Wednesday, June 11, 2003
PARIETAL RULES Saturday, May 31, 2003
I'd stolen my freedom at 14 so by the time I went off to college I took that freedom for granted. Was I in for a rude awakening. In September 1963 my mom and dad helped me pack up the family station wagon and my dad drove us to Boston. Dad hated Boston immediately. He drove across the Mystic River Bridge 3 times thinking it was a different bridge each time and swore he would never return.
I'd won a scholarship, mom and dad were resigned about me studying Art. I'd been assigned a room in the brand new freshmen dorms on Babcock Street. When we arrived on that hot and sweaty September day, my room was not ready. In fact the dorm, overlooking Nickerson Field, was still under construction. The lower floors were finished, the upper floors where I was asigned were not. They told me some of us would have to live in the lounges together until our rooms were ready. It was a girls dorm but the construction workers roamed freely everywhere.
My parents had had it. They unloaded my bags at the door, and took off for home in NJ. I stood there in a yellow dress I'd bought especially for my first day in Beantown. I was so excited I almost burst. The euphoria did not last. Constuction went faster than expected, we were ensconsed in our rooms within a week. During freshmen orientation I heard about "parietal rules". It was like a death sentence. I felt totally betrayed. What the fuck is going on here? I worked hard for my freedom. I'm an adult. They told us "girls" (several hundred young women in the girls dorm with 2 boys dorms on either side over looking the football field) that we had a dorm "mother" who was "in loco parentus", the university would be acting as surogate parents. Our "mother" was Dean Elsbeth Melville. She looked about 75 years old, had her tightly curled gray hair in a bun. She was 6 feet tall and never smiled. (I know she couldn't have been 75 in 63 because I recently read her obit in the NYT). We were instructed that we each had name cards at the front desk. When you left the dorm you had to "sign out" say where you were going and upon return, note the time and "sign in". The dorms were locked at 10:00 pm weekdays and 11:00 pm weekends. If we did not make it back before the doors were locked, they would send out the campus police to look for us.
This was nuts. I come to a big, cosmoplitan city to go to a UNIVERSITY and I'm treated like a 5 year old. I decide this is wrong, I'm not going to pay any attention this. I ignore the rules. I get into minor scirmishes but lie my way out of them. The worst happens in October. Saturday night, a drunken frat party. Mostly football players It was a hot fall, I'm still wearing sandals. The kitchen floor in the apartment is flooded with beer and broken bottles. I'm pretty plastered and my foot slips out of my shoe. I'm ankle deep in beer. A red sploch spreads into a huge puddle. My date, a sweet gorilla, tries to get my attention. I'm meserized by the growing red puddle at my feet. He looks down and says "Oh My God, you're bleeding, we've got to get you to the hospital." He picks me up, wraps a dirty towel around my foot and carries me out to his car. I start to realize I'll never get back to the dorm in time. We get to the emergency room at Boston City Hospital. Not too busy in the ER, they stitch my foot up and gorilla takes me back to the dorm. The doors are locked but we go around to the service entrance and a janitor lets us in. We have to sneak past the sign-in desk and get to the elevators without getting caught. Somehow we manage this, he hands me my new crutches, kisses me good night and the elevator door closes. The next day, ELSBETH calls me to her office. "YOU DID NOT SIGN IN LAST NIGHT!" "What are you doing on crutches?" - "I'll call your parents and have you suspended!" I begged her not to, I'd loose my scholarship and yada yada yada...She checked my records. Just like in High School, the academic stuff saved me. Bad girls always had bad grades, but I faked them out. She let me stay.
I spent the rest of October on crutches. By November my foot had healed. On a beautiful late November day, I was walking down Commonwealth Ave to class. Something was dreadfully wrong. People were pulling their cars over to the curb, some stopped in the middle of the street, everyone was crying. It was surreal. I asked a women who was sitting on the curb sobbing what was wrong. She said the president was shot.
DUCK AND COVER
The alarms would erupt with an ear shattering blast. We knew what to do. They showed the film in class. Our teacher demonstrated how to squat under our desks, draw our knees up, tuck your head down. Some of us cried. It was my kindergarten class 1950. The fear factor embedded itself in my psyche here. I'd peak out of the corner of my eye and see a speck, high in the sky. It was a plane. I'd hear the engine and imagine it crashing in the window, explosions, fire. My heart was pounding in my ears. We were all 4 and 5 years old.
At some point, they stopped conducting those tests in school. But the fear factor remained. My dad had been a B17 bomber pilot in WWII. He was only 19 when he first took the throttle and flew missions over Germany. Can you imagine being asked to do that at 19? He had always loved planes and flying. I saw pictures of him as a kid grinning, holding the huge model planes he'd built. He was incredibly handsome, movie star handsome. Tall, blond, the Scandinavian square jaw, gray blue eyes - I have pictures of him in his leather bomber jacket with his crew, standing on the tarmac in front of their plane. I was in love with the image of my dad, the myth of my dad. He and my mom got married at 20. He wore is uniform in the wedding pictures. My mom never looked better than in those pictures.
The war ended, I was born and my dad's difficulties with alcohol surfaced. But it was a time when we all had to return to normal life. A structured life where we imagined we were in control. Ordering the surface of things became our life's work. If the house looked like the cover of House and Garden magazine, if mom and dad were attractive, well-dressed (at all times well-dressed), if we never ever talked about fear, everything would be fine. So that's how it went with us.
I could always forgive my father. No matter how bad things got, I'd come back to that image of the handsome 19 year old. I'd try to imagine the level of fear he must've experienced and overcome to function and fly 25 missions, get shot at, and survive. He became successful inspite of his drinking. Jobs after the war were tough to find but he started as an auto mechanic and was very good at it. He eventually bought the garage and business grew and he built a very large auto, truck and bus service company in an industrial park in northern NJ. He never, ever talked about the war.
My dad is 79 this year. Long retired in Florida. I tried to talk him into getting a computer and getting on the net but he refused. Not long ago he got a call. It was his old co-pilot from the B17. His former crew had stayed in touch after the war but lost track of my dad. They would have reunions and several of the guys were avid web explorers, had found my Dad's address and called. He was stunned. They had been looking for him for years. They were living scattered across the country, but all agreed to make the pilgrimage to visit my dad. They said they owed their life to him. He kept them alive. Mom and I never knew.
SLEEPING TOGETHER
My parents slept in the same bed for 57 years. That I never saw them kiss on the lips, embrace with passion or any kind of feeling is astounding. I had no intention to write about this. I had other subjects on my list, but in plundering the nooks and crannies of my brain to write this blog not a single image of my parents touching each other beyond a pat on the back popped up. This can't be true. They must've touched each other. My brother and I exist. It was not immaculate conception. That they had sex without love is no shock. That they lived in the same house, slept in the same bed all those years, without touching, is a horror story.
I'd stolen my freedom at 14 so by the time I went off to college I took that freedom for granted. Was I in for a rude awakening. In September 1963 my mom and dad helped me pack up the family station wagon and my dad drove us to Boston. Dad hated Boston immediately. He drove across the Mystic River Bridge 3 times thinking it was a different bridge each time and swore he would never return.
I'd won a scholarship, mom and dad were resigned about me studying Art. I'd been assigned a room in the brand new freshmen dorms on Babcock Street. When we arrived on that hot and sweaty September day, my room was not ready. In fact the dorm, overlooking Nickerson Field, was still under construction. The lower floors were finished, the upper floors where I was asigned were not. They told me some of us would have to live in the lounges together until our rooms were ready. It was a girls dorm but the construction workers roamed freely everywhere.
My parents had had it. They unloaded my bags at the door, and took off for home in NJ. I stood there in a yellow dress I'd bought especially for my first day in Beantown. I was so excited I almost burst. The euphoria did not last. Constuction went faster than expected, we were ensconsed in our rooms within a week. During freshmen orientation I heard about "parietal rules". It was like a death sentence. I felt totally betrayed. What the fuck is going on here? I worked hard for my freedom. I'm an adult. They told us "girls" (several hundred young women in the girls dorm with 2 boys dorms on either side over looking the football field) that we had a dorm "mother" who was "in loco parentus", the university would be acting as surogate parents. Our "mother" was Dean Elsbeth Melville. She looked about 75 years old, had her tightly curled gray hair in a bun. She was 6 feet tall and never smiled. (I know she couldn't have been 75 in 63 because I recently read her obit in the NYT). We were instructed that we each had name cards at the front desk. When you left the dorm you had to "sign out" say where you were going and upon return, note the time and "sign in". The dorms were locked at 10:00 pm weekdays and 11:00 pm weekends. If we did not make it back before the doors were locked, they would send out the campus police to look for us.
This was nuts. I come to a big, cosmoplitan city to go to a UNIVERSITY and I'm treated like a 5 year old. I decide this is wrong, I'm not going to pay any attention this. I ignore the rules. I get into minor scirmishes but lie my way out of them. The worst happens in October. Saturday night, a drunken frat party. Mostly football players It was a hot fall, I'm still wearing sandals. The kitchen floor in the apartment is flooded with beer and broken bottles. I'm pretty plastered and my foot slips out of my shoe. I'm ankle deep in beer. A red sploch spreads into a huge puddle. My date, a sweet gorilla, tries to get my attention. I'm meserized by the growing red puddle at my feet. He looks down and says "Oh My God, you're bleeding, we've got to get you to the hospital." He picks me up, wraps a dirty towel around my foot and carries me out to his car. I start to realize I'll never get back to the dorm in time. We get to the emergency room at Boston City Hospital. Not too busy in the ER, they stitch my foot up and gorilla takes me back to the dorm. The doors are locked but we go around to the service entrance and a janitor lets us in. We have to sneak past the sign-in desk and get to the elevators without getting caught. Somehow we manage this, he hands me my new crutches, kisses me good night and the elevator door closes. The next day, ELSBETH calls me to her office. "YOU DID NOT SIGN IN LAST NIGHT!" "What are you doing on crutches?" - "I'll call your parents and have you suspended!" I begged her not to, I'd loose my scholarship and yada yada yada...She checked my records. Just like in High School, the academic stuff saved me. Bad girls always had bad grades, but I faked them out. She let me stay.
I spent the rest of October on crutches. By November my foot had healed. On a beautiful late November day, I was walking down Commonwealth Ave to class. Something was dreadfully wrong. People were pulling their cars over to the curb, some stopped in the middle of the street, everyone was crying. It was surreal. I asked a women who was sitting on the curb sobbing what was wrong. She said the president was shot.
DUCK AND COVER
The alarms would erupt with an ear shattering blast. We knew what to do. They showed the film in class. Our teacher demonstrated how to squat under our desks, draw our knees up, tuck your head down. Some of us cried. It was my kindergarten class 1950. The fear factor embedded itself in my psyche here. I'd peak out of the corner of my eye and see a speck, high in the sky. It was a plane. I'd hear the engine and imagine it crashing in the window, explosions, fire. My heart was pounding in my ears. We were all 4 and 5 years old.
At some point, they stopped conducting those tests in school. But the fear factor remained. My dad had been a B17 bomber pilot in WWII. He was only 19 when he first took the throttle and flew missions over Germany. Can you imagine being asked to do that at 19? He had always loved planes and flying. I saw pictures of him as a kid grinning, holding the huge model planes he'd built. He was incredibly handsome, movie star handsome. Tall, blond, the Scandinavian square jaw, gray blue eyes - I have pictures of him in his leather bomber jacket with his crew, standing on the tarmac in front of their plane. I was in love with the image of my dad, the myth of my dad. He and my mom got married at 20. He wore is uniform in the wedding pictures. My mom never looked better than in those pictures.
The war ended, I was born and my dad's difficulties with alcohol surfaced. But it was a time when we all had to return to normal life. A structured life where we imagined we were in control. Ordering the surface of things became our life's work. If the house looked like the cover of House and Garden magazine, if mom and dad were attractive, well-dressed (at all times well-dressed), if we never ever talked about fear, everything would be fine. So that's how it went with us.
I could always forgive my father. No matter how bad things got, I'd come back to that image of the handsome 19 year old. I'd try to imagine the level of fear he must've experienced and overcome to function and fly 25 missions, get shot at, and survive. He became successful inspite of his drinking. Jobs after the war were tough to find but he started as an auto mechanic and was very good at it. He eventually bought the garage and business grew and he built a very large auto, truck and bus service company in an industrial park in northern NJ. He never, ever talked about the war.
My dad is 79 this year. Long retired in Florida. I tried to talk him into getting a computer and getting on the net but he refused. Not long ago he got a call. It was his old co-pilot from the B17. His former crew had stayed in touch after the war but lost track of my dad. They would have reunions and several of the guys were avid web explorers, had found my Dad's address and called. He was stunned. They had been looking for him for years. They were living scattered across the country, but all agreed to make the pilgrimage to visit my dad. They said they owed their life to him. He kept them alive. Mom and I never knew.
SLEEPING TOGETHER
My parents slept in the same bed for 57 years. That I never saw them kiss on the lips, embrace with passion or any kind of feeling is astounding. I had no intention to write about this. I had other subjects on my list, but in plundering the nooks and crannies of my brain to write this blog not a single image of my parents touching each other beyond a pat on the back popped up. This can't be true. They must've touched each other. My brother and I exist. It was not immaculate conception. That they had sex without love is no shock. That they lived in the same house, slept in the same bed all those years, without touching, is a horror story.
