Years later, when I was long gone from the household and was able to watch other families in action, only then did I wonder about my own family because even though the Schaaps were remarkably free the scandals that rip families apart, we didn't get together all that often. Uncle Jay and Aunt Sis lived in Cedar Grove, fifteen minutes away. In a cold Wisconsin winter, it took longer to get a car warm than it did to get their upstairs apartment.
Uncle Gerard and Aunt Jeanette lived in the city, in Sheboygan, a half-hour away, not far at all. Three Schaap sisters ended up in Michigan. Aunt Gertrude had orange trees in her Santa Barbara backyard. We were there once. And the youngest, Agnes, lived in Rochester, New York, married to a man with a prickly personality, an in-law likely closest to an familial aberration. He wasn't Dutch, and she met him during the war--that's all I knew. I don't remember him--what he looked like, how he talked. I don't know that I ever met him. He worked for Kodac. Upstairs in a closet we had a huge photograph he'd taken of a city at night. That's all I remember of an uncle I don't think I ever saw.
It was a loving family, preachers kids all, full of good people, sweethearts. Occasionally, we'd stop in Sheboygan to see Uncle Gerard and Aunt Jeanette. And occasionally, Dad would take me along to the barber shop in Cedar Grove, but those visits were few and far between. What we needed was a Michigan family to show up. That would get the whole bunch into our living room.
Uncle Marinus, a preacher, was a card--all I have to do is think of him and I smile. He was a real city boy, grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was capable of slinging slights at backwards Oostburg, which riled Uncle Bill, who lived in Michigan but grew up in the burg and loved even the thought of the village where I too grew up.
That Uncle Jay told the story of the Korean woman at a family reunion wasn't shocking, but it likely came as a surprise. The Schaaps loved to giggle, and by the time I was old enough to listen in, they'd all long ago determined that a great family reunion meant a healthy dose of Uncle Jay's whacky boyhood stories. Silence was his mode until one of the older sisters egged him on. The first one out required a commitment he hadn't worked up, but once he started, he would take over the reunion. The Schaap girls soon loosened up that odd falsetto laugh, and the stage was his and his alone.
He was a master story-teller, with a satchel of stories he'd always lug along, most of them old standards he could repeat time and time again because they were outfitted so richly in detail his sisters and his brothers just loved.
When he started in on the Korean woman, for a moment I held my breath. I don't know that anyone in the family had ever spoken so openly about a woman's naked breast, so when he started up--"So a couple of months ago, a Korean woman and her little boy--cute little guy, button nose--came into the shop". . .I was maybe slightly ill-at-ease. By this time, I'd heard the story in two versions. I knew the punch lines, and I had a hankering for what that bare Korean breast looked like.
"There it was, right in front of me. I didn't know where to look--" he said as if the scissors and comb were there in his hands.
If he had misgivings about telling the story, they weren't in the least apparent. He'd started out the show in familiar territory with some classic winners, childhood tales most everyone already knew before venturing into new territory. Then, the Korean woman.
"And it worked, you know, because just like that the little boy stopped crying."
My aunts were small and pleasingly round. They rolled around a bit on the chairs Dad had set out in the living room, but it wasn't long and tears were spilled from laughing fits that only served to crank up the madness that took over the living room.
Uncle Jay was coming around the far turn. "What should a barber do about the boy's hair that fell right there on his mom's bare breast--you know, if it stays there it's going to irritate some. . ."
Aunts and uncles--and Mom and Dad--were holding onto each other as if a windstorm is tearing up the lakeshore and the only way of not blowing over is holding on to each other.
"You know, that whisk broom has really stiff bristles. I couldn't use that so I decided I had to blow that hair off. . ."
Poof, poof--he blows at a breast that, I swear, at this point in the story had magically appeared right there in our living room.
Nothing Uncle Jay could say was new. I didn't expect any new revelations. I'd heard the story twice already--once in the barber chair, once on the softball field.
But there in our living room, the audience was different--rollicking relatives who could barely contain themselves. He and the Korean woman had turned our living room into a chicken coop--a really bad choir of falsetto laughter.
I was twelve, maybe thirteen years old, and there was still this shocking matter of a bared woman's breast being spoken of, being joked about, right there in the sanctity of my mom and dad's living room. I'd never felt anything like it, but there, in the chorus of laughter, hard as it is to believe, I felt perfectly free to sing along.
It felt very strange to hear my uncle's story in his barber chair. I'd been embarrassed in the barber shop that day and abashed by what I heard--and didn't hear--on the third base line. Uncle Jay's barber shop is gone today, I think, and an Oostburg town-team tradition of fast-pitch softball long ago disappeared.
Even though, today, my Schaap uncles and aunts are all gone, I know darn well my cousins will likely forget a Korean woman whose breasts they likely remember from an image they could only have created from their own imaginations--and an image of their slightly eccentric uncle pursing his lips to blow away that little boy's hair.
I'm not sure why, but by far the best rendition was the one I somehow felt part of right there in our own living room.
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In the photo at the top of the page, left to right, are Uncle Gerard, Uncle Jay, my dad, and Uncle Ward.
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