Real Life

The number 23 trolley-car depot was a block beyond our house on the other side of the road, and when we first moved to Musgrave Street, you couldn’t help noticing the rattle of the trolley cars on the track as they passed with their pole crackling against the overhead line. But this sound merely broke the silence. It didn’t disturb the peace.

Our family nearly belonged. Pam was openly admired for her studious appearance when she rushed off early to school first thing, looking as if her mind was on algebra instead of boys. She’d be wearing her new glasses and clutching her briefcase, which was always stuffed and overflowing with books and homework. She’d started at the Philadelphia High School for Girls at 17th Street and Spring Garden, which admitted girls from throughout the city on the basis of outstanding academic achievement. Pam studied the bass violin, and on Saturday morning she and Dennis went to special art classes that were given to children selected from all over Philadelphia who had exceptional artistic talent. I was just as proud of them as Edna, Ikey and Thelma were.

Once Edna had started her new job, at a factory that made children’s dresses, I was transformed from being starched and presentable to being ‘turned out’. I’d like to claim that I wasn’t made vain, merely extra confident in a wardrobe finer than anybody else’s at school. Edna bought me each new model that came off the factory floor.

Ikey was in her element working at the local library as a librarian. She walked home through rain and snow and once through a hurricane with her arms full of books for us, which gave her a reason to write her own poems and read other people’s, and I could get a reading of ‘Invictus’, ‘Crossing the Bar’ or ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ any time I wanted. They were my favourites, though neither my mother nor I knew that ‘gaol’ was pronounced ‘jail’.

Thelma remained our sweet unselfish aunt who cared about Ikey’s children as though they were her own. She enhanced her good looks to the fullest each morning with a little help from Maybelline cake mascara, a trace of eyebrow pencil and rouge with a hint of dark-red lipstick to finish it all off. She and Ikey wore straight skirts with cinched belts and stilettos that you could hear click-click-clicking on the cobblestone street in front of our house as Thelma returned from work around 5.30 pm. It was no wonder that she and Ikey got an intolerable dose of whistles, especially during the summer months.

I was free to bang the screen door going and coming with a shout to name which neighbour I was rushing off to visit. My personality still changed between home and school. The two environments were separate but equal in my head and heart.

We were a strange family in some ways, compared to the people on television. Love was not a thing we discussed. Though we liked each other, we didn’t call each other ‘darling’ and no one asked if you’d slept well when you stumbled down to the kitchen for a bowl of hominy grits or a fried egg. Sometimes we’d have a family pow-wow and decide that new resolutions were called for to make us practise at home on each other some of the good manners we exhibited outside. We could manage to adhere to the new rules for about a week, not raising our voices to each other, or speaking an unkind word, or leaping like Tarzan from the fourth stair into the living room.

There was a collection box to hold the penalty of a penny to be paid any time you used bad language or incorrect English or spoke dialect. It was always chock-full at the end of the week and went to the person who’d made the fewest faux-pas. My grandmother never played …

There was a certain amount of democracy in our house, although hard and fast rules for the children like no cursing were never allowed to be broken. There was an assumption that we had as much right to an opinion and a vote in matters as the women. The word fair was used a lot, perhaps too much. It only confused me into thinking that life was going to be fair.

Television continued to be my teacher. Family sitcoms like Ozzic and Harriet and Father Knows Best not only kept me amused, they made me informed and aware of things that I was not exposed to through my own experience. For instance, women on the television were always crying, but I don’t remember seeing my mother or grandmother cry through my childhood. For any upsets other than physical injuries, we were invariably told to ‘save the tears’. It was almost a relief to fall down and skin a knee, because I could wail the house down without the least reproach.

One of the things that set us apart from other kids in the neighbourhood is that we weren’t beaten. Even though people didn’t yell out of the windows in Mount Airy or curse each other so that it could be heard by passers-by, we often overheard the parental threat of the strap or the belt and the screams and cries that resulted from such punishment, which my mother considered uncivilized and inhumane. We were never punished in this way and were thought lucky by kids who were. Edna would threaten us with the strap if we incensed her while my mother was out, but it fell on deaf ears, even if she stomped off as far as the back yard to pull a switch from the stinkwood tree.

We couldn’t afford holidays, but I didn’t feel that we were missing much, and at that time, family holidays weren’t considered a necessity and planned with the feverish intensity that they are today. We had the odd day trip to Atlantic City or the Catskill Mountains, which broke the monotony. That we’d been somewhere and seen something was enough when school started and we had to write about our vacation. At Christmas we got enough presents to entertain us until a birthday brought some more. Most of the family’s birthdays fell within a week of each other in the spring.

Apart from these minor deviations, we carried on like a lot of other families. We were just noisier. Mornings were absolute chaos. Any kitchen would be busy in the morning with a family of six, but when three of them are women, there’s never enough space and our kitchen wasn’t particularly large. The radio didn’t blare as loudly as my grandmother claimed it did, but Dennis refused to switch it off so that Edna could think, and she refused to stop shouting about it so Ikey could think. There was always that beat in the background, for instance Bo Diddley singing ‘Down Yonder, Down On The Farm’ on the local Melangian station until it got switched to a station with Eddie Fisher or Tony Bennet crooning something above the din of the family rushing up and down the stairs trying to make their way to their separate lives. My mother developed the irritating habit of calling several wrong names before she hit upon the name of the person she really wanted to address. ‘Pamala, I mean Dennis, I mean Marsha.’ She did this so often that my aunt and grandmother caught the habit of it, too.

Fits and fights over whose turn it was in the only bathroom filtered downstairs into the kitchen through a crack in the floorboards to mix with the snitch of swearing that came with a last-minute touch-up with the straightening comb as one of the women singed her scalp in the rush of confusion.

‘Was the cat fed?’ ‘Have you got your milk money?’ ‘Who took my last piece of chewing gum?’ ‘Put your front-door key in your pocket …’ I can’t think how anybody arrived in one piece ready to start the day. Luckily the long journey to school on the trolley had a calming effect.

There was nothing that I thought I needed that I didn’t have except an atomic-bomb shelter stocked with neat little shelves of canned goods and folded army blankets and candles and a flashlight. Lots of people had converted their basements like this in case the Russians bombed us, a threat often implied in the Junior Scholastic and the Weekly Reader which we got at school. Instead, our basement was like an overstuffed attic with that oval portrait of my grandmother always in the way. Things were put down there when they had no other home and part of it was used as a laundry room. It was doubtful that it would ever become a bomb shelter, or even get a facelift of knotty pine walls and be called a den.

This is where my mother was one day, sorting out the coloureds from the whites to do a wash load, when I was called down to speak with her.

Ikey was standing on the platform near the washing machine when I bounded down the staircase. It was one of those old-fashioned washing machines that look a bit like a white pot-bellied stove with a separate wringer attached on top. No one ever went down to the basement unless they were doing the wash, and this made it the only place in the house you could be guaranteed a bit of privacy. It was lit by a bare bulb which hung down from the ceiling and cast spooky shadows.

When Ikey told me that Blair had been killed early that morning in a car accident, she wasn’t crying. She was just piling the clothes into the washing machine. (I’ve detested doing laundry ever since.) Because she didn’t really look up at me, I could tell that it was one of those times when I wasn’t allowed to ask questions. If I blinked fast I could always keep back the tears so I tried that while I stood by the bottom stair waiting to be told what to do.

My father had never written to me. I couldn’t rush upstairs to look at his handwriting.

There was no school that day because of a teachers’ meeting, so Dennis and I went to the little green next to the library. It wasn’t raining. The leaves had fallen.

Later that afternoon I was allowed to go to a friend’s house. She had a Persian cat that had its own birth certificate, which I thought was the most wonderfully chic thing I’d ever heard of. My friend’s mother must have found it very disarming when I looked up at her and said that my father had died that day. I didn’t make a big deal of it, because I didn’t want any sympathy. I just wanted to tell somebody.

No flowers arrived. And Blair wasn’t mentioned again until my mother had to go to Boston for the funeral.

The mornings came and went with nothing to mark the change. This was something else that I was to learn not to talk about. I got so good at keeping secrets that I eventually learned to keep them from myself.

Music rescued me from secrets and silences just around that period. My mother had taken me to see Johnnie Ray once when I was about five. He was performing in a cinema with the curtains drawn across the silver screen so that it could double as a live theatre. He was supported by the Four Aces or the Diamonds – one of those groups with a name like a suit of cards. They came on before the main attraction wearing blue iridescent suits and sang. Three of them gathered around one microphone singing harmonies to the melody and managed at the same time to snap their fingers, smile and do little dance steps in unison. The lead singer had his own microphone and spoke to us between the songs while one of the three in back clowned around a bit as part of the act. The other two just sang and I suppose they did that well enough or the audience wouldn’t have clapped so much.

Ikey had told me before Johnnie Ray appeared that he was deaf, so I felt very sorry for him when he came out with his hearing aid in his ear and sat down at the black baby grand piano. Our seats were in the balcony. It was dark everywhere except on the stage and we could see him perfectly, singing and swaying back and forth on his stool as he played the piano.

His blond hair was swept back and parted. Only one lock in the front moved, however much he threw himself around as he sang ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’. A few women sitting near us were crying and so was Johnnie. I imagined he was crying because he was deaf, which did seem very sad to me, but I didn’t know what on earth those women were crying about.

The Uptown theatre in Philadelphia was rather famous for showcasing better-known Melangian performers. My mother said it was too dangerous to go there. Fights sometimes broke out in the audience, and on a few occasions gangs had scuffles outside after a show. So I didn’t go to any more concerts, but when people like Eddie Fisher, Dean Martin or Sammy Davis Jr sang on the radio, I imagined them appearing on a darkened stage just like Johnnie Ray.

I had to rely on radio, television and my brother’s collection of records for my music. When we moved to Mount Airy, it was not yet the kind of neighbourhood where people sang on the street corners, although we could often get within listening distance of the landlady’s Holy Roller meeting, as a few spirituals filtered out to the street.

Music seeped in and around me at home for as long as I can remember and this may have been the initial reason for my passion for it, but I can say without doubt that it was ‘seeing’ music that eventually made it stick to me like cement glue.

A stocky, rather ordinary man with slick dark hair named Bob Horn hosted the 3 pm music show from our local TV station – Bandstand. He played the latest single record releases and talked to an invited group of guests after they had mimed to their record. He also introduced the teenage studio audience.

If I rushed home from school I could catch all but the first half-hour of Bandstand. Tearing out of my fourth-grade class as soon as the final bell rang, I’d nearly get myself run over by the cars on Germantown Avenue because I’d spotted my trolley coming and couldn’t wait for the traffic lights to change.

Unfortunately, the programme time interfered with my friendship with the open-air girls and their after-school teas as well as my ballet practice at home to my scratchy 78 record of Chopin’s Polonaise. Watching Bandstand made me want to practise the mambo and the bunny hop instead, because that was what the fourteen- to eighteen-year-old audience was doing. That, and the bop. I’d been dancing since the hucklebuck, but never with the frenzied fever to get it right. I suppose that having a teenage brother and sister introduced me to teenage tastes early, but it was music that whipped me into my premature adolescence.

I was still wearing braids when I started bopping about the dining room in front of the television imitating teen attitudes with my head filling with notions about ‘earth angels’, ‘thrills on Blueberry Hill’ and other fairy-tale romances nailed to a four-four beat. I felt I was missing a ponytail, bobby socks, a cardigan sweater worn backwards and a felt skirt with a curly-haired poodle on it wearing a diamond-studded collar. I also had to find a partner to dance with as Dennis refused and Pam would arrive home loaded with homework and disappear straight upstairs to study.

Five afternoons a week for at least an hour each day I was mesmerized by Bandstand. I gave my undivided attention to the vision and sound of what they were calling rock and roll, which sounded like a pokier version of the rhythm and blues I’d heard on jukeboxes on the reservation and on the Melangian radio station. I don’t want to give the impression that I was getting lost in it, though. If anything, I found myself in the music, because somehow it satisfied all my secret needs.

Rock and roll’s simple childlike passion poetry had various smudges of joy, pathos and sentimentality which I felt or was starting to feel but couldn’t express. The lyrics were repetitive like the commercial jingles that regularly interrupted my favourite TV and radio shows. There was a throbbing rhythm which was sometimes almost menacing and had an element of the reservation about it. Melangian dialect was often used for the lyrics and Melangian groups like the Platters were as important to the music as white stars like Bill Haley and the Comets.

In the early days of Bandstand, Melangian teenagers used to participate. When the camera scanned the audience, which was invited to dance to each record that was played, the Melangian couples were by far the best dancers, doing the most intricate variations of spins, twirls and fancy footwork and never looking as if they’d just graduated from an Arthur Murray dance course.

As Bandstand was broadcast live from South Philadelphia, which was a rough part of the city that had more than its share of gangs, slums and delinquents, it attracted teenagers from that area, so the dancing audience didn’t look like a contrived showcase for middle-class kids. They had something of ‘the street’ about them.

The show was off the air before Ikey, Thelma and Edna got in from work, and they didn’t disapprove of my watching. My mother was only in her midthirties at the time, neither old enough nor old-fashioned enough to denounce rock and roll as a sinful or negative influence, which was a growing complaint about it among very conservative adults. She and Thelma liked the music in the house.

They were as enthralled as we kids were when Elvis Presley first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show one Sunday night, gyrating like a rhythm-and-blues singer. When his bumping and grinding below the waist was banned from the screen on a subsequent show, it made a tremendous stink, turning his censored performance into real box-office and TV-rating appeal. It made people talk about him. I can’t remember how many appearances he made on the show, but there were several at a time when Ed Sullivan had the most popular variety programme on nationwide television. The censorship made Elvis’s appearances newsworthy. The papers were full of reports and I guess it was the first time that television and journalism married their interests to make a rock idol.

Edna was a bit distressed by the newspapers’ claim that Elvis’s style was original, because she said rightly that it was really the Melangian rhythm-and-blues singers’ performing style. But she could have screamed about that until the cows came home and nobody would have taken a blind bit of notice. It was his white version of the form that made it provocative and caused white teenage girls to scream and want to pull out his hair and their own. Others imitated him and his style and helped his brand of rock and roll surpass teen-cult status to become a national phenomenon.

Bandstand was so influential to the promotion of this teen music phase that it was picked up by a big network and became a nationally broadcast television show. It was renamed American Bandstand and a young MC named Dick Clark replaced Bob Horn as the star presenter.

When the phase became a craze, Philadelphia was on the map again. Bandstand spotlighted a growing trend in America to recognize teenagers as a breed with their own style and culture, and the weekly allowance to be consumers. To say you were from Philadelphia in the mid-1950s was probably like saying that you were from Liverpool after the mid-1960s. The place name projected a certain teen-cult music status, not only because of Bandstand, but also because many of the popular teen idols like Frankie Avalon, Dion, Bobby Rydell, themselves teenagers, stepped out of Philadelphia city-centre high schools into the media frenzy building up in America about its teenagers.

Ten years after the Second World War, parents may have been relieved that they could afford and tolerate rock and roll, and regarded it as a minor cultural nuisance that was temporarily captivating their war babies. Even though I was a postwar baby, I was ready to be captured, too.

My passion for music and the culture that grew out of it was not my only interest. There were other elements of my life, like getting good grades at Jenks school, which held me back from becoming a wholehearted bobbysoxer. But I had no reluctance about putting my dolls and my roller skates in the basement to show that I wouldn’t be playing with them any more. And I found new friends in the neigbourhood who wanted to master the latest dance steps as I did.

I was nearly delirious when I spotted my first adolescent pimple and had to buy my first tube of Clearasil, which was new on the market and being advertised on television and in teen magazines.

Wasn’t there a whole generation going through it? I was just taking an early grab at the tail of pubescence. It pulled me into the pandemonium of teenage culture so fast that there wasn’t a chance for me to wave goodbye to childhood before it disappeared over the horizon with some of my more agreeable traits in tow, such as wanting to please adults. As can be expected, my mother wasn’t thrilled about my quick personality change. It made her nervous and angry to see me running up and down breathlessly while I chased the spirit of something that was invisible to her but galvanizing and hypnotic to me.

The teen cult was like the call of the wild. It beckoned me first through music. Rhythm and blues and rock and roll had an insidious penetration. Sometimes I’d hear a song that I couldn’t get enough of from hearing it a few times on the radio, so I’d buy the record and listen to the same song over and over and over again. It manipulated me like a mantra with the lyrics about puppy love and such, accompanying a beat that excited me to the point that I was either transfixed or transported to another zone.

I had become so good and convincing at marching to other people’s drummers that it was a shock to me and my family when music let me hear my own. I was a handful and couldn’t be constrained any more by a harsh word or criticism of how I looked or behaved. I didn’t want to look like a nice little girl and refused to wear clothes that didn’t have a look of flair and independence. I would have teetered around in stilettos if only I could have got away with it.

First it was music, then it was clothes, then it was boys. Or first it was music, then it was love, then it was boys. I’m not sure. All I know is that while I was jumping up and down dancing in the mirror to the beat, not being in love just didn’t seem good enough. I pulled my cinched belt tighter and waited. Falling in love with love came before falling in love with somebody.

It’s a wonder that I kept my studies up, but I did. One day the school principal called my mother to find out why I was wearing lipstick to my seventh-grade class. This came as a bit of a shock to poor Ikey, who sent me to school looking as refined and dignified as possible. She never realized that on my way to catch the trolley car in the morning I slipped into a telephone booth en route and made a few subtle alterations. Like Superman, my persona was transformed by my get-up. I’d come out of the telephone booth with my skirt hitched up by a belt to a much shorter length, my hair swept to the side in a winsome braid, and at least two thick layers of Westmore’s Oooh-La-La Orange on my lips. The iridescent lipstick cost 49 cents at Woolworth’s. I kept it in my briefcase.

My whole demeanour changed under the ‘Oooh-La-La’ spell. I wanted to be noisy and boisterous and saw nothing appealing in being dignified. I didn’t want to imitate open-air girls except in their occasional company. Instead I wanted to mimic the DJ on WDAS (the Melangian radio station), whose fast, hip monologues derived from the reservation dialect. The friends I made in the neighbourhood were happy to do the same thing and were impressed that I was good at it.

My musical preference reflected my love for music from the reservation and its dialect. I didn’t want to sing along with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly or ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’. I wanted to moon about to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and the Flamingoes. Anybody with that sound of a cappella singing that I used to love to hear on 23rd Street was for me.

Dennis thought that I looked and acted a bit ridiculous but he did enjoy my departure from childhood. We didn’t have the same taste in music, unfortunately. Our allowances would have gone further if we’d wanted the same singles, but he was more into Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. They were all right but hardly made the kind of music that you could stand in a dark corner and do a slow stroll to, which was what I wanted to do.

I was a nightmare for my mother, and it was probably a shock as much as a relief that I qualified for entry into the Philadelphia High School for Girls when I was thirteen.

Pam was going to the University of California in Berkeley, where Uncle Henry lived, after her graduation from the Girls’ High. Ikey took the day off to go to Pam’s graduation, and took me. I hoped the fact that she graduated summa cum laude from the best school in the city made her trials in Germantown pale.