The Birthday Party

When I was seven or eight years old, I went to a birthday party. I attended many birthday parties as a kid. My mother said our neighborhood was a round robin of sheet cakes, frilly dresses and ever more elaborate gift wrap, to say nothing of the gifts. Birthday parties were an expense neither my father nor mother anticipated, and years later, my mother was known to remark bitterly on this strange, circular, share the wealth strategy of entertaining children. Because someone had your kid over at their house for one of these bacchanals, you were obligated to invite that kid over to yours, once the time came. I single-handedly managed to break that cycle with this birthday party, but it is a long, fogged-over story whose details haunt me to this day.

To understand the relevance and weight of this particular party, allow me to explain its setting and context. We were, in our relatively new subdivision of Los Angeles, a fairly uniform group of parents and children. There were some hippies and Hollywood types interspersed among us but for the most part we were white, mainstream and middle-class America. My father was the rare L.A. native; most of the fathers came from the east coast and Midwest. They discovered California through their military service or a sense of adventure. Our mothers were the women they had recruited to have their children and keep their houses clean, although many had live-in “Spanish maids,” women who had immigrated from Latin America. A lot would change for us kids in 1970s, but when we were young enough not to know better, we were consumed by our privileges and possessions: our bicycles, swimming pools, Barbies, Big Wheels, Hot Wheels—every toy you could think of. 

Birthday parties were not then what they are now, a forum for parents to demonstrate their generosity, financial prowess, or patience with other people’s children. They were initially simple, backyard celebrations with cake and presents. As we got older, we were escorted to movies and amusement parks. The most coveted of all birthdays was a party at Bob Baker’s Marionette Theater. Now a designated cultural-historical landmark in L.A., Bob Baker’s included the cutting of the birthday cake in the back room and then a puppet show that often celebrated whoever’s birthday was in the house. I remember it as a garish, gaudy and glamorous place, a combination haunted house and princess castle.

There may have been another much-sought-after birthday venue, although I do not remember this one myself. A friend told me about it recently, after we reconnected on Facebook. At this place, she maintained, there was a genie whose requisite costume of scarves and beads was interwoven with candy.  When you were called to the stage to meet the genie, you could touch the genie and candy would come streaming out like dew drops. The genie was, in effect, a human pinata, but I drew a blank when my friend asked me about it. She insisted this was a real feature of our childhood, one she had told her children about, though they didn’t believe it.  

As homogenous as our neighborhood was, I also felt my family stuck out like an angry pimple at the end of a crone’s nose. My parents were older and having lived through the Depression, their consumption was decidedly not so conspicuous. I wanted all the things the other kids had, their pool tables and Easy Bake ovens and a birthday at Bob Baker’s, but my father said no, these were all too expensive. Many of us were Jewish yet put up Christmas lights on our houses in December and hosted “Chanukah bushes” in our living rooms. My father was a Christmas tree supplier to grocery stores, service clubs, and other retailers, and the last thing he wanted to see was one of his products in our living room. My mother never dressed up as the other moms did or wore makeup; she was an Army brat, disdained basic finery, and sometimes spent the entire day in her pajamas.   

My parents also were resolutely sober; this was a point of pride to them, since drug use was in vogue. They didn’t drink because my father had a bleeding ulcer. We didn’t even eat like our neighbors; our food came from a military base PX, or Post Exchange, because my grandfather, a retired colonel, had privileges there. It made groceries far cheaper, and clothes too. We were not members of the local country club, and didn’t need to be, my parents said, since my grandfather’s house, around the corner, had a pool. My mother played tennis in the public park. We did not have a live-in “Spanish maid,” or a weekly gardener. Our cars were used, and our television was small and black-and-white. These are petty distinctions, I know, but they made me feel strange, like a reprobate. What were we doing in this neighborhood?  I thought maybe this was why the other kids picked on me. 

I was small, overly sensitive, and after school, I was a favored target. Boys batted me around because they knew I would cry. Once I was attacked with a tree branch and had to head back to school to deal with the bleeding on my legs. Then there were the girls, who made it personal. These were the daughters of doctors who worked with my uncle at the hospital, where he was chief of staff. They laid in wait, pouncing once I thought I had passed their houses. They demanded I pull down my pants so they could look up my ass. Once, I remember, they made me drink mud. Another time they tried to make me eat garden snails. They told me that one of the local gardeners wanted to marry me and I should go talk to him, but I couldn’t understand what they were talking about, and just walked away.

If I have spent too much time explaining, or over-dramatizing—a charge often made against me--know it is an old habit, continually trying to decipher the alternate episodes of Kabuki Theater and Battle Royale I perceived being enacted around me. My memories of a turbulent childhood are opaque, and yet they are peculiar, as if I’ve always sensed that something was not quite right about them. I often found myself on obstacle course where I honed my fight-or-flight responses perhaps a little too finely, and for this I have lost friends, been called paranoid and neurotic; been ignored and belittled. Looking back on it now, I can’t say if that particular birthday party was where it all started. But it certainly reinforced the lessons that the ether seemed to be delivering each day, this time with a vengeance.      

It was 1968, or ’69. I know this because of the chronology of my parents’ marriage, the long story of how and when it unraveled, though that divorce was more than a decade in the future. Divorce was a dirty word in our neighborhood, or at least among my parents and their friends. My father had several female cousins in any number of extra-marital arrangements, and he called them “crazy broads,” a phrase he would find himself using more often about people he once thought he admired.  

The girl having the slumber party had been my friend since nursery school. Her father worked in the music industry (the exact nature of what he did I’m keeping vague to protect the family’s identity). He worked so much that he could not attend his daughter’s birthday party. The birthday girl’s younger brother spent much of the party miserable, moaning, whining, and asking his mother when his father would show up. Decked out in pale lipstick, gold necklaces, a silk blouse, stylish slacks and high heels, the birthday girls’ mother tried using a two-pronged strategy to comfort him. She told him she either didn’t know when their father was coming, or that he was bound to appear very soon.

The birthday girl didn’t seem as upset, at least to me, by the absence of her father. Perhaps she was distracted by her friends, her presents, the whirlwind of what had to have been twenty girls running and squealing nonstop since they received their invitations. The party guests included multiple cohorts of girls, including some of my friends; some from private schools; and others I was afraid of. Call them “bully adjacent,” for they were sympathetic, to say the least, of the core group of girls who tormented me daily. But the guest list was large enough that I didn’t have to deal with them, and we were soon separated into separate cars for the ride to the Ice Capades. Next to a trip to Disneyland or a Disney movie, the Ice Capades was the crème de la crème in family entertainment. At least, I knew, somehow, it was better than the down-market Ice Follies.    

I was scared of the car ride to the ice show since I often got car sick. The birthday girl’s mother wouldn’t let me sit in the front seat as I had asked, but it turned out ok. At the ice rink, I was separated from the other girls and sat with the birthday girl’s mother again. We clapped and laughed together until the most mesmerizing part of the show, a narrative of intrigue. I’ve researched old Ice Capades programs that I could find online for the details of this production but have never been able to corroborate my memory of it. The music was big, bombastic as I have tried to reconstruct it, like the opening song in a James Bond movie. I remember how beautiful the star skater was. I couldn’t see her from my seat, but I had my glossy Ice Capades program to confirm her visage: clear-skinned, exquisite features, a blue-eyed brunette. She expertly delivered her leaps and spins on the ice, yet she wound up within the clutches of an evildoer. He had built a machine, and she was put into it. When she came out, there were hundreds of her, identical copies, and they skated together as though they were part of a larger organism.

Had I had a better handle on the storyline of this production, I’m sure it would be fertile territory for any feminist scholar interested in the long-term repercussions on its audience. For within the stew of the show was a lesson on individualism, who or what is emulated and who is singled out for censure. Before the birthday party, I already had a keen sense of the divide between beautiful and ugly, which side I stood on. But I did not know why I was ugly; that the Ice Capades that thrilled me and the television I watched religiously and the magazines that awed me with their pictures and promises were methodically drilling me on what was feminine, acceptable, desirable, essential.  Childhood is a huge sorting project, and at this stage my contemporaries and I had already been enlisted into it, whether by our participation in team sports, our choice of friends and enemies, who our parents were or what they did, and whether we perceived ourselves as cute, strong, fragile, or average. The only way to be was to be pretty, ultimately; like the star skater, or to be nothing, unimportant, disposable.

I wasn’t so much concerned with all that as I was with the reality of the situation. As the pretty-girl-copies glided over the ice, I asked the birthday girl’s mother if this was real. Were the girls actual copies of the original skater? Were they wearing masks, makeup? Was it an optical illusion with the lights and costumes? I don’t remember her answer. I consulted the pictures of this routine in the glossy program, but I couldn’t find an answer there either. I must have asked the birthday girl’s mother several times because I vaguely remember what she said next. Such a shame, she seemed to say, that I could fall for this trick, and yet only someone like me could be convinced of it.

The day went downhill from there. There was the car ride back from the Ice Capades, where I was again denied the front seat, though I did not get sick. Then there was dinner at the birthday girl’s house, and I couldn’t believe we were being made to eat again, after lunch and the birthday cake. Plus, the hot dogs we were given weren’t my preferred Oscar Meyer. Then it was time to play party games—Musical Chairs, Duck Duck Goose—that were the bane of my existence. I was rarely picked when people were choosing teammates and the last thing a bullied girl wants to do is be disqualified because she can’t run or think fast enough. I remember great hilarity as these games unfolded and I sat isolated on the couch, watching.

At bedtime, there were too many of us to fit into the birthday girl’s bedroom. I don’t know why the birthday girl’s mother hadn’t foreseen this problem in all of her planning, but it was treated as an unexpected development. We had to be divided between the birthday girl’s room and her little brother’s. The birthday girl’s mother opted to put her daughter’s best friends and those she wasn’t likely to see at school on Monday in one room, and the rest in the other. I was sent to the other, where a group of bully-adjacent girls awaited me. It was explained to me that I could see the birthday girl anytime I wanted, but some of the chosen girls went to private school and didn’t have that opportunity. I must have gotten on with the business of being as inconspicuous as I could be, so I wouldn’t be bait for those who already knew that I was easy pickings.  

Once we were sorted into the bedrooms and begged repeatedly to settle down in our sleeping bags, another girl arrived at the party. I recall it being in the middle of the night, although I could be wrong. In any case, her parents were unable to get her to the party any earlier. There were whispers her parents were divorcing, or that they were going through some divorce-level domestic trauma, and we had to be especially accommodating. Or maybe her father was frightfully busy, being a noted character actor, and this was the only time he could drop her off. Whatever the source of the problem, the solution was to make room for the new guest. The birthday girl’s mother ordered me off one of the twin beds to a spot under a desk. I was small, yes; but not that small. I stayed up the rest of the night, sitting under the desk and feeling mighty sorry for myself, and wondering what I had done to deserve such treatment.

The next morning, we played in the driveway as we waited for our parents to retrieve us.   There were bicycles and hopper balls to ride, and basketballs to throw, and I fell, or wound up on the ground, and someone ran over my finger with a bicycle. I knew better at this point than to ask the birthday girl’s mother for help; someone said I could run my finger under the cold water in the sink, and that’s what I did. By the time my father picked me up—promptly, I should add; my parents rarely kept me waiting--I was near tears. I didn’t cry, though; tears were my mother’s department, and I was able to hold them for the quick ride home.

At home I collapsed in my mother’s arms, or perhaps she embraced me; it’s hard to know, because most of what I remember about my mother is her remoteness, especially after her nervous breakdown in 1970. Before she was hospitalized for several months after a manic episode, she seemed remote to me, or preoccupied. Once released from the hospital, she took on projects—acrobatic housework, PTA campaigns—or she was perennially fatigued. But on that day, she hugged me and told me that it wasn’t my fault. The birthday girl’s mother was an alcoholic, driven to drink by her husband’s adultery. They were going through a divorce. The best thing I could do now was stay away from her, forever, she said. That turned out to be no problem, as I was subsequently banned from the girl’s house. Whenever my friend’s birthday rolled around, she’d explain why I couldn’t be invited, and we would laugh. I suppose we laughed for different reasons, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t much like her mother after that night.

Such was, in effect, the first time I was cancelled. Before the emergence of “cancel culture,” the people who were publicly shunned despised or rejected were the difficult, disabled; the annoying or inconvenient. But for now, that is not the point. The point is that paranoia is a hard habit to break when you are initiated into it so early. And also, that my mother, who would tumble into her own abyss of shame via her eventual diagnosis, never, ever, took out her frustrations on my friends. Her breakdown was the culmination of many crises within our family and social circle, and she struggled for years afterward to regain her confidence. I learned decades later through her doctor that she felt cancelled herself back then, forever labeled as a menace to the collective peace and security of our subdivision.

I’ve struggled too, if for no other reason than to understand why I have repeatedly wound up in situations that recall the birthday party. I’ve lost friends, been cut off by family members, and was failed out of an industry I thought I loved—journalism--because of my behavior. But I’m not violent. I’ve never been arrested. I acknowledge I’m impatient with injustice, but I don’t like confrontation. I do not pick fights, though I’ve also been told I don’t know how to pick my battles. I have been treated for depression, bipolar 2, obsessive-compulsive disorder and an adjustment disorder “with other emotional features.” Mental illness does not necessarily make for a poor employment record, though perhaps the vagaries of my prognosis holds the key to why I was—and still am—deemed so unacceptable. 

Or perhaps this tragic flaw, as it emerged at that fateful birthday party, is too deeply embedded in my memory. I am hiding from the true horror of my personality. Maybe I have buried this truth under all the great times I had, to shoo away the bad stuff, the bewildering, indecipherable incidents. My parents, after all, attended all my ballet recitals, and I made lasting friends in ballet class. My parents also went to all my parent-teacher conferences, got me through school and paid for my college education. I even had grandparents, from both sides of my family, and they took care of me while my mother was sick. But the girl who told me about the birthday genie once threw a pile of dirt on my front steps after my father answered the door, because she thought it would be funny. As an adult, she apologized for all the wrongs done to me. She was a horrible person, she said, although I remember her being better than most. Certainly, she possesses the ability to look at herself, and understands that seeking forgiveness always is an option.

The last possibility is that my childhood truly was so good—and the breakup of my family once I was in college so painful—that I can’t help but wonder when that childhood ended. Was it at that birthday party, or when I was bullied: was it when my body or my mind learned to respond to threatening situations in a particular way that is neither common, decent, or civilized? Was it that I had never before stepped or been placed so intentionally into the great thresher that separates people into the shorthand categories we use to make decisions about them? It’s possible that if the birthday party wasn’t a giant leap forward, it was a step toward the inevitable. Or my memory has made it so, because that is what memory does. It looks for answers, even when there might not be any.           

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Jane Rosenberg LaForge writes poetry, fiction, and occasional essays from her home in New York. Her most recent publications include the full-length poetry collection "Medusa's Daughter" from Animal Heart Press, and the novel "Sisterhood of the Infamous" from New Meridian Arts Press.