Elizabeth Keckley

Hey, Hey Paulette
by Michelle Filippini


Ours was an odd family where I grew up. It was more than having a vacation condo at in the mountains so we could go skiing in the winter and horseback riding in the summer. (And I'm not talking about Lakes Berryessa and Clear, a scant couple hours' drive from the city. No, ours had to be the largest alpine lake in the country, the friggin' jewel of the Sierra). And it wasn't just that we attended a church all the way across town because my father didn't like the priest at St. Veronica's, where all my friends and everyone in the neighborhood went. In our Italian-Irish-Hispanic-Filipino-Catholic working-class town in the 1970s, families were large and we were small. If it's true that there was strength in numbers, then it was a crummy defense we were fielding against the larger forces at work. Another player would have been good.

I wished we were more like the Buddes across the street. I don't remember when they moved into the neighborhood because it seemed like they were always there. There were six Budde kids, and their names all began with an R or a P: Penelope, Ronald, Patrice, Renee, Rochelle (Shelley) and Roxanne. Penny, the youngest, was my best friend, even though her brother Ronnie was older and closer to my age. She was large for her age or else I was small, so it worked out. The Budde kids were always complaining how cold it was here compared to where they came from (some place in the country called Santa Rosa), and I couldn't argue with that. It was true, we lived in a shithole, at least where it came to the weather. I figured that was the reason my father always seemed angry. He went off to work at a magical place down south called Menlo Park, where the sun always shone and the wind never blew. It must have been hard for him to adjust being back at our cold house, even though it was clean and quiet compared with the Budde's.

"Sssssshhhh," Penny and Ronnie whispered in unison. We were in the downstairs family room at their house, spying on their oldest sister Roxie outside. Roxie was the creative one in the family and it was fun to try to make her angry or cry, but also a bit scary. Today she was dancing in the backyard to music none of us could hear. Her black frizzy-curly hair sort of fanned out behind her and her arms were akimbo, her rapt, pimply face tilted up to the sky. Her eyes could have been closed but it was hard to tell because of the glasses that took up half her face. The window was open but we couldn't help it; we started giggling. She stopped. She spotted us and even behind her glasses I could tell she was crying. She slammed into the house and past us up the stairs, to her bedroom, I figured. She was the only one in the house who had her own room, and I didn't know if it was because she was the oldest, or on account of her artistic, sensitive nature. Their mother was upstairs—she didn't work—so we went through the backyard and up and out to the street and to our respective garages. We got on our bikes and rode around our concrete wonderland, and for a few hours we were safe, until our moms called us in for dinner.

There were a lot of reasons I liked to hang out at the Budde's, but television usually factored in. At my house the TV was only allowed on at night, after dinner. Prime time was the officially sanctioned TV-viewing time, unless it was the playoffs or the fights, or Academy Awards time, when the TV trays were pulled out from the closet. Too much television was bad for you, like soda or candy (also banned), except for maybe Jacques Cousteau. Kids should be outside in the fresh air, doing something. At the house across the street with all the kids, Betty Budde was busy sewing or doing laundry or laying down in their windowless downstairs bedroom, and television was her children's friend. (The dad was always at work; when he was home, he blended in with the drab colorless furniture and the beige VW Bug that took him out of the neighborhood and away from his large brood each morning.) Penny and I watched Bonanza and would play-act the characters, as long as we could be Little Joe. We both loved Little Joe. Finally we left the TV downstairs and went up to the kitchen to make Kraft macaroni and cheese, which really was cooking. We felt sophisticated. We had to walk past Penny's teenage sister Patrice on the phone in the hallway outside the kitchen, which made me nervous. I was always nervous around Patrice, who was pretty and mean. She didn't like me but I wouldn't embarrass myself by asking Penny why. I loomed large in my interior world, but on the outside I tended to be one of those forgettable people. Once in a while, though, someone took a strong dislike to me. We could hear Renee and Shelly out in the living room, laughing and critiquing their photos from the Barry Manilow concert in Oakland. I was too shy to join in so I went back in the kitchen and stirred the noodles. The only concert I'd been to was the Osmond Brothers and that was with my family. "Do you want to pour the noodles into the drainer, or do you want to stir in the stuff?" We both liked stirring in the ingredients because it was more like cooking, where you had some control—you could scoop in a little more butter than was called for, or pour in a bit less milk to make it cheesier. You could be creative. I was just happy to be there, so I dumped the noodles into the container in the sink. Penny smiled. She never wanted to go to my house and that was fine with me. At my house, I was boss, but there were other, less pleasing things about being there.

Everything about the Buddes was exotic: Their dog Keelo and cat Tammy (we weren't allowed indoor pets); the fact that they didn't own their house and weren't dragged on family outings every weekend for exercise or culture or forced to listen to classical music; the wild, untended backyard. The older girls dated and wore makeup and they didn't talk to my sister, who was also a teenager but nothing like them. "How come there's only your sister and you?" We were in my backyard, Ronnie, Penny, Kevin, and me. Kevin was my age and lived next door; he and Ronnie were best friends. We were playing horses, which involved pretending to be a horse. My rabbits Hopper and Snowball grazed the same sheath of lawn, but at a safe distance away. The grass was lush and healthy, bordered by flowering bushes and shrubs that my dad scrupulously maintained, along with the rabbits' hutches he built by hand. "I dunno," I answered, before excitedly adding, "We did have another sister." "What happened to her?" my friends hollered. We had to yell a lot when we were outside. In addition to being in the eye of the fogbelt, where we lived fell directly within SFO International's flight path. "It was a couple of years after Lisa was born. My mom said it was a bad pregnancy and she didn't have a good feeling about it. The baby was born deformed and they took it away. My mom said she didn't look at it. They told her it died a few hours later, and she and my dad had to give it a name for the death certificate. My mom said the nurses all felt sorry for her and wanted to give her a private room but my mom said, ‘No, the only way I'm going to get over this is to be around other mothers with their babies.' And that's what she did, and when she went home she was fine, and a year later I was born. So we would have been a year apart. It would have been great to have another sister; I'm sure she wouldn't have been a dork." They were quiet for a few seconds, and then Penny shouted, "Wasn't your mom sad, though?" "Uh-uh," I said. "She said she wouldn't have been able to deal with a deformed baby, so she was glad it turned out the way it did." More silence. "So what was the name?" "What?" "The name they gave it for the death certificate?" "Oh. Paulette. Her name would have been Paulette. My dad was in the army in France and liked French names for girls." "So there would have been three of you instead of just you and Lisa?" I was about to answer Yes when I remembered something else my mom had said when she related that story. "Daddy and I wanted to have two children, so when you came along a year later, it was a blessing." I'd always felt sorry for my dead deformed sister, and sad for myself that I had been cheated out of having a normal sibling. But now something nagged at me, just at the edge of awareness. I didn't want to talk or think about Paulette anymore, so I put her out of my mind like my mom did and, like her, I was fine. I whinnied to signal to the other horses that it was time to move on to greener pastures, and we galloped off into the foggy sunset.


Michelle’s poetry and narrative nonfiction have been published in the Sierra Nevada Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, and in the upcoming anthology "A Generation Defining Itself: In Our Own Words," Volume 8.