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Retirement Talk for Boomers, Seniors, and Retirees |
Frog Spit
Jackie Spinks
Chapter 1
Growing Up Mormon
When
Sunday rolled around we were in for a day of high drama, as that was the day
Mama, and Grandma Dee, Daddy’s mother, who came from
The power, status game would start like this with us. After dinner Grandma, Mama, Daddy, my brother and myself would crowd into the Model A for the traditional Sunday drive, cruising up one street and down another, while Mama evaluated houses in our town of about 30,000, and then probably wracked with envy demolished them with, “I wouldn’t have that pile of junk on a bet.”
It was on these drives that Grandma Dee and Mama skirmished for power, and the joust began over where they’d sit in the car, who would sit in the majestic front seat or who would play second string in the back seat.
“I can get in the back seat,” Grandma D would say as we approached the car.
“No, you get in the front with your son,” Mama would generously counter. “Where you can talk to him.”
Although, wanting to present herself as big-hearted and self-sacrificing, Mama hated riding in the back with Jason and myself, as we equally hated having her back with us, telling us every two minutes to sit down and be quiet.
“Oh, I don’t need to sit in front to talk to him,” Grandma Dee said, “I can talk to him anytime.”
Now, this was something new to Mama. Was Daddy sneaking off and visiting Grandma Dee on the sly? Mama was quiet for a couple of heartbeats.
”Oh, I like to sit in the back with the kids-- they can keep me company,” Mama exhaled like something had squeezed her. Now that was a new one. Being caged in the back seat with our wiggling, squirming body drove her nuts.
“I’d really prefer to sit in the back,” I heard Grandma Dee whisper softly to the firmament. Mama was working so hard at making concessions, I could visualize how cranky she’d be tomorrow.
“Eat your mush,” she’d say.
“No,” I’d reply.
“Eat your God damned mush.”
“No.”
“Jimmy, do something with that
kid.”
“Don’t have time, “ said Daddy, “Got to get to work.”
And once Daddy had left for work, Mama would collapse and weep at the injustices of the world. I could expect this to happen tomorrow as surely as I could expect Daddy would spend most of Monday evening outside working on the car.
“I’ll sit in front,” I piped up, offering what I thought was a good compromise. I was ignored.
“No! Mother Dee, I insist you sit in front,,” Mama said. “It’s easier for me to get in and out of the back seat.” Now climbing over the front seat in a two-door Model-A to get in and out, took a little ducking and twisting, but it wasn’t as hard a squeeze as Mama made it out to be.
“Well, all right,” Grandma said, “If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.” Mama prided herself on being magnanimous to everyone, at the same time she’d be livid the next day at the person for whom she’d made the sacrifice and this would go on for two days, with Mama mad as a raccoon stuck in a bramble bush, at every one of us, who made the mistake of coming within her orbit. I could understand now why those cardinals fired up Joan of Arc. Martyrs, like Joan and Mama can lather up the most hand-folded, head-bowed, pious anyone. And not only is the martyr crabby but who nobody appreciates the martyr’s martyrdom, they’re hell bent determined on exposing their suffering.
During the seating altercation, Daddy stood beside the car silent, while Mama climbed over the front seat into the back, always scraping her leg and either saying, “Ouch,” or “I hope I didn’t get a run in my stocking.”
Smoothing her dress under her and sighing, she’d take her time about pushing the front seat forward and allowing Grandma Dee to settle in the front seat.
On that day besides trying to either ignore the power struggle between Mama and Grandma Dee Daddy had a mission—to find our future home, one Mama like and most important, one we could afford. Along with that mission we had to drive by the houses of the men Daddy worked with so Mama could appraise them and routinely give them a failing grade, along with a sharp critique as to why she wouldn’t have that fire-trap on a bet.
Sporadically, to show we were a cooperative part of the family, Jason and I would spot a newly painted house and say, “There’s a nice house, Mama.”
If Grandma wasn’t along, Mama would ignore us, as the no-nothing kids that we were, but if Grandma was along Mama would find something wrong with it to demonstrate her good taste. Maybe she’d only gone to the 8th grade, but she knew quality when she saw it.
“Look at that little itty-bitty porch, will you?” she’d say, “Bungalows aren’t supposed to have such little porches. It looks ridiculous, like it’s been stuck on as an after-thought. I can just see those builders, “Oh, guess what? We forgot the porch. Let’s put it on now. And those windows? Tiny. I wouldn’t have that house if you gave it to me?”
Or she’d raise her voice so Grandma Dee could hear, “Doesn’t Cate (Daddy’s sister, Grandma Dee’s beloved daughter) have a bungalow.”
“Yes, but it has a big porch.” Grandma Dee was going to rock on the side of the
bed over that one. It was a major event when Grandma Dee visited. We’d have a fancy Sunday Dinner, than on all the other meals we’d have for the rest of the week. The meal invariable consisted of duck or quail or some other bird Daddy had shot while hunting, mashed potatoes, (we’d get hundred pound gunny sacks of potatoes from Mama’s brother) gravy, peas or string beans we’d grown in our back yard, biscuits that I cut out with a drinking glass, home-made blackberry jam (Jason and I picked the blackberries) and lemon pie, all Grandma Dee’s favorites. Mama wanted Grandma D to see that Daddy might have married someone with only an 8th grade education but he hadn’t married a slouch as a cook. The menus for the rest of the week would be oatmeal for breakfast (I hated oatmeal) fried bread for lunch, macaroni, beans, rice and potatoes, with sometimes some beef. Daddy took his lunch of a sandwich, apple and cookies in a medal lunchpail.
Mama felt inferior all her life because of her lack of education and to make up for it disguised our poverty the best she could and if she could get away with it, put on airs.
Before we’d go on our Sunday drives, Mama would check in the phone book for the addresses of Daddy’s fellow employees. During those Depression years, if people rented, they seldom installed telephones, but borrowed the neighbor’s phone. So when we looked at a person’s house, that had been listed in the telephone book, we were fairly certain they owned or were in the process of owning, or as it was also known—paying off the place.
If several Bob Smiths were listed in the phone book, we’d drive by both until Daddy caught sight of some identifying mark, like the guy’s car and he’d say, “That’s the one.” And Mama would say, “Slow down,” and she’d give it a good once over.
“Oh, it’s not so much. They’ve frilled it up with that wrought iron, but it’s nothing I’d have,” and she’d turn her eyes forward after finding its fatal flaw. Sometimes I wondered if Daddy pointed out the most unsightly of Bob smith houses to make Mama happy.
For all people even the muckety-mucks, the house was the primary, maybe the only method of gauging status.
And woe to us, if the house, belonging to one of Daddy’s fellow employees, was better than our present home especially if the guy earned less than Daddy.
“He makes less than you, doesn’t he, Jimmy?” Mama would inquire in a mournful voice.
“Well, about the same.”
“I wonder how they can afford a place like that? Does she work?” Women seldom worked during the Depression.
“I don’t know,” Daddy probably contemplated give the excuse that she worked in order to explain the nice house, but then ran a quick survey of options, and deduced Mama would check it out. She didn’t like women who worked outside the home, as they made the female playing field uneven, perhaps Mama was also jealous, so Daddy better play it neutral.
“What do his folks do?” Mama asked meaning did they have the money to loan their offspring the down payment, so they could afford this expensive house.
“I think his father’s a millwright.” When it came to houses Daddy had figured out that playing it sort of honest was the superior philosophy as Mama would dig around until she discovered the truth.
But I knew Daddy gritted his teeth when he said, “A millwright,” because Mama would slump into a depression. The reason for the unhappy silence was because this house, superior to many, purchased at a lesser wage meant that the wife of Daddy’s lesser fellow employee managed money better than Mama.
She wouldn’t speak for the rest of the journey home, except to shout back to us, “If you kids don’t shut up, you’re going to get it when we get home. An idle threat.
On occasion we’d drive by Daddy’s boss’s house, which was an elegant ante-bellum mansion, with columns, set back from the road and with this house Mama would exclaim, “Oh, I wouldn’t have it if they forced it on me (oh yeah!? Tell me another one) Just think of heating that place and keeping it clean. His wife must wear herself out keeping that place up.”
“I think they have a maid.”
“Oh.”
If Grandma Dee was with us, she’d sit silently during these exchanges discreetly rubbing her nose with her handkerchief, embroidered around the edges and either stare out the window or pull out and rearrange the tortoise pins that held her long gray hair in its proper Victorian knot at the nape of her neck.
Mama disliked Grandma Dee, but Grandma was such a timid little Victorian washerwoman, it was hard for anyone else to dislike her.
Her hair was polished back tightly into a knot and she wore the same black coat for thirty years, under which she wore a loose dark housedress. She owned three dresses. In winter she wore a brown cardigan she’d knitted herself. Although shabby, she was always impeccable. She was also the smartest person in our family, able to solve any kind of homework problem Jason or I might have. Made me wonder, before me time for wondering, what smarts has to do with big-frog jobs. After Grandma’s husband died at the age of forty in the flu epidemic of 1918. she supported her six kids by doing
She wore her wedding ring on hands disfigured by years of plunging them into water saturated with bleach and lye soap and than pulling out heavy washes and wringing them out by hand. Her hands were so maimed now the only way her ring could be removed would be to cut it off and she wouldn’t do that.
“Why not, Grandma, you’re not married anymore?”
“Oh, yes, dear, I’m still married.”
“But he’s dead.”
“But that doesn’t matter.
I’m still married to him.”
The most important event that
happened to her in her life was meeting Queen
Self -effacing, overly impressed with royalty (once we
shocked and offended her by asking of Queen
Once home from our Sunday drive and Grandma was gone, Mama would light into Daddy.
“You always let your mother sit in the front seat.”
“But you said you wanted her to,” Daddy would counter.
“Well, if you’d said something, stuck up for me, like Signe’s husband does—after all, I’m only your wife—or is your mother more important to you than I am?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sakes. What difference does it make who sits where?”
Mama ignored Daddy’s cussing. Unless she was really angry she’d remonstrate, “Jimmy, don’t sweat around the kids.”
But now her indifference to his swearing meant she was steaming.
“It all goes to show you very obviously put your mother before me.”
“I don’t put my mother before you. I never have.”
“Yes, you do.”
“How can you say that?”
“You always let her sit in the front seat and if that doesn’t show you put first I don’t know what does.”
“Okay, I’ll tell
her from now on, she has to sit in the back seat.”
”Why not.”
” She’ll think I put you up to it and that I’m a terrible person.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Oh, just drop it,” and Mama slammed a few things around and walked out of the room.
The hostility Mama displayed towards Grandma was based on one thing—which was partly fault. It was a remark Grandma Dee made while Mama was in labor with me.
In our family every woman likes to put on a show when delivering a child. She let’s go with one piercing scream after another. And if our screams don’t reverberate back from the farthermost walls in the hospital, we’ve not made our case.
So when Daddy, young, in his twenties, returned to the hospital after work, with Grandma Dee in tow, for support, during Mama’s labor and heard her screams he became apprehensive, filled with guilt and did some rapid soul-searching on the payoff for sex.
He sat outside in the hospital corridor across from Mama’s room, his head in his hands mumbling over and over, “Oh God, what have I done? I’m the one responsible for all her suffering. I should be shot.” And this was exactly what Mama wanted—until Grandma Dee butted in. She patted Daddy on the back. “Don’t worry Son, it really doesn’t hurt all that much.”
THIS DID IT! Mama overheard that comment and after that cultivated such a rancor towards Grandma Dee she could barely stand the sight of her and an even greater gripe towards Daddy for not supporting her in her on-going fracas with Grandma.
And while Daddy got lambasted the most, we kids took some heat, too. We felt sorry for Grandma, her hands bearing witness to her life of toil.
“Grandma Dee’s nice,” Jason avowed and his treachery turned Mama’s face red and her eyes into slits.
“Did Grandma cook you chocolate pudding when you were sick with the mumps or have a birthday party for you or buy you that bat you wanted even though she had to go without medicine for herself to do it? Did she?”
“No.”
“Well, than don’t let me hear talk about who’s nice and who’s not anymore.”
After several hundred of these tiffs, when Sunday dinner was over Daddy would slowly get up from the table saying, “Well, I guess I’ll go warm up the old Tin Lizzie.”
“That would be nice, dear,” Grandma would reply.
And out he’d go the screen door slamming behind him. We’d sit around the table, silent, waiting. He’d be back in a few minutes.
“Something’s haywire with the
car. Needs a new gasket or something, I
guess.”
Grandma Dee would say, “Oh, dear, do you think you can drive me home?”
“Oh sure. It’ll go that far.”
Mama would sign with relief. Another
Sunday drive averted.
So Mama was deprived of her Sunday
drive, but at least she wouldn’t have to sit in the back seat and watch Grandma
sitting beside Daddy like some consort.