Dawn Schiller: The Road Through Wonderland: Surviving John Holmes

Aunt Ella, barely five feet tall, wears her white hair in tight curls too. She is a very round woman with a matching circular, soft face, and one of her legs is a good six inches shorter than the other. My grandma tells us the story of how, when Aunt Ella was a baby, she was so small their mother used a shoe box for her cradle. I think shoe boxes were big back then.

Grandma and Aunt Ella speak High German and wear plain housedresses, aprons, and black lace-up boots six days a week. Sundays, they dress up in their customary church-day attire, complete with hats and gloves.

Aunt Ella’s one boot has a higher sole on it, and she uses a cane so she can walk properly. She is, we are told, an “old maid.” She never married, and everyone in the family takes care of her. To me, Aunt Ella is the sweetest, kindest lady, always soft-spoken and polite, ever prepared with a hard candy in the pocket of her housedress or apron. When we children are being scolded, she often stands up for us, stepping into the middle of Mom’s cross words or wild backhand swings or rage as she drags us upstairs to “get the belt.”

“Now, Edda, what has the child done?” Aunt Ella asks. As quickly as she can, she stands and then wedges her lame leg between Mom and me. Anchoring herself with her cane, she distracts Mom and buys me time to hide. Aunt Ella knows if she questions long enough, Mom’s temper will subside. It works—sometimes.

But most times it doesn’t.

Still, many sweet childhood memories are made here in the big house on Main Street. Grandma does the cooking, and Aunt Ella always bakes. Crumb cake is my favorite: cinnamon, buttery crumb cake. In the pantry every Sunday morning is a large bowl of sweet dough, the ingredients mixed from scratch. Aunt Ella’s faintly lavender-and-stale-rose-scented black sweater drapes tightly over the bowl’s edges, and the yeast, thick and rich, fills the air in the warm pantry closet.

“Keep the door closed,” Aunt Ella says, “so the dough will rise.”

It always rises mysteriously.

Downstairs, at night, it is customary for Grandma to sit in her favorite rocking chair facing the darkened mouth of the massive redbrick fireplace. Tilting to and fro, the old, worn, knotty-wood rocker creaks when I sit in it, pretending I am grandma, gray and wise.

On many an evening I discover Grandma snoring loudly in her chair, head leaning forward on her chest, arms crossed tightly around her waist in a hug.

“Grandma, Grandma, wake up,” I whisper one time, gently shaking her arm after watching her snore awhile longer. I ponder how odd and different she looks while asleep in the low living room lamplight.

“Oh, did I fall asleep?” she mumbles, her voice sweet and sleepy.

I quietly guide her up the polished oak stairs to her bedroom.

Grandma and Aunt Ella share a large bedroom on the second floor, and before bedtime each night, we children ritually appear to unlace their boots and to say our “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayers together, blessing everyone we know afterward.

One winter evening, after saying my prayers with Grandma and Aunt Ella, I turn to leave their room and see through the window the year’s first snow gently and silently fall. I lean against the radiator at the window and excitedly call out the snow’s arrival.

“How lovely,” my grandma says, too tired to get up and look.

They let me stay for a while in their room as I watch the shadowy street and trees become blanketed in white. The streetlamp below the window illuminates the quickly falling flakes and bathes everything in a pale blue light.

I love them—Grandma and Aunt Ella. Filled with the magic of an angelic moment, I feel so much love for them that particular night. After a while, I say my good nights and kiss each again.

It is a perfect moment that will be etched into my memory forever.

Aunt Ella and Grandma are religious. They are Lutheran by birth, but it seems Grandma wears the Bible on her dress. On her bad days, she has a tendency to call on the devil and offer to send us to him should we “not mind.” Of course, she does this with God’s permission and always asks us, “Is that what you want? To go to hell and the devil?”

“No, Grandma!” we cry. “We’re sorry. We don’t want to go to hell and the devil.”

I don’t know what hell and the devil is, but one thing’s for sure: It isn’t good.

When Grandma says this, it seems we are going there even if we don’t want to. Sometimes at night, when unlacing my aunt Ella’s boots, I ask her worriedly if that’s where I’m going—to the devil. I worry mostly because of the memories of my uncle visiting my room at night, those nights when I felt blank inside, like a dirty rag doll. She never answers, but instead casts a disapproving sideways glance in my grandmother’s direction. Grandma then purses her lips, making them thinner than ever, and says a short, sharp “good night,” turning over in a huff without reciting her prayers. I never really know if I’m going to the “bad place” or not, but I feel terrible that she won’t pray with me.

Still, the best and most fun hours we children spend are outside in our sprawling yard. Filled with wild honeysuckle, it is home to big, funny, flowering trees good for climbing. Behind our clothesline is the little garden patch, where we grow radishes and carrots. Farther back still, behind the garage, is a never-ending cluster of woods, as big as the whole world.

Here, we find box turtles, and we keep them as pets until Grandma or Mom makes us let them go. (Aunt Ella always lets us keep them.)

Here, too, we pick wild strawberries. Then we dash into the house for a bowl and sugar and scurry back out into the afternoon sun to sit and eat our prize picks.

Dr. Bricker, our neighbor to the left, owns a large portion of tangled woods that melds into ours. We pick dogwood blossoms from the short, gnarled trees in his part of the back woods and bring them in as presents for my mother, grandma, and Aunt Ella. Sitting out on our large, green lawn, my brother, sister, and I gather dandelions, playing the game where we hold them under each other’s chin to see if we like butter. I always like butter.

The best thing about this time in New Jersey is the wonder of summer twilight, when the fireflies come to show their luminous, green flashes. They are magical, sweet remnants of my fairy-tale dreams. While I sip tea with my royal court of dolls under our climbing tree, the fireflies protect me as they soar above. I am their queen, and they love me.

Warm days lazily turn into nights. The eastern sky blazes purple and pink at the peak of the fireflies’ evening arrival. Their little lights blink randomly, floating on the thick, honeysuckle air.

Sometimes near, sometimes far, the fireflies dare us to believe in them. When they grace us with their presence, my heart knows they come out to enchant us and remind us of their existence.

I try to stop my brother, who, to my horror, only wants to catch their glowing bodies. “Maybe they’re fairies,” I tell him.

When he catches them anyway and puts them in jars, revealing their insect nature, I am still convinced they are magical beings that simply change when caught. Insisting that the glass prisons will kill their magic, I free every firefly my brother gathers. Soon he believes in them too.

I arrived the firstborn of three children. Mom was pregnant with me soon after coming to the States with my father. Born in a neighboring coastal town called Point Pleasant on December 29, 1960, I had golden curls and crystal blue-green eyes exactly like my father’s. In fact, it is said among family that, aside from being a girl, I was the spitting image of my dad.