Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

Author:Mary-Ann Tirone Smith [Smith, Mary-Ann Tirone]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2006-02-23T22:00:00+00:00

MID-DECEMBER DAYS grow dark within an hour and a half of our coming home from school. Now that Tyler sleeps until dinner time, I go outside and play a game of hide-and-seek with my friends, or we get out our roller skates and fly recklessly down the Nilan Street sidewalk leaping over the cracks until we reach Chandler. If there is—Oh happy day—snow, then we make a snowman, or have a snowball fight, or if there’s more than six inches, sled down the backyards of Nilan Street, starting between the lilac bushes in my yard, across Eddie’s backyard, across the Nelsons’, across my friend Joyce’s, and into Bobby Turner’s. Bobby is skinny and a victim of bullies; they call him T-bone Turner on an oil burner. We sledders must stop because of the hedge between the Turners’ and the next house down.

Beginning the day Miss Bowie gives us to understand that Irene is dead, the children in the neighborhood aren’t allowed to play outside except in their own yards, which means we aren’t allowed to play with each other.

The winter the body of my friend Irene is found in the Proccacinos’ yard, there will be no snow throughout December and it’s a good thing since we children are all trapped indoors.

On the day Irene’s body is found, I walk home with my Nilan Street friends from school and go in my door as my mother flies out to her car to drive to C.G. But on that day she speaks to me: Stay in the house, Mickey, and don’t go out.

My mother only knows the rumor that Irene is missing. The doors are not locked though, rumors being what they are. The power of positive thinking. The door will be locked tonight, however, when everyone will learn that Irene has been murdered.

I do not feel comfortable in my house. What is going on?

In the collective plan to pretend everything will be normal if we all act normal, parents refrain from walking us home from school, and mine even leave me alone in my house with my brother until my father arrives home from work.

I do not feel safe or unsafe in my house. What I feel is confused: What happened to Irene?

Today, of course, I would be counseled. In the fifties, revealing one’s thoughts and emotions is a sign of weakness and lack of maturity. And of course, complaining is verboten. Yet, the news of Irene’s murder is held until the children can get to their classrooms in order to hear that information from their teacher rather than each other. We are protected from the scandal of talking to each other about rumors while at the same time a killer is out there somewhere who can kill any one of us on the way to school.

Poor Kathy Delaney tried to kibitz with me, but beyond the ban on discussion of Irene, I am well trained in silence. Denial is my family’s religion, my brother Tyler our god, and the Reverend Dr.

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