I spent the first three to four years
of my life deeply in love with my pacifier. Yes, I was one of those children
who held firmly to that natural comfort of a nipple in my mouth for long after
it was appropriate. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem all that strange. There are
a great many adults who still, either subconsciously or consciously, walk
around looking for nipples to put in their mouths, so the few years that I was
overdue for a weaning don’t seem so serious anymore.
But damn . . . was it serious back
then.
I have memories reaching as far
back as my second year of life, the first clear, brilliant recollection being a
moment when my mom sat my tiny toddler body on our classically 1970’s orange kitchen
counter top, her standing closely by, as we watched the gold-domed popcorn-maker
stir its long metal arm in a circle until the kernels inside began to explode
into white puffs. I remember laughing hysterically at this. Had I been born in
2007 instead of 1977, it was a scene that my parents may have recorded with
their smartphones and posted to YouTube. You’ve seen them—clips of dads and
moms repeatedly doing something like making a fart noises with their lips and
the young toddler belly-laughing uncontrollably and then waiting in
anticipation for the noise to come again. This is a testament to how little I
must have been, small enough to roar in comedic delight at the popping of corn
kernels. I asked my mother once, many years later if she recalled this event.
And while I don’t think she remembered it happening, I saw her eyes widen in
disbelief and shock that my memories extended so far and with such exquisite
detail. She claims I couldn’t have been more than two years old, and that seems
about right to me. I thought the subject might make her feel nostalgic, but the
astonishment on her face seemed less like reflective musing and more like grave
concern. It suggested my mother was thinking, “If she remembers THAT, what else
does she remember?”
I remember everything I’ve chosen
to remember. And my memory is long.
My parents hated that pacifier. I
loved my Nukky. I loved it so much. I loved gently biting it and shifting my
teeth around to make squeaky sounds of rubber-on-rubber. Nukky made me feel
happy when I was sad. Nukky served as the calmer of my frustrations, the crutch
to my shyness, and I wasn’t the only kid who had a ‘thing’ they carried with
them all the time. No one got mad at my best bud, Tonya, when she took her
blankie everywhere. And while I was admittedly too old for something most
certainly intended for infants, I didn’t understand why everyone was so pissed
off about it. I just knew that they were.
At home, Nukky was more of a
tolerated annoyance. He’d occasionally be put in Nukky jail if I got in trouble
or if I left him unattended somewhere, but I’d always find him, pop him back
into my mouth, and go on with whatever kid-plans I had for the day.
A spirited debate about Nukky would
most often occur when we were going somewhere and I insisted on taking him
along. Nukky in public was the thing that drove them over the edge. See, it
wasn’t so much that I loved and wanted Nukky all the time, it was the notion of
people in town catching sight of a three-year-old marching confidently down the
grocery aisle, pacifier planted firmly between her lips, which dripped deep
humiliation into my parents. I suspect my mother imagined the entire township
of Plattsburg whispering behind their hands: “Is that Franz and Patti’s kid?
Isn’t she too old for that? How strange. Why don’t they just take it away from
her?”
Outings were the catalyst for all-out
Nukky battles, which most often ended in the terrifying threat that Nukky would
meet his end soon, and most often that end was death by toilet flush.
That was when true distress would
set in. I knew that things that went down the toilet never, ever, EVER came
back again. It served me to allow the parents to put Nukky in hiding, in
Nukky-jail, where I knew I could stealthily retrieve him later. They weren’t
very creative about his imprisonment, and for the most part, I could find him
in one of about four places, most often the cabinet nearest the entrance to the
kitchen from the living room. And if that earliest childhood memory of the
popping corn taught me anything, it was that interesting shit happened on the
kitchen counter, and so I had since learned to climb up there myself.
“I’m gonna flush that Nukky down
the toilet!” I still see my mother’s furrowed brow, eyes piercing through me,
her lips tight in condescension, her finger pointed at Nukky clenched tightly
between my teeth.
Don’t
worry, Nukky. I got you. They can’t get you out of my mouth if I bite really,
really hard. No one will take you away from me.
Around this same time, I developed
a deep interest in a series of books someone had gifted me. They were called Value Tales, by Value Communications
Publishers in LaJolla, California. This was the height of the Time Life series
days, when people bought sets of books about World War II or the animals of the
earth or the Old West, before the internet dropped everything we would ever
want to know about anything into our magic boxes.
The Value Tales were children’s books which
depicted a biographical sketch of a famous person while focusing on some moral
or value exemplified by that historical figure’s life. Helen Keller’s story was
The Value of Determination. The Value of Leadership told the tale of
Winston Churchill. But my favorite of the series was The Value of Believing in Yourself: The Story of Louis Pasteur.
The fact that this was my
favorite, as a look back with my adult(-ish) brain, highlights something specifically
peculiar about my personality. I absolutely adore being terrified. I’ve been
exposed to some of the most sophisticated writing in history, but when it comes
time for me to read something for sheer delight, or if I have a long road trip requiring
an audiobook for entertainment, Stephen King is my author of choice. I have
always been the one to vote to watch the horror movie over the romantic comedy,
and always been the one who laid in bed later that night, startling at every
creak of the floor board or howl of the wind outside. And the Louis Pasteur
story was DARK. I don’t know if it was a reflection of the sullen, jaded,
psychedelic hangover that was the 1970’s, the kind of winsome charm with a
sleeping creeping sensation just beneath the surface that movies like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory exemplified.
I have always liked scary things, and this was the first thing that genuinely
whipped up the heebie-jeebies in me.
The French chemist Louis Pasteur
is best known for his development of the Pasteurization process of milk and
wine, prohibiting bacterial contamination. But the Value Tale focused primarily
on his development of the cure for rabies. Now because things like microscopic
germs were entirely subjective to the minds of the children reading this Value
Tale, the ‘invisible enemy’ of the rabies germ is illustrated thusly:
As a child listening to my parents
read this story, as the pages turned one by one, my heart would quicken,
knowing that the Rabies were coming. With
each turn of those pages, I was getting closer and closer to the moment when I
would come face to face with the demons that would haunt me long after I’d been
tucked in and the light was turned out. And yet, I selected this title over and
over again. Tossing aside the books featuring the biographies of Nelly Bly and
Johnny Appleseed, I would go back to one title that would keep me nicely
chilled for a long night in a dark room.
I never got desensitized to the
Rabies. I always knew they were coming and I always knew what they looked like,
but each time was like the first time. I couldn’t look, and then I couldn’t
look away. The closer they came, the harder sucked on my Nukky, biting down on
him, squeaking him between my teeth. In
fact, the only reason I could make it through the book each time was knowing
that I had Nukky there with me. I knew I’d be scared, and that I would kinda
like it, and it was alright because Nukky was there.
Having grown more and more
careless of his whereabouts, my parents had more frequent opportunities to lock
Nukky away somewhere. If it took me longer than a few minutes to find him, a dread
would set in, an ever-creeping fear that she’d DONE it, she’d finally gone and
done IT, she’d flushed Nukky down the toilet and I’d never, ever see him again!
The more panicked I became, the more adrenaline pumped into my little child
body, and the more I wanted him there between my teeth to squeaky-squeaky-squeak and tell me everything was ok. When I would
find him, the relief would be tenfold when I would pop him in my mouth . . . oh, Nukky I thought you were lost forever.
Dark days don’t often start so
dark, and I remember feeling happy, not-yet frenzied in my Nukky hunt. I hadn’t
seen him in some time. While I recall these events with sparkling clarity, I
have trouble determining time in measurements, because an hour to a child feels
like years, and a year feels like decades. So while I feel like I hadn’t seen
Nukky in a few days, it could have been as little as a few hours. I’d checked
obvious places . . . Dad’s bathroom shaving drawer was the easiest cell to
spring Nukky from, but he wasn’t there. I walked into the kitchen, to the
cabinet that Nukky had to go to when Mom and Dad were super pissed at me,
because of the effort involved in the jail break.
Sun
shone through the kitchen windows, the afternoon still blooming with promise of some
adventure for me to embark on, just as soon as I found Nukky. I could go out
and play under the weeping willow, or watch the horses in the pasture from the
backyard, or jump on my bed and dance and listen to Paul Revere and the
Raiders, for whom I’d developed an intense liking.
My confidence soared when I
started to pull the kitchen chair from its place at the table over to the
counter, because the ruckus it made usually drew attention to my illicit
activity. Sometimes my plans to bust Nukky outta jail were foiled by the
downfalls of being a tiny human, having to bang things around and exert effort
that wouldn’t be necessary if I were just a little bit taller, just a little
bit bigger. But Dad was right there in the living room, balls deep into some
western on one of the three channels we had way back then.
He can’t hear me. Ha ha ha. Nukky, I’m coming to save you and then we’ll
spend the whole day together.
I climbed from the floor to the
seat of the chair, from the seat of the chair to that orange countertop where I’d
had my first belly laugh at the popping popcorn, so proud no one had caught me
getting Nukky, so happy that the moment was almost here. My fingers gripped the
round, brass handle on the cabinet and I slowly pulled it toward me, inching
open the door as a shaft of light peeked through and illuminated the dishes
inside. I looked around, making sure no one was coming, then swung the door
wide. I saw Nukky, tucked into the corner. But standing in front of him, guarding
him from our reunion, was a giant RABIES demon.
I screamed, nearly falling from
the counter, I screamed. I screamed and didn’t stop and then my world turned
hazy and black. Behind my screams was the disbelief that my one true terror had
somehow leapt from the pages of that book, conspired with my parents to take
Nukky away from me, another true terror. The only thing worse than Nukky being
flushed down the toilet was Nukky in jail with one of the rabies. That hideous
thing was standing there so far from the world it belonged in, invaded my
house, and was keeping Nukky prisoner. While
I’m sure I didn’t actually faint, my soul darkened for a time and I felt
nothing but terror, and the events of the rest of the day—until later that
evening—are a bleak fog. I retreated somewhere to cope with the distressing and
ghastly events that had befallen me.
It couldn’t be possible, you’re
thinking to yourself, right? These are the nightmarish machinations of a child
doing something wrong and manifesting an imaginary bad guy to scare her out of committing
the infraction of reclaiming Nukky, you think? No. That monstrous
representation of a once incurable disease, that caricature that I simply
called ‘Rabie’, was real.
Rabie entering my
three-dimensional world demonstrates the difference between my mother and my
father. My mother yelled and shamed and tried to humiliate me away from Nukky,
and when none of that worked, threatened to flush Nukky down the toilet. My
father’s approach was quiet, deliberate, a scheming saved for a high reward—a
shock-and-awe style of parenting that would have made Dick Cheney proud. My
father hand-sketched an oversized duplicate of that Rabie. He took time to
shadow lines beneath its eyes, sharpened the Rabie’s teeth into fine, razor
points; he narrowed Rabie’s fingers into claws. A man who preferred the
sciences to the arts, a man who, to the best of my knowledge, never drew
anything before or since, focused immense artistic energy and pizazz into a
drawing intended to scare the ever-loving shit out of his kid.
Sometime in the post-terror darkness,
I realized he must have heard me from the living room as I was making my
approach. My father must have heard me dragging the chair across the kitchen,
heard the clamoring of my efforts to climb onto the counter. He knew my
clandestine adventure would end as soon as I opened that cabinet door. I
thought that the cowboys on television had distracted him enough for me to make
my move, but he knew the whole time what was in store for me. Did Mom know,
too? Did they plan this together? How long did they know before it happened,
and why on earth would they scare me like that?
My parents delighted in the series
of events. I heard my mother recounting the afternoon to someone on the phone,
laughing at Franz’s clever plot, snickering at my despair. At some point, they
must have felt guilty because they gave Nukky back to me and stopped talking
about it. Or at least, stopped talking about it with such gusto.
After darkness fell (and in my
memory it seems like the same evening, but it may have been a few days later .
. . again, child sense of time is strange) I found myself curled on my bed,
Nukky in my mouth, a squeak and a squeak and a squeak between my teeth, and I
knew what to do.
Heartbroken, I walked to the
bathroom.
I loved Nukky. No part of me
wanted to do what I had to do, but Mom and Dad would never stop trying to take
him away from me. At such a tender age, I learned what happened when two horrifying,
but seemingly separate fears suddenly collided, inciting a despair too big for
me to handle. I never wanted to lose Nukky, but if they would put him in the
cabinet with that Rabie, what would they do next? How would they try to scare
me away from him? They’d already manifested the most terrifying thing my child
mind could imagine; what horrors await me if I keep him?
I remembered a story my uncles,
who were teenagers at the time, told about flushing a baby alligator down the
toilet and it turning into a giant alligator. This oddly gave me hope. If an
alligator can go down the toilet and grow up and live, maybe Nukky can go out
to the water where the toilet water ends up. Maybe Nukky can find me, or some
other kid to comfort . . . but hopefully me. If he stays here, I don’t know
what will happen. Maybe some time when I’m down by the lake next to our house,
my Nukky will come floating up to me, my lost friend who would certainly come
back to me if he could.
My brain holds this memory in vibrant
Technicolor—my standing next to the toilet, my little feet shoulder-width apart,
my palm stretched flat, and in the center was my Nukky. He was yellow, his
plastic roughened by too many years of providing security I so needed, his
orange-brown nipple pocked with tiny teeth marks. I gazed down at him, overcome
by sorrow. I felt fat tears growing on my lids, and I feel silly that thirty
years later, I feel those same tears welling up for a little girl who just
loved something, was brought peace by something silly and infantile, but who
would have likely grown out of it in her own time.
I dropped Nukky into the toilet
and flushed. I watched him circle the bowl with the tornado of water, a
clockwise waving of goodbye to a girl who loved him so much. I told myself I
was a big girl. That Nukkys were for babies. That I couldn’t take Nukky to
kindergarten with me when I went. That my new baby sister couldn’t learn how to
be a big girl if I were still a baby myself with a stupid baby Nukky. I wiped
tears from my face and walked to the living room.
“Mom, Dad. I’m a big girl. I’m not
going to use my Nukky anymore.”
They looked pleased for one
second, my mother relieved that the battles were finally over, my father
justified that his very elaborate scheme had worked. I realized this was who I
was in this family. That they would be nicer to me if I just did what they said.
“I did it. I flushed him down the
toilet.”
Their parental pride evaporated.
My mother’s mouth dropped open, releasing
a “WHAT?!?!?” that was more of an exclamation than a question. My father flew
up from his chair and ran to the bathroom, and I could hear him making sucking
noises and splashing the toilet water, saying the f-word and the s-word back
and forth.
“Why ON EARTH did you flush him
down the toilet, Jackee?” Mom asked.
“That’s what you told me you were
going to do.” And so that’s what I did. That’s what grownups do, I imagined.
They flush shit they can’t use anymore down the toilet.
“Ok, well from now on don’t flush
anything except peepee and poopoo down the toilet.”
I sulked back to my room,
despaired over my lost Nukky, disillusioned that the one thing I thought I
could do that would make my parents proud resulted in more frustration and
annoyance, and I think maybe a call to a plumber, but definitely a few rounds
of hearty plunger uses.
If this were my Value Tale, it would
be called “The Value of Thinking of Your Children as Human Beings with Their
Own Wants, Needs, and Emotional Guidance Systems: The Jackee Marceau Story”. I
don’t think I ever fully trusted either of my parents after the Nukky incident.
It’s a cautionary value tale. The things you think aren’t important, the forgettable
daily events and irritations and annoyances that children conjure in their
parents aren’t so forgettable for the children who have yet to learn to
navigate the absolute weirdness of our world. Children remember, even if you
don’t. It’s a lesson in learning to acknowledge the needs of people who don’t
have a say in the decisions made for them. It applies to people who aren’t
parents, but who have to deal with people that may have a very different
perspective from you.
Or maybe I just wanted to holler
my parents out for scaring the shit out of me. The Value of Telling an
Entertaining Story That Might Demonstrate Something or Other.
R.I.P. Nukky
1977-1980somethingorother
