smelly.
“No it wouldn’t,” I said, “they’ve got one at school and it doesn’t smell.”
“It would get lost behind the furniture,” my mother said, “and starve to death.”
She wouldn’t hear of a guinea pig or a hamster or even a bird. Finally after nearly a year of failures I backed her into a corner. I asked for a fish. It would be noiseless, odorless, germ-free and clean; after all, it lived in water. I wanted it to have a bowl with colored pebbles and a miniature castle.
She couldn’t think of any good reason why not, so she gave in and I bought a goldfish at Kresge’s. “It will only die,” my mother said. “Those cheap goldfish all have diseases.” But when I’d had it a week she did give in enough to ask me its name. I was sitting with my eye against the glass, watching it as it swam up to the top and back down again, burping out pieces of its food.
“Susan Hayward,” I said. I had just seen
With a Song in My Heart
, in which Susan Hayward made a comeback from a wheelchair. The odds were stacked against this goldfish and I wanted it to have a courageous name. It died anyway; my mother said it was my fault, I overfed it. Then she flushed it down the toilet before I had a chanceto weep over it and bury it properly. I wanted to replace it but my mother said that surely I had learned my lesson. I was always supposed to be learning some lesson or other.
My mother said movies were vulgar, though I suspected she’d once gone to a lot of them; otherwise how would she know about Joan Crawford? So it was my Aunt Lou who took me to see Susan Hayward. “There, you see?” she said to me afterwards. “Red hair can be very glamorous.”
Aunt Lou was tall and heavy and built like an Eaton’s Catalog corset ad for the mature figure, but she didn’t seem to mind. She piled her graying yellowish hair onto the top of her head and stuck extravagant hats with feathers and bows onto the mound with pearl hatpins and wore bulky fur coats and heavy tweeds, which made her look even taller and fatter. In one of my earliest memories of her I’m sitting on her wide, woolly lap – hers was the only lap I remember sitting on, and my mother would say, “Get down, Joan, don’t bother your Aunt Louisa” – and stroking the fur of the fox she wore around her neck. This was a real fox, it was brown, it wasn’t as mangy as it later became; it had a tail and four paws, black beady eyes and a cool plastic nose, though underneath its nose, instead of a lower jaw, it had a clamp by which it held its tail in place. Aunt Lou would open and shut the clamp and pretend that the fox was talking. It often revealed secrets, such as where Aunt Lou had hidden the gumdrops she had brought me, and it asked important questions also, like what I wanted for Christmas. When I grew older this game was dropped, but Aunt Lou still kept the fox in her closet, although it had gone out of style.
Aunt Lou took me to the movies a lot. She loved them, especially the ones that made you cry; she didn’t think a movie was much good unless it made you cry. She rated pictures as two-Kleenex, three-Kleenex or four-Kleenex ones, like the stars in restaurant guides. Iwept also, and these binges of approved sniveling were among the happiest moments of my childhood.
First there was the delightful feeling of sneaking out on my mother; for although she claimed to give her consent when I asked permission, I knew she didn’t really. Then we would take the streetcar or a bus to the theater. In the lobby we would stock up on pocket-packs of Kleenex, popcorn and candy bars; then we would settle down in the furry, soothing darkness for several hours of guzzling and sniffling, as the inflated heroines floating before us on the screen were put through the wringer.
I suffered along with sweet, patient June Allyson as she lived through the death of Glenn Miller; I ate three boxes of popcorn while Judy Garland tried to cope with an alcoholic husband, and five
“No it wouldn’t,” I said, “they’ve got one at school and it doesn’t smell.”
“It would get lost behind the furniture,” my mother said, “and starve to death.”
She wouldn’t hear of a guinea pig or a hamster or even a bird. Finally after nearly a year of failures I backed her into a corner. I asked for a fish. It would be noiseless, odorless, germ-free and clean; after all, it lived in water. I wanted it to have a bowl with colored pebbles and a miniature castle.
She couldn’t think of any good reason why not, so she gave in and I bought a goldfish at Kresge’s. “It will only die,” my mother said. “Those cheap goldfish all have diseases.” But when I’d had it a week she did give in enough to ask me its name. I was sitting with my eye against the glass, watching it as it swam up to the top and back down again, burping out pieces of its food.
“Susan Hayward,” I said. I had just seen
With a Song in My Heart
, in which Susan Hayward made a comeback from a wheelchair. The odds were stacked against this goldfish and I wanted it to have a courageous name. It died anyway; my mother said it was my fault, I overfed it. Then she flushed it down the toilet before I had a chanceto weep over it and bury it properly. I wanted to replace it but my mother said that surely I had learned my lesson. I was always supposed to be learning some lesson or other.
My mother said movies were vulgar, though I suspected she’d once gone to a lot of them; otherwise how would she know about Joan Crawford? So it was my Aunt Lou who took me to see Susan Hayward. “There, you see?” she said to me afterwards. “Red hair can be very glamorous.”
Aunt Lou was tall and heavy and built like an Eaton’s Catalog corset ad for the mature figure, but she didn’t seem to mind. She piled her graying yellowish hair onto the top of her head and stuck extravagant hats with feathers and bows onto the mound with pearl hatpins and wore bulky fur coats and heavy tweeds, which made her look even taller and fatter. In one of my earliest memories of her I’m sitting on her wide, woolly lap – hers was the only lap I remember sitting on, and my mother would say, “Get down, Joan, don’t bother your Aunt Louisa” – and stroking the fur of the fox she wore around her neck. This was a real fox, it was brown, it wasn’t as mangy as it later became; it had a tail and four paws, black beady eyes and a cool plastic nose, though underneath its nose, instead of a lower jaw, it had a clamp by which it held its tail in place. Aunt Lou would open and shut the clamp and pretend that the fox was talking. It often revealed secrets, such as where Aunt Lou had hidden the gumdrops she had brought me, and it asked important questions also, like what I wanted for Christmas. When I grew older this game was dropped, but Aunt Lou still kept the fox in her closet, although it had gone out of style.
Aunt Lou took me to the movies a lot. She loved them, especially the ones that made you cry; she didn’t think a movie was much good unless it made you cry. She rated pictures as two-Kleenex, three-Kleenex or four-Kleenex ones, like the stars in restaurant guides. Iwept also, and these binges of approved sniveling were among the happiest moments of my childhood.
First there was the delightful feeling of sneaking out on my mother; for although she claimed to give her consent when I asked permission, I knew she didn’t really. Then we would take the streetcar or a bus to the theater. In the lobby we would stock up on pocket-packs of Kleenex, popcorn and candy bars; then we would settle down in the furry, soothing darkness for several hours of guzzling and sniffling, as the inflated heroines floating before us on the screen were put through the wringer.
I suffered along with sweet, patient June Allyson as she lived through the death of Glenn Miller; I ate three boxes of popcorn while Judy Garland tried to cope with an alcoholic husband, and five
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