Daddy gives my sisters and me nicknames when we’re little girls.

Donna, Happy-Go-Lucky.

Jeanne, Smartie.

Barbara, Hot Shot.

Maria, Mona Lisa.

Whether or not we believe it, the elephant in the room, impossible to overlook, is that Daddy truly loved us.  The elephant that I can’t talk about is Daddy.

“He was a drunk,” said Mom.  She slams the pink elephant book on him.

“Jeanne, you’re the only one that has unconditional love for him,” said Barbara.

Stick up for Mom.  Always.  Don’t talk about Daddy.  Never.

“I saved you girls from Jefferson Street,” said Mom.  This is an obvious truth.  The elephant is banished.

Yet, the only one who truly saves me is Mother Mary.

The nicknames follow us in life, even when I see the Mom that I miss when she peeps out, now and then, in a dementia unit of a nursing home.  Mom tells Maria that she’ll always hold a special place for her in her heart.  I’m over the top about this because my Mona Lisa princess sister needs to hear it.  Barbara struts her stuff, holds Mom’s hand, tells her that she loves her, in her Hot Shot way.  Donna gives out a Happy-Go-Lucky vibe as she teases her son into kissing Mom.  Mom smiles.  Mom tells me that she missed me years ago, when I was away at Smartie college.  How I wish she had told me then, at the time I needed it most.

When I was a teen, Mom said that I should be more like Donna, Happy-Go-Lucky, put a smile on my face, instead of a frown, let things roll off my shoulder.

Through my thin skin, a weight sits in my cord-knotted stomach when Mom talks like that.  The elephant is in my throat.  I can’t speak, or defend myself, wonder why Mom wants me to be more like my sister and what was wrong with me, the way that I am.

The way that I am.  Smartie.

The nickname takes me back.  Daddy plays games with my sisters and me.  We’re in the kitchen, where aproned Mom cooks yummy gravy, spaghetti, and meatballs, for Sunday dinner.  The kitchen smells good, like an Italian restaurant.

“Your mother’s the best cook,” said Daddy.

He keeps us out of Mom’s hair, sits on a chair, Barbara, Maria, and I henpeck around him as we lead him in a beauty parlor game.  He lets us brush his hair with Mom’s pink hairbrush.  We use her black bobby pins to curl Daddy’s hair, in the way that Mom does her hair, but the pins slip-slide to the floor, which crack us up.  In another game, with a quarter hidden in his fist, he gives us turns at guessing which hand the coin is in.  I get it right every time.

“Smartie,” he says, unconditionally.

“Look ahead, don’t look back, hold onto your dreams,” said Mom.

The torpedoed teenager mess in my head spins in divorce trauma, welfare, mom-beats-me-because-she-does-not-like-the-way-I-look-at-her, subsidized housing, mom-rips-my-clothes-out-of-the-closet-because-she-does-not-like-the-way-I-hang-them, rich Darien, no money, embarrassment, no memories, ugly words, why-don’t-you-just-marry-your-boyfriend-and-get-the-hell-out, housework sweat, no help, can’t-use-the-dryer-so-towels-freeze-on-the-clothesline, crippling shyness, yells, don’t-bother-Uncle-Pippi, wild wooden spoon smacks, school stress, shame, endless fear, have-another-of-Aunt-LaLa’s-Italian-cookies, squashed feelings, say-your-prayers-at-bedtime, mow-the-lawn-and-car-drivers-pass-by-and-stare-at-my-tshirted-chest, screams, mom-beats-me-because-I-crack-up-her-car, slaps, pinches, bruises, always-be-friends-with-your-sisters, swear words, mom’s-pink-hard-hairbrush-hits-my-shoulder, violent fights, you-can’t-do-anything-right, fuck, fuck, fuck, mom-says-she-has-no-one-to-help-her-but-me-burdens.

Smartie doesn’t work so well in those days.

Once in awhile, I sneak into Mom’s bedroom and search in a dresser to be reminded of my nickname and what it was like to have a Daddy.  It’s a good thing that Daddy recorded the nicknames on paper, in a drawing for Mom.  With colorful pencils, he drew his daughters and taped a black and white photo of each of us, taken in Woolworth’s photo booth, above our portraits.  We have beautiful smiles and the most hopeful eyes.  A headline, in his technical block hand-lettering, above each girl, lists an item number.  I am Number 2, as I’m the second-oldest.  We are all required in his recipe as he wrote, “Mix four items together and bake well:  WOW!  Happy Anniversary.  Love, Joe.”    Below each girl’s image are our nicknames.  In a corner, compass arrows with a question mark symbolize what item number might be next in their family dreams.

Over the years, I ask Mom if I can have the drawing, a marriage memento, but she says no.  She keeps it in a drawer of what used to be Daddy’s dresser.  When I’m in my thirties, Mom finally gives me the drawing.  It is in fragile condition.

“I know you appreciate old things, Jeanne, and that you’ll take care of it,” said Mom.

It is the sweetest wedding anniversary present that I have ever seen.

In the nursing home, I show Mom my wedding album, family photos, a Noroton Heights history book, and photos of her grandfather and brother, Pippi, as a Darien high school football star.  The weight in my stomach is here as I search for clues, reasons, answers, on how to live up to my know-it-all nickname and for God’s directions to my happiness.

Smartie investigations give the answer key to many questions.

Now I know that Mom tried, at times, in kindness, to lighten the elephant with her roundabout nature.  She didn’t get that I have to look back to look ahead.  I hold onto dreams.  Not her way.  My way.  In a reoccurring dream, I am dutifully connected to Daddy and Mom with a strong, white cord.  I have to go where they go.  The cord is fragmented and weakened with Mom’s death.

Dreams, dreams, dreams.  With a call to joy, my mother-in-law spelled me with dream interpretations to find answers.  Years spirit by.  I investigate a dream where the elephant in the room comes to me.  An elephant is in my yard, to clear away debris, from the sidewalk installation that occurs in true life.  He clears away leaves and twigs near a dogwood tree.  He helps me clear away the mess.  He is friendly and I don’t fear him at all.  He is thick-skinned and lets things roll off his shoulder.  The elephant speaks for God’s power to remove obstacles.  I offer the elephant an apple, as though it’s a present for a teacher.

Through investigation, I gather that the defensive nature of an elephant may represent an introverted nature.  Elephants symbolize inner strength, wisdom, memory.  The power of persistence.  It depicts the power of the unconscious with a conscious direction to achieve wonderful things.  So, it is the totality of self rather than awareness of only the conscious ego.  In Christianity, this is the Holy Spirit, the influence that heals, instructs, guides us to truth.  If you feed an elephant in your dream, you are elevated through kindness.  If the elephant is friendly, you will have good luck in what you are undertaking to do.  If the elephant is doing a job, you will have success above your wildest dreams.  I don’t believe in dreams, still, I learn that if you are seeking answers, the elephant symbolizes the key to knowledge and truth.  You will be told the answer.

Frida Kahlo was a woman artist of persevering strength, worshipped by me.

From top to bottom:

Victorian beeswax plaque of Mother & Child.  (Unknown artist).

Accordian pull-out of Kahlo’s self-portraits.

Ceramic plaque with flower embroidery.  (Jean, 1980)

Ceramic lamps, leaf pattern.  (Jean, 1980).

Art saves lives.

Daddy watches me as I imagine he sits on the brick front porch of my house.  His clear, blue-green gemstone eyes twinkle as he joyfully chuckles to see me.  I know his laugh.  He wears a Mom-iron-pressed white shirt, sleeves rolled up, collar unbuttoned, white t-shirt peeps out, beige trousers, neatly cuffed at the ankles, all 1950s vintage clothing now.

Silly, I think, I know, I dream.  Silly, old me.  He’s gone over thirty years, yet I feel his presence still, in wistful moments, as I pass by the porch to throw the trash to the curb in the early morning light, or walk up the drive to the kitchen door in the twilight of the soft sky at the end of the day, when night is just beginning.  Daddy is in twilight, a state of my childhood cloudiness, waning in my mind.

His gemstone eyes will never see my children, one with eyes the color of a cloudless blue summer sky, one with eyes the color of the deep, ocean blue.  They are the gems of my eye.  They would have been his, too.

“Hello, Daddy,”  I say, waving to the porch to resurrect him.

Wistful moments wondering what could have been, what should have been, what wasted wishes got rollered over by his phantom alcoholic twists-and-turns that made him abandon me and my sisters.  A spiritual resurrection comes late in life as pain lets go of wondering what to say about Daddy, how to tell about Daddy, how not to be embarrassed and hurt over Daddy, of letting go of the crumpled cursed tears of what I imagine are a daddy’s moments with my first date, high school report cards, college maneuvers, wedding aisle, father-and-daughter dance, first house, first baby, first, first, first.

With my spiritual resurrection and after Mom’s gone, I reunite my parents on my front porch.  They don’t fight as in the old days.  She sits close to him as in their early days of lustful love.

Those were ugly, the old days of fighting that fell between blessed spells.

Hateful, shuddering screams over just about anything fill our house.  Mom’s yell to Daddy to get the hell out often ends fights, as he goes his way, to Tony’s liquor store, to the Colony Bar and Grill, his brother’s house, or to god only knows where else.

“He’s an alcoholic,” said Mom, her only explanation, as if I know what that means.

Many fights are about money.  No, all fights are about money.  I think money is more valuable than me.  It is scary when they fight.  Why don’t they know how I feel and why don’t they just shut the hell up?

With one fight, the remains of Daddy’s business, a jewelry-making shop, are on the kitchen table.  In the gem-polishing business, friction is key.  In madness, Daddy grabs a box filled with aquamarine, garnet, opal, ruby, emerald, and amethyst gemstones, throws open the kitchen’s back door, and out on the porch, slings the box to the backyard.  The gems sail, skitter-scatter, settle in the grass.  As in so many of his starts-and-stops, Daddy abandons Joseph’s Jewelers, then cuts and runs from the house.

Mom orders Donna and me to collect the gems.  I use my eagle eyes to find them in the summer-green grass, turn it into a game, guess how many feet the distance is from where Daddy stood on the porch, to how far he could throw, and how much flexed muscle force is needed to make gems fly.  I think of hunting for Easter eggs, Jesus’ candy jewels in the grass.  I find a lot more gems than Donna does and tell her so.

Instead of doing this, instead of wondering what is so important about these shimmering gems to make my parents act the way they do, instead of trying to figure things out, I want to push my dolly in her carriage, ride a tricycle, pet the cat, jump rope, roll about and watch ants, pluck-and-suck sweet blossoms from the honey suckle bush, all things a six-year-old girl should do, not shudder-shake a scare in my stomach.

“Did you get all of them, Jeanne?” asks Mom.  We dump the precious gems into her cupped hands.

I silently nod yes.

“Can’t we leave Daddy and go and live with Nanny?” hiccups Donna, out of a blue dream.

Mom hands my sister a napkin to dry her tears.

“No, that’s just silly,” said Mom.