Oddballs Read Free

the back porch railing and peed out into the yard. We studied the color photographs in my mother’s medical books. Some of the pictures, of hideous skin diseases, for instance, were thrillingly gross, giving us weird pangs in our stomachs. Other pictures were fascinating for different reasons.
    We played catch with eggs. There was a lot of tension to this game because we were both lousy athletes, and we knew that it would not be long before an egg would smash on the floor or on the kitchen counter. Then we would scrape the egg into a big bowl and make fake vomit. We’d dump in oatmeal, brown sugar, vinegar, syrup, raspberry jam (for bloodiness), and whatever else seemed disgustingly realistic. When we were satisfied with our artistry, we would splash the mixture onto the sidewalk in front of the house. Then, hiding on the front porch, we’d watch the reactions of passersby, praying that someone would step in it.
    Even when Mom did come home, it was still fun at my house because she was very relaxed and did not fuss over her kids. She had her own things to do and would leave us alone. Frank and I would go up to my room, which was a refinished attic—we lived in a big old house, and I had the whole top floor to myself—where we could read comics and use bad language and have private conversations about anything we wanted.
    Mom was unconventional in many ways. She let my sister and brothers and me read anything we wanted and never objected to any of our friends or quizzed us about where we were when we weren’t at home. She thought it was great that I loved puppets and loathed baseball. She never tried to make us finish our food at meals, which was probably why none of us ever had any eating problems. Though Mom was proud of her Jewish heritage—her mother and father were poor immigrants from the Warsaw ghetto—neither of our parents was religious. Many kids we knew went to synagogue or Sunday school; we never attended any religious services. On Sunday mornings (Dad worked on Saturdays), the whole family had a large, leisurely breakfast together, while Dad played chamber music on the phonograph.
    Since Mom was a pediatrician, I never entered a doctor’s office until I went away to college. Mom gave us all our shots, and none of us was the least bit afraid of the needle. In fact, a couple of times Mom took Vicky to her clinic. She gathered the kids around and gave Vicky a shot of some innocuous substance while Vicky stood there beaming, to try to prove to the other kids that it didn’t hurt.
    Mom did not wear high heels or makeup, which was very unusual in those days. “Why should you worry about what some stranger thinks about you?” she would ask us. But she wasn’t obnoxiously rigid about this. When Vicky was a little girl, she would beg Mom to please wear lipstick whenever she came to school, and Mom would oblige, not wanting to embarrass her.
    Sometimes Frank and I did have to go over to his house because his mother had this idea that it somehow wasn’t fair for us to spend all our time at my house. We also didn’t want her to get suspicious and start wondering exactly why we so preferred my house to his. His mother would be waiting for us at the door of their ranch house—in a dress and stockings and high heels, her hair in a permanent, her face perfectly made up—and she would always be holding a tray of donuts or jelly rolls or cookies. We would have to sit with her at the kitchen table and force down the sugary pastries and drink glass after glass of milk, while she questioned us in her ladylike way about what had happened at school.
    She would also ask politely about my family—how my sister was doing, and my two little brothers. Frank was an only child, which might have accounted for his mother’s relentless hovering. I suppose she was impressed that my father was a scientist at the university, but though she refrained from comment about my