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

there at night, too. After dinner, I would volunteer to take the garbage to the incinerator, run to the Parkway, see my friends for ten minutes, and run back home.
    “What took so long?” my mother would ask.
    “There was a line,” I would say.
    On Saturdays we’d race home for fifteen minutes to check out
American Bandstand
. We would want to see the latest new dance. Then we would race back and talk about what we’d seen. Our world revolved around weekly dances. The school hosted a dance every Friday afternoon and the Jewish Community Center had one on Saturday nights. Those were important social occasions. They were fraught with drama. Everything revolved around who you’d danced with the previous week, and who you hoped to dance with at the next one.
    At the dances, the girls went on one side and the boys stood on the other side, and eventually the music lured those of us more confident about our ability into action. Calvin Klein, the future fashion mogul, was one of the boys who liked to dance. He was good, too. He was a year older than me and later married my friend Jayne Center. When I was in seventh grade, my sister gave me a diary for Christmas and I filled pages with concern and speculation about being asked to the Valentine’s Day dance. “I hope either Joel, Ronald, or David asks me!” I wrote. Two weeks later, I was still waiting. “Please make one of those boys ask me to the V. dance,” I added hopefully.
    By the week of the dance, I was waiting for either Jeffrey “Mousey” Strauss or Joel Permsian to ask me. I liked both of them. Now, fifty-five years later, I don’t remember who took me. Thanks to my diary, all I know is that I danced with Jeffrey, Norman, Joel, and Yohan. Gene wouldn’t dance with me or anyone else, but I excused him because, as I wrote, “He’s sooooo cute.”
    Like most thirteen-year-olds, I didn’t realize that my dramas were actually normal life. But they were utterly normal. Consider this diary entry: “Today in school I was sitting in back of Joel and next to Anita. We were laughing and talking so we have to stay in on Thursday. I tripped Joel and he went flying and landed on his side. I got scared because I thought he got hurt. I also got my period today. By the way, Eddie broke two of his fingers playing basketball.”
    Two years later, my friends and I moved on to high school, believing we were wiser, smarter, and more experienced. Were we? I dug out my ninth-grade autograph book, looking for pearls that would show that some of us at least knew what the hell was going on. I found this note from my friend Kenny, who clearly had figured out what mattered and passed it on to me:
Penny,
When you are kissing
don’t be hasty.
Take your time
and make it tasty!

CHAPTER 8
Mucho Grath-e-ath

    Penny at the 1960 Westbury High School prom with her date, Frank Ryder
Marshall personal collection
    I CAME HOME FROM school one day when I was fifteen and my mother surprised me with the news that she and my father were getting a divorce. She said it matter-of-factly, as if it was on her list of things to tell me before dance class, and in fact, it was. She didn’t give me a chance to ask any questions.
    “Decide who you want to live with,” she said. “Him or me.”
    “Do I have to decide now?” I asked.
    “Yes,” she said. “And take out the garbage on your way out.”
    I went outside and stood next to the incinerator, wondering if my life had just gone up in flames. What had happened? Why were they splitting now? But more important, which one of them did I want to live with?
    I weighed the pros and cons of each. My mother was funnier—and that counted for a lot. But she would insist that I continue dance school, which I hated. My father was boring and humorless but more lenient. He wouldn’t care where I went. However, he would probably move to Manhattan and I didn’t want to leave my friends in the Bronx.
    I was still trying to decide when my father came home from