always the perfumed, lotioned, laundered scent of a womanâs sheets.
Her grip on my deltoids and biceps wasnât merely bracing as she ground into me, nor was it merely a caress. Rather, it was part massage, part claw, talons attached to my arms as if she could keep them. She said my name and I did what you do: I said hers back. And thatâs when she demanded, âCall me Daisy.â And I called her that until themoon showed me her bun of lemon hair shaking free and she began to tremble toward release. Soon sheâd switch jobs, switch gyms, and I wouldnât see her again, although Iâd remain intensely grateful for that single night she gave me, and for her leading me deeper into Fitzgerald than I might have otherwise gone.
Parma had convinced my father that he needed whatâs routinely called personal time, that his life couldnât be a conveyor belt of kids, work, chores. I can hear her say it still: âHowâs he ever gonna meet someone if he never goes out?â I was ten years old when she bought him a membership at a Jack LaLanne gym two towns away. For roughly four decades, from the early 1950s to the late 1980s, LaLanne was the preferred fitness czar for everyday Americans; his television program, The Jack LaLanne Show , which ran from 1953 to 1985, had a lot to do with that. But his gyms were of the sort that I and my set would, eight years later, regularly tease for their unembarrassed lack of masculine asperity and grit, their neutering sounds of Duran Duran and Phil Collins.
But a lack of asperity and grit was exactly what my father needed then. He was only in his early thirties, although, said Parma, âhe looks forty,â and so she paid for his gym membership with a motherâs gung-ho hope that it would both dilute his unhappiness and introduce him to a female. âHe needs a woman in that house. Itâs not natural for a man to cook and clean, and I canât help forever.â My family was big on declarations about what was and was not natural.
Iâd recently overheard Parma and my father talkingâadults often have an ignoramusâs inability to detect the antennae of children, when and how often those children can hear them, and how incredibly much those children care to comprehendâand my father said he was worried about bringing a woman into our house, worriedabout destabilizing us kids (my sister was eight, my brother six), worried about how threatened a new female might make us. If I felt guilty about this, I cannot now recall. It seems as if I should have felt at least a little guilty about the lonesome bachelorhood my psycho-emotional needs had helped to force upon our father.
Parma was capable of periodic gestures of hope, I know, but overall her disposition was unsinkably grim. That mood of hers, her dire sense of drama, set the tone in our family, and so there was habitual talk of how bad we three kids had it: âThose poor kids, without a mother, itâs so hard.â Thatâs the reason my father hadnât brought a woman home; he believed, with Parma, that we kids were contents under pressure, canisters of ineffable internal suffering.
My father worked out at Jack LaLanne on weeknights while my siblings and I were at my grandparentsâ eating supper and scratching through homework. Not long after his gym life began, there was indeed a swelling of chatter about a woman. This appeared supernatural, if for no other reason than Parma, consistently wrong about human living, was right about Jack LaLanne.
Whatever reservations my father had about bringing a woman into our house had been dashed, because this woman, Kim, was about to spend the nightâon the sofa, but still, she was spending the night, because she lived an hour away. Our father and Kim had a date, my siblings and I had a babysitter, and because our father was sawing lumber until noon the following day, we were given warning and we were given
Her grip on my deltoids and biceps wasnât merely bracing as she ground into me, nor was it merely a caress. Rather, it was part massage, part claw, talons attached to my arms as if she could keep them. She said my name and I did what you do: I said hers back. And thatâs when she demanded, âCall me Daisy.â And I called her that until themoon showed me her bun of lemon hair shaking free and she began to tremble toward release. Soon sheâd switch jobs, switch gyms, and I wouldnât see her again, although Iâd remain intensely grateful for that single night she gave me, and for her leading me deeper into Fitzgerald than I might have otherwise gone.
Parma had convinced my father that he needed whatâs routinely called personal time, that his life couldnât be a conveyor belt of kids, work, chores. I can hear her say it still: âHowâs he ever gonna meet someone if he never goes out?â I was ten years old when she bought him a membership at a Jack LaLanne gym two towns away. For roughly four decades, from the early 1950s to the late 1980s, LaLanne was the preferred fitness czar for everyday Americans; his television program, The Jack LaLanne Show , which ran from 1953 to 1985, had a lot to do with that. But his gyms were of the sort that I and my set would, eight years later, regularly tease for their unembarrassed lack of masculine asperity and grit, their neutering sounds of Duran Duran and Phil Collins.
But a lack of asperity and grit was exactly what my father needed then. He was only in his early thirties, although, said Parma, âhe looks forty,â and so she paid for his gym membership with a motherâs gung-ho hope that it would both dilute his unhappiness and introduce him to a female. âHe needs a woman in that house. Itâs not natural for a man to cook and clean, and I canât help forever.â My family was big on declarations about what was and was not natural.
Iâd recently overheard Parma and my father talkingâadults often have an ignoramusâs inability to detect the antennae of children, when and how often those children can hear them, and how incredibly much those children care to comprehendâand my father said he was worried about bringing a woman into our house, worriedabout destabilizing us kids (my sister was eight, my brother six), worried about how threatened a new female might make us. If I felt guilty about this, I cannot now recall. It seems as if I should have felt at least a little guilty about the lonesome bachelorhood my psycho-emotional needs had helped to force upon our father.
Parma was capable of periodic gestures of hope, I know, but overall her disposition was unsinkably grim. That mood of hers, her dire sense of drama, set the tone in our family, and so there was habitual talk of how bad we three kids had it: âThose poor kids, without a mother, itâs so hard.â Thatâs the reason my father hadnât brought a woman home; he believed, with Parma, that we kids were contents under pressure, canisters of ineffable internal suffering.
My father worked out at Jack LaLanne on weeknights while my siblings and I were at my grandparentsâ eating supper and scratching through homework. Not long after his gym life began, there was indeed a swelling of chatter about a woman. This appeared supernatural, if for no other reason than Parma, consistently wrong about human living, was right about Jack LaLanne.
Whatever reservations my father had about bringing a woman into our house had been dashed, because this woman, Kim, was about to spend the nightâon the sofa, but still, she was spending the night, because she lived an hour away. Our father and Kim had a date, my siblings and I had a babysitter, and because our father was sawing lumber until noon the following day, we were given warning and we were given
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