Monograph

    Blue eyes, that’s what I wanted at six years old.  My mother used to call me her “black-eyed Susan”, though my name wasn’t Susan and I didn’t have black eyes, but deep brown. 
This was the age when my Mom sang “Twas on the Isle of Capri” at bedtime. I closed my eyes and clutched my toy pig with a music box inside its belly. It was a fuzzy, yellow pig with stains and vibrant-colored flowers sprouting from its body. My mom, who met my father while singing in a choir at Temple Ohev Tzedek, sang everything from Barbara Streisand’s “Funny Girl” to the top 40 hits of Judaism. Her voice was a warm caramel blanket pouring over us. Tender and innocent as it seemed as a child,  “Twas on the Isle of Capri” is about love’s disappointment. A man in love with a woman finds a golden ring already placed on her finger by another. The last line was a killer, “Twas goodbye on the isle of Capri.”  Goodbye love. It was a fitting precursor for the years to come. 
At age six, my sister Evie and I had two pet mice named Felix and Arnold. We’d let them run through doors and windows of our Fisher Price miniature village in a race to see which would poop first. At bedtime when mom finished singing, the squeaking of their exercise wheel in the “habitrail” cage lulled me to sleep. Then one day, we found Felix and Arnold lying on their backs motionless in the habitrail tower.  They were gone. A suicide pact of two brothers? Two lovers? A poisoned pellet of food? It was an unsolved mystery. I cried for days. I held tightly onto my remaining pets, border collie Annie, her scraggly son George, and goldfishies Fanny and Danny. 
    At seven years old, my older sister Valerie tried to burn my Barbie doll’s shoes in the Hanukkah candles. We were enjoying the soft glow of candles after an early sunset in December  My big brother Bobby rushed to my defense. He tackled Valerie and pushed her through the door to the bathroom breaking the hinge. She tried to escape his grip, wrestling over the bathroom sink.  We went from a peaceful picture, like a Jewish Norman Rockwell painting, to a scene from the World Wrestling Federation. I stepped aside and tried to fit the tiny melted shoes on the doll’s perfect little feet. 
    My brother wasn’t home much, he was in college at Ohio State studying Zoology, but whenever he had the chance, he defended me.  He seemed so untouchable at times. During vacations, he worked on his cars like “Waldo I”, a beat up teal Dodge convertible with the words “Waldo I” painted on the front. Waldo wore a dejected expression on its grill, like it had given up  hope to be anything but scrap metal. And after a long day working at Fisher Foods meat packing when he’d take off his blood smudged apron, my brother would retreat to his room in the basement with cinderblock walls painted black. Above the musty smelling bed hung a towel with the print of a sexy woman whose body was marked in sections: rump roast, quarter pounder. My sister Evie and I snuck into his cave when he was away hoping to find a hidden treasure. We found bb gun accessories, a few scattered playboy magazines and mould. Intriguing artifacts but not much fun for two little girls. 
    At age seven and a half, my second grade teacher, Ms. Teawanger, cut off the top of her index finger in a paper cutter. The class was captivated by her story. And what seven year old doesn’t love a gory tale about severed appendages? Ms. Teawanger showed her bandage, and we were riveted.  But we really wanted to see the finger...the greenish, waxy sewn up finger. To this day, whenever I use a paper cutter, I think of Ms. Teawanger and her finger just lying there on the table feeling so “cut off” from the rest of the world. 
At age eight, just after my birthday party at Barnhill’s Ice Cream Parlor in February, my dad found a squealing mutt-puppy in the backyard.  We called him “Jay Jay '' and Dad called him “Sport”. But as Jay Jay frolicked, ripped up toilet paper and nipped my sister Val’s socks as she practiced dance routines, we noticed that Jay Jay didn’t have a penis.  Jay Jay became Gee Gee.  Typical children always beg typical parents to keep abandoned pets, but when the answer was “no”, we didn’t fight back. We silently compiled and made a catchy poster, “puppy needs a home” and taped it on the bulletin board at Ben Franklin Plaza. Hanging the poster was ceremonial, a finality, a done deal. We walked away and back to the car, heads hung low, but I lagged behind. Something was in my shoe. When no one was looking, I snagged that poster, tore it down and never told a soul. Gee Gee would stay. My dad, who never wanted the dogs anywhere near the red shag carpet in the living room, or in the house all together, would grow to love Gee Gee with all her slobbering, ripping up paper, leaving the occasional fecal surprise and spinning around like a furry top.    
    At age eight, about the time of Gee Gee’s acceptance into the family, my Dad died. Onset of illness to passing away was only a month. It was only two weeks after his 49th birthday. It was a dark veil, it was a sunny, breezy day in April, it was seeing dogwoods in bloom that day. It was sparkles in the sidewalk in front of the hospital. It was seeing him walking around the hospital corridor in his navy blue robe for the last time. It was all of these images compounded into one. It was everything that an eight-year-old doesn’t understand.
***
The ride to the cemetery was in a shiny black limo. So fancy.  A little violet flag on the front of the limo with the word “funeral” waved to the passing traffic. My emotions were doing flips and somersaults. One minute I was hopping around, climbing the bunk bed ladder, playing the games with my sister while guests sat in the living room whispering and nibbling on tuna salad, ambrosia and chopped liver. The next moment, I was shutting myself up in the bathroom wiping tears on my polyester pants that mom handmade. 
And why were the mirrors covered with sheets? Uncle Leonard said that it was for the spirit to not get confused once it has departed the body. Why would the spirit be confused? It is Dad’s spirit and his house.  He knows where to go, where to get a snack, where he keeps his cigars, where he does his glassblowing in the basement. To think of Dad now as a “spirit”, a remote ghost who was lost and displaced. It was too much. 
My sister Valerie said, “Don’t look in the mirror. You’re not supposed to care about your face.” She was biting her now stubby nails and picking at a zit on her cheek. She barely went to synagogue , was she now the expert on Judaic traditions? I glanced at those mirrors draped in sterile white sheets, like the ones from a hospital bed, I could see faces, contorted and surreal. This was supposed to be comforting and calming, but it was more like fixtures in the haunted mansion at Disney World. 
It was strange that my mom had to wear a torn black ribbon on her coat, and that we washed our hands in a tub of water on the front porch before entering the house. The world suddenly was topsy turvy, like something from a bygone era, shades of grey, out of whack.
 I wanted to ask questions, to comprehend the mystery, get a straight answer, but I held it tightly inside. 
This was the turning point. From this moment on there was a shift in the path;  the Barbie house was demolished. There was a metamorphosis, it sounds drastic but it happens, even for an eight year old. There was no going back to that little mop-top with a crooked front tooth and jelly stains around her mouth. My sister Evie and I were staying overnight at Linda’s house on a little ranch in Hartville, Ohio. We hopped around Linda’s homestead completely unaware that Dad had passed on that night. Linda's parents knew.  We were kept in the dark. 
Linda was the biggest horse-freak (like many tween girls) that I’d ever met. She drew pictures of horses, smelled like hay with a sour hint of manure and showed us how to feed her favorite horse, Trixie, bruised apples from a nearby tree. I worried that Trixie’s giant teeth like wood pegs would chomp off my hand along with the apple.  Big-boned Linda allowed us, the skinny sisters, to ride her. We’d nudge her “giddyup” and Linda would trot around the blood-red shag carpet in our house. We collected hay from Trixie’s barn stall to use for the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.