As time goes by: HOLD ON

Some nights I run. I run so far, so fast, I wake up in a bed of sweat, too exhausted to wait for the sun. The pain is so severe it haunts me like a beardiboo walking on my grave. Willie and I are a twosome of one, Romeo and Juliet, too young to be lovers but loving all the same.

 

Sadie, my Mom, won’t tolerate it. She has forgotten her youth. It  disappeared on my fifth birthday. What a nice day it had been. Daddy was going to drive to the Arundel Ice Cream Emporium to bring home a quart of chocolate ice cream and red candy cherries to go with the birthday cake Mommy baked for me. He waved and called, ’I’ll be back soon and lied.’ Daddy didn’t come back, ever.

 

Child that I was I didn’t realize the calamity that had befallen Mommy and me. I knew she was sad and hugged her a lot, kissed her and told her not to cry. ‘Want to play with my dollies? We can use my tea set, if you want.’ ‘Sandy, let me alone. I don’t want to play now.’ There was nothing she wanted to do except cry.

 

Her friends called, came over, brought me cookies and some clothes that their daughters had out grown. My closet was full of pretty things. I kept waiting for my Daddy and asked over and over, ‘When is Daddy coming home? My ice cream must have melted by now.’ ‘Sandy, Daddy isn’t coming home. Don’t ask me about him again because I have no answers for you.’ Usually Mommy would leave me by myself and I could hear her sobbing in the kitchen.

 

By the time I was seven, Mommy went to work while I was in school and was home when I got off the bus. The whispers of neighbors I heard when playing with my friends. They called her ‘Poor Mrs. Frankel.’ I remember asking my mother, ‘Are we poor, really poor, Mommy?’ ‘Yes, we are in some ways but we get along, don’t we? Do you still miss your father? If you do, don’t. Learn this now and remember it always, ‘Don’t trust men!’

 

Nary a day passed that I didn’t hear at least one mean, nasty comment about my lousy father, that men are no good, that I must never trust any of them. She often added, ‘Just don’t you go trying to date anybody. I’ll toss you out of the house if you do.’ My life was not empty as girls liked me and I had plenty of friends, friends who were starting to have boyfriends. They said boys think I am a cold fish or a lesbian and then had to explain those terms. Something snapped in me and I made a decision ‘not to be like my cold, frozen mom.’

 

Carsie, who was in my class, gave my name to Stanley who was in the 12th grade, hoping to go to college in the fall. I was in the 11th grade and knew, without seeing him, talking to him, Stanley and I would like each other. Sandy and Stanley almost rhymed, sounded like poetry to me.

He saw me at school and took me to the movies on a Saturday afternoon. Did I see the picture? No. I couldn’t as starlight was in my eyes. Stanley held my hand and in the free one I held a box of Good and Plenty that spilled on the Lyric’s floor. We giggled when anyone left our aisle and the candy crunched under their shoes. Magic happened so fast. Love happened to two inexperienced kids and it was grand.

 

Stanley and his older brother were reared by their father who has been a widower, but not a recluse, for ten years. He liked me, knew his son more than liked me, and invited the four of us, plus his older brother to dinner to celebrate my Sweet Sixteenth birthday-- and included my mom. ‘Thank you, Mr. Frazier, but my mother doesn’t even know I have had a date, nor anything at all about Stanley. She hates men, has tried to ingrain that in my mind for nine years. I just can’t suggest such a lovely thing to her. I can’t. Can I?’

 

‘Missy, you better had. You are both fools. Straighten that lovely, strong, young back of yours and speak up. Lay it on the line. Tell her how you feel.’  Stanley strongly agreed with his dad.

 

Our neighbors surely heard the shouting, aluminum pans hitting the walls, dropping on carpetless floors, and then the silence, a long silence. Mommy was crying her eyes out. Tears came from what I thought were eyes that had dried out a long time ago. Like I did on my seventh birthday, I hugged her, kissed her and asked, ‘Mommy, want to play backgammon with my Stanley? I’ll make tea and be scorekeeper.’
Mommy hugged me back, dried her slopped up face and agreed to go to  my sixteenth birthday dinner party.

 

I and my Mommy had apple pie a’ la mode for dessert and neither of us thought about the chocolate ice cream and red candy cherries we didn’t get so many years ago.