It happened a hundred different ways. Here is one.
3:15pm on a rainy school afternoon in 1963. No where to play, Rory and I came indirectly home from school, drenched because we fought through and dove into every puddle on the way to our house from St. Stephen's.
It started on the 4th floor landing when we tried to get in the apartment door and Mom pushed us back into the hall.
“Sons of bitches, I just bought those shoes, they come out of my house money! Undress, there!”
Rory and I get down to our drawers and took off our blue socks. Mom arrived at the door to see how we were doing.
“Holy Christ, half the sock’s dye is on your feet, into the bathroom.”
After Rory and I belted each other around the tiny bathroom while soaping off the blue stuff, I came out and went in the refrigerator leaving Rory in a ball stuck between the toilet and the tub. I gave the fridge a thorough look see and said to Mom, “How come you don’t buy more cake and soda like my friends mothers do?”
After receiving a death ray from Mom’s cold blue eyes she said, “How come your father hasn’t raised my house money in five years?”
I didn’t completely finish saying, “you should take that up with him,” when Mom’s swinging foot brushed my head still bent over in the fridge. Her wild miss spun her body around. By this time, Rory was back in the kitchen and we both ran away while Mom yelled, “I’m going to friggin kill you!”
Rory & I sang that right back to her, first in falsetto voices then deep in a monastery chant, “I’m going to friggin kill you.” Really stretching at the "yooouuuuu."
Whatever she said from that point on, we sung it back to her word for word. We could harmonize, we were pretty good, “Take it, Phil!”
But Mom didn’t appreciate this. If we kept it up she would leave the chase, go to her bedroom and come back with Dad’s belt. We’d carefully look at her eyes, if they had rolled up into the back of her head, she was seeing black and we were in real trouble. We’d run to our bedroom and get under our bunk bed going all the way to the wall. Mom had short arms and though she tried she couldn’t reach us and we’d be there giggling as she wildly swung the reversible brown/black 34 inch belt. Only after exhaustion struck did she stop and with heaving breath say, “Wait till your father gets home.”
And she waited, in a chair in the kitchen holding the belt cursing to herself. We used this time to locate items we had lost under the bed weeks before and thoughtfully picked dust balls off each other.
When Dad got home it never worked out the way Mom wanted. He’d be in a good mood or self absorbed in something, she’d be feeling semi-guilty about getting the belt in the first place, he’d say, “where are the kids?”
Rory would come charging out, “Hi Dad!” I’d come out cautiously keeping a sharp eye on Mom while she looked me over and weighed her next move, and there usually wasn’t one. It was just another typical rainy afternoon on 83rd Street with nothing to do.
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