My Mother Was Nuts by Penny Marshall Read Free Book Online

end of camp, my parents picked me up and we caught up during the long drive back to the Bronx. Everything was the same, my mother said, nothing was new, that is until I asked how my grandfather was doing.
    “Oh, he died,” my mother said.
    “Excuse me?” I said, shocked.
    “He died,” she said.
    “When?” I asked.
    “Around the beginning of the summer,” she said.
    “But in my letters I asked how he was doing, and you said he was fine. Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “We didn’t want to ruin your summer.”

CHAPTER 7
The Marshall Plan

    Penny at Camp Geneva in 1954
Marshall personal collection
    I N 1952, MY BROTHER started at Northwestern University. Garry was eager to get out in the world and away from my parents. However, he was concerned about leaving Ronny and me behind. Before departing for Chicago, he asked us to meet in his bedroom. When we were all together, he shut his door and stood in front of us looking as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. What was on his mind was a topic that would occupy the three of us for the rest of our lives: family.
    “As you may have realized,” he said, “Mom doesn’t understand much about life beyond her ballroom, and who knows where Dad is most of the time. Nanny’s walking into walls, and Grandpa is living across the hall.”
    Ronny and I nodded.
    “Basically, we got no shot with these people,” Garry continued.
    He paused to let his thoughts sink in, and after a moment of silence he leaned forward.
    “If something goes wrong, they aren’t going to be there for us,” he said. “That’s just the way it is. So as we go forward in our lives, we have to stick together. We’re the only ones who are going to understand each other.”
    After Garry finished, we all stood up and hugged. At nine years old, I didn’t understand everything he said. But I knew his assessment was accurate. In fact, two years later, Ronny followed him to Northwestern and I realized Garry’s worries had been prophetic. Once my brother and sister were out of the house, my parents quit pretending to like each other. Whatever pretense they had maintained for our benefit disappeared.
    She layered her sarcasm on even thicker. Hearing his key in the door at night, she would turn to me and sneer, “Better get up and give
him
a kiss if you want your bank money.” Sometimes she dragged Mildred or one of her other friends into their bedroom and pointed to his closet where his clothes hung neatly. “Look at that,” she’d say with disdain. “He’s such a pansy.”
    My father thought that my mother was holding him back. His business was thriving, thanks to the commercials he made for the American Medical Association, the biggest and best of his clients. “He’s such a phony baloney,” my mother said. “He thinks he’s such a big shot.” He wanted to move to Sutton Place, an affluent neighborhood on Manhattan’s East Side. But when he brought home floor plans, my mother said, “And what am I going to do there? What am I going to do in Sutton Place?”
    I wondered the same thing.
    Did he not know this woman?
    At least I had my own room now. It was Garry’s old bedroom. After Ronny left for school, my mother painted the walls turquoise, installed new closet doors, added a bookshelf, and bought me a white, Danish-style bed, which I liked. Even better, I didn’t have to share a room with my grandmother anymore. I had privacy. I stayed up at night, reading Nancy Drew and Dana Girls mysteries, as well as stories about animals and kids running away from home. I kept a diary. Sometimes I snuck down the hall and secretly watched whatever TV show my mother had on in the living room while she waited up for my father to come home.
    My brother once observed that when you watch our home movies,you see me grow progressively more depressed, and it’s true. I suppose that’s why my father came home one day with a dog, a cocker spaniel that I named Mr. Belvedere. My mother loved him,