Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley

Chapter 20: When in Roanoke

20 When in Roanoke “O h, honey,” my mother sighed over the phone after I’d told her, at last, that I was living in a tree house. “Don’t you dream of something better?” What could be better? It was time to introduce Depty Dawg to my mom. “Did you prepare her for me?” he asked anxiously as we drove north to Virginia once again. “How do you suggest I do that?” I teased him. My father had already been prepared, when a business trip three weeks earlier allowed him a brief layover in the Atlanta airport. We’d ridden over to meet him and spend a few hours. There he had taken our picture, and now I could only imagine how Momma had reacted to Dep’s battered cowboy hat and my worn-out bellbottoms. “Let me prepare you,” I told Depty in the car. “One word of Yiddish: f’mished.” “Famished,” Dep repeated dutifully. “It’s f’mished,” I corrected him, laughing. “Rhymes with pished. And it’s what my mother’s going to be when she meets you.” I was hoping I was wrong. I was hoping Momma might see in Depty Dawg the genius that I saw. After all, she and my father were both thwarted artists. Her meteoric career in community theater had been shattered by heightened sensitivities and a lack of nerve. And Daddy had long before surrendered all his creative ambitions. As a teenager, Sam had sat in his bedroom in Brooklyn , designing airplanes and dreaming of a future at the aeronautics school in Dayton, Ohio. But he was an only child, and Grandma wouldn’t let him go so far away. Besides, my peddler-grandfather had a different vision of the American dream: business, not flying, was the path to success. His son would play the pajama game just as he had done. Daddy rebelled briefly, becoming 85 86 | Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley a wedding photographer for a time, but when that endeavor failed, he, too, wound up in nightwear. Still, my parents’ marriage had fulfilled all the longings of their wartime letters: they had sent their three children to college, an unavailable option for them, the offspring of immigrants coming of age in the Great Depression. No doubt they were praying I’d regain my senses and give up this unsettled life for marriage to a Jewish, preferably professional, husband with scads of wellbehaved grandchildren for them to spoil. Instead, here I was: their college grad-turned-actress-turned-hippie daughter, bringing home this big galoot with hair below his shoulders, a thick handlebar mustache, and my IUD dangling from his ear. I’d gone back to the women’s clinic to be fitted for the copper intrauterine device, so we would have birth control at last. My insides had wanted nothing to do with it. Cramping painfully, I lay moaning on the cool tiles of the exam room floor. The gynecologist had removed the IUD, already mangled from the pressure of my womb. He gave it to me and I gave it to Dep. Always the snappy dresser, Depty put it in his ear. As it was, Momma took one look at him, turned around, went into her bedroom and started crying. My prediction had come true, except it wasn’t funny. Her response shamed me; I couldn’t bear for Dep to see her behaving this way. Following her down the hall, I was walking in footsteps imprinted in childhood, as full of dread today as I had been then. She was given to unpredictable moods, long bouts of crying and recrimination. I stopped in the doorway. Momma was sobbing on the bed. So many times I’d stood in this same spot pretending to be sorry for things I hadn’t done; it was easier than trying to plead my innocence. This time I knew what I’d done, and I wasn’t pretending anything. She lifted her wet face, grimacing, “What’s that smell? Like something burning.” I guessed what she meant. My hand-me-down coat of black lambs’ wool reeked of wood smoke. “I love that smell,” I countered, sending her head back to the pillow. “Momma, you don’t have to do this. We can just leave.” “We never see you.” She sat up, petulant as a child, and blew her nose. “I don’t know what to say, Sybil. I guess I expected more.” “You haven...