A Lotus Grows in the Mud Page 6

  Running past them all, ignoring their stares, I turn onto my dead-end street. I run up the steps to my front porch. Nixi is surprised to see me and jumps up, wagging his tail and smiling, so happy I am home.

  My next-door neighbor, Mr. Morningstar, is in his bathroom, as usual, looking out. “Goldie Jeanne ate a bean and now she’s lean…” he begins to say to me, as if nothing is wrong. How can he not know that a bomb is going to drop on us any minute? He is a friend of ex-president Truman’s. Maybe he can call him and stop this from happening?

  I burst through the front door, which is never locked, and barrel into the empty hallway. Running right to the telephone, I call Mom at work. My hands are shaking so much I can barely rotate the dial.

  “Mommy? You have to come home right now.”

  “What’s the matter? Goldie? You’re home? Why are you home?”

  “Because we’re all going to die.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “We’re all going to die, Mommy, because of the bomb. I’m so scared.”

  “What in the world are you talking about, Goldie?” my mother asks insistently.

  “I saw a movie at school, and they said we’re gonna die from an enemy attack. I ran straight home, Mommy, because I have to see you. Please come home.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake! Okay, just let me lock up the store and call a cab.”

  Throwing my arms around Nixi’s neck, I push my face into his black-and-white fur, feeling his chest rise and fall.

  Running to the window, I climb on top of the radiator cover, waiting and waiting for the yellow taxi to pull into our driveway. It seems like an eternity. Suddenly, it appears from around the corner, and I am flooded with relief. I watch my mom step out, pay the driver and walk with quick little steps toward the house. She’ll have the answers. She’ll know what to say to make me feel okay. I run to the door, throw it open, hug her and begin to cry. “Mommy” is all I can manage.

  She takes me inside, my arms tight around her waist, sits me in her lap on the sofa and waits for my tears to subside. In between hiccups, which I always get when I cry too hard, I start to tell her about the film. Bit by bit, I gather momentum.

  “There were babies screaming and mothers crying, and dead dogs and cows. There was light busting out of windows, and all the buildings were ruined. Then there was this man, this man who said…” I try to catch my breath. “There was this man that said we were all going to die, and our skin would be burned away unless we used soap, and…and, Mommy, I don’t understand.” Sobbing, I hug her tighter. “Is Russia really going to bomb us?”

  In my mother’s inimitable fashion, she shakes her head. “All right now, Goldie Jeanne,” she tells me, setting me down on the couch beside her, “we’re going to straighten up and fly right here.” She gets up and walks over to the bookcase and pulls out an atlas. Sitting down, she opens it on her lap. “Number one, this is Russia. And this is us,” she says, pointing to two separate sides of the page. “We are miles and miles apart. If one person presses a button in Russia, it’s going to take a long, long time for a bomb to get here. Number two, our bombs are bigger and faster than theirs, and they know that. Do you think the Russians want to be bombed any more than we do?”

  I feel such relief. My breathing calms as Mom wipes the tears from my eyes. “Really, Mommy? Really?” I want to believe that she is telling me the truth.

  “Yes, really. The fact that we have the same weapons, the fact that nobody wants to die—this is what’s protecting us and keeping us safe.”

  I sit on the couch thinking about what she said, staring at the map. I hear Mom in the kitchen rattling around. I think she’s putting on a pot of tea. She always does that to make me feel better. Sweet tea with lemon. When I was sick, she used to sit by my bed and spoon-feed it to me. But I’m a big girl now, sadly. She can no longer spoon-feed me tea. Just as she can no longer keep me from the fear of dying.

  When the tea is brewed, I turn around and see my mother through the kitchen door. I watch her dial the telephone and demand to speak to the superintendent of schools.

  “Hello, this is Laura Hawn,” she says tersely. “My daughter Goldie is sitting here in our house in a terrible state because someone at her school was stupid enough to show her a film today about the A-bomb. I have had to come home from work to calm her down.”

  Her fury making the veins pulse in her neck, she asks, “What on earth do you hope to achieve by such propaganda? And what in the hell are they supposed to do about it? You are frightening the life out of them. I’d think twice before you show these films to other children!” Then she slams down the receiver.

  Despite my mom’s assurances, I continue to live in mortal fear of the atomic bomb. Every week in class, we have to perform a duck-and-cover exercise, flashing us back to that horrible experience in the Dungeon. I often skip school.

  As the Cold War gains momentum and the propaganda fills our TV screens, ominous-looking sirens are erected on street corners and on the rooftops of every school. I can’t even bear to look at them. And each time they begin to wail, I shift into a state of panic. For me, the sound of the siren is the sound of instant death and annihilation.

  Even the noise of the firehouse siren sets me off. If I could call the president and ask him if this is the end of the world, I would, but instead I dial the operator.

  “Excuse me, but are we having an enemy attack?”

  There is silence at the other end of the phone. “Er, no, dear, I don’t think so.”

  Afraid to be on my own, I climb the fence to the Fishers’ or to my girlfriend Jean Lynn’s house every night after school.

  One afternoon, arriving at Jean’s, I walk in and throw my schoolbooks on the table, and she rushes out of the kitchen with a wicked smile on her face.

  “Hey, look at this!” She grins and shows me an unopened jar of peanut butter. “Okay, who gets to go first?” she says as she unscrews the lid and reveals its shiny, swirly perfection. Satisfying our need to despoil it, we both stick our fingers in and mess it up badly, laughing so hard. Just as Jean goes to find another jar of peanut butter, or—better still—a jar of mayonnaise, the sirens go off.

  The jar slips from her fingers and smashes onto the tiled kitchen floor. Shards of glass and globules of peanut butter splatter everywhere. Panic buddies, Jean and I lock eyes, and she runs for the door to her basement.

  “Come on, Goldie!” she screams.

  We race down the stairs, our feet clattering on the wooden steps, into a dark room filled with old scooters and art projects and caked mud pies we made as small children. In the middle of the room stands a table, piled up with freshly washed clothes and ironing.

  “Here! Quick!” Jean cries, throwing me some of her mother’s freshly pressed clothes. “Put these on.”

  I do as I am told, and watch as Jean rips the oilcloth from the table with one swift motion, tumbling the clothes to the floor. “They told us at school that if we cover ourselves in oilcloth, it will protect us from the fallout.”

  We wrap ourselves furiously as she pulls it over the top of us and we clamber under the table. Lying there together, huddled in the duck-and-cover position, arms over our heads, we look at each other and cry big, fat tears.

  “We’re going to die! I don’t want to die!” we scream at each other, hyping each other into an hysterical state.

  “Where’s my Nixi? I don’t want him to die by himself.”

  I cry and cry for my dog. I cry for the life I fear I won’t have. I cry for the fact that I am never going to grow more than bumps on my chest. I cry over the double wedding Jean and I had planned in Takoma Park. I am so afraid of dying.

  Looking at Jean under my arms, I say, through my snot and tears, “I haven’t even been kissed yet!” Raising my face to heaven, I cry, “Please, God, let some boy kiss me before I die.”

  Just then, we hear an airplane fly low overhead, and we both fall quiet. Our eyes are as big as saucers; my fingers gri
p hers so tight that I can no longer feel them. “Oh my God! Oh my God! This is it!”

  I hang my head in prayer and wait for the end.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace,” I repeat over and over, reciting the lines that I have learned from going to church with Jean Lynn. I have no idea what they mean. Just speaking them comforts me. Unknowingly, I am reciting my first mantra.

  Without fear, we cannot evolve. It is a natural human emotion that protects us from harm or even death. It creates something called the “fight-or-flight response,” where people either fight or run away. But fear is also one of the most destructive emotions we have. It can quickly manifest into anger. And, as we all know, anger can be poisonous. You must approach your fears with as much truth and courage as you can.

  Fight-or-flight is very clearly embedded in us for survival, in the amygdala, a small area in the limbic center of the brain that becomes active only when people are emotionally aroused. It stems from the fight for survival; it keeps us from being annihilated. But fear can also override some of our other capabilities as humans, to live fully in a state of joy.

  I once met a man who was a hundred and ten years old and very wise. “What is joy?” I asked him.

  He smiled a toothless smile and replied simply, “It is the absence of fear.”

  I thought, My God, what would my world look like if I had no fear? When you look at that, you think of all the things you are afraid of in your life, and you suddenly realize that you spend so much time defending against them that you have no time to open up to fearlessness, to experience the greater potential of our gift—the wholeness of being human.

  When I think about the people who run our world, I cannot help but wonder how much their brains have evolved. Now that we no longer have to kill for food or have to fear being eaten by saber-toothed tigers, we are honor bound to use every aspect of our remarkable evolution. The new brain—the prefrontal cortex that scientists have only recently discovered—has the endless ability to experience a full emotional life, and it is the only brain in the animal kingdom that has the ability to witness itself.

  Unless we use that ability to look at ourselves, to rise above our situation and examine it from way up, we are going to get into trouble. In order to know that violence begets violence, that hatred is grown in the petri dish of fear, we must understand the ravages of anger and fear. Fear-based actions never end up well.

  People get angry because they feel out of control. They are lost, they feel powerless, and so they lash out. Paranoia and polarization set in. If we can eliminate the negative emotions attached to fear—not necessarily the fear itself—if we can cultivate compassion and understand the root of our fear, then the experience itself will not control us.

  Looking for answers to my own fear, I turned to God to try to find a sense of place, peace of mind and the nurturing of an inner life. I had such a sense of longing for a connection to the vastness. I used to look at the moon tangled in the trees outside my window and feel this incredible space and time in the universe.

  Each night before I went to sleep, I read aloud the Twenty-third Psalm from a Bible an aunt gave me. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” These words gave me immense solace, to know that there was a continuation of life, that death was nothing to fear.

  From the time of the Cold War, I actively sought a spiritual life. It was this that helped me modulate to the next level of my being. It was one of the greatest teachers I ever had. I developed an inner yearning and a deep need to be grounded in some sort of faith. That need has continued to shape my entire life.

  postcard

  My eyes are too big, my nose is too flat, my ears stick out, my mouth is too big and my face is too small. The only thing I really like about myself is my hair. My body is as thin as a clarinet, and my ankles are so skinny that I wear two pairs of bobby socks because I don’t want anybody to see how thin they are.

  “The trouble is,” I tell Nixi as I grimace into the bathroom mirror each night, “I just don’t look like the other girls.” Nixi licks my hand devotedly and thumps his tail on the floor to show me he doesn’t care.

  I can’t say what exactly separates me from the rest of my classmates, but I just feel different—out of step somehow. I sometimes wish I could blend better with the other girls, who form tight cliques and pride themselves on how they look.

  When I’m not practicing or rehearsing ballet, I go to the dances at the church every Friday night. Sneaking off to the bathroom, I stuff my double-A bra with lamb’s wool that I use to pad my toe shoes, to make my breasts look bigger.

  Every time a slow tune comes on, I wait around on the perimeter of the dance floor, hopeful that I might be asked, but when I realize I won’t I find my way to the bathroom to put on more pink frosted lipstick and lift my ponytail higher. Unfortunately, the only thing I can see is my ears sticking out. If only I had some chewing gum, I could paste them back to the side of my head.

  How can I stop looking so much like a ballerina? I groan inwardly as I grimace at my reflection.

  Forgetting my childish dreams to become Alicia Alonso as I struggle with thornier issues of teenage hormones, I try in vain to slouch like the other girls in school, who all seem to walk around in groups, giggling, whispering secrets I can only guess.

  At thirteen, I see my naturally ramrod-straight spine as one of the reasons for my exclusion from their cliques. It defines me as a dancer, the girl who can never come for tea or go out because her mother is always making her attend classes or rehearsals or theatrical productions.

  I also hate my name. From as far back as I can remember, everyone has teased me about it. “Goldie-locks,” they call across the playground. “Goldeeeeee-locks!”

  I come home in tears and tell my mother, “I’m going to change my name to Jeanne. Nobody can tease me for being Jeanne.”

  My mother looks at me sternly over a bubbling pot of matzo ball soup on the stove. “I called you Goldie after the woman who meant most to me in my life,” she reminds me. “I also gave you that name because I knew nobody would ever forget it. You mark my words, young lady, someday you’ll thank me for it.”

  Now I am at the seventh-grade dance, and everyone seems to have forgotten my name. Not one boy has asked me to be his partner despite my attempts to dazzle them with my solo improvisational dancing. I can’t understand it. I know I’m a good dancer. I’m just not the girl that anybody wants to be with.

  Hiding in the bathroom as usual, I feel ugly and unloved. I poke out my tongue at my reflection, and pout sullenly as it pokes back.

  Even David Fisher doesn’t need me anymore. His first set of teeth finally fell out and the new ones grew in, and he is now understood by everyone. My translation skills are now redundant, even at Gifford’s ice-cream parlor, where we go on weekends to eat Swiss chocolate sundaes with marshmallows.

  David’s brother, Jimmy, now seems to get the biggest kick out of me, by making me the butt of his practical jokes. Most recently, he made me stand on our street corner and call out repeatedly for an imaginary dog he told me was missing.

  “Peeeeeee-nis!” I yelled, just as I was told. “Peeeeeee-nis!”

  He laughed so hard the bubble he was blowing with bright pink gum burst all over my hair. My mother was furious, and she had to cut great chunks of it out.

  Anyway, I don’t need David and Jimmy Fisher. Not when I have such an aching crush on a dark-haired Jewish boy at school named Ronnie Morgan. He has big, soupy black eyes and a full mouth, and he is so cool. My heart pounds every time I see him.

  Mom has made me a beautiful green velvet skirt for the dance, full with crinoline, and a cream blouse. I know I’ll never have a better chance of snaring Ronnie Morgan than I do tonight. Sadly, he doesn’t even seem to know that I exist.

  Standing alone with the rest of the wallflowers at the end of the evening, watching and waiting, I pray that at least o
ne boy will ask me to dance. I want to grow up. I want boys to like me. I want to feel part of the crowd.

  I nearly die of embarrassment when one boy yells across the dance floor, “I know what you have in your bra, Goldie Hawn, and you should be ashamed of yourself!”

  “If I wasn’t such a nice girl,” I yell back, “I’d show you.”

  I am lying through my teeth. I can feel the sweat dripping from my armpits soaking my bra. I want to run and hide, but instead I laugh and twirl around, spinning my green velvet skirt, lifting the crinoline that in the privacy of my bedroom I secretly wear as a veil when I play at being a bride.

  I nearly die a second time when I see Ronnie Morgan walking in my direction. Oh no! Is he going to ask me to dance? I think.

  “Would you like a piece of cake, Goldie?” Ronnie asks, a glint in his eye.

  I hardly dare hope the glint is for me, that maybe this is the moment I’ve been yearning for alone in my room at night. “Yes, please, Ronnie,” I manage, flashing him my biggest smile. In my mind’s eye, I can see myself twirling around the dance floor with him, like Ginger Rogers with Fred Astaire, perfectly in step, my green skirt kicking out between his legs as we float on air.

  I watch him go over and cut me a piece of cake and carefully return with it resting on a napkin.

  “Thank you,” I say, and reach out both my hands. But before I can take the cake, he smashes it into my face, twisting it so that the cream and the jam squishes up my nose, into my eyes and mouth.

  The cake slides off my chin to the floor, smearing greasily all down the front of the pretty green skirt my mother labored over to make me look like a princess. I stand there, staring at him through icing-encrusted eyelashes, a lump of misery in my throat. I can feel the corners of my mouth turning down involuntarily; I can’t seem to control them.

  Ronnie, and the friends who put him up to it, all stand around laughing uproariously and pointing as I feel my skin begin to heat up.