Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [9]
Meanwhile, my parents were doing their utmost to scratch out a living. My father worked very, very hard doing PBX wiring on ships, which kept him out of the army. Other than that, he worked at Pacific Bell Telephone his entire adult life, until he became seriously ill and couldn’t work anymore.
His illness first manifested itself when he was traveling home from work on a streetcar and started vomiting blood. The doctors were puzzled to find cuts in his stomach; they speculated that ground glass somehow might have gotten into his food and that he unknowingly ate it, but none of the doctors ever knew for sure. Eventually he healed and went back to work, but he was never the same again. He became very angry and started to drink heavily. In the end, my parents had to sell their house on Forty-fifth Avenue so they could pay his medical bills. But although Mom and Dad were upbeat about the house sale, nothing was ever the same between them again.
In 1969 I was living in Sherman Oaks and married to my first husband, Michael Ansara, when I got a call from my mother telling me that my father had passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage, caused by a surge of high blood pressure. Afterward, paramedics found a great many blood pressure pills in his pocket. Though they had been prescribed for him, he had opted not to take them, for reasons I’ll never know. I felt guilty that I hadn’t been around to convince him to take the medication and that I hadn’t gone to visit him more often. I still feel I haven’t thanked him sufficiently for the man that he was. He worked so hard to support us.
My mother worked right through the war and after, as the credit manager for a Granat Brothers jewelry store. She didn’t own much good jewelry herself except for a watch and her wedding ring, but even if she wore costume pieces, people routinely stopped her in the street and asked her where she’d gotten them. She had a wonderful, inborn sense of style that never left her, not even at the end of her life when she was frail.
My parents’ financial existence was so perilous that we moved around a great deal. I attended five different schools in San Francisco, and we lived in five different homes, including one we shared with my aunt Margie and her husband.
We also spent a great deal of time with my great-aunts, Aunt Nora, Aunt May, and Aunt Nell, and with my great-uncles, Uncle Will and Uncle Tom, who lived in San Leandro and Vallejo, across the Bay. We’d go to visit them via the ferry, and when we’d come home very late at night, the foghorns would blare and I’d feel extremely sleepy and happy. I look back on those nights with warmth and affection.
Once I became a teenager, though, those happy times were punctuated by the occasional tussle with my mother over clothes, makeup, and of course boys. In high school I wasn’t really attractive; I was thin, underdeveloped, and geeky-looking. Even if I had wanted to improve my appearance, my mother would have stood in my way. She was very strict: she frowned on lipstick, and even if she had allowed me to wear more fashionable clothes, we simply couldn’t have afforded them. Later on, she drilled into me that I shouldn’t go steady too soon, and that I definitely shouldn’t marry early in life. In retrospect, I believe she wanted me to remain a little girl for as long as possible.
I don’t know whether it was due to the era in which I grew up or the way I was raised, but I was really sheltered, not in the least bit like teenagers today. I was so very square. I was banned from ever swearing; once, when I was long since an adult, my mother and I saw a swear word written on