In the languid light of the Venetian blinds, I performed improvised operas, epic melodies of my own design. I was a mommy, singing to her, rocking her, loving her so.
I was about to enter the transitory and terribly uncomfortable age of ten. This passage to adolescence is ripe for rock bands and pop stars. Young girls are suspended in time as they fall deeply in love with the larger world. I was to fall for the first and best of all of them, the Beatles, and they would remain my true love, musically at least, for the rest of my life.
Our new house on 32nd Avenue was about a mile from our old one, next door to a car wash. We had apricot trees, two rabbits, and a stereophonic console record player. When I wasn’t standing by the back window trying to practice my violin, I lay in front of the record player and listened to my dad’s records: Andy Williams’s “Moon River,” Nina Simone’s “Black Is the Color,” and my favorite, Harry Belafonte’s Calypso. I was studying music theory and I did not even know it.
Just a month or so after we arrived in our new house, my six cousins and Aunt Linda arrived from Chicago. With Uncle Bud gone, Linda wasn’t able to look after all six children. Uncle Richard might be a surrogate father, they hoped, but my father was the rebel artist of the family and barely involved with his own kids, much less six more. It was the summer of 1965.
I was thrilled to meet my new instant family of so many children. Cousins by the dozens! They were all Chicago attitude, thick accents smearing a “y” on the “a,” so tough and mean. The girls ratted their hair and drew black eye-liner under their eyes. That summer they taught me to dirty dance.
Uncle Bud had been a prolific man, child-wise. He was the handsome oldest brother. I have only one memory of him, a memory of safety and love, the kind of memory upon which the others lean.
Uncle Bud often babysat his brother’s three-year-old girl—me. Bud lived in an old wooden Chicago tenement apartment, one story up. On this day, as Mother was sneaking off to work, I just caught her leaving—the edge of her coat slipping out the room. I screamed and I ran to the screen door as it sprung back and slammed my finger. I stood there, wrecked in despair and pain, crying as the bus drove away. Don’t leave me here Mother! Don’t go!
My Uncle Bud bent over and picked me up. He turned and sat down in the rocking chair in front of the round black-and-white television screen. There he rocked me, back and forth, back and forth, holding me tight, until no more sobs hiccupped from my chest. This memory of being comforted by my uncle trumps all infant memories. I am sure we were cared for, but this is the only memory of love and consolation that made it out of Chicago.
“The heart is always that one summer night . . .”
My cousins’ new house was on a corner where neighborhood kids came out at night to play. It was the best August I would ever know, even better than the end of summer after my debut record came out. It was the best August of all time.
After our dinners of Rice-A-Roni and fried chicken when the heat went down to ninety degrees, my cousins and I would emerge from our houses to join the other hungry desert animals in the coolness of the night. We played all-neighborhood games like kick-the-can and hide-and-go-seek. My mother was reluctant to allow me to play with “the gang.” We might be related to these Joneses but they were not like us and she did not want me becoming like them. I’d already heard swear words from them I had never heard before, much less coming out of the mouth of a six-year-old.
The thing about a game like hide-and-go-seek is that if you are really good at it, then no one ever captures you. A girl has to pretend not to be very good if she wants to make friends. I was so determined to be good at everything I did that I was rarely captured. It was discouraging.
One night it was only Rodney and Debbie and Donna and I. We were ants-in-our-pants anxious to live out every summer night before school started.
“Where are you going?” Mother asked.
“Out.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Be back here in forty-five minutes. I mean it.”
Three cousins and I walked down the sidewalk. This was our sidewalk.
“So what are we doing?” I asked.
“We are going to ring doorbells.”
“Huh?”
“We ring the doorbell and run.”
“Some adult opens the door and no one is there.”
“It’s funny but scary because they get mad and can catch you.”
It sounded so frightening that my stomach felt queasy. I was going to do something bad! Something Mother would not approve of, but I’d be part of the gang. We snuck up to a house and rang the doorbell. The interior light spilled out the front door and a man followed. Ha! He’s so big and we lured him out of his house! He can’t see us. We win! Ha ha hah! We conquered the adult in his own domain.
Not a nice game but we didn’t realize that someone might really be afraid.
As the night wore on, it got quieter and spookier. The shadows were blending into the darkness and no cars were going by. It was my turn to ring the doorbell. We chose a house, crept up to it, and then everyone hid as I approached the door. I was alone crossing the last few feet to the doormat. I still remember the columns on the porch. Even the crickets stopped singing.
I rang the bell and bam! No porch light, no shuffling of feet—it was like he was waiting for us. There was no time to jump off the porch, no chance to run. In the microseconds of the door starting to open I had only one option. I stepped next to a column on the porch.
My cousins could see me standing on the street side of this column as the man walked out of his house. He looked aggravated. I could see his face in the streetlight.
Behind my pillar I held my breath. I willed, I prayed to be invisible. “Don’t see me, don’t see me, don’t see me.” I was standing four feet away from him when he looked right at me. He seemed to be looking right through me. It was true, he could not see me! I was invisible!
The man moved toward me now to stand on the opposite side of the pillar. I almost said, “Hi. I’m here. Fooled ya!” But no, I kept my breath in and stayed so very still. I could see my cousin Debbie’s eyes were wide as saucers and she was motioning me to not move.
Then he simply turned and went back into his house. The sound of the screen door slapping its wooden frame was my cue: I jumped onto the grass and ran to my cousins who emerged from the shadows of cars, telephone poles, and shrubs. We ran halfway down the block toward Aunt Linda’s, squealing with excitement.
“He looked right at you!”
“Yeah! Did you see him do that?”
“Impossible!”
“Like you were invisible.”
“Oh my God!”
“I was invisible!”
Something told me that he had not been able to see me there in the shadows for two reasons. One, he didn’t expect me there, and two, because I had willed myself into a different reality and it had worked. Real magic. Adult-tested invisibility. That night I became invisible using the airless spirit of night that hides what does not want to be seen.
Every school year my mother bought me and my brother Danny a whole new wardrobe. I received new blouses, skirts, dresses, shoes, the whole treatment. This year Mother decided to make our clothes and cut my hair herself. My bangs were crooked in my school picture that year and I could not tell her that all I wanted was store-bought clothes and to be like everyone