When I was seventeen and
living on Devoe Street with my mom, there was a
day when I came home from my job at the New York
Telephone Company in Manhattan and my mother
greeted me with an edict. "Give your boss two
weeks notice tomorrow and start packing up all
your things in boxes. We're moving to
Florida."
Huh? It took a moment for her mandate to register.
Finally I said, "What about Daddy, does he really
want to move to Florida?" I must have been pretty
naive because I was shocked when she said my
father wasn't going with us because she was
leaving him for good. No family meetings. No
discussions. Mom ruled and we all jumped through
her hoops to keep the peace. Always.
Never fear, I will not use this platform to
unleash a diatribe against my mother. She wasn't a
bad mother. On the contrary, we had lots of fun
times together, as the staged photo taken in Coney
Island shows below. Mom simply ruled the roost,
like all the women on the Normandia side of the
family. Later, I found that odd because she was
not a Normandia until she became one when she
married my dad, Sebastian Sylvester Normandia, in
July of 1921. I don't think mom's sisters were
like that, but I could be wrong. I was once.
When some people learn that my ancestry is
Italian, they assume I must have had a strict
father. They can't wrap their brains around the
fact that I was raised in a matriarchal family.
Mom ruled. Grandma Normandia ruled. All the wives
who married my Normandia uncles ruled. Some of
them were benevolent dictators and concealed their
manipulations so convincingly that their macho
husbands actually thought they were in
charge. Mom
was too angry and unhappy and impulsive
for that. She just let it all out and we
obeyed to keep what was left of the peace
in our home.
The only married
Italian women I was around were relatives, mothers
and cousins, and aunts. I now believe they all had
the same goal in common: to elicit obedience in
their home, which guaranteed the smooth running of
busy households full of rambunctious children,
while they did everything else expected of a wife
in their culture. Gender roles were clearly
defined. The middle-class moms in my family were
either Italian immigrants themselves, like two of
my mother's sisters who were born in southern
Italy, or the children of immigrants who were born
in New York and raised their children the same way
their mothers and grandmothers did for generations
in the "old country."
I can only comment about the middle-class women
who surrounded me. They knew they weren't
considered equal to men yet. Most older women in
my family, including my mother, were born before
women even had the right to vote. They were never
suffragettes and accepted that that's just how
things were. It's practically unbelievable to me
now as I am hooked on the most contentious
presidential election of my lifetime. I'm
going to stop writing about this. Even I am
getting tired of it. Today, the millions of cracks
in the glass ceiling of gender inequality have
been shattered forever. Former Secretary of State,
Hillary Rodham Clinton, is the first woman in the
United States to ever be the presumptive
Democratic nominee for President. Stay tuned. It's
only June.
Back in the 1950s, there were a few things I knew
for sure. I had been moved from Brooklyn, New
York, to Hollywood, Florida, by my mother, without
having anything to say about the matter although I
was already out of high school, working, and
engaged. That didn't seem fair. Dad's brother
George had bought a brand new house in Hollywood
for when he and Aunt Mary retired. No one had ever
lived in it yet. Uncle George knew that we didn't
have much money and offered us his house to live
in so we would have a nice home for awhile. He and
Aunt Mary planned to be typical New York Snowbirds
and would eventually drive south on I-95 before
the snow blanketed New York. When Florida got too
hot for them in the summer, they would drive back
home to New York where, in my humble opinion, it
was almost as hot and humid. New Yorkers always
say, "It's not the heat, it's the humidity," but I
can remember the dog days of summer up there when
your sneakers would sizzle on the pavement. So
that's how we ended up living in a pretty new
house on Fletcher Street across from the Hollywood
Dog Track which was actually in Hallandale, right
over the city line. Mom liked to gamble and the
first time we went there she won $200! At that
time we didn't know anything about the life of
those greyhounds and would never go to a dog track
again.
Something else I knew for sure was that Mom moved
to Florida because it was easier to get a divorce
there than in New York at that time in history.
Florida was a no-fault divorce state already,
which meant either party could get a divorce
without proving any reason for it. They just had
to say their marriage was "irretrievably broken."
When Mom asked me to be her witness at her
no-fault divorce hearing, I said no, even though I
would only be required to vouch for her being a
Florida resident for the last six months. I wanted
no part of the divorce that separated me from the
unconditional love of my dear father. Dad sent me
a telegram before their divorce, asking me to come
back to New York. I remember it said I could even
bring my mother. He didn't contest the divorce and
the painful day was soon over. Mom recovered
nicely and created a happy new life for herself.
She never dated another man for the rest of her
life. She was free at last and blossomed as a
single woman after thirty-two years of marriage.
It was nice to finally see her happy.
Another thing I thought I knew for sure when I got
engaged on my eighteenth birthday to
my wonderful first boyfriend, Johnny
Martin, was
that I was going to be happily married to him for
the rest of my life. We fell in love when I was
fourteen.
Johnny was half-German, half-Italian and very
handsome. He looked like John Travolta to me. We
planned to marry when he got back from Korea. Mom
had informed us that she would live with us after
the wedding in New York. Johnny agreed. Our life
was planned. We would have four children, two boys
and two girls. My decision.
Then, as life would have it,
during the last week of 1953, I met the man who
would one day be my first husband. Hal Wilson was
on leave from the Army. He was gorgeous and looked
so handsome in his uniform. With his blonde hair
and blue eyes, he looked totally different from
the cute Italian boys I grew up with, with
their dark hair and dark brown eyes.
Hal was only home for a few days to visit his
mother, Emily. She was the indispensable
bookkeeper at Hopkins Appliance Store where I also
worked. I had just moved to Hollywood in October
and needed a job right away to help with expenses.
I went to an employment agency that took my entire
first week's pay for their fee - $35! I
became the appliance repair dispatcher. That's
where I first got my nickname Patti, because the
head bench repairman couldn't remember the name
Priscilla.
I only saw Hal a few times during those few days
he was home, but I could tell I had a little
crush on him. Truthfully, he kind of took my
breath away. I found myself daydreaming about what
my life might be like if I was his girlfriend and
didn't have to go back to New York. We promised to
keep in touch when Hal left on the Greyhound to
head back to Camp Atterbury, which was near
Edinburgh, Indiana. My intuition said to take some
photos, and I was glad I did. It was January 1,
1954. The first picture is of me and Hal. The next
is Hal with his mother, Emily, and brother, Bruce.
That's when I knew for
sure that I shouldn't be marrying Johnny if I
was having such strong feelings toward someone
else, like Hal, whether or not anything
materialized or not when Hal got his Honorable
Discharge. That was a good life decision.
I wrote Johnny a "Dear John" letter while he was
in Korea. That was not a good decision. I wish I
had waited to break up with him when he came
home. The war was over, but he was still far
away from home, and I really didn't discuss it
properly in a letter. Well, I was eighteen and I
did what felt right at the time. Maybe that line
in "our song" was right. "They tried to tell
us we're too young . . . ." I know now
that the fork in the road I chose that day led
me away from my New York roots and ushered me
into a totally different world than I could ever
have imagined. Even if I could, I would have
thought it was not an option for me, the girl
who obeyed. The fact that my mother had the
courage to get divorced even though she was
Catholic, gave me the first inkling that maybe I
could start thinking for myself and making my
own decisions. I didn't tell her that.
Hal finished his Army time and we started dating
in earnest. When we reached the stage where we
started talking about a possible future together,
one of the important areas we discussed was about
how many children we wanted, if we decided
to get married.
For some reason I didn't understand at the time, I
absolutely knew I wanted to have four children.
Two girls and two boys. It was not negotiable.
Seems a little silly now to be so specific about
their gender, but I was. To my relief, Hal felt
the same way and wanted to have a large family.
That clinched the deal and we set the date for
February 1956, at the Church of the Little Flower
in Hollywood. I was twenty. He was twenty-two.
Thanks to my new friend, Vladimir Nabokov, I
looked back to my early years to trace my
unwavering insistence on having four children some
day. It was always a given that I would marry, yet
so illogical to me that my marriage would produce
exactly four children when there were so many
variables to take into consideration. What if I
couldn't have children? What if he couldn't? What
early event could have foretold this obsession for
four children and not three, or two? It was as
though I had written a script for my future life -
or maybe, since all time is simultaneous, I peeked
into another life where I already had four
children, two girls and two boys. I wouldn't read
books about creating my own reality for forty
years or so, but some things we just know. This
required a stronger magnifying glass to look into
my early childhood to find the answers I sought.
Although I was not an only child, I felt like one.
My older sister was thirteen years older than me.
I was only seven when she
married Pete Lomuto and they moved across the
street to their first apartment with the first TV
on the block. My brother was nine years older and
joined the Army when he was seventeen and that
left me alone with my unhappy parents. One day it
hit me that that's what it must feel like to be an
only child.
It was a long walk from 37 Conselyea Street to 181
Maujer Street and Mom made it almost every day to
see her bedridden mother, Principia, and her
sisters, Margaret and Susie, and her brother Sal
who owned the candy store on the first floor. For
awhile Aunt Jennie lived in one of the apartments
too. When I was young, Mom took me in my baby
carriage. When I outgrew it, I had to walk many
long blocks to see my other grandparents.
It seemed like an adventure to leave the
familiarity of Conselyea Street, and then turn
right onto Lorimer Street where people could walk
down a flight of stairs and be in an underground
world where you could get on a subway train to
Coney Island. Grandma Normandia would take me to
Coney if I could be ready by 5:30 am to avoid the
crowds on the beach. We never went before Memorial
Day, to be sure it would be warm enough. We also
didn't wear white before Memorial Day but I don't
think that's related. Once I drifted out into the
deep water of the Atlantic Ocean and almost
drowned. I still remember how my little grandma
towed me to shore and saved my life. I didn't grow
up with a love of the water. I like to look at it,
but not go in it, not even pools. I am an Earth
child.
