I Don't Have a Happy Place (4 page)

I was finally in the Barbie game.

And it wasn't long before I was out.

My mother caught me with Barbie and there was an exchange of words and instructions for Nana to bring that
thing
back from whence it came. I was inconsolable after that, moping around the house for weeks singing Barry Manilow ballads to ease my pain.

That was two years before I became a latchkey kid. And even though I was now nine, an age at which one's Barbie interest should start to wane, mine was more ramped up than ever. I flipped through the toy catalog, and just seeing the little blond girl models polluted with sunshine and bliss as they curled the hair on the ginormous Barbie Styling Head, sweeping electric-blue shadow across her eyelids, made me want to stick forks in my eyes. Women's lib might have empowered ladies all over the country but it was ruining my free time.

It's not like I wanted much. Just Malibu Barbie, complete with fringy yellow towel and pink bulbous sunglasses, who could potentially hang out with Superstar Barbie in Cher's dressing room, where they'd meet and befriend the Cher
doll herself and argue over who gets to wear the Bob Mackie dress and who
would sport the fancy Indian headdress and sparkly jumpsuit when they had a soiree at the exquisite Barbie
Townhouse, the one with the yellow elevator (dolls sold separately), and home of the new, dashing tenant, the Six Million Dollar Man (with bionic grip), who was angling to date all the
Charlie's Angels
dolls so he could have someone to make out with in the back of the orange Country Camper (with vinyl pop-out tent).

Nine years old and twenty-eight minutes into this Phil Donahue–­imposed life of solitude, I made a decision: feminism was stupid.

3:43 p.m.

Ace's wallpaper was hot dog mustard yellow with a continuous pattern of broad orange plaid squares. The brown shag was wall-to-wall and a KISS
Destroyer
poster hung on his closet door. I pretended to browse around the room like I didn't know exactly where I was headed, but I knew full well what interested me in that room and it was in the closet behind a stack of
Richie Rich
comics. The briefcase was black, a Samsonite, with nubby skin and two slick silver locks flanking the plastic handle. I don't know how he'd gotten that briefcase, but it wasn't mine, and that was all the reason I needed to fish around in there any chance I got. Plus, I'd once overheard my mother call it an attaché case, which just made it sound even more like it should be mine.

I'd been covertly visiting it for a month, if for nothing else than to delight in the clicks as I engaged the silver locks. If my brother was at hockey practice and my parents were deep into
The White Shadow
, I could be found placing the case on the bed, clicking open the locks, and saying something businessy, like, “I have the microfiche
.
”

When I first began snooping inside, there was not much of interest in there. Some hockey cards, birthday notes from Nana, a Cheap Trick ticket stub. In years to come, I'd discover a sandwich bag filled with crunchy greenish leaves and a small wooden pipe shaped like a corncob, the likes of which I'd never seen before. For that reason, I felt it my duty to march downstairs and show my parents. Later that night, I'd hear my father say behind Ace's closed door, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” followed by the whoosh and slap of the Gucci belt. After that night, Ace barely made eye contact with me. The case would be locked forever and my time with it done, but not before I made another discovery.

There was no way Grandpa Solly would venture upstairs, so I seized the opportunity and opened the case. To my delight, there were two new items inside.

(1) A book:
familiar to me, because I had its companion squirreled away under my mattress. Recently, we'd found these illustrated hardcovers marooned at the foot of our beds, with no notes from our parents, no further mention or subsequent confab whatsoever. The point of my book,
Where Do I Come From?,
was to explain how babies showed up in the world so my mother didn't have to. There was no shortage of cartoony penises and swimming sperm in top hats holding flowers. These were distressing enough, but the capper was the main character, who was naked on almost every page and looked an awful lot like Ziggy. And while I had no interest in seeing anyone's penis, Ziggy's was one I really would have preferred to keep under wraps. (Ziggy's wife, I should mention, was also a bit of a nudist and no vixen either.) They also gave us an education on how to spell
penis,
even though they said it sounded like
pee-
nus (“
peanuts
without the
t
!” it stated, which completely ruined Snoopy for me).

My brother's book, the one staring at me from the case, was entitled
What's Happening to Me?
,
and I decided right then and there that I didn't care what was happening to him. I pushed it aside. Underneath lurked other bait.

(2) A magazine:
glossy, with smiling ladies on the cover—a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. I knew instantly where this periodical hailed from. I'd been to my father's office three times, and with each visit I was too panicked to enter the bathroom due to the neat stack of
Playboy
s weighting down the top of the toilet tank. At home,
Ms
. magazines were piling up on the kitchen counter, while across town my father's magazines boasted headlines like, A P
ICTORIAL
F
IRST
: O
UTER
S
PACE
S
EX
! I
NTRIGUING
!

Those magazines irked me, and not for the heaving bosoms on the covers, but for the little white strip on each issue with my father's name and work address typed in black ink. The mailman would tote this magazine around the neighborhood in his mailbag, forced to handle it as he took out stacks of letters and birthday cards from nanas all over the world. And then, upon reaching my dad's office, he'd know that it was my father receiving this magazine with those ladies on the cover sporting
GIRLS OF
THE BIG TEN
T-shirts and no pants.

There were copious pages to get through before I hit the gauzy layout of a lady in a white fishnet shirt and nothing else. Gone was Ziggy's pear of a wife. The farther along I got, the more I was faced with angles of body parts I had no business or interest in seeing. My friend's mother had given her a special gold compact with which to inspect her private parts at her leisure. I saw little reason to go rooting around in that area.

I flipped through more of the magazine through squinted eyes, until I arrived at the Tootsie Roll center of the Tootsie Pop. The centerfold. I found this to be a much more polite section, thanks to a flappy thing covering up some of the nakedness and
instead of body parts I was presented with something utterly enchanting: an interview. Here, I was led into a world of deep thoughts and esoteric information. Now
this
was up my alley. I learned that Brandi enjoyed badminton and spy novels and kittens and kissing. But she hated rude people. I made a mental note to put a “Turn-ons & Turnoffs” section in my own diary.

At the bottom of the Q&A, there was an elaborate signature. I admired the way Brandi looped her
B
and drew a bubbly heart above the
i
. I hoped to one day have a great signature like Brandi's and to be able to say I was turned on by badminton. But I was done with the nudity portion of the day. I needed a palate cleanser.

4:17 p.m.

The beige push-button phone hung on the kitchen wall with a long spirally cord, allowing you free rein to walk the perimeter of the house. The living room and kitchen were far enough apart that I didn't have to worry about Grandpa Solly listening in. I dialed randomly.

“Hello?” said the voice on the other end of the line.

“Is Joanie there?”

“I'm sorry, who?”

She sounded nice enough, but old, and like she was chewing something smushy, maybe egg salad.

“Joanie,” I said again.

“I'm sorry, I think you have the wrong number.”

“
You
have the wrong number,” I said.

Silence.

“Pardon me, dear?”

“Is Joanie there?”

“Right, then. Goodbye, dear.”

Granted, it wasn't my best work but, in fairness, I was just warming up. So I called back.

“Hello?” she said, her voice more clipped this time.

“Is Joanie there?”

“Dear, I just told you there is no one here by that name and that you have the wrong number. Now please stop calling or I will alert the operator.”

This was no threat for me. I continued.

“My mother is an operator.” (Which
might
have been true. If you recall, I had no idea what profession she had slipped into.)

“Right, dear. Why don't you do your homework?”

“Why don't
you
?”

“That's fine. I'm going to hang up now.”

And she did. So I called a third time.

“Is your refrigerator running?” I said.

Click
.

I moved on.

“Hello?” This time it was a man, also old, and aggravated from the get-go.

“I am stuck in a box,” I said in a teeny voice.

“What?” He was hostile, like I'd interrupted his afternoon appointment with
Bonanza
. “Miriam? Is that you?”

“Yes, it's me and I'm stuck in a box.”

“Heh?” he was shouting. “What?”

This guy was useless and, if we're being honest, pretty irritating. I cut him free.

Wrapping the coiled cord around my wrist like a bracelet, I made one final call.

“Operator,” announced a young, pleasant-guy voice.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello.”

I then affected my best Miss Piggy voice, briefly mad at myself for not having thought of opening with this impression. “My phone is not working properly. Might you be a love and try the number just to see if it rings?”

I knew he was smiling in his operator office, I could just tell. I'd never gotten a male operator before. I wondered if he wore a blazer and what kind of chair they gave him and if he had a stack of
Playboy
s on the toilet tank where he worked. The operator call is a prank caller's last resort because an operator can see your number and probably could call the police—or your mother—but Ace once told me they had to call you back, by law, if you asked them to.

“Okay,” he said. “I will try you back.”

“Thank you, Kermie.”

I hung up and waited. Seconds later, it rang.

“Kermit the Frog here,” I said.

“Okay, kid.”

“Okay, Operator.”

He hung up. I remained on the line until the silence was broken by a series of annoying beeps.

4:28 p.m.

My new plan was to lie quietly and settle into despondency. Dragging my pillow onto the floor, I noticed the top of Shaun Cassidy's head. Kicking the magazine out from under the bed revealed the rest of his face, along with his pals Scott Baio, Leif Garrett, and Willie Aames. Their heads had been enlarged and placed in a quadrant, like a giant game of tic-tac-toe.
Tiger Beat
was chock-full of secret facts (
Andy Gibb's middle name was Roy
), not to mention beautiful posters of Parker Stevenson to tape onto your walls. I'd recently read the issue cover to cover, but upon
another perusal I laid eyes on something I'd missed. It was at the bottom of the page.

WIN A DATE WITH GREG!

The Greg in question was starring on a new TV series,
B.
J. and the Bear
, about a freelance trucker (B.J.) and his chimpanzee best friend (Bear). Together, they'd travel the country's highways getting into hijinks while trying to avoid the rascally law enforcer, Sheriff Lobo.

Now, my fantasy-date dance card was already full with Fonzie and Bobby Vinton. However, the song “Convoy” had recently taught me some trucker lingo (
yeah, breaker one-nine, this here's the rubber duck
), and CB radios seemed neat—plus I didn't really have anything else to do, so I cut out the contest form. I should note here, I was not much of a winner. There were no yellow horse ribbons tacked onto my bulletin board, no trophy cups engraved with my name. Ace always got to the Spooky Speedster prize in the FrankenBerry box first. And I'd taken no shortage of dodgeballs to the head in gym. But there was something about Greg Evigan's feathered hair and halfhearted smile that added up. I was about to be a winner.

I spent a good deal of time debating which ink from my Bic 4-Color pen to use. Settling on red, I called up those dazzling letters Brandi used for her signature, knowing it was that kind of penmanship that Greg Evigan would spark to. We were asked to write one line about ourselves:
I like badminton and spy novels, kittens and kissing.
I then crossed out
kissing
and put in
CB radios
instead. I debated a SWAK on the back of the envelope, but decided on a kiss instead, using the Tangee lipstick I'd lifted from my nana's bathroom last Yom Kippur. Just to put it over the top, I spritzed the envelope with a little Love's Baby Soft.

I would get my father to mail the contest form. He never questioned what we handed over, probably assuming it was one of those letters I was supposed to be writing to Penina Hamburger,
the adopted mail-order Israeli orphan pen pal my mother'd sent away for. I knew he'd take it, along with the stack of envelopes my mother gave him, mindlessly sticking it into the brown leather purse he'd started carrying.

The potential outfit panic for my impending date set in right away. I was confident that the rust-colored crochet necktie my mother thought was cute just didn't seem cocktail-waitressy enough for my date. And what would we chat about? I didn't know a thing about badminton or spy novels. I needed some talking points, hobbies. I needed to be interesting.