Interiors, exteriors

EXT. – DAY

When my twin cousins Pami and Paula still lived across the street, I used to sleep over a lot. Especially after my father died and they often fed me. Early one Sunday morning, we were surprised when we looked out the window at my house to see my mother’s black Cadillac was not in the driveway. It couldn’t have been later than 8 a.m., so we thought it was odd that my mother, who seldom rose before 10, would have gone anywhere that early.

So before I went back home we called. My mother answered the phone like nothing was unusual and we said, “oh, you’re home.” She said of course she was, and we told her that her car wasn’t in the driveway. She said “yes, it is,” and when we insisted that it wasn’t, it slowly dawned on all of us that someone had stolen it.

I don’t remember ever having trouble with that Cadillac, but I remember not being wild about the dark blue Plymouth Volare my mother bought to replace it. It was boxy, without style and warmed to a choking 110 degrees during steamy Rhode Island summers. Our claustrophobic dog, Bebop, didn’t seem to care for it, either. If left in the car for even five or 10 minutes (even if I was in the car with her), she’d bark and jump around and rip the vinyl interior padding to shreds, through the yellow foam and down to the navy metal. It was startling how much damage that dog could do to upholstery in mere minutes.

We never recovered our stolen Cadillac. And the feeling of comfort that I had had as a small child, that I was safe in my house and on my property, was gone too. The creepy feeling I experienced that morning, of knowing that someone could take something that was mine and would never have to give it back or be punished for it, wouldn’t be the last time I’d feel that way.

INT. – NIGHT

I don’t remember teenagers doing this in the ’80s in the years before I moved from small-town North Kingstown to Providence, RI, but in the ’70s, young scumbags in my hometown used to enjoy slowly rolling their cars down the dirt road between my backyard fence and the woods behind our house late at night during the summer. Sometimes with the lights off, sometimes on, they’d slowly creep 50 feet or so in, park and get out, laughing, the cherries of their cigarettes glowing orange while I spied on them from my bedroom window. I rested my chin on the cool sill with thick chipped paint, nose discreetly poking between my Holly Hobbie curtains, eyes straining to make out any risque behavior in the darkness.

There were never any shootings or fights or anything. Mostly pot smoking and beer drinking, coarse laughter, the shrill tittering of drunk girls, the occasional soft woosh of a beer bottle landing in a bed of pine needles and dirt. AC/DC or Led Zeppelin would waft over the fence and into my room but I could rarely hear actual conversation. I imagined that someday when I was older, I’d understand the appeal of gathering in the dark woods behind family homes, but I never would. In the early to mid-’80s, social interaction seemed more centered on the house party. Or in the mall, where we’d buy Rob Lowe and sarcastic “Poverty Sucks” posters even though we were practically living it.

INT. – DAY

The morning the police came to our door to tell my mother that my father was dead was impossibly beautiful. I remember the bright, early-morning sunshine streaming through our front screen door. Crickets were still chirping. It would be at least a couple hours before the heat really set in — that damp, wooly-blanket heat of New England in August — and the neighborhood kids screamed and careened on their bikes and the teenagers impatiently honked their horns and peeled out at stop signs to show off.

The cops took their hats off as they glided up the few stairs to our door, just like they do on TV. They even called my mother ma’am. As soon as she saw them, my mother’s hands fluttered to her heart and she gasped, “oh my god!” before they had a chance to say anything. I think she later told me that she had worried that that would happen. That she was always half expecting to hear that my dad was dead. Although she had figured on a car or motorcycle accident, not suicide.

When they said that my father was dead, she immediately started bawling and didn’t reach for me. She closed her eyes, put her palm on the wood paneling on the wall at the bottom of our stairs and rested her forehead against it. I ran upstairs just as fast and cried lying horizontally across my bed, my little feet banging against the wall. I don’t know anything about kids, but I dimly recall reading or seeing stuff on tv that indicates that children sometimes don’t “get” death and need to have it explained to them. I don’t know when the average kid is supposed to be able to grasp what it means when a parent is dead, but I immediately understood what the cops had told my mother; no one had to explain it to me.

My mother came into my room later, still crying, and sat down on my bed to talk to me about it. I don’t remember anything she said though.

I have more weird memories about my father’s death. And some that I don’t remember but my mother told me, like how my grandparents were embarrassed and complained to my mother when they were taking care of me that I’d taken to announcing to people brashly, “Guess what? My father died.” And I guess the people would say sympathetically, “I know, honey,” or something like that, but my grandparents were very annoyed by my pitiful little announcements and tried to get my mother to put a stop to it. She said she told them “she’s just a little girl; she needs to talk about it.” But my grandparents found me, at 5, to be very embarrassing.

They also didn’t approve when my mother insisted that I not attend his funeral. She didn’t want my last memory of my father to be in a casket, and I always agreed with her decision. They thought I wouldn’t be facing reality if I didn’t go. And I did sometimes fantasize as a child that he was alive somewhere, even though I didn’t like the idea that that implied he had wanted to leave us. Even though that was more or less the case anyway.

But deep inside, I understood. I understood that things could be taken from me and there were things that I would have to accept even if I could never understand them.

Coming up!

Adorable Mexican feral kitten photos from my trip to Baja and thrilling recap of Sunday’s episode of “I Love Money.” And is anyone else disturbed that friggin National Enquirer reporters are featured guests on NPR? That John Edwards has a love child? Has the world gone mad??

Steven’s Store

So I’m launching a new subsection, kids, in which I bore you with tales of my childhood as opposed to boring you with details of my adult life.

I don’t recall when I first heard about Stevens’ Store (I’m really thinking the name was actually “Stevens’ Store” or “Stephens’ Store,” but according to some yokels in my hometown , it was “Steven’s”), but I remember biking up the big hill many times into the more affluent part of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, cutting through the Davisville Elementary School grounds, where I attended kindergarten through 5th grade, then through some more neighborhoods to the nondescript gray 1950s ranch-style house that didn’t have a sign on it. But all the kids knew there was candy in it.

Inside the small, usually sunless porch sat Mr. and Mrs. Stevens behind a old-fashioned glass candy display counter, he on a stool holding one of those wee red change counters that I’m having trouble describing adequately because I haven’t seen one in about 25 years, and she standing by an ancient cash register, teeny brown bags at the ready. In a Seinfeld “soup nazi”-customerlike fashion, we knew to arrange ourselves in an orderly manner on the Mr. Stevens end of the counter. As we pointed and specified the amounts of the small candies that we wanted from the colored plastic bins behind the glass, Mr. Stevens would toss our candy into a basket and click the white buttons on his counter to tally our totals. It was enormously convenient not having to count ourselves, and the last time in our lives that we’d ever have a storekeeper hold our hands to that degree, making sure that we didn’t pick out more crap than we could pay for.

When we’d blown our wad — hardly ever more than $1 — he’d pass the basket down to Mrs. Stevens, who would take our money and empty our candy from the baskets into those little brown bags.

When I was really, really little, I liked hot balls and candy cigarettes and those gross pouches of sugar dust that you’d dip saliva-slicked candy tongue depressorlike things into and then lick them off. Oh, and Gold Rush gum. Now that was marketing genius…I actually have a pouch of Gold Rush gum in my kitchen junk drawer that I bought at the ironic hipster candy counter at St. Francis Fountain in San Francisco. (And like an ironic hipster, I haven’t touched it. It remains in its original packaging.)

But fairly early on, I decided that I preferred actual candy bars to sour balls (yuck), those stretchy, gelatinous gummy items, Tootsie Rolls (vomit) and other cheaper, grosser candies. So my friends would emerge from the store with these bulging little brown bags of assorted crap while mine invariably contained like, a Twix bar with maybe a small Bazooka gum or something too because I enjoyed the small, chalky comics that came in them and also so I could fit in.

The Stevens were pretty old and he was pretty overweight in the late ’70s/early ’80s when my friends and I patronized the store. In typical myopic kid fashion, I assumed that having the option of purchasing candy from this elderly couple selling out of their home was unique to my generation, but if you look at that random hyperlink above, apparently the Stevens’ Store had been around for at least a couple decades. Someone on that message board mentioned buying bread on credit from the Stevens during WWII, I believe.

Which endears them to me even more, incidentally, because someone in my own family did something similar when she immigrated from Ireland at the turn of the last century. My aunt Jenny, who always thought I was named after her (no one had the heart to tell her that my name was actually Ginny, not Jenny), was sent to America at the last minute after her older cousin chickened out and they made Jenny go instead. If I remember the story right, she was only 16.

I know a little more about typical experiences of Irish immigrant women of that period (I did a project on the subject in an urban studies class in college) than I did when I heard stories about my aunt Jenny, and it was common for many of them to work as maids or nannies, not run their own general stores like Jenny did. My mom always used to try to point out where she thought “Jenny’s Store” had been on this crappy block on Smith Hill in Providence, where I spent the latter part of my high school years, every time we drove by a particular small, dark door at the base of a Victorian-style apartment building. According to family lore, Jenny’s formerly thriving business died during the Depression, when she let too many people buy food on credit and they could never square their bills with her.

But evidently the zeal North Kingstown children had for candy was enough to keep Stevens’ Store afloat for generations. The Stevens weren’t especially kindly people; I don’t have any amazing memories of endearing stories that they told me or anything. We just took for granted that they were supposed to be there, that they would always be there. Looking back on it, it seems kind of bizarre and quaint that as a child, I biked to a house, left my bike on the ground outside and purchased candy for under a quarter. I mean, it’s not like I grew up in the 1930s.

But apparently it’s not as unusual an experience as I thought. My friend who’s a reporter in San Francisco told me that it’s very common in the projects, ladies selling candy to kids out of their homes. I had never heard of that before and thought it sounded kind of adorable, although surely the reasons for the private-residence candy stores exist as much because of the dangers of the streets as they do for the economic incentives for public-housing candy entrepreneurs.

Years later, I heard that Stevens’ Store had been robbed. The town was appalled. It was one of those innocence-annihilating experiences, particularly because it was such a dipshit, small-potatoes target, it was assumed the culprits were “kids,” or one or more of our own. I wish I could remember more about it, but I think the couple had actually been at home and didn’t reopen the store for a long time afterward because they were traumatized, according to rumor. I remember driving past the gray house with my mom and feeling sad and ashamed about it. It just looked so empty, but I guess it always had.

I imagine that no one aside from me or Dave would possibly be interested in this, but because I came up with only one measly, random link when I googled “Steven’s store + North Kingstown,” I’m publishing it anyway. If anyone else remembers the store and looks for info online, here’s my memory of it.