Dolly Slocum

“Mister Josh you better get in here!” my aunt Connie said when I walked into my grandmother’s apartment after school. Aunt Connie said it in with her trademark giggle-cackle that sounds like mine. “Dolly Slocum is sassing back and I told her just wait until Daddy gets home.”

Connie was sitting in her wooden rocking chair that looked exactly like the one Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann perched on. One of grandma’s crocheted blankets—open work with large gaps—in 1978 brown and yellow was slung over the back. Dolly Slocum was sitting her lap, face down, getting a desultory spanking as Aunt Connie giggled behind the four fingers on her right hand, a mannerism I have, too.

“Connie girl has been rocking a groove into the floor all day waiting for you to get home, Josh,” grandma laughed. “She’s going to shuffle off to Buffalo in that thing!”

It was 1983 in Garden Grove, California, just as the 1970s were starting to look like the 1980s. In those days, every era had a distinct look, but every era had a big helping of the last one still hanging on. People did not redecorate all the time—the universality of “updating” is a very late 20th century/early 21st century obsession that didn’t exist when I was a child. The trailer my mother and I lived in during the mid to late 70s was a model from the 1950s, sky blue on white on the outside, and Formica inside with a built-in red plastic dinette nook.

My youth pastor had dropped me off at grandma’s that day in his 1967 Mercury Cougar, black and convertible. Such cars were known as “bitchin’,” and cars last a very long time in Southern California. There were almost as many autos from the 60s and 70s on my block and on the roads as there were late models. I used to stop my skateboard behind our neighbors’ 1973 Chrysler Newport, a robin’s egg blue land barge with such bad timing that the engine sounded like it was going to stall between every revolution. “Brrrrrrrr—AT. . . . .Brrrrrrr—AT.” I loved the sound of it, and the smell of pre-emissions-standards exhaust.

Across from Connie’s rocking chair was grandma’s console stereo, a large, wooden piece of furniture with an AM/FM tuner, three-speed record stacker, and an 8-track deck. I kept some of my 45s and albums at her house because they sounded so much bigger and better on that Zenith beast than on my Fisher-Price suitcase record player.

But Aunt Connie was eternal. From her birth in 1958 to her death in 2003, Connie Mae Slocum had the same no-nonsense bowl haircut. This was unusual for a girl, but Connie was unusual for a girl. She was born profoundly mentally retarded (yes, that was the proper term for it in those days), possibly in part from fetal alcohol syndrome.

She wore the same kind of clothes as my grandmother all her life. Double-knit polyester shorts and slacks with a standing seam, bright floral print pull-over tops, canvas tennis shoes.

At first, grandma and grandpa pretended Connie was normal. They enrolled her in kindergarten despite the school’s misgivings. She didn’t last the whole year, of course, as she was not capable of learning to count past four or five, and she had screaming tantrums when she got scared.

(Please forgive the quality of the family photographs in this piece. I haven’t taken them from their frame for a good high resolution scan, and the lens on my phone is marred.)

Connie Slocum ca 1962

Connie couldn’t tolerate sitting still long enough to get anything fancy done to her hair. From early childhood, she couldn’t tolerate a lot of things normal girls can. My grandparents were poor and too old to be parents again when Connie was born. Grandma was 45 when she was born, and grandpa was in his 50s. Both were heavy drinkers in those days, and according to my mother, regular brawlers. Frying pans and dishes flew through the house, the one in the country that no one had ever put a bathroom in. The family still used an outhouse.

Despite the admonishments from doctors that she belonged in an institution, my grandparents refused. Connie lived with them, and with my grandmother after grandpa’s death in 1966, for most of the rest of her life. When my grandmother began to get old with a bad heart, she finally found Connie an adult group home for the retarded that seemed genuinely good, with kind people. I think it was, because Connie was obviously happy there. Grandma had tried a group home placement with Connie in 1980s, but quickly brought her home when she found that someone had bought her lingerie to wear, and had tried to hide it inside the dresser.

But that was all many years in the future. That day in 1983, Dolly Slocum needed a good spanking. That was my job, because when we played house, obviously I was the daddy and Connie was the mommy. We always played house, or cops and robbers; my aunt had a limited repertoire but what she did she did well. The play sessions always followed the same narrative arc. Robbers were shot, children were spanked, and everything was over and tidy before dinner and the Lawrence Welk show before bed.

Dolly Slocum was a member of the family from long before I was born. She was a mid-century baby doll, the kind made of hard plastic with the eyes that close when you laid her down. They popped open again when you picked her up, except for when only one opened, giving the impression that she was winking at you. Her left hand was broken off up to the forearm, probably a casualty of a fight between Connie and my mother. You could see the inside of the hollow arm all the way to the shoulder.

Like so many dolls of that era, the makers exaggerated the darkness of the eyelashes and the redness of the mouth in a way that left the impression of an infant wearing makeup.

I haven’t been able to find a photograph online of this specific doll, but this one is close.

Dolly Slocum stayed with Connie all her life. We talked about her in the family as if she were another Slocum child. The odd thing was, Dolly Slocum was always “bad.” When we played, Connie told me about how naughty she’d been that day, how she sassed back, and spent most of the afternoon in the naughty corner, but nothing worked. “Give her a spanking, Daddy Josh,” Connie would say.

And I would, and we’d both laugh. I don’t know how many times we played this scene out over the years. As I got older I started to question what was going on in Connie’s mind. Why was Dolly Slocum always bad? Why did she never do anything right, never anything that elicited praise?

It took until adulthood, until middle age, to understand that for me Dolly Slocum was Connie, and Connie was Dolly Slocum.

Was this how Connie herself was treated? Was that how my mother was treated, and did Connie watch? Did Connie pick this up from television? I’ll never know, as I’ll never know the truth of what went on in that house. As readers know, my mother is deranged with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. She has been mean and abusive my whole life. But I don’t think she was born that way. My grandparents had many troubles and chronic alcoholism was only one of them. It seems likely my grandparents were personality disordered, too, if my mother’s descriptions are to be believed.

My mother hated her sister Connie. Mother was born in 1955, and Connie came three years later. They were the last two children my grandmother bore, issue of her second marriage. In her first, she had seven children before leaving her first husband who knocked her around and mistreated his kids. There were at least two additional stillbirths, and several abortions were rumored.

Mother was jealous of her younger, retarded sister, because Connie soaked up almost all of the parental attention. Leaving aside the personal emotions about my mother as the son she abused, it is not hard to see how my mother was deeply wounded by her childhood, and had a hole inside her from neglect that she could never fill. It’s not “bad” for a child who doesn’t understand to be jealous of a disabled sister. Children need nurturing and love intensely in their early years, and my mother did not get nearly what she needed.

I knew all this because for all my life with her, my mother narrated her childhood, the failings of her parents and her siblings, and told every secret and suspicion she had. Sometimes she’d scream these stories in full voice, other times she would put her hands over her face and cry when she told them. “Bonnie, why are you so selfish-can’t you see that your sister needs our attention more than you do?”, my mother reported hearing from her own mother.

“Why did I have to give up EVERYTHING for my fucking RETARDED sister?” my mother would yell during one of her tears.

Like most severely personality disordered people, my mother is a habitual liar. It’s not possible to tell what parts of which stories were true, which were exaggerated, which were confabulations. She likely does not know herself any longer, if she ever did.

Mother told me that when she was a very little girl, Connie had constant temper tantrums full of kicking, screaming, and biting. It wore my grandparents out and frayed their own tempers. I think it’s likely that they abused Connie. Mother said that her own mother was convinced that Connie had chronic constipation and grandmother thought she needed daily enemas, which she administered as Connie screamed.

It’s twenty-five years into the 21st century, and I still don’t know what really happened. As a child and then a teen, it seemed to me that my grandmother was much kinder and more loving than my mother. She was exceptionally warm and loving to me, when I was allowed to see her. Every couple of years, my mother would stop speaking to her mother, and that meant I wasn’t allowed to see her either.

Was my grandmother the same dysregulated harridan mother to her children that mine was to me? Did age soften the sharp edges of her personality? Or, did my mother exaggerate real trauma and distort the truth to herself in memory? Was my grandfather—whom my mother alternately deified and damned for his wisdom, his alcoholism, his final abandonment through death when my mother was 12—much harsher than my mother admitted? Was the grandmother I knew an act from an old lady who fooled a naive child?

These family members have changed faces and aspects for me over the years. Like all abused children, I lied to myself for a long time, denying even in my own mind that my mother was wicked and destructive. I never met my father, and my mother’s husband, the father of my brother and sister, was a violent pedophile who tried to kill my mother and who raped his own daughter, beating me when I caught his attention. I just couldn’t bear to “lose” both parents, so I rewrote reality about my mother until I couldn’t any longer.

But not Connie. Semper eadem. The best approximation for Connie’s developmental stage was a four or five-year old. But she was not a normal five-year-old. Connie could feed herself, but she got food all over her shirt and bib. She could walk and talk, but she could not tie her shoes or say her ABCs past the letter C.

Aunt Connie was the same woman, the same little girl, at the end of her life that she was when mine began and I became her playmate. I grew up with her, watching Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers and The Electric Company. Most of the time, she laughed. We laughed together. I cannot explain it, but inside that malformed, mentally retarded mind, my Aunt Connie had a touch of sarcastic and dark humor. She would say something once in a while with that knowing tone in her voice, then look away from you and giggle behind her hand. It was as if she had flashes of normal, grown-up mentation, but she couldn’t hold onto it. Sometimes she was wickedly funny.

Connie was the nervous sort. She was easily overwhelmed by loud noises and unfamiliar foods and places. Sometimes on an outing to Woolworth’s or K-Mart with grandma, she’d start shaking and getting angry and scared. “I want to go home,” she’d say. I’d put my arm over her shoulder and guide her down the street, or hold her hand, as we got her back to her rocking chair.

She had ways about her, mannerisms and oddities that made her Aunt Connie and no one else. She was stoop-shouldered and her back was somewhat bent forward. There was a Big Bird quality about her gait, she would sort of bob along with her head and torso moving back and forth like a bird that keeps her head and vision steady as she moves across the ground.

When she got scared or overwhelmed, she would hold her hand with four fingers over her mouth and nose and talk, or cry, behind them. When I’m especially down or troubled, and alone, I make this same gesture unconsciously. There was a physical family resemblance, too; as a child I looked a lot like my aunt.

1984, Christmas. My brother Curt is on the left. He got Big Bird under the tree that year.

When my grandmother died in 1991, the family decided to have a full funeral with a viewing and calling hours the night before. Aunt Mary Ellen, my mother, and my brother and sister took Connie to the funeral home the morning before the service so that she could say goodbye to her mother without the pressure of a room full of people.

There was my grandmother lying in a casket with more makeup on than she had ever worn in life (we got the undertaker to tone it down). It was an unsettling experience. I didn’t know if Connie understood the concept of death. She did. As we brought her over to the open coffin, she started shaking and crying. Fingers over the mouth and nose. “Mommy wake up, come back Mommy.”

Grandmother Edith Slocum with Connie, early 1980s.

I have been writing this remembrance in my head for years without actually writing it. Of all the people in my life who I have loved, and who are gone, I miss Connie the most. She was innocent and blameless, and she needed protection. There isn’t any famous person from history I would bring back from the dead to have dinner with for a night; I would give a lot to bring Aunt Connie back.

If they knew all about you, they’d end up loving you too
All those same people who scold you
What they’d give just for the right to hold you

A year after grandmother died, I turned 17, and was only a few months into my new status as a legally emancipated minor. After leaving the boys’ institution I’d been placed in between 12 and 13, I decided to build a life as far away from my family as I could. That only meant a distance of 35 miles from where I was in Syracuse to where my mother was in Cortland, but it was enough. I cut myself off not only from my immediate family, but from the extended family too. It wasn’t clear what they knew about our family. Did they know my mother was insane? Did they believe I was as bad as she said I was? I was embarrassed and afraid, so I cut all my family out of my everyday life for years. Then came college hundreds of miles away, and four years of spending most of my time in New York City. I was on my way, I was a real adult, and confident enough to revisit some of the places and people I ran from.

Around the year 2000 I went to visit Aunt Connie in the adult care facility where she was living. Something, no one knew what, was causing her brain to degenerate and Connie needed more care than the group home could give. She moved to a concrete-and-beige medical tower complex with hard tile floors and fluorescent lights.

I hated that goddamn place from the minute I set foot in it. The smell of sterilizing cleaners, puke, and piss. The barely audible hum of those hateful lights. No soft surfaces.

Connie was sitting alone in the middle of a dining hall with the kinds of tables from your school lunch room cafeteria. I almost didn’t recognize her; she’d become so thin and frail. Ever like a bird, but more now. Would she remember me?

”Josh,” she said in a croak.

We sat and I held her talking and crying. How could I have left her for so many years? It was a terrible mistake and I’m still paying the price. I pray she didn’t feel as lonely and abandoned as she had a right to. There were more years we could have had together, and it was my fault that we didn’t.

When she finished her food Connie peed her pants; she didn’t have much control over her body anymore. “Come on Connie, let’s go back to your room and get you cleaned up.”

“OK, Mister Josh,” she said.

The last thing I did for her was a sponge bath and a change of clothes so she’d be able to sleep comfortably. I never saw her again.

I don’t know if Connie is resting with God, but if there is any justice in the world, that’s where she is.

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