AHEAD BY A NOSE

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

Way back when I was a kid of Columbus, Ohio’s inner-city, narrow ribbons of patchwork concrete ran between the old, asbestos-clad Victorian houses and row upon row of brick townhouses, dwellings comprising neighborhoods much like those found throughout Colonial American cities. In one of the townhouses lived my friend Janey and her mother, Helen. Helen was the only single, working mother on our block, a status that rendered her a curiosity among the stay-at-home-mothers. There was never any mention of the whereabouts or even of the existence of Janey’s father. At some point, one of the local busybodies decreed that he must have been a casualty of World War II, for after all, most of the neighborhood kids were born while the fathers fought in that conflict. The explanation took hold and held, but we never really knew the true story behind the mystery of Janey’s missing father.

Actual fatherlessness was an almost unknown factor among our circle of family and friends in those days. Whether birth fathers or surrogates, fathers were at minimum often obscure figures in the background of our daily lives. In my and my sibling’s case, our dad worked nights and while he was at work, we slept, and while he slept, we were at school. He was nearly a specter-like presence among us on weekends, for most Saturdays and Sundays he was preoccupied with repairing his car, replacing a busted faucet or other chore required to keep a family and its household whole and functioning. But our dad, like the dads of other kids we knew, was there—somewhere—when the chips were down. Janey was the exception.

Janey was the exception in other ways, as well. She was the only kid I knew who sassed her mother. That kind of thing just didn’t happen in my tiny 1950s world. I stood in shocked horror of Janey’s aggression toward her mother, a kind of hostility I didn’t feel toward my mother, and if such a thing ever popped into my head, I ejected it for fear of hurting my mother’s feelings and/or losing her love. That Janey took such risks with her mother was astonishing to me. I didn’t like Janey’s behavior, but at the same time, I felt a kind of unwelcome admiration of her pluck. Guts like hers could take a person places, and that fact gave her a pass in my mind. It set her up as the wild-child of our play group and a fascinating character I was content to embrace despite her bad behavior.  

At bottom, the thorn that pricked the clashes between Janey and Helen was that Janey sucked her thumb. Janey and I were both six years old and in the first grade of the same school as well as neighbors when we met. She sucked her thumb then and still sucked her thumb when at the age of fifteen we said our last “goodbye” on the day my family moved out of the neighborhood. Throughout the years I knew them, Helen had coated Janey’s thumb with iodine and other bitter substances, had wrapped her thumb in tape or her whole hand in gauze, all to no avail. Janey persisted in her baby-mode despite the fact that her mouth and teeth were altered by the practice, and the thumb she sucked was stunted. It never developed to a size larger than a toddler’s. Other than the pint-sized thumb, the most notable mark of the thumb sucking ritual was on her nose. As Janey sucked her thumb, she hooked the index finger of the same hand across her nose, and the constant pressure from that finger carved an inwardly curving ridge in the bridge of her nose. Her ski-jump nose made Richard Nixon’s look half-baked. I can’t help but wonder if Tricky Dick sucked his thumb on the sly.

I am not here to disparage Janey. I have infinite sympathy for her, for surely her thumb was the pacifier she used to cope with the challenges that came with the absence of a competent father-figure somewhere in the catacombs of her days, and exaggerated by the enormous stresses of an overworked, single mother. Helen’s anxiety over Janey’s thumb sucking addiction was understandable for there was no getting around the huge impediment her thumb sucking presented to her future success and happiness. But even so, I just bet there is room for optimism about Janey’s chances in life, for you never know where an oddly-shaped nose might point you. Look at Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand. Janey’s strong and nervy, ramrod-straight backbone set against the flimsy bent of her nose tells me that while she might have remained a strange character in the eyes of many, she was also wily enough to stay ahead of the game—if only by a nose.©*

 

*The above is a work of fiction based on a composite of actual events as they exist in its author’s fuzzy memory bank.

 

***

           Linda Lee Greene’s award-winning novel

 

CRADLE OF THE SERPENT

 

“5 Stars…A woman’s search for the truth behind her husband’s infidelity unearths dark secrets and monstrous circumstances, chilling exposures that in the end illuminate her path to a new and better life…told from varying viewpoints in varying states of existence and so becomes quite unique and utterly fascinating."

 

Purchase Link: goo.gl/i3UkAV

 

#VictorianHouses, #Townhouses, #ColonialAmercanDwellings, #WorldWarII, #FathersDay, #ThumbSucking, #FathersAndDaughters, #MothersAndDaughters, #SingleWorkingMothers, #RichardNIxon, #LindaLeeGreene, #CradleOfTheSerpent