“Little Juney Pie with her petite little body and her perfect little house,” my mother would mock.
Alone in our small apartment after her long hours of working at the drugstore, my mother let her hair down, so to speak, as she drank her first of many nightly beers. That’s often when the Wicked Witch of the West came out. Her messages to me were subtle but deadly, and they were often nonverbal, delivered only with her eyes, facial expression, and exasperated sighs. The messages were clear: “Leave me alone, I’ve worked hard all day.” “Can’t you just be quiet?” “Can’t you just entertain yourself?” “You are in my way.” “I wish you would go away.”
Being a smart kid, I got the messages loud and clear. I learned to stay clear of my mother when she was drinking. Talking to her too much, making too much noise, asking for anything, was risking her wrath. And this I would avoid at all costs, for when she got angry I saw the real witch—the witch with the sharp chin and the sharp words, the witch who could melt me into a puddle with one look from her glaring, hate-filled eyes.
I knew I was walking on thin ice with my mother—that she was just tolerating me and it wouldn’t be long before she banished me altogether. I tried to become invisible around her when she was drinking. If she couldn’t see me, she wouldn’t be so annoyed by me. If she couldn’t see me, I was less likely to catch her wrath once she’d finished her fourth or fifth beer. I was the vanishing child. I could make myself and my energy very, very small. Or I could vanish outside, where I was free of her scrutinizing gaze.
Although my mother mostly only showed her good-witch side when she was in public, I do have a few fond memories of times we spent alone together. She didn’t play games with me or read to me like some parents did with their children. I knew not to ask for those things. I knew to be grateful for the fact that she worked hard to put food on the table. I knew to be grateful that she kept me instead of sending me away to a convent—her frequent threat if I dared to disobey her.
But very early on, while I was still cute and couldn’t yet talk back or be bad, there were times when my mother bounced me on her knee and sang this little ditty:
Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She shall have music wherever she goes.
This last part would be said with great relish and I remember laughing with glee. In those moments, long before I was introduced to my mother’s Wicked Witch side, I felt loved. I felt blessed by her magic wand, showered by the glitter and fairy dust she sprinkled upon me.
When she had the money, she’d take us to the movies, another thing we did well together, perhaps because there was mandated silence. We’d take the bus downtown to the Fox Theater, one of those old theaters decorated in a grandiose way, with baroque pillars and heavy purple drapes. I felt proud to be with my beautiful mother. I loved sitting in the dark theater listening to the dramatic music and anxiously waiting for the movie to start.
My mother loved keeping up with movie stars like Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart. She adored them, perhaps because their lives were so glamorous compared to hers. I always thought she was beautiful and charismatic enough to have been a movie star herself if she’d been at the right place at the right time for a talent scout to discover her.
Momma liked dramas filled with romance and pathos. The first movies I remember seeing were Three Coins in the Fountain, Magnificent Obsession, East of Eden, and The Barefoot Contessa with Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner. Most of the movies we saw were not appropriate for young children because they were filled with simmering sexuality and other adult themes. But I loved the sweet darkness of them, their intensity and pain—pain that echoed the deep pain I felt.
Momma wasn’t just a fan; she was also a critic, and this is where her Wicked Witch side would slip out. She talked about the stars as if she were an expert in acting. And she gossiped about them like they were personal friends of hers. She’d say, in hushed tones, “You know, Sammy Davis Jr. only has one good eye. The other is an artificial one.” When he married Brit Eck-land, a white Swedish actress, she strongly disapproved. “Who does he think he is, marrying a white woman!”
She also had strong opinions when Eddie Fisher left Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor. “I can’t stand that Debbie Reynolds. She’s too sweet and squeaky clean for me, so I don’t blame Eddie for leaving her. But Liz is just playing with that boy. She’s going to eat him up and spit him out.”
My mother also kept up with the singers of the time, like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and she loved composers like Gershwin and Cole Porter and Jerome Kern. She loved to sing and she had a beautiful voice. One of her favorite songs was “All the Things You Are,” by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein. She often sang it to me when I was small. The song was a lovely description of how a man felt about his lover,
