BUTTONS & BEAUS illustrates a mid-20th Century girl’s journey to 21st Century womanhood.
BUTTONS & BEAUS
A JOURNEY
Chapter One
Someday You’re Going to Grow Up
On a Sunday morning in 1954, Gillian Lord splashed in the wading pool of her grandparents’ backyard. That morning, Grandpa Erskine had taught her how to play baseball, and she had worked up a good sweat. He had bought her a tiny wooden bat that was no longer than the distance from her wrist to her elbow and no wider than her skinny, four year-old arm. It was the smallest bat she had ever seen, and he’d picked it out just for her and spent some time showing her how to hold it and swing.
“Now I’m going to pitch the ball, Gillie, and you hit it as far as you can and run! First base. Second base, if you can make it. Third base, if you can hit the ball really hard and run really fast. Home if you do very well. Now we have to decide where to put the bases.”
The yard was irregularly shaped, and there was no way to position the bases equidistant from each other. “We need to make a diamond,” said Grandpa. “That’s like a square, only viewed from a corner instead of an edge.” He took a piece of paper and then turned it slightly, to demonstrate the point.
“Let’s put home plate in front of the garage. That way we won’t have to worry about broken windows. Now black-eyed Gillie, do you think we should put first base by those black-eyed Susans under the elms?” asked Grandpa, “or would it be better by the bird bath?”
“By the bird bath,” I said decisively, feeling thrilled to have a say in it all. At my house the grown-ups always decided. They told me what to wear, and they pulled my hair tight into ponytails that hurt my head, and they made me wear saddle shoes that pinched my feet. Grandpa Erskine let me go barefoot in the summer and run with my long, dark hair free. I liked that. He also bought me candy bars and took me to parades with old soldiers from the War, usually about an hour after my father would instruct, “Now don’t take them to the parade, Dad. They might get lost in the crowd.” I could never get lost on Grandpa’s shoulders, but we both knew better than to argue with my father, because he could shout louder than anyone in the world.
“Fine, Martin, fine,” Grandpa Erskine would say, waving him away. “We’ll be just fine.” Last week we had seen a really spectacular parade with cannons and horses and brass bands. But this week, we were going to play baseball.
“Where should we put second base, Gillie?”
“By the pepper patch,” I said, running over to the vegetable garden. “And third base can be way over here,” and I scooted across the driveway to the neighbor’s yard where white sheets were drying on the line. Grandpa looked over at Jerry, his cigar-smoking neighbor, as if to ask permission, and Jerry laughed and walked across the drive and said, “If I get to be the Catcher, and you promise not to pull down Martha’s clean sheets,” he said, tossing me into the air.
I giggled. He remembered how I’d twirled and wrapped in Grandma’s sheets earlier in the summer, and I’d made a mess, it was true. But they had been just irresistible — great puffs of billowy, white, fresh-smelling cotton, begging for collision. In the morning, before the whole clothesline had come crashing down, I was Queen Elizabeth and “Here Comes the Bride” rolled into one — the most elegant creature on Central Avenue. That is, before the laundry lurched! I had wanted to tell them about the glory of that instant and the rush of clean cotton that had danced across my nose, but no one was listening as they scurried to save the laundry from the damp garden. “Peeee-lay ball!” shouted Jerry, calling me from my reverie, as he lit up a new cigar.
Everyone was surprised when I hit the ball on my first try. It didn’t go very far, but I’d cracked the bat smartly, and in it we’d heard the promise of surer swings to come. Grandpa said we should practice hitting for a while before I ran.
As the sun rose in the sky and I swung harder and farther, I grew better, but tired. I didn’t want to stop. Sweat dribbled all over my body, even after they’d taken off my blouse. “It’s going to be a scorcher,” said Jerry, “and the sun isn’t even at the top of the sky yet! Gillie, aren’t you ready for that nice, cool pool yet?”
“Not yet, not yet,” I begged. “Just a few more, Grandpa, please, Jerry!”
“That Gillie is going to wear some man out some day,” I heard Jerry tell Grandpa. “It’s going to be some fellow who’ll be able to keep up with her! Now can we go to the pool, Gillie? Please, Gillie,” he teased, pretending that I was actually the one in charge.
“Very well,” I said, because I had heard the phrase in a story at the Library the day before and thought it had sounded very grand. And I led them to the wading pool. I was all burning energy from the effort of learning a new thing, and even the water didn’t cool me off much. I liked to hold my breath for as long as I could, while I rolled on the bottom of the pool and pointed to the letters as Grandpa called out my ABCs, to see how many I knew. Then I would come swooshing up to the top and pierce the water’s surface.
“The little fish!” said Jerry.
“I’m not a fish. I’m a mammal,” I said proudly. It was a whale that had said “very well” in the story at the Library, and I wanted them to know that I knew the difference. Then I jumped out of the pool to join my little brother, Harry, who was playing on the swing set.
“The sun feels so good on my chest!” I called to Grandpa, as he pushed me faster and higher and the wind pulled my hair.
“Here, put on your blouse, Gillie,” said Grandpa, when Harry and I came back down to earth.
“What about Harry?” I said. Doesn’t he have to put on his shirt? Why he’s even younger than I am.”
“He’s a boy,” said Grandpa.
“So?” I pressed on, entirely unaware of his point, but sensing there was one.
“So a boy doesn’t have to wear a top and a girl does.”
“But I like it the way I am,” I protested.
“Very well, Miss Gillie,” he said calling up my new phrase of the day, “but in a few more years you will have to keep your shirt on.”
“And Harry won’t?”
“That’s right,” said Grandpa.
“But why?” I asked again.
“I told you, because you’re a girl,” he said absently, having already turned his attention toward the weeds in the vegetable patch.
I didn’t like his answer, because in it I sensed other things, things that I couldn’t know, but that I already knew I wouldn’t like.
A tear trickled down my cheek, but no one noticed because Joe DiMaggio had just made a home run on the radio, and Grandpa peered up from the carrots and green beans to cheer with Jerry.
“ . . . it’s the bottom of the eighth and as night falls over Yankee Stadium on this steamy July Thursday, things are all tied up between the Orioles and the . . . “
I wiped the tear away from my cheek, hoping that Gideon Breach hadn’t noticed it amid the damp, matted tangle of hair on his chest. Not that he was paying attention to the baseball game. Or even really to me. It’s just that I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry — especially in bed. He reached past me to turn off the radio.
Why was his answer to fighting to grab me and carry me off and throw me into bed? Why couldn’t he hold me and talk first? Why couldn’t we settle our differences rationally, and then make love irrationally? Why did he always insist on doing it the other way ’round? Horns honked and buses rumbled in the West Side traffic below. The air was thick, still, immobilizing.
What had we been fighting about? It took me a moment to remember. About fighting. This was what our year of intensity had come to, and I think we both knew it could not go on. Yet there was tender resignation in the way he stroked my head. “Everyone wants the same thing,” I said softly, “and there are always so many SNAFUs along the way!”
“Yes,” he said, pulling me closer. We lay there for a while, anger spent, but our sadness just beginning. Had we known how long it was to last, maybe each of us would have tried harder. Had we then been equipped to deal with each other, how much different our lives would have been. From his window, traffic on Columbus Circle churned noisily past, eight stories below. I knew I should be out in it, but he wasn’t ready to let me go, and so I stayed a little longer.
There was some thing stubborn in both of us that couldn’t let the awful evening end badly. “You always believed in me,” I said as I dressed. “I’ll always remember that you believed in me the only time I didn’t believe in myself,” referring to my “identity crisis” of the previous year, as we call our uncertain times in the early 1970s.
Gideon Breach beamed at me, intent on having the final say, as always. “I was right. I was right. I was right. I was right. I was right about everything!” This made me want to fall into his arms and try again. For the first time, I wanted to do it his way, but then he started to laugh at me, and the moment died. I was furious. How dare he laugh at me, just as I was about to . . . “It’s your buttons!” he exclaimed, laughing again.
I looked down. I had got them all twisted up and out-of-kilter and now had the disheveled look of an uncoordinated four year-old. He pulled me onto his lap and set to straightening them out. “Unbutton them, Gideon! Unbutton them all!” I wanted to shout, but my mouth froze, and I sat lifeless as a chastised child.
“There, you see. I really can behave myself when I put my mind to it!” he said gently. “You know, Gillie, someday you’re going to grow up, but I won’t be around.” Then he tucked down my collar and smoothed the wrinkles, lingering across my chest. “So many buttons for a July night, Gillie,” he said as he kissed me good-bye.
“So many buttons on your blouses, Gillie,” said Grandpa, referring to the ruffly blouses Mother insisted I wear, even in summer. My small fingers could never push them properly through the holes, and sometimes they would tear. Grandpa’s arthritis made it harder for him to do much better. And so this procedure, which neither of us liked, was always put off for last — after Grandma had braided my hair ’til my head hurt, and laced my shoes ’til my feet pinched. “I hear Martin’s car coming up the drive,” Grandpa would say — and only then, would Grandpa and I turn to our final task.
And invariably, I would say, “Buttons are a lot of bother, aren’t they Grandpa?”
TO BE CONTINUED . . .