The Count

It was 1959, the year before John F. Kennedy was elected President, in what I'm told was a more innocent era. I was five, and it was that winter that my sister Dale turned four. My mother had two other children in diapers then, and it was probably about the time she was beginning to realize that she really wasn't cut out for this Mommy business, but well before it had time to simmer and sour for her. My father was a country doctor in North Dakota, and we were living in Northwood, a small town mainly known for not being Hatton.

What you grow up with is normal for you. We were the only Jews in town, and, so I thought, in the world, because when we drove in to Grand Forks to the synagogue where I was introduced to the rabbi, when somebody mentioned that he was Jewish I was so surprised by this that I kept referring to him as the "Jewish rabbi", as though there were other kinds.

Other normal things weren't so cute.

Winters in North Dakota make the worst the Twin Cities have to offer seem mild. While Mom spent her day changing endless diapers upstairs, my sister Dale and I spent most of the time in our basement playroom, entertained by the bluish flickerings of the TV set, a fairly good collection of toys, and whatever games we could devise. (We once -- quite accidentally -- almost hanged her in one of those games, but that's another story.)

And waiting in fear, every day, for my father to get home, hoping that this time we had it right.

He never did explain why it was so important to him, or where he got the idea from -- my father was never much for explaining himself -- but it was very important to him that when he got back from the clinic, every toy, every block, every item in the playroom be put away in its proper place. I'm sure it had something to do with him losing his father very young -- depending on which family story you believe, Grandfather Joseph was either run down by a pickle truck or just plain mugged and left dead back in the twenties -- but I'm not sure exactly what.

The trouble was, we just didn't get it. The whole idea of order, and of everything in its place, and of neatness, isn't one that a lot of kids that age are really equipped for, it turns out.

I remember, though, looking over at the shelves, and at the piles of stuff on the floor, and turning to Dale and saying something about how this time we had it, this time for sure, this time he'd smile. This time it would be okay.

But we never did quite get it right. And instead we got the count. He would count up how many things were out of place, and we each would get hit, once, for each item. Ten items out of place? Ten hits. Fifteen? Fifteen hits. Sometimes it was only two or three. It was twenty-two, once.

Nothing dramatic, mind; he didn't bring out a cat-o-nine tails, or even a belt. Just one solid whack across the bare butt for each item out of place, and since Dale was the youngest, she had to decide which one of us went first.

Like everybody else, right? And, like everybody else, I didn't talk about it. You weren't supposed to talk about private family business.

#

Eleven years later and a half dozen states away -- we'd settled in Connecticut by then -- he had long given up hitting regularly. But I do remember time when I was sixteen and hadn't mowed the lawn well -- it was important to overlap the wheels, as you left little tufts of grass otherwise -- and Dad, face red from the screaming, sent me out with a nail scissors to finish the job, as I clearly wasn't responsible enough to use a mower correctly.

After about ten minutes of it, I figured -- wrongly, as it turned out -- that he couldn't get any madder, and took off on my bike to let both of us cool off. When he found me gone, he grabbed Dale as a witness of what happens to the disobedient, and drove off to find me, and did, and threw my bike in the back of the station wagon, then made me run home in front of the car, threatening -- in retrospect, I think he was bluffing -- to run me over if I made a break for the sidewalk.

#

But most of it wasn't that dramatic. Most of it was petty. Looking back at the pictures, I may have been as much as ten pounds overweight -- I am, alas, rather more a lot more overweight than that now -- but there was the constant belittling for being fat. I got Bs and As in school, but only heard about how my sister Dale was getting all As. There was my fear of heights that he solved by making me stand on a ladder to clean the gunk out of the gutters -- it didn't work -- and the incessant demands that I practice that goddamn violin, an instrument that for six years had been clear I'd at best small talent.

#

I don't think it's any mystery why I didn't dare have children until my mid-thirties, and was more than a little nervous about it then, even though I'd long since found out that the kids who said they really didn't shake in fear when they waited for their parents to come home weren't just covering better than I was, but really meant it.

At least, I think they really meant it. Most of them.

#

I'm told that those people who study such things think that about a third of children who are sexually abused grow up to be molesters. Which means, of course, that about two thirds don't.

I can't prove it, but my guess is that that's true for those of us whose abuse was just -- just? -- physical and psychological, not sexual. It's just that we're harder to count; sometimes it seems that there's so many of us, and it's so hard to define the terms, and often so difficult for those of you who didn't grow up in fear to understand those of us who did.

But that anger has to go somewhere, to be dealt with somehow. You can't just shunt it away; gotta do something with it.

#

My daughter Judy is three and a half now, and -- you'll pardon a father's pride -- probably about the cutest, brightest and sweetest kid on the planet. Also rather well-adjusted, so I'm told, and so I believe. (Her baby sister, Rachel, is only two weeks old as I write this, and while so far she's doing great, it's too early for me to decide that she's just as cute, bright and sweet as her sister, only differently so. Give me another couple of months, and like a whole parade of fathers, I'll decide just that.)

That's how I get even. Not by slapping her around, mind, but --

My sister Sharon was driving her to daycare the other week. They get along pretty well. "When I grow up," Judy said, "I want to be an Aunt Sharon."

Sharon chuckled. "Well, if you can work things out with Rachel, you might be able to be an Aunt Judy, but not an Aunt Sharon."

Judy sniffed. "My Daddy says that when I grow up I can be whatever I want." End of discussion.

#

Every once in a while, though, I just can't help it. I walk into her bedroom or her playroom, and look at the toys and books and games and clothes strewn about the floor, and say, quite somberly, "Young lady, I believe there are four thousand, three hundred and seventy-two items out of place here."

"Daddy, are you being silly again?"

And then we both laugh.

-end-

March 1994
 
  

I've left this page black and white on purpose.  Some things in life are.

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