I’m not much of a sleeper. I like the quiet of the night. Nothing is expected of you at three in the morning. You can do your own thing without being bothered by a phone call. There’s no pressure to be social with anybody. I can get stuff done. Or do nothing at all.
Usually, I’m up and padding around the house with my cat, Twilight. We’re both nocturnal. It’s a lifelong pattern for both of us. It sometimes makes other people, who might be staying at my house, feel disturbed.
They’ll say, “What are you doing? Why are you up? Go to bed.”
They only ask me, never the cat.
I do rest. I lie down on the bed and listen to a good audiobook on my headphones. I might doze off for a couple of hours. Four hours is a lot of sleep for me.
When I was little, my mom used to send me to bed at a regular kid hour. She’d read to me, tuck me in, and kiss me goodnight. Then, she’d tiptoe back in to check on me an hour or two later. I’d still be wide-awake, looking out the window at the lights on in other windows or whatever part of the sky I could see. I’m sure it was frustrating for my mother.
She’d say, “Aren’t you tired? Everybody needs sleep.”
I didn’t seem to need much sleep to be fine. I don’t know why. It’s just my make. My imagination is always busy. That has never changed. As a kid, I’d make up stories and give voices to inanimate objects in my room. Who could sleep when you’ve got your box of crayons having a conversation with your sneakers? You know, there’s no reason to lie there lonely when you can bring inanimate objects to life. I still do it.
I don’t know when my mother got to sleep either. When I started kindergarten, she worked at the French Hospital, which was this great hospital in Chelsea started by Catholic nuns. It closed down in the ’70s.
She obtained her diploma from one of the only programs in the country that would educate black women who wanted to go into the nursing field. Her goal was to become a registered nurse, but that wasn’t an option if you were black. So, she was a practical nurse in the pediatric ward. She worked the overnight shift. It was the best hours for her as a single mom with two children. There was no extra money for someone to watch us if she worked daytime hours, so she’d trust us to go to sleep while she worked nights. Clyde was in charge at about age twelve. Off she’d go in her white nurse uniform, stockings, and white shoes. Black nurses weren’t allowed to wear their natural hair in the 1960s. She would hot comb it until it was straight and then pin it up under her nurse’s cap. Most nights, she would leave around 10:00 p.m. and be back at 6:30 or 7:00 a.m., in time to get Clyde and me up and ready for school.
When Clyde got into his teenage years, word got around our neighborhood that our house was parent-free overnight. We became the dance party place for all the teenagers. They would sneak out of their apartments around midnight and show up at ours. The music would start up: the Temptations, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and James Brown. I learned all the dances of that time from my brother and his friends at 2:00 a.m.
Sooner or later, one of them would notice me standing on the sidelines and say, “Go back to bed.”
I’d try to stay. “Can I have some potato chips?”
“No! Get back in bed!”
Around four in the morning, everyone would start to leave, and Clyde would throw away the trash and get in bed for a couple of hours of sleep before Mom got home.
I never ratted out my brother, but somebody did. I’m betting the folks in the apartments above, below, and next to us weren’t happy with James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” blasting after midnight from an apartment full of unsupervised teenagers. I’m sure Ma could tell stuff was going on long before the neighbor complained. When twenty people smoke in a small apartment with all the windows closed for four hours, it’s going to stink. Teenagers are dumb.
Besides my mother keeping some reins on a growing teenage boy, there was me, pulling the midnight special. If my mother was able to grab a couple hours of sleep in the morning, that might have been it. At my Catholic elementary school, we’d be sent home for lunch every day, so I don’t think she slept much.
I was not only a nonsleeper; I was a noneater. I had a big wide range of taste when it came to candy, except for black licorice (who the fuck thought that was a treat?), and a limited palate when it came to real food. I would eat my Cheerios dry in the morning. I liked to keep it simple. I still do. I don’t like anything globby, mushy, wet, or hidden under a sauce or gravy.
Eggs, no matter how you cook them, fit into too many of those descriptions. From the second the shell was cracked on the edge of the frying pan, I left the room. That clear, gooey gel and yellow slimy yolk were never going to turn into something I’d eat. I gagged at the smell of eggs cooking.
One day, my mother decided to broaden my food horizons. I was in second grade, and I came to the table for breakfast dressed in my plaid Catholic girl uniform and a white blouse, ready for school. On my plate were scrambled eggs.
I looked at my mom like she was joking with me. She wasn’t.
She said, “Caryn, you can’t decide you don’t like something if you never try it.”
Yeah, that is probably practical and reasonable, especially since Clyde would eat anything and everything she put on his plate.
I didn’t talk back about it, though. I thought she’d understand my point of view if I held out. So, I sat there, not trying the eggs.
I didn’t get anything else for breakfast, and after about twenty minutes, I got sent out the door for school.
I wasn’t going for a standoff, but I was sure she now understood that eggs were not something I was ever going to eat. It looked like Ma had decided to push the matter some more because when I came home for lunch, those scrambled eggs were still on the table, waiting for me.
I couldn’t believe it. At some point she let me know I wouldn’t get anything else to eat until I, at the very least, tried a bite of eggs.
“It’s important for you to try new things,” she told me, not unkindly but firmly. “It’s good for you.”
If I could have, I would have, just to make her happy. But that shit now looked like cold pig slop. It wasn’t leaving the plate on my fork. I didn’t care. I wasn’t giving in. I waited until time was up and headed back to school.
Like in a horror movie, right when you think that monster has to be dead for good, those eggs had survived and were still there on my plate after school. They even looked bigger, like they had multiplied. My mom had probably made fresh ones to prevent botulism. There wasn’t a snack in sight. I didn’t know how much longer she was going to hold out on giving me some real food, but I was going to hold out longer. I wasn’t going to eat eggs at age seven, twenty-seven, or forty-seven. I still haven’t had an egg at age sixty-seven.
No other food was offered, but I was okay because I had a small stash of candy in my room. Hey, what kid wouldn’t rather eat candy for supper?
The next morning, nothing was said, but life was back to normal: dry Cheerios and a cup of orange juice.
I learned a great lesson from my mom on this one, especially useful when I became a mom myself. Sometimes you’ve got to let the kid have their way. You’ve got to believe they know what they’re talking about. If they can’t stand to do something and no incentive changes their mind, then you have to back down.
My mom was smart enough to see that my eating eggs was never going to happen.
As I got a little older, she tried a variety of tactics to get me to eat different foods. If there was a plate of food before me that didn’t fit my simple tastes, she’d say, “You better eat that food or I might have to send it to children in Ethiopia who would be happy to have it because they’re hungry.”
After age eight, I knew that would never happen. I didn’t say anything out loud, but I’d be thinking, How are you going to send this? In a Tupperware? Is there a place you go to drop it off to be sent to Ethiopia? How long would it take to get there?
Years and years later, she was at one of my shows on Broadway, and I told the story of her saying that I wouldn’t survive a disaster because I was such a picky eater. So, I pointed her out to the audience. “Yeah, sitting right here in the front is my mom.”
Then, I said to her, “Do you realize that had there been a nuclear thing that happened in the ’60s, it would have been you and Clyde who would have had a hard time? I’d get by okay since I didn’t have to eat.”
She was laughing so hard the tears were running down her face. And when I saw her after the show, she asked me, “How long did it take you to figure that out?”
She really did try her best to get me to eat better. I’m sure she would have liked me to be more adventurous in the food department, but that didn’t happen. Not then. Not now. She got herself a quirky kid in almost every category.
My mother was into expanding her mind and showing us a larger world in any way possible. Education was a very big deal. Since childhood, she had been curious about many different things and loved learning. She was interested in ancient history, music, literature, art, and creative writing.
We had the Will and Ariel Durant book series The Story of Civilization in our house, and every couple of months, a new Time-Life book would arrive. If I asked her why something was the way it was in a movie we watched, she would say, “There’s a book right over there on the shelf that will give you more information about what really happened.”
Anything that I might be interested in, she would take the time to encourage me, saying, “You can parlay the little bit that you know about a subject into something much more.”
Whatever she wanted to know, she’d get books in the library and read up on it. Sometimes, the three of us would go to the huge New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue, across from Bryant Park. We’d walk the hallways and stop in the various rooms, especially the Rose Reading Room, with its clouds painted on the ceiling forty-five feet above our heads. I’m sure if my mom didn’t have us kids to look after, a lot of her days off would have been spent right there in the Rose Room, surrounded by fifty thousand books.
She could discuss a wide variety of subjects. And she was funny. She would have fit right in at the Algonquin Round Table lunches that took place in the 1920s, where writers like Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and George S. Kaufman would get together every day and shoot the shit about any subject that came up. She would sit and write when she could, but she’d put it all away.
Later on in my life, I thought of my mother as an undiscovered George Sand, the female novelist from the 1800s who published under a man’s name to be allowed to write what she wanted. My mother had a brilliant mind but did not have the opportunity to express her potential. I know, later in her life, she submitted a few things to magazines. As she told me, “I’ve got many envelopes that hold rejections.”
Many women who lived in our housing division would react rather distant and cool toward my mother. They saw her interest in opera, art, and Roman history as unrelatable. And my mom was unwilling to speak badly about other people, so she didn’t join in on the gossip benches outside. They couldn’t figure out why her husband was gone, and they were a little suspicious that she might steal away theirs.
My mom just blew it off. She would say, “I got two kids of my own. Why would I want her man and four more of his kids?”
In the 1960s, the New York art scene was busting out with modern and pop art. It was radical in its definition and pushed the limits of what people considered art. We’d go to MoMA to see what it was all about. There was Andy Warhol’s tomato soup can and Roy Lichtenstein’s graphic art that I dug, being a big comic book fan. We each had our favorite artists. Mine was Maxfield Parrish. Still is.
Every year, Ma would take us to the Ice Capades, which I loved, when it came to Madison Square Garden. The costumes were phenomenal, and they would slide giant set pieces out onto the ice. We’d also go see the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus when it toured in New York.
I knew I couldn’t ask Ma for too much stuff from the vendors going up and down the aisles hawking cotton candy and peanuts in the shell, but she would almost always get me a souvenir program book that I would look at over and over at night when I wasn’t sleeping.
Since I was already up all night, giving voices to a box of crayons, headphones, jump ropes, and sneakers, Mom thought I’d dig a good puppet show. There was a couple, Bil and Cora Baird, who created puppets and marionettes and had their own theater space in the Village. I was enthralled by it all. Every couple of months, they would put on a new show, and my mother would make sure we went together. It helped me feel a little less weird, seeing these two adult people who had a whole career in making wooden things move and talk.
She also found a way for the three of us to go to Radio City Music Hall and see every Rockettes show. In the 1960s the Rockettes would do their show, and then the curtains would part and there would be a giant CinemaScope movie screen. She took us to see How the West Was Won, one of the first movies shot in Cinerama style. I’m sure that’s where we saw The Sound of Music (which featured Bil and Cora Baird’s marionettes in “The Lonely Goatherd” when the kids and Maria put on a show for their father and the countess). We also went to see Camelot when it first came out.
I would sit there before the movie and imagine myself becoming a Rockette one day. Somehow, it seemed possible, even though there wasn’t one dancer in that whole line of thirty-six women who looked anything like me. They all matched each other, but none of them looked like me. (It was 1987 before a black child saw a Rockette that looked like her. The organization has been scrambling to fix it all in the last couple decades, which is good. Every kid should see a skin color close to their own in that lineup.)
Our favorite time to see the Rockettes was always the Christmas Spectacular. My mother turned our lives into a Christmas Spectacular at home, too. Like everything else she made happen, it was all very mysterious to me. She could make stuff appear out of thin air.
It would start when Macy’s in Herald Square, the flagship store on Thirty-Fourth Street, decorated their windows for the holidays. Every window would have a theme or a story to it. We’d walk around the entire building and then head over to Gimbels department store a block away to see if their Christmas windows could match up with Macy’s.
About five days later, we’d get up for school, and there would be a fresh-cut evergreen tree in a red metal stand set up in the living room. I knew it was there before I saw it because the pine smell would travel down the hall. We had no clue how our mom could get that tree in the house and up on the stand, but if I asked her, she’d look at me seriously and say, “How do you think it got here?”
The next thing that would happen is, one morning, we’d come out to breakfast, and the windows would be covered with spray-snow stencils of Santa, elves, Rudolph, a sleigh, snowmen, and Christmas trees.
On the last day of school before Christmas week, we’d come home and see the boxes of Christmas decorations, strings of lights, and ornaments next to the tree. Our apartment was very small, so I never knew where the boxes were kept the rest of the year.
I’d ask my mom about that, too, and she’d answer, “I have no idea what you’re asking me. They came from wherever they were.”
My mother was determined to keep the season as magical as possible for us kids.
That night, the three of us would play Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole Christmas albums and decorate the tree. We’d laugh and dance around, tossing handfuls of silver tinsel as high on the tree as we could. Then, Mom would plug in the red, green, yellow, and orange string of lights, and we’d turn off all the other lights in the house and take in our tree design.
Every day after that, I’d look to see if there were any presents under the tree, but there never were. If my mother wasn’t home, I’d search the house with a fine-tooth comb trying to find hidden gifts. Nothing. The only wrapped item under the tree before Christmas Day would be whatever Clyde and I bought for Ma. We’d have scraped together a month or two of Hoffman bottle returns and gotten her some Jean Nate bath powder or a necklace. We’d wrap up crafts we had made through a city park program. She’d always act like it was something she really wanted.
On the night before Christmas, I remember Walter Cronkite would sign off the evening news by saying something like, “Right now there is no war or fighting going on anywhere, and there is peace all around the world. We wish you a very happy holiday.” And that was when I felt like we would all be okay—for the next couple days, everybody would be safe. Then, we’d turn the TV to the local channel (WPIX) that aired the continuous burning of a Yule log in a fireplace and played Christmas music.
At 8:00 p.m., Ma would take the thawed Butterball turkey out of the fridge and get it ready to bake. She’d pull out the bag of giblets and rinse out the cavity. (I should have paid better attention because as an adult I left that bag in the hole once. Big mistake.) She’d arrange the turkey on a stand so she could stuff it up with Pepperidge Farm traditional stuffing that she had seasoned. Before the stuffing went in, she put a cut-up stick of butter inside and then the mixed-up stuffing on top of it. Once the turkey was in the pan, we perforated the outside with a knife to make entry points for all of the basting sauce, which was about ten sticks of sliced butter, a cup of water, salt and pepper, and whatever dripped from the cooking turkey.
At 9:00 p.m. she’d put the turkey in the oven at 270 degrees and then baste it every hour, probably all night long.
I’d have my mind set on staying up to watch A Christmas Carol, starring Alastair Sim, the original British version, which usually came on at 11:30 p.m. Clyde and I would sit there with bags under our eyes and our lids propped open. I’d give it my full effort to make it to Tiny Tim’s “God bless us, everyone,” but would usually nod out around when the Ghost of Christmas Future made his appearance. Clyde would shuffle me off to bed. At some time in the middle of the night, Clyde would shake my shoulder and whisper, “Come out with me to the living room.”
We’d tiptoe out of my room and look into the living room. We couldn’t get close because our mom would be sleeping on the couch. The tree would be twinkling in the dark, and under and next to it would be a sea of wrapped presents. Some, like new bikes, would just have bows on them. One Christmas, a Lionel train set was running around the tree. It would be the best sight in the world, and I would be blown away that it had all happened while I was sleeping for a couple hours. We’d have to go back to bed because Ma wasn’t going to let us open presents until after breakfast.
The next morning we’d float out of our rooms on the aroma of roasting turkey and stuffing and fresh pine Christmas tree. We’d unwrap gifts for hours. There would be games like Parcheesi and Sorry!, a Flintstones magic movie projector, which I’d lose my mind over, a Chatty Cathy doll, and Tressy, whose hair grew to her waist by pushing a button on her stomach. My favorite present one year was a Frosty snow-cone machine, where you would put ice cubes in his hat and rotate the handle on the back to make your own snow cones. It came with paper cone cups and squeeze bottles of flavoring. There were new snow boots and a new dress, which didn’t thrill me, but one disliked gift in fifteen isn’t bad.
Later in the day, the three of us would stuff ourselves with turkey, rice, and stuffing. I left all the greens and cranberry sauce to Clyde and Ma. All I wanted was for the three of us to be together, and that’s what made it Christmas.
The decorated tree would stay up until we went back to school in January. Then, one day we’d get home after school, and it would all be gone, like it had magically disappeared. I’d be even more determined to find out where the boxes of decorations were kept in our apartment, but it never happened. I couldn’t even uncover a leftover strand of tinsel, no matter how long I looked.
The mystery of how my mother made all of this happen remains unsolved. Even as an adult, she never told me how she got us all those gifts. I imagine she started putting stuff on layaway in February. And I never did figure out where she kept them all hidden until midnight on Christmas Eve or where all the decorations went in January.
One time when I was an adult, Mom, Clyde, and I were talking about the upcoming Christmas. I knew I couldn’t ask Ma anything outright. So, I tried to circle around the question.
“I was just thinking about when we were kids. Where did you put everything, you know, all the decorations and presents at Christmas?”
She looked over at Clyde, then back at me, as if I were speaking a different language. “What are you talking about? I have no idea what it is you’re asking me.”
I started to feel dopey, thinking, Really? Am I not asking it correctly?
“Ma, the apartment was so small. And there was a lot of stuff. Where was it all?”
She answered, “Well, where do you think it all came from?”
To this day, I have no idea how she did it. Her attitude was firm. “Why do you need to know that? Why can’t I tell you Santa Claus brought it? Why isn’t that enough?”
She never spilled her secrets. She’d just smile, look at me sideways, and say, “It’s all magical as far as I know.”
Whatever it was, I still keep Ma’s traditions going. Every December I have to put up a fresh-cut evergreen tree and slow-roast a turkey overnight to feel like it is Christmas.
I don’t even mind being the person who bastes the turkey every hour all night long because, you know, I’m not a big sleeper.