Dad gave me my name, Lynda with a “y” to call me Lyn or Lynnie, as well as his handsome features, thick dark hair, and introversion. He worked on Madison Avenue advertising soups, and my mother stayed home and advertised me. I was, she said, “my father’s child.” Such a dedication might have set me to wondering whether I was her child, but I didn’t because of her studious determination to remake me in her image, putting little bows in my unruly hair and daily dressing me in frilly pinafores. The red party shoes were acceptable, but honestly, the only good thing about pinafores was their “wings.” I wanted some hair-rumpling hugs that mussed me up but I don’t remember many. Still: I got something more, something that would intrigue me for the rest of my life.
“You are a miracle and a gift from God, Lynnie,” my mother told me more than once.
“What’s a miracle?” I asked.
“Something God does for us that we can’t do for ourselves,” she said. “I wanted a baby and I kept losing them. Miscarriage, it’s called. And then you came.”
“But didn’t I come from a hospital?” I asked.
“Of course, LeRoy Sanitarium, a maternity hospital in downtown Manhattan,” she said.
I would have kept up my questioning, but my mother had that “enough” look and turned aside. So I pondered my near-divinity on my own. Miracle status was problematic, in part because it earned me excesses of maternal praise and made me feel almost breakable, and in part because my younger sister Laurie never made it to miracle status, even though Mom had two miscarriages before her birth. I was just plain too miraculous for comfort. Being a gift from God, however, had promise. Who was God? What kind of gift was I? Where was God? I wanted to meet God.
I’d seen God in a book called The Little Book About God published just four years before I was born. It became my favorite book, so favorite my mother got sick of it. I still have it, crayon marks and all. God was an old man with a long white beard perched on a cloud and creating wonders on earth far below. In the city where we lived everything reached up, like an alleluia hymn, so on our daily playground walks I held tightly to the carriage and trained my gaze skyward searching for God. I never saw God up there though, so maybe my book’s sky-God wasn’t all there was to God.
Nightly, Mom and I prepared for Daddy’s homecoming. I shed the pinafore and hair bows. We bathed. Mom dressed me in a not-too-frilly nightgown, and herself in a lavender negligée and mules with open toes. She sat at her dressing table, prettying herself with bright red lipstick, rouge on her cheeks, and perfume behind her ears. I got a daub on my wrist. A cigarette hung out of one side of Mom’s mouth, causing her eye to squint as she brushed my hair to a sheen and said out of the other side of her mouth, “Isn’t this fun, darling?”
I nodded, held my nose, and requested some lipstick, which Mom spread on lightly with her fingertip.
“It’s just for girls,” she said. “The bewitching hour because we love Daddy.” My mother taught me vanity and an awareness that appearances could help me feel good-all-over feminine.
I begged for a book. “Just one, a short one, please, please, Mommy.” She read The Children’s Hour by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I held my breath.
Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
That is known as the Children’s Hour.
I think my mother and I both longed for the children’s hour. It evoked a hope that hung unspoken in the air between us: This night will be different. But every night the Children’s Hour turned into the Cocktail Hour. Daddy would come in the door and we’d both run to meet him. He tossed his newspaper aside and picked me up for a kiss. His cheek was grizzly and tickled mine. He smelled like tobacco. “Smell my perfume, Daddy.” I held my wrist to his nose as he carried me to the bedroom where he changed into his velvet-lapeled smoking jacket. Then we all went into the living room. An hors d’oeuvres tray sat on the table in front of the blue-and-white sofa. Daddy sat in his Daddy chair, which had wings like my pinafores did. I sat in my small rocker. The stage was set for my mother’s entrance. She appeared on cue with the drinks on a tray, her large Coke and Daddy’s large cocktail shaker and his favorite glass—shaped like a triangle with a long slender stem and three enormous green cross-eyed olives nestled in its bottom. It was one of the few times my mother’s butterfly soul alighted. She riveted her attention on Daddy, who twirled the omnipotent glass and took sips. That glass sucked up all the attention I wanted for myself. We could’ve been in church for all the awe this ritual commanded.
“Can I have a sip, Daddy?” I asked, breaking the spell.
“Not for little girls,” he said.
“Mommy?” I said, and got a sip from her glass. I wondered if olive-filled glasses were for men only.
I rocked at breakneck speed and hummed little tunes, but no one noticed. Fed up at last, I gave up. I snatched Ritz crackers from the cocktail tray and huffed off, with the stomp of three-year-old feet. It sometimes seemed to me that my feet knew where they were going before I did. That was certainly the case as I exited the cocktail hour, hearing my father, by now turned martini-nasty, say as I left, “She only wants all those crackers for herself.”
I found a place and invented a ritual of my own under the dining room table, which had cross beams to connect its four fat legs and a cloth to the floor. At first I felt lonely and lost, so I removed my slippers and placed them outside the tablecloth so my parents would know where I was; then I lined the Ritz crackers up on a beam and sat cross-legged on the worn maroon rug. To make company I began to chat to my three imaginary friends when a fourth friend joined us—very silent, extremely invisible. I had longed to be noticed, yet suddenly discovered a mysterious freedom in going unnoticed. That’s when I knew I mattered and decided that this fourth friend must be the God I longed to meet. With delight I unburdened my soul. God listened to me with an attentiveness neither of my parents, distracted at this hour by an ugly glass, nor my distractible imaginary friends could give. After our conversation I served a one-course meal under the table. I ate one Ritz cracker and left four on the beam, partly to prove something to my father and partly because it was plain polite.
At bedtime, my mother called for kisses and took me to bed. In the morning the crackers were still there, just as I’d left them.
Not for some time did I realize that I would not have picked out the little God book for myself. It had no splashy illustrations and I couldn’t read. My mother picked it out for me. How did she know I would love it, or did she love it for me? Another portrait of God in the book was earthy and true to my experience:
When God was sitting in His garden very quietly, He began to hear a sound coming up from His Earth and the sound was like the buzzing of a great far-away bee. And God became very interested. And He began to listen, and separate it, one sound from another, and to find the place that each came from. . . . And the sounds of the Earth were very interesting to God. And He said “I do so love My Earth.” He went on listening. And while God was hearing all these sounds and looking up each one in its own place, He heard one small high sound that called through and over all the others. And God tried to find out what was this weeny sound, but it was hard to find.
Every evening I kept up my “weeny sounds” and my Ritz cracker meal. I asked God to take away my father’s glass and give me my mother’s heart, but God didn’t do one single thing I asked for, at least right then. Nevertheless, I found contentment in my under-the-table chapel for another