We moved from Oak St. to Lomita some time before Christmas of that year, but we moved into a duplex that Pam, Freddie and Willene were renting across the street and a couple of houses down from the triplex being built. After New Year's, dad married Willene since his divorce was now final. That's when the real issues began. Tiger was gone. That Christmas, I got a car carrier with three cars on it. It came with three rubber bands to keep the plastic cars on the carrier. My soon-to-be step-brother Freddie stole the rubber bands which he needed for some gift he got for Christmas. When I protested loudly about what he had done, Willene came over and smacked me hard across the face. She then lied and announced that the three rubber bands he now had, while I had none, had been given to him by her. They were not mine, though where mine had gotten to was a mystery. This would become the pattern of our lives with her. Freddie would do something bad, she would cover up or ignore his transgression, and the rest of us would somehow be punished.
I have but one photo that I will put up next from this period; but, again, there are no others, so Lorri might have those. The new house itself when we moved in that spring needed all kinds of exterior work on the grounds. We helped dad build that low brick wall at the sidewalk, as well as the brick planters across the front of the house. We hauled many wheelbarrows filled with dirt in or rocks away, to fill in the front yard. We felt like slaves much of the time. When the lawns matured, Freddie and I had to divide them between us to mow once a week. He would do his, the easier sections that had the least amount of edging, first thing in the morning. I would have to wait until he was done and then take over. Especially with the two segments of lawn in back, in front of the two rental units, I would mow and edge and Willene would stand at the den window and watch me the entire time, thumping on the window with her knuckles and then pointing to where she insisted I had missed some blade of grass or other.
One summer, Freddie was supposed to take summer school. He was forever doing poorly in school anyway. However, he did not attend. He skipped school every single day. I soon realized what he was doing, but I had quickly learned that you could not tell Willene anything that her precious son had done wrong. She would refuse to believe it and would turn the accusation against the informant. Pam may have also figured it out, but Willene remained oblivious. (Georgann was staying with the grandparents that summer because she had had her own confrontations with Willene and this was a cooling off period for both of them.) By term's end, of course, she was presented by the school with the fact that he had not been attending at all. The rest of us were punished for not have squealed on him--we could not win either way.
Mom's monthly visits were the only highlights of our three and a half intolerable years of living with Willene and Freddie (Spring 1960 - June 1963). We'd get to go away for a day and forget about the rest of the month, for a few hours, at least. But then we'd have to return on Sunday evening, and the cycle of physical or emotional abuse would continue all over again.
During one stretch, emotional confrontations between Freddie and me were so intense, they moved him into the spare room even though Lorri was in the crib there. I was in heaven, now having the bedroom all to myself. We didn't fight nearly as much because he and I weren't sharing the same room--and the nights when Willene would come in and smack us with the metal fly swatter hardly happened--Freddie would leap all over the room once she started on him and weep openly even when hardly a single blow landed--I would stoically stand there and take the beatings with the metal handle of the fly swatter and not react in any way. (I think that made her even angrier, and she'd hit me harder, but I would still not be provoked.) Unfortunately, the separation ended after a couple of weeks and he was moved back into the bedroom.
A bit of background is important here. Dad had ulcers--no surprise there--so he would chew gum to deal with them. Freddie would sneak into their bedroom and steal packs of gum to chew at night. The girls also made brownies for our school lunches, but they seemed to disappear faster than they ought to have. Here was Willene, broom in hand, and there at her feet, after Freddie's bed was moved out, were multiple brownie crumbs and a few empty Chicklets boxes, yet she never acted as if she saw any of this obvious evidence. I stood there, amazed, and watched her sweep, marveling at her overt denial that her son was a thief.
His thievery was not confined to food or gum. He would steal my things, take them to school, and trade them for food to other students. If we had identical toys, and Willene had taped our names to the bottom, as she did with our new, red tanker trucks, as soon as he abused his truck, he sneaked out to the garage and switched the name tags. You could see the outline of where the tape had been reapplied since we had run them through a mud puddle in the alley. He did the same thing with my jeans. She would write our names on the leather tags on the back. When his began to wear down, he would take a pen and write over my name with his. You could see the faint outline of "Greg" having been overlaid with "Fred", but telling her would do no good--it was the rubber bands incident all over again.
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