Skip to main content

Screaming out the Window


Sometimes, it's just too much. "It" can be anything at all: losing your keys, the series of phone calls you have to make to investigate a fraudulent charge on your credit card bill, a visit from the in-laws, the cat scratching the furniture, missing the bus, burning dinner, the rude person who lets a door shut in your face while you juggle groceries and a child, broken machinery, stepping off the curb into a dog pile . . . But sometimes there is nothing wrong, it's just a day with an overwhelming amount of work (real work and "busywork") that must get done, and you are just a one person with two hands. My mom and I have a shorthand for empathy in this situation. "Want to go scream 'shit' out the window?" we'll say to each other. It dates back to a specific moment of frustration, though I don't remember at all what it was about. We were living in Chicago—on Lake View across from Lincoln Park, which puts me at about eight years old. The apartment had a solarium. (Okay, I love the sound of that. That all by itself is a memory worth holding: the apartment had a solarium. How many times will I be able to say that in my life?) It was a sun space that projected from the living room, a large polygonal bay window to let in the light. My mom had placed some plants there; I remember at least one schefflera, and I think a fuschia as well, unless I'm mixing up my urban gardens and the fuschia was in some other apartment. Now that I think of it, I'm not at all sure that the bay windows opened. They did or they didn't. If they didn't, then my screaming memory belongs to a window with the same exposure in the apartment: right out onto the very respectable, serene Lake View. As I said, I don't remember what caused that moment's frustration, or whose it really was (only my mom's, or was I also out of sorts?). Anyway, the thing I will always remember: leaning with my mother out an open window on this lovely tree-lined street and screaming a long, drawn-out expletive into the neighborhood. Not to mislead you, this was uncharacteristic of my mother; please do not form any impressions of her based on this four-letter act. But the irregularity of it is precisely why it's such a great memory, and why it gives me an odd comfort (and, back then, it gave me a thrill). I was eight, and complicit for one naughty moment in a grown-up's tantrum. Why should we be frustrated and hide the fact, or worse take it out on each other? Much healthier to raise the sash and scream on a rare occasion. It made us both feel better, made us laugh, and I got to see that it was okay to blow off a little steam. We are all human after all—a fact I tended to overlook as a child, concerning my parents. As for childhood swearing . . . I didn't learn it from my mother. She didn't corrupt me, only acknowledged the realities of what you hear daily in the city. Besides, I'd been in preschool in Greenwich Village NYC in the early 1970s; I'd already heard much worse.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ships (Westport, CT)

I graduated from high school in 1987, and although I had applied to college (one only, I knew what I wanted) and gotten my acceptance, I deferred matriculation for a year. It was for the best. Teen angst and anger were peaking, I was sick of school, and really it would've been a waste for me to go straight through when all I could think of was living on my own in the "real" world. Well, I got a dose of that. A good dose of what I could expect to do with a high school diploma and—let it be said—a bunch of shifty slackers for roommates, whose only ambition was to get wasted and stay that way all day. Except that I was not a slacker; that's something I never have been. And even if I had wanted to party—illegally, mind you, I was still underage for beer let alone the rest of what was out there to be had—well, there wasn't the time or energy for it. After a somewhat lost summer following graduation, I set about getting a job, a checking account, and an apartment, tryin

Touch Club

Another experience to come out of my father's L.A. years with Playboy was involvement with a private, membership-based Beverly Hills supper club called Touch. The connections are fuzzy in my mind. I always want to say that the club was backed financially by Playboy Enterprises, but I'm not sure this is accurate. It may have just been that one of the club's owners belonged to Hefner's entourage—being one of the many who made it their business to stop by the Playboy mansion on a regular basis. Or perhaps he (I forget his name, despite having heard it regularly at one point in my life) was a salaried employee of the company, linked somehow to club/casino operations? However it came into being, the Touch Club opened in the early 1980s (perhaps it was the year 1980; it was eventually sold in 1986), and we dined there sometimes, my parents and I; this was always a special occasion I got to dress up for. I don't remember the menu, but based on the intended clientele, I'

Polly's Pies

Today I made a fresh strawberry pie. Maybe it's the wishful thinking of a transitional season: it's spring officially, but you don't quite feel it yet, at least not in New York. Making a fruit pie can't force sunny spring weather to come any quicker, but it still tastes good, and the color of the pie, glazed with a fruit/sugar/cornstarch reduction, is a cheerful anecdote for the often rainy and gray sky in early April. I used to have my paternal grandmother's recipe, but looking for it this afternoon, I couldn't find it. I ended up substituting a recipe from another trusted Southerner, Lee Bailey, whose Southern Desserts cookbook has been on my shelf from the time I first had my own kitchen. The pie came out great—actually, it was better than my grandmother's version (or my misfired attempts at her version, should I be the one at fault). But all this thinking about, making, now writing about pie has brought up another landmark of memory: Polly's Pies in