I Don't Have a Happy Place Read Online Free Page A

witches. There were no summits or secret convocations, but there was a leader. He spoke in dulcet tones and had a Muppety face. He called them to action and they got off the sofa. If I saw their captain today, I’d look him straight in the eye and say: “Fuck you, Phil Donahue.”
    I was nine when it went down at my house. Up until then, I thought we were doing just fine with The Mike Douglas Show . The theme music was groovy, Mike was avuncular and sang to us daily, plus he didn’t boss his viewers around. But Phil Donahue was positioning himself as the latest craze and my mother liked to keep up with the times. Back when it was customary for women to stay homeand keep house, you might find my mother perched on the chesterfield holding my brother as an infant, wearing a pencil skirt and a whipped-up lacquered beehive. As bras began to go up in flames, she made sure to have bell-bottom denims and long middle-parted hair the color of vanilla Jell-O instant pudding. And when Phil Donahue infiltrated our den, she remodeled her look once more. The hair shortened and pantsuits began filling the closet.
    Women fought for equal rights and economic justice, and my mother joined NOW to get a lapel pin. Feminism was spreading through every ‘ville, town, and hamlet and there was nothing we could do about it. Phil Donahue murmured into his sticklike mic and women all over North America heard him.
    Well, my mother mostly heard him. It’s quite possible she stepped out for a handful of Bugles during part of his tutorial. But these were the fundamental tenets of feminism, as presented in my house:
    1. Wear pants.
    2. Do not let a man open the door for you (and if he does, make throaty sounds of outrage and disgust).
    3. Veto the kitchen.
    4. Have other people watch your children, or—better—have them watch themselves.
    5. Barbie: You are not welcome here.
    Now, tenets 1 and 2 were my mother’s own business. If she wanted to practically knock my father over en route to the door, or dress like a fellow, fine with me. I think it was fine with my father, too. Actually, it was a boon to my father. All this business about my mother’s slacks afforded my father undivided freedom to become the Cher of the household.
    My father enjoyed a costume change more than any lady I knew, plus he had an outfit for every occasion. I wasn’t exactly sure what occasion called for constricting banana-yellow jeans with matching shirt separated by a brown leather Gucci belt, but he had one at the ready, should the need arise. His closet was lined with deluxe cowboy boots he claimed he had to wear—something about high arches, which was in line with those girls at camp who were forced to get nose jobs due to their pesky deviated septums. The ultimate accessory in his wardrobe was a full-length raccoon fur coat he insisted was“really in right now.” My father’s 1970s look fell somewhere between European porn director and Jewish buckaroo.
    Veto the kitchen, tenet 3, worked in my favor. Here, women everywhere relinquished their grandmothers’ recipes and jilted the avocado green Amana Radaranges they would have once been pleased to win on Let’s Make a Deal . This was dynamite news for my mother and, frankly, for the rest of us, seeing as her two specialties were meatloaf with hard-boiled eggs squished inside, and liver.
    When my mother vetoed the kitchen, we traded our plates for compartmentalized aluminum trays. Out went homemade gray meats, in came Swanson’s Salisbury steak (with the superstar apple cobbler, which was the best dessert they had). If my mother was too tired to heat something up, heaping bowls of Technicolor cereals were served. Suburban nutrition in the seventies was a free-for-all. Health nuts existed, sure, but they were usually to the tune of your great-uncle grinding his own peanut butter or your weirdo art teacher trying to share the squares of carob she brought to school