While dad was working, Martha, my mother, took my brother Sam and I from our Kansas City home to visit my grandparents in Detroit. Martha told us that Billy Lee would follow along to meet us, but he did not. Once at Charles’ and Bella’s Scottish household, my ardent unraveling began. It disoriented me and internal suffering became my shadowy lifestyle. That summer, a childhood friendship briefly disengaged my despair. A friendship sparked by dirt.
Billy Lee greeted me with his smile and muscular arms at the front door of our home every afternoon when he arrived from his shop. He was tall with large square shoulders. Motor oil and gasoline were his cologne. Enamored with my dad’s scent and his squared-off hair, he calmed my little girl spirit. He was my gentle prince. Taken up into his arms every day, I felt secure. I do not remember my mother touching me nor giving me much notice.
Musing of his strong, scooping arms and his auto shop cologne, I pondered my dad every day throughout my childhood. When I was six years old, he sent me a set of Winne-the-Pooh books and his portrait. I gazed at his warm smile and heard his soft, deep voice as I read. They salved my incessant grief and diminished my loss as I meandered into sleep.
Aimless summer days in my grandparents’ backyard were interceded by a glance over the fence.
“I live across the street. Would you like to come over?” “Sure,” I said. I needed a distraction from the growing grief in my gut.
Amelia’s house faced my grandparents’ blue trimmed stucco home. When the weather was favorable, she spent her days in her garden pretending she was a beautiful sought-after socialite, the talk of Detroit. She tried to enlist me into her fantasy night life of sparkly affairs, but I was loyally committed to girlish remembrances of my loving father.
Amelia enjoyed my company because I was her wing girl in attendance at her social amusements. She longed for society, silk dresses, and chauffeurs. She was filled with womanly fantasies of glamourous society life and attentive bachelors. I was seeking a fanciful distraction from confused thoughts and a torn heart that had lost Billy Lee.
Her mom allowed Amelia access to her refrigerator and beverage pitchers. We mixed frozen lemonade with icy water and created our cocktails. Once the liquid was prepared, we set the pitcher and tumblers on the family picnic table. Next to the table was an area of bare soil near the garden hose. On the adjacent grass we arranged short wooden planks as baking sheets.
My grandma’s somber meals were composed of mealy puddin’ sausage, and heavily salted boiled potatoes, with occasional canned string beans. Sam and I lamented the savory hot dog and macaroni and cheese dinners that my mother cooked back home. Here she was busy working and could not take time to cook, so Sam and I suffered in silence. My grandfather’s preferences ruled their home, and we knew complaints would have brought his ire upon us, so we kept the secret to ourselves.
Grandma’s bland menu matched the dullness and desolation in my abdomen and the dry loneliness in my chest. My mother [SC1] Martha had an efficient personality with a functional worldview, and my casual, imaginative, and free-spirited personality annoyed her. With our cocktail parties, I could soften the injury to my spirit by imagining dad’s love and comforting presence. There, I found a festive escape from the culinary dreariness of Bella’s carte du jour, Charlie’s somber home, and conflicts with mom.
We prepared our appetizers with water from the garden hose and the soil next to the picnic table. Mixing them with our hands in her mom’s old, red cooking pot, we crafted our dough. When the consistency was exactly right, we scooped up handfuls of mud and gingerly placed them on the wooden planks, patting them down into various shapes that complemented that day’s party theme. The midday sun was our oven.
Amelia preferred to eat her mud pies daintily with her polished fingers. She used her mother’s spatula and lifted the dried mud up from the boards. With soft background music, she sat at the table imagining her suitors, as her red lipstick carefully consumed the reconstituted dirt. She swallowed the cocktail and appetizers with a self-satisfied smile. I preferred to slowly sip my cocktail, eat my mud pie, finish my drink and then lie down in the grass. All of my enjoyment came from gazing at clouds dancing in the sky, while I heard and felt my racing heart pound as the dirt took hold within me. Then I felt Billy Lee calming me, and telling me, “I love you, DJ.”
I left my grandparents’ home soon after that summer friendship. It was time for me to begin kindergarten, and mom had found another husband to marry. Amelia’s creative game restrained my immediate devastation, and the mud spoke to my grief-stricken chest, keeping Billy Lee’s gentle memory alive. Yet, the mud never gave healing balm to my wounded abdomen, and once in our new home, with mom’s new husband and children, my curious animated relationship with foods began. In my desolated abdomen, an emotional tumor had taken hold, and it needed quantities of food to soothe its grief and spiritual barrenness.
Martha’s silent distance that isolated her from her children’s love confused and disoriented me until I grew into middle age. I lacked parenting; therefore, I needed food to comfort my emotions and calm my spirit. Now, with the help of Overeaters Anonymous, I am learning to love myself and live freely.
Dorothy P. began her journey with overeating before she began school at age five. She is a member of Overeaters Anonymous. Please send your 1st Person submissions to phoenix@thephoenixspirit.com.
