From the Family Chronicles....in progress

Ellen, Elena, Electra

My sisters’ double bat mitzvah was a gala affair, the IT-event of the family at the Crown Plaza in Rockville, Maryland. Hawaiian-themed. My parents had returned from a trip to Hawaii where my sister Elena, or rather, Electra and her partner Orbit were fully indoctrinated in the hippie cult, The Source Family. They brought back Hawaiian muumuus that we would don for the festivities. Elena arrived with her one-year old “Aloha” in her arms. He was my first nephew and my parents’ first grandchild, born when I was only ten years old. His chubby face, infant gurgles, peach fuzz head and Hawaiian shirt was like a new toy. Electra propped him up in a high chair and fed him papayas and raw eggs. His little mouth winced with each gulp of the goey amber yolks. “Maybe some cooked eggs?” mom would suggest.

“Oh no,” Electra replied, with a hint of self-righteousness. “Only from Father Yod’s original source. Raw.”

She set up a shrine to Father Yod, or Yohowa, the hippie cult leader, in my bedroom. A framed picture of Yowa with his long, wiry gray and brown beard was adorned with fabric hibiscus and plumeria flowers. On the floor, sleeping mats contrasted with my powder pink canopy bed and matching shag rug–they did not touch the bed. There were candles, ointments, chants and strange smelling concoctions in the refrigerator that we dare not touch. And in the midst of it all, little Aloha pranced around in his birthday suit. Once, I played with him and tickled him and suddenly urine streamed all over my shirt.

“It’s not urine. It’s not piss. It’s angel water.” she said, irritated by my revulsion at getting sprayed. And as Aloha grew older, Electra and Orbit wouldn't cut his hair. Passersby wondered, a boy or girl? Until one day after school at age six, Aloha put an end to the questions and teasing. “Cut my hair and call me Mike, or I’m not going to school,” the first signs of rebellion against his parents.

At the reception of bnai mitzvah (bnai for two) , Electra saddled Aloha in her arms and freely pulled out her breast to nurse Aloha while guests at her table nibbled on rugalah for dessert. “Oh no, put that back,” my sisters and I said to each other, but never a word to Electra. It was like an alien force had settled into our world. We tried to adapt. We were a liberal family, but the exposed breast hanging from a halter dress was too much for the old-school aunts and uncles. But no one said a word. Was it out of respect, or fear? Would she place some kind of spell on us? She had an unspoken power and you dare not tamper with it.

A few years later we learned that Yehowa was really Jim Baker. Apparently “Jims” were known for starting cults. He engaged in mystic sex with his followers and died in a hang gliding accident off a cliff in Hawaii. His followers told him, “Don’t jump!” but he didn’t listen.

In the years that followed Electra dabbled in many endeavors. She created her own cosmetic line, Electra’s Eyes, and sent us samples from her homebase in San Francisco. I piled on the metallic cobalt onto my eyelids making me look like a combo tweenage tart and circus carny. Electra got an agent and appeared as a cashier with one line in the TV drama MacGyver. Donned with black fishnet stockings, shoulder pads and a perm, she was the lead singer in a band, Electra and the Aquarians. “Slippin’ through my fingers, quick like mercury,” was the only lyric I remember from her cassette tape tucked away in a drawer. It was so much like Electra, so fast changing, so many names, shifting identities and styles arriving and departing like a bolt of electricity. As for her husband Orbit, he was busy orbiting the world of “sales.”

“What kind of sales?” we asked.

“Sales,” Electra answered.

“But what are you selling exactly?” There was a pause, a deep inhalation, some thinking, then, “Gold. We sell gold.”

And the next thing we knew, Electra and Orbit had changed their last name to “Gold” and were living the high life in upscale Marin County, California, selling gold. Gold that no one ever saw.

When Aloha, now Michael, was seven and his little brother Adam, five, they traveled from the west coast to see their east coast family. The two spirited urchins ran around the house in their onesie pajamas squawking and punching each other. They were the little brothers that I never had. They liked sugary cereals that their health-crazed parents didn’t allow, matchbox cars and sushi. We could toy with their innocence and still be forgiven, so my sisters and I taught them secret bad words like sputnik, Mussolini, and benign vestibule.

“Don’t ever say these words,” we told them. “Don’t ever, ever, say them. It’s very, very, you know. I can’t say a word that measures up to how horrible these words are.” But naturally, they didn’t miss a chance to barge into the family room while punching each other and shouting sputnik! mussolini! benign vestibule!

At this time Electra was on her fourth name change—Elena Gold. She visited with the boys, again without Orbit, who had changed his name back to his birth name, David. So where was Orbit-David?

“He’s at computer camp,” Elena told us.

As a naive tween raised in suburbia, I had never heard of computer camp, but imagined computer camp. You go for a week, jabber about IBM, share meals with techie geeks, talk floppy disks, RAM, argue if Apple is better than Microsoft. But Orbit was at computer camp for several months, not a week.

That’s one long computer camp. It was the only viable story told to these two precious little boys, to Michael and Adam. Years later I learned the truth about computer camp. Computer camp was code for jail. Selling gold was code for drugs. The secret remained and the boys could never know the truth.