Amy has a doll named Baby Tender Love. This sounds like the title of a Barry White song, or the Captain’s pet name for Tennille, but in fact Baby Tender Love is an object of such all-consuming affection that it is, for a time, Amy’s only doll. My sister will not countenance any rivals. So it is that when Amy descends to the basement one Saturday morning to find us using the disembodied head of Baby Tender Love as a hockey puck—Tom has torn the hair from Baby’s scalp, and left it at the side of the basement like roadkill—our sister is momentarily struck mute.
She stands frozen on the stairs, her open mouth a black rictus. And then suddenly her tonsils twitch to life and she screams. It is so shrill, so piercing, we fear it will shatter the glass in the little basement windows just beneath the beams, the way Ella Fitzgerald’s voice—first live, and then recorded—shatters a wineglass in the Memorex commercials on TV. Dad despises these commercials, because they’re memorable and Memorex is a rival brand of recording tape. “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” is the kind of catchphrase Scotch brand recording tape would kill for.
But despite this unwelcome reminder of Memorex, or the sight of his only daughter trembling with sorrow and rage, or the thought of The Boys in the basement still going top-shelf and five-hole with the now-bald head of Baby Tender Love, Dad remains calm. He might even have a grudging respect for The Boys. Not that he will say so. On the contrary, after a stern but rather wooden reading of the riot act to us—an unconvincing actor running his lines—he turns to Amy and says, “I can fix this.”
After five minutes bent over his basement workbench, Dad emerges with Baby Tender Love’s head. Her scalp has been restored, though a green glue is oozing from her hairline. And Baby Tender Love’s expression, though unchanged—eyes wide, brows raised, mouth open in a pink pout—now appears to contain a hint of horror rather than wonder. So does Amy’s, it must be said.
Mercifully, and at long last, I’ve discovered a world beyond The Boys, playmates independent of the three other shitheads, for love is in bloom at Nativity. At school, in our first-grade classroom, behind the little window in the door that Mrs. Streit has obscured with a HAVE A NICE DAY sticker—the smiley face brilliantly hiding her classroom from looky-loos like Sister Roseanne Roseannadanna—I have found a best friend. It is necessary to have a best friend, to have an answer to the questions “What’s your favorite color?” and “When’s your birthday?” and “Who’s your best friend?” Mike McCollow and I share a love of the Vikings, can both imitate Rod Carew’s batting stance, and quickly begin to speak to each other in a kind of twin language or Navajo code talk.
In years to come we’ll stand with our palms church-steepled in prayer in our First Communion photo, drag his mother’s couch cushions into the backyard to soften the landing when we shoot each other off a ladder as stuntmen (after seeing Burt Reynolds and Jan-Michael Vincent in Hooper), ride Sting-Ray knockoffs over homemade ramps, produce our own newspaper called the Digital Times—with a cranky advice columnist named Dear Crabby and hilarious marital notices that go “Ella Fitzgerald married Darth Vader and became Ella Vader”—and by eighth grade be sneaking off Nativity’s grounds at recess to search for naked ladies on the Ohio Players album covers in the bins at Harpo’s Records ’n Stuff on 98th Street. We’ll con our parents into letting us see Gabe Kaplan—TV’s Mr. Kotter!—do stand-up comedy at the University of Minnesota’s Northrup Auditorium, as Mike’s mom shakes her head at the profanity and the blue material, mostly about women having their periods, and I strike exactly the same posture I did when pretending not to hear the profanity in The Poseidon Adventure.
But for now we are content to make signs for Vikings games and hold them up in front of the TV as if the players can see them. If Miss Betty was able to see us through the TV on Romper Room, surely Fran Tarkenton can. Perhaps our signs will be captured by TV cameras and shown to the nation and spur the Vikes on to the Super Bowl at Tulane Stadium. WE’RE VIKES FANS AND HERE’S OUR PLANS. WE’RE GONNA PACK OUR JEANS FOR NEW ORLEANS. If Doris McCollow is unhappy that her son has Magic-Markered that phrase onto her bedsheets, she doesn’t say anything, at least not to us.
I’m leading a kind of double life, for in addition to my best friend at Nativity I also have a best friend in South Brook. School and neighborhood are two distinct worlds, with almost no crossover. Neither knows about the other, and I feel no guilt when I go to Kevin Sundem’s house in South Brook to play driveway baseball or backyard football, running there through a dozen backyards, a landscape I now know intimately, and “intimate” is the right word, given the off-white brassieres hanging on the backyard clotheslines. I blush as I run past them, smell the Tide blowing off them, and try not to think of the moms and big sisters to whom they belong, all these over-the-shoulder boulder holders, rippling in the wind.
Exploring South Brook by backyard or bicycle, I develop an expert knowledge of the neighborhood topography, whose yard I cannot enter to retrieve a ball (the Sea Hags, the two elderly ladies we seldom see) and in whose house I should decline the milk (the Sundems serve skim, and my body is accustomed to the higher-octane 2 percent). The Redmonds have central air—stepping across their threshold is like stepping into a refrigerated boxcar—and the Raichs have a basement beer-can collection. The McCarthy boys are allowed to collect pop cans, while the Rushin boys are allowed neither. Mom might not think it’s hillbilly, stacking beer cans in the basement, but she wants the trash brought out of the house, not in.
There is one other way to glimpse domestic life in South Brook, one that feels even more intimate and intrusive than stealing a peep at my neighbors’ brassieres. That way is to watch my envious siblings trudge off to school while I remain gloriously, blissfully sick in bed, suddenly part of—and privy to—the secret world Mom inhabits all day.
Young life holds few pleasures greater than the school sick day. The hourly ministrations of Vick’s VapoRub, the back of Mom’s hand on my hot forehead, the thermometer jutting from my mouth like a Chesterfield cigarette, Mom tucking and retucking the powder-blue acrylic blanket so that the satin trim is just under my chin—all of these little joys must be indulged with a grim face. “You poor thing,” Mom says, feeding me a St. Joseph chewable children’s aspirin as I knit my forehead and nod dolefully. With many a cough and sniffle, I finally work up the energy to ask if I might be allowed to convalesce on the couch, beneath the knitted afghan, in front of the TV and the comforting visage of Wink Martindale.
And so the day passes in a blur of Broyhill furniture, Amana appliances, and other game-show giveaways. The announcers’ product plugs and prize descriptions are instantly committed to memory:
“Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat!”
“From the Spiegel catalogue, Chicago, Illinois, 60609!”
Whatever illness I am suffering is replaced by a feverish craving not for the saltines and chicken noodle soup on a tray beside me but rather for all the wonderful objects on offer on The Price Is Right.