3: Some readers . . .
Little Follies, “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” the Preface concludes
Preface (continued)
Some readers will be interested in knowing the sources of one or two other fabricated details.
My grandfather, Guppa, is a Studebaker salesman in “My Mother Takes a Tumble.” In fact, he was not. Making him a Studebaker salesman was, I admit, simply an easy way out of a difficult situation. Let me explain.
The smell of burning leaves made me recall my years on No Bridge Road because it brought to mind quite clearly a fall ritual that began with the raking and burning of leaves: as if in response to some silent bell, men up and down No Bridge Road would rise from their breakfasts one fall Saturday, pull on old sweaters, step outside with rakes in their hands, and begin raking leaves into enormous piles on their lawns. Then the children of the neighborhood would jump into these huge piles, run through them, and scatter them. (At that time, any decent leaf pile came up to my waist, and in some I could get buried up to my armpits, but today I’m hard pressed to accumulate a pile that reaches to my knees. Either there are fewer leaves now than there were then, or the art of piling leaves has decayed.) The men would rake the leaves into piles again and then begin carrying them to the street. They would make a number of small piles in the street, in the gutter, which was merely a shallow valley at the margin of the roadway, not defined by a curbstone, and burn them, one pile at a time. Up and down No Bridge Road, men would lean on rakes and watch their leaves burn.
The burning of leaves was followed by the second part of the ritual: the crushing of shells. Everyone on No Bridge Road had a clamshell driveway; many people in Babbington still have clamshell driveways, but they are not so widely favored now as they once were. They were cheap and serviceable, and required little maintenance other than a yearly addition of new shells to replace the bits of crushed shell that had been carried away by the wheels of cars and bicycles or the soles of the mailman’s, milkman’s, and breadman’s shoes or washed into the gutter in rainstorms. The men would drag out burlap sacks of clamshells that had accumulated since the last fall and dump them onto their driveways. The children would pick through the shells and set aside a few of the shapeliest, the most clamshell-like; these paragons would be used for ashtrays or made into knickknacks. The others, the not-quite-right, the deformed and broken, the men would spread up and down the driveways. Then, and at last we near the point of this reminiscence, they would drive their cars up and down the driveways to crush the shells.
So vividly did the smell of leaf smoke return the memory of those fall days to me that I could see all the men driving up and down their driveways and hear the clamshells crushing under their wheels. Quite suddenly, I realized something that had never struck me when I witnessed this scene as a child. All the men were driving Studebakers. I looked more closely, straining to see all the way to the corner. There was no doubt about it: every car on No Bridge Road was a Studebaker. This put me into quite a tizzy, because I knew that if I included this remarkable fact without explanation the reader would regard it as gratuitously absurd. So, to make it plausible, I made Guppa a Studebaker salesman, and a very good one, although in fact he was a foreman in the culling section of the clam-packing plant.
In the barroom scene, I have repeated the word barroom far too often, I know. I have no excuse; I repeated the word simply because I enjoy coming upon it when I read, for I can’t help reading it, no matter how strong the context, as the word my childhood chum Raskol used to use to imitate the sound of a mighty explosion: “Boy! You should’ve seen it when old Roundass’s clamboat got hit by lightning. He’s right in the middle of the bay, minding his own business, taking a break to wipe his sweaty brow, and thinking that maybe he’ll eat a sandwich, when suddenly there’s a big flash of light, and then barroom!”
One more point. In “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” all the houses on No Bridge Road are stucco. (That is, they are faced with stucco. Such houses are in Babbington called simply “stucco” instead of “faced with stucco.”) That was not actually the case. All the houses on the north side of No Bridge Road were stucco, but on the south side was a hodgepodge of small vacation houses and shacks, unevenly spaced and poorly painted, with no garages and, as I recall, no Studebakers, despite the efforts of my grandfather. I omitted any mention of the differences between the two sides of the street because I knew that if I mentioned the difference I would have to explain it, since if I didn’t explain it, many readers would consider my not explaining it significant, nodding knowingly and saying to themselves, sardonically, as Porky White did when I tried it out on him, “I see what this is. It’s all class differences. Peter is born into the tight-assed and striving lower middle class, a class that literally lives behind a thin and fragile facade: stucco.” He put his fork down and took a swallow of coffee. “You know,” he said, “the lower middle class is very interesting. This facade they work so hard to erect and maintain is, well, it’s like the frosting on this cake.” He poked with his fork at the slice of cake I had given him. “It’s pretty white frosting, but it has no real flavor; it’s just sweet. The good part of the cake, in fact the essence of cakeness, is the cake itself: its texture, its chocolaty-good flavor, even its shape. So the people in the class into which you were born, to sum up, was hiding their true vital essence, their essential vitality, behind a sort of icing. Ahhhh —” He waved his fork at me. “— but across the street your young self sees, and maybe yearns to join, the haphazard, sweaty, lusty, and fundamentally richer life of the unfrosted sometimes-working class. Right?”
Peter Leroy
Small’s Island
April 2, 1982
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
The Personal History continues in Episode 4.
In Topical Guide 3, Mark Dorset considers Clams: Clamshell Driveways; Studebakers: Babbington Studebaker; Clams: Babbington Clam, the packing plant; and Small’s Island and Small’s Hotel from this episode.
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You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.