Maria, Maria, Maria. Thank God for Maria.

“I do, do, do,” said Mom.

Mom complains that she does a hell of a lot for me and my thankless sisters. I don’t quite get what she does for me. I always do a lot for her. At least, it seems that way to me.

I’m in a dark devil place.

I scowl at a sickly-yellow-colored food stamp with an image of General Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, as they proudly sign the Declaration of Independence.

I wish I could sign my independence from Mom’s power over me.

I hate, hate, hate this inner commotion of devil and angel where I can’t disobey her.

I wish the government’s Secretary of Agriculture and the Welfare department could figure out something else for Mom besides these stupid food stamps that we use to put food on our lousy table.

Food stamps. Mom’s safety net to make sure we eat well, except, well, she proudly hates using them. She hates, hates, hates, being on Welfare. She works under the table, in an Italian restaurant’s kitchen in Darien. At the same time, she collects Welfare. She got the job through her cousin Lucia, and does this so she can pay for our Catholic school tuition at St. Mary’s, and to get the hell off of Welfare. God forbid if the Welfare department found out. I worry about that.

At eleven-years-old, I know what food stamps can buy. Wonder bread, Cheerios, a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, bananas, a head of lettuce, and chop meat for meatballs. It doesn’t cover the red carton of Pall Mall cigarettes with the rich flavor that rolls down the
check-out counter, but Mom needs those. Good thing Uncle Pippi’s garden subsidizes our table with tomatoes, peppers, green beans, squash, basil, cucumbers, and sweet corn.

“Here, Jeanne, pay the lady,” said Mom. She hands me the food stamp coupon book, then turns away to pack the groceries in brown, paper bags. Mom won’t give the food stamps to the cashier at Grade A Market, where we grocery shop, in Shippan.

Scrutinize, evaluate, judge her poverty level, wonder how she made a poor choice in a husband by saying “I do.” She worked too damn hard to hold a bad marriage together, made a poor choice to have four children, a poor choice that put her in this embarrassing spot of her battle.

Now, it’s subsidize your food, your rent, your life.

Mom’s black, wavy hair falls to the side of her face as she works. She won’t look at me. I don’t look at the cashier as I hand the book over.

“Put the eggs on top, Barbara. So they don’t break,” said Mom as my sister helps pack.

“Okay, Ma,” said Barb. She sniffs a loaf of Italian bread with her D’Arrigo nose.

“Don’t make such a commotion,” said Mom to my little sister, Maria, as she squabbles over who gets to open a bag of lollipops.

We carry the groceries to the car. I carry Mom’s fear, shame, sadness. Pain is the rent I pay as it permeates my skin, like a tomato turned black, with putty peel as flesh turns to rot.

St. Mary’s towers catty-corner, across the street from Grade A Market. I feel better just seeing my church and school. In church, at my next confession, I’ll pray for God to forgive my dark devil. As I sit on a wooden pew, I’ll look into Mother Mary’s eyes on the icon hanging above my head. Mother Mary will look right back at me.

Like Mom, I think I own Darien.

How can we not think this way, as the town is at the heart of us?

Yes, the town proper owns the beaches, the woods, the parks, and the sidewalks that roll beneath my walkin’ feet. All of these things enter my eyes wildly. I suck them in and own them in my heart.

As I walk home from my after-school cashier job at Grade A Market, in the center of town, or, as I sit in the passenger front seat of Mom’s car as she drives home from
Aunt Matheline’s richness, or, on a ride about town to see lights twinkling in front yards, the lavish Christmas trees call out to me, flicker from sparkling windows. Homes whisper in my ear, as their Victorian, Colonial, and rich Mansion styles give peeks under their skirts of a life different than mine. Trees sing, from windows where fireplaces shimmer, candles glimmer, where holiday parties gather in rich people’s homes. I suck them in. They are my own. Beautiful pipedreams.

There in the closet-darkness, we sit, crouch on shoes, slippers, boots. My back pushes up against the cold, hard metal, round canister of the vacuum cleaner. I pushed Barb and Maria in the closet before me, then slid the door closed. Mom ordered me to do this at times like this. It’s my job to keep Barb and Maria quiet. We wait for our parents to get through their selfish, fuckin’ fight. Donna hides under the soft, turquoise blanket on her bed.

“Get the hell out! Leave me alone!” Mommy screams. I hear a big bang as Daddy curses out the front door.

Mom stores the vacuum cleaner in our bedroom. I like our vacuum cleaner. It is funny-looking, unlike the new, sleek, low, cylinder type advertised by Sears, Roebuck and Company in The Stamford Advocate newspaper, as being noiseless, quietly swooshing over your carpets, so quiet, you won’t even notice it’s there.

December 23, 2009
My sisters shoot piercing arrows, pull back, the twang of their bows make arrows fly to my heart. These are the painful pierces, the ugly words, the horrible looks, the off-the-shoulder, turn away actions, nose in the air looks that shout they don’t care. Yet, interspersed with these arrows are the ones from cupid’s bow – the ones that land softly in the pillowy flesh of my heart and spread their fiery warmth, sisterly love, love, love, in me. I am eager to love.

An imaginary white cord ties me to Daddy in the water, the cool, blue water of Long Island Sound, at Cummings Beach. The cord squiggles and flows across the water’s surface, twinkles in the sun, reflects light that bounces on me. Toe-by-toe, I inch out to deeper water, where Daddy is clamming.

“Don’t come out any further, Jeanne. I told you not to go out above your waist. Stay with your sisters.” Daddy scolds as his wet, white shoulders scoop under the water and he bends to pick up another clam. Surrendering, I stay at the low end. I obey him because Dear, Sweet, Jesus wouldn’t like it if I didn’t.

I connect to Daddy in ways unlike Mom. I long to be with him, out above my waist, take a risk, dig heels into muck, blindly search for clams to triumphantly throw, hear a hard snap, as a clam hits another in the basket that bobs happily along nearby. I long to spend time with him, learn from him, without Mom or sisters bugging me. I long to be kissed, hugged, squeezed. I long to be loved by him. Is that so much for this nine year-old girl in a blush of a faded, pink, hand-me-down bathing suit to ask for?

This is a start to a piece that I’m working on now. It’s 1967 and I’m 8 years-old…

Daddy slowly slides the black, leather belt out of the loops of his pressed, gray pants, the sharp creases run down his long legs, the fresh finish ironed by Mom, the iron gliding smoothly on the ironing board, the kitchen air invisibly clouded with the magic of Niagara spray starch. Mom’s jet-black hair, tightly pin-curled with black bobby pins against her head, makes her high cheek bones tauter, her head smaller, as shoulders, patterned with blue violets and a ring of white-petaled, yellow-centered daisies, circle around her aproned neck. She sways with the soothing rhythm of the iron’s motion and sings along with the Beatles on the kitchen radio, all you need is love, da-da-da-da-da. Mom says that Niagara makes ironing shirt collars and children’s clothes a breeze.

I’m up above the world, kick my baby blue, Keds-covered feet against the Grandpa-built stone wall, and sit on the wall’s gray slate ledge that overlooks the driveway at Nanny’s house. Great-uncle Mike’s maple tree shadily filters God’s sun above me and my sisters. The four of us girls take a break from our sweet, summertime tag of running around the yard, picking dandelions, sneaking into Grandpa’s kitchen garden to steal cucumber bites of watery sunshine, ignoring Mom’s sour yells as she sticks her head out of a window and scolds, “get out of the garden,” and a break from the pushing, pulling, pinching, that propels us to be pilloried by our teasing of each other. Underneath that messy ragging is sister-love. Served to us in plastic cups decorated with a fake Hawaiian grass skirt is Aunt LaLa’s sweet and sour lemonade; my cup trimmed with a pink rim, Donna’s with blue, Barb’s with green, Maria’s with yellow. We’re on our own island in Darien, having a lemonade summer.

Sometimes, Mom smiles at a job well done and says,”You’re a good girl.” Sometimes, she laughs at the t.v., or at a joke with a sister, girlfriend, or Nanny.

Mom smiles when there’s a happy time, like when we celebrate her day with a birthday cake, or in springtime, when we decorate an Easter egg tree in the yard.

It isn’t Easter without an egg tree. My sisters and I hang colored plastic eggs strung with string on a young birch tree alongside our subsidized driveway of our subsidized house. Sometimes, Mom hangs them by herself if the four of us run, helter-skelter, curling our fists, from what we saw as another chore.

The eggs seem lonely to me then.

Sometimes, I hang them by myself, in a mood to save one of a handful of family traditions and a handful of happy times. I am a good girl. Mom doesn’t have the time because of the hand God dealt her, or she doesn’t feel good, or, she’s just not in the mood, so I do it.

“God is good,” says Mom when she sees the yellow, blue, green, pink, orange, and purple eggs swish-and-sway among the new spring-green leaves and the dark splotches of uncurled bark of the tree trunk. Happiness is in the tree.

I will go to my Easter God today.

Heaven is under my Keds as I run in Nanny’s yard and chase my sisters down the hill.