ONE MONTH CHANGED IT ALL-

Life changed drastically in 1952 in Long Island City, Queens, in the projects, when I was told in early June my mother was pregnant. I was almost nine and a very young nine at that. Gladys, my sister was seven.  I didn’t know what pregnant meant, knew nothing about where babies came from and less about how they got there in the first place. And I didn’t even care. I was busy with Double Dutch and my new Spanish twin friends, Blanca y Negra; I was busy with writing names on my pink spaldeen; I was still playing with dolls and taking ballet lessons and planting seeds in wooden cream cheese boxes. I was busy sneakily pinching Gladys and hiding her things.

I knew my mother wore something called a brassiere and a girdle on her body and she didn’t often let us see her in them. This was to hold her belly in. But not now.  An out belly was more than an ok change.  

Having this baby came at a time when I learned lots of things. There were lots of secret things in the house, particularly in my parents’ room. They had a bedroom “set,” pronounced it “a bedroom sweet.” The bed was always made up and off limits for sitting around on. On top of their dresser was a lacy doily and on top a wedding picture in a gorgeous glass frame. To me they were two beautiful people in beautiful clothes in a room with a staircase that looked like it came from Cinderella. This photo was the same as all my friends’ parents’ photos, it seemed. And to the side of this frame, a mirrored tray with gold metal lace trim along all four sides which held those perfume bottles and compacts and lipsticks and a black shiny jewelry box with a little dancing ballerina. In my mother’s dresser drawer which was unofficially off limits too, (in other words, I shouldn’t be there but the world would not fall apart if I was…) were wonderful things- gloves, handkerchiefs, and letters from my father during the war, cards she’d saved, lacy lingerie, nylon stockings with long seams. I loved to sneak a look into her bedroom and watch her get dressed.

But life was changing. I saw Mommy’s belly get bigger and bigger with what I learned was to be a baby. I’d watch Mommy put powder under her arms; powder from tiny little jars decorated with covers with roses and jewels on them. She dabbed perfume on herself with two fingers, behind her ears, on her neck, on her wrists and into her cleavage, even on her new belly, perfumes with names like “Tigris” and “Channel”, not baby names, smells that came from faraway places that I had only learned the names of in school, like Paris and Florence, Mommy’s favorite since it was also her name, Florence Rose. After the perfume, she’d  put on her duster, the one with the huge motherly pockets, and did her chores and got dressed for real later.

Sometimes our father was in that room getting dressed, but I never sneaked a look at my father. I only saw him come out of the bathroom everyday, fully clothed, with a wet terry towel tied tightly around his head like an Arab to flatten down his very curly red hair. I never smelled cologne on him, just medicinal shaving smells on his cheeks as he kissed me and Gladys goodbye as he left for work every single day of my life at home. I didn’t even dare to think about parts of his body! I never thought about his belly or the part he played in this baby. Oh there were lots of things that I didn’t think about. 

  There were other things in my house that I was sort of told were related to having a baby.  In the linen closet in the foyer in our apartment, tucked away under towels and sheets and blankets, was a huge box of cottony rectangles. What were those? Who knew from this? One day, I discovered these huge cottony things and paraded around with some, asking,” Hey what is this, what is this?” The “hey” part was answered first, “Judy, hay is for horses,” one of these short sayings that  my family’s used to make a point, something to distract me from possibly remembering a question maybe they didn’t want to answer. I guessed these cottony things were, “it’s cotton-put-it-away.” So? What did that mean? So much for my childhood questions! And when mom was having this baby, these items it seemed were no more, gone.

I discovered one day when I was alone in that room, there was also this little book, How Shall I Tell My Daughter? Tell me what, I wondered, and I conjured up all kinds of things it could tell me, until I had the right moment to look at it and get the answer myself. Did this have to do with the changes and the coming new baby?

It wasn’t like there was no one to ask. We were a communicative family. I was encouraged to ask questions, but I guess these were the wrong ones. This little book told me about something called menstruation, my period, “it” and developing breasts and growing up. It told me I too could have babies once this happened, but not really how. Mom was having that baby so this was really important to know, I thought. Didn’t that mean being married and becoming a housewife?  Wasn’t that supposed to be the dream and goal in those years in the early 1950’s? The book didn’t tell me about sex, and truthfully; I wasn’t ready to understand that anyway. My time to learn would come. My time to read magazines and books that were thrilling and titillating, to swoon in the movies over Rock Hudson and James Dean, to gyrate with Elvis and sashay with the doo-wop groups would come soon enough. When I was older, I would be part of the sleepover “club” to make tents of our bed blankets, and into the night, with a flashlight, read from Peyton Place or 69 Park Avenue and dream and swoon.  In my teens, I would read those so-called “dirty” books on the subway trains and cover them with plain brown paper or book covers with flags that we got in school.

Back to this baby. My mom was pregnant. That was the reality. I noticed the new and different clothes and things now in her room. I’d feel the baby in her tummy. Mom even walked differently. I went with her to the doctor’s. “Well here’s the young lady,” Dr. Serlin would say. Yet, he still patted my head and pinched my cheek in the outer office but didn’t let me in to the examining room with mom.

 I took part in discussions in our family of what names the baby might have. My mother told me new babies were named for those who were dead, to remember them.  I was named for her father, Joseph Hyman who died of TB. I would rather have been named for Judy Holiday who was famous and alive. A lot about a family is learned at this time. As a matter of fact, it was at this time even though I was nine that I found out about Hitler and concentration camps since two sisters of my grandmother probably died there, and maybe the new baby could have their names.  Really not much more was said. I really didn’t learn that much though. That would come later. It seemed obvious that sad things and scary things were not really shared in our house. This was ok with me for now though. 

I thought up great boys’ names. I liked John after John Wayne and Buster after Buster Crabbe. My parents liked Franklin after Roosevelt, then a favorite for Jewish people. I wanted a brother desperately. I knew my father wished for a boy too. He had hoped I was one but said he “coped” when I was born a girl and then “coped more" two years later when Gladys was born a girl.

At this time in my life, in summer, it seemed like all I saw outside in the park and on the streets were big bellies. “When you are looking for things, you find them,” I said to myself. My mother had two close pregnant friends, Leah and Jay. Leah was having her first baby at the age of my mother, almost 35, and Jay was having her 4^th. With big bellies I saw huge carriages, sometimes my mother called them prams, with rattles and ribbons decorating them and white netting covering whatever was inside.

 Everyone was so excited about all these changes that would happen except my grandmother Esther, mommy’s mother. She seemed embarrassed by it all. I thought maybe that she didn’t want my mother sitting with these big bellied women, like sitting close to a pregnant person was catching, like catching things in the bathroom, maybe.   “Baby,” my grandmother said (she called my mom that until she died); “you’re pregnant, what happened. Isn’t it enough with the two girls? Aren’t you too old?” My mother looked away and never really answered her.  My father though was as mad at her as he always was and walked away from them. It was not any of her business and he let her know this and so she had no choice but to keep quiet and of course learn to accept her coming grandchild no matter how old she thought a pregnant person should be. All of this bickering made me uncomfortable but it wasn’t really that different from the discomfort I always felt when my father and grandmother got near to each other.

Being pregnant did mean other changes. It meant mom had to be more careful. She might not play catch or let us wrestle her or later on, sit on her lap. It meant preparations in the house too. It meant changing things in Gladys’ and my room and it would mean more sharing. It would mean sharing the new baby too. This was something else to argue over and these somethings would continue all our lives. Gladys and I never were good friends. I found a million things to tease her about and annoy her with. But in this wait, we were both united and excited.

 I will never forget this excitement when July 19, 1952 came. Mom said her water broke--what did that mean to a nine year old? - Water couldn’t break! And dad was taking her with that little bag which lived near the side of her bed for weeks to Astoria General Hospital and Nettie was coming over to watch Gladys and me. When Nettie visited it meant fun and presents and for the time we forgot about babies and mom and her belly. Nettie said the time was near. We actually got scared as the afternoon turned into evening. Again, not too much was said to us. Every time the phone rang, I asked a million questions and got shrugs and “wait, doll.” At this time, Leah too was in the hospital and the call from her husband Jack came first and we could hear Aunt Nettie say, “a girl, oh Susan Beth, how nice…” and I was not happy. I had enough with this one sister and I longed for that brother. Our family was really short of men I asserted and I had come to treasure those few who were around.  Nettie told the two of us and said it was not our mommy who called. But, later in the day our call came, and we learned Carol Beth was born that day in Astoria General Hospital. My father spoke to us on the phone, told us to behave, and said he would take us to the hospital the next day. Nettie would sleep over and of course we got to stay up late. The next day, she took us by train to meet our father at the hospital. We could not go into the hospital, we had to be 13 or something, but we stood at the front of it and we waved at the window of the room where our mother was staying for one whole week out of our lives. Later she said to us, “Girls, this was one of the best rests I have had in years.”

I couldn’t wait for mom to come home and bring this little doll with her. We didn’t have a car and so we stood at the window waiting for the taxi to bring them home. In preparation, I remember taking out all the toys, the bears, the dolls, my favorite Candyland game, and lining them up for their arrival. Gladys did the same. She had her own ideas of toys and made a line of blocks and balls and her bag of jacks and a ball. If only this baby knew what was in store for her, the competition she would stir up and the times she would have to tell me and Gladys who she loved more and whose side she would take in those “Schneider wars”. Gladys and I would even fight about which side of the room Carol’s little crib would be on. Had cute little Carol Beth known all this, she might have chosen never to be born. But I would not have changed a thing. While Gladys and I, only two years apart in age, drifted further apart from each other, Carol and I, with nine years between us, became the best of friends. That was such a welcome change. What a change in only one month!