Breathing Out
Childhood
1.
Changeling
In folklore, a child who is secretly substituted for another by fairies.
As a child I would often make myself lie absolutely still before falling asleep. Once there, fantasy would overtake me. It was a world that I alone owned, a place I had dominion over. I chose the thoughts and the desires. I played my own game and always came out the winner. No one and nothing could rein me in.
In the way that changelings know, I always sensed I didn't quite belong. I knew I had to find others like me--the magical helpers who would show me how to get to the other side, although I didn't know exactly what it was or how to get there. The burning desire to be free of the small-town life never left me for long, and I stoked its fire by reading poetry and tawdry novels, going to movies and Broadway plays, and listening to all kinds of music. These were my doors to the other side. But I was stuckon the wrong side of the looking glass, waiting for that Alice in Wonderland hatch to suddenly appear. One tumble could, and would, send me into the netherworld of my dreams.
In that enchanted space before falling asleep, I sometimes saw myself as the actress everyone was talking about. Or I was the possessed journalist hunkered down at her typewriter, capturing the latest big news story. At other times I imagined myself a poet like Sylvia Plath, with every nerve in my body alive and aching to tell my strange and haunted tale. I read The Bell Jar at fifteen as I was embarking on my career, worried that I had fallen into it, and that if I wasn't careful and vigilant and in some way anchored to the outside world, I could slip over the edge into a dark abyss.
I kissed and hugged my pillow nightly. It became the boy or man I wanted to love me. I imagined all my embraces being returned. Much of it was a blur of longing and I would fall asleep, blissful or sad. When I was a young teen, my sexual fantasies ran rampant. I began having these fantasies during the day at school, or at home watching TV, or spending the afternoon listening to Johnny Mathis or John Coltrane. I had yet to experience love. I still had never touched myself, not even my small, budding breasts. Oh, but the mind was having wild sex all the time: hot visions of prolonged and languorous kissing sessions and pledges of love--to Dion and all the Belmonts, James Dean, and Warren Beatty. I could wrap my long, skinny arms around them all. Spin the bottle, so popular with pre-teens, could send me into a frenzy--if I got lucky enough to get invited to one of "those" parties.
One night I was invited to a thirteen-year-old's basement party. Parents redid the basements of their suburban homes in the 1950s as recreation rooms. Kids had their own friends over to play the forty-fives in their ever-increasing record collections on a jukebox or Victrola, drink Coca-Cola, and have make-out sessions. Moms with their pageboy hairdos, dressed in billowing cocktail dresses, would swirl into the underground adolescent Mecca with a cocktail in hand to check us out. We would dance or huddle in corners, eating Wise potato chips and giggling over which boys we liked.
At one of these spin-the-bottle parties I wore a beautiful blue mohairturtleneck I had painstakingly picked out. I often got hand-me-down clothes from a friend of my mother's--all items her daughter had outgrown: checkered shirtwaist dresses, full skirts, Peter-Pan collared blouses, and sweaters. That night I chose carefully from my newly obtained wardrobe, applying blue eye shadow to match the sweater. Quite unceremoniously, during Frankie Lymon's "Why Do Fools Fall in Love," I was told by a nasty, nasal little girl from across the street, "You have body odor." Embarrassed, I surreptitiously smelled my armpits all night long.
That year at summer camp I had my first kiss on a hayride with Bobby Leon. It was a romantic, picture-perfect setting. I remember thinking: "This is it! This is what I've waited for: The beginning of life. And I'm doing it! I'm actually doing it!" He gave me a sloppy wet kiss, then pulled away. Suddenly I was an observer, oddly outside of the situation, knowing I didn't measure up: my breasts, body odor, and, by now, braces and acne.
At fifteen I fell for Allan the heartbreaker. He was twenty and engaged to a beautiful high school senior. Allan lived on what people in the Five Towns agreed was the wrong side of the tracks. This only added to his allure. I went to the Town Diner on Central Avenue looking for him, then to Juniors Diner in Hewlett, in hopes of a sighting. He drove a red Chevy. I sat at the windows of these diners anticipating that any minute he would turn the corner in his convertible--hopefully without his girlfriend. I knew he was too much of a catch for me. After all, I was young and not very popular. I felt at any moment I would be crushed. But my passion ran strong as I plotted for months for a way to get him to notice me.
Finally, I got up the nerve to invite him out under the ruse of a triple date. His two best friends with my two best friends. It was a very good plan. We went to Coney Island and rode the Cyclone rollercoaster together on a summer night in seedy Brooklyn. We picked at sticky pink cotton candy and chased it down with Nathan's hotdogs. Between the food and the ride I got sick to my stomach. I was caught in a valiant struggle: trying to appear grown up and sophisticated, while not revealing that at any moment I might barf. But it wasn't just the junk I had piled in that night. My equilibrium was teetering and panic was setting in by the time he walked me to my door and thanked me.
"Good night, Peg," he whispered and gave me a little kiss on the cheek. It was all over before it even began. My first love, and not even reciprocated. There was absolutely nothing I could do to win his love. I cried and cried and cried and looked in the mirror constantly to see what was wrong with me. Well, for one thing, I wasn't Nancy, his beautiful teen-queen fiancée. In the mirror I saw only my awkwardness.
BREATHING OUT. Copyright © 2005 by Peggy Lipton. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
