Photo of Gertrude Stein from Ovation TV.

I was possibly the only seven year old in the world whose mother read Gertrude Stein out loud to her. At the kitchen table Mom would puzzle through the books she checked out of the Wilmington Public Library, boring her reluctant audience of one. It became a joke between us, the dazed child resting her head on the table, lulled into submission by the tediousness of Gertrude Stein. “A cheeseburger is a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger,” I would tease Mom, and we’d laugh.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when she picked an Edgar Allen Poe story as a Halloween treat for two nine-year-olds. We were living in Newark, Delaware, in a one-bedroom, student family housing apartment. My friend MaryAnn was spending the night and we did the rounds of our complex. Many neighbors didn’t expect trick or treaters, and the ones that did weren’t passing out Hersey bars or KitKats. There were several international families living there and I remember getting strange candies, sweet wafers, little trinkets.

Most people didn’t even open their doors, like the hulking single guy who now lived in my friend Belinda’s old apartment (student family housing?). Belinda had lived there with her mother and younger sister and we had spent most of the previous summer together, organizing skits in the little playground and running around the adjacent field where the University of Delaware marching band held their practices. A long scar traced the length of Belinda’s chest, the mark of two surgeries to correct a congenital heart condition. She had another round of operations scheduled in a couple of years. Though Belinda didn’t seem particularly fragile, I wanted to protect her from harm. When she and her family moved to Michigan in late August, we were both bereft and worried about dealing with new schools on our own.

I wanted to go to her apartment, stare down the guy I blamed for her move, get a little restitution Halloween candy. MaryAnn and I walked up the stairs through the dreary light of humming florescents, up one flight to Belinda's place. The strings of my Cousin It costume kept getting under my feet as they brushed against each stair. The hulk's television was on, blaring some sports event. “Trick or treat!” I yelled, pounding on the hollow metal door. No response. MaryAnn looked at me skeptically through her Wonder Woman mask. “Let’s just go back to your place.”

Poster available from All Posters.

Maybe my mother decided to read “Murders in the Rue Morgue” to help us get over our candy haul doldrums. Perhaps she was hoping for a good, old-fashioned Halloween scare. The story, written in 1841, starts slowly (so slowly that she couldn’t have possibly started at the beginning. Even a nine-year-old raised on Gertrude Stein would have protested), but it sped up when she got to the crime scene. Two women have been brutally murdered. Here is the description of one of the corpses, courtesy of the Poe Museum:

"After a thorough investigation of every portion of the house, without farther discovery, the party made its way into a small paved yard in the rear of the building, where lay the corpse of the old lady, with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off. The body, as well as the head, was fearfully mutilated --the former so much so as scarcely to retain any semblance of humanity. "To this horrible mystery there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew."

We didn't get very far through the story before MaryAnn became hysterical. She was frightened. She wanted to go home. Finally, Mom called her parents and they picked up my friend half an hour later.

She never spent the night at my place again.

Tags: Gertude Stein, Halloween, Edgar Allen Poe, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Mom, storytelling, Delaware

Fall, 1978, Newark, Delaware: Desegregation of the Wilmington city schools! Teachers’ strikes! Afternoons spent at the Deadhead-run Malt Shoppe on Main Street! I read books and ate toasted onion bagels with butter, while I waited for my mother (emphatically not a Deadhead) to finish her shift at the Shoppe. It was a little slice of the sixties in the late seventies, but Delaware has always been a little slow on the uptake.


Elk River, Winter of 1977-78

The year before, my mother had decided to go back to college. In order to save money, she moved in with Jim, her future former husband, while I went to my grandparents’ house in Maryland. It was a year scented by cigarette smoke and coffee fumes. Mornings were my favorite time of day, sitting in the warm kitchen, a tray of food prepared for me by my grandmother, usually Eggo waffles dabbed with Parkay squeezable margarine and dripping with Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, cartoon-character shot glass of orange juice on the side. That winter the snow kept coming. It piled up and formed five-foot drifts in the driveway, places to dig out forts and make snowmen. Snuggling in my grandmother’s bed as we listened to the radio school closing announcements became an almost-regular ritual.

Mom scored a one-bedroom apartment in student family housing in the summer of ’78 and I moved back in with her. She took the couch in the living room while I slept on a full-size mattress on the floor in the bedroom, a wooden orange crate for a bedside table topped with a flowery ceramic lamp, a clock radio, and an “I Love You This Much” figurine -- a robed, potbellied man, arms outstretched – that she had given to me in first grade.

1978-79 was the first year of court-mandated school desegregation for the Wilmington city schools. We were bused 34 miles roundtrip from suburban Newark, a predominantly white, middle class community at the time, to an elementary school in the middle of the inner city. It was the fourth school I had attended since kindergarten.

The dark, institutional halls smelled of ancient gymnasium mats and cafeteria pizza. Because I didn’t like sandwiches, Mom would pack things like crackers and cheese or the occasional hard-boiled egg, cooked until it was sulfurous and the exterior of the yolk was green. I’d display the egg to my friends and toss in the trash can to a chorus of ewwwws.

After lunch, students were herded over crumbling asphalt to play outside on ancient metal jungle gyms and rusty swings. Murals with selected scenes of black history covered the exterior walls. At night the surrounding neighborhood leaked into the schoolyard; people left behind their bottle caps and broken glass, empty lighters and plastic bags. The atmosphere became more unwelcoming when I acquired the nickname “Kermit,” a name given after I came to school in a kelly green, polyester, three-piece suit (worn with white turtleneck!). Think Saturday Night Fever meets Annie Hall meets the Muppets, a well-meaning gift from my grandmother, who had become accustomed to choosing my clothes.

The teachers weren’t happy either and went on strike from mid-October through most of November. Much of that time is lost to me. My third grade teacher brought me back to Chesapeake City Elementary for a day or two; I read a lot of books from the small children’s section at the University of Delaware library, spent many hours staring at the ceiling of the Malt Shoppe. The ending of the strike coincides in my mind with reports of the Jonestown massacre, images of children lying on the ground beside their parents, as still and peaceful as if they were asleep.


April 1979

By early March, 1979, my grandmother was dead and Mom, Jim, and I had moved back to Maryland to watch over my grandfather.

Our grand experiment was over.

Tags: grandfather, Delaware, grandmother, Muppets, Kermit the frog, step-father, school, desegregation, Mom