Daydream Believer

“Stop that right now, Dinda,” said Big Dinda to Little Dinda. “It may be your birthday but we’re in a restaurant and we don’t act that way in public.”

Little Dinda was yelling and shrieking and dancing around with joy because she was having a birthday party with Ronald and all the Playland characters. It was natural exuberance, but it did need a parental correction for going a bit too far.

But we weren’t in a “restaurant,” I thought to myself, we’re just in a McDonalds. Restaurants were fancy places that you only go to once every few years and you had to wear nice clothes and use your napkin the right way. McDonalds was a treat for sure, and not a common one, but how sad that this neighbor family thinks they’re in a restaurant. I knew better.

How did I know better at 9 years old in 1983 at the McDonalds in Fullerton, California, at Little Dinda’s birthday party? My shorts were sewn by my mother on her Singer from leftover fabric because we couldn’t afford to buy many clothes except for what was on offer at the Salvation Army. Half the time we didn’t have a car. We’d never had a color television set, and the most anticipated mail every month was a welfare check and book of tear-off food stamps.

We were just white trash, the same way Dinda’s family across the way was just California Mexican trash. I was putting on airs in my mind. My mother taught me to have airs in my mind the way she had them. While she didn’t pretend that we were anything in reality but poor white people, she somehow knew that she was destined for bigger and better things. We were poor whites, but we weren’t like those people.

In a few years, those people showed up in our lives as Wonder Family. That was the name my mother gave to the destitute family of drug addicts, neglected kids, and toothless 35-year-old parents who looked 60 who walked past our house several times a week on the way to shopping. Wonder Family lived on the street around the corner from our house; the one with the single-wide trailers with roofs caving in and a 1961 DeSoto rotting in what used to be a driveway.

They were a mess. Mother was morbidly obese in a way you never saw regularly until these past few years. Dad was Jack Sprat with a belly that was practically concave and a jawline that comes from too much work and too little supper. The eldest daughter was pregnant at 15, and seemed to strut down the street in skin-tight, anatomy-splitting jeans, proud of her front-heavy condition.

“Remember that we may be poor, but we’re not like them,” my mother pronounced as she blew the smoke from her cigarette through her pursed lips while crushing the butt in the clear, square-pointed ash tray. She had just cracked me up with some raucously funny but also cruel joke at Wonder Family’s expense. This was a habit I picked up from her, and honed until I could cut someone to pieces with just my tongue.

It gives me shame to remember it. Undoubtedly, Wonder Family fell so low in large part due to their own choices, because their own parents never showed them how to work and live well, and also because good work is hard to come by in some years for uneducated whites in dead industrial towns. But they were people, and surely they loved each other, and had other people who loved them.

My mother’s sarcasm and cruelty masked an un-fillable hole inside her, as mine often has. She was badly broken. She abused her children, her men, she took abuse from her husband until the night he strangled her in front of her children, and she never stopped worrying about how to put food on the table for us.

She was alone, and she was lonely, and she was scared. The hardboiled bitch mode was only one of her personas. Sometimes I’d come into the house from outside and walk quietly because I could hear her at the sink singing to herself as she did dishes. My mother had a pretty soprano and never went flat, never missed a note. She would sometimes sing along, or sing harmony, to songs of her childhood that came on the radio.

‘Cheer up sleepy Jean, oh, what can it mean
To a daydream believer and a homecoming queen’

Sometimes she’d be softly crying as she sang, so I tiptoed away. But I often listened from around the corner, trying to understand what she was sad and lonely about. And also because I liked to hear my mother sing.

My mother once thought of me as a white knight on his steed. When I was very little, she came to me for comfort and solace. She told me secrets about her fears, or about men she’d known, or about her father and her mother. She should not have told me these things, and she should not have made me her confidante, but as a small child, this was normal to me. I felt like a hero to my mother, and I was proud of myself. Of course, this pattern in my mind caused me no end of suffering for decades of my adult life, as such distorted parental relationships always do.

Yesterday I went out foraging for a motley assortment of things I needed, a bit irritated that I had to go to four whole different stores! to get my supplies. So I took myself to lunch at McDonalds first.

A version of Wonder Family was seated at the table on the other side of the divider. Mom and dad couldn’t have been even 25 years old. They looked exhausted. She was pudgy and wearing food-stained pink fleece. He was another Jack Sprat wearing a Snap-On Tools hoodie and a camouflage cap. They had four children.

Kelsey was having a birthday party at McDonalds. I knew this because of the store-bought sheet cake in the corner of the table. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KELSEY! in blue icing, cursive script. “A store-bought sheet cake,” I thought to myself with reflexive disapproval before immediately catching myself in shock. I was having a moment like the one I had in the thrift store many years ago.

Grandma and grandpa showed up then along with the uncles. Everyone was wearing similar fleece country-camo-tool work gear. Grandma had the jutting chin that comes from years of toothlessness because she couldn’t afford implants and her cheeks caved in as she went through increasingly ill-fitting dentures. Grandpa was similar.

Mom and dad, grandma and grandpa, and all the uncles had that cast about them of tiredness. No, demoralization. They knew what life was, and they knew life would never change. They were doing the best they could in the moment.

And besides, Kelsey was a having a birthday party at McDonalds, which is more excitement than many kids will be able to have.

‘And our good times start and end without dollar one to spend
How much, baby, do we really need?’

The family obviously loved their children and each other. I could tell by the way the adults engaged the kids, giving encouragement to the two-year-old boy to finish that cheeseburger bigger than his fist before his little sister took it away. They ended up passing it back and forth in between trips to the indoor jungle gym.

In that moment catching myself thinking about the sheet cake, I heard my mother’s voice in my head and felt a jumble of conflicting emotions. Shame at myself for being so uncharitable, disgust with my mother for her hypocrisy, and deep, aching sympathy for my mom. That is the hardest emotion for me at age 50. It doesn’t fit well with the other emotions about my mother. Perhaps it never will.

As I got ready to leave I thought about wishing Kelsey a happy birthday, but I thought that might seem “weird” and too intrusive. I did manage to smile and make a joke with the adults about whether the little tyke would be able to finish that fist-sized burger before I left. Oh, I wanted to make a human connection with these people.

I left quickly because I knew I was going to cry and I will not have that in public. The parking lot of the local diner down the road had a spot next to the dumpster where I sat for a while.

‘Now I know how happy we can be’

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My mother sang harmony to this song, always to the popular version by The Monkees. I later redisovered Anne Murray’s cover, and now I sing harmony to the song too, in a different key.