By the mid-1950s, my “racism” went underground—buried alive. You know how it is when you’re looking into a blizzard—wild snow so heavy you can’t see a thing except all-white horizons everywhere you look. I was learning to live-race-blind.
I’d made it through Junior High and was headed for High School. At least I had a couple of small but discernible boobs, one cashmere sweater, and a pencil skirt in which actual walking was prohibitive. So I minced along, pretending to be sexy—proud to have had a one-time smattering of blood. A real—my type—boyfriend was the next step to fitting in.
Scene XII. First Kiss
Bob was my very first crush. That’s what they called it when you felt mentally and emotionally crushed by some combination of anxiety and hormonal desire—enough to make you inarticulate and turn dumb. Bob was pathologically shy, hence I targeted him for flirting practice. We went for a twilight walk in the local bird sanctuary. Trees hung over the paths we walked, the air smelled like peaches, and every bird was singing an aria. I felt faint with sheer joy as Bob pulled me closer—and closer. His breath smelled.
Still, my August birthday loomed, and for my sweet sixteen birthday party I needed a date. This party would have boys. Boys! Bob, the only boy I’d ever kissed, would say yes. Darien had a private beach club. I’d lived this scenario before. Damn! But now I had other problems.
First, there was the humiliating problem of a swimsuit, preferably one that would magically make me look slim and sleek, like Esther Williams. I’d solved the my-date problem. The more profound and invisible problem was the guest list. My best friend helped me with that. I did not, thank God, have to make racial choices. There were no Carol Lees in “whitesville.” I concealed the queasy swell I felt inside, but I remembered anyway. I remembered till it ached. I dove off the float, my arms parting the cool dark waters like Moses had, or maybe God—down and down as deep as I could without drowning. It helped.
Scene XIII. The Right White Boy Named Bill
Bill Brakeman was the most handsome boy I’d ever seen. Even better, he was a failed immigrant, transplanted from Chicago as I had been from New York. We first met at one of those teenage parties hosted by the parents of a classmate who was more handicapped than me. I only imagined I was fat, the worst thing to be, but this girl was actually fat.
I lurked at the food table, grazing on celery while longing for a huge piece of the chocolate layer cake, when I spotted Bill. He stood in the corner alone with beckoning eyes—not flirting just longing. My heart leaped into his arms. (No wonder “Blue Moon” eventually became our song.) Bill was going steady with someone else, but in the game of high school belonging, steadiness wasn’t a strong player, even though everyone craved it.
Our first official date was the next day. We went to a football game. I didn't understand a thing about football, but that didn't matter, because I was with this boy named Bill who, I was sure, knew what he was doing. Two teams ran out onto the field; cheerleaders jumped and howled; the announcer blasted: Tarrytown versus North Tarrytown. Not even our school! We laughed and laughed and watched the damn game anyway. We became a couple.
High School was full of racial-like categories—jocks, prom queen/cheerleaders, spicks, hoods, wops, nerds, whores, aka sluts, and madonnas like the one in Betty Singer’s song. Groupings were organized according to physical appearance and ranged from most popular to untouchables— like Phineas, or the girl who still wore an undershirt. There were religious classifications too—Catholics and everybody else. There were no Jews thanks to an unspoken agreement among realtors not to show properties in the shore towns of lower Fairfield County to Jews.
I was in the middle group—a “madonna” secretly aspiring to slutdom. We girls struggled to climb up the social ladder. A lot depended on who we dated, or if we had a car, or if we had a sport or a special gift. Bill, for example, was an electronics whiz and could fix anyone’s radio. I had won the 9th grade foul shooting contest.
In truth, there wasn’t much social mobility at all in high school. It was a caste system. You just knew it—without going to India.
Jimmy Fraccola was Italian and olive-skinned—the wop category. He was extremely handsome and had a crush on me. Once at the public beach—not a club—he pulled me under the water and kissed me. It was slimy; I was sure I would drown; I ran up the beach and sheltered with my girlfriends. “You won’t believe what just happened?” I reported, horrified and titillated at once. Jimmy, who aspired to be a cop and had a motorcycle, didn’t give up. He once pursued the car Bill and I were in—a chartreuse convertible no less. His cycle roared and farted, because that’s what motorcycles do, as he pulled in front of our car. I felt as if I was in a movie—the beautiful young heroine pursued by the ‘bad guy’. Would “prince charming” rescue her? Jimmy, playing cop, ordered Bill out of the car, and threatened to beat him up, announcing that I was going to be his girlfriend. No one asked me of course. Bill stood up to him and told him to leave us alone, or else. I wasn’t sure what “or else” meant, but Jimmy backed off. Bill was a hero—my hero.
We were friends immediately. I could be myself with Bill, even gorge on chocolate cake without embarrassment. This bond of affection meant more to me than his looks or his bravery. We could navigate high school together. I didn’t think of this back then, but Bill was also safe—normal, white.
The charge I’d gotten from Jimmy’s dashing bravura at first tempted me, but my gut flashed a warning sign. My mother would have said: “He’s not your type, darling.” Normally, this would have send me joyfully into Jimmy’s embrace, for the sake of defiance. But, resistance tugged at me inside. Fear of Sex? Well, of course. Italian? Maybe, but Italians were common in our high school. There was Bartolo, Romanello, Fraccola. Still, something more subtle exerted its pull on me. Something I couldn’t then define.
I was learning internalized ethnic prejudice. I was running into the undertow of the high school caste system whose outer accoutrements I easily identified but whose infrastructure consisted of unwritten rigid rules about who could be where with whom and how. There was no why.
Oddly, the Parable of the Sower, told by Jesus and remembered in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, raced across my mental scan.The Sower sows seeds in all kinds of soil, not all of it receptive, hence unfruitful. I had read the Bible, and intuited something wrong about this parable—maybe something that had wisdom about racism in it?
Chapter XIV. Going Beyond, aka Postscripts
Jimmy died in 2016. James Joseph Bruno Fraccola, still handsome, had realized his dream. He was a cop in the Darien Police Department, also married with six children and thirteen grandchildren. One of those Catholics! According to his obituary, Jimmy had “ranked as deadly marksman and was truly a cop’s cop.” Thank God, he didn’t have a gun in high school! I felt a surge of plain happiness when I read that Jimmy had made good.
Bill and I stayed together over the years—on and off/off and on. We married in1962. Good humor, deep caring, and the blessing of four remarkable children sustained us over twenty years of marriage, half of it painfully insecure. Divorce brought intense grief. We both remarried. For all of it, and all the memories I am grateful.
Bill died unexpectedly of acute leukemia with respiratory complications on February 14, 2020. He was my first true love, the one who first helped me feel real, and I grieve.
The heart is a spacious vessel, capable of holding many loves, an infinity of feelings.
To be continued.
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