happy home we had been fortunate enough to have thus far and to accept the fact that we would no longer have our father present like he had always been before. As determined as we were to cope with the changes in our lives, it was difficult for us to understand why this calamity had befallen our family.
Gradually, I adjusted to the routine of my new life living in town, no longer surrounded by open fields nor walking on a dirt road to school, and no longer having my mother at home waiting for me when I arrived. But life was good. I had made new friends at school and like my teachers. I enjoyed being able to walk uptown to the grocery store whenever something was needed. There was a bathroom in the house, a luxury none of us had ever before experienced. Until we got a water heater, the water for baths had to be heated on the stove and carried to the tub.
Right after we moved into our new home, my sister and I decided it would be fun to give our little brother, Joey, a bath. “Let’s fill the tub all the way to the top like Dagwood always does in the funny papers. Barbara, go tell Joey to take off his clothes and come take a bath.”
She found Joey outside with a little boat he was floating on water in a hole he had dug in the ground. “Joey, Marcie has the tub filled with water. How would you like to take a bath? You really look like you need one. You’ve never had a bath in a big tub like this before. We filled it all the way to the top.”
“Let’s go. I’ve been wanting to get in that tub.” He jumped up and headed for the house. When he got inside he quickly stripped off his clothes. Barbara and I lifted him up and plunged him into the water.
“Yow!! This water is ice cold; let me out!” Joey started scrambling to get out of the water.
“No, you need a bath. Sit down and let us wash you off.” I pushed him back into the water. “You’ve seen Dagwood in the funny papers, haven’t you? He always sits way down in the tub.”
“I bet his water isn’t as cold as this. At least let me stand.” He stood there shivering as I quickly washed him off. At Joey’s expense we learned the water didn’t automatically come out of the faucet warm, especially if there was no hot water heater.
In addition to the luxury of a bathroom, I had a room of my own with a closet. I no longer had to share space with my brother and sister; I could keep things in order and my room always tidy. I delighted seeing only my clothes neatly hanging, not packed tightly with Barbara’s and Joey’s.
After school one day as I skipped along the sidewalk leading to our porch, whistling a little tune and feeling happy from a good day at school, I found my father sitting in the porch swing. I never knew when he would be home or when he would have to leave. He usually came home when he had passed from the manic stage into the quiet depressive stage. My mother could handle him when he was quiet because he spent most of the day in his chair, saying almost nothing to anyone, although he would give short answers to questions. Trying to understand how he felt about his situation, once I asked him directly what he felt when he changed personalities. He could give me no answer; he just smiled his sweet smile, reminiscent of his old self, which hurt me deeply when I saw it. I missed so the father I used to have.
His episodes gradually began lasting longer than they had at first, each stage being several weeks long. After sitting for days, rarely bathing or shaving, he would get up one morning and be perfectly normal – the man we used to know. It would be so wonderful to have him back.
But after experiencing several of these episodes, we knew there would be only a short period when he would be relatively lucid before the manic stage took over. However, it was so good to have our precious father back, if only for a short time. As always, however, the sleepless nights and restless days would begin again. In this stage of his illness he would often roam around town, sometimes even get picked up by the police. Then he would be taken back to the hospital, where he would stay for several months until he once again changed to the depressive state.
It was so hard for all of us to understand how someone could make such a complete change, even physically. In the manic stage he looked heavier, his face fuller and his eyes wild. As he sat in the depressive stage, he seemed to shrink in size, his face was relaxed, and he slept a great deal. Eventually my mother began to leave him in the hospital even in his quiet periods, as the personality changes were just too much for her to cope with, in addition to working and taking care of us children. She never knew what he might do in his wild state, and it became something she wanted to avoid if at all possible.
With my mother working everyday I found that more and more responsibility was placed on my shoulders. I helped her make decisions about the family and became someone on whom she could lean in lieu of a husband. My mother was the type of person who should have had a strong husband to take care of her and make all of the decisions. Instead, she had suddenly become totally responsible for the support and care of three children and herself and had to deal with my father’s illness as well.
I didn’t mind that my mother found it necessary to depend on me for help in raising the family, I was proud she had confidence in me. Often she would give me money and ask me to go uptown to pay bills. As I strolled up the sidewalk on an errand, I felt as though I was the mother of the family, and this responsibility gave me self-confidence. Without realizing it, I was becoming older than my twelve years, and by the time I was of high school age, I felt I was a capable, mature young lady.
When it was time for me to go to high school, I worried about my sister and brother having to trudge the eight blocks to school without me to protect them from barking dogs and guide them across busy streets. However, I had to leave them to fend for themselves; we no longer would be going to the same school. I was now fourteen and had entered the age of adolescence, a time of hormonal changes and emotional upheavals and was embarking on a new phase in my life. In my innocence I was unaware of the joys and pains that awaited me as adulthood loomed in the distance.
PART II
YOUNG LOVE
CHAPTER 4
Autumn was in the air as I sat in the front porch swing listening to the sounds of the night–little chirping noises made by the few remaining crickets rubbing their legs together, an occasional twitter of a bird snugging into a comfortable position on a branch. A street light glowed through winding trumpet vines as they strove to reach the top of a trellis enclosing one end of the porch. Leaves of the vine danced in the breeze, creating a pattern of shadows flittering on the porch wall. The strong fragrance of chrysanthemums flourishing near the porch drifted toward me. Turning my head toward the source of the fragrance, I noticed the silhouette of someone striding briskly down the sidewalk. Something about the figure was familiar when, with a bouncy gate, it turned into my walk and approached the porch. I recognized Brian O’Connor, a boy from my class at school, who had gone to a Soapbox Derby the day before with his girlfriend along with me and a boy I occasionally dated. After the Derby we stopped at a Miniature Golf Course to try our hand at putting the little white ball into holes placed in various places on the course. How it happened, I am not sure, but Brian and I ended several holes behind his girlfriend and my date. We laughed and kidded around and had a great time back there by ourselves. There was some kind of current between us, but after the game we got in the car to go home, he and his girlfriend in the back, me and my date in the front, and we had no further contact. However, I found myself thinking about Brian all the way home, even after I had gone to bed.
I stepped out from the shadows of the vines just as Brian reached the steps of the porch. “Hi, Brian. What are you doing down this way tonight?”
“Oh, I was up at the pool hall shooting pool with some of the guys, and I kept thinking that the same sidewalk that runs in front of the pool hall probably runs in front of your house.
