Because I Come from a Crazy Family Read online

  “Neddy, would you ride down to Ho-Jo’s and get me a 3-D?”

  “Why should I? I’m not hungry.”

  “Well, why don’t you do me a favor and get it?”

  “Because I’m happy here doing nothing.”

  “Well, if you’re doing nothing, why not do me a favor and go get me a 3-D? Since you’re not doing anything anyway.”

  “Why can’t you go get it if you want it?”

  “Because I’m reading this magazine. Please, just go get it. It won’t take you but a few minutes.”

  The next thing I knew I was on my bike on my way to the other end of Chatham to fetch Lyndie a 3-D. She never lost this power over me or Jamie, even when we were adults. When she was nice, she was soooo nice, but when she was angry or distant it felt so terrible that both Jamie and I did whatever we could to stay in her good graces.

  Her hold on us did not come just from her being the oldest. She seemed to have a magical skill to make life fun and exciting. She came up with ideas for things to do. She was the one who made Christmas special, not the grown-ups. And she was the one who always wanted to know what was going on in my life, far more than my own mother did.

  Lyndie was pretty and also really bright, which set her apart from the other kids in her high school class. She had two close friends, Nancy Thornton, who was also smart and pretty, and Martha Toabe, one of the few Jewish people in Chatham, daughter of an attorney named Igo, a name we thought hilarious. Martha was extremely shy and introverted, and quite an odd duck, but also intelligent and sensitive. Lyndie always loved and identified with oddballs.

  I didn’t know what Jewish meant, or Protestant or Catholic for that matter. That Martha Toabe was Jewish meant absolutely nothing to me. I was too little to know of the prejudices in Chatham. I would later learn that there was a local man whose garage was full of Nazi memorabilia. He held meetings there from time to time to vent his hatred of Jews, as well as all other nonwhite groups, not to mention homosexuals, one of his most despised targets.

  Unbeknownst to me, Jamie was discovering during those years his own sexual feelings for boys. Just as I didn’t know what Jewish was, I also didn’t know what homosexual was, but Jamie did. He kept it secret because this was the 1950s in small-town America, where being gay was about the most forbidden thing a person could be, right up there with being a Communist. Looking back, I feel so bad for him, having to hide who he was and feel ashamed.

  Jamie knew about the man who loved Nazis and hated gays—fags, fairies, queers—and was terrified of him. He was a large, muscle-bound man who openly spewed hatred wherever he went. Until Jamie told me years later, I had no idea of the daily fear this Neanderthal caused him. The town seemed so sweet and peaceful on the surface. I never sensed the pockets of fear, rage, bigotry, and other all-too-human poisons hidden underneath.

  There’s so much I just didn’t see. I suppose Chatham, with its select vindictive people like the Neanderthal, resembled most small towns. As cruel as the community could be in rare spots, though, it was mostly filled with good and caring people, so many that I never felt afraid. I remember almost all of them with a smile, fondness, and even love, from Mrs. Eldredge, my first grade teacher, and Mrs. Brown, my second grade teacher, whom I would visit by riding my bike to her house for milk and cookies, to Mr. Tileston, who conducted the band concerts every Friday night (they still have them, sixty years later), to Ben Bassett, the angular, handsome high school principal who dressed all in black when he played golf, to the town drunk.

  As an adult, I mentioned “the town drunk” one day to Jamie. He laughed and said, “The town drunk? Who did you have in mind? There were quite a few candidates for that title.” It’s true, alcohol flowed so freely in Chatham that some people called it a drinking town with a fishing problem. But if it was one, it was a hugely friendly drinking town. Chatham was a happy place to live, or so it seemed to me.

  Even though our family owned a local business, the bowling alley, and we kids went to the local school, we did not qualify as true Chathamites. We’d moved from a farm in western Massachusetts, so even though my dad and Uncle Jimmy had spent much of their childhood in Wianno on the Cape, where they were well known for winning many sailing trophies, we had nowhere near native status.

  I never knew how much trouble Lyn had fitting in at school until years later when Jamie told me. Duckie and Uncle Jimmy knew she was having trouble socially, so they sent her to the George School, a Quaker boarding school outside Philadelphia, but she got so homesick that she came back and finished up at Chatham High School in spite of social problems there.

  While smart and pretty, she was also shy and sensitive, and teased by the boys. One day they fed a turkey Ex-Lax, broke into the car Lyn drove to school, and locked the turkey inside. When she came out to her car, she found a berserk turkey and a car full of turkey shit. Mortified, she somehow had to keep her composure as the boys whooped it up while she drove home in the stinking car, all the while fending off the rampaging bird. Uncle Jimmy would slaughter the turkey himself, and we’d eat it, a kind of revenge.

  Still, Lyn didn’t want to leave Chatham. In addition to the family, she had a charismatic English teacher who got both Nancy and her excited about literature. He recognized that these two students were exceptional. With his guidance, Lyn’s lifelong love of words, stories, books, life’s details, and people’s quirks, all of which were in her genes, and in the genes of all of us kids, continued to develop.

  She’d go with this teacher down to the boatyard to work on his sailboat or, in good weather, go out sailing. She’d go to his house to watch Shakespeare on TV with him and his wife now and then, once bringing Jamie and me. I was bored to death.

  We roamed Chatham together: Lyndie, Jamie, and me. At the center of town there was a candy-newspaper-magazine-stationery-some-of-everything store called the Mayflower, where I leafed through my first Playboy magazine. Across the street was the corner drugstore with its soda fountain with round stools with padded green seats that spun around plugged into the floor on shiny aluminum columns. I loved spinning on those stools between sips of my frappe.

  The proprietor was Mr. Parmenter. He never could get Jamie’s name right. He always called him Janie. Jamie desperately tried to correct him a few times but finally gave up. Jamie hated it because he thought others would realize that he liked boys instead of girls, and that Mr. Parmenter was on to him, which is why he called him Janie.

  Lyndie would often ask me to go into the drugstore and buy Tampax for her. About eight, I had no idea what Tampax was. But if Lyndie wanted it, I would get it. So I’d just walk right up to the counter at the back of the store, only a few feet away from all the people having their hot dogs in grilled, buttered buns and Cokes or frappes at the soda fountain, and, as if I were asking for a bottle of cough syrup, say, “I want to buy some Tampax.” I could never understand why the lady behind the counter would smile and people at the soda fountain would giggle as I purchased the blue and white box of Tampax, which the lady behind the counter would promptly put into a white paper bag.

  One day—I was around ten, so Jamie was fourteen and Lyndie sixteen—we stopped at the open-air Main Street fruit stand. As we browsed the piles of fruit, Lyndie picked up a peach.

  The proprietor of the store, a tall, rotund, comical-looking balding man wearing a white apron that came down to below his knees, swooped in out of nowhere and quickly lifted, if not snatched, the peach from Lyndie’s hands. Then he pointed to a sign above the bin of fruit that read LET LOUIE PICK YOUR FRUIT. He clearly did not want customers pawing over his produce. His face produced an unctuously insincere smile as he pronounced, “It’s more sanitary to do it this way. That’s why I say ‘Let Louie pick your fruit.’ ”

  The way he spoke those words—“Let Louie pick your fruit”—was unique, and to our ears endlessly funny. He enunciated each word with such precision and heartfelt devotion to the principle embodied in the phrase that it would have been impossible not to o
bey his command, if not fall under his ingratiating spell altogether.

  Louie’s phrase stuck. Whenever one of us three wanted to crack up the others, we’d simply say, “Let Louie pick your fruit.” We’d say it with a characteristic emphasis, as “Let Louie pick your fruit.” Many years later I’d see the poetry in that simple sentence, the alliteration of the l’s and the scansion of the syllables. But it was not just the lyricism of the line that made it stick; it was the entire character sketch of Mr. Louie that the three of us instantly filled in during those few minutes in his presence. We believed we knew Mr. Louie very well, even if we actually knew next to nothing about him.

  We’d get an intuition, a feel for a person or a situation in a heartbeat. Looking closer at people and situations, we drew remarkably similar conclusions. It was as if we shared a set of lenses ground exactly the same. It’s why we loved being with one another, and why being out in the world without one another made us—or at least me—so nervous. How could I get by with no one to understand life exactly as I did?

  Most people would forget about Mr. Louie and move on, but we were drawn to the Mr. Louies. We liked weird. Probably because we felt kind of weird ourselves—Jamie secretly dealing with being gay, Lyn knowing she was not Miss Popular in her high school, and me living with my own uncertainties—we felt an affinity for odd ducks.

  Years later, when I learned that I had ADD as well as dyslexia, I’d discover that it is common for people who have those conditions to grow up feeling different, not in a good way, on the outs—if not outright misfits, then at least ragged around the edges, trying to figure out how to be smooth.

  At the time, I didn’t know about Jamie’s and Lyn’s struggles. I didn’t know how brave Lyndie had to be to stay in Chatham, or how much abuse she dealt with. All I saw was Lyndie the queen, soon requesting she be called Lyn. I obeyed instantly, lest I incur her wrath.

  My brother Johnny, two years older than Lyndie, would tease her now and then, calling her Bossy Jossie, as her true first name was Josselyn. She hated being called Bossy Jossie, and as soon as she was old enough to manipulate Johnny into submission, she put a permanent end to the use of that moniker.

  Lyndie was the one who would come up with group projects. For example, at her urging, Uncle Jimmy bought a used car for us when Lyn turned sixteen and could drive. It was a beat-up old heap that couldn’t have cost more than fifty dollars. Under Lyn’s guidance, the three of us set about painting the car. We knew nothing about painting a car, but after a couple of days’ work we had put paint on metal and changed the color of the car from dirty gray to clean, bright blue.

  She always had some idea cooking. For her eleventh grade biology project at Chatham High School, she followed the progression of a chick embryo through various stages of development, carefully excising the developing chick from the yolk for display, until finally one fertilized egg was allowed to hatch on its own.

  The question then arose, what to do with the newborn chick? Killing it, which Duckie advocated, was out of the question for Lyn. Uncle Jimmy, of course, favored whatever Lyn wanted to do with the chick, so a new member of the household took up residence in the house on Kettle Drum Lane. Uncle Jimmy suggested we name the chick Falstaff, with which Lyn enthusiastically agreed, having just studied Henry IV.

  Duckie hit the roof. “How the hell do you housetrain a chicken? I am damned if I am going to go around picking up chicken shit!” Duckie rarely used profanity, so this was clear evidence she was ready to go to war.

  Lyn was always ready to do battle with her mother. They had some truly nasty fights and said horrible things, especially Lyn to her mother. It didn’t bother me that much, because I knew they loved each other, but the arguments really shook Jamie. He was traumatized by their fighting and, in spite of harboring a truly vindictive and unforgiving part of himself, developed a lifelong avoidance of overt conflict. When Lyn said to her mother, “Why don’t you go fuck a tree?” Jamie looked at the floor as if he wanted to melt into it.

  When Duckie started to walk toward Falstaff with a knife, she was stopped in her tracks by ever-resourceful Uncle Jimmy, who declared, “I have an idea!”

  Duckie halted her march toward execution. Lyn paused. “How about diapers?” Uncle Jimmy proposed. “They work on humans, why not on chickens?”

  “Jimmy, you can’t be serious,” Duckie said.

  “It’s a great idea,” Lyn said. “Jamie and Neddy will help me put the diapers on and change them, won’t you?” We both nodded dutifully, even though I barely knew what a diaper was, much less how to put one on a chicken or take it off.

  So it came to be that a chicken wore diapers in the house on Kettle Drum Lane. Fifty years later, the son of the Penningtons, the people who lived across the street, bumped into me at a party. “Are you related to the Hallowells who had a chicken who wore diapers?” he asked.

  Knowing there could be only one, I nodded.

  9.

  I started kindergarten in the public school in Chatham. After Dad moved out of the house and up to Wianno with Gammy, we remained living on Seaview Street, near Uncle Jimmy, Duckie, Jamie, and Lyndie, just across the golf course and down the hill from the McMullens’ house, the people who owned the Chatham Bars Inn, and whose twins, Helen and Bess, I went to school with. Next door to us was my friend, Terry Pickard, whose father had a pile of lobster pots on the grass between our two houses. We’d turn those lobster pots into cages for our made-up games.

  I was a curious, imaginative kid. The grown-ups called me the Question Box because I would wear them out with endless questions until they finally had had enough and said, “Stop! I simply can’t answer any more of your questions.” They didn’t say it in a harsh way, just a weary way. So I’d go away for a while, always to come back with many more questions.

  I did not have a typical brain. My mind went off on tangents all the time, and in addition to flooding my family with questions, I also found so many things funny that I would laugh and giggle excessively. It was a habit I had to work to control.

  It was in first grade that I initially encountered my problems with reading. I didn’t learn to read as quickly as other kids. Back then if you were slow to read there were no learning specialists to be referred to. Your “diagnosis” was obvious: stupid. And the “treatment plan” was equally clear: Try harder.

  In some schools those in charge used shame and humiliation to motivate slow readers: standing in the corner, or wearing a dunce cap. In some schools, kids would get spanked. If none of that worked, the diagnosis was that you were really stupid. The IQ tests and what formal assessments there were actually used terms like “moron,” “idiot,” and “imbecile” to identify differing levels of stupidity or retardation. But that was OK. People said there was always a place in the world for the really stupid.

  I was lucky. I was never given any of those tests. I also had a first grade teacher by the name of Mrs. Eldredge, who knew that there was more to little boys and girls who were slow readers than being stupid, and there were better ways to help them than by shaming or punishing them. She had no special training in reading that I know of, but she’d been teaching first grade for a long time.

  Mrs. Eldredge was quite plump and very kind, but she could also be tough, so no one messed with her. During reading period, with us sitting at round tables reading aloud from the “See Spot Run” books, when my turn would come and I would have trouble decoding the words, Mrs. Eldredge would take a seat beside me and put her arm around me. She didn’t excuse me from reading, but her arm took away any embarrassment I might have felt as I stammered and stumbled over the words. None of the other kids laughed at me, because I had the enforcer sitting next to me.

  Her kind nature and soft arm took out of the process of learning to read the damaging disabilities: fear, shame, and believing something was wrong with me. Mrs. Eldredge’s arm is what we would now call my IEP, my individualized educational plan, and it was the best IEP ever devised.

  Had I
had a different first grade teacher in a different school system, I likely would have acquired the toxic disabilities of shame, fear, and selling myself short. I will always be grateful to Mrs. Eldredge and the Chatham public school system for giving me such an excellent start.

  My father would tell me later that year that I was what’s called a “mirror reader.” When I asked him what that was, he spoke a long word that I didn’t understand. It was probably “strephosymbolia,” a term commonly used back then for people who made reversals and read some words backward. Now it is all subsumed under the heading of dyslexia, or a reading disorder, which I do have.

  When my dad told me what was wrong with me, and I didn’t understand the long word he used to explain it, I asked him again what it meant.

  “It means you read some words as if they were in a mirror. You read them backwards.”

  I asked him why I did that.

  “You were just born that way. But don’t worry, you’re learning to read all the same.”

  “But how can I read them if they’re like in a mirror?”

  “It’s just how your brain works. But like I said, don’t worry, you will still read just fine.”

  For a while after that I’d hold pages up in front of mirrors to see if I could read them better that way, but I couldn’t. Once I realized that a mirror didn’t help, I pretty much forgot about it and just tried my best to read as well as I could.

  Throughout my schooling I knew I was a slow reader, but that didn’t hold me back. I learned to read well enough to excel academically and major in English in college, graduating with high honors. That would not have happened without Mrs. Eldredge.

  In addition to reading slowly, I also went about solving problems differently than other people, often inventing my method on the spot. I preferred free essays rather than being assigned a topic. I liked to think of off-the-wall examples rather than common ones. So, if asked “Name something you throw,” instead of saying “A ball,” I’d likely as not say “A plate of spaghetti.” I wasn’t trying to be a wise guy, I just liked being playful, going off in unexpected directions. I knew I was different but it didn’t bother me, in part because eccentricity was such an accepted part of my extended family.