A girl seeking connection when growing up in the ‘70s.

A visit to my uncle and aunt’s home meant adventure, although they lived only ten highway miles from my family. The trip did not require an ocean crossing, the conquering of wild forests or scaling a mountain peak. However, at my tender ten years, their home was so dissimilar to mine it was akin to visiting a foreign country. Even the language was distinct. They cursed. They slept in on Sundays. They read science fiction, played chess, and did the Times crossword. It was magical.

In my home, where I was the oldest, my parents focused on child-rearing their young family. They did not have the energy for a Times crossword. Work and school, homework and scout meetings, diapers and cleaning, playing board games, and mowing the lawn marked days in my home. I am sure my parents would have liked to do the Times crossword. Or read a book, uninterrupted. But life follows a pattern and my family was poised at the starting line of that long race.

At my aunt and uncle’s home, the cousins, high school and college-aged, attended proms and drove while my youngest brother was just being weaned from formula. My uncle was always invested in some state-of-the-art or experimental project. At one point, he raised bait worms in wooden bins my father fashioned and installed. I am clueless as to the outcome or profitability of the worm investment. Like other ventures, the bins and the resident worms were there one weekend and disappeared the next.

I knew my uncle was a c-level exec, owned a placement agency for a time, and eventually launched a recycling company. He died long before I had the guts or opportunity to get to know him. With what my aunt occupied herself is as ongoing a mystery as the worm finale. My aunt was beautiful, always impeccably dressed, with her hair and nails just so. She tolerated me and could never understand me. Each birthday she would gift me a shirt two sizes too small, which I would never wear. I suppose she thought she could inspire me to lose weight. At each visit, I spent little of my time in her presence, unable to bridge and suffering her distance.

In my Italian family, the girls primped and dated, worried about dancing and fitting into small shirts. After meals, the men would retire to another room to discuss important things, whatever that meant, and the woman would do the dishes and prepare dessert. This practice applied even to those of us relegated to the kids’ table, although the woman would encourage even the male children to remain in the kitchen. This was the way it was. Women and children relegated to dish soap and saran wrap. Unwelcome with the men, and unsatisfied with the women, I, burdened with my mind, stood alone in the chattering crowd.

I cared little for learning to boil pasta and season sauce. I couldn’t care less about trash-talking the neighbor who had gotten fat after her pregnancy, the new soap opera plot, or exchanging compliments for each other’s dresses and shoes. And I found no peace in the expectations pressed upon me, no matter my pretense. I wanted to be with the men. I would lean around doorframes and crave to join the economic and political conversations, heated debates, and long-winded philosophizing. Even the arguments about football or baseball would excite me. Yet my aunt, my mother, or my grandmother would haul me back to the kitchen, extinguishing my lit mind and insisting I was lazy and needed to do my part. The punctuation: Those men are discussing nonsense. Come, set the plates on the table for the cake.

My two female cousins, four and eight years my senior, provided my sole guidance on how to fit in. As a girl without older female siblings to mirror, those two young women were my intended schoolhouse. Beautiful and popular, they fit into tiny shirts. They visited the salon while my mother took me to a barber who shaved my hair to mere inches. In my blooming, awkward prepubescence, I listened, always silent, to every word those girls said, afraid to be, but often, the foolish kid. If they told me my shirt was unflattering, I would stain it to invite my mother’s permission to never wear it again. If they talked about boys, or brought a boyfriend to a family event, I would watch and learn how to flip my hair, or giggle, or smile coyly. They were my key to freedom, if only to the prison yard. They demanded that my mother let me tweeze my eyebrows and shave my legs. They introduced me to tampons and to the concept of boyfriends, marriage and children as the ultimate achievement. And they informed me that Donny Osmond was sexy. I preferred Robert Plant and Peter Frampton.

And though I now cherish the kind mentorship attempted, those lessons have faded, and I have filed them with the misinformation from my government-managed education. I understand now that beauty and romance lessons are too personal and contextual to mimic and experience is the sole master teacher. Fashion magazines and girl cousins following blue-eye shadow trends is not a primer. I could never and cannot play their hair flipping and giggle games. And Donny Osmond is a fop.

My male cousins, however, unknowingly delivered life lessons imprinted into my synapses, into my soul. I am sure they never realized the little tomboy in the room’s corner watched them from a safe distance with admiration and infatuation. Six and ten years my senior, those boys terrified and intimidated me. There is no other way to describe it. They were men. They were going to college. As they would joke and kid with each other, I would lurk and listen, and touch the books on their nightstands with my fingertips, wondering what the volumes contained. When around them, the mental resonance was preferable to chitty chat about new shoes. But, what twenty-year-old or sixteen-year-old man even notices the little brat leaning against the door frame?

I remember one visit as summer, but it may have been autumn. The glare of the setting sun sparkling around the mental picture gives me no clue, but I was around fourteen. My memory telescopes into that house, into the noisy rooms filled with teens and friends and music. Petting the dog. Greeting my aunt. A terse kiss to my intimidating uncle’s cheek. The girls dragged me around to look at new jeans and new shoes and meet their new boyfriends while I pined to be invited into the basement where the guys were practicing with their band. Chit chat in my ears, robotic and rehearsed compliments from my mouth, while my whole self was focused on the vibrations through the floor. What was that? I wanted to melt into it. To understand it. I felt what can only be described as joy when the girls went down the stairs and I was, by association, permitted to visit the basement.

Trying to appear as cool and mature as I could, I took a seat, hoping no one would shoo me away. Please let me stay. Please let me be here. I’ll be quiet. I can be cool. See? I watched them tuning their instruments and argue over what to practice next. It was like slipping through a wardrobe into another world. They began to play and only later did I learn it was a cover of The Clash, Should I Stay or Should I Go. I had never heard of The Clash. My loving parents exposed me to culture: the oldies, opera, classical music. I listened to the popular 70s stations. My undeveloped taste was based on a limited library. And I had never been exposed to live music. Or the chill of someone I knew playing a guitar or singing.

That moment created a hunger in me and I stopped apologizing for my presence. The world would tell me what it knew. To my surprise, although the guys’ vocal tone still discounted my little-girl curiosity, they answered my questions. I remember them showing me album covers. Playing tracks with excitement and expressiveness. No matter their words, what I heard was: This music is worthy. There is a secret world out there waiting for you to discover it. Just ask. Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Yes. Pink Floyd. Queen. Led Zeppelin. Emerson, Lake and Palmer. The Clash. And David Bowie.

When I met David Bowie, face-to-face, I wished my cousins had been at my side. The guys would understand why I shivered when I shook David’s hand and met his gaze. Magic behind the makeup.

Copyright, 2001. C. A. Schmidt. All rights reserved.