I got my first real job when I was sixteen and finally old enough to get paid for my work, in contrast with the underage jobs I'd had in school cafeterias where I was paid in lunches, or in my mother's store where I earned 25 cents an hour after school and on weekends in lieu of an allowance. Now I was earning board and room for Marie and me, plus forty dollars a week. Just four years earlier, my mother and I had lived in a similar situation in Kansas, and she had been making $40.00 a month.
My duties were housekeeping and cooking for a man and his fourteen year old son. My employer was an electronics tech who worked a swing shift at McClellan Air Force Base, and on the nights he worked I was also responsible for keeping an eye on his son from the time he came home from school until bedtime. The kid and his father thought I was eighteen, when in fact I was not quite two years older than the boy. That never proved to be any problem.
The first problem we encountered persisted for the whole time I worked there, and actually worsened in time as more of my family learned that I was there, and I made some new friends.
My employer's name was Leonard. Everyone called him Len. His son's name was also Leonard, and everyone called him Len. They had different middle names, were not junior and senior, but few of the people who phoned there for them knew their middle names or initials. The kid had been called Lennie when he was little, but by the time I knew them, he was bigger than his dad and nobody called him Lennie any more. They told me, when a caller asked for Len, just ask, "the old one or the young one?"
I hadn't been called Kathy since I was ten years old. I had taken a stand and insisted upon being called by my middle name, Lynn, and that's what everyone called me. On the phone, the difference between Len and Lynn is just as subtle as the difference between the old Len and the young Len. In no time at all, our end of every phone call would start out like this: "Hello. ...the old one, the young one, or the female?"
My name became an issue for me in another way, too. Having significant income for the first time in my life, I opened a bank account at Wells Fargo. Having long been an adherent of Amy Vanderbilt and Emily Post, I believed that my proper name was Mrs.*insert husband's name here*. I was also inordinately proud of being a married (and therefore grownup) woman, so I was both disappointed and offended when the bank employee told me that the name imprinted on my checks had to match the name on my Army dependent's ID card.
Not only would they not let me be Mrs. "Him", they wouldn't let me be Lynn or "K.Lynn," as I had been in school. The Army insisted that I was Kathy L."Him" and so, of course, that's what was imprinted on my fancy new checks from Wells Fargo. I went on for a while signing checks as Kathy and introducing myself as Lynn. Then, gradually, I caved and went back to being Kathy, and eventually started being Kathy Lynn, the hated name my mother had always called me when I was in trouble. It's only a name, after all. It's not who I really am. More people know me now as SuSu than ever knew me by any other name.
"Ford" had to accept a name change, too. He had gone through school as Alford. It's what his mother said his name was, and it was the name on our marriage certificate. But when the Army took a look at his official birth certificate, they discovered that it said, "Alfred," so thenceforward and forever, he was Alfred, not Alford. Nobody had ever called him Al. I called him Alford. The way his mama said it, it sounded more like Alferd. But some of his Army buddies, those who didn't call him Tex, called him Al. I started calling him Al. I think that's what I'll start calling him here, too.
When we were on the bird ranch, Mama had bought a potty chair for Marie, and we started trying to potty train her. The potty chair had moved with us to Lodi, and then to Frank and Katherine's and then on to Len and Len's, and I was still trying to potty train her. It was one of the most traumatic and embarrassing events of my life.
I had extreme inhibitions regarding feces. I don't recall my own potty training. That is very strange considering that I do recall being weaned when I was six weeks old. I'm theorizing that the potty training had been even more traumatic than the weaning. I know that my mother used to brag about how she had potty trained me before I was nine months old. That, right there, is a red flag. The fact that throughout my childhood I had chronic constipation might also be related to traumatic toilet training.
Anyhow, by this time Marie would let me know when she needed to use the potty, but she would usually take her time about doing anything once she was seated in the potty chair. She would point at things and either say their names or ask what they were. Or she'd reach for anything within arms length, or stretch and try to reach things too far away. She would sing and warble and shout and giggle. She would try to engage me in conversation, and I would sigh and say, "Go potty." The one thing I could not do was just leave her there alone to do her business.
If the phone rang, or the oven timer, or something else called me away, as sure as anything, by the time I got back to the bathroom, she would have done her business and would have her shit smeared in her hair, all over her face, the walls, and anything else she could reach and little balls of it would have been flung away to splatter wherever they hit. She slept in diapers, and if she spent any time awake before I got to her, removed the dirty diaper and put on her training pants, she would have delved into the diaper and started her fecal fingerpainting.
It didn't happen very many times because, after the first time, I was alert and did my best to prevent it. The phase lasted only a few weeks, but caused me immense distress. It wasn't just the mess itself and my efforts to get the place cleaned up, aired out and deodorized before Len or Len got wind of it. I had found a reference to coprophilia and fecal fingerpainting in Psychopathia Sexualis, and was horrified that my baby was a maniac. Eventually, it all came out in the wash.
That was the worst from that time. The best thing about the time we spent there was the radio. Len and Len were both ham radio operators. I experienced a whole new world and learned a new language. The guys had a hard time deciding how to identify me to their contacts in hamspeak. I didn't really qualify as a YL (young lady) because I was married, and the older Len in particular had trouble referring to me as an XYL, and there were apparently no other designations for females. On his wall full of hundreds of QSL cards, Len could point to only two that came from women, but he was happy to tutor me in Morse code and let me use his books to study for my ham license.
I'd sit quietly and listen as they talked, and I'd leaf through the manuals to look up unfamiliar words and abbreviations. Two abbreviations that I heard many times, but could not find in the books, were, "CH" and "RCH." It almost always referred to fine-tuning a frequency. A signal would be off frequency, and someone would say, "Take it up a CH," or "Go down, just an RCH." Finally I asked what it meant. My asking caused some consternation, spluttering, hemming and hawing, but eventually I learned that a CH, a very small interval, was a female pubic hair, and RCH was a red one, presumably finer than the rest.
I have sometimes thought that, since it usually meant that something was just a little bit off, RCH might be an appropriate title for me, and by extension, for my memoirs.
Recent Comments