Real Life

My sister and brother hadn’t been infected by the music craze the way I was. With Pam in the all-city orchestra and Dennis going out for football and track, I guess they didn’t have time. Dennis was going to Central, which was as scholastically competitive as Girls’ High. There was hardly time to think about much other than studying, although I kept boys and music high on the list of priorities after I started there.

The Bivins family lived across the street. Mr Bivins was a detective in the downtown police force and his daughter Lynn was my best friend, along with Jean and Gloria Scott who lived a few blocks away. Lynn was a beanpole and although being tall and thin was not considered a plus on the reservation, where having big legs was the great physical attribute, Lynn was very popular with the boys. She had a younger sister, Patsy, who was born with Down’s syndrome. When Lynn’s mother went out, we were often expected to baby-sit for Patsy, who at eight couldn’t converse or follow instructions. But she had the sweetest nature and was easier to mind than a baby as long as you didn’t leave her on her own for a minute.

As soon as Mrs Bivins went out, boys were invited in and invariably there would be some necking in the kitchen beside the refrigerator, shielded from view in case someone walked in unexpectedly. Patsy would sit patiently waiting and watching. We were sure that she couldn’t tell and she seemed a harmless enough voyeur. What we didn’t bargain on was that the sight of two adolescents kissing and groping next to the refrigerator would make such a lasting impression that she tried to imitate us in the presence of Lynn’s mother intermittently for months after. Mrs Bivins never quite figured out what Patsy was doing rubbing up next to the refrigerator.

Lynn, the two eldest Scott sisters and I never considered more than necking. We didn’t even deign to talk about anything else.

There were four children in the Scott family and Mr and Mrs Scott both worked to keep them all fed. It was the girls’ responsibility to take care of the house and even the youngest, Helen (who has since become one of the singers in the Three Degrees), was well trained to do the cleaning and cooking. The three girls and their younger brother Robert were all pretty, especially by Melangian standards, with their green-grey eyes, fair skin and tawny hair. Mrs Scott, whom they got their good looks from, suspected that boys would be endlessly banging on their door. What she didn’t imagine was that we would go out looking for them while all our parents were out at work.

Ikey probably hoped that if she was lenient and patient, my new personality would disappear as mysteriously as it had appeared. She tolerated new habits like smoking cigarettes as long as I restricted them to the house. I’d enjoyed sneaking a smoke with friends but didn’t find the experience half as gratifying when it came around to doing it at home.

I don’t know if the girlfriends I entertained found as much resistance from their parents to our fast noisy talk as I did, but it was certainly easier for me to get on with the life I was making for myself before Ikey, Edna and Thelma got home from work.

When Edna lambasted me for thinking that I was a woman, she wasn’t far off the mark. I’d put a wiggle in my walk and my head was full of love lust. My ‘fast’ ways were encouraged by my older friends but beneath the new, worldly exterior, my intentions were harmless. I didn’t really want to do any more than a bit of necking under a red light bulb in a darkened room with some new heart-throb of mine from the local playground who, I’d decided, was the beginning and the end of my life … for a week or two. We girls loved sauntering by the nearby playground where the teenage boys were always sweating in the heat of a basketball game or lolling about at the edge of the court waiting for a chance to play. We pretended not to notice them as we drifted past slowly enough to be seen in a pair of short shorts or a tight skirt, hoping to attract the attention of our latest forecourt fantasy. (That priest who accused me of switching down the aisle at St Elizabeth’s must have had a premonition.)

Suffice it to say that by the time I sat in front of the television watching John F. Kennedy win the nomination to run as the Democratic candidate in the 1960 presidential election against Richard M. Nixon, I was a fully fledged teenager. I felt terribly sophisticated while I chomped chewing gum and smoked an Alpine mentholated cigarette and waited for the party returns.

Dennis was ready for college that summer and had been accepted at the University of California at Berkeley like Pam the year before. My mother decided that with both of them at college on the other coast, we needed to leave Philadelphia and move west. I was horrified by the thought of being wrenched from my beloved city. I didn’t think I could cope without my favourite TV show and my favourite radio station.

Television, radio and the industry that manufactured teen culture had fashioned me far more than anything that was fed to me at school except the talk about freedom and equality, the principles of which I used as an argument against my mother’s protests that I didn’t have a right to do with my life as I wanted. After all, she said, wasn’t my life her life too? I didn’t think so.

She proved me wrong when she packed me onto a propeller plane and dragged me to the other side of America.

6 THE DREAM MACHINE

Although I didn’t want to go to California, my imagination painted a vivid image for me of Oakland, the city we were moving to. I expected it to look like the unidentified towns which were the backcloth of the family situation comedies I regularly watched while I grew up 3000 miles away. They usually depicted a pretty suburb: a mini Beverly Hills, divided by neat front lawns on quiet tree-lined streets with the splash of a freshly painted ranch-style house with a garage that had a basketball net conveniently attached to an overhead wall so that the kids could play.

I wasn’t an avid moviegoer, but I had enough beforehand knowledge of California to be wrong about it. In my head was the clichéd vision – blazing yellow sun, picturesque orange groves, palm trees against a blue sky. I could see a swimming pool and the languid masses of draped bodies slung across deck chairs as they browned like toast under the sun. An unspoken wealth supported the whole canvas.

California might just as well have been in another country. Our only connection to it was that each Christmas, Uncle Henry used to send Edna a voluptuous basket of fruit from California where he’d been living since he’d retired from the navy. The fruit was always a glamorous array of wrapped citrus with something exotic like a pineapple on top in coloured cellophane with a big bow around it. (Once a basket arrived with a dark green thing in it which I had never seen before. Edna claimed that she had in Florida, but I didn’t believe her. I was sure she was just saying this to impress us and that the avocado pear wasn’t a pear at all and was poison.)

The journey to San Francisco airport took about sixteen hours and we had to stop off once to refuel. At one point during the flight, the pilot told us to look at the Grand Canyon. I did so reluctantly. I’d never been on an airplane before, but I can’t say that I appreciated my first experience, because I was too caught up in sombre remorse: I was sick from the ache of leaving friends behind and believed that the only reason destiny was pulling me westwards was to help Ikey interfere with a budding romance between me and an eighteen-year-old boy. It was July 1960 and I was not a bit happy about the prospect of a future in California.

That first afternoon we drove through Oakland was sunny – too sunny for my liking. A heat of light burned the sidewalk. There was no imposing residential monument of history to interest me and no orderly strips of red brick houses with dark-green hedges to match. In fact, brick must have been at a premium, because every house and building seemed to be made of stucco.

I’d only been out of the North once, when the Bivins family took me on a weekend jaunt to visit some of their relatives in North Carolina. The flat dullness of the small nameless Southern towns we drove through left me with the same depressed feeling that I had when I looked at Oakland for the first time.

There wasn’t one lawn or ranch-style house to be seen as we drove down Grove Street. It looked like an architectural free-for-all. No building seemed planted in the sidewalk with solid old East Coast permanence. Instead the ticky-tacky greyish boxes with storm windows looked as if they’d been thrown on the pavement and designed with less imagination than my first Lego attempts.

More sky than I’d ever noticed before hung down. It was barely the palest blue and was dipped in dry heat. The air seemed no cleaner than the sidewalk.

I wanted to cry and probably would have if I’d thought that it would do any good. But the truth was that I was there to stay. I knew my grandmother had had the right idea when she ground her heels in and refused to join us for the move west. I longed to be back there with her, lounging around in big-city civilization.

I also felt Ikey’s disappointment and could see it registering in the dull glaze of her eyes as she stared from the car window listening to her brother explain how she, Thelma, Pam and I could temporarily cope with a one-bedroom apartment above some shops at the corner of 55th and Grove. He wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t so temporary.

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