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It's a strange feeling, the first time you think of your parents as real people who once had lives that had nothing to do with you. People who not only didn't love you, but who hadn't even dreamed of you yet.
The way it happened for me is the way I imagine it happens for many people - with a photograph. I was in eighth grade, puttering around the basement on a winter afternoon, when I came across my mother's high school yearbook. Stunned by the far-gone year 1965 stenciled across the cover, I arranged myself onto the clammy concrete floor and began to flip through. I found her there, an inch-high face that was at once familiar as my own and also as exotic as some creature of myth. She smirked up at me inscrutably with eyes so blue you could read their color even in the black and white print.
We stared at each other for a long time.
I brought the yearbook upstairs and found my mom in the kitchen. She was standing in front of the stove, stirring a pot of pork and beans. I presented Barbara Brennan, 1965, to Barb Morrison, 1994; she stopped stirring and examined the picture, a slow sad smile growing on her face.
"What were you like?" I asked.
"I was a Greaser," she told me. "Can't you tell by the hair?"
I looked at the stiff dark mass that swooped behind her head and took up most of the gray background. I was fascinated. Just the word - Greaser - filled me with visions of sock hops and soda fountains and Vietnam war protestations, all the disconnected, cartoonish images of the 60's I'd gained by listening to my older sister's Beatles albums.
"What's a Greaser?"
At this point, the key turned in the front door and I heard the heavy thud of my dad's briefcase dropping to the wood floor of the front hall. He came into the kitchen in his gray suit and greeted each of us with a kiss on the cheek.
"John," Mom said, walking over to the oven and checking on the chicken, "your daughter's asking about Greasers."
"Were you a Greaser, too?" I asked him.
"You better believe it!" he said. "What'd you think I'd be - some kind of Dooper?"
He and my mom exchanged a knowing glance, then burst out laughing. The quality of their laughter was intimate, conspiratorial. I stared at them. All of a sudden, my conventional, familiar parents were part of something foreign, something that even their children could not touch. How, I wondered, could my father be a Greaser or a Dooper? He was simply My Dad. He'd been coming home from work at 6:30, dressed in a suit, every night of his life. Hadn't he?
The Greaser style, I learned, originated in the early 1960's with the Italian kids on Taylor Street, where it trickled its way down through working-class Chicago neighborhoods like my parents'. Greaser boys wore black socks and shoes, black Italian knit sweaters over Dego tees and suspenders, and sharkskin pants or baggy blues. They greased their hair back with pomade, and when it was cold outside they wore leather jackets-if they could afford one. "I couldn't," Dad said wistfully. The only article of clothing more egregious than white socks for a Greaser male was jeans. "Only farmers wore those," scoffed Dad.
"I would never date a boy who wore white socks," my mom added. "I wouldn't even let him come near me."
"If I'd a been wearing white socks, you kids probably wouldn't be here right now," Dad pointed out. He and my mom both laughed that private laugh again, but it seemed to me that there was an element of truth in what he was saying. Could it be possible that my entire mortal inception and existence could be traced back to a teenage boy's choice of footwear?
For girls, the rules were a bit looser, though black was still the abiding principle. You ratted your hair with a fine-toothed comb, and then you styled it into a bouffant, secured in place with several blasts of Aquanet. You wore black liquid eyeliner, pale lipstick, black skirts, and black patterned stockings. You carried a black plastic purse, $3.99 from Jack Robbins on Belmont and Central.
The enemy of the Greaser was the Dooper. If the Greasers were Elvis, then the Doopers were the Beach Boys. Doopers didn't live in my parents' neighborhood, but when they did come around, they stood out like ice cream confections. They wore madras plaid, pastels, and white socks, and both boys and girls wore penny loafers. The Doopers were the privileged class, the rich kids. If the Greasers got cigarettes for their sixteenth birthdays, the Doopers got cars. Just a few years later, the Doopers would go to college. The Greasers would go to Vietnam.
That night, in my dreams, I saw fifteen-year-old Barbara Brennan, poor, shy, and beautiful, ditching school, smoking Kools, and dreaming of some other place. She is lonely and bored and unsatisfied with life, stuck at another sock hop on another Friday night. She slouches, alone, against the bleachers. The lights are dim, the room is sweaty and close, and her toes, encased in nylon stockings, are clammy and damp. They leave steamy imprints on the hardwood floor of the school gym. Faceless boys approach her, their white socks glowing in the darkness, and she turns them all away. Her makeup runs into her eyes, and the room blurs.
The music wails and another boy approaches, but this one has a face. An Irish Catholic altar boy face, blue eyes and a cowlick. He's a textbook Greaser, got his hair slicked back, suspenders holding his sharkskins over a skinny frame, fishbelly white arms poking out of a Dego tee, the lean shape of muscle just beneath.
Black socks.
"I'm John," he says. "Would you like to dance with me?"
And for once, she would.
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