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Breathing Out

St. Martin's Press

Chapter One

In folklore, a child who is secretly substituted for another by fairies.

As a child I would often make myself lie absolutely still before falling asleep. Once there, fantasy would overtake me. It was a world that I alone owned, a place I had dominion over. I chose the thoughts and the desires. I played my own game and always came out the winner. No one and nothing could rein me in.

In the way that changelings know, I always sensed I didn't quite belong. I knew I had to find others like me-the magical helpers who would show me how to get to the other side, although I didn't know exactly what it was or how to get there. The burning desire to be free of the small-town life never left me for long, and I stoked its fire by reading poetry and tawdry novels, going to movies and Broadway plays, and listening to all kinds of music. These were my doors to the other side. But I was stuck on the wrong side of the looking glass, waiting for that Alice in Wonderland hatch to suddenly appear. One tumble could, and would, send me into the nether world of my dreams.

In that enchanted space before falling asleep, I sometimes saw myself as the actress everyone was talking about. Or I was the possessed journalist hunkered down at her typewriter, capturing the latest big news story. At other times I imagined myself a poet like Sylvia Plath, with every nerve in my body alive and aching to tell my strange and haunted tale. I read The Bell Jar at fifteen as I was embarking on my career, worried that I had fallen into it, and that if I wasn't careful and vigilant and in some way anchored to the outside world, I could slip over the edge into a dark abyss.

I kissed and hugged my pillow nightly. It became the boy, or man I wanted to love me. I imagined all my embraces being returned. Much of it was a blur of longing and I would fall asleep, blissful or sad. When I was a young teen, my sexual fantasies ran rampant. I began having these fantasies during the day at school, or at home watching TV, or spending the afternoon listening to Johnny Mathis or John Coltrane, I had yet to experience love. I still had never touched myself, not even my small, budding breasts. Oh, but the mind was having wild sex all the time: hot visions of prolonged and languorous kissing sessions and pledges of love-to Dion and all the Belmonts, James Dean, and Warren Beatty. I could wrap my long, skinny arms around them all. Spin the bottle, so popular with pre-teens, could send me into a frenzy-if I got lucky enough to get invited to one of "those" parties.

One night I was invited to a thirteen-year-old's basement party. Parents redid the basements of their suburban homes in the 1950s as recreation rooms. Kids had their own friends over to play the forty-fives in their ever-increasing record collections on a jukebox or Victrola, drink Coca-Cola, and have make-out sessions. Moms with their pageboy hairdos, dressed in billowing cocktail dresses, would swirl into the underground adolescent Mecca with a cocktail in hand to check us out. We would dance or huddle in corners, eating Wise potato chips and giggling over which boys we liked.

At one of these spin-the-bottle parties I wore a beautiful blue mohair turtleneck I had painstakingly picked out. I often got hand-me-down clothes from a friend of my mother's-all items her daughter had outgrown: checkered shirtwaist dresses, full skirts, Peter-Pan collared blouses. and sweaters. That night I chose carefully from my newly obtained wardrobe, applying blue eye shadow to match the sweater. Quite unceremoniously, during Frankie Lymon's "Why Do Fools Fall in Love," I was told by a nasty, nasal little girl from across the street, "You have body odor." Embarrassed, I surreptitiously smelled my armpits all night long.

That year at summer camp I had my first kiss on a hayride with Bobby Leon. It was a romantic, picture-perfect setting. I remember thinking: "This is it! This is what I've waited for: The beginning of life. And I'm doing it! I'm actually doing it!" He gave me a sloppy wet kiss, then pulled away. Suddenly I was an observer, oddly outside of the situation, knowing I didn't measure up: my breasts, body, odor, and, by, now, braces and acne.

At fifteen I fell for Allan the heartbreaker. He was twenty and engaged to a beautiful high school senior. Allan lived on what people in the Five Towns agreed was the wrong side of the tracks. This only added to his allure. I went to the Town Diner on Central Avenue looking for him, then to Juniors Diner in Hewlett, in hopes of a sighting. He drove a red Chevy. I sat at the windows of these diners anticipating that any minute he would turn the corner in his convertible-hopefully without his girlfriend. I knew he was too much of a catch for me. After all, I was young and not very popular. I felt at any moment I would be crushed. But my passion ran strong as I plotted for months for a way to get him to notice me.

Finally, I got up the nerve to invite him out under the ruse of a triple date. His two best friends with my two best friends. It was a very good plan. We went to Coney Island and rode the Cyclone rollercoaster together on a summer night in seedy Brooklyn. We picked at sticky pink cotton candy and chased it down with Nathan's hotdogs. Between the food and the ride I got sick to my stomach. I was caught in a valiant struggle: trying to appear grown up and sophisticated, while not revealing that at any moment I might barf. But it wasn't just the junk I had piled in that night. My equilibrium was teetering and panic was setting in by the time he walked me to my door and thanked me.

"Good night, Peg," he whispered and gave me a little kiss on the cheek. It was all over before it even began. My first love, and not even reciprocated. There was absolutely nothing I could do to win his love. I cried and cried and cried and looked in the mirror constantly to see what was wrong with me. Well, for one thing, I wasn't Nancy, his beautiful teen-queen fiancée. In the mirror I saw only my awkwardness.

Chapter Two

I grew up in the Five Towns on the south shore of Long Island, New York. I was given the name Peggy Ann at birth. Forty years later, I learned from my father that my mother went back and changed my birth certificate to read Margaret Ann, feeling the name Peggy was either too Irish or too unsophisticated. But it was too late. I was always known as Peggy. The Five Towns were quite infamous in those days, known for being sassy, brassy, and rich. Lawrence, Cedarhurst, Inwood, Hewlett, and Woodmere: each town bordering the other. I lived in Lawrence, having moved there at the tender age of two from the big, bad, beautiful New York City of the late '40s. I might as well have moved to Mars.

The area was originally a WASP enclave, dotted with duck ponds and green marshy swamps. Magnificent old brick estates loomed over huge yards set back from the tree-lined streets. And into this sleepy enclave came a large postwar Jewish population, families by the hundreds, fathers donning yarmulkes and some wearing prayer shawls. Delicatessens featuring a Sunday brunch of lox, bagels, and chopped liver; Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox synagogues springing up across the towns. Pedal-pusher-wearing, bouffant-haired morns with their baby prams and maids in tow walked the avenues with their kids trailing behind on new tricycles.

Jewish families entered the Five Towns as if flung from slingshots-which in a sense they were: They were immigrants or refugees fleeing racism and a hostile world, all combustible nervous energy, humor, and angst. Their children were spoiled. Here they could have everything they wanted. Things their parents and grandparents had only dreamed of. There were the private beach clubs, the expensive shops on Central Avenue, the dances at the Temple and unlimited access to Hebrew schools, tutors, doctors, dentists, and orthodontists.

Not far from this, the town of Inwood rested uneasily on the other side of the Long Island railroad tracks in Lawrence. Here, the black families and most of the Italians had settled. Without my parents knowing, I'd walk the seven or eight blocks from home, cross the tracks and wander around, sometimes going into a candy store or a pizza parlor. I had to see it and experience it in any way I could. Living in such close proximity to a poor neighborhood made me aware that there was more to growing up in the world than hot-rod cars and parties in newly renovated basements.

We lived on a very beautiful street, lined with elm and birch trees that led to a golf course and, ultimately, wound its way to the Rockaway Hunt Club, where I knew of no Jews who belonged. The two sides of our street were like before and after photographs. On one side-ours-were the newly built homes; on the other, exquisite old mansions.

I loved scaring myself when I'd walk home from a friend's house in the late afternoon. In the winter it was dark and there were unpaved streets, with ominous hedges and unlit homes. I'd relish the stillness of the evening, half walking, half running down my block. Here, all around me as a child, was a feast for the senses. There were enormous specimen trees on acres of land, the majestic Atlantic Ocean a short car ride away, and flower-filled gardens, marshes, and rolling lawns. The physical beauty of the Five Towns was extraordinary. It was idyllic and safe, as long as you didn't cross the tracks.

My family was upper-middle-class, but we weren't wealthy. And my mother never did anything that the Five Town ladies did. She was cut from a different cloth and enjoyed being the individualist she truly was. Other parents would send their kids to Florida for school break. My mother never did that. We spent our vacations in "exotic" Atlantic City.

I don't think my Mom was happy on Long Island. I could sense it even though she never voiced it. Whenever she could, she'd drive into the city and visit museums. She could never be a country club person-she made a bold statement just by wearing jeans and smoking a pipe. Nobody behaved like that in the Five Towns in 1953. But these eccentricities were never to draw attention to herself: they were just her natural way of doing things. Rita Lipton was a wonderful painter. Her canvases were filled with vibrant colors and striking subjects: nudes, still-life, and abstracts. She painted in oils and watercolors-she could do it all. She had more than a dozen one-woman shows over the years, received numerous awards, and was listed in Who's Who in American Art. As a child I didn't appreciate her talent. She was so high strung, and sitting with her in her studio in the basement of our home, I sometimes felt nothing but dread. She wanted me to paint with her, but I had absolutely no ability. I just wanted her to listen to what was in my heart, but I held back as much as she did. At times, Rita was an excessive and compulsive character. It's amazing and slightly sad that she managed to live in that middle-class community as a brilliant artist with her outbursts and strange unconventional ways, while other mothers were baking apple strudel and holding coffee klatches.

My bedroom was my sanctuary. I could spend hours alone reading or listening to music. I wrote plenty of poetry in that space, poetry that I would later gather and make into my high school thesis, in the spring the backyard became an extension of my cocoon. The branches of a beautiful tree in the center of the lawn touched my second-story windowsill. From that perch I watched the seasons come and go. The glorious tree with its leaves, first green then burnt orange, and finally bare, was like a talisman. At night when its branches moved with the wind, I listened and let the gentle sound put me to sleep. All my treasures and icons were in my bedroom. A little Geisha doll my father had brought from Japan, a stuffed animal won at Rockaway Playland, and pictures of movie stars, writers, and models pinned to a bulletin board on the wall: images of Warren Beatty, Audrey Hepburn, Joyce Carol Oates, James Dean, and Delores Hawkins-a top model at the time.

On my fourteenth birthday my parents gave me a television. I watched it until all hours of the night, often finding it difficult to get up for school the next day. These were the halcyon days of live theatre on TV-great actors performing weekly dramas written by the brightest new playwrights in America: Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Edward Albee, and Paddy Chayevsky. I was so moved by the plays of William Inge (who had written Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Picnic, and Bus Stop) that, as a freshman in junior college, I interviewed him and wrote my semester thesis on his life and works.

I always had to have a crush on someone. My heart was in a state of perpetual longing. Any object of desire that could take my mind off my teenage angst and insecurities made me feel empowered. My huge crush then was on Paul Burke, the lead in the TV series Naked City. "There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them," was the tag line. I wanted to be one of those stories. A girl who loves so deeply that her universe is transformed. At the center of my bulletin board shrine was a picture of Paul Burke torn from TV Guide. He wore a classic fedora and a suit and tie. His smile was enigmatic; he reminded me of my father.

One afternoon while my older brother, Bob, was out, I oh-so-carefully snooped around his room-a true Pandora's box. He was by then a very hip rocker teenager, with his greased-down hair, black leather motorcycle jacket, boots, and extreme good looks. I knew his room was forbidden territory and that I could get into serious trouble, but my curiosity outstripped my fear. Every moment in that room, my heart beat wildly as I discovered paperback books about gangs like the Amboy Dukes and came across a wolf deck-playing cards of naked women smiling and gazing erotically over their creamy white shoulders. I even found a knife. Though I thought I had carefully covered my tracks, when Bob came home he knew that I had entered his domain. While I was eating dinner that night, he went into my room and, in a fit of retribution, inked out Paul Burke's face on my wall. I was furious. I complained to my parents, but they had so little control over my brother. They really couldn't do much except try to enforce the room boundaries a little better.

"Just don't go in there, Peggy," they told me in an admonishing tone of voice. They didn't want any more problems. But I did go back many times after that. What younger sister could resist the temptation of mining the hidden treasures of her older brother's mysterious world, especially when he was the most feared, revered, and charismatic character she had ever known?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Breathing Out by Peggy Lipton David Dalton Coco Dalton Copyright © 2005 by Peggy Lipton. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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