for the day, with instructions that we’re not to come back until suppertime. I have a Bobby Sherman poster secretly taped inside my bedroom closet. Publicly I’ve sworn to my sisters to having no interest in boys. My life will be devoted to horses. Karma fervently agrees.
A long, fenced bridle path encircles both subdivisions and kids can gallop their ponies and horses around and around. No bikes, no dirt bikes, no motorcycles. A new boy moves into Meadowgate, a boy my age with dark hair and brown eyes, named Randy Sullivan. He’s tall, with a quick smile, and he rides a palomino mare. At our kitchen window I hide behind the curtain and watch him gallop past on the bridle path, which goes right behind our house.
Our house is filled with endless places to hide: behind the back patio, in the walk-in closet in the master bedroom, under the basement stairs. Hide-and-seek takes on a new dimension. But the house can be terrifying as well. On top of a hill with no trees to protect it, it’s a perfect target for the winds that sweep across Rocky Flats, which hit with the force of an eighteen-wheeler. The windows rattle and buzz and we have to shout to hear one another in the bearskin room. When the chinooks hit, inexplicably hot and fierce, everyone feels on edge. My parents complain that the windows aren’t sturdy enough to withstand the weather. The developer, Rex Haag, stands firm: the windows are up to code.
My mother has no qualms about setting aside her nursing degree to look after her own brood, which, she is happy to tell anyone, is more stressful than any job. She finds solace in paperback novels with lurid covers that she hides under her bed and beneath the sofa. “These books are strictly off-limits,” she says. “Don’t let me catch any of you girls reading these books.” Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins, Victoria Holt, Mario Puzo—her admonition is better than a library card. I read them all and slip them back into place without bending a page or breaking a spine.
Very few women in the neighborhood have outside jobs. Once a week they meet for coffee, first at one house, then another, ten o’clock sharp after the beds are made and breakfast dishes done. Sometimes I get to sit in when the wives come to our house. My mother pours me milk with a drop of coffee. When I’m grown up, she explains, I’ll drink my coffeeblack like she and my father do, like all good Scandinavians. “I don’t miss having a job,” she says. “It’s impossible with kids. Who would take care of them?” Day-care centers haven’t been invented yet and the only babysitters around are the fourteen-year-old daughters of her friends, good for one evening a week at best. “They just sit on the phone and empty the refrigerator anyway,” she says. She often tells the story of how, when she was pregnant with me and again with my sisters, she wore a tight girdle under her nursing uniform to hide her expanding figure. “You get fired if they know you’re pregnant,” she says. “I hid it right up to the end.”
It’s generally agreed that for women there are very few jobs worth having. Although, truth be told, the wives agree, a husband can be a lot of trouble. The only divorced woman in the neighborhood, a good friend of my mother’s, comes over by herself on a different day. Everyone whispers about her.
Some of the husbands work at the plant out at Rocky Flats. “I don’t know what he does, exactly,” one wife says. “He’s an engineer. It’s too complicated to explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain,” another wife snorts. “It’s Dow Chemical. They make bathroom products. What’s the glory in that?” The women sit at my mother’s kitchen table, smoking and sipping coffee, until someone says she better get busy with her laundry before the kids get home or her grocery list is long enough for the Russian army, and the group disbands until the following week.
But my mother has social aspirations beyond the
A long, fenced bridle path encircles both subdivisions and kids can gallop their ponies and horses around and around. No bikes, no dirt bikes, no motorcycles. A new boy moves into Meadowgate, a boy my age with dark hair and brown eyes, named Randy Sullivan. He’s tall, with a quick smile, and he rides a palomino mare. At our kitchen window I hide behind the curtain and watch him gallop past on the bridle path, which goes right behind our house.
Our house is filled with endless places to hide: behind the back patio, in the walk-in closet in the master bedroom, under the basement stairs. Hide-and-seek takes on a new dimension. But the house can be terrifying as well. On top of a hill with no trees to protect it, it’s a perfect target for the winds that sweep across Rocky Flats, which hit with the force of an eighteen-wheeler. The windows rattle and buzz and we have to shout to hear one another in the bearskin room. When the chinooks hit, inexplicably hot and fierce, everyone feels on edge. My parents complain that the windows aren’t sturdy enough to withstand the weather. The developer, Rex Haag, stands firm: the windows are up to code.
My mother has no qualms about setting aside her nursing degree to look after her own brood, which, she is happy to tell anyone, is more stressful than any job. She finds solace in paperback novels with lurid covers that she hides under her bed and beneath the sofa. “These books are strictly off-limits,” she says. “Don’t let me catch any of you girls reading these books.” Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins, Victoria Holt, Mario Puzo—her admonition is better than a library card. I read them all and slip them back into place without bending a page or breaking a spine.
Very few women in the neighborhood have outside jobs. Once a week they meet for coffee, first at one house, then another, ten o’clock sharp after the beds are made and breakfast dishes done. Sometimes I get to sit in when the wives come to our house. My mother pours me milk with a drop of coffee. When I’m grown up, she explains, I’ll drink my coffeeblack like she and my father do, like all good Scandinavians. “I don’t miss having a job,” she says. “It’s impossible with kids. Who would take care of them?” Day-care centers haven’t been invented yet and the only babysitters around are the fourteen-year-old daughters of her friends, good for one evening a week at best. “They just sit on the phone and empty the refrigerator anyway,” she says. She often tells the story of how, when she was pregnant with me and again with my sisters, she wore a tight girdle under her nursing uniform to hide her expanding figure. “You get fired if they know you’re pregnant,” she says. “I hid it right up to the end.”
It’s generally agreed that for women there are very few jobs worth having. Although, truth be told, the wives agree, a husband can be a lot of trouble. The only divorced woman in the neighborhood, a good friend of my mother’s, comes over by herself on a different day. Everyone whispers about her.
Some of the husbands work at the plant out at Rocky Flats. “I don’t know what he does, exactly,” one wife says. “He’s an engineer. It’s too complicated to explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain,” another wife snorts. “It’s Dow Chemical. They make bathroom products. What’s the glory in that?” The women sit at my mother’s kitchen table, smoking and sipping coffee, until someone says she better get busy with her laundry before the kids get home or her grocery list is long enough for the Russian army, and the group disbands until the following week.
But my mother has social aspirations beyond the
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