relentless when it is possible to watch the sun make an uninhibited arc across the day, when the stars take up more of the night’s space than the darkness, when a footprint lives for days in its moist soil bed, when the only motor to be heard is the occasional tractor several miles away. I understand why my parents chose to spend this stage of their lives away from the commotion of urban America.
I am watching Iowa go by. This midwestern countryside is the place that possesses part of my childhood, the place where I caught snowflakes on my tongue and fireflies in Mason jars, imagining that I had captured things born of the stars. I don’t know where I’m going, and even as I drive amid familiar territory, I wonder where I’ve been. Yet I have inherited a certain essence, a philosophy perhaps, from my parents, and it’s not important for me to know. Possibility is a wind so strong it sometimes blows right through you. The same wind, perhaps, that carried the kite my parents and I flew recently on top of a big hill in Cedar County as the sun was setting one evening. That is where I will be-where I am-and all around me, Iowa is humming.
Diane B. Sigman
I smoked my first joint three weeks before my eleventh birthday. With my mother. My mother had smoked her first roughly three years earlier, at age thirty-four. She got high with our neighbors, Michael and Caroline, who lived two houses down from us in suburban Detroit.
Prior to meeting Michael and Caroline, my middle-class parents listened to Johnny Mathis, wore polyester pants, ate Saturday night dinners at Joe Muir’s Steakhouse, and socialized with other young Jewish couples who were beginning families and paying on starter homes. My father was a ham radio enthusiast; my mother played Mah-Jongg every Wednesday night with four other women. Bowel habits of the children dominated the conversation.
My brother’s birth in 1971 made our starter home too small. My parents selected our new house from a tract going up quickly and cheaply over empty fields. All the houses were thin-walled and leaky. During winter months we put towels on the windowsills that stuck to ice in the screen tracks.
My mother met Caroline when our schnauzer, Margo, crapped on her expensive, chemically maintained lawn. My mother apologized-Margo had an annoying tendency to bolt when let out-and they fell to conversing. During the next few weeks, whenever I couldn’t find my mother in the house, I’d stand on our driveway and look down the block. My mother would be sitting on Caroline’s porch, the two of them chatting and smoking cigarettes bought by the carton.
Then Caroline introduced Michael to my mother, my father was brought in and my family experienced a sea change. I was seven, my sister, six, my brother, three. Born in 1967, I remember vast expanses of ‘before,’ including the Vietnam War, Watergate, my mother’s bouffant hairdo and my father’s leisure suit.
Michael and Caroline were thirteen years apart in age, smoked pot and listened to music we’d never heard before. Dionne Warwick, Eydie Gorme and Johnny Mathis records were soon shelved to make space for the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. I came downstairs one morning and wandered over to the stereo, where an album lay out from the night before: Led Zeppelin IV. The gray man bent under his load of twigs looked a hell of a lot different from Dionne Warwick, insouciant in her Pucci sheath on the cover of
‘Something is very different here,’ I remember thinking. ‘Something has changed.’
Indeed. What Michael and Caroline offered my parents was a way station into something they were longing for but could not articulate. They were bored by those Joe Muir’s dinners, talk of how many bags of grass clippings each garnered from the Saturday lawn mowing and whether or not the kids shat according to Spock. Michael and Caroline read books and listened to this weird music and talked about ideas. Michael liked to cook exotic foods. He belonged to a beer club and ordered aged steaks through the mail. Issues of
My mother stopped using lipstick and put her frosted blue eye shadow away. She stashed her hot rollers (whose smell while heating I loved) under the bathroom sink and threw away the CFC-laden can of Aqua Net. She began wearing flat shoes. My father abandoned his hair spray, grew a full beard and mustache and allowed his thick hair to grow in. Both began wearing jeans. They dropped their straight friends swiftly and without explanation.
Yet they did not become hippies. Detroit didn’t produce hippies any more than it manufactured reliable cars. Instead, they became more open-minded, aware. They began to see societal mores as false constructs. Their relationship with Michael and Caroline deepened into an extended marriage.
Detroit wasn’t a swinging L. A. or the remote hills of Humboldt County, where open marriages and casual attitudes toward drugs were more prevalent. The Detroit I grew up in was about White Flight and ostentatious money and moving to a house in West Bloomfield with a Cadillac-always a Cadillac-in the driveway. The mothers of my peers wore gold jewelry and tight designer jeans. Black women from the inner city cleaned these women’s homes while they shopped and swapped divorce lawyers.
Although my parents never told me to be discreet, I intuited that ours was not a lifestyle discussed outside the house. I was in training for the dual life I maintain to this day. When I was younger, this meant getting a decent education and a job, limiting my drug exploits to weekends and keeping my counterculture views quiet among my peers. Neither of my parents had college degrees, and we thought that magic parchment meant financial security, infinitely more appealing than macaroni and old coats. So while I toked up with my folks on free Saturday nights, I also began accepting babysitting jobs whenever possible, spending those Friday and Saturday nights at somebody else’s kitchen table, buried in American history or Spanish verb conjugation. Sometimes I’d get home around one or two in the morning, still silently conjugating the verb ‘to be’ in Spanish, only to find my parents huddled around the table with Caroline and Michael, tapping Quaalude powder-still commercially available-into vitamin E capsules. Or they might be snorting a few lines. Pot was always around. I was frequently invited to join and just as often declined.
Sometime in my early teens, Caroline decided she didn’t want to be married to Michael anymore. I have no idea why. I’m not sure anyone did. Michael moved to New Mexico to be with his son, lan, the child of his brief first marriage. My parents were devastated, but continued their intense relationship with Caroline. Robert H. Rimmer’s The Harrad Experiment and Proposition 31 lay out in the family room. I read Rimmer’s careful analyses of extended, loving relationships and felt they made perfect sense. A group of consenting adults wanting to share lives: sex, children, home, money. Yet I compared Rimmer’s Utopian world to my parents’ lives: missing Michael, dependent on me for child care, low on cash and living in a house deteriorating under harsh midwestern winters. I resented the metal key chain that gave my neck a rash. Going off to live with a like-minded group of people who took care of each other sounded fine to me.
By high school I had my life down to a science. I attended classes in the morning, then worked in the high school’s main office during the afternoon as part of the cooperative education program. I studied madly, enrolling in advanced placement history and English, hoping my good grades would get me loans or maybe a scholarship to Wayne State University. With my paychecks, I bought corduroy pants, matching sweaters and low-heeled boots. I kept my wavy brown hair shoulder-length and clean. Years later, readingyane
My school job freed me from babysitting, so Saturday nights, my books neatly stacked in my dusted bedroom, I’d get high with my parents. My father had befriended some younger co-workers who were into cocaine. They’d come over with their girlfriends and assorted buddies and we’d party all night.
One buddy was a tall, shy young man named Dean. He came from a working-class Catholic family of nine brothers and sisters, many of whom worked alongside him at a Ford plant. Though he was sharply intelligent, college was never encouraged in his family.
So despite his desire to attend, he abided by his father’s wishes and followed in the family footsteps into the
