I Dwell in Possibility. Toni McNaron

perfect in school subjects. Nights often found me sitting on the cedar chest across from his favorite easy chair. We were there to go over my history or geography lesson, and Daddy defined that activity as follows: he would announce a topic heading; I would recite, word for word, the material underneath. If I missed even a preposition or conjunction, I had to do it over. Similarly, when I brought home tests graded 97 or 98, his only response was, “Well, why didn’t you get 100?”

      Of course I adored him, as my first memory of him shows: It is early Christmas morning, and I am nine months old. Warm in my flannel sack, I come out of sleep to see my father leaning over my baby bed. His face smiles, his eyes twinkle; his prematurely gray hair is cut unusually crew for the holiday. He calls to me: “Wake up, Jay Bird Blue, it’s Christmas.”

      Daddy had another special name for me—Son—that he used in private for the first six years of my life. In the South, a saying went, “If you can kiss your elbow, you’ll turn into a boy.” One summer when I wanted desperately to be Daddy’s son and was old enough to realize that I was only a daughter, I would sit in my back yard, alone, in my seersucker playsuit, contorting my arms, trying to get a lip over to an elbow. Once I even asked a girl friend to bend my arm further than I could. That night I lay awake in my canopied bed aching from my trial.

      Failing the elbow trick, I tried other devices to pass. I asked for and got boys’ toys: a jungle gym, chemistry sets, Lincoln logs, tinker toys, baseballs and gloves and bats, and all manner of guns during World War II. I wore cowboy shirts with my school skirts; I learned to run fast, to play hard ball, to shoot marbles, and to throw a pocketknife so that it landed blade in ground.

      When Daddy stopped calling me Son, my attempts to be one merely became more subtle. To avoid being a “dizzy blond,” I learned all I could as fast as I could. Because Daddy once showed me pictures of the Axis army’s territories and chuckled when I tried to say the French or German names, I studied history with a passion. Because I heard him humming the tune to “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” I read cowboy books until I could spout the lingo like a native. Because my father once said he admired Alan Ladd in Whispering Smith, I wore two six-shooters and leather chaps even in the hottest summer weather. When I saw neighbor boys working in the yard or on the family car so their dads could read the Sunday funnies, I pretended to like mowing the grass and washing our old Plymouth. When I began menstruating, I denied my pain so I wouldn’t be like “those silly girls” who stayed home from school the first day, lying under heating pads or hot water bottles. I carried books for boys I had crushes on in junior and senior high school, not even aware of how confused I was about my gender identity. Embarrassed in adolescence not to be able to shave my face, I took a razor to my underarms every morning, causing rashes that stung most of the day.

      As I was growing up, I longed to hear my father call me Jay Bird Blue or some other term of endearment. But he stopped calling me pet names or any names as he and I got older. Something about me was causing my idol to fade from sight. Rare moments, to which I have attached tremendous importance, stand out. When I was four or so, he occasionally let me crawl up into his lap after supper and listen while he read me the daily funnies: “Major Hoople’s Boarding House,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Hazel,” “Dagwood and Blondie”—domestic strips in which well-meaning men were henpecked by imposing women.

      In about 1943, I decided that my father bore some physical resemblance to Adolf Hitler—he too wore a small mustache in the center of his upper lip and had dark eyebrows. I would beg him to let me wet comb his crew cut over to the right. With his hair plastered down, the image was remarkably like the Führer’s. When he indulged me in this fantasy, I imagined him powerful and assertive, full of words and passion.

      Wanting desperately to spend time with him away from home, I asked to go fishing from the time I was about seven. Though he often promised—“The very next trip, you can go, but not just now”—I never got to go on one of these magical adventures. He preferred the company of his friend Mr. Kelton, a huge beefy man over six feet tall, whom my mother disliked intensely. On lucky Saturday afternoons, Daddy offered to take me for a treat, when he was not off fishing. What we actually did was go over to Mr. Kelton’s house, and he and Daddy talked, while I played relatively unsupervised in a back yard, fenced in for Mr. Kelton’s hound dog.

      Once when I was ten, Daddy took me to a professional baseball game at night under huge flood lights that attracted thousands of southern summer bugs. Birmingham had two baseball teams—the Barons and the Black Barons. The Barons were a farm team for the Boston Red Sox, while the Black Barons trained the earliest blacks who broke into major league baseball. Spectators for each team were absolutely segregated. Sitting in the bleachers with my father, I felt excited to be there. I ate a hot dog and drank Coca-Cola in a paper cup with Walt Dropo’s picture on it. Walt was my hero since he, like I, was a left-handed first baseman. Near the end of play, Daddy bought me an ice cream sandwich. But he was annoyed by my questions: “Why do they fall onto the ground near home plate?” “Can we move down in to those seats where nobody’s sitting and we could see more?” “Why is that man with the red face yelling at the umpire?” “Wasn’t that a strike, not a ball?” “Why can’t I have a Popsicle?” He never took me to another ball game.

      With his sudden death in 1954 when I was almost seventeen, my father became even more a mystery to me than his shadowy presence had caused him to seem. From that time until I entered therapy twenty-five years later, I made up stories about him and what he would think about his daughter/“Son” as I matured.

      Early memories of my mother are much more troubled. I see her face, moon-round, smiling but often slightly strained, coming closer than was comfortable for me. “Don’t cross the street, honey, you’ll get hurt.” Hearing her say this, I feel instantly defiant and angry. Within half an hour, I’ve gone outside, toddled over to the curbing, looked across the road at nothing of interest, and crossed that street. No hurt comes to me, so I feel tricked.

      Mamie seemed full of “don’ts,” sentences telling me what not to do in order to avoid danger: “Don’t go barefoot outside, you’ll get impetigo.” “Don’t go swimming in public, you’ll get polio.” “Don’t run and play, you’ll get over exertion exhaustion.” “Don’t get your nice starched white pinafore wrinkled.” “Don’t go out of your yard, the stray dogs will get you.” “Don’t lie in the dirt, you’ll get eaten by ants.” “Don’t play pitch, you’ll hurt your fingers for piano practice.” “Don’t perspire, it’s not nice.” “Don’t spit out your watermelon seeds, it’s common.” “Don’t ever eat ice cream and watermelon on the same day or you’ll die like Mrs. Munson did last Fourth of July.” I explored all these warnings and found only one true—when I played pitch frantically with a hard ball, I did sprain fingers, making piano playing virtually impossible.

      My mother was acting out of her best sense of what was necessary for me to become only a slightly modernized version of the southern belle she had been. Two images of me clearly illustrate her hopes: All through childhood, I wore my golden blond hair waist long. Wanting me to look like someone in Gone with the Wind, my mother rolled hunks of my thick hair on worn-out boys’ socks that she scavenged from neighbors with growing sons. Trying to sleep on eight or ten wads of hair was an ordeal, and I felt only relief when my locks were finally shorn as I entered junior high. All through childhood, I also wore a starched white pinafore each morning over my dotted swiss or polka dot piqué dresses. Mamie would get me ready for a morning presumably of play, put her hands lovingly on my shoulders, look me hard in the eyes, and say: “Now, go outside and have a good time, honey, but remember not to get your little pinafore wrinkled or dirty, in case we have company this afternoon.”

      My way of coping with so many don’ts was to lie, not merely to avoid trouble but as a way of life. Most of the time I wasn’t found out, but fear haunted me. When I was caught, it was shameful and full of pain for us both. One summer between college terms, I insisted, when Mamie asked if I was bored with spending so much time with her, that I liked playing two-handed solitaire every afternoon and sitting in front of the TV trying to think of something other than the programs or her occasional contented snoring. I wrote my true feelings to my roommate and buried her answering letter in my underwear drawer. My mother periodically inspected