If only I could make Ollie understand. I traveled through the house following the sound of the vacuum cleaner and found her in a bedroom straightening a bedspread. “Mom says we aren’t rich and we aren’t poor,” I told her. “We’re normal.”
Ollie gave me a searching look, then laughed and shook her head. She smoothed the bedspread until every crease was gone.
Later that day, after she’d taken the chicken out of the oven and changed out of her crisp, white uniform into what she called “street clothes,” I watched Ollie walk down our driveway and up Grayton Road toward the bus stop. What she had said to me—that we were lucky because we were rich—was something that she would never have said to my parents, and I wondered if she saw my parents the way I saw the Beverly Hillbillies, not as real people at all.
The traffic on Grosse Pointe Boulevard was light on a Saturday. I did not feel the need to turn my head each time I heard a car approaching from behind, straining my neck, to check that my outstretched legs were safe.
“Make sure to hold your legs out,” my mother had warned when I’d climbed onto the book rack behind her bike seat. “Don’t get them caught in the spokes.”
We rode this way often in the summer afternoons, careening the grid of streets, my mother stopping to greet friends she spotted on the sidewalks.
We were headed to the library, where my mother would check out her monthly supply of books. “Ridiculous waste of money, buying books,” she used to say. I loved the library’s musty smell. Paging through magazines, I would be lulled into a trance by the rustling of newspaper pages around me, until my mother finally came to collect me. Down the library steps we’d walk in the afternoon heat to where my mother’s leather-seated old bicycle leaned against the brick of a wall, unlocked. She bungee-corded the books to the book rack before I got on.
“You add almost no weight,” my mother laughed as she began to pedal. “I’d hardly know you were there.”
Through the tree-lined streets we rode, my mother’s freckled thighs slowly pumping our wire-spoked wheels along the pavement, until we arrived home with her armful of books. Ollie would be preparing lunch when we came into the house, chicken livers and green beans or hamburgers spattering grease from the open frying pan.
When I became too heavy to ride on the book rack, my mother bought me a Schwinn three-speed with a red, white, and blue bicentennial banana seat, my most prized possession. Now I could ride anywhere in Grosse Pointe anytime I wanted, so long as I came home for dinner. My friends and I would tear around the neighborhood, barely observing stop signs, or hang around Schettler’s drugstore, eyeing the Revlon products. When we became hungry, we’d head up to one of the clubs for a meal, signing the chits with our parents’ names. My mother hated getting big bills from the club at the end of the month, so I always felt relieved if my grilled cheese ended up on someone else’s check.
With my new bike I graduated to independence in the blink of an eye, but I would always miss holding on to my mother’s waist, inhaling the gentle perspiration through her starched cotton blouse.
In the summertime, my mother spent her afternoons playing backgammon with her friends on the upper deck at the “little” club. Off limits to children under the age of eighteen and located just above the snack bar, the upper deck was a reliable retreat from the demands of parenting while offering a panoramic view of the club’s pool, where Whitney and I spent our afternoons swimming under the idle gaze of the lifeguard or causing mischief in the locker rooms. (My mother subscribed to Dr. Spock’s parenting theories, which included permissiveness and a “trust yourself” approach to the rearing of young children.)
When my grandmother came for her summer visit from New Jersey, she’d sit regally on a chaise by the pool wearing a navy-blue sleeveless dress, clip-on gold earrings, and a banded straw hat.
“Mrs. Robertson looks rich,” Ollie sometimes said of my grandmother. “She and your daddy’s mother, Mrs. Stroh. The two of them got the skin of rich folks.”
My grandmother would turn the pages of her Somerset Maugham novel while Whitney and I played Marco Polo or did flips off the diving board with the other kids whose mothers reclined on towel-draped chaises, Johnson’s baby oil slicked over their legs and arms. I would be tormented by the charcoal scent of burgers grilling in the snack bar, or the sight of Dusty Miller sundaes carried out to the pool in tall waxed paper cups—perks of club life that Whitney and I rarely delighted in.
My grandmother always chided my mother in the car after we’d left the club. “Those lifeguards are fast asleep behind their sunglasses,” she’d say. “Someone ought to be minding the children by the pool.”