Come Sit on My Tangerine Couch

By Carol Y. Godsave

About the Author
Who am I? I am a small, mouthy person who was born on the East Coast at the end of WW II, grew up and matured in placid 1950’s Americana and the turbulent 60s and 70s. I was a successful entrepreneur and businesswoman during the docile 80s and 90s and am now aging in the turbulent early years of the 21st century. I have driven a hippie van and muscle cars, ridden subways in NYC, Boston, London and Paris, rescued old cats, started and managed several businesses, subsisted on food stamps, made $1 million in a year, voted in every election since age 21, knitted about 1,000 scarves, planted about 1,000 bulbs and hugged many more than 1,000 times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Mar 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9798890276490

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The contents of this work, including, but not limited to, the accuracy of events, people, and places depicted; opinions expressed; permission to use previously published materials included; and any advice given or actions advocated are solely the responsibility of the author, who assumes all liability for said work and indemnifies the publisher against any claims stemming from publication of the work.

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2024 by Carol Y. Godsave

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, downloaded, distributed, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Dedication

While in high school, I needed a title for a school composition. Without looking up from her soapy dishwater, Mom offered, As I slide down the banister of life, let me tell you of the splinters in my career. I laughed and filed this away.

So, here are the splinters, the smooth spots, the highs and lows, the vital parts of me! But there would be no story without the cast of characters who accumulated in my life. This book is dedicated to all of them…

…starting with my parents, my siblings (and oldest friends), progressing through my many wonderful friends, not-so-wonderful adversaries, business partners (some good and some bad) to companions, people on the street who caused me to stop, pause and observe, great people about whose lives I still relish reading, pets who give me unconditional love and wet licks, grandchildren who used me as grandma furniture and are now starting to take care of this old lady when we’re out and about.

And to my awesome husband, Dan, the best travel and stay-at-home companion I could have hoped for.

Elmire, NY - 1948

Trust and Pixie Dust

The saleslady watched as the teenager entered the children’s clothing department and began checking out the new snowsuits, which were toddler fashionable, especially those for little girls. Slowly, seemingly regretfully, she moved on to the sale section. The viewer noted the teen was no more than 5'2" and tiny, about 100 pounds. She was dressed in a pre-WWII winter coat of a nondescript color, it might have been a soft gray once, that was a size or two too large but looked like it was providing warmth. The prettiness of her face was dimmed by the tired, almost worn look about her. Her pale cheeks began to gain color as the heat of the building settled in her.

The baby she carried, not yet a year old, was bundled in several small blankets and appeared toasty. However, the two toddlers wore only sweaters over their navy blue sailor dresses and had no leg coverings. They were dressed as twins, but one was obviously older in that she was protectively holding the hand of her younger, smaller sister.

A couple of weeks ago, the temperatures in this southern New York city had been a balmy 55-75 degrees. But the numbers were dropping quickly and would reach a record low of minus 25 degrees in this year, 1948. Now it was about 30 degrees in the sunny afternoons and getting colder each day, this week before the Thanksgiving holiday.

At first the observer had been concerned about the teen but now she found herself studying the two little girls. Why were they not dressed more warmly? What was the story of this very young family? Still, she did not leave her station behind the counter.

Decisively, the young mother selected two blue jacket-and-legging sets from the sale rack—in a size two and a size three—and presented them to the clerk without offering payment. She explained, softly and matter-of-factly, that she had no money and would like to make time-deferred payments. The shop woman, a mother herself, liked the look of this young lady with the soft brown hair, fair complexion and unpleading hazel eyes; she had the earnest customer complete a simple credit application, listing name, address, telephone number and her job as a waitress at a local restaurant. Meanwhile the sympathetic saleswoman busied herself snipping the tags from the snowsuits. After the paperwork was complete, they shared the dressing of the smiling, warmer youngsters before the seller watched all four depart, entering the cold Elmira afternoon, better insulated from the decreasing temperatures.

The saleslady did not worry that the bill would go unpaid, and my mother ultimately honored the deal she’d just struck for the benefit of her tiny progeny.

Nineteen Years Later…

It’s August 1967, I’m dressed in an emerald green halter wrap dress, white medium-heel sandals, hosiery and a straw hat with a green ribbon around the brim. Of course, I’m carrying a matching handbag; people dressed to travel then! This is my first airplane trip, I’m 22 years old and I look good—good enough even for a big city. Our friends pick up me and my boyfriend David at LaGuardia Airport. We’re staying with them while I secure a job to start after I graduate from Syracuse University next month.

David was born in New York City and has shared his love and enthusiasm for this place during our two years of dating. Rather than overselling, I find that he’s not done it justice. Perhaps because there are not sufficient descriptive words to sketch the rushing of people everywhere, at any hour of the day, the height of the many magnificent buildings, some old, some new, and the glimpses of so many world-famous landmarks. We saw places all of us have read about or heard about or seen in movies and picture books but not up close and personal. The air is filled with sounds of busyness bordering on chaos and with the smells of transportation and the ever-present eateries. It’s all too exciting and exhilarating. To think, I might be living here soon. But first to find that job.

Our first day is about sightseeing, which we do in style. I wear those two-inch heels while visiting the Empire State Building, Metropolitan Museum of Art and walking up and down Fifth Avenue. By late afternoon, my feet are killing me, so many steps! Desperate for relief, I limp into a Woolworths to buy a pair of soft black slippers that I’ll wear for the rest of the day. I’m dressed to kill from the ankles up while feeling bedroom comfy from the ankles down. Moving about this fashion-plate of a city thus shod, I expect disdainful looks or even judgmental comments. Evidently, even in big cities the people are caught up in themselves such that they don’t notice, or perhaps they are being polite. I don’t care.

The next day I’m attired in a skirt and blouse and my slippers for more exploring. But first, as planned, I leave my resume and application with a college-oriented employment agency. While touring the Museum of Natural History, I am put in touch with a hiring employer who needs a personal secretary at the Wall Street branch of a major French banking firm. When he hears that I graduated with honors from a Syracuse business school before receiving my Syracuse University degree, have a typing speed of one hundred words per minute and a shorthand speed of 160 wpm, he wants to meet me … now! However, because of my touring schedule and companions, he agrees to wait until 6 P.M. About 5 P.M., I realize time is marching south but I am not. I leave David and our friends to embark on my first taxi ride.

Traffic is insane. We hardly move for long periods of time and when we do, it’s with stops and starts and jerks and lurches and horns blowing. My God, the horns blowing! This is how Manhattan drivers communicate, with the assist of their middle fingers. My taxi driver and I are moving and stalling toward my first interview in The Big Apple. We don’t speak; the cabbie needs all his attention and energy to commandeer his yellow vehicle. I’m constantly checking my watch as it ticks, ticks, ticks. We won’t make it on time. Will my possible employer wait for me? Will I be entering an empty office? Will there be other job offers in this fast-paced, catch-it-while-you-can metropolis?

Suddenly, the driver slams on his brakes, pushes open his door that swings in the evening breeze and leaps from the car, shouting and gesticulating at another cab driver, who is communicating in like manner, each accusing the other of things much worse than ill-mannered driving. I’m close to hysterical, thinking I’m going to die before I’ve even lived when he reenters the cab and says, Sorry, lady, but that guy almost killed you. My brain is shrieking, What, you moron, YOU almost killed me! But I sit quietly, tears in my eyes, struggling to not start screaming and gesturing in a very NYC way. It’s 6:15! Is he still waiting for me? Will I get the job? Will I ever see my family again?

We finally arrive at One Wall Street. I pay this crazy man and head up in the tallest elevator I’ve ever occupied. One man is waiting for me, there is no one else in the office. Of course, they’re all heading home after a long day of work. He’s a tall, big-boned, dark-haired and dark-complected man in his 40s who asks, in a deep voice, Are you okay? He graciously does not inquire as to why I’m wearing slippers but is intrigued as to why I have tears streaming down my face. Good Lord! I’m sure that he’s thinking of old movies he’s seen about bumpkins coming to the big city and he’s undoubtedly wondering if my skills are such that I’d be worth the employment risk. What if I come to work with hay in my teeth?

I explain my harrowing cab experience, exclaim about the horrendous traffic and wonder out loud about the frenetic pace of this New York. He agrees consolingly while I’m pulling my tattered nerves together before we move into the get-acquainted-sharing-of-information interview. An hour later, I’m hired! When can I start? In two weeks. I will return to Syracuse, get my college diploma, pack my two skirts and two blouses, gather up my cat, find an apartment and a roommate, kiss David goodbye for a while and start my new job and my new life.

"Life is not fair,

get used to it."

–Bill Gates

Mom often replied, in response to our childish complaints, Who ever said life is fair? Her exposure to this stark reality began when she was born, the unplanned last child of six after ten years of barrenness to an aging couple who lived on a hardscrabble farm in Saegertown, Pennsylvania, sometime between June 22 and June 26, 1928, a year before the beginning of the Great Depression (1929–1939). I was born, illegitimate, when she was sixteen and this was a punishable breach of society’s rules, on March 17, 1945, in Meadville, PA. I was the size 3, the oldest child at three and a half years, in the first chapter.

When the impregnation occurred, she was the babysitter for my father’s four very young sons; his wife, Norma, was pregnant with their fifth son. I have no doubt that Mom pursued Dad, that she saw this as a chance to escape an unhappy childhood and home life. She was desperate enough to not care who might get hurt in this threesome, which was really a seven-and-a-half-some.

Reflecting her youth, Mom named me after a famous actress, Yvonne de Carlo (1922–2007), but she rearranged the order to Carol Yvonne. For the time, I was an average-size newborn at five pounds. Having received minimal motherly love for most of her young life, probably feeling hated by the older woman who had birthed her when she was done raising kids, Mom loved this tiny person who was hers and hers totally. Knowing her mannerisms, I don’t see her spending a lot of time at play or cooing and such with me. She could not breastfeed; I was a Pet Evaporated Milk baby. I suspect her diaper changing and other maternal ministrations were done with an I’m-busy-this-needs-to-be-done efficiency, but I have no doubt she was fascinated and awestruck by this little bundle that represented love and responsibility. Being Mom, she addressed the responsibility and let the love follow as an understood. There was very little money so my baby clothes and diapers were handed down from her four sisters, who were already mothers. There was one expensive exception, which I still have: a tiny pink plastic hairbrush and comb with painted pale pink flowers and a (now) faded pink ribbon. She’d saved these in the original box with the receipt for $2.50, which was undoubtedly hard earned.

I remember nothing of those early years, and I’ve learned very little from our very private mother. No one is alive to tell me the stories or give me the details of those first years my parents were together. I can safely surmise that my father left his first family to be with Mom. She became pregnant with my sister Sandy less than three months after my birth.

Dad was divorced and able to marry Mom on February 1, 1946. Sandy, the size 2, was born on February 24, also in Meadville.

Sometime during that first year, I was kidnapped by Mom’s parents. My cousin, Nancy, who is ten years younger than Mom, remembers a commotion at our house when the police came and tried to find where you were living. Ostensibly, MumMum’s and Granddad’s argument was that Mom was too young to take care of a newborn. Mom well knew the kind of love that would be awaiting her tiny baby in that farmhouse and fought to keep me. I was not in their care for long. I suspect that she and Dad relocated to Elmira not long after Sandy’s birth to put distance between them and all the families.

Getting back to the life is not fair discussion, Mom had good reason to accept this as one of her mantras. She’d been born to an unloving mother and a father who was gentle and caring but dominated by his wife. She’d grown up with a minimum of nurturing, without siblings close by, in poor financial circumstances. Where was the fair for her? But, and this is a big but, Mom was dishing out the unfairness as well as she’d been receiving it.

Dad’s first wife Norma was now left alone with four boys, an infant and probably no job or means of support. I doubt Dad was able to finance two families; I hope that he helped Norma as much as he could. It was not enough. She made the tough decision to give her baby boy, born a month before me, up for adoption. A doctor and his wife became the baby’s parents and raised him in Texas. Charles later said he was raised happily. He was reunited with his brothers many years after. The older four boys saw very little of their father and lived frugally while growing up. They still harbor ill will toward him about the distance he put between them while creating this new family of three girls.

Cousin Nancy remembers Mom and Dad paying for her train ticket so she could spend two summers with them in Elmira when she was eleven and twelve years old, which would have been in 1949 and 1950. She says that we six—Nancy, Mom, Dad and us three sisters—made happy visits to the local carnival. She recalls how we kids would rush outside to wave to the engineer whenever the new-style diesel trains ran outside our house. Later, we lived next to a train track in Mattydale, NY, where I would, again, run out to wave at the engineer du jour, who inevitably waved back at this young enthusiast.

The baby in the blankets, Jackie, was born in Elmira, NY, on March 18, 1948. Sometime later, Mom was working in a bar where her Oakie accent was a source of amusement to the owner, Leo, who would translate her localisms, such as fer pert to four ports. She, and others from her region of Pennsylvania, did not patronize plurals so we grew up hearing three mile down the road and two pair of socks. He teased this pretty, tiny lady a lot.

One day, our father arrived home to find a packed suitcase on the front porch with the locks changed. Mom had found a more prosperous provider in Leo, the bar owner. Now Dad found himself on the receiving end of life is not fair and we three girls were beginning to understand this phrase as well.

Memories of my father? I have very few from those early years, but I do have a couple of photos. He stood about 5’9" with a solid workingman’s physique, fair complexion, blue eyes, a full head of light brown hair, eyeglasses and a noticeably high forehead; he was not balding. His hands are the focal point of my favorite picture; they are square with strong knuckles and long fingers. In this photo, I’m sitting on his knee as he squats and these hands are adjusting my too-large coat; I seem to be shyly listening to him. I was four when he was disappeared from the family scene.

One memory, he was late picking us girls up for a play day. He tried to rush us by saying, Hurry up, eat your cocoa and drink your toast. We squealed with laughter. During a psychic reading a few years ago, his spirit apologized for not fighting for any of his kids but Your mother scared me too much. He referred to a letter his firstborn girl wrote declaring her love and stating she missed him. This sounds like a letter I’d write even at that young age, during my first exposure to the life-is-not-fair rule.

I guess if you believe in what goes around, comes around, his treatment by Mom was well earned. I have no other explanation for the unhappiness he undoubtedly experienced at that time. He married at least two more times—one wife was named Carol, had no more children, moved back to Meadville and thereafter seems to have lived a happy life with Marian.

Life’s Lessons Start Early

Once Mom hooked us up with Leo, we were headed down an unhappy path. I can only guess at the attraction each had for the other. Mom saw a businessman she thought could provide her the security and comforts she’d been wanting and missing. He may have seen a pretty, young woman he thought he could dominate while she administered to his creature and sexual wants. I suspect both came away feeling cheated.

Things started out rocky. When I was about five or six, Mom put us three kids into foster care with a family that owned a farm. This was undoubtedly a very difficult decision for her. We were hers. She’d already proved she was not one to walk away from her children when she thwarted her parents’ attempt to take me. Now, for financial reasons, she was having to relinquish her time with us to strangers.

This sounds like a hardship for us but it was one of the best summers of our childhood, bursting with pastoral experiences such as running barefoot through fields, harvesting eggs each morning, helping to bring in the cows for milking (we were too small to do the actual teat pulling) and basking in all the good that God could create. Every day seemed like playday for us. There were two kids in their teens named Butch and Nancy, coincidentally the names of our two favorite cousins in Meadville. These new foster siblings spoiled us with attention, lessons about farm life and ways to play. Mrs. M., their mother, even sectioned our oranges as one does a grapefruit, no peeling and getting messy for us tykes. We loved being with all the animals and were accepted by most of them.

Well, my sisters Sandy and Jackie were accepted. I tried to ride one of the horses bareback until it sidled up to the barn wall and attempted to scrape me off its topside. I haven’t done much better with horses since. And there was one rooster who despised me and only me. Whenever he saw me, he would run at me, proceeding to chase me around the yard. Once I fell and cut my leg badly; the wound did not clean up well. I still have a patch of cinders under the skin of my right knee.

Mom did not abandon us. She visited every Sunday. I can still see her getting off a bus and walking down the farm lane to where we eagerly awaited our opportunity to show her what we’d learned and were doing. When we were reunited at summer’s end, we asked Mom to section our oranges. The spoiling ended with Mom declaring she was too busy to do such foolishness. Summer was over and it was affirmed that Mom would always be with us. I was developing a feeling of security and was learning to trust it.

The barnyard incidents were my second brush with physical danger, albeit I’m embroidering the dangers of the chicken chase. My first real brush with danger was when I was two years old, when we lived in an apartment in Meadville. No one really knows what happened, but Mom surmised, after later viewing a broken child’s teacup, that I was having a tea party and poured lighter fluid as the beverage. After hearing my screams, Mom rushed to find me lying unconscious on the floor. She quickly gave Sandy over to her neighbor, scooped me up and ran downstairs to the street. Not being able to afford a car, she ran to the first car idling at the corner red light, threw open the passenger door and commanded the man to take us to the hospital. While he was driving, Mom had me lying face down across her knees and was frantically and without stopping jiggling her legs and pounding me on the back. The doctors opined that these movements probably kept my heart fluttering and saved my life.

I lay in a coma for about two weeks before returning home, where I could not eat solid foods for a year. Whenever anyone came near me with food on a spoon, I would scream because my mouth hurt so much. X-rays show I still have burn scars on my esophagus. During that year, I lived on a liquid diet augmented with daily doses of cod liver oil for supplemental nourishment. I grew to love cod liver oil, which is not something you hear very often.

Because of other mishaps, which I’ll share later, Mom started to claim that I was like a cat with nine lives; she would peer into my eyes after each incident, trying to ascertain which life I was currently working on. To balance this penchant for physical disaster, Sandy was prone to ailments and fainting sessions; Jackie had falls that left scars, like the time she broke her tongue when she was two or three years old.

Mom had located a babysitter/caregiver named Carol, who sat for us in her home. I vaguely remember one or two other children; they may have been hers. Carol was an excellent nurturer who cared for us, fed us and kept us entertained...with one arm, her right arm. She was missing the lower two-thirds of her left arm; why, I don’t know. Her house always smelled of bologna. This had nothing to do with her abbreviated limb, perhaps she served a lot of bologna. Nonetheless, I still identify the smell of this luncheon meat with a missing arm.

One day, Jackie took a fall down Carol’s steep concrete steps and arose screaming, with blood gushing from her mouth. She’d bitten her tongue through the center top, only the sides were connected. Carol, the wonder woman, scooped up the moaning Jackie, shepherded two to four other frightened children under the ages of six into her, probably, manual steering car and got us all to the hospital, where she called Mom. No stitches were made and Jackie was sent home with bandaging to the point that she could not close her mouth, instructions as to what she could eat and the inability to talk for many days. She healed in good time, and I found another hero in this amazing woman. A person doesn’t need two arms to take care of business.

As a freshman at Syracuse University, I lived in a tiny