But first, a story, prompted by a comment l-empress left:I worked with a woman some years ago who had a wonderful and sometimes odd sense of humor. She and her husband were both teachers in my school system, their children grown. Her husband was an average sort of guy, mostly bald, a big bushy mustache, glasses, and something of a hooked nose.
One evening, the wife sat herself down to watch TV and waited for him to join her. She had put on one of those fake Groucho noses with the glasses and the mustache, and of course, the big nose. Her husband came in and sat on the couch and started watching TV. She was quietly reading, but after a few minutes, turned to him and said "You know I guess it's true what they say: after a couple has been married for a long time, they start to look alike."
He, I believe, turned and looked at her for a minute or two, and then said nothing and went back to watching the TV, muttering something about her probably being right.
Damn, they're two funny folk.
It was actually a comment that LA left that brought back the memories that are today's entry. She said something about always liking the gap in her teeth, and I answered her that I had pretty much been taught from birth that mine was a defect that must someday be corrected. Which led me to Doris.
When I was two, we moved from the Bronx to a garden apartment in suburban New Jersey. I don't know if garden apartments, as such, exist outside the Garden State, but they are sprawling apartment complexes, only two stories high, spread out with expanses of green front lawn and ample parking. The older complexes, like the one I lived in, also had big common backyards; in my case, there were about 20 apartments that opened onto and shared the same backyard. Everyone's front door opened onto a landing and a flight of stairs, and two apartments shared this little entryway: the downstairs and the upstairs. We lived upstairs. When I was about four, a new family moved into the apartment just below us; they shared our front door and hallway. There was Doris, the mom, her husband, an accountant, and their little girl, two and a half years younger than I.
Doris must have been in her late twenties then, and was from the get-go a high-energy person. That's the best way to describe her. She's not a highly stressed person, although she tends to cause stress in others. She's very bright and energetic and a lot of fun. There was always a Mary Tyler Moorish quality about her, even in her looks. She and my mother became best friends, especially when Doris had a difficult pregnancy a few years later and my mother did everything she could to help. They bonded.
Doris was always, and is still, a person of extremely strong opinions and no hesitation about telling other people what's best for them and what to do. But there's no malice in her whatsoever, and it tends to have the effect of convincing people, rather than bossing them around. She knows what's right and she lets you know that that's what you'd better do!
Her childhood is a story -- keep reading -- but the thing that impacted me mostly was that Doris had had a gap in her front teeth as a child and was always mortified by it. But she had been very poor, and had no recourse until she was an adult and got a retainer, which over time brought her front teeth together. I'm guessing that she still wears it nightly, and she's almost 80. When she's fixed on the right course of action, she does not waver.
She must have immediately made it clear to my mother that to allow me to grow to adulthood with a gap in my teeth would surely ruin my life. My mother was convinced. Doris' little girl had the gap, too, and together, our moms researched the best way to resolve this disfigurement for both of us, because surely, that's how we were made to see it. When I was 12 and my little buddy was 10, we each had oral surgery -- a phrenectomy -- that removed the tiny muscle that runs from under your upper lip and back over your gums, but which in our cases was too low and kept our teeth from meeting together in the front. By the end of the year, the teeth had grown together and over time, I've pretty much forgotten that I ever had the gap. When K had it in her baby teeth, I don't think I ever gave it a thought; I just figured she'd grow out of it, or not, and she did.
The gap, or at least, the attention drawn to it, made me very self-conscious, and contributed to my growing shyness. I learned to smile and laugh without showing my teeth at all, because that way, no one would see it. I was badgered every year by the school photographers to SMILE, and I would answer with clenched lips "I AM smiling," because I knew that if I showed a tooth, they would snap, and I would end up with a picture that I would refuse to let my mother show to anyone.
Within the next few years, Doris also became an expert on the raising of teenagers; of course, she was years away from having one. But she knew exactly what my mother should do when it came to my sister. "I would never let a teenager have her own phone!" "Sixteen is too young to have a boyfriend!" Now clearly, my mother bore some responsibility here for listening to her, but my sister's grudge against Doris has never quite gone away. Doris' own daughter, as you might imagine, got her own phone at 13 when all her friends did, and dated high school boys at 14. By then Doris had learned better, but it was too late for the Sibs.
Her daughter tells me she has not really changed with time. But her daughter listens, yesses her, and does what she wants. Doris' son, unfortunately, married a woman who tells him when to breathe in and out, and you can't really have room in one life for two women like that, and so he and his mother argue a lot.
Here's her backstory, which I think says an awful lot about her: she was born in the late twenties, so her earliest memories are Depression era. She had a meek, yet sweet mother, who was totally controlled by the three older sisters who had come to America with her. She had a magical, charismatic father around whom her world revolved. By the time she was eight, she had a younger sister, and her mother was pregnant with #3. One day, little Doris went off to school, and when she came home at the end of the day, her world had changed forever. That morning, her father had had an emergency appendectomy and died on the operating table. Her mother was beyond distraught, and her mother's sisters took matters into their own hands, in the extreme. Before three o'clock, they had the pregnant widow and her pre-schooler on a ship out of New York harbor, bound for England, where their own mother lived. Doris came home from school to find that her father was dead, her mother and sister were gone, and her home had vanished; from now on, she would live with one aunt or another until Mother came home. Which she did, after the baby was born.
Is it any wonder that this person developed the need to control ANYTHING she possibly could? Her mother, who worked and supported her family alone once she got back, was super-sweet (I called her Grandma as a child) but not firm or strong, and Doris ran the household and made all the decisions, probably since she was 8 or 9. In time, all the aunts kow-towed to her, too. She went from having no control over her life whatsoever to having total control over everyone.
She's quite a person, in many ways admirable. She couldn't afford to go to college, but always wanted to, so she went after 40, and then got a scholarship to graduate school. For about 20 years, until she retired, she did social services work with the elderly. She was an honor student, always, because boy, was she ever motivated.
So that's the character study for today, about a character who had a whole lot of impact on my life. For good or for bad.
