3.28 A Longer Scorecard

Marie McCartney, July 1960

Summer 1960 • San Francisco ~ I was eleven when Dad began courting Tweedledee. When I first met Marie she reminded me of a life-sized, inflatable Tippy Doll, the kind with sand in the bottom that when you knocked it over, it popped right back up. She worked in Margo’s dress shop up the street from my father’s store on Haight Street. When Dad’s second wife died, Marie attended Irene’s funeral. A week before, when Marie’s husband died, Dad acted as one of Mac’s pallbearers. Two years later my dad managed to once again marry a woman who liked her highballs.

My father still got as bashful as a thirteen-year-old farm boy when it came to women. He and Marie sat on her living room sofa and held hands and giggled. I heard he took her to the Ocean Beach overlook near the Cliff House where all the teenagers went to park. Picturing them necking in his little black convertible made me twitch.

Janet, Marie, Dad, Irene, Sep 25, 1961

1961 • On September 25, 1961, on their mutual birthday, Dad (who was 56) and Marie (age 44) married in a civil ceremony in San Francisco. They were both Catholic but couldn’t wed in the church as my dad was divorced and Mother was still living. I had a new stepmother and two new sisters. I needed a longer scorecard.  

Marie had two teenaged daughters; Irene, a perky blonde, and Janet, a lanky redhead. They were Mercy High girls. They rolled up the waists of their Catholic uniform skirts, had lots of boyfriends, smoked cigarettes, swore, and silently rolled the 1950s DeSoto out of the garage after school and before Marie got home from work. They thought their grandmother wouldn’t hear them as they popped the clutch a few doors away. As near as I could tell, those two got away with murder. Grandma never ratted on the girls for taking the car; she figured it was none of her business.

Grandma McCartney, 1961

Marie’s first husband’s mother lived in their house on 45th and Noriega. Grandma McCartney did most of the cooking and cleaning. The remainder of her time she manned her corner post in the kitchen near the front window, dressed in her Navy blue sweater and her hair in a dark hairnet. She rested in a hard backed dining room chair and talked to her bird Tweetie and kept watch on the neighborhood. After dinner she covered the bird cage and retired to her room to read her bible or listen to the radio. I seldom heard Grandma speak other than to her little yellow parakeet. She died at 84, just before Christmas in 1961. I don’t know what happened to Tweetie.

Cathy and Janet, July 1960

Irene had graduated from Mercy in 1960 and worked at the Noriega Street Hibernia Bank where several years later Patty Hearst and the SLA would make a withdrawal at gunpoint and shoot two bystanders. Irene was not much interested in a younger stepsister. Janet, however, was delighted and sometimes invited me to tag along with her and her friends. The first time I met her, she and her best friend Pat Barrett had come in from roller skating; they didn’t bother to take off their skates until they clanked to the top of the wood staircase. I was shocked they didn’t get in trouble. I was even more astonished the way Janet and Irene back-talked to their mother. If I ever spoke to anyone in my family that way, I’d be peeling myself off the wall.

Janet shared her downstairs bedroom with me that first summer when I stayed with them for two weeks. When she graduated from Mercy High and went off to nursing school, I occupied her vacant room (Irene had taken over Grandma’s room after Grandma died), played her 33s, and dusted her ceramic knick-knacks. I kept my clothes in part of her closet and three of her drawers. I slept in her bed. I didn’t make it my room because it wasn’t. My room was at Carleen’s in La Habra, where my real home was.

to be continued…

© 2018. Catherine Sevenau.
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