In the night in our playhouse, deep in the pyracantha, we three girls practiced lighting matches, pinching them between the striker and the cover, then pulling them against the friction. Brief sulfur smell and flare of light into cobwebbed hush.
When I think of being five, I remember rage.
This flashes in one memory of the sixteen-year-old boy from across the street. We are all walking onto Ventura Beach. It is a foggy summer day, but he is shirtless. I don’t see the taffy webbed scars he has across his chest from playing with fire. I am pretending not to see he is shaking his nipples at me, grabbing my shoulder, interrupting my conversation with his little sister, who is my age.
“Heather, Heather!” Clark demands. He sings, “Shake your boobies, Heather! Come on! Shake! Shake! Shake! Shake! Shake your boobies…”
It is 1976. I am five years old.
I got hand-me-down Toughskins around then, which were so well marketed, that I believed they would never get a hole in them. Maybe I wore the orange, yellow, and turquoise plaid to the New Games in the park. Every time I tell the story of being passed across the interlocked arms of young hippy parents in the Cookie Machine game, there's a little bump at little children being handled by grownups. It makes me think about Halloween trick or treating, taking candy from strangers, then the stories later, about razor blades.
Even what happened to us was used as part of a long campaign to build mistrust between neighbors and between children and adults.
Five-year-old me feels rage.I call her Summit, after her school. Her Big Wheel tires are grinding across the street. She's pedaling as fast as her legs can take her with her knees sticking out. I hear the roar, the sticky sound of plastic on the melted, ground-up rock and oil that are yearly laid and pressed to make the surface. She glares from under the shadow of her brow over the handlebars. She builds up speed as the downward turn approaches. She will let loose her tennis shoes from the pedals and stretch her legs wide as she hurls down the hill, until the little gold and red and black plastic tricycle slows to a stop under the oak in her front yard.
I remember sitting on the curb on Greenwood Drive under the ceiling of oak branches one evening with Clark’s youngest sister, the tenth child. We were arguing about the presidential election. I knew why Carter. She knew why Ford. I knew why not Ford. She why not Carter. I think our hot debate faded away as it dawned on me that I didn’t know what the fuck I actually thought. I was just a kid.
Impatience burns under the base of my sternum. I'm trying to eat breakfast in hopes that it will calm me down. But I have no appetite. I tell myself it is right to feel angry. I tell Summit. “Of course, you are angry. It is proper to be angry about that.”
I pick up my phone and tell this to the Notes app.
“Am I not speaking clearly?!” I yell. “I’m teaching you words and you’re not learning them?!” I am shouting at my phone. My dog sits. He tilts his head.
I realize that this rage is not impatience at my rushing dog who wants a walk or at this inept talk to text translation. This impatience is almost fifty years old. It's outrage. And it's righteous. “Fucking Supreme Court,” I mutter. The problem isn't the rage. The problem is the stuffing of it, the shackling of it, the disconnecting from it, the dissociation that would be required to pass through the world for decades pretending to be disarmed.
Much of my life I have forbidden myself anger. I have thought of how ridiculous my father looked when he lost his temper. I learned to cock up one eyebrow, cross my arms and lean back with disdain.
Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford. Gerald Ford had the first anti-abortion platform in the history of the Republican party. One scholar calls the pro-life movement a “cunning diversion” that gave white supremacy cover. They said that feminists wanted “the right to kill a baby,” and that women’s equality meant having men’s right “not to become pregnant and not to be expected to care for babies they brought into the world.”
Save Our Children from those who targeted gay teachers, from the architects of the coalitions that blocked the ERA, from the Moral Majority that said feminism would make little girls aspire to be prostitutes, swingers, and lesbians, instead of virtuous mothers and wives.
I remember having a crush on Linda Ronstadt. In 1977, I hung up the album sleeve with the glossy square photo of her up close, bare shouldered, her hair caught in the blue light, a big flower behind her ear. Her glossy mouth is open, her eyes wide as a bunny’s above my bunk bed.
I remember my little sister telling the neighbor, Clark’s dad, when he would ask for a kiss? “Sorry, the mailman didn't deliver any kisses today.”
Poor, poor, pitiful me Oh, these boys won't let me be Lord have mercy on me Whoa, woe is me.
My little sister and I remember eating Top Ramen noodles raw, then fighting over the spice packet. Open faced peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Then coming home to ask if we can get some Welch’s grape jelly. Hershey’s syrup from the can, tipping it back, rushing so you don’t get caught. Eating apple cores because we read the seeds might prevent cancer. Bruce Jenner on the Wheaties box. Peeling the skin off grapes before popping them into our mouths, until they were boycotted. Orange wedges, one tiny jewel at a time, first holding them up to the sunlight. Little stained-glass windows. Exchanging stories with Clark’s little sister. Like put upon housewives, we rolled our eyes when he demanded I come help him “clean the bathroom.” Cooking all beef hot dogs in the RV kitchen, the one that Clark’s family drove us in, to that first anti-abortion rally.
The headline in the LA Times for Friday, January 23, 1976, “Thousands March Against Abortion.” I remember driving forever, marching for hours, boredom, exhaustion. A man in a red shirt lifting my little sister or me onto his shoulders. I remember being given a sign to hold and the looks of approval on the marchers’ faces when I did.
When I ask my little sister, she says. “All I remember is how pissed they were.” She means our young parents. We were a pro-choice family.
Anyone else would be angry at this, I tell Summit. They would fantasize about murder too. They would take it out on smaller things and younger children. They would push them down, push them too hard, so they fall and maybe break their skin and go running bloody home to tell. You would be racing this child to the house to try to explain why you had hurt them, that you didn't mean to, that it was their fault. You would feel the panic at being caught.
I am still shouting cathartically into my Notes app.
“And now you are hearing me quite clearly aren't you? Did I learn to be mealy mouthed, to not speak clearly, to not enunciate my rage? You bet I did! And now it's time to unlearn it and to tell the truth.”
It’s true, the app isn’t misspelling a word now.
We girl children knew where the power lies.
My red-haired cousin stood at the top of the slide, commanding our attention. “I'm King Kong and this is my big penis!” she roared.
When my sister was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said, “I want to be a doctor with a big penis.”
At the therapist, I was given colored pens. In one I was green. Then I turned blue. In the third I was yellow. Finally, I drew a big red person with an enormous penis that I slashed off with an even larger machete. Someone had given me a thesaurus. I had so much vocabulary for all the colors. There was power in the words I scrawled around the borders, synonym after synonym.
When my mom called to tell Clark’s parents, they said it was normal. Besides, he wanted to be a priest.
He’s not. I heard he had ten kids of his own.
I remember Big Wheel days, the gritty plastic roar of me under the oaks on the gentle, curving streets. How enflamed I was at a car that honked long at me as I pedaled out of his way.
Heather of Greenwood Drive. Summit. Why not go in costume today, bunny rabbit? Cowgirl on the neighbors’ rock wall, boot heels that were tennis shoes pounding the soft stones, scuffing against the grey cement. Kick a soccer ball against the garage about fifty times, hard. Then give up a plan to be a soccer star one day. Pull purple flowers off the vinca and suck the honey sweet nectar.
We jumped off roofs into piles of leaves in Stekel Park, where the peacocks cried their haunting call.
In the night in our playhouse, deep in the pyracantha, we three girls practiced lighting matches, pinching them between the striker and the cover, then pulling them against the friction. Brief sulfur smell and flare of light into cobwebbed hush. Match after match, book after book.
Clark’s little sister and I cut the hair off my little sister’s favorite doll. We carved tic-tac-toe on the precious dresser drawer. And when I finally got my new blue and gold sneakers, I went out with her after the rain and ran through mud puddles, pounded down into them, ground the dirt into them. The thunk and slush and ooze and slap lukewarm against my shins.
Over the little house on Greenwood Drive in 1976, the oaks opened and the blue sky poured in. One winter, a little spring broke through, flooding the yard. My father would dig trenches to redirect its flow. The yard was bordered by a little square garage off the house, where he weighed drugs, against which I would kick my soccer ball, behind which my mother hung the laundry, along which my dad endlessly built a rock wall, until the day they sold the house right out from under me.
The oak in the front yard, where Summit had always climbed and hugged and pressed her cheek, straddled and clenched with bare knees and feet, along whom she could always put her little brown hands, whose silver bark she gripped with her fingertips, this oak had always stabilized her along its rough, cracked skin. This oak was deep rooted enough to hold broad branches that joined with the ceiling of oaks over Greenwood Drive to spread shade over her front yard and house on hot summer days.
She would miss this tree forever. She would never hold it again.
Wow I felt this hard. Gorgeous, relatable details that are so specific but they almost feel like my own memories. Great writing in here--like the fight over the ramen spice packet and peanut butter sandwiches are bridges to the same anger I’ve felt with different landmarks. Well done!
Gorgeous rage. 😏
Wow I felt this hard. Gorgeous, relatable details that are so specific but they almost feel like my own memories. Great writing in here--like the fight over the ramen spice packet and peanut butter sandwiches are bridges to the same anger I’ve felt with different landmarks. Well done!