You Don't Own Me

The girl waits patiently – though patience is not her virtue – while Carol, the short and stout old-timer divides up the day’s take and slides her share, $6.46 across the table.  She unties her burgundy apron – the required uniform – and pockets the money. The man – her husband – will not be happy. “Thanks,” she says, “for not much” she does not say. “Bye, guys,” she nods at the others -- Barb, the sharp-tongued hostess; Greta, wispy-gray-haired Austrian; Kay, divorced mother of two hellions; Tom, the busboy in love with Frankie Valle; and Lee, the pissed-off cook.  “See you tomorrow.” The girl deposits the apron down the laundry chute next to the short order serving kitchen and leaves the dining room.

Out in the lobby of the country club, to the left, the bar is almost empty.   That also means the man – her husband – is not making much either tending bar on the day shift.  The girl decides against poking her head in to say hello. The man was in a foul mood this morning. Another slow tip day will make matters worse.

An unknown man in a fedora chats over the front desk with Ralph, the general manager, who nods and smiles as she passes.  To the right in the sunken part of the members’ lounge, Victor is tugging at a vacuum cleaner.  Madeline scurries past, her arms filled with freshly laundered, burgundy table cloths and napkins, ready for the dinner crowd -- crowd being a relative concept.  The tall Christmas tree speckled in tiny colored lights glows in the lounge and makes the girl feel happy and sad at the same time.  

The girl enters the main prep kitchen through swinging doors. Lenny, the head chef, is arguing with the bread delivery guy about what was or wasn’t delivered yesterday. At the back of the kitchen, she pushes through a non-descript brown door into a back hallway and begins the climb to the third floor. The stairway is narrow. If she put out both elbows she would skin them. The walls are a shade of dull green, smudged and nicked.  

The girl reaches the top landing.  She is home.  There are four doors – the one on the left belongs to Victor, the porter. The one on the right belongs to Madeline, the laundress. They have both lived here for what might be decades. Straight ahead to the left is the bathroom, which they all share, and to the right is the room where the girl and the man have lived since September. She unlocks the small padlock that keeps the door closed and enters, praying this won’t last for decades.

The girl sits down on the bed in the attic room -- home. She unties her white waitress shoes. On this gray day in late November, there is little light coming through the tiny dormer windows.  She turns on the small bedside light. There are two hours before she has to be at her next job in the greeting card department at Sibley’s, two towns away. She turns the clock radio on and slowly unbuttons her white waitress uniform. “I want to be Bobby’s girl,” is playing. The girl loves this station but she can only listen to these oldies when the man is not around. The man hates this music. He hates the era from which it came.  But this music makes the girl happy. It fills her with something between wistfulness and eager anticipation. She remembers hearing the older kids on the school bus sing these songs while she yearned for entry into their world.  Even when the lyrics are of death and breaking up, they sound upbeat.

The girl feels sad and empty even as she looks around this crowded room – home.  Every inch of this room is full. There is the bedroom set she fought to buy with some of their wedding money, the table and chairs from her mother, a recliner from her grandmother which he has claimed, his crappy old television, her stereo and her records which he does not let her play. There is a 3 foot refrigerator with a tiny freezer (his), an electric frying pan (hers), and a two burner hot plate that looks dangerous (definitely his). This is the kitchen. There are her plates and her glasses and her silverware, her Revere Ware pots whose copper bottoms are still shiny even though he gets irritated and says it is a waste of time to shine them. There is no oven. There is no sink. Water is retrieved from and dishes are washed in the bathtub in the shared bathroom next door.

She is here because the man was dissatisfied. He is a grass-is-always-greener, rolling-stone-that-gathers-no-moss kind of man. The man is vaguely discontent wherever he is, whatever he’s doing, whomever he is with.  He has come back to this country club, where he worked at some point in his wandering past, questing for some unknown, unnamed “better.” A “better” that is not working for her father (nobody tells the man what to do), a “better” that has taken her from her family, her town, her job, her education.  The girl has begun to despair that this man’s “better” is not “better” at all – just different.

This life he’s insisted upon usually begins and ends with the man groping for her. This life spends weekends visiting the man’s aunts and uncles and cousins along with their ill-behaved children, in towns everyone with an education flees. She sits in their cluttered, dirty kitchens gazing at dusty, stained floors, and hopes the man will not say ‘yes’ to staying for dinner.  This life has no room for hope. This is not the life she wants. This life will never go to Europe or water ski, eat crème brulee or see a Broadway play.   

The girl and the man fought this morning about Christmas. The man has said “no” to the girl’s wish to erect her small Christmas tree in the room. The man has declared a vehement distaste for any holidays – especially this one.  The girl loves holidays – especially this one.   Sometimes she suspects that anything remotely festive makes this man miserable. 

The girl dons the skirt and blouse she will wear for her next job. She will leave before the man finishes his shift and if she is lucky, she will get home after he has fallen asleep. She can see snow has begun to fall and it is coating the roof. She should leave soon. Another song is playing -- one which she has never heard before. She stops to listen. "You don't own me. Don't try to change me in any way." Wha, wha, what?? She moves quickly toward the radio, not quite believing what she is hearing. She grabs a pencil, she must not let this song get away. "I'm free and I love to be free, to live my life the way I want, to say and do whatever I please." When the music ends, the girl's tears begin to fall. The announcer uncharacteristically gives the girl the information she needs to find this song, which she will play over and over again on her stereo when the man is not around. 

It is time for the girl to leave. For the first time in many  months, something close to hope hovers around her edges. She padlocks the door behind her. Tomorrow, she will decorate her Christmas tree.

We Have Forever Together

It was March 26, 1985, a Tuesday. I left my job on West 57th Street at lunch time and walked 19 blocks north.  All the way, my stomach did double flips. I found the building I sought and pressed the doorbell, 4D. I waited.  There came a voice. “Who is it?” I looked around before I answered, and then said my name. The door clicked in release and I dove for it. There is a short window of opportunity with those buzzers. Inside, I found the elevator and pressed 4. It moved very slowly. When the doors creaked open, I stepped out and looked to the door on the left.  4D.  Whew. Easy, I thought.  I pressed the buzzer. My stomach had moved on to triple flips. “Yes?” called the voice. Damn…. I’m going to be forced to announce myself again. I hated saying my name. The voice instructed me to go to the other door.  There was another entrance? Silently I cursed my friend – the one who’d referred me to this voice – she could have made this easier with better instructions.

The voice opened the other door.  Attached to the voice was a solid woman about my height with large brown eyes and short, straight blonde hair that hung not quite to her shoulders.   She led me a few steps to her office, and closed the door behind us. Inside the office on the left against a wall of book was a couch that looked like it might have belonged to Freud and a chair. Across the room on the opposite wall was another “normal” couch.  She headed for the chair at the head of Freud’s couch.  I made a beeline for the normal couch across the room. I sat probably 10 feet away from her with a wide expanse of rug between us.

 Now what?  “What brings you here?” asked the voice.  I took a deep breath and the words came tumbling out. “There’s this guy,” I started. I did not stop for 50 minutes.   I was crazy, madly in love with “this guy.”  But this guy was not crazy, madly in love with me. I wasn’t whimsical enough. (To this day, I wince when I hear that word.) I was too much like him – serious, responsible. He wanted his opposite. Nobody specific – there was no competition at the moment – but he hadn’t met her yet.  Not that he didn’t “love” me in a way.  Just not the way I desperately wanted. Yes, we were sleeping together.  But for him, it was just a fun thing to do with a good friend. He was crystal clear about that. But I chose to believe his actions and not his words because his actions gave me hope…. a reason to think that there might be a chance I could morph into someone else.

I told her the whole story of how I’d met him at school, how we made films together, how he’d urged me to move to NYC a year before, found me a place to stay with his then-girlfriend, referred me for a job that he knew about, about how I’d moved in with him when the girlfriend broke up with him (crazy girl, lucky me), and how I was now living in an illegal attic apartment in Brooklyn. About how attached I was to him, how he made me laugh, how handsome I thought he was, how he made me look beautiful on film (he had magical powers), how the deep sobs rose from my toes and could not be stopped whenever the conversation turned to our (lack of) future together.  All the while, she just sat and listened to what must have seemed like the presentation of a person in the grips of mania.  I finally stopped and took another breath. Oh yeah, I continued, and there’s my daughter. I have a daughter. She’s 7 and she’s living with a family – they’re friends – in Queens. This was another huge situation in my life I couldn’t seem to get a grip on.

“We have to stop now,” the voice said. We discussed money. I had none. She asked me what I could manage and I told her. The deal was made, and I was shown the door. “I’m sorry that I talked so much,” I said. “I was afraid I wouldn’t have time to tell you everything.”  She smiled just slightly. “I was wondering why you were in such a hurry,” she said. “You know, we have forever together.”

Being that I was never mentally where I was physically located at that point in my life, it didn’t sink in until later. Then I thought – what a curious thing to say—we have forever together. What did she mean by that? Forever was a concept I didn’t quite “get”. Forever implied – well, a long life. Just a week before, I had stood in line at my bank waiting to open my first IRA as a defensive maneuver. The bookkeeper at my job had roughed out my taxes for me and due to accidental under-withholding my first year in NYC, I was going to owe the government money. I was terrified.  I only had about $2000 to my name and the bookkeeper had suggested an IRA as a way to solve my problem. The line at the bank moved very slowly and I was having an out-of-body experience. I was not quite 32 years old. I would not have access to my $2000 again for close to 28 years.  This was both stunning and sobering to me because I realized that I had not anticipated living that long. Opening an IRA was like a commitment to living. I wasn’t so sure it was possible.

When I returned to my office after the appointment, I realized I had forgotten to tell her that I wouldn’t be there the following week because I would be out of town. But I was “phone phobic.” I could not possibly call her to tell her so. The words would get glued together before exiting my mouth. I did the only sensible thing. I sent her a letter to tell her.

Two weeks later, I returned to her office. “What happened last week?” asked the voice. I panicked. “Didn’t you get my letter?” I did not want her to think I was irresponsible, that I would do such a thing as just not show up. “Yes, I did,” she said. She went on to tell me that she had been concerned because she was going away the following week for two weeks, and she had wanted to be able to tell me this the week I wasn’t there. She said she didn’t know how I would feel about such short notice. “It’s ok,” I said. Again, I was curious – why would she think I would have feelings about short notice? It would be fine for her to be gone, I wouldn’t notice the difference.  Have a good time, I said.

Well, that was for sure the last time that she would go away without me caring. “The voice” became the woman I call my ‘heart mother.’  [Not that I didn’t have a perfectly wonderful real mother but this was different.]  She moved into not only my heart, but every cell of my body.  It is largely because of her that I made it to the age when I could officially get my $2000 back.  

My heart mother will turn 70 on Tuesday this week.  I honor her and I thank her. And I’m still counting on her to keep her promise – that we will have forever together.  Somehow.