Page 26 of The Music Demon

“Okay. Where was I?”

“Big war.”

“That’s right. Well, you know the term boomer came from the Baby Boom right after World War II. The story goes that there was pent-up demand for babies and people getting together to celebrate peacetime took the duty to reproduce seriously. The world had changed considerably after the war. Industrialization. The move from agrarian to urban society. The rise of suburbs. Huge public schools.”

She stopped for a few seconds, appearing to be lost in thought before she continued. “There were so many of us, Baby Boomers I mean, that, for the first half of my life, the average age in this country matched my birthday. When I was twelve, it was twelve. When I was thirty, it was thirty.”

“Wow.”

Cass’s laugh sounded sarcastic. “Yeah. Wow.”

“What went wrong?”

She sighed deeply. “Heavy-handed fathers. Ineffectual mothers.” Gray didn’t know what she meant by that, but guessed that remaining silent would encourage her to go on. “I get it. Going off to fight in foreign wars and not knowing if you’re going to survive? It’s a whopper of a big sacrifice. But the question is this. If you survive that, how much entitlement should it buy?” Again, Gray waited. He knew a rhetorical question when he heard one. “Well, a lot of those kids who went off to war came back thinking their three or four years of service entitled them as a group to be lord and master over everyone. As individuals, absolute rule over their own families.

“Back then the term ‘head of the house’ was pretty common and there was a subtext that only males were eligible. The women who’d been told that their children were better off in childcare so they could work in wartime factories experienced whiplash at war’s end when they were told that they needed to do their part and go home. Free up jobs for returning servicemen. The thinking on daycare reversed overnight. All of a sudden, putting children in daycare was akin to child abuse.

“So. Women went home to be ‘housewives’. Industry tried to appease the basic human need to create or work by insisting that all women had to aspire to Martha Stewart standards, only the ante was raised to include high heels and red lipstick. There were a thousand ways for women to fail their husbands, which meant they were failures, and the list grew exponentially every day.

“Cheating husband? It’s not his fault. You’re not doing enough to keep him happy.”

Gray breathed deeply, thoughts turning to the lying, cheating sack of shit who’d fucked over his sister and Seashell. Unable to think of something better to say, he repeated himself. “Wow.”

“The foundation belief was that every man was entitled to a workhorse who did his bidding with a big smile and got him off on demand. Meanwhile, women didn’t even know they had an organ designed for orgasm.”

“Um.”

“Too much information? I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. But you asked what it was like. Big o’s were for men only. Suburb sex was as Victorian as Victoria could be.”

Gray looked down at his feet and blinked a few times like he was trying to figure out where she was going with this.

“You wanted the whole picture. I’m painting it. There was no concept that women were supposed to be pleased sexually. They were supposed to please men and that was the end of it. Now add in the fact that fathers and husbands who served had been thoroughly militarized. They believed in that kind of structure, that brand of discipline, and above all deference to authority.” She laughed derisively. “They imported military systems into American family life.

“As time went on, they knew they weren’t entirely happy or satisfied, so they kept stretching the metaphorical rubber band tighter and tighter until the female population began to disintegrate. If you were a middle-class kid, there was a good chance your mother was either a secret drinker or addicted to valium.” She turned to Gray. “A person can only take so much. You know?”

With a solemn nod Gray communicated that he did know.

“Then there was us. The children of the time. Let’s just say that self-expression was not encouraged. After all, we were there to be accessories on the glossy photo. We weren’t supposed to have our own needs or desires. And we certainly weren’t supposed to think. We were supposed to ask our dads for our opinion and be grateful if they paid enough attention to give it to us.”

She turned in her chair to more fully face Gray.

“Did you know that, back then, women couldn’t open a bank account without a father, husband, or brother to co-sign? The idea of a woman getting a job and an apartment and going out on her own? People your age couldn’t even wrap their heads around gender bias. I mean, we might as well have been wearing burkas.” She looked at the box. “Give me one of those.”

Gray passed the cookies back to Cass.

“I know it probably sounds like I’m all over the place. I guess after all this time I can still get worked up when I think about it.

“Where I’m going with this is that, culturally speaking, the mid-sixties was a perfect storm. 1965. Baby boomers came of age and, man, we were pissed. Girls who had two brain cells to rub together were pissed about lack of personhood, not even talking about opportunity. Boys, the ones who weren’t rich or connected, were pissed about the prospect of getting drafted for Vietnam, which couldn’t be framed as a righteous war by anybody but Henry Fonda.”

Gray looked confused. “Henry Fonda was…”

“Jane Fonda’s dad.”

Gray’s look of confusion only deepened which caused Cass to seem a little irritated. Not with the boy, but with ever-growing evidence that her time in the world was nearing an end.

“Never mind. The point is that everybody who wasn’t on drugs was angry about something. Black people had finally had it with being treated like they were subhuman. Women were waking up and reading Betty Friedan…”

She stopped and looked at Gray, remembering that he probably, no certainly, wouldn’t get the reference. “Never mind about that either.

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