From the Publisher

With beauty, power, and remarkable wit, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith interweaves a bittersweet portrait of growing up among the working stiffs of 1950s Hartford, Connecticut, with the chilling progress of a serial pedophile who threatens to shatter her small town's innocence. In Girls of Tender Age, Smith lovingly evokes the jubilance and chaos of life in her extended French-Italian family and the challenges of living with her brother Tyler, an autistic at a time before anyone knew what that meant. Hanging over Smith's rough-and-tumble youth is the shadow of the approaching killer who forever alters the landscape of her childhood.

The New York Times - Julia Scheeres

Smith's memoir is her attempt at catharsis, 50 years later. Like a sleuth from one of her own Poppy Rice mystery novels, she tracks down the microfilm version of The Hartford Courant, orders copies of her friend's autopsy report and studies the transcripts of Malm's trial. The result is a trenchant act of literary empowerment. It is also a character study, a look at one writer's formation: Smith's fans will learn how her life informs her fiction.

The Washington Post - Reeve Lindbaugh

Smith claims that in writing this book she hoped to "build a memorial to Irene." In fact, she has built a memorial to her brother, to her childhood and to the truth. With intelligence, disarming humor and deep affection for the families and the neighborhoods of the 1950s, Girls of Tender Age speaks eloquently on behalf of children and confronts the crippling silences that damage us in any era.

Publishers Weekly

The recovery of repressed memories of the 1953 murder by a serial killer of an 11-year-old friend and neighbor in a blue-collar enclave in Hartford, Conn., triggered Smith's absorbing memoir. In recalling her childhood, she is compelled to describe her upbringing in a fractured family whose existence centered on placating her older brother, Tyler, an autistic boy who couldn't bear sounds of any kind (crying, laughing, sneezing, dog barking). The narrative is further enriched by the author's investigations into the life and crimes of the psychopath who preyed on her friend and other little girls, and by her insights about the unequal rights of girls and women before feminism. The making of a writer is the subtext here; forbidden by her strict Catholic upbringing to question her parents, Smith was forced to develop her imagination. She was blessed with a nurturing father, who was the lifesaving antidote to her cold, selfish mother. Smith's ironic narrative voice, familiar to readers of her Poppy Rice mysteries and her sensitive and witty novels, serves her well. Larger than the sum of its parts, this book illuminates a social class as it recounts a tangled story of a family and a crime. Photos. Agent, Molly Friedrich. (Jan. 11) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Smith, author of the Poppy Rice series of mystery books (She's Not There), grew up in 1950s Hartford, CT, a place where people don't lock their doors. She had an autistic older brother and a mother perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Her story, a distinctly unsentimental view of life in a post-World War II working-class family, is interspersed with the story of Bob Malm, a serial pedophile who brutally murdered a fifth-grade classmate of hers in December 1953. The neighborhood children were forbidden to discuss this girl, Irene, who disappeared from their lives as if she had simply never existed; Smith literally forgot an entire year and a half of her own existence. Then an essay she wrote for the literary magazine of the Hartford Courant jogged her memory, prompting her to follow up on the trial and the murderer, reclaiming her lost time. The chapters on Malm cast a sinister shadow over other parts of the book, accentuating Smith's own lack of control over her odd upbringing. But the peace she finds in reconnecting with this local tragedy spills over into the rest of her life. This poignant memoir belongs in all collections.-Deirdre Bray Root, Middletown P.L., OH Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Smith (Love Her Madly, 2002, etc.) intertwines delightful stories from childhood with a grim chronicle of a sexual predator whose murder of the author's grade-school classmate has haunted her for decades. By alternating chapters on the pedophile stalker's sorry life with chapters on her youthful past, Smith creates almost unbearable tension as she makes the reader wait for the two stories' lines to intersect. Her vivid account of growing up in a working-class Italian Catholic neighborhood in Hartford, Conn., is filled with memorable characters: besides a raft of close relatives, there's her indifferent mother, perpetually "on the verge of a nervous breakdown," her hardworking, distracted father and her autistic older brother, who chews on his arm if he hears noise, cannot bear the color red or the word "Thursday" and is fixated on World War II-he advises the White House via his Campbell's soup-can phone. As the normal kid sister, Smith is largely overlooked, gulping swigs of Hershey syrup for her breakfast before dashing off to school. In fifth grade, everything changes when Bob Malm abducts and strangles 11-year-old Irene a few blocks from Smith's house. Adults try to protect the children through silence, telling them nothing, keeping newspapers from them and forbidding them to discuss Irene. Smith says her memories of the next two-and-a-half years are blank. Years later, when she is an established writer, she includes Irene's story in an essay for a Hartford literary journal that triggers a call from Irene's brother and launches her on a quest to, as she puts it, "build a memorial to Irene." From newspapers and court records, which she quotes extensively, she garners details of Malm'slife, of his trial and appeal and even his execution, an electrocution that went awry. The reader may not know Irene better, but Smith, who gives only glimpses of her own life after fifth grade, illuminates Malm. The childhood memories are great fun; the crime reporting workmanlike; the portrait of the adult relationships touching. Agent: Molly Friedrich/Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Forewords & Introductions
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Reading Group Guide

Girls of Tender Age Reading Group Guide

Written with great humor and tenderness, Girls of Tender Age combines an intimate family memoir with the tale of a community plagued by a horrifying crime. Mary-Ann Tirone Smith's Hartford neighborhood is small-town America, where everyone's door is unlocked and everything is within walking distance. Her loving family is peopled with memorable characters, but Smith's household was also "different" because her older brother, Tyler, was autistic before anyone knew what that meant. Unable to bear noise of any kind, Tyler was Mary-Ann's real-life Boo Radley.

Hanging over Smith's family is the sinister shadow of an approaching serial killer. The menacing Bob Malm lurks throughout this joyous and chaotic family portrait, and the havoc he unleashes when the paths of innocence and evil cross one early December evening in 1953 forever alters the landscape of Smith's childhood.

Reading group discussion questions

1. Mary-Ann's father's role as primary caretaker is established early in her life. On page 10 she tells the story of waking up too late to see her father before he goes to work. She cries, knowing that missing him "means a day without any attention whatsoever." What is her mother's reaction to Mary-Ann's tears? How do the parents' actions throughout the book reinforce your early impressions of them? Does either of them ever change? Does the way that Mary-Ann relates to them ever change?

2. The young Mary-Ann is "always looking for ways to be transported out of the bedlam that is my home" (55), yet as an adult she is saddened when the crying of her new baby means she must be "banished" from her parents'house. Discuss her conflicting needs to be both close and distant from her family at various points in her life.

3. Consider Mary-Ann's experiences with death prior to Irene's murder. What does she learn from each? What is the cumulative effect of the experiences — do they prepare her in any way to cope with the murder? How do they leave her unprepared?

4. Mary-Ann says that as a child, her "fear is related to the irrational — terror of the guillotine lopping off my feet, for example." (page 140) What are some of her other irrational childhood fears and what causes them? Do you see a pattern in the causes?

5. Language — written and spoken — plays an important part in the book. The lack of it harms Mary-Ann: "to this day, I sometimes mispronounce words because of the dearth of speech in my house." (page 58) But the written word provides her with escape, and the book itself brings her closure. What are some other examples of the significance of language in her life? What are some instances when words left unsaid are as powerful as those that are spoken?

6. Though Girls of Tender Age primarily focuses on the personal lives of the author and her family, it also reveals a great deal about small town communities and American culture in the 1950s. What is the town of Hartford like? What makes it distinctive from, or representative of, the rest of America? Discuss references the author makes to common 1950s attitudes or beliefs.

7. When Mary-Ann's professor tells her that her brother is not retarded, but autistic — an "idiot savant", she is surprised. Why do you think an alternate description of her brother never occurred to her? The professor describes life with Tyler as a "rigid, narrow grid" (page 158). Do you agree with this description? How does the nature of the "grid" change when Mary-Ann's mother goes back to work? When Tyler grows older?

8. In many ways, police procedures are more advanced today then they were in the 1950s...and in may ways they are not. How might Robert Malm's crimes have been handled differently today? Consider the police's actions after Malm's assault of Pidgie D'Allessio, the investigation of the crime scene after Irene's murder, and Pidgie's identification of Malm. How might the questioning of Fred Fiederowicz be handled differently today, or would it? Might the ploy to insinuate to Malm that he was the victim still be a police ploy? Do the police use trickery or lies to elicit a confession?

9. Robert Malm blames "the monster" inside of him for killing Irene, and the author writes that Tyler also had a monster: autism. Do you agree with the comparison? Do you think that Malm was rightly held accountable for his actions, or were they beyond his control, as Tyler's were? Does the author's choice to link her brother and the murderer who killed her friend surprise you? Why or why not?

10. Consider the notion of catharsis and what the author accomplishes by writing about Irene's death. Do you think she has, as she hoped, created a memorial for Irene? What has she achieved for herself by "filling in her gap"? What evidence can you find that writing is cathartic for her?

11. The author chose to include the definition of "tender" as the epigraph to her book. Discuss the significance of the title "Girls of Tender Age." Why do you think the author chose this title? How do you interpret it? Do you think that everyone is "of tender age" at some point?

12. Do you think autism is an epidemic today?

Enhance your reading group experience

1. Food connects and comforts the author and her family. Make the recipe for Pineapple Cream Pie included at the end of the book, eat slices of French bread spread with butter and topped with sliced radishes, or look up a recipe for bagna cauda on www.italianmade.com and serve it during your book group's meeting.

2. Create a mix CD of music mentioned in the book, such as "Love Me Tender," "I'll Never Smile Again," "My Blue Heaven," "The Sidewalks of New York," or other music from the era. You could also include Tyler's favorite — polka.

3. If you enjoyed Girls of Tender Age, consider reading another one of the author's books. Discuss notable features of her writing style and whether the books contain any similarities. Alternatively, choose another memoir about family and childhood with similar themes such as The Glass Castle, Angela's Ashes, The Liars Club, or Change Me Into Zeus's Daughter. Compare and contrast the voice, plot, and family dynamic.

4. Girls of Tender Age is filled with the author's family photos, but she notes that during the time her memories were repressed, her mother stopped taking photos. Have everyone in the group bring in a picture from their childhood that summons up a significant or poignant memory. Share your photos and stories and discuss the evocative power of photos and what they can and cannot preserve.

Forewords & Introductions

Girls of Tender Age Reading Group Guide

Written with great humor and tenderness, Girls of Tender Age combines an intimate family memoir with the tale of a community plagued by a horrifying crime. Mary-Ann Tirone Smith's Hartford neighborhood is small-town America, where everyone's door is unlocked and everything is within walking distance. Her loving family is peopled with memorable characters, but Smith's household was also "different" because her older brother, Tyler, was autistic before anyone knew what that meant. Unable to bear noise of any kind, Tyler was Mary-Ann's real-life Boo Radley.

Hanging over Smith's family is the sinister shadow of an approaching serial killer. The menacing Bob Malm lurks throughout this joyous and chaotic family portrait, and the havoc he unleashes when the paths of innocence and evil cross one early December evening in 1953 forever alters the landscape of Smith's childhood.

Reading group discussion questions

1. Mary-Ann's father's role as primary caretaker is established early in her life. On page 10 she tells the story of waking up too late to see her father before he goes to work. She cries, knowing that missing him "means a day without any attention whatsoever." What is her mother's reaction to Mary-Ann's tears? How do the parents' actions throughout the book reinforce your early impressions of them? Does either of them ever change? Does the way that Mary-Ann relates to them ever change?

2. The young Mary-Ann is "always looking for ways to be transported out of the bedlam that is my home" (55), yet as an adult she is saddened when the crying of her new baby means she must be "banished" from her parents'house. Discuss her conflicting needs to be both close and distant from her family at various points in her life.

3. Consider Mary-Ann's experiences with death prior to Irene's murder. What does she learn from each? What is the cumulative effect of the experiences — do they prepare her in any way to cope with the murder? How do they leave her unprepared?

4. Mary-Ann says that as a child, her "fear is related to the irrational — terror of the guillotine lopping off my feet, for example." (page 140) What are some of her other irrational childhood fears and what causes them? Do you see a pattern in the causes?

5. Language — written and spoken — plays an important part in the book. The lack of it harms Mary-Ann: "to this day, I sometimes mispronounce words because of the dearth of speech in my house." (page 58) But the written word provides her with escape, and the book itself brings her closure. What are some other examples of the significance of language in her life? What are some instances when words left unsaid are as powerful as those that are spoken?

6. Though Girls of Tender Age primarily focuses on the personal lives of the author and her family, it also reveals a great deal about small town communities and American culture in the 1950s. What is the town of Hartford like? What makes it distinctive from, or representative of, the rest of America? Discuss references the author makes to common 1950s attitudes or beliefs.

7. When Mary-Ann's professor tells her that her brother is not retarded, but autistic — an "idiot savant", she is surprised. Why do you think an alternate description of her brother never occurred to her? The professor describes life with Tyler as a "rigid, narrow grid" (page 158). Do you agree with this description? How does the nature of the "grid" change when Mary-Ann's mother goes back to work? When Tyler grows older?

8. In many ways, police procedures are more advanced today then they were in the 1950s...and in may ways they are not. How might Robert Malm's crimes have been handled differently today? Consider the police's actions after Malm's assault of Pidgie D'Allessio, the investigation of the crime scene after Irene's murder, and Pidgie's identification of Malm. How might the questioning of Fred Fiederowicz be handled differently today, or would it? Might the ploy to insinuate to Malm that he was the victim still be a police ploy? Do the police use trickery or lies to elicit a confession?

9. Robert Malm blames "the monster" inside of him for killing Irene, and the author writes that Tyler also had a monster: autism. Do you agree with the comparison? Do you think that Malm was rightly held accountable for his actions, or were they beyond his control, as Tyler's were? Does the author's choice to link her brother and the murderer who killed her friend surprise you? Why or why not?

10. Consider the notion of catharsis and what the author accomplishes by writing about Irene's death. Do you think she has, as she hoped, created a memorial for Irene? What has she achieved for herself by "filling in her gap"? What evidence can you find that writing is cathartic for her?

11. The author chose to include the definition of "tender" as the epigraph to her book. Discuss the significance of the title "Girls of Tender Age." Why do you think the author chose this title? How do you interpret it? Do you think that everyone is "of tender age" at some point?

12. Do you think autism is an epidemic today?

Enhance your reading group experience

1. Food connects and comforts the author and her family. Make the recipe for Pineapple Cream Pie included at the end of the book, eat slices of French bread spread with butter and topped with sliced radishes, or look up a recipe for bagna cauda on www.italianmade.com and serve it during your book group's meeting.

2. Create a mix CD of music mentioned in the book, such as "Love Me Tender," "I'll Never Smile Again," "My Blue Heaven," "The Sidewalks of New York," or other music from the era. You could also include Tyler's favorite — polka.

3. If you enjoyed Girls of Tender Age, consider reading another one of the author's books. Discuss notable features of her writing style and whether the books contain any similarities. Alternatively, choose another memoir about family and childhood with similar themes such as The Glass Castle, Angela's Ashes, The Liars Club, or Change Me Into Zeus's Daughter. Compare and contrast the voice, plot, and family dynamic.

4. Girls of Tender Age is filled with the author's family photos, but she notes that during the time her memories were repressed, her mother stopped taking photos. Have everyone in the group bring in a picture from their childhood that summons up a significant or poignant memory. Share your photos and stories and discuss the evocative power of photos and what they can and cannot preserve.

Read an Excerpt

Here is how my father describes our socioeconomic level: Working Stiffs.

We live in the D section of Charter Oak Terrace in Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford is a city where all manner of public buildings, bridges, restaurants, playgrounds, and gin mills are named after the oak tree where Captain Joseph Wadsworth hid the Charter of Independence granted by England in 1687. He hid it because England changed her mind. When James II assumed power, he sent an agent to seize it but the charter had gone missing and the agent didn't think to look in a squirrel's nest. Likely story.

Charter Oak Terrace was the first low-income housing project to be constructed in the United States. It was built for the GI's returning from war to give them a leg up while they put the Battle of the Bulge, Anzio, Bataan, and Corregidor behind them and looked for jobs. My father's brother-in-law, Uncle Guido, was a WWII veteran so he got to live there, and my father, who wasn't, got to live there because of his job making ball bearings for the war effort. Also because Uncle Guido had pull.

At D-106, we have a coal furnace in its own little room, an alcove black with soot, between the front door and the kitchen. Our furnace utilizes a primitive heating system consisting of aluminum pipes and ducts and a narrow chimney that carries fumes, gases, and grime out through the roof while providing fitful outbreaks of warmth to our kitchen, living room, and two bedrooms. The vents in the walls have an aureole of coal dust. These heating details differentiate us, Working Stiffs, from the truly impoverished, who also work, but at the most menial of jobs — pickingtobacco in the fields bordering the city's North End, sweeping factory floors, or risky jobs like running numbers. Their coal stoves have no alcove; they are in the kitchen.

The truly impoverished attach a rolled-up piece of sheet metal to their stoves that leads through a hole gouged out of the wall. Plus they gerry-rig hoses from the main shoot to bring heat into the other rooms. These hoses melt and then the houses catch fire and burn down.

Their children come to school with rags tied around their shaved heads because they have lice. The truly impoverished girl who sits next to me in first grade with her head wrapped in a rag has a name that intrigues me, Poo-Poo. When her house burns down, she moves to a new school district. Two days after she leaves, all the first-graders have lice. Since we're the children of Working Stiffs, not the truly impoverished, we don't have our heads shaved. Instead we are subject to foul-smelling shampoos, plus my mother combs my hair every night with a fine comb to remove the nits, which are lice eggs.

Got one! she goes, whereupon she carefully slides the nit out from the teeth of the comb and snaps it between her thumbnails.

Each morning my father fuels the furnace, shoveling coal into its belly as quietly as he can so as not to wake my mother, who is the prototype of the light sleeper. My mother can be wakened by the smell of cigarette smoke outside.

Yutchie, wake up. A prowler!

She's also awakened by Mrs. Alexander's radio even though it's late in the evening in the dead of winter and we're all sealed in tight with our coal dust. My mother can hear a field mouse in a nearby empty lot as well as Fluffy, the neighbor's cat, stalking it.

Later I will learn that fog comes on little cat feet. My mother can hear arriving fog too. Beyond that, she is just as easily awakened by the absence of sound; one spring night the freight train barreling through Hartford like clockwork at 2 A.M. doesn't send forth its dull blast at the Flatbush Avenue crossing three miles from D-106 at the northeast corner of Charter Oak Terrace. That's because it never reaches Flatbush Avenue.

She rouses my father. Yutchie, wake up! The train has crashed.

My father calls my Uncle Norbert, my mother's youngest brother, who is a fireman.

Early the next morning Uncle Norbert drops in.

What do you mean, Florence? he says to my mother. You couldn't have heard the crash. The goddamn train derailed in Meriden! (Meriden is twenty-five miles away.)

She says, I didn't hear the crash. What I heard was the train's horn not blast (which it always does when it crosses Flatbush).

My father says to my Uncle Norbert, How about a short one?

Word is that my mother has psychic powers based on her placement in her family of fourteen. She is the seventh daughter. When I ask my Auntie Coranna, the sixth daughter, what psychic powers are, Auntie Coranna says it's when people can see and hear what the rest of us can't. A devout Catholic, my mother eschews such nonsense. But the night the train derails in Meriden there is fire and destruction and death too, because in Meriden the train tracks run right down the middle of Main Street. Being a psychic, no matter that she denies it, is it any wonder she woke up?

Ten years later, my Uncle Eddie, my mother's brother born between her and Uncle Norbert, is staggering home from Alphone's Bar and Grill and is hit by the 2 A.M. train when he passes out on the tracks at the Flatbush Avenue crossing. The engineer never sees him, never applies his brakes, so my mother doesn't hear the train coming to a screeching halt, which would have really woken her up.

At six each morning, I force myself to open my eyes and climb out of my crib in the corner of my parents' bedroom, where I experience many horrific nightmares probably due to the sounds of sex a few feet away and my, no doubt, witnessing the shadowy tussles in the dark. When my father hears me whimpering, he comes over to the crib and says, You're having a nightmare, Mick. (My nickname is Mickey though I am a girl.) Go back to sleep.

He brings me a glass of water.

At 6 A.M., I scramble downstairs, take a right through the kitchen, and sit on a little rug by the front door in order to watch my father perform his daily, cold-weather ritual: he takes up a shovel leaning against the wall of the alcove and heaves coal out of a three-sided metal bin and into the fading pink interior of the furnace until its gaping black maw magically blooms into a wildly crimson glow. Then a tiny lick of flame leaps up above the coals signaling the end to my father's chore. The red glow is the most beautiful, most ethereal image that exists in my life. Sitting and watching, I think that if Our Lady ever appears to me (all little Catholic children are insanely envious of the children of Fatima) it won't be in a bush, it will be in our incantatory furnace.

When my father is finished shoveling coal, he gives me a piece of toast from the toaster on the kitchen floor. There is no counter space in our kitchen to speak of, just a sink against the wall and a white metal table next to it with one drawer packed tightly with Raleigh coupons. One day, I lean against the hot toaster acquired via Raleigh coupons and the first three letters of the name WEAREVER are branded onto the back of my calf. I am four and starting to read. WEA I know, is not a word. The toaster burn is my first memory of pain. I gag and press my hands to my mouth as I leap away from the toaster.

My mother says to my father, Look at what you've done!

This is the chronic response to crisis in my family. First, there can be no cry. That is because of Tyler. Tyler is my brother, five years older. We are all half-mad because my brother is autistic at a time when no one has ever heard of autism. (Today it is rampant.) Tyler cannot stand noise, which includes crying out or, in fact, just plain crying. The agony he feels when he hears such noise is extreme; when that pain comes, he bites his wrist. He grasps his left hand in his right and gnaws away like he's devouring a drumstick. He squeals hideously while he does this. His left wrist is covered by a thick, often oozing, callous. People will do terrible things to satisfy their compulsions and in Tyler's case, he does them to himself.

There is no one in the United States with the name Tyler except my brother. His name, like autism, is also rampant today. But then, my mother was psychic.

The second response to crisis follows immediately upon the heels of the first; my mother assigns blame and then won't forgive the guilty party even if it means carrying a grudge to the grave.

The third response is for her to light up a Raleigh then light up a second while stamping out the first until the ash tray is overflowing.

Until I am in first grade, I have no idea that when you are hurt, some people have the urge to hug and comfort you. In the first grade, my fingers get caught in the girls' lavatory door and my teacher, Miss Wells, takes me in her arms and hugs me to her big bosom. I don't understand what this is, a body surrounding mine, pressing sympathy from one heart into another. But my mother is the prototype of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

That is what I hear my aunts say to each other: Florence is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They are familiar with such verging because it is the fifties when women were either on the verge or actually having one. Two of my aunts have nervous breakdowns themselves. When I am five, my Auntie Mary, my mother's only unmarried sister, has a nervous breakdown and then gets shock treatments after which she comes and lives with us for three months. She sleeps on a cot in the living room. My Auntie Kekkie has one too; first she goes missing and then my father's brother, Uncle Johnnie, finds her behind the furnace and she won't come out. He calls my father to come help. My father assesses the situation and calls for a doctor. The doctor sends my father and Uncle Johnnie out for all the ice they can get. Then he has them dump the ice in the bathtub, add cold water almost to the top, whereupon my aunt is wrestled into the tub and submerged. (Perhaps there wasn't such a thing as a shot of tranquilizer back then.) Once subdued, Auntie Kekkie goes to the hospital and comes back a month later all better.

As young as I am, when I am burned by the toaster I know it isn't my father's fault. I know it isn't anyone's fault. It's the toaster's fault and the toaster didn't do it on purpose because it's an appliance. After I'm burned, my father smears the WEA on my calf with Vaseline and then he makes me smile by lighting up a Dutch Masters and blowing smoke rings into which I carefully insert my index finger. His record is six smoke rings from one inhalation on the cigar. Sometimes, a friend will give him a special treat, a cigar from Havana. He passes all his exotic cigar bands along to me for my treasure box, which is actually a humidor distributed on the fiftieth anniversary of the Dutch Masters Company. I think the picture on the humidor — a lot of men in a jolly group and sporting pointy beards — are Jesus's apostles only wearing pilgrim suits.

My father tells me the girl and boy on my prize Havana band are Romeo and Juliet.

He says, In Cuban, Mickey, that's Romeo y Julieta.

He tells me his rendition of the Shakespeare tragedy except he changes the ending and Romeo and Juliet get married and live happily ever after. I picture them dancing the polka at their wedding. I pretend my name is Juliet. After all, I have an uncle named Romeo, one of my mother's brothers. When I'm an adult, I watch Dick Schaap interview Joe Namath on TV. Dick asks Joe what movies he's seen recently. Joe says, Some broad dragged me to see Romeo and Juliet. I didn't like it.

Why? asks Dick.

Because it was so sad.

There's a pause, and then Dick asks, You didn't know how it would end, did you, Joe?

No.

Poor Joe. Poor me; when I read the play in high school, I figure I know how it will end, my father's version.

A few days after I am burned by the toaster, I am sitting in the closet with a flashlight aimed at my leg, enjoying the delicious solitary pleasure of peeling the paper-thin scab off my skin. I look at the pieces of scab in the palm of my hand. They are me, but they are no longer me, a phenomenon I wonder at. I save the scab in my humidor. For the next few days I will have raw pink letters on my leg — WEA.

Each morning after my father stokes the furnace, I stand in the doorway and wave good-bye to him. He drives off in his black Ford coupe to the factory where he will keep many furnaces stoked all at once. He is a heat treater in the hardening room. The factory, the Abbott Ball Company, turns out millions of ball bearings punched from steel wire an inch in diameter, which are heat-treated in the furnaces and then polished to a high shine in huge vats of teeming chemicals, where they bounce up and down like Mexican jumping beans.

The Abbott Ball Company also produces ball bearings the size of poppy seeds punched from twenty-four-karat gold wire the diameter of a silk thread. My godmother, Auntie Doris, works at the Abbott Ball Company as an inspector. When she has to inspect the tiny gold ball bearings, she must be guarded and then inspected herself. The inspector knows Auntie Doris isn't a thief, but all the same he has to check very carefully under her fingernails, where the ball bearings might lodge without her even knowing it.

Auntie Doris studied opera when she was a girl. At all our family weddings she sings the "Ave Maria." (For my wedding, I ask her to sing the Miriam Makeba hit, "Kumbaya"; I have returned from Peace Corps service in an African country and I think it's an appropriate choice. But Auntie Doris sings the "Ave Maria.") As a child, I am convinced my godmother is an actual angel with her golden voice and the stray golden seeds lodged beneath her nails.

Auntie Doris is actually my cousin, but she is twenty years older than me so I think she is my aunt. No one corrects this. I do not know that she is my mother's oldest sister's daughter. My mother's oldest sister, Auntie Verna, whose real name was Zephyrina, died of breast cancer when she was in her early forties. My Auntie Mary, who is sister number three, tells me Verna was in so much pain she would lie on the floor and ask family members to jump on her. The pain of being jumped on is bearable while the cancer pain is not; the former takes her mind off the latter. I understand, then, why Tyler bites his wrist.

I stand in the doorway and wave good-bye to my father until I can't see his black Ford anymore. One day, when I am three years old, I stand in the doorway whimpering because I do not manage to wake myself up in time to watch him feed the stove, or feed me my piece of toast, or worst of all, wave good-bye. He is gone and I must face the day without the ritual of his attention, which means a day without any attention whatsoever. It's winter, and my mother comes downstairs with a sweater wrapped around her.

Mickey, get in here and shut the door.

I don't move.

Get in here, Mary-Ann! She calls me Mary-Ann instead of Mickey when she is angry.

I still don't move. I am hoping my father forgot something and will come back and I don't want to take a chance of missing him. But it must be a morning when my mother is especially close to the verge of a nervous breakdown because she grabs my hand and yanks me in the door so hard my upper arm breaks. This is a pain I don't remember.

What I do remember is my mother standing in the doctor's office arguing with him that my arm is broken.

He keeps saying, You can't break a child's arm by yanking her by the hand.

My mother says, I'm telling you, I heard it snap.

The broken arm is suddenly his fault. That is, until my father arrives, running into the examining room, Freddie Ravenel right behind him. Freddie is the colored man my father hired to sweep the floors at the Abbott Ball Company. The first colored man ever hired there. My father says on many occasions, Freddie Ravenel is the best man I've got. When my father becomes foreman, he promotes Freddie to stoker. My father's real name is Maurice, which his family pronounces Morris, but everyone calls him Yutch. Freddie Ravenel, though, insists on calling him Mr. Mawse because Freddie feels it's a due respect and my father can't convince him otherwise.

Freddie is so grateful for the job he is devoted to my father. When the news of my broken arm reaches the Abbott Ball Company, Freddie insists on driving my father to the doctor's office because he can see how upset my father is.

My mother's arms are folded across her chest. She says to my father, You didn't wave good-bye to her.

This is her explanation of how my arm came to be broken. I won't be waving good-bye to my father for some time. At least not with my right arm.

The doctor quits arguing with my mother and takes an X ray. Then he mixes a pot of plaster of paris. (In those days, there was no such thing as going to a specialist in orthopedics.) While he is soaking the strips of gauze, he is distracted by my brother, who is drawing a line of B-52s on the examining room wall.

The doctor turns to my mother. Can you not do something about that?

My mother says to my father, You do something.

Freddie Ravenel, like everyone else, knows my mother is on the verge of a nervous breakdown so he goes to my brother and says, Tyler, come stand over here by Freddie. Doctor say not to draw on his wall.

Tyler looks up in the vicinity of Freddie Ravenel, not directly into his eyes because that is something autistic people are unable to do, smiles his perfect Cheshire grin, and says, Blackie.

He loves Freddie Ravenel, who rolls his eyes, slaps his knee, and laughs heartily. Then Freddie Ravenel says to me, Don't you worry, Junior Miss, you be fine.

His words have a similar effect to Miss Wells's hug.

When I'm an adult attending a dinner party, I'm sitting next to a specialist from Yale-New Haven Hospital, a child abuse expert. He is one of the doctors who determines that Woody Allen's behavior toward his three-year-old daughter is inappropriate rather than sexually abusive. I find myself telling him about my mother breaking my arm.

He says to me, It's an accident when a child is yanked and her wrist breaks. But the humerus? You were treated very roughly. Today, that injury would be categorized as a direct result of physical abuse. The physician would be required by law to notify the police.

I say, My mother didn't really mean to break my arm.

He says, Oh?

She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

He's quiet and then he says, No intent then?

That's right.

He says, A nervous breakdown isn't a clinical term. In most cases, it's a psychotic episode of paranoia.

Really?

Yes, but the lay term conveys what a lay person might observe in the patient.

Then he says, Was it a wake-up call for your mother? Injuring you like that?

Yes.

She never hurt you again?

She never laid a hand on me.

He says, Sometimes, that's the case. I'm glad. He pauses before he says, Did she have a nervous breakdown?

No.

I'm glad for that, too. Then he says, My own mother had a ner-

vous breakdown.

I say, Did you find her behind the furnace?

No. Up in the apple tree.

I'm sorry.

Thank you.

I don't explain to the doctor the reason my mother is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Explaining Tyler would overly monopolize the man and he wouldn't be able to speak to the woman on his right.

When Tyler is eight and I am three, sporting a cast from hand to shoulder, he has over five hundred books on the subject of WWII because he is obsessed with the war; his books cover battles, defense, weaponry. My mother says to the child psychiatrist at the Boston Children's Hospital, who deems him retarded, If he's retarded, how come he's reading Arms and the Covenant by Mr. Winston Churchill?

The doctor gives her a withering look. But my mother will not wither. She raises her chin and storms out of the child psychiatrist's office. This is how she fights people, storming out on them because, of course, she's powerless.

My mother learns she is powerless as a young woman at the Aetna Life Insurance Company where she is successful at a difficult job — processing data at a time when it is accomplished with a pencil. But this is during the Great Depression and the rule is that female employees are immediately fired upon marrying. Married men need work to support their families; how selfish for a woman to take up a job merely for frivolity.

However, when my mother is about to get married she is asked to keep the marriage a secret because the championship Aetna girls' basketball team is undefeated and they have been asked to take part in an exhibition game against the girls' Olympic basketball team. My mother, a fine athlete and the youngest member of a national championship bowling team, is Aetna's center, which today would translate to point guard. My mother agrees to keep her marriage a secret and gets to play in the big game. The center for the Olympic team is Babe Didrikson. The Aetna girls win. (Connecticut girls have been playing great basketball for a long, long time.)

Then my mother is fired.

Copyright © 2006 by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

Read a Sample Chapter

Girls of Tender Age

Free Press

Here is how my father describes our socioeconomic level: Working Stiffs.

We live in the D section of Charter Oak Terrace in Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford is a city where all manner of public buildings, bridges, restaurants, playgrounds, and gin mills are named after the oak tree where Captain Joseph Wadsworth hid the Charter of Independence granted by England in 1687. He hid it because England changed her mind. When James II assumed power, he sent an agent to seize it but the charter had gone missing and the agent didn't think to look in a squirrel's nest. Likely story.

Charter Oak Terrace was the first low-income housing project to be constructed in the United States. It was built for the GI's returning from war to give them a leg up while they put the Battle of the Bulge, Anzio, Bataan, and Corregidor behind them and looked for jobs. My father's brother-in-law, Uncle Guido, was a WWII veteran so he got to live there, and my father, who wasn't, got to live there because of his job making ball bearings for the war effort. Also because Uncle Guido had pull.

At D-106, we have a coal furnace in its own little room, an alcove black with soot, between the front door and the kitchen. Our furnace utilizes a primitive heating system consisting of aluminum pipes and ducts and a narrow chimney that carries fumes, gases, and grime out through the roof while providing fitful outbreaks of warmth to our kitchen, living room, and two bedrooms. The vents in the walls have an aureole of coal dust. These heating details differentiate us, Working Stiffs, from the truly impoverished, who also work, but at the most menial of jobs -- picking tobacco in the fields bordering the city's North End, sweeping factory floors, or risky jobs like running numbers. Their coal stoves have no alcove; they are in the kitchen.

The truly impoverished attach a rolled-up piece of sheet metal to their stoves that leads through a hole gouged out of the wall. Plus they gerry-rig hoses from the main shoot to bring heat into the other rooms. These hoses melt and then the houses catch fire and burn down.

Their children come to school with rags tied around their shaved heads because they have lice. The truly impoverished girl who sits next to me in first grade with her head wrapped in a rag has a name that intrigues me, Poo-Poo. When her house burns down, she moves to a new school district. Two days after she leaves, all the first-graders have lice. Since we're the children of Working Stiffs, not the truly impoverished, we don't have our heads shaved. Instead we are subject to foul-smelling shampoos, plus my mother combs my hair every night with a fine comb to remove the nits, which are lice eggs.

Got one! she goes, whereupon she carefully slides the nit out from the teeth of the comb and snaps it between her thumbnails.

Each morning my father fuels the furnace, shoveling coal into its belly as quietly as he can so as not to wake my mother, who is the prototype of the light sleeper. My mother can be wakened by the smell of cigarette smoke outside.

Yutchie, wake up. A prowler!

She's also awakened by Mrs. Alexander's radio even though it's late in the evening in the dead of winter and we're all sealed in tight with our coal dust. My mother can hear a field mouse in a nearby empty lot as well as Fluffy, the neighbor's cat, stalking it.

Later I will learn that fog comes on little cat feet. My mother can hear arriving fog too. Beyond that, she is just as easily awakened by the absence of sound; one spring night the freight train barreling through Hartford like clockwork at 2 A.M. doesn't send forth its dull blast at the Flatbush Avenue crossing three miles from D-106 at the northeast corner of Charter Oak Terrace. That's because it never reaches Flatbush Avenue.

She rouses my father. Yutchie, wake up! The train has crashed.

My father calls my Uncle Norbert, my mother's youngest brother, who is a fireman.

Early the next morning Uncle Norbert drops in.

What do you mean, Florence? he says to my mother. You couldn't have heard the crash. The goddamn train derailed in Meriden! (Meriden is twenty-five miles away.)

She says, I didn't hear the crash. What I heard was the train's horn not blast (which it always does when it crosses Flatbush).

My father says to my Uncle Norbert, How about a short one?

Word is that my mother has psychic powers based on her placement in her family of fourteen. She is the seventh daughter. When I ask my Auntie Coranna, the sixth daughter, what psychic powers are, Auntie Coranna says it's when people can see and hear what the rest of us can't. A devout Catholic, my mother eschews such nonsense. But the night the train derails in Meriden there is fire and destruction and death too, because in Meriden the train tracks run right down the middle of Main Street. Being a psychic, no matter that she denies it, is it any wonder she woke up?

Ten years later, my Uncle Eddie, my mother's brother born between her and Uncle Norbert, is staggering home from Alphone's Bar and Grill and is hit by the 2 A.M. train when he passes out on the tracks at the Flatbush Avenue crossing. The engineer never sees him, never applies his brakes, so my mother doesn't hear the train coming to a screeching halt, which would have really woken her up.

At six each morning, I force myself to open my eyes and climb out of my crib in the corner of my parents' bedroom, where I experience many horrific nightmares probably due to the sounds of sex a few feet away and my, no doubt, witnessing the shadowy tussles in the dark. When my father hears me whimpering, he comes over to the crib and says, You're having a nightmare, Mick. (My nickname is Mickey though I am a girl.) Go back to sleep.

He brings me a glass of water.

At 6 A.M., I scramble downstairs, take a right through the kitchen, and sit on a little rug by the front door in order to watch my father perform his daily, cold-weather ritual: he takes up a shovel leaning against the wall of the alcove and heaves coal out of a three-sided metal bin and into the fading pink interior of the furnace until its gaping black maw magically blooms into a wildly crimson glow. Then a tiny lick of flame leaps up above the coals signaling the end to my father's chore. The red glow is the most beautiful, most ethereal image that exists in my life. Sitting and watching, I think that if Our Lady ever appears to me (all little Catholic children are insanely envious of the children of Fatima) it won't be in a bush, it will be in our incantatory furnace.

When my father is finished shoveling coal, he gives me a piece of toast from the toaster on the kitchen floor. There is no counter space in our kitchen to speak of, just a sink against the wall and a white metal table next to it with one drawer packed tightly with Raleigh coupons. One day, I lean against the hot toaster acquired via Raleigh coupons and the first three letters of the name WEAREVER are branded onto the back of my calf. I am four and starting to read. WEA I know, is not a word. The toaster burn is my first memory of pain. I gag and press my hands to my mouth as I leap away from the toaster.

My mother says to my father, Look at what you've done!

This is the chronic response to crisis in my family. First, there can be no cry. That is because of Tyler. Tyler is my brother, five years older. We are all half-mad because my brother is autistic at a time when no one has ever heard of autism. (Today it is rampant.) Tyler cannot stand noise, which includes crying out or, in fact, just plain crying. The agony he feels when he hears such noise is extreme; when that pain comes, he bites his wrist. He grasps his left hand in his right and gnaws away like he's devouring a drumstick. He squeals hideously while he does this. His left wrist is covered by a thick, often oozing, callous. People will do terrible things to satisfy their compulsions and in Tyler's case, he does them to himself.

There is no one in the United States with the name Tyler except my brother. His name, like autism, is also rampant today. But then, my mother was psychic.

The second response to crisis follows immediately upon the heels of the first; my mother assigns blame and then won't forgive the guilty party even if it means carrying a grudge to the grave.

The third response is for her to light up a Raleigh then light up a second while stamping out the first until the ash tray is overflowing.

Until I am in first grade, I have no idea that when you are hurt, some people have the urge to hug and comfort you. In the first grade, my fingers get caught in the girls' lavatory door and my teacher, Miss Wells, takes me in her arms and hugs me to her big bosom. I don't understand what this is, a body surrounding mine, pressing sympathy from one heart into another. But my mother is the prototype of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

That is what I hear my aunts say to each other: Florence is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They are familiar with such verging because it is the fifties when women were either on the verge or actually having one. Two of my aunts have nervous breakdowns themselves. When I am five, my Auntie Mary, my mother's only unmarried sister, has a nervous breakdown and then gets shock treatments after which she comes and lives with us for three months. She sleeps on a cot in the living room. My Auntie Kekkie has one too; first she goes missing and then my father's brother, Uncle Johnnie, finds her behind the furnace and she won't come out. He calls my father to come help. My father assesses the situation and calls for a doctor. The doctor sends my father and Uncle Johnnie out for all the ice they can get. Then he has them dump the ice in the bathtub, add cold water almost to the top, whereupon my aunt is wrestled into the tub and submerged. (Perhaps there wasn't such a thing as a shot of tranquilizer back then.) Once subdued, Auntie Kekkie goes to the hospital and comes back a month later all better.

As young as I am, when I am burned by the toaster I know it isn't my father's fault. I know it isn't anyone's fault. It's the toaster's fault and the toaster didn't do it on purpose because it's an appliance. After I'm burned, my father smears the WEA on my calf with Vaseline and then he makes me smile by lighting up a Dutch Masters and blowing smoke rings into which I carefully insert my index finger. His record is six smoke rings from one inhalation on the cigar. Sometimes, a friend will give him a special treat, a cigar from Havana. He passes all his exotic cigar bands along to me for my treasure box, which is actually a humidor distributed on the fiftieth anniversary of the Dutch Masters Company. I think the picture on the humidor -- a lot of men in a jolly group and sporting pointy beards -- are Jesus's apostles only wearing pilgrim suits.

My father tells me the girl and boy on my prize Havana band are Romeo and Juliet.

He says, In Cuban, Mickey, that's Romeo y Julieta.

He tells me his rendition of the Shakespeare tragedy except he changes the ending and Romeo and Juliet get married and live happily ever after. I picture them dancing the polka at their wedding. I pretend my name is Juliet. After all, I have an uncle named Romeo, one of my mother's brothers. When I'm an adult, I watch Dick Schaap interview Joe Namath on TV. Dick asks Joe what movies he's seen recently. Joe says, Some broad dragged me to see Romeo and Juliet. I didn't like it.

Why? asks Dick.

Because it was so sad.

There's a pause, and then Dick asks, You didn't know how it would end, did you, Joe?

No.

Poor Joe. Poor me; when I read the play in high school, I figure I know how it will end, my father's version.

A few days after I am burned by the toaster, I am sitting in the closet with a flashlight aimed at my leg, enjoying the delicious solitary pleasure of peeling the paper-thin scab off my skin. I look at the pieces of scab in the palm of my hand. They are me, but they are no longer me, a phenomenon I wonder at. I save the scab in my humidor. For the next few days I will have raw pink letters on my leg -- WEA.

Each morning after my father stokes the furnace, I stand in the doorway and wave good-bye to him. He drives off in his black Ford coupe to the factory where he will keep many furnaces stoked all at once. He is a heat treater in the hardening room. The factory, the Abbott Ball Company, turns out millions of ball bearings punched from steel wire an inch in diameter, which are heat-treated in the furnaces and then polished to a high shine in huge vats of teeming chemicals, where they bounce up and down like Mexican jumping beans.

The Abbott Ball Company also produces ball bearings the size of poppy seeds punched from twenty-four-karat gold wire the diameter of a silk thread. My godmother, Auntie Doris, works at the Abbott Ball Company as an inspector. When she has to inspect the tiny gold ball bearings, she must be guarded and then inspected herself. The inspector knows Auntie Doris isn't a thief, but all the same he has to check very carefully under her fingernails, where the ball bearings might lodge without her even knowing it.

Auntie Doris studied opera when she was a girl. At all our family weddings she sings the "Ave Maria." (For my wedding, I ask her to sing the Miriam Makeba hit, "Kumbaya"; I have returned from Peace Corps service in an African country and I think it's an appropriate choice. But Auntie Doris sings the "Ave Maria.") As a child, I am convinced my godmother is an actual angel with her golden voice and the stray golden seeds lodged beneath her nails.

Auntie Doris is actually my cousin, but she is twenty years older than me so I think she is my aunt. No one corrects this. I do not know that she is my mother's oldest sister's daughter. My mother's oldest sister, Auntie Verna, whose real name was Zephyrina, died of breast cancer when she was in her early forties. My Auntie Mary, who is sister number three, tells me Verna was in so much pain she would lie on the floor and ask family members to jump on her. The pain of being jumped on is bearable while the cancer pain is not; the former takes her mind off the latter. I understand, then, why Tyler bites his wrist.

I stand in the doorway and wave good-bye to my father until I can't see his black Ford anymore. One day, when I am three years old, I stand in the doorway whimpering because I do not manage to wake myself up in time to watch him feed the stove, or feed me my piece of toast, or worst of all, wave good-bye. He is gone and I must face the day without the ritual of his attention, which means a day without any attention whatsoever. It's winter, and my mother comes downstairs with a sweater wrapped around her.

Mickey, get in here and shut the door.

I don't move.

Get in here, Mary-Ann! She calls me Mary-Ann instead of Mickey when she is angry.

I still don't move. I am hoping my father forgot something and will come back and I don't want to take a chance of missing him. But it must be a morning when my mother is especially close to the verge of a nervous breakdown because she grabs my hand and yanks me in the door so hard my upper arm breaks. This is a pain I don't remember.

What I do remember is my mother standing in the doctor's office arguing with him that my arm is broken.

He keeps saying, You can't break a child's arm by yanking her by the hand.

My mother says, I'm telling you, I heard it snap.

The broken arm is suddenly his fault. That is, until my father arrives, running into the examining room, Freddie Ravenel right behind him. Freddie is the colored man my father hired to sweep the floors at the Abbott Ball Company. The first colored man ever hired there. My father says on many occasions, Freddie Ravenel is the best man I've got. When my father becomes foreman, he promotes Freddie to stoker. My father's real name is Maurice, which his family pronounces Morris, but everyone calls him Yutch. Freddie Ravenel, though, insists on calling him Mr. Mawse because Freddie feels it's a due respect and my father can't convince him otherwise.

Freddie is so grateful for the job he is devoted to my father. When the news of my broken arm reaches the Abbott Ball Company, Freddie insists on driving my father to the doctor's office because he can see how upset my father is.

My mother's arms are folded across her chest. She says to my father, You didn't wave good-bye to her.

This is her explanation of how my arm came to be broken. I won't be waving good-bye to my father for some time. At least not with my right arm.

The doctor quits arguing with my mother and takes an X ray. Then he mixes a pot of plaster of paris. (In those days, there was no such thing as going to a specialist in orthopedics.) While he is soaking the strips of gauze, he is distracted by my brother, who is drawing a line of B-52s on the examining room wall.

The doctor turns to my mother. Can you not do something about that?

My mother says to my father, You do something.

Freddie Ravenel, like everyone else, knows my mother is on the verge of a nervous breakdown so he goes to my brother and says, Tyler, come stand over here by Freddie. Doctor say not to draw on his wall.

Tyler looks up in the vicinity of Freddie Ravenel, not directly into his eyes because that is something autistic people are unable to do, smiles his perfect Cheshire grin, and says, Blackie.

He loves Freddie Ravenel, who rolls his eyes, slaps his knee, and laughs heartily. Then Freddie Ravenel says to me, Don't you worry, Junior Miss, you be fine.

His words have a similar effect to Miss Wells's hug.

When I'm an adult attending a dinner party, I'm sitting next to a specialist from Yale-New Haven Hospital, a child abuse expert. He is one of the doctors who determines that Woody Allen's behavior toward his three-year-old daughter is inappropriate rather than sexually abusive. I find myself telling him about my mother breaking my arm.

He says to me, It's an accident when a child is yanked and her wrist breaks. But the humerus? You were treated very roughly. Today, that injury would be categorized as a direct result of physical abuse. The physician would be required by law to notify the police.

I say, My mother didn't really mean to break my arm.

He says, Oh?

She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

He's quiet and then he says, No intent then?

That's right.

He says, A nervous breakdown isn't a clinical term. In most cases, it's a psychotic episode of paranoia.

Really?

Yes, but the lay term conveys what a lay person might observe in the patient.

Then he says, Was it a wake-up call for your mother? Injuring you like that?

Yes.

She never hurt you again?

She never laid a hand on me.

He says, Sometimes, that's the case. I'm glad. He pauses before he says, Did she have a nervous breakdown?

No.

I'm glad for that, too. Then he says, My own mother had a ner-

vous breakdown.

I say, Did you find her behind the furnace?

No. Up in the apple tree.

I'm sorry.

Thank you.

I don't explain to the doctor the reason my mother is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Explaining Tyler would overly monopolize the man and he wouldn't be able to speak to the woman on his right.

When Tyler is eight and I am three, sporting a cast from hand to shoulder, he has over five hundred books on the subject of WWII because he is obsessed with the war; his books cover battles, defense, weaponry. My mother says to the child psychiatrist at the Boston Children's Hospital, who deems him retarded, If he's retarded, how come he's reading Arms and the Covenant by Mr. Winston Churchill?

The doctor gives her a withering look. But my mother will not wither. She raises her chin and storms out of the child psychiatrist's office. This is how she fights people, storming out on them because, of course, she's powerless.

My mother learns she is powerless as a young woman at the Aetna Life Insurance Company where she is successful at a difficult job -- processing data at a time when it is accomplished with a pencil. But this is during the Great Depression and the rule is that female employees are immediately fired upon marrying. Married men need work to support their families; how selfish for a woman to take up a job merely for frivolity.

However, when my mother is about to get married she is asked to keep the marriage a secret because the championship Aetna girls' basketball team is undefeated and they have been asked to take part in an exhibition game against the girls' Olympic basketball team. My mother, a fine athlete and the youngest member of a national championship bowling team, is Aetna's center, which today would translate to point guard. My mother agrees to keep her marriage a secret and gets to play in the big game. The center for the Olympic team is Babe Didrikson. The Aetna girls win. (Connecticut girls have been playing great basketball for a long, long time.)

Then my mother is fired.

Copyright © 2006 by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

Continues...

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Excerpted from Girls of Tender Age by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith Copyright © 2005 by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith. Excerpted by permission.
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