would accept him as a day student. And that was how we ended up moving to Brattleboro.
The choices were still discouragingly few, but my parents had heard positive things about changes at the school they'd first visited in Brattleboro before the doomed Connecticut decision. New classrooms and a gymnasium had been built at the Austine School, and they'd also hired a dynamic, innovative headmaster. After long discussions with him and much deliberation at home, my parents agreed that Austine was the place for Steve and we'd be moving to Brattleboro.
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We couldn't manage to leave Poultney without drama. Since we were moving right before my birthday, Mom planned my party early so my friends and cousins could help me celebrate. It was a grand birthday and good-bye party all rolled into one. Everyone was caught up in high-energy, sugar-fueled excitement.
As I was blowing out the candles on the cake, five-year-old Mary Beth jumped out of her chair and began teasing Mark, who was a few months shy of four. He had a sourball in his mouth, and my sister was dangling the bag of hard, round candies over his head, just out of his reach. As he looked up and stretched to grab the bag, he inhaled the sourball.
Clutching at his throat, Mark immediately began coughing and choking, but gasping for breath only lodged the candy more firmly in his throat. The festive party atmosphere dissolved instantly. Mom started slapping his back to try to dislodge the candy. It didn't work. She flipped him upside down and shook him by the heels. That didn't work either. Turning him right side up again, she slapped his back another time. No luck, and Mark was turning a distinct shade of blue.
Desperate, my mother stuck her finger as far down his throat as humanly possible and managed to get the edge of her long, beautiful, red fingernail under the candy and flip it free. By that time, Mark's eyes had rolled back in his head and he wasn't quite conscious, but at least he started breathing again.
Through it all Mom wept in fear, but she never stopped trying to get that damn candy out of her son's throat. The rest of us were her hysterical chorus. When the town's doctor arrived, Mark was lying on the sofa, still dazed. By then his normal color had been restored, and he was declared sound. Not long ago Mary Beth told me that once Mark had started choking, she'd fled and taken refuge under our bed, trying not to cry out loud. Long after the event, she continued to feel upset and guilty because she'd “almost killed her brother.” None of us had ever noticed her part in the drama.
Mark's near-death experience frayed whatever resolve Mom might have had to try to make our move to Brattleboro as smooth as possible. Instead, it was sheer hell. My mother was immediately and totally miserable, and every single weekend without fail we'd pile into the family's blue-and-white Ford and drive home to Poultney to stay with my grandparents. In between those trips, Dad would continue his search for a job.
The two-hour ride was mostly a nightmare. My stressed-out parents took turns hollering at the four of us in the back seat to “behave” or “be quiet” or, in desperation, “shut up or we'll stop this car and spank you.” The threats were idle, but sometimes Mom would completely lose patience and make weak efforts to slap at us over her shoulder while Dad focused ever more intently on driving.
Much of our misbehavior in the car, if that's what it was, was a battle for space. Sometimes one of us would lie down in the rear window, above the back seat. Another would get on the floor and try to find comfort stretching out over the hump in the middle. That left the two others vying for the back seat itself. And somebody was always carsick. The worst case was when Mary Beth lurched forward to be sick on the floor, only to throw up on sleeping Mark's face. His mouth happened to be open at the time.
Just as it seemed like the road trips from hell were never going to end, they did. Unfortunately, it wasn't because the family had happily adjusted to Brattleboro. We no longer went to Poultney, because my mother couldn't. She couldn't get out of bed. In the terminology of the time, Mom had a complete nervous breakdown.
· · ·
After half a year without work, my father had finally found a job as a salesman for General Electric and would cover a three-state area. This meant he'd be traveling all week, leaving the house early Monday mornings and not getting back home again until late Friday evenings. While it was a huge economic relief that Dad finally had a job, my mother felt completely abandoned while trying to cope with four kids in an alien town, with no friends or support network. My father had to take their only car, which left her feeling further trapped. Mom was angry at my father and envious at the same time. He'd get to hop in the car and drive off for five days of peace and quiet while she struggled to manage everything alone.
If I'd been in my father's position, I'd have been thrilled to drive away from that distressed, chaotic house. If I'd been in my mother's shoes, I would have been a raging maniac. Mom didn't have the energy to rage. Instead she descended into a profound clinical depression, where she lingered for about a year. It was a no-win situation.
Dad couldn't stop working, so he hired a woman to stay with us while he was gone. Mrs. Day must have been competent enough and not unpleasant, because I have no bad memories of her. I think of her in shades of gray. The rest of life around that time is sepia colored. If my mother emerged from her bedroom at all, I don't remember it. The only clear memory I have of her from that year is watching her sleep when Dad would let me tiptoe into the room to look at her and make sure she was still there.
I don't know how my mother pulled herself back from her abyss. She had no antidepressants, and they couldn't afford counseling. Even if they could have, at that point in my parent's lives, help of that kind, outside the family, would have been out of the question. Probably her acute depression just ran its course as most do, helped along by the fact that, for my mother's sanity and the sake of the family, my father stopped working for General Electric.
Dad found a job in town with a local vending company that provided food machines for factories in town and at some of the ski lodges around Mount Snow. They also had jukeboxes and pinball games. A few years later, my father bought the business, which he owned for the next three decades.
As far as I could see, he wasn't around all that much more than when he'd been a traveling salesman. Along with his full-time work with Brattleboro Vending Corporation, Dad held a variety of part-time jobs on the side. He sold used cars; and he sold mobile homes, which we were never supposed to call trailers but did anyway. Just to poke fun, which he didn't find funny at all.
My father was an insurance investigator once and, later, a bartender. At one point he owned his own bar, until my mother told him it was the bar or her. There were too many late nights there, after he'd worked all day, and too many women interested in hanging around the handsome bartender.
Dad's long workdays weren't only a result of our puritanical New England work ethic; he cobbled jobs together to make ends meet. He was gone by the time we got up for school, and he often worked late into the night. But he was always home for the family dinner at 5:30 every night.
Only recently has my mother finally recognized that what she lived through was acute clinical depression. Curiously, despite the move to Brattleboro and its terrible impact on my mom, I've always considered her to be the rock of stability in the family. I was never one of the kids who hid things from her. To the contrary, there were many times throughout my life she wished I wouldn't share my adventures with her. Sometimes when I'd start to tell her something she didn't want to hear, she'd stick her fingers in her ears and start humming. I'd just wait her out. I always wanted her to know the entire me, not just the good parts.
Mom was always deeply embarrassed about her nervous breakdown, even though no one seemed to resent her for it, covertly or openly. It wasn't until we were young adults that we could try joking with her about it. Sometimes she could laugh, but usually she'd end up
