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
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