“Come on,” he said, as we walked through the lobby and stood under the awning outside our apartment building on West 76th Street. “Ya neva was there. Try it! Maybe ya’ll like it.”

I made another face. But to humor him, I said, “Okay, but just for a little while. You know I hate the Ansonia!”

“Ya won’t feel like yer in the Ansonia.”

A little while later when we walked downstairs to the small empty gym in that huge basement--where the gay sex club Continental Baths, then the swingers club Plato’s Retreat would be located--I looked around at the exercise equipment and said, “This place looks like a dungeon!”

The only things I recognized were bikes and barbells.

“Here, why don’ ya sit down on this one,” he said.

I suppose he chose this particular barrel-shaped machine because it was nearby and required no effort on my part. This fat jiggling device had rotating rollers. Each roller had a row of hardwood balls that hurt as they “massaged” my butt and thighs.

“This is stupid!” I said, holding on to the wooden handles at the sides. I didn’t like my father looking at me while I jiggled. His looking didn’t feel fatherly. But I couldn’t even formulate that thought then. It existed within me in a wordless sort of way.

I was far from fat but I thought my body was developing much too rapidly. That was much worse than being fat! Why can’t I stay flat-chested like some of the girls in my 6th grade class? I wondered. My body embarrassed me. Embarrassed? Who am I kidding? The word “embarrassed” doesn’t begin to describe the shame I felt about my burgeoning breasts and hips. It would take many years for me to recognize how lovely my face and figure were in snapshots taken at that time.

In my father’s health club, when I saw the look of approval on his face, I closed my eyes tight so I couldn't see him. He stood at least a yard away. With my eyes shut, I still felt him looking at me. Is it possible the look I had seen in his eyes was innocent? Is it possible his smile merely expressed his delight at seeing me exercise? Maybe so, but that doesn’t mitigate my excruciating shame.

Every day my body seemed to grow softer, rounder, fuller. Every day my body looked more like my mother’s. What could be worse! I thought, disgusted. More than anything, I wanted to forget I had a body. If I’d been given a choice, I would’ve opted not to have one at all.

Years later, some doctors claimed that internal organs were damaged from too much “jiggling” though recently in my quest on the internet, I discovered a few people who still covet the vintage machine I used in 1956.

“Turn this thing off!” I said, angrily.

Flipping the switch, my father said, “Ya gotta exercise to be healt’y an’ strong,” as though I was still seven years old. He didn’t know what to say to a daughter in puberty.

Roberta Allen is the author of eight books and a visual artist who has exhibited worldwide, with work in the collection of The Met. Allen has just completed a memoir about her family called DIRTY GIRL. She also teaches Micro Memoirs at The New School and conducts private writing workshops. Her website is robertaallen.com.
 

I turned it on. My father had mentioned my half-sister, Sylvia, many times over the years. When he was away on “trips”–which meant he was running from Mafia goons or the IRS–she was the one he always stayed with in L.A. Or so he said. Many years later, I discovered this was a lie. He never stayed with her. Never.

It was 1957. My father was sixty-one. I was twelve.

The money Groucho Marx gave away on his program, You Bet Your Life, was meager in this era of big money quiz shows. The guests were mostly foils for his wit. That night while I listened to Groucho’s jokes, waiting for him to interview Sylvia Baron, who was one of the contestants, I didn’t know what to expect.

My first thought when she walked on stage was: She can’t be my half-sister! I glanced at my father who was smiling proudly, nodding as he watched her speak. NO! I thought. She’s not his daughter!

It’s true I wanted to be my father’s only daughter. But that was just part of my shock. How can she be so old? I wondered. I’d been told she was only four years younger than my mother who was forty-five. Though I knew she was the child of his first marriage, I never expected her to look so old! Sylvia’s age would’ve been enough to shock me. But she was also fat! And I mean fat! Worse, on our black and white TV, I could see her dark roots; her hair was dyed blonde. And the heavy make-up she wore! She even had a heart-shaped lip she’d drawn way above her lip line.

“So, Sylvia, are you married?” Groucho asked, puffing on his cigar.

“Yes,” she said. “I have two children, Richard and Marsha.”

She has a family! I thought in amazement.

Groucho’s trademark brows went up and down briskly and he made a few jokes–they weren’t funny–before he asked, “How old are your children?”

I heard a hint of Brooklyn in her voice when she said her son was eleven. Marsha, however, was fifteen! How can my half-sister have a daughter three years older than me? I glanced at my father. He didn’t seem surprised.

“So what do you do, Sylvia?” Groucho asked between jokes.

“I cater parties,” she said.

“And who are your clients?” he asked.

She mentioned a bunch of names. The only ones I recall are Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Dean Martin.

I have a half-sister who caters parties for Hollywood stars! I thought. More shock. I’d seen her business card. My father had shown it to me but it didn’t register until I saw her on Groucho. Parties by Sylvia, the card said in swirling pink script.

My father, who listened intently, didn’t look the least bit upset when she answered every question wrong. He was, in fact, still smiling proudly. She’s not even smart! How can my father be her father? I wondered. I looked at him. He suddenly seemed like a stranger. I thought, Maybe he’s not my father after all.

Roberta Allen is the author of eight books and a visual artist who has exhibited worldwide, with work in the collection of The Met. Allen has just completed a memoir about her
family called DIRTY GIRL. She also teaches Micro Memoirs at The New School and conducts private writing workshops. Her website is robertaallen.com.

As soon as my father hears me, he throws open the door. His face is ashen. Strands of thin wavy hair shoot from his scalp in all directions like exploding rays from a lightless sun. Why is he so mad?

“Whaddaya think yer doing?” he bellows.

His anger makes him big. A giant. A powerful giant. And wild as a stallion even Hopalong Cassidy couldn’t tame!

I blink, then blink again. This isn’t Daddy. I try to find his face in the features distorted by rage. But he isn’t there. A stranger has taken his place. I feel white-hot fear as the stranger scoops me up and grabs a leather belt from the closet the color of dried blood. He sits down on the bed and throws me roughly over his knees. I hear the snap of the belt over and over, just before it strikes my soft bottom. I howl in pain and cry at the injustice of my spanking. Why was it bad to look at Daddy’s pee pee? I was just playing. It was like a game. Why can’t Daddy see it like a game?

Four years later when Mrs. Kipp, my third grade teacher, asks the class to write a composition about our favorite animals, the words come so fast my pen can hardly keep up. I haven’t seen my father’s penis since I was four, but the words about his long red pee pee keep pouring out. Without thinking, I hand in my paper like the others.

Mrs. Kipp looks like an old maid even though she is married. She pulls her hair back tightly in a bun on top of her head. Her neck is long and stringy like a chicken, which is why I call her Chicken Neck.

She looks at me strangely after reading our compositions and says in a monotone, “Roberta, see me at the break.”

I don’t hear a word that’s said all morning. I know I did something bad. Very bad. At the bell, my classmates flee. I shyly approach her desk.

“What made you write this?” Chicken Neck asks, leaning forward, her voice tense, her eyes gazing at me intently.

I stare at the scarred wooden floor, old and buckling, shift my weight, say nothing. I want to go far away but my head is whirling–with what? Boobies, my father’s name for breasts? Booboos, my grandmother’s name for vaginas? Showgirls like the drawings on matchbook covers from The Stork Club or maybe the Copacabana? My father’s sexy sister, my Aunt Lil? The autographed photos of Marilyn Monroe my father admired in Playland on Broadway and 50th St.?

My head is so noisy I don’t hear Chicken Neck at first.

“It’s not normal for an eight-year-old girl to write such things,” she says.

“I’ll have to call your mother and have her come in to see me,” Chicken Neck says.

My thoughts stop whirling. Oh no! Mommy will kill me! Her boss will dock her pay. I wish I could hide in a dark tunnel. Am I in for it now!

That evening my mother says nothing after Chicken Neck’s call. But her face looks blank as though she’s in shock. Nana says my mother is going to school the next morning.

I hold my breath till she comes home from work.

But she doesn’t explode as I expected. She only says to me, “You are NOT my daughter!” She has told me many times that they must have given her the wrong baby in the hospital so this is nothing new. But she looks at me as though I was spawned by an alien species. Her looks and silence are even worse than her rage.

Roberta Allen is the author of eight books and a visual artist who has exhibited worldwide, with work in the collection of The Met. She also teaches Micro Memoirs at The New School and conducts private writing workshops. Her website is robertaallen.com.

In acting class, I don’t say a word. I don’t look at anyone. For an hour, while I stand under a spotlight, in front of a heavy black curtain, beside other kids, mostly older, who, unlike me, really want to act, I keep my head down, stare at the wooden floor of the stage and pretend to be invisible. The kids stifle giggles when the teacher asks me to read a line in a play, or repeat a line exactly the way he has said it.

When he calls on me, I get the same feeling I had in the auditorium at P.S. 87 the day all the kids in second grade were sitting in assigned seats and the teacher at the podium pointed to me out of two hundred pupils. She was checking to see if we had the right seats. I was sitting in the center. All eyes were on me. “What’s your name?” she said.

In a whisper, I said, “Roberta Allen.”

“What?” the teacher said. “Speak up!”

“Roberta Allen,” I mumbled.

“Louder!” she said. “I can’t hear you!”

“Roberta Allen!” I said, my anger beginning to show.

“I still can’t hear you!”

“ROBERTA ALLEN!” I finally screamed, my voice powered by rage.

One day I decide I’ve had enough of acting class. I am standing in the noisy school yard with Diane Pine, a girl in my class, waiting for the bell. My mouth set, my arms folded across my seven-year-old chest, I say to her, “I’m not going to acting class! My mommy can’t make me! I’m gonna run away!”

“You are?” Diane Pine’s blue eyes open wide.

“I’m gonna make greeting cards and sell them on the street!”

“You are?” Diane Pine says.

With Diane Pine as my accomplice, I run away after school on Tuesday, the day of my next acting class. I have everything I need. A drawing tablet. Blue ballpoint pens my father gave me for drawing. Pencils. Crayons I stole from the supply cabinet. At night, after I sell greeting cards and pay Diane Pine for leftovers from dinner, I am going to sleep under her bed so her mother and father won’t find me.

Diane Pine lives on 74th Street between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West in a basement apartment in a brownstone. In order to get there, we have to walk down a dangerous side street. We pass drunks, low-lifes, women in short, tight skirts. They stand around, talking loudly on the stoops of decaying tenements. I watch them out of the corner of my eye. This is adventure! I tell myself. But when we cross Columbus Avenue on our way towards Central Park West, we are back in ordinary life.

“Remember,” Diane Pine says, “you have to be very quiet.”

We creep down the stone stairs to her apartment. Diane Pine unlocks the door. To our left is the living room. The blinds are drawn. The only light comes from the TV. The sound is turned down real low. Her mother, The Burnt Log, lies on the sofa, dozing under a blanket. Diane Pine told me she does that every day. The Burnt Log fell asleep one night with a lit cigarette and burned most of her body and part of her face. We tiptoe past her over the living room carpet to reach Diane Pine’s room in back but suddenly the floor creaks and wakes her up. She opens one eye, then the other. The fire has not damaged her sight. Or her hearing.

“What are you doing, Diane?” she says, lifting herself, painfully it seems, onto her skeletal elbows, and looking me up and down. “Who’s this?”

“Roberta,” Diane Pine says. “She’s in my class.”

“What is Roberta doing here?”

Diane Pine is quiet. She shuffles her feet.

“What’s going on?” The Burnt Log says. To look at her, you wouldn’t think she had that much of a voice.

Diane Pine sighs. “Roberta ran away. I said she could sleep under my bed at night.

She’s gonna make greeting cards and sell them on the street.”

“She’s what?” The Burnt Log is silent for a moment. “She can’t stay here! Diane, give me the phone!”

Diane Pine looks at me, helplessly, while she obeys her mother.

“What’s your last name Roberta?”

“Allen,” I say, in a whisper.

“Where do you live?”

“The Ansonia.”

“Does your mother know what you’re doing?”

I shake my head no.

“She must be worried sick! Diane, you better not try anything like this!”

“No, Mommy,” she says. I feel sort of bad for Diane Pine, but not nearly as bad as I feel for myself. The Burnt Log calls my mother.

When my mother arrives, she puts on her “nice act” for The Burnt Log. As soon as we are out the door, however, she wears her gargoyle face and drags me up the stairs to the street. Shaking me like a dirty rag, she shouts, “Little devil! You humiliated me in front of that woman!”

But she never makes me go to acting class again.

Roberta Allen is the author of eight books and a visual artist who has exhibited worldwide, with work in the collection of The Met. She also teaches Micro Memoirs at The New School and conducts private writing workshops.

The maid opens the door when she rings the bell. No one else is at home in the large apartment. When the maid is out of earshot, Doree Gottlieb says, “I want to show you something.” We sneak past the maid into the master bedroom with windows overlooking the park. Once we’re inside, she locks the door and takes out a stash of magazines, hidden under her parents’ huge bed.

“Have you ever seen dirty magazines?” Doree Gottlieb asks, giggling.

“No!” I say, giggling, too. I can hardly believe it when I see the sexy lady on the cover.

We sit cross-legged on the bed and go through each magazine, page by page, giggling like crazy each time we see a new pair of boobies or another lady in sexy poses. My mother never lets me see her undressed so I’ve never seen nipples before. We laugh like mad at a lady sticking out her tongue and holding her enormous boobies in her hands. Some ladies have their legs wide open! Others stick out their tushies as well as their boobies. We laugh at each lady and touch her nipples on the page. We get hysterical each time we see a naked lady with what looks to me like a sexy sideways look. We each try to imitate the sexy poses. We stick out our tongues and pretend to have giant boobies. We pretend to squeeze them, thrust them forward, wiggle and shake them. We stick out our tushies. We wiggle and shake them too. We give each other sexy sideways looks and burst out laughing.

“What’s going on in there?” the maid says. “Doree, you’re not supposed to be in your parents’ bedroom.” She tries the door. “Unlock the door this minute!”

We try to stop laughing as we quickly pile the magazines together and Doree Gottlieb puts them back under her father’s side of the bed, exactly where she found them. She whispers, “I hope my dad won’t remember what order they were in.” She looks a little scared as she smoothes the bedspread.

“Unlock that door!” the maid says again.

Doree Gottlieb opens the door. We try to keep straight faces.

The maid looks around suspiciously, but everything seems to be in place. “I don’t know what you two were doing in here but I bet your parents wouldn’t approve!”

Roberta Allen is the author of eight books and a visual artist who has exhibited worldwide, with work in the collection of The Met.

The boys I hung out with at the Croydon, the coffee shop in the Croydon Hotel on the corner of Madison Avenue and 86th Street were mostly private school boys from McBurney, Collegiate, Horace Mann. A few drove Corvettes. One drove an XKE. I don’t remember the girls well except for my hooked-nose friend Lucy and raven-haired Rusty and the two Judys who, like me, attended The High School of Music and Art.

Around the Croydon, it was rumored that Bob A. had a genius I.Q. He lived in his parents’ large apartment on Park Avenue and sang rock n’ roll at Park Avenue Synagogue on Saturday nights. I can still see his big, fleshy lips and hear him singing in that high-pitched voice: Your love gives me such a thrill but your lovin’ don’t pay my bills… His room at home was filled with the latest recording and sound equipment and hundreds, maybe thousands, of records which he blasted. (I wonder now if at least some of that equipment was stolen).

When he wasn’t playing music, singing, or hanging out at the Croydon with his latest girlfriend, he lived in an underworld of pimps and con artists and creeps like his friend George, a tall scary guy with an unhealthy palor and an evil smile who once phoned my grandmother and said to her, “Suck my dick.” His friend Tommy G., a mulatto who passed for white, was AWOL from the Army. Ernie, a scary black guy who worked in a parking lot on Madison Avenue let Bob A. use parked cars to screw girls. The only girlfriends of Bob A. that I recall are Tanya, a beautiful blonde, whose looks and Russian accent I envied, and Ann, a clean-cut private school girl who applied eyeliner along her heavy lids in a perfect hair-thin line that inspired my awe. I became friends with Ann, who was not beautiful, only because I wanted to know her secret for luring Bob A.

When my turn finally came, Bob A. took me to a midtown hotel filled with prostitutes where he was probably “given” a room by friends who owned or managed the place. When I would not have sex with him–I was a virgin then–he left me there. In shock, I made my way home alone. I never slept with Bob A. Even then I think I knew he was the incarnation of my father; I could not sleep with a man who was my father. Instead, Bob A. and I became good friends. In fact, we had a special bond, especially after his parents disowned him, and he stayed in one fleabag hotel after another. His pain was familiar. His pain made him safe. I knew who to be in the presence of pain. My mother and grandmother, who considered me homely in comparison to the beauties they had both been, were grateful that any male would take an interest in me, and welcomed Bob A. into our apartment on Amsterdam Avenue and 76th Street. I remember him laughing once in my room about his stolen credit cards. Otherwise, Bob A. was vague about his illicit dealings. His visits went on for months and though my father continued to call him “a lowlife” and “a degenerate,” my father was never at home in the evening when he came over. By the time Bob A. decided to hitchhike to Miami to try his luck as a deejay, my father had already killed himself.

Recently, out of curiosity, I googled Bob A. I imagined him dying young, penniless, and barefoot on the beach, a victim of suicide like my father. But it turns out he had a hit single in 1969. What became of him since then I don’t know. The last time I heard from Bob A. was 1963 or 64 when he wrote to me from Florida and asked me to send him a dollar, which I did.

Roberta Allen is the author of eight books and a visual artist who has exhibited worldwide, with work in the collection of The Met. She also teaches Micro Memoirs at The New School and conducts private writing workshops. Her website is robertaallen.com

“OHMYGOD! OHMYGOD!” she shrieked. “You miserable child! What do you think you’re doing?”

“Playing,” I said. I didn’t know then I had made my first abstract painting. It was 1949. Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists were making history.

“I can’t take my eyes off you for a second!” my mother screamed. Tears flooded her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She grabbed my arms roughly, shoved me into the bathroom, ran the water in the sink. She scrubbed my hands and arms until they were red.

Between sobs, she kept screaming the word, “DISGUSTING!”

I didn’t know what “disgusting” meant. But I was shocked and hurt. I was sure it meant something worse than bad. My doodoo is nice! I told myself. It comes out of me. It’s mine! It’s my mommy that’s disgusting! I decided then that I would never be anything like her.

My mother washed the wall with a bucketful of foamy water and a large sponge, sobbing while she worked. “I should leave this for your father to clean up! He likes everything natural! Well, I’d like to see how much he’d like this!”

Roberta Allen is the author of eight books and a visual artist who has exhibited worldwide, with work in the collection of The Met.

A few years earlier, among half-eaten sandwiches and junk mail piled half-way to the ceiling in my mother’s tiny apartment at The Williams, an assisted living facility on the Upper West Side, I had found a copy of my father’s death certificate and a snapshot he had carried in his wallet. Without reading the document, I slipped it inside an envelope with the snapshot. I took the envelope home and hid it away in a drawer. Just weeks before Craig and I entered the Hotel Edison, I happened to find that envelope. I opened it. By then, my mother was no longer called The Junk Mail Queen of The Williams. She was living in a nursing home eleven blocks south. She was ninety-one. She no longer remembered my father.

Before I looked at the death certificate, I examined the black and white snapshot with frayed edges. It was familiar; a picture of me he had taken on visiting day at summer camp when I was twelve. I looked slim and shapely in my regulation green short shorts and my favorite salmon-colored cotton sweater, my burgeoning breasts thrust out as I sat on the railing of my bunk, head tilted back, wearing a big smile. That pose is too sexy for a girl of twelve, I thought. Was I trying to imitate my father’s beautiful sister, Lil? According to my mother and grandmother, women who “flaunted” their bodies like Aunt Lil were lewd and whorish. I had wanted to be like Aunt Lil. She was proud of her body, proud of her large breasts, her small waist, her hips that swiveled when she walked. I admired her as much as my father did. At camp that day I must have been posing to please him. No wonder he liked that picture. He carried that snapshot in his wallet when he died.

According to the death certificate, the time of death was 12:55 AM. The date was March 25, 1963. Under usual occupation, I read: Contractor. It should have said: Compulsive Gambler. That night before he rented a room at the Hotel Edison he went to the track and lost $5000.

The certificate said that my father was sixty-seven years old. But his birth date, April 1, 1896, had been the whim of an immigration officer at Ellis Island when he and his family arrived from Russia: they didn’t speak English. The cause of my father’s death “after the post mortem examination and autopsy” read: “Visceral Congestion: Pending Chemical Examination.” He died of a barbituate overdose. In our Upper West Side apartment, he had taken barbituates every night for three weeks. He had been practicing his death.

Thirty-nine years later when I walked into the Hotel Edison with Craig and realized I could not go to the bar, I told him that my father had taken his life in that hotel. “I’m so sorry,” he said. He took my hand and we hurried out into the cold night air.