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Frog Spit

Jackie Spinks

                                               Chapter Eighteen

            During the thirties, sex education was catch as catch can.  And as I seldom caught on to even the most obvious things I didn’t catch on to that.

 Even today it takes me forever to catch on to jokes.  They swirl around my head, everybody laughs uproariously, I smile in what I hope is a knowing fashion and later my curiosity getting the better of me ask someone, “What did they mean by that?”

            “Oh, was that it!  Yeah, that was pretty funny,” I’d reply to their explanation, but even their explanation dribbled off me like icing on a hot cross bun.  Another defect I have is that I unerringly pursue knowledge in the wrong direction.  “See me.  See me,” the right knowledge could be standing up and waving its arms and I’d ignore it or take the other route.  Hence, I devote a lot of energy ferreting out clues from unreliable sources.

            So, I was amazingly slow at catching on about sex, even living part time on a farm.  I couldn’t associate animals with humans, first because  Elder Bob said humans weren’t animals and Mama said he always told the truth. 

            I deduced, after self-examination, if babies came out of the mother, which I doubted, the only place big enough for babies to come out was through the mouth, but a neighbor boy said babies didn’t come from the mouth and ran off before he could elaborate but assured me the mouth wasn’t the exit.

            For various periods of time, I’d abandon my mission, but reinstall it with a determined passion when some playmate would taunt me, “Jackie thinks storks bring babies.  Tee hee!”  I would have cut out my tongue before I’d reply, “Okay if the stork doesn’t bring them, who does?”

            I tried to give up my investigation, but this baby knowledge gnawed at some central management in me.  It seemed everyone else knew something I didn’t know, even the kids my age and younger.  I had to find out.

            Mama was a fount of information on everything except this.  I couldn’t open the front door without releasing a tsunami of advice on all things immoral.

            “Mama, where do babies come from?”

            “You’re a good girl aren’t you?” Mama inquired.

            “Yeah.”

            Don’t get a reputation. Stay a good girl. Don’t dress like a tramp.”

            “What’s a tramp, Mama?”

            “She’s a woman no man will marry.”

            “Why?”
            “Because she’s a tramp. Always be a good girl.  Don’t do anything that will make people talk about you.’
            “But what aren’t I supposed to do?”

            “It’s easy to be a good girl.”

            So I set out to find the answer of where babies came from and what seemed to be a connected issue—being a good girl.  And Granny, probably as a result of being a Northern Swede, with freezing fjords and rocky scrabble farming, seemed to have a tougher hide or less touchiness about these matters than Mama, who was a confirmed flapper, chewed Spearmint, practiced the Charleston when no one was looking (I didn’t count), stick her gum under the nearest chair, table or desk for safe keeping, almost never reclaiming it had a reluctance so whenevr I’d bring it up Mama would say I made her nervous.          “Mama where do babies come from?”  I hit her up again.

            “YOU GET ON MY NERVES ALWAYS PESTERING ME WITH THAT QUESTION.”

            “But Mama…”

            “Can’t you see I’m too nervous to talk about that?”

            “Do you know, Mama?”

            “Are you trying to give me a nervous breakdown?”

            “No.”

            “That kid has nerves of steel.  She has the nerves of a Philistine.  She could sleep on a bed of nails and not feel a thing,” Mama spoke to the room at large.

            So Granny was the one to approach.  I tackled Granny, while she was cutting onions.

            “Where do babies come from, Granny?”

            “The stork brings them.”

            “No Granny, the kids told me the stork doesn’t bring babies.”

            “What do kids know?”

            “But I looked for the stork when Aunt Agnes had her baby and there was none.”

            “Go play.”

            “Please, Granny, I want to know.”

            “Oh, al right, they come out of the onion patch.  Now go.”

            “So being, by nature, as I previously described myself, both obtuse and of a scientific mien, I strolled out to the garden, squatted on a rock  and began my vigil, determined the next baby to pop out of the onion patch I’d grab.  After about fifteen minutes, tiring of sentry duty, I re-entered the kitchen, picked up a big spoon and returned to the onion patch to stir up some mud pies while I waited.

            “What you do, Baby Girl?”  Grandpa came by.

            “I’m watching the garden, Grandpa.”

            “You watch good.  But why?”  He stuck his shovel in the garden, as if prepared to stay the watch with me.

            “To watch the babies come from the onion patch.”

“Hmmm.  Well, I don’t think they come today.”
’Why not?”

“They take a holiday.”

“Maybe, tomorrow?” I inquired.

“Oh well, who knows.  Pretty long holiday.  Maybe a year. Maybe not show up at all.”

“You mean I won’t find any babies here, Grandpa?”A scientist must have the ability to read adult cop-outs.

“Maybe not”

“But if no babies come from the garden, where do they come from?”

“Yo-ah, little pitipalt (Swedish potato dumpling) is using Granny’s good spoon and is going to get in big trouble with Granny.  I happened to be using Granny’s sterling silver wedding ladle she’d brought from the Old Country to stir my mud pies.  I looked up at Grandpa and my chin quivered.  I knew trouble.  It meant, “Naughty!  Naughty girl!” and swats on my legs.  Then Granny would say, “What do you say when you’ve been bad?”

“I’s sorry.”
”Okay, now up to bed.”

“I don’t want to go to bed.”

Everyone when they stayed with Granny slept in the loft in cribs filled with straw.  I hated to sleep up there alone in the daytime.  But that’s where everyone slept except Granny and Grandpa.  I stopped staring at the garden and stared at the ladle I’d been making mud pies with and the preliminary tears began to roll.”

            “Yo-ah, little pitipalt.”  And Grandpa took the ladle, pumped the well until some water ran into the dipper and washed the ladle and dried it on his shirt and stuck it under the bib front of his overalls and smuggled it back to Granny’s china cabinet.

            “How about we go inside and see if Granny has any good eats.  I herd Granny was baking some applesauce cake with butterscotch frosting.  Maybe we drink a cup of milk with it?”

            “Okee dokee.”

            “Sounds good, huh?
            Anybody suggesting “Low cal” food as “good eats” in our family would be given the once over.  Did they have few bolts loose?

            I ate my cake slowly, silently, while Grandpa measured me.

            “Baby Girl has things on her mind,” Grandpa said to Granny.

            “Jah.  She’s the curious one.”

            “Grandpa said the babies might not come from the onion patch.” I said.

            “Grandpa has a big mouth,” Granny replied.

            Back to the drawing board.  I brainstormed it all day and as we rattled from Ferndale to Bellingham, where we stayed with Daddy on the weekends—as it was the Depression and Daddy was out of work, living part time in a Hooverville type shack, while Mama and I lived on the farm.  I decided to take a shot at it from another angle—Daddy.

            “Daddy, where did you get me?  No stork came with Aunt Agnes’s baby.  I watched.  Granny said they came from the onion patch, but Grandpa said, “Maybe not.”  Nobody will tell me.  You had to get me someplace.  So where did you get me?”

            “Uh…you know…where we get everything.”

            “You mean at the store?”

            Yeah, we got you at the store.”

            ‘What store?”

            “What store, Selma?”  Daddy turned to Mama.

            “Mama shrugged.

            “Please Daddy—what store?”

            “Uh, I think it was Monkey Wards.  Wasn’t that where we got her, Selma?”  (Montgomery Wards was the biggest department store in town.”

            “I guess,” Mama mumbled staring out the car window.”

            “Was I pretty expensive.  Or did you get me on sale?”  As a child of the Depression I understood sales and pinching pennies before I was potty-trained.

            “Selma, you answer,” Daddy threw the ball to Mama.

            “You were expensive.  You know—good, better, best. Well, you were the best.”

            “I was the best?  But how could you afford me?”  I knew Mama and Daddy’s cash flow was constricted and they never bought the “best.”

            “I was the best!  How could you afford me?”

            “We couldn’t.  We still can’t.”

            “You mean you’re still paying for me?”

            “Nah, you’re paid for,” Daddy said.

            “Just barely,” Mama said.

            “Did you put me in the time payment plan?”  I asked as we bought just about everything from tires to lamps to shoes on the time payment plan.  It seemed everything we owned came from Montgomery Wards on the time payment plan.

            For example, about shoes, Mama would draw an outline of my foot on a paper sack and mail it off and back would come some hated high tops to be paid for later.  It all made sense, at least better sense than mouth exits and onion patches.

            At the same time, I knew Mama and Daddy would shop around for the best buys—but always seemed to end up back at Montgomery Wards.  So it seemed reasonable that I’d come from Monkey Wards.

            I carried this around with me until some wiseacre neighbor kids, with the cabalistic wisdom given to the exclusive few, who had divorced parents and freedom from constant parental surveillance, enlightened me.

            This unacceptable news brought forth my “kill the messenger” reflex, but after days of denials, that Mama, who was such a stickler for a germ-free environment, that she would never let a foreign germ get near her, let alone in her, I conceded defeat.  I was finally forced to face the unwelcome fact.  I was the upshot of Mama getting some germ from Daddy.  I didn’t come gift- wrapped, cash on delivery, Montgomery Wards best.