My friends and I knew that Condon was a place you were sent to, not one you’d choose to attend. No one on the outside could understand its pleasures or why anyone would become attached to “the Retard School.” They didn’t understand that at Condon, we were the school. We didn’t have to ask permission to be included—accepted—by the “normal” kids, the way we might have in the mainstream. The Glee Club was our Glee Club, the Christmas play was our school play, our Scout troops, and our student newspaper, albeit produced on a mimeo machine that turned our fingers the color of Welch’s grape jelly.
We were messed up the way kids were, but not the way outcasts were, until the end of the school day, when we got back on the bus and turned back into freaks.
*1 https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/the-case-for-black-with-a-capital-b.html
*2 The Petermann Bus Company was the first to design ramped buses for wheelchairs.
*3 I’m leaving off most of the last names of my fellow students, but the Whitakers were quite famous.
*4 And when I call anyone else a monster, I’m not ever saying that that’s how they saw themselves, or that they were evil, freakish, or anything negative whatsoever. I am saying that that’s how we were often treated in the world; as disturbances, threats, as frightening or pitiable creatures, not as young humans on their way to human lives.
CHAPTER 10
House of Wax
I jumped off the school bus and furrowed a trail across our snowy yard, clomped inside, and let the muck of outerwear thud to the carpet. I was careful not to splorch anything with accidental slush. It was the Most Wonderful Time of the Year: our living room sofa had once again been transformed into the Chanukah Couch.
A gust of 20-degree air hit the back of my neck. Doug must have run all the way home from Swifton Elementary. He pulled off his cap, revealing hat hair that made him look as if he’d worn a salad bowl to school. I snickered; he shoved an icy mitten down the back of my sweater. From the other room, Mom yelled, “Kids, knock it off.”
Doug and I stood before the couch, drooling like cannibals at a mosh pit. Before us lay a seven-foot length of navy upholstery entirely covered with presents. It was the first night of Chanukah, that perfect moment in which not a single package had been unwrapped. Eight separate piles of gifts that gave us a smug superiority over all those gentile children, who had but one night, poor things. Eight nights that helped us endure solid six weeks of “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night” and red-and-green everything.
Doug grabbed a box covered in dreidel paper. “It’s for you. It’s a sweater.”
“Nuh-uh. It’s a party dress.”
“I bet it’s green. Like a pickle. Pickle nose, pickle nose,” he sang, never tiring of pointing out that mine was, indisputably, a very large nose. Like we didn’t have the same schnozzola.
“Well, if it is, don’t worry, it’s all yours. Green is your favorite color, isn’t it? You’ll look sooooo purty—just like a kosher dill.”
“Eeww! Gross!” Realistic barfing noises ensued. The boy did have his talents.
Totems and Familiars: Nomy Lamm
2008
Our little brother, four-year-old Markie, wandered in from the kitchen and began to climb the couch like a dazzled monkey. (Obviously, his birth hadn’t killed our mother. In fact, of the three of us, he looked the most like her—a beautiful, wide-eyed child with the sturdy frame of a Horwitz.) Mom called out, “Don’t let him tear open the packages.” As if.
* * *
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At dinner, Dad wore a fresh white shirt and an unspotted tie (talk about your Chanukah miracles), while Mom had on the fancy new dress she’d made the week before. I had been in my bedroom re-re-reading Little Women (I was Jo! No, I was Beth, dying—in poetry!) when I heard the snip, snip, whirr, coming from the den. I wandered out to see Mom bent over the table, pinning filmy pieces of a Butterick pattern to a bolt of orange brocade.
“Hey, what’s that? Is it for me?”
“Go look.”
I picked up the pattern envelope, on which an emaciated model vamped in an evening gown, though the label said size 16.
Mom said, “Just the thing for your Christmas pageant. What do you think, maybe a Wise Man’s robe? Or are they making you be an angel again?”
“I’m just a villager this time. They never know what to do with me.” I was one of only two Jewish kids in my entire school. So far, I’d avoided being cast as either of the Marys.
Mom held up a section in front of her chest and pinched the dart points. “Just as well. I have a feeling you’d need someone to carry your train.”
I fingered a scrap of ornate fabric. “Think there’s enough here to make me a skirt?”
“Don’t lose that, it’s a facing.”
“I thought you went shopping yesterday. No luck?”
“Well, if your idea of high style is a beige muumuu, Lane Bryant is certainly the place to go.” She bent forward and pushed brocade under the needle, her voice too tight for the joke.
My mother had wanted to be a fashion designer. She’d won a scholarship to Pratt Institute, but her parents demanded that she attend pharmacy school since they’d allowed her older brother, Lester, to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and someone had to take over the family business. And that was that. She escaped after a year by virtue of a lab accident involving a Bunsen burner and a quantity of magnesium. She flash-blinded herself, a blindness that lasted for several months. I don’t know if Carole was a chemistry genius or a future liability for the pharmaceutical industry.
Carole loved clothing with an unrequited passion, even considering that the fashion industry pretended that she didn’t exist. When Doug and I were eight or nine, she’d take us downtown on the bus all the way to the Cincinnati Art Museum. Our final pilgrimage was always Gainsborough’s Ann Ford (later Mrs. Philip Thicknesse) so that we might marvel at the satin gown, a cascade of frothing silver. Ann Ford herself was an afterthought, a vehicle for the glory of the dress. And Carole was always a dress-loving woman: not for her the plebian pantsuit, the wash ’n’ wear slacks.
These days, she consoled herself by drawing wasp-waisted debutantes in Dior “New Look” frocks. She’d never find such things in her size, because Carole Sue Horwitz took after her father. Sam Horwitz was height times width times girth times appetite, six foot two at a time when Jewish men were built like Woody Allen. Big men could get clothes, since big men got respect, but Lane Bryant was the only store that served big women, offering a range of shame-based garments that ran the gamut from Drab to Saggy to Punitively Asexual.