top hats holding flowers. These were distressing enough, but the capper was the main character, who was naked on almost every page and looked an awful lot like Ziggy. And while I had no interest in seeing anyone’s penis, Ziggy’s was one I really would have preferred to keep under wraps. (Ziggy’s wife, I should mention, was also a bit of a nudist and no vixen either.) They also gave us an education on how to spell penis, even though they said it sounded like pee-nus (“peanuts without the t!” it stated, which completely ruined Snoopy for me).

  My brother’s book, the one staring at me from the case, was entitled What’s Happening to Me?, and I decided right then and there that I didn’t care what was happening to him. I pushed it aside. Underneath lurked other bait.

  (2) A magazine: glossy, with smiling ladies on the cover—a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. I knew instantly where this periodical hailed from. I’d been to my father’s office three times, and with each visit I was too panicked to enter the bathroom due to the neat stack of Playboys weighting down the top of the toilet tank. At home, Ms. magazines were piling up on the kitchen counter, while across town my father’s magazines boasted headlines like, A PICTORIAL FIRST: OUTER SPACE SEX! INTRIGUING!

  Those magazines irked me, and not for the heaving bosoms on the covers, but for the little white strip on each issue with my father’s name and work address typed in black ink. The mailman would tote this magazine around the neighborhood in his mailbag, forced to handle it as he took out stacks of letters and birthday cards from nanas all over the world. And then, upon reaching my dad’s office, he’d know that it was my father receiving this magazine with those ladies on the cover sporting GIRLS OF THE BIG TEN T-shirts and no pants.

  There were copious pages to get through before I hit the gauzy layout of a lady in a white fishnet shirt and nothing else. Gone was Ziggy’s pear of a wife. The farther along I got, the more I was faced with angles of body parts I had no business or interest in seeing. My friend’s mother had given her a special gold compact with which to inspect her private parts at her leisure. I saw little reason to go rooting around in that area.

  I flipped through more of the magazine through squinted eyes, until I arrived at the Tootsie Roll center of the Tootsie Pop. The centerfold. I found this to be a much more polite section, thanks to a flappy thing covering up some of the nakedness and instead of body parts I was presented with something utterly enchanting: an interview. Here, I was led into a world of deep thoughts and esoteric information. Now this was up my alley. I learned that Brandi enjoyed badminton and spy novels and kittens and kissing. But she hated rude people. I made a mental note to put a “Turn-ons & Turnoffs” section in my own diary.

  At the bottom of the Q&A, there was an elaborate signature. I admired the way Brandi looped her B and drew a bubbly heart above the i. I hoped to one day have a great signature like Brandi’s and to be able to say I was turned on by badminton. But I was done with the nudity portion of the day. I needed a palate cleanser.

  4:17 p.m.

  The beige push-button phone hung on the kitchen wall with a long spirally cord, allowing you free rein to walk the perimeter of the house. The living room and kitchen were far enough apart that I didn’t have to worry about Grandpa Solly listening in. I dialed randomly.

  “Hello?” said the voice on the other end of the line.

  “Is Joanie there?”

  “I’m sorry, who?”

  She sounded nice enough, but old, and like she was chewing something smushy, maybe egg salad.

  “Joanie,�
� I said again.

  “I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong number.”

  “You have the wrong number,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Pardon me, dear?”

  “Is Joanie there?”

  “Right, then. Goodbye, dear.”

  Granted, it wasn’t my best work but, in fairness, I was just warming up. So I called back.

  “Hello?” she said, her voice more clipped this time.

  “Is Joanie there?”

  “Dear, I just told you there is no one here by that name and that you have the wrong number. Now please stop calling or I will alert the operator.”

  This was no threat for me. I continued.

  “My mother is an operator.” (Which might have been true. If you recall, I had no idea what profession she had slipped into.)

  “Right, dear. Why don’t you do your homework?”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “That’s fine. I’m going to hang up now.”

  And she did. So I called a third time.

  “Is your refrigerator running?” I said.

  Click.

  I moved on.

  “Hello?” This time it was a man, also old, and aggravated from the get-go.

  “I am stuck in a box,” I said in a teeny voice.

  “What?” He was hostile, like I’d interrupted his afternoon appointment with Bonanza. “Miriam? Is that you?”