SPEAKING OF CHRISTMAS

There were only two bedrooms in the Raymond apartment, so Doug and I shared the one with peeling yellow-flowered wallpaper. Under the narrow window was our terrarium with all the lizards we’d caught and, in time, a hog-nosed viper and a giant millipede. Besides the “sand” lizards and “mountain boomers,” as my dad called collared lizards, we eventually had blue-bellies, a skink, a chuckwalla, and a horned toad (which isn’t a toad at all). For a while we even had a couple of baby horned toads that were only slightly bigger than poker chips. On one occasion we took them out of the terrarium and discovered that if you patted their heads, they would close their eyes, but if you pinched their tails, they’d go skittering across the floor.

Despite the close quarters of our Raymond apartment, Mom found space for her Singer sewing machine in the little hallway leading to the kitchen. One of her first efforts was an orange corduroy bedspread for my parents’ bed. Sunlight through the matching curtains she made turned their bedroom—which was also my dad’s study—into a fiery orange inferno during the day, an effect I don’t think she’d anticipated.

In the evenings after Doug and I went to bed, she would make me dresses, since in those days that’s what girls wore to school rather than jeans or leggings, even in cold weather. In winter we wore ski pants—under our skirts—that we had to take off at our lockers. Despite our attempts to do this modestly, some boy was liable chant, “I see London; I see France; I see so-and-so’s underpants.”

Mom also made clothes for my 12-inch doll and several costumes for me—first, a yellow tutu I loved. I have a photo of me in clashing red skating socks attempting a balletic sideways leg extension. Unfortunately, my pigeon-toed left foot is turned in, hanging perpendicular to the floor. For Halloween one year, she made me a harem costume in cocoa-colored satin, but after the boys at school teased me with the aforementioned chant, I refused to ever wear it again. She never held it against me, though, and went on to make me a colonial gown for the 4th of July that I did wear and never complained that olive green was my least favorite color.

As for the newly finished dress I wore to Wolfy’s birthday party—and ripped—I don’t recall her getting mad at me or even scolding me.

And speaking of scolding, my dad didn’t scold either; instead he meted out swift and decisive punishments. My brother he spanked with a belt; me, he gave cold showers.

I talked back to my dad just once that I can remember. I don’t know what set me off, but I complained that he and Mom didn’t do anything for Doug and me. The next thing I remember is having to wash my own clothes on an old-fashioned washboard in our old claw-foot bathtub.

As for Doug, he often recounts how he handled a gun of my dad’s carelessly one time, inadvertently pointing it in Dad’s direction. My father grabbed the pistol out of his hand and hit him in the head with the butt end of it.

Curiously, my parents never made Doug and me do regular chores. Come to think of it, I have no idea who did the dishes after dinner—whether my father did them before Mom got home from work or she did them later in the evening. As for the other housework, we had a cleaning woman come each week—Mrs. Fales, who took me to her place once to see her daughter’s fabulous dollhouse, everything handmade out of wood.

Other memories of life in the Raymond house:

• One day Dad got a ladder and climbed into the attic. What he brought down was a small rock collection with geodes and large polished slabs of agate—to me, as miraculous a find as buried treasure.

• For one of his birthdays, Doug and I bought Dad a ceramic kangaroo, which he kept on his desk; you could hang your keys on its tail and put your spare change in its pouch. Now I’m also remembering a small iron paperweight—a brontosaurus-—that we probably gave him too. (In his top desk drawer, he always stored candy to keep him from smoking, sweets Doug and I never dared touch.)

• During one of those years I drew a large picture of a black octopus and colorful fish that my parents hung over the desk in the living room. (One of my favorite artistic activities was to make a crayon drawing of underwater creatures, then wash blue or black watercolor paint over it to create the background.)

• Recognizing my artistic ability, my parents bought me a blackboard easel, where I did a chalk drawing of an ocean liner and a locomotive from a drawing book. They also got me a box of sixty-four crayons with a crayon sharpener at the back (we didn’t have markers back then), and after serious deliberation I decided that my favorite colors were turquoise, lime green, and magenta. (Some things never change.) I had a coloring book of nursery rhyme characters that I loved because I thought their faces were so cute—I’m still obsessed with faces—and I always was careful to color within the lines. Whenever my parents bought me a drawing tablet, I’d get excited just to see the smooth white paper, experiencing it as an irresistible invitation to create…what?

• My dad bought me a little baking set after a visit to the dentist, my favorite gift from him ever. (Mostly he gave Doug and me “educational” presents.) The set came with miniature boxes of cake mix and frosting, and on Wednesday nights I baked cakes the size of small pancakes and flat cupcakes as big as silver dollars to serve when my neighbor Alvin came over to watch Disneyland.

• I started a sewing club with my friend Margie and made—without a pattern-—a pair of flannel pajama bottoms for my twelve-inch doll. (Those did make it to California—in my little suitcase—though I never got around to making the pajama top.) To this day I still make doll clothes, but only with patterns I’ve devised myself.

• I liked to try to do things without instructions—to figure things out for myself, which meant a lot of my cooking experiments were inedible, and I was left wondering why my efforts to create perfume out of flower petals and water in a bottle always wound up smelling so foul.

• Doug and I often played caroms with our friends on the carom board my dad bought us, which is a little like pool but without the cue. 

• When I was old enough and became a Camp Fire Girl, my friends and I sold chocolate creams at Christmas, raising a lot more money than we ever made selling peanut candy.

And speaking of Christmas, I loved everything about it—not just the getting presents part, but the carols and caroling (I’ve written a Christmas carol for children you can listen to on my Song Page); the decorations we made at school—ornaments like family photos in jar lids hung with ribbon; the Christmas pageant at school of the nativity; and decorating the Christmas tree with my dad—neither Mom nor Doug ever joined in. Today I have a large collection of traditional glass ornaments that I started buying in my twenties, when I wouldn’t spend an extra nickel on anything else.

From the outset my parents told Doug and me that there was no Santa Claus—they didn’t want to lie to us—but I kept this secret from my friends who still believed there was. And that reminds me of another inadvertent mistake I made:

Before Christmas one year, Mom took me to Dayton’s department store to buy a gift for the teenage daughter of friends of ours. Mom chose an expensive 18” Madame Alexander doll—a grown-up doll with breasts (this was before Barbie)—a big mistake because, of course, then I wanted one too. For Christmas the following year, she surprised me with the same doll in a pink satin evening gown. The week before I’d copied, in chalk, an illustration of an old-world “Father Christmas” making his way through a town with twinkling lights after dark. Christmas morning, I unthinkingly stood my new doll on my dresser, leaning it against the wall my drawing was on—and got navy chalk all over the back of her satin dress. For the rest of my childhood and adolescence I took great pains to make sure my mom never saw this damage.