The first back porch that I remember was a 10 x 10 concrete slab off the back of our house in Naperville, Illinois. It was tucked into the corner where the kitchen met the family room and looked out over the lawn and the cornfields beyond.
Our neighborhood did not have fences. Our yard stretched out to the yards beside ours, on and on. On summer evenings, parents would gather after dinner in one yard or another, bringing folding lawn chairs and coolers of beer, bottles of booze and tall glasses clinking with ice. There they would talk and laugh, drink and smoke while all the children ran through the grass, practicing cartwheels and summersaults, starting games of tag, and running in and out of the cornfield that bordered our backyards. During summer days , when our parents were not present , we would play in the cornfields , cutting down sections of the corn to make rooms and hallways using our mothers good knives and run screeching out of the field when we heard the farm equipment coming.
The one game we did not play outside was hide and seek. Where would you hide? There were few shrubs, and jumping down into the well outside a basement window meant you might land on a family of salamanders, and with bare feet, who wanted that?
While other children might have played hide and seek inside of their houses, we had a different game. Our’s was called Seek and Find. We would break off into 3 groups: The Lookout, usually me, as it was not unusual for me to be sprawled out on the floor, reading a book somewhere between the entry to the family room, and my mother , who would be planted on the couch, sipping on a gin and tonic and smoking a cigarette. I raised the least suspicion of any of my siblings when it came to keep an eye on her. Next were the Seekers. Their job was to scatter throughout the house looking for bottles of booze, wine and cans of beer. Last were the Destroyer’s. Their mission was to empty the bottles into the kitchen sink. But not all of it. Some you poured out half, others you emptied completely. You did not want to create the need for a run to the liquor store. The Seekers then returned the bottles to their original location, or the closest they could remember.
Both my parents drank. When my father was home, they had evening cocktails, followed by wine with dinner, usually followed by a “nightcap”. I’m not sure how many “nightcaps” were had, and they often toddled off to bed at a decent hour, but there was no drama about it. But when my father traveled for business, my mother got out of control.
Before one of those trips, my father was packing while I sat on his bed digging around the little elastic side pockets inside his Samsonite hard side luggage. I was hoping to find a packet of peanuts, or better yet, macadamias. I had to have been 7 years old, because my little sister Josi was still in a playpen, not able to walk yet and I remember it being summertime. As my father moved back and forth between the closet and the suitcase, He said to me” Now, you will take care of your Mother when I’m gone, right?” I froze. My interpretation of that question was” Now, you’ll be sure not let your mother drink too much, right?” “You will be sure that she doesn’t plow the car into the garage wall, again, right?” I scooted off the bed and left the room, refusing to acknowledge the question.
My father could only call home every few days, because back then long-distance calls were expensive, and his company only allowed so many. On about the third night of this trip, he called. It was summer and I remember the back door being open, the warm summer air drifting through the screen. My baby sister, Josi was in her playpen, sucking on a bottle, half sitting, half laying down on a blanket crumpled in the corner. She looked drowsy, her eyes blinking slowly, her body slowing tipping to one side like a drunk who wasn’t ready to call it a night. My brothers and sisters were nowhere to be found. As soon as the dinner dishes were done, they had run out of there. Escaping to friends’ houses, seeking refuge away from here.
I was keeping watch, my mother listing on the couch in a similar fashion to my sister. My mother was a petite woman, maybe five foot two, about one hundred pounds. She wore her hair in a tight bun and was usually dressed in capri pants and a turtleneck or an oversized woven shirt, a nod to Jackie Kennedy or Audrey Hepburn. While the neighbor ladies would try out new hairdos and bell-bottomed pants, my mother kept it classic. She had an air of superiority about her,making comments about” Those career housewives” as if she had somewhere else, she had to be. By the time our family moved to Illinois, it had become abundantly clear that she was a housewife, and the idea of living in a grand home in upstate New York, dining in Manhattan, and showing Afghan hounds had long drifted away.
What happened next holds one of the clearest memories stored in my head to this day. I can feel the warm air coming through the screen door, the black and tan pattern on the midcentury modern drapes. The smooth lines on the legs of the danish modern coffee table. The very second that the phone rang, I was on it. I grabbed the receiver off the hook and whispered” Hello”. I told my father that my mother had gone to a neighbor’s house, and when he asked, “Is she not just out back?” I slipped out the back door, looked around as if he could see me, and replied” Nope, not out here “, letting the door slam for effect. What I heard next was my mother shouting “IS THAT YOUR FATHER?”” KATHLEEN, IS THAT YOUR GODDAMN FATHER ON THE PHONE?” She struggled to lift herself from the couch, shifting her body forward, but keeping the cigarette in one hand and the drink in the other. Now she was muttering. “Goddamn son of a bitch …..leaves me here with these kids ….goes off to god knows where …….” At this point she was up, but instantly lurched forward. Have you ever been in a car wreck, and had the experience of time slowing down? Where everything moves in slow motion? That is how things appeared to me in that moment. Her mouth formed an O, her torso lurched forward, and her legs hit the table. The table toppled, sending a green pottery ashtray filled with cigarette butts flying into the air. They rose and fell in an array that looked like something in the movie Fantasia. My mother fell forward, across the table, never letting go of her cigarette or drink. The drink splashed up out of the glass, also in super slow motion, catching the light from the back door. She landed on her chest, hands held high in the air so as not to drop the drink, starting to yell again. I dropped the receiver and ran upstairs, knowing my dad was going to be so mad at me.
I woke the next day, curled up on a pile of clothes in my closet. I slept there in case my Mother decided to try to come find me. Why none of my brothers or sisters came looking for me, I don’t know. Maybe when they got home, they assumed I had spent the night with a friend. The next few days, I was a nervous wreck. I just knew when my father returned, he would be furious with me. Of course, nothing was ever said, and my mother would reign it in for a while, having my father home to keep her in check.
This would become just a chapter. There would be many episodes to come, many more instances of being on watch. I realized, only partially, that I was most likely not going to be held accountable for my mother’s behavior. I say partially, because the front part of my brain knew that I couldn’t be or shouldn’t be. But the back part of my brain maintained a constant buzz, always on alert, and planning for the worst.
The View from my Back Porch 