My Mother Was Nuts by Penny Marshall Read Free Book Online Page A

and my father walked him at night, and he kept me company. After about a year, though, I woke up one day and he was gone.
    “Where’s the dog?” I asked.
    “He went to a place in the country,” my mother said.
    “He’s gone?” I asked.
    “He’s much happier where he is,” she said.
    My parents let me replace Mr. Belvedere with two parakeets, Charlie and Pete, and two goldfish, Charlie and Ebenezer. I was into the name Charlie. After a while, the fish stopped swimming and floated on their side. I thought they were resting.
    Every few months, I considered running away to Arizona. Don’t ask me why Arizona. I don’t know. After I started junior high, my parents got me another dog, a beige mutt I named Nickel. He stuck around for a few years before being shipped off to the country, too. By then, though, I had turned into a typical teenager. I was a member of the Elvis Presley Fan Club (I still have my membership card), collected all the latest 45s, and thought constantly about boys.
    When my friends referred to the Marshall Plan, they were talking about my interest in getting boys to pay attention to me, not the United States’s effort to rebuild postwar Europe. I would hit boys on the Junior High School 80 schoolyard and run, hoping they would catch me. But they couldn’t. I was too fast.
    One day I snatched Jeffrey Strauss’s baseball mitt and sprinted away, taunting him to run faster. He couldn’t. My mother told me to slow down. It was the only advice she ever gave me about boys. “You have to let them win,” she said. “They don’t like it when you’re better than them.”
    That turned out to be true. Then Ronnie Kestenbaum let me carry his mitt. I thought he loved me.

    At thirteen, I had my first real kiss. My friend Tema Aaronson and I were baby-sitting and Stuey Seltzer and Lenny Cohen came over to keep us company. We were so lonely, you know? After talking about homework, we asked if they liked The Five Satins and The Del Vikings, and then pretty soon we were all French kissing. As soon as they left, Tema and I hurried to the bathroom and rinsed out our mouths. Laughing, we called them “the water boys.”
    I never liked the way I looked. As an adult, I was once asked what my least-favorite feature was. I said everything. I always wanted to be prettier. All the girls in my neighborhood were Italian or Jewish and they had brown or blues eyes. Mine were green. One day I came up with a cockamamy theory that my grandmother’s glaucoma eye drops would turn my eyes brown like everyone else’s. They didn’t. They nearly blinded me.
    “What did you do?” my mother asked.
    “Nothing,” I lied.
    “What did you do?” she asked again.
    “Nothing,” I said. “I just woke up like this.”
    I had to stay home from school, which wasn’t the worst thing in the world. I tried to skip school as often as I could. Every week I would go through the
TV Guide
and circle movies I wanted to see. If enough of them were on the same day, I would hold the thermometer up to the lightbulb and tell my mother that I had a fever. “See, one-oh-two.” By three o’clock, I would feel better and run out to see my friends and ask what had happened at school.
    All of my friends hung out at the same place: the Parkway. The Parkway was the center of my social life—of my life, period. It was a stretch of fence that started directly across the street from JHS 80 and ran for a good distance along Jerome Avenue. The high school kids gathered around the Mosholu Cafeteria. They didn’t want to be around the younger kids. Every group had their own piece of real estate. Even the loose Rocky girls—the cool girls—had a spot.
    I went there every day as soon as school let out and met up withTema Aaronson, Irma Gottlieb, Carol Cohen, and other friends. There was a reason my friends joked that one day I would have a permanent dent in my ass from sitting on that fence: I was always there. I didn’t want to miss a thing. I snuck