Ruby’s rules gave me a feeling of security I got nowhere else. It wasn’t until I started school that I experienced this kind of structure and the sense of safety that comes with it.
Ruby recognized, of course, that I was a kid and wasn’t going to be able to sit still without having something to do. I was four years old at this point, not yet able to read, so she’d hand me a pad and a pencil and told me to draw. This was her second gift. While my mother’s side of the family is artistic, I owe some of my interest and talent in art to Ruby, who gave me permission to experience art as an enjoyable way of passing time.
Ruby would sit in her tattered old easy chair with the lamplight beaconing down on her book and I would sit crouched nearby on the floor, hovering over a drawing pad. I didn’t have crayons, just a pencil, but the world I created was full of colors and magic. I drew worlds of exotic people and animals, and I drew the ships and airplanes that would take me to see them.
Hours would pass and then Ruby would say, “Don’t you think it’s time for a snack?”
That was music to my ears, not only because I loved to eat any time and anywhere, but because we had a ritual around our snack that I loved. Ruby would give me a handful of coins and I’d walk or run to the little store down the street. There I’d buy a can of Vienna sausages and two ice-cold bottles of Coca-Cola, and then I’d run back as fast as my legs could carry me, imagining how the cold, crisp soda would taste, how the bubbles would tickle my mouth. I’d stumble into the apartment and Ruby would get up from her chair and head for the little kitchen, where she’d make us Vienna sausage sandwiches with white bread and lots of mayonnaise—things we didn’t have at my house. Those sandwiches—rich and salty, just like kids like them, washed down by the sweet, bubbly Coca-Cola—felt like love to me.
After our snack it was “nap time.” I realized later in life that the nap was as much for Ruby as for me. The first time we took a nap together she said, “Do you know how to lie down ‘spoon fashion’?”
When I said no, she taught me how. She lay on her side and I lay in front of her and sat on her lap as she held me close to her. Love for the starving child.
Love was not the only thing I was starving for; sometimes I was starving for food too. Making food was always an afterthought for my mother, a chore she had to fulfill because she had a child. Left to herself, she would go all day without eating. On her days off, she started the day with coffee and cigarettes then switched to beer and cigarettes, which she would continue consuming long into the night. Finally, late at night, just before going to bed, she’d cook a greasy, starchy dinner. At that point she would eat too much, shoveling the food down as fast as she could—as if she’d suddenly remembered what food was.
So during the day, when I would tell my mother I was hungry, she’d look at me blankly, as if she didn’t understand how that could be. Then she’d look in the cupboard for a can of something.
One hot August day the something she found was creamed corn. She opened the can and poured it into a bowl, not bothering to heat it up.
I loved creamed corn so I happily took the bowl and started eating it standing up. But the sight of my eating bothered my mother somehow—just as so much of what I did bothered her.
“Go outside with that,” she scolded.
Dutifully, I opened the door of our little apartment and sat down on the red front steps. Since it was midafternoon and I hadn’t had anything to eat yet I devoured the whole bowl in no time. Unfortunately, my body didn’t want to accept this offering. I threw up, spewing kernels into the shrubs below. To this day, I hate creamed corn.
I don’t ever remember having a good relationship with food. It was never just nourishment for me the way it is for some people. It was so scarce—and alternatively so plentiful—that the stage was set for problems. When my mother did give me food it was usually too much too late in the day, causing me to view it as if it was literally a life saver—and then, once I had gobbled up too much, I viewed it as my enemy. Stomach swollen and hurting, I would lie down on the nearest couch, hating myself for eating so much. I would vow to eat less next time, to stop as soon as I became full. But I never knew when the next time would come, and the fear of there never being a next time catapulted me into another eating frenzy when I was fed—the way wild animals devour a dead carcass after a long season of starvation.
chapter 5
The fact that I didn’t have a father and had a mother who looked like my grandmother set me apart from other children. After all, I was growing up in the fifties—a time when the nuclear family with a mother, a father, two kids, and a dog was the ideal. But what made my childhood the most unique was that my mother had no idea how to be a mother, which meant I was left pretty much on my own, expected to raise myself.
She knew nothing about children—what they needed, what they wanted, or who these little creatures were. She expected me to act and think like
