The Things We Save
Joanne Zienty
Copyright 2011 Joanne E. Zienty
All rights reserved.
This is work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Grateful acknowledgement is paid for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:
“Family Affair” by Sylvester Stewart. ©1971, 1991 Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corporation. Rights controlled by Mijac Music/Sony Music Corporation. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
“Magic Carpet Ride” by John Kay and Rushton Moreve. ©1968, 1996 Universal Music Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
For my father and my brother
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my family, Lar, Cecily and Simone, for their love and support, and for being the type of people who like to sleep-in, providing me with quiet mornings. Hugs and kisses to my first readers, Debi Workman and Sallee Brossard for saying the two things any writer wants to hear: “you made pictures in my head” and “that character was so real.” Thank you to those mentors who encouraged me along the way, including Molly Ramanujan Daniels, who taught me the importance of the object.
And a very special thank you to anyone who ever told me “No.”
CHAPTER 1
Everyone has a box. Oh, don’t bother to deny it. You have one, you know it. It might be an old-fashioned steamer trunk made of wood, strapped with worn leather bands and framed with embossed metal corners. It might be a hyper-feminine heart-shaped box, lined in velvet or satin, girlish in pink or flaming in scarlet. Maybe it’s a banker’s box with an orderly progression of beige manila file folders. Or an ornately carved Chinese box with its surprising secret of a box within a box within a box—the opening of all those lids leading to … what?
That depends on who you are. For just as we all have boxes, same but different, what’s inside them varies with the owner. One woman’s treasure is another woman’s trash. My artifacts, your detritus. My talisman, your fetish. Relics, debris, mementos, sediments, keepsakes, crumbs. And maybe it’s not even the things themselves that are important—but how they got there, who they belonged to, why they were saved instead of discarded, why they were put in the box.
Because that’s the story, isn’t it? The story where you are the hero, on your hero’s journey, answering the call to adventure, encountering your mentor, crossing the threshold to the other world where you’ll be tested and forge alliances and make enemies and face the ultimate ordeal. It’s the story where you seize the elixir or the jewel or the ring and flee down the road, pursued by the furies, which you will vanquish. Or perhaps not. But you will return to your world, transformed, with the treasure in hand, older, wiser, a survivor.
And you’ll place the object in your box. And set off on the next big adventure, for we are all Scheherazade, with tales to fill a thousand and one nights, warding off the sword with the cliffhanger.
At some point, you’ll stop adding things to the box, thinking that particular tale is at an end. And you’ll tuck it away in a closet or up in the attic or down in the basement. And you’ll forget about it... well, not really forget. You’ll just move it out of your working memory, to free up space. But then one day you’ll come across it, maybe when you’re spring cleaning, or gathering items to drop off at the Recycling Extravaganza, or searching for that black cape that has attired many a Halloween trick-or-treater, from Dracula to Darth Vader. And when you open the box, the present-day world will fall away, and it will be just you and the things you saved, and the story.
This is what it means to be haunted.
The call came on a Tuesday evening in early May. The lilacs on the bush outside the back door were already withering, their sweet perfume decaying into a musky, earthier odor just this side of rot, the purple blossoms bruised and wilting, melting at the touch of my hand. Through the screendoor I saw Tally lunge for the telephone with the lithe grace and awkward anticipation of a sixteen year old in love. Her initial tone was low, expectant, almost sultry. Then her voice changed to the higher pitch of a child talking to an adult.
She murmured into the phone, turning every now and then to gaze over her shoulder in the direction of the screendoor and me. Then she held out the receiver and said loudly, to no one in particular, “It’s Grandpa Joe.”
So of course Aaron had to take it. He rose from the armchair he claims as his own when he’s in residence, put his journal down on the end table with a weary sigh and glanced through the window as he made his way to the telephone.
I stepped down off the patio and moved to the stone bench under the maple tree, the better to watch him through the sunporch window, to interpret the tone and import of the conversation through his body language, because when he talked to my father he never talked loud enough for me to hear, as if to punish me for the great sin of refusing to talk to him myself.
He’s a big man, tall, broad-shouldered and just starting to go a little soft around the middle as he moves into his 50s. When I first met him, he was lanky, raw-boned, just starting to fill out again after his tour in Vietnam and the aftermath years. Strong-jawed. That Dutch Vanderhout blood. His blonde hair was already streaked with gray then. Now it’s gold and silver white. My old man.
Listening intently, the receiver pressed to his ear, his shoulders fell into a slump, as some aspect of the conversation deflated him. He sat down at the secretary and ran the fingers of his free hand through his hair. He glanced over at the patio where he thought I’d be, then passed his hand over his eyes. Taking up a pen, he scribbled on the pad of notepaper that rests by the phone. I could picture his small, tight vowels and consonants starkly black against the white page.
He hung up and sat for a moment, big hands on his knees, before he rose with the notepad and walked to the screendoor. He’s still lovely to watch in motion: walking, running, playing tennis or softball. He moved deliberately, yet gracefully, like a big Clydesdale, stepping down off the patio, striding across the grass, sitting down on the bench beside me.
“I hate this bench. No back.” He stretched, and then leaned forward, elbows on the worn, dusty-blue knees of his jeans, tapping his forehead with the bound edge of the pad.
“Claire …that was your dad.”
I tilted my chin a degree in acknowledgement.
“Your Grandma Sophia died sometime yesterday.”
Aaron never was one to sugar-coat anything.
And, of course, it was really no shock. She was old, terribly old, hovering in frailty throughout her nineties. It was more of a surprise that the call hadn’t come sooner.
He ran a hand up and down my back and let it rest around my waist.
“I’m sorry, babe.” He rested his chin against my head for a moment. “Joe said she just died in her sleep. He talked to her the day before about groceries, went over this morning to drop them off and found her. Thought she was sleeping.” I felt his lips brush my forehead, soft and fleeting as errant petals. “He’s going to set the wake for Friday and the funeral Saturday.”
Once again I nodded with the merest tilt of my chin.
“I’ll book us some plane tickets.” He stood and looked down at me for a moment. “I guess it’s time you went home.”
He turned and strode back toward the house, all fluid bigness, his shoulders straight and square again, his hand combing again through that white gold mane.
“We could drive.” I flung the words at his retreating back.
He stopped, turned and threw me his offhand grin. “Pro-cras-ti-nation. Pro-cras-ti-nation. It’s letting me wait. It’s keeping me sa-a-a-a-fe,” he sang to the tune of an old Carly Simon hit. He saluted me. “Nice try. We fly.”
“Hotel. Not his house.”
He winked. “Baby steps for my baby.”
“You’re a lousy singer, farm boy.”
The tears didn’t come as I had hoped they would, not even later, when the arrangements had been made, for bereavement fares and hotel suites and pet sitters and the holding of keys and pick-up of mail and newspapers; and after seminars had been re-arranged and graduate student consultations postponed; when all the piles of things that we call our lives had been filed into temporary holding bins and the house was dark and the bed was soft and the complacent, fat tabby was nestled in the crook of my legs and the nervous, skinny calico was tucked against Aaron’s feet. When it was quiet but for the whispery stirring of infant leaves and the sweet and sad breathings of the flute next door, then I wanted to cry; I yearned for the hot, salt-water kisses, the trembling, achy, convulsive body caught in a heaved breath, and the smothering comfort of a face pressed into a pillow to keep the quiet. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I hadn’t in a very long while.
Another small piece of the fabric of my early life gone, ripped away. Why cry over it? What little was left was so frayed and faded the pattern was almost indistinguishable. It was so ugly I had tried to throw it away years ago, and told myself I didn’t care, because the square of fabric upon which I now stitched was a stronger cloth that I had wove all by myself. It was Aaron and Tally who had rescued that old fabric from the scrap heap, who held out a hope the fibers might somehow be repaired. So I had locked it away in the dim attic of memory. Now, awake in the night, I clung to that fabric even as it unraveled in my fingers, even as I wondered: Why am I doing this? I don’t want to do this.
But I could shed no more tears.
The flight from St. Louis to Chicago takes less than an hour on a good day with a tail wind. You’re up, sip your soft drink, and you’re down. It can take longer to get out of O’Hare and down to the Loop if the traffic on the Kennedy Expressway is especially bad. We crawled along in the rental car, marveling at the difference between rush hour in St. Louis and rush hour in Chicago, strangers returning to a strange land, expatriates come again to the homeland, twenty years later, bug-eyed at the changes. The river of cars flowed slowly toward the delta of skyscrapers, the Sears Tower, the John Hancock, the Emerald City skyline of my childhood, but there were considerably more towers looming now, nameless ones, crowding together, bumping shoulders.
“I think we’re in Oz now,” I murmured.
Tally cracked away at her gum, its strawberry essence filling the little sedan. “Surrender Dorothy,” she drawled, leaning forward, her chin resting on my seat back.
Aaron grinned. “When we get to the Loop, it’s okay to gawk and crane your neck to see the building tops. We’re rubes, you know.”
She was trying hard not to be impressed. “No gawking,” she sniffed. “It’s 1999, not 1899, and we’re not country bumpkins visiting the big city.”
But at the hotel she was disappointed that we weren’t boarded on the lake side, sounding ever so much like Miss Lucy Honeychurch in her quest for a room with a view.
“I would have liked to see a Lake Michigan sunrise,” she grumbled, her forehead pressed to the pane that offered only buildings and grids of streets stretching west into the early twilight.
“When do you ever get up to see the sunrise?” I mocked.
“I’m up every day. You know, like, for school.”
“The times when I’m over, it seems like you spend more time admiring yourself in the mirror than any sunrise.”
“You’re not always there, are you?”
That left me with my mouth open but temporarily without words to fill the gap. Aaron glowered. It was sore spot with him, and she knew it. It used to bother her more—why her mother and father weren’t married—the convoluted explanations she’d have to give to playmates and teachers: no, they’re not divorced, they just never got married; no, they don’t live together, but she stays over a lot and we sometimes stay over there. Realizing that it bothered him, too, perhaps even more so, she lately had begun to wield it as a weapon.
My aim was true on the mirror issue. She did spend a lot of time at her toilette. But then, why not? She is her father softened and molded into a feminine form, tall, a golden Palomino of a girl; Thalia, the grace of Good Cheer.
Finally Aaron choked out a retort. “Name me the last time you saw a St. Louis sunrise. Hey, you want to see a real sunrise, you come out with me to Cahokia. Now there’s a sunrise.”
A sigh of exaggerated weariness. “That’s so like a dad.”
“I am a dad.”
“Are we going to see Grandpa Joe tonight?”
“Tomorrow,” I said quickly. “At the wake.”
“But—”
Her father headed her off at the pass. “Tomorrow,” he reiterated, steering her out of our room and into hers, handing her the hotel’s restaurant and nightlife guide in its blue leatherette binder. “For tonight, investigate dinner. Find someplace we’ll all like.”
His hands on my shoulders felt like anchors, holding me in place. “Almost home.”
Through the window, car lights glowed, turn signals winked red under the topaz shimmer of streetlights. Concrete heaved, asphalt flowed, glass and steel flashed neon. And underneath the colors and hard surfaces there was a low, constant thrum, the electric life of a city: cell phones, beepers, Palm Pilots, laptops. People talking and showers spraying and toilets flushing and horns beeping and whistles blowing and elevators whirring—and under that cacophony, below it all, the lapping, liquid, inexorable, hungry, yearning siren song of the water.
“My home is 300 miles away.”
It drew me in the morning, called impatiently to me as I laced up my running shoes, pushed me through the revolving door of the hotel into the brisk air, pulled me along the concrete and through the early rush hour jostle of taxi cabs and pedestrians with bleary eyes and resolute mouths, into and out of the flatulence of articulated buses inching along the pavement like monstrous irradiated caterpillars. When the streets ended and the grassy sprawl of Grant Park began, I could see it just beyond, a dark, roiling green-gray mass beneath the breathier, misty gray of the clouds. Crossing Lake Shore Drive, I saw it in all its sullen glory and felt the ancient chill in the northeast winds that came tearing down the length of it from those northern locales with exotic names: Manistique, Muskegon, Munising. I should have gone north to spite the wind while I was still fresh but I turned south instead, some vestigial homing instinct setting my course. The wind pushed me along past the sailboats and cigarette boats and miniature yachts that shifted and sighed as waves swept through the harbor.
Things had changed. The Drive, which in my childhood had split in two and wound east and west around the white limestone shoulders of the Field Museum, had been moved to the west. A wide green lawn stretched where the concrete and asphalt had once lay and I marveled at man’s ingenuity and nature’s triumph. The Shedd Aquarium sported a curved wall of glass on the lakeside like a sheath of funky, ultracool, wraparound sunglasses. Swinging back around and heading north, I could see Navy Pier jutting out into the lake, looking alive and faintly garish, with an enormous Ferris wheel rising up and anchoring its horizontal span like a captain’s wheel on a quarterdeck. Staring into the visage of the Loop, at its bared, jagged teeth of steel and glass, took my breath away as much as the force of the wind in my face.
My city was gone. And some other thing had risen in its place. Oh, it was breathtaking, the towers defiant under the leaden clouds, but also breath taking, leaving no space to breathe amid the looming surge of concrete as immovable as some neighborhood bully. The lake roiled, the buildings leaned in and then it began to rain. And the city hissed.
The funeral home squatted on a corner of the Southeast Side facing a vacant stretch of dirt and rubble slowly being reclaimed by urban vegetation: trees of heaven and thorny spurge, wide swaths of dandelions in full yellow glory. The Skyway rose beyond like the skeleton of some giant amusement park roller coaster. Conveniently, a tavern crouched on the opposite corner, belching its peculiar odors, promising relief for those who like to drown their sorrows after—or during—an evening spent across the street.
The parlor was the same—blessedly, cursedly—it hadn’t changed in nearly 30 years. Oh, the carpet was different, but it was still the same worn beige, the traffic patterns of mourners clearly embedded in the industrial strength fibers, a runway down the center between rows of brown vinyl-padded folding chairs, a taxi area in front where the caskets rest, permanent indentations marking the placement of the kneelers. The sofas and armchairs were different but the same, blue and beige now, striped and solid, instead of the rose tones of before, but still faded and bearing the same, minute, tell-tale stains, brown spots of spilled coffee, yellow blooms of sweat, a purple blotch—spillage from a child’s juice cup? The walls were different but the same, a dingy off-white. The crack that had fascinated me long ago had been plastered over but a new one had taken its place.
Even the casket at the far end of the room seemed familiar, the gleaming gray surface begging to be caressed, yet forbidding, too, in its highly polished silence.
And then there was my father, who should have looked familiar above all else, comfortable as an old shoe, inviting as a well-worn easy chair, but who instead was foreign territory, standing in his charcoal-gray suit that looked a little too big, the shoulders drooping a tell-tale fraction of an inch, the sleeves hanging a little too far below the wrists, the cuffed pants covering a bit too much area of shoe.
“That’s not his suit,” I whispered to Aaron as we paused at the entrance to the room.
He was bent over the condolence book, adding our names. He had pressed me to call my father when we got into Chicago, just to chat, but I’d resisted. So now his hand was on the small of my back, propelling me forward, guiding me as if in a dance down that center aisle past the three or four other mourners who had already arrived, viewed, condoled and staked out their territory for the rest of the late afternoon and evening. Aaron’s hand gently compelled me onward, and then brought me to rest in front of the man in someone else’s suit who was, indeed, my father.
He turned his head from the condolence of an elderly couple who leaned heavily on their matching canes and smiled. It was the same smile that had thrilled me as a child when he flashed it my way, bestowing it like a king’s largesse. And then I was a child again—and I hated that feeling—and it seemed to go on forever, the smile and the thrill and the resentment all tangled up in the two feet of air between us.
Aaron broke the spell, extending first his right hand and then wrapping his left arm around my father’s shoulder, shaking hands and pressing the flesh in a perfect man-hug.
“Joe, good to see you, though I’m sorry it’s under these circumstances. You look good.”
“Well, old man, you look older,” came my father’s reply.
They grinned like old friends, these two men who had only seen each other thrice in a span of 20 years, their communication limited to scattered phone calls at birthdays and holidays.
Then my father looked past me to Tally, hovering behind, the nervous child undermining the fledgling woman.
“There she is, and more beautiful than her pictures.” He folded her in a tentative embrace but she was surprisingly willing to hug back, giving him a glancing kiss on the cheek as well, quickly wiping away the little pink smudge that her lip gloss left on his pale skin.
What is up with that?
I had sent no recent photographs. Lord knows what went on under their roof, ten blocks from my own. I made a mental note to conduct an interrogation later.
He turned his focus on me and the space between us felt impenetrable, more lead than air. But there was Aaron’s hand again, the steady pressure, the irresistible force that moved its object. The hug and brush of lips against cheek were over in a matter of seconds on my part, but my father lingered in that moment, his hand replacing Aaron’s on my back, pressing me against his chest until there was nothing to do but surrender my face to the soft fold of his lapel and feel the rapid thrum of his heart in my ear and through my cheek.
“Claire,” was all he said.
If he wanted to say more, he didn’t and I didn’t let him, for at the first sign of release, the first lessening of pressure from his hand, I eased away and made my way up to the casket. The brown velveteen on the kneeler was faded and splotched, having absorbed from the tears and sweat of countless mourners. The scent of death was strong, but it wasn’t the rank odor of decay, just the peculiar sweetness of institutionalized flowers: the forced freshness of gladiolus and bridled spice of carnations; that concentrated floral essence found only in the coolers of florists’ shops and surrounding the dead in funeral parlors.
She was ancient, Grandma Sophie, but then she always had been, to me. She looked the same as I remembered, hair floss white, but still in the braids she always wore wrapped neatly around her head, her face a cosmetologist’s nightmare of folds, lines and creases, her hands in repose all airy bones and transparent, paper-thin skin peppered with fawn-colored age spots, weighted down with the black globes of her rosary beads and the rococo silver crucifix that rested on her ridged, yellow thumbnail.
Sophia was baptized Zofia in 1903 in Poland and lived by that name until an immigration official changed it to the more conventional spelling. In the heyday of immigration, Greek, Italian, Polish, Irish, German, they were all the same. Come to the New World, change your fortune, change your name, marry, live, give birth, raise your family, grow old, die, and be surrounded by all the blooming artificiality we can muster.
“One more year, one more year and you could have bragged that you stood in two centuries, Grandma. I should have brought you crushed lilacs and lilies-of-the-valley.” I bent to kiss her powdered cheek with a pinch of trepidation, for fear she would crumble into dust.
After we paid our respects, we sat on the sofa against the wall, rather than in the folding chairs. It afforded a view of the entire room and the trickle of mourners in and up to the casket. They wore faces vaguely familiar and undeniably strange. I could also watch my father as he ran through his lines and blocking in the one act called “The Mother’s Wake.”
If Aaron is a draft horse, my father is a Mustang, all tight, wiry energy, supple-muscled, compact of bone and movement, flaring, glaring, charming-turn-on-a-dime-mean and vice versa. Black mane graying to distinction. Pockmarked cheeks under intense brown eyes that always, even in the midst of a smile, seem on the verge of a glare. Shifty-skinned, snapping at flies and fools. A stranger would never guess he was seventy-five. Sixty-five, maybe—and only because of the furrows that fanned out from the corners of his eyes and settled around his mouth like parentheses, and the skin that drooped under his eyes, the baggage of his life and the force of gravity weighing his flesh down. But not sapping his energy. The years hadn’t granted him repose: his fingers were still in his pockets, jangling his keys and change, his eyes were still scanning the perimeter of the room, making note of the available exits.
But he went through his paces like a show pony or a glad-handing politician, grippin’ and grinnin’, good ol’ jocular Joe. No tears, folks, 96 for Christ’s sake, a good life, a full life, yes, and how are you doin’, Mrs. Piskorowski, nice of you to come, is this the little Tiffany that used to visit her grandma next door, well, I’ll be damned, you’re getting married now?
And so on. But I knew he hated it and would have rather been in the back of the room against the wall or in the corner, or, better still, across the street in the dark refuge of the tavern with one beer in his belly and another on the way. The oversized suit and the actor’s mask couldn’t hide that from me.
The dinner hour came. Tally’s adolescent metabolism required a meal and her adolescent temperament craved relief from the tedium of meeting and greeting a parade of blood relations that for all intents hadn’t existed the day before and would vanish again, like Brigadoon, in the span of 48 hours. She and Aaron left to find the kind of solace only fast food, familiar, fat-laden and salty, can provide.
Then it was me and the room, same but different, the faint hiss of polyester, the scent of the gladiolus, this time less sympathy, more reproach from the eyes of the women, curiosity mingled with disdain. The old men looked resigned, slack-faced, flesh delicate as parchment or the outer skin of onions, goggle-eyed behind their thick-lensed glasses. The younger ones, my age or less, cousins perhaps, looked Target fashionable, the women’s hair still frozen in spiral perms a decade after they went out of fashion, the men in business casual instead of suits, clad in their nervous tics, hands running through hair, inside shirt collars, fingers drumming on knees, twisting wrists to check the time without any pretense of stealth, gauging how many more minutes until they could blow this popsicle stand. I didn’t know them.
Two faces struck me. One smirked above a decent, navy-blue suit and red-striped tie, eyes shifting under a slick of neatly trimmed brown hair. The other face looked as pliable as clay, grayish flesh molded over hollows and jutting bones, unreadable, except for the startling curve of pink-tinged lower lip. When our eyes met, the lip trembled slightly, threatening some revelation, until big front teeth closed down over it, and a big-boned hand swept down over the face and kneaded it back into expressionless submission.
When I rose, it was ostensibly to visit the powder room, to splash water on my face and wrists. I paused in the foyer that connected the two parlor rooms. The other was unoccupied, as it had been 30 years before. So I stepped in.
CHAPTER 2
The day my brother Joey—Joseph Matthew Sokol, Jr., Joe Jr., little Joe—drowned was blue-sky bright, polka-dotted with cotton balls clouds, just-out-of-school giddy. The summer lay before us like an empty canvas. We were the artists brimming with ideas, setting out brushes and paint pots. The lake was our muse.
We were drawn to water like baby leatherback turtles, instinctively, as if our lives depended on it. Every summer weekend we would pester Marjorie, our older sister, to take us to Calumet Park and usually she’d happily oblige, enjoying the chance to sport her black two-piece bathing suit and rub on the cocoa butter, to recline on her big blue and white striped towel and lazily tune back and forth from WLS to WCFL on her silver transistor radio. She baked in the heat as the Lovin’ Spoonful ground out “Summer in the City” and all our necks got dirty and gritty. She called us water sprites for we came alive in the lake like nowhere else. The minute our feet touched the sand we launched into a sprint to the shore—and not just for respite from the blistering heat under our toes. We tore off our clothes along the way, leaving a trail of T-shirts and shorts for her to retrieve as she made her way at a more sedate pace. My brother was a plunger, dashing straight through the baby waves that lapped at the beach and flopping face and belly into the water’s enveloping cold. I was considerably more diffident. Once I reached the water’s edge, I slowed and let only the tips of my toes breach the waves. Cold—toes, feet, ankles. Colder—calves, knees, thighs. Coldest—a shivery embrace around my waist, gooseflesh raising the hairs on my arms. Inevitably, Joey would tackle me from behind with a roar and I would be in over my head, resurfacing with a gasp of chilly delight. After that, we were in for the day, one minute thrashing arms and legs in our efforts to subdue the water, the next floating calmly at one with it.
Only the rest breaks prescribed by our mother and strictly enforced by our sister could tear us away from that cold caress and back to the hot, hard shore. We’d make a half-hearted effort to build a sandcastle but we’d find ourselves inching away from the roughness and graininess and stickiness of the sand back to the smooth, wet, sapphire satin.
The lake called. It murmured. It said, “come away.” And we answered joyously, “yes.”
But Marjorie was eleven years older than Joey and eighteen years older than me and as the 60’s shuddered to a close, one week before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, she walked down the aisle of Immaculate Conception Church to marry a junior-level auto and casualty underwriter. She’d met her groom at a ‘singles’ bar called Butch McGuire’s, a fact which left our Temperance League-eligible mother with a pinched twist to her lips as if she’d accidentally bitten into the pith of the grapefruit she ate for breakfast. Sandy-haired, Brill-creamed, fondue-eating, martini-swilling, up-and-comer Rich whisked his new Mrs. Olmstead off to the home office in Hartford, Connecticut. She willingly left her beach weekends and, for the most part, us behind.
Mom wasn’t a beachgoer. I’m not sure she even owned a swimsuit. Ever. She never voiced any particular objections to the beach. It just seemed there was always something else to do: laundry, dusting, ironing, gardening, running errands and doing yard work for her mother-in-law. She was always in motion, like a hummingbird, but without the jewel-toned plumage. The exposed leisure of the beach did not suit her.
My father worked at the steel mill. There were many at the time, but everyone knew which one you meant when you said “the mill”—U.S. Steel’s hulking South Works on the shores of the lake. He took us to White Sox baseball games with the box seat tickets he occasionally received as a perk in his position as a turn foreman. He bought us salt-and-butter-soaked popcorn to munch and icy Coke in big, red and white striped waxed cups to wash it down and vanilla ice cream rippled with fudge that we’d eat with flat wooden spoons, while he contented himself with beer and peanuts. He’d let Joey keep score, but watch over his shoulder the whole time. He’d shuffle his feet and tap his heels restlessly until after his second beer, anticipating his third, when he’d finally be able to sit back in the hard seats and semi-relax. He didn’t go to the beach either.
So the summer of 1970 didn’t bode well for beach-going, especially for me. Joey had older friends with drivers’ licenses and parents who trusted them with the family car. He, having just turned sixteen, had a learner’s permit and was taking driver’s ed over the summer. And it definitely was no longer cool to be seen at the beach with your eight-year-old pest of a sister.
I wore my ratty royal blue swimsuit from the previous summer under my shorts and T-shirt when the boys swung by to pick him up that day. The straps bit into my shoulders, the elastic around the leg openings nipped my skin. But discomfort was a small price to pay for the tiny possibility that he would defy all teenage conventions, give me that look that said “just between you and me, I tolerate you” and, with an exasperated show of helplessness, shrug me into joining them.
I sat on the front stoop drawing figure eights in white chalk, which metamorphosed into butterflies, occasionally glancing at the sand pail and shovel I’d stashed under the evergreen tree near the sidewalk. My beach towel was rolled up and secreted in the bucket for a quick getaway. But when the boys came rolling up to the curb in an old chocolate-colored Rambler, Creedence Clearwater Revival wah-wahing through the open windows, and Joe Jr. strolled out the door, his own towel casually slung over his left shoulder, walking a new walk he’d adopted of late, a loose, rolling gate, strutting arrogance and immortality, I knew it wasn’t going to be.
But nothing ventured, nothing gained. “Can I go, too?”
He shook his head. “Sorry, kiddo. If it was Cal Park, maybe. But we’re going to the Dunes. Be gone all day.”
They were wailing “Green River” all out of tune as he folded his lean frame into the front seat. I doubted he would compromise his cool to even say goodbye, but as he slammed the car door and the Rambler jerked away, I saw his hand out the window rise and fall. Maybe his companions thought he was just thumping to the beat, but I knew different.
Later it was all confusion and rush: a phone call, panicky tears, frantic gestures.
“In the water? What?”
“What hospital?”
From upstairs in my bedroom, I heard the front door slam shut and the semi-hysterical catch in my mother’s voice. From my window I was watching the fireflies rise from the lawn, winking merrily against the gloomy, bluish face of twilight.
He should have been home for supper long ago. His mashed potatoes were cold gray mounds, his charred piece of round steak was dotted with congealed fat, his green beans were limp alien limbs sodden in gravy that had oozed over from the meat.
I crept down the stairs and sat hidden on the step just above the place where solid wall met open banister, my usual eavesdropping post. My father must have taken the phone.
“We’re on our way—take us about an hour.”
I heard the click of the receiver.
“Sonovabitch, sonovabitch…”A litany, a mantra. “Sonovabitch. Call up Dodie, maybe she can take Claire for the night. Sonovabitch!”
“No, she can come with—”
“Mary, he’s dead. Jesus, whaddya think—they’re gonna let a little girl—sonovabitch!”
A teary, panicked anger clutched my father’s voice, constricting him, making him sound as if he would vomit and choke at once.
I heard the whirring of the rotary dial. “Shit, I’ll call her myself, if you can’t bring yourself—”
“You bastard!”
“Hello, Dodie? It’s Joe.”
“You goddamn sonovabitch. You told him he could go—when I said no.”
That last was a fiery whisper. My mother’s red, tear-streaked face appeared around the banister at the bottom of the stairs. She still had a yellow dishtowel draped over her shoulder, slung there haphazardly when she’d left her chore to answer the telephone in the front hall. She drew it off her shoulder and swiped her face quickly. She didn’t look surprised to see me.
“Your brother was in an accident. Daddy and I’ve got to go to the hospital.” She paused, breathing in a shuddery sigh. She dried and re-dried her hands on the towel, hands that weren’t wet in the first place; standing there, drying and drying, her skin reddening under the rough wiping.
“You can stay at Aunt Dodie’s.”
“I don’t wanna.”
My father’s face appeared, hovering over the round top of the lowest baluster, a talking human head on a wooden chess piece body.
“Get your PJs and a change of clothes. You’re spending the night at Aunt Dodie’s.” A clipped, martial control had replaced the choky emotion in his voice.
“Joey’s dead?” The words came from somewhere inside, half a question and half not.
My father’s head snapped back as if the words had hit him out of the blue like an uppercut to the jaw.
“Something happened at the Dunes,” my mother snapped. The towel finally hung limp in her hand. “Get your pajamas and toothbrush. Here, I’ll help you.” She slung the towel back over her shoulder and hurried up the stairs, her hand covering her face as she passed.
My father stared at me for a moment, uncustomarily still.
“Did he drown?”
He blinked and turned away. “Get your stuff. We’ve got to go.”
No tears. There was no time for tears. And no sad explanation to bring them forth, as of yet. At Aunt Dodie’s house it was even possible to forget that anything had happened. She was my father’s youngest sister with an auto mechanic husband. Uncle Bob was a bantamweight cock-of-the-walk with strawberry blonde hair and a speckled face out of whose mouths spewed all sorts of words that I never heard at home. Not the usual foul language—I heard plenty of that—but nasty ways of referring to people of different color and custom: wop, spic, nigger, chink, gook; the guttural, barnyard squawks of the bigot. They had five children. The three oldest, teenaged stair-step kids, two boys and a girl, all named for saints, cast sympathetic and oddly awed looks at me before retreating to their rooms. Dougie, ten months older than me, was engrossed in a re-run of Hogan’s Heroes. Linda, ten months younger than me, grasped my hand and led me away from the significant whispers of the adults.
In her room, she revealed the newest addition to her Barbie’s wardrobe: a glamorous gown of white and gold lame, complete with a fur-cuffed evening coat, a velvet handbag, gloves, hankie, pearl necklace and earrings, and a fur headband. We dressed and undressed her clique of dolls: two Barbies, a Midge, a Stacy, a Ken, and played out the rituals and scenarios of dating that we imagined, in chic ensembles. Poor Ken did double and triple duty in the escort department. Dougie leered from the doorway and hooted derisively until his mother sent him to the room he shared with his brothers. Later, after I had held my pee until the fiery pain of denial seared my privates and I was forced to finally stumble off to use the bathroom down the hall, he was waiting. He knew the steps to his bullying dance so well. He was the Fred Astaire of the full body block and the arm dodge, the sidestep, the shuffle-and-lean and the sotto voce taunt.
“Beg me, beg me to use it. You’re about to bust your bladder so beg.”
Finally the eldest McConnell boy leaned his blonde head out his bedroom door and muttered, “Knock it off, shit-for-brains, before Dad hears you.”
But rescue came too late: the warm liquid was coursing down my legs and onto the avocado-colored carpet and I just stood there and let it flow, relief and shame and anger and defiance freezing my limbs and setting my jaw.
The fleeting look in Dougie’s eyes, as he stared into mine, was one of pure terror, before he remembered who and what he was and commenced his hyena-like laughter. What did he see on my face, in my eyes? Aunt Dodie swooped in, her drab, ashy hair feathering wildly around her head, escaping its lacquer cage, tsking and cawing like a flustered hen as her talons stripped me of my clothes and deposited me into a hastily drawn bath. While I sat there amidst the foam, fuming, plotting revenge, I could hear her on the other side of the bathroom door, scrubbing the carpet.
Then it was bedtime. Linda and I brushed our teeth side by side in the green and pink-tiled bathroom, spitting in unison into the white sink, washing our mouths out with water sipped from Dixie cups. As we lay in her pink-and-white bed in her pink-and-white room, she recited prayers on her white plastic-beaded rosary. Aunt Dodie’s was a very Catholic house: church on Sunday, fish on Friday, parochial school, catechism, confirmation. I didn’t have the prayers memorized like Linda, though it seemed as if I should, so I mumbled and slurred, repeating phrases that I knew—our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, hail Mary, grace—hoping that, as Linda got caught up in the mantra, she wouldn’t notice my ignorance.
From the kitchen, the clatter of pans and the whir of an electric mixer blended with the murmur of the Hail Mary. Aunt Dodie was baking a cake.
Black, navy blue, charcoal gray, the occasional brown, the three-piece suit, the shirtdress, the A-line, the polyester pantsuit, the jumper with white blouse, the black wingtips, the black pumps, the navy flats, a few brown loafers. Blue and gray striped ties, solid blue clip-on ties, genuine white cotton handkerchiefs peeking out of breast pockets. Aftershave, perfume, an underlying odor of sweat, of bodies dressed too warmly for a hot summer day, chewing gum both minty and fruity, the sweet, sticky scent of hard candy, the nostril-flaring, mouth-puckering smell of lemon drops. That first afternoon at the wake was an assault to already my shell-shocked senses. My father moved restlessly among the crowd of mourners, rarely pausing for more than a moment, and even when he did, never truly joining a conversation. His head might nod, his lips might move, but his eyes were always seemingly fixed on some object that lurked on his own private horizon, keeping his back to the casket. My mother sat in the third row of folding chairs, right smack in the middle, enclosed by a barrier of chairs to the front, back and sides, with Marjorie and her husband guarding her flanks. Mourners offering their condolences faced a labyrinthine journey. Her gaze rarely wavered from that which rested before her.
He looked like a wax dummy lying there in the steel gray casket, pan-caked and powdered, blushed and hair-sprayed. Only his lips had a natural liverish hue. His hands were hard and cold in the place where I touched them with one trembling finger. This was not my brother; this was some strange, graven image that the undertakers had placed before us; an idol to which we could genuflect; some mannequin wearing my brother’s brown Nehru jacket.
As well as my beach buddy, he’d been my ally in the war against our mother. We could fight like Kilkenny cats between ourselves, from the tips of our nails to the end of our tails, but when the time came to fight the good fight, we put aside our differences and pledged a truce, pooling our resources to vanquish the greater enemy. Joey was wise in the ways of the battlefield. I had been his standard bearer, the little drummer girl, not quite ready for serious combat, but always prepared to come to my man’s defense.
Making war was a way of life for my brother. His toy soldiers, little green plastic GIs barely three inches tall, molded in action poses, wearing fatigues and helmets, brandishing rifles, bayonets and hand grenades, conducted surprise raids upon the particleboard walls of my red-brick Colonial dollhouse. Soldiers climbed in through windows, rappelled down from the green faux slate roof to crash through the front door, and crept around the back to pillage the garden and kidnap the children at play. One ambush had led to the trial of the kindly father of the doll family, Mr. Willoughby, before a military tribunal for treason, desertion and various other war crimes. It seems he had burned his draft card and avoided military service by escaping to Canada. My brother didn’t have an entirely original imagination; he adapted his stories from the headlines he read in the newspaper, the snippets of news he heard on his transistor radio between Beatles and Rolling Stones songs, the flashes of horrifying information that came from the glowing eye of the television set; and the volcanic and profane tirades that erupted from our father, a decorated World War II veteran, in the face of film clips of long-haired young men with raised fists chanting anti-war slogans on his very own lakefront, in his very own city, in front of his very own, much beloved mayor.
Mr. Willoughby never stood a chance. After barely a minute’s deliberation among the three officers, the word came: “Guilty.” The sentence: execution. But the firing squad and the gallows weren’t brutal enough for the likes of a lily-livered draft dodger. He was beheaded. Literally. His little plastic head, with its goofy, sweet grin, sky-blue eyes and jet-black, molded and thus always perfectly combed hair, was severed from his fully pose-able body with a Swiss Army knife. Crying hysterically as my little hands worked feverishly to put him back together, I invoked the spirit of Florence Nightingale to empower me with the healing arts.
Mother, hearing the uproar, had climbed the steep staircase to our bedrooms and loomed in the doorway, disapproval narrowing her eyes before she had even heard a word of accusation or denial, a cry of protest or, my brother’s specialty, the rambling filibuster of explanation. These, properly delivered, occasionally bought time before punishment, a cooling-down period, and were designed to lull the lawgiver into handing down probation. Not this day. My brother received a sharp blow to his cheek. I saw the angry red color heightened in relief against the canvas of his pale face before he ran from the playroom and took refuge in the bathroom. Mother sighed, holding out her hand. Mr. Willoughby and his head looked particularly small and fragile in her callused palm. She shook her head, sad, angry, impatient at having to interrupt her housework to referee her children’s battles and play nurse to a doll. She made an effort to repair Mr. Willoughby, making a tiny cast out of brown modeling clay, wrapping it around the severed portion of his neck, but, in the end, it just didn’t look right—Mr. Willoughby in a permanent neck brace. The clay kept falling off as it hardened. From that day forward, he had been confined to the dollhouse attic, where he lay bedridden, reduced to watching the fabulous activities of his family, but never allowed to participate.
My brother never apologized, but somehow, in the way of siblings, we achieved a rapprochement through peace offerings: a stick of Bazooka bubblegum, half of a Snickers bar, the loan of a prized Lone Ranger comic book. And my mother had her own way of bringing us together. Her wrath touched all, without discrimination. To defeat her—wily enemy that she was: punisher of children, chief critic, deliverer of pious sermons and numbing jeremiads—required the mutual cooperation of united forces that would rival NATO.
But now he was gone, his body replaced by a painted figurine, hard and cold as ceramic, as useless in battle as the Terracotta Army. My instinct was to flee, but I was too proud to run away. I walked instead, casually weaving through the thick crowd of mourners, winding my way through the colors, the fabrics, the odors.
Accidental drowning. Tragedy. So young. Such a waste. Do you think he was drunk? Drugs?
Whispered words, hushed sentences, sympathetic murmurs, regretful sighs scented the air of the funeral parlor like some mournful perfume, wafting and waning between clusters of aunts and uncles, cousins and family friends, the dirge-like odor stronger among the women and weaker among the men, who were already moving on from lamentation and speculation to talk of baseball, team stats and the White Sox road trip.
Away from the casket and its floral plume, the sharp, oppressive reek of cigarette smoke and the faintly rank smell of too many bodies pressed together on the first really hot day of the summer narrowed the room, made the ceiling seem too low. It continued to shrink as candy and sympathy pressed from my dowdy aunts and great-aunts in their decades-old dresses, who slipped Root Beer Barrels and Tootsie Rolls into my hands with gentle squeezes, as if indeed just a spoonful of sugar would help this particular medicine go down easier.
The parlor next door was empty. And huge. Maybe too huge.
I squeezed under the end table next to a sofa at the far end of the room. It was a tight fit sitting cross-legged, my navy cotton dress hiked over my knees, candy cradled in my lap. My head bumped against the underside. The pain felt good. I pressed harder. The pain shot, then throbbed; was acute, then chronic. Momentarily, the pain was all that existed, blocking out everything else. How long and hard could I press before my skull would burst from the throbbing of flesh and bone grinding against unyielding oak? However, it eventually became routine, manageable pain, and the murmurings and images from the wake drifted in again like smoke through an open window. I spied the festering scab on my knee, the remnant of accidental contact with the sidewalk a few days before. It was perfect: a hard, brown-red shell encasing a yellow, watery layer of pus. My nail scraped it gently, then, when it resisted, more urgently. The crust broke with a feeling similar to a sigh and oozed infection, then bright red blood, which trickled down my leg and dripped off to blossom into a tiny, perfect plum-colored rose on the gold carpet. But the suits and the sympathetic looks and, above all, the waxwork figure in its bower of flowers still loomed. I squeezed my eyes shut, pressed my head up harder, and dug a fingernail into the wound, biting down hard on my lip. Voices drifted in and then the whisper of shoes scuffling over carpet.
“I saw her come in here,” a boy’s voice asserted with whiny certainty.
“She musta went out again, cuz she’s not here now.” A girl’s sneering reply—my cousins, Dougie and Linda. I shrank into myself, held the breath in my mouth and nostrils. I’d had enough of her Barbie dolls and of his brutal idiocy. Their feet shuffled by my hiding place, his encased in black dress shoes, hers in patent Mary Janes.
“Little chickenshit, ‘fraid of a dead body.” He said it a little too loudly, as if trying to provoke me out of wherever I was skulking. I let the bait pass.
“Come on, let’s go get some candy from Uncle Jimmie. He has Necco wafers—I saw.” The room was empty again. I closed my eyes and focused on the pain my jagged fingernail could inflict upon an open, bloody sore.
Blood on a gold carpet. My brother and I had spilled enough of it, together and apart. Keeping it a secret from our mother sealed the bond, made it a true blood oath.
Playing football in the square box that was our living room—or “front room” as it was known in our house—was forbidden. But during football season, in the waning light of a November afternoon, when the first flurries of snow flung themselves kamikaze-like against the panes of the picture window and the wind tortured the bare branches of the lilac against the corner of the house, after a day spent watching men pile onto one another with ruthless abandon and fling the ball like a grenade at a moving target, my brother could not resist. He inevitably called for a game. As the most immediately available opponent, I was drafted.
“Okay, I’m Johnny Unitas. No, maybe, Dick Butkus—or maybe Gale Sayers.” Joey reeled off the names of his current football heroes, rambling through the play rosters without regard for team or position. “Who you gonna be?”
Dumb silence. My seven year old mind could not register a single player’s name. In the space of time it took me to answer, Joey would have rattled off six or seven more names.
He snapped his fingers in my face. “Come on, come on. Okay, look, you can be—”
“Jack Concannon!” I shouted the first name that came to my tongue, a name dredged up from the swamp of memory, a name I had once seen on the back page of the newspaper under the Sports section banner headline.
“He’s a quarterback, dummy, but I’ve got the ball so you have to be on defense. Be someone else.”
“I’m being him or I’m not playing.” A pout and crossed arms.
“Okay, fine, Jack Concannon. Okay, so it’s first down and ten. I’ve got the ball. I’m gonna run it through and you try to block me.” He crouched down in the three-point stance.
“23, 32, 57, hut, hut, hike,” he yipped in staccato rhythm. He was center, quarterback, and running back at once. He shifted the imaginary football under his arm and made his move up the field, all sixteen feet of it.
I leaped in front of him just as he made it to the blonde-wood Danish style coffee table. The effort earned me a solid blow to the nose from his forearm and we both went crashing down to the recently-purchased gold carpet, a tangle of arms, legs and laughter.
“First down!”
“I got you before you made it,” I whined, putting tentative fingers up to my nose.
The blow had really jarred me and when I pulled my hand away, feeling an unusual wetness, I saw the crimson stigmata on my palm. My impulse was to shriek, but then I heard my mother’s voice ringing from above.
“What’s going on down there? What was that crash?” Standing at the top of the stairs, she wasn’t able to see the disarray.
I stared at my brother, clutching my nose, picturing what my mother would do if she found out we had been engaging yet again in illicit acts of violence and mayhem. My brother’s eyes were wide with his own unique expression of fear: the alarm of the instigator apprehended, the culprit caught red-handed. Literally. My blood stained his wrist.
Looking down, we saw its telltale scarlet droplets marring the field of gold.
“The bathroom,” he whispered with a fierce gesture toward the central hall, just steps away.
My mother’s shoes clicked and creaked on the wooden stairs, the drumbeat of the enemy army on the march.
“Nothing, Mom. I just bumped into the table,” he shouted as he hustled me through the bathroom door and shut it behind me. While he staved off the attack on the front line, it was my duty to stanch the bleeding, clean up the evidence and, if the battle should be lost, remain mum when the inquisition of the prisoners began.
Name, rank and serial number. Divulge nothing else or be guilty of treason.
I stepped up onto the side of the porcelain bathtub, leaning over to take a peek in the medicine chest mirror. The blood was not gushing as I had feared. It was just a thin trickle, a little red Chaplinesque mustache growing over my upper lip. Hopping down from my perch, I grabbed some toilet paper to suppress the flow. Holding the wadded paper against my nostrils, I let my body slide down the wall until I was squatting on the black-and-white tiled floor, hunched in the corner between the icy side of the tub and the metal grate of the heat register, alone in my cell, praying for the end of the war and my liberation.
Outside the door I heard the first shot of the battle fired.
“What were you doing? Where’s your sister? What did you do to her?” Three rapid-fire missiles, bam, bam, bam. Could he possibly fend off such an unremitting attack, deflect the blows, escape unscathed?
“Nothing! We weren’t doing nothing. She’s in the bathroom. You know she has a bladder the size of a peanut.”
An agile parry to her rapier thrust, with a sideswipe of humor. He alone, it seemed, could make her laugh—or what passed for a laugh with her—and that ability often helped to extricate him from sticky situations, but this time I had little hope that it would bring a truce. We had been warned. Numerous times. And with that ammunition, she was too strong, too quick. She’d draw blood soon. I saw the doorknob turn. Thank the gods of war that I’d had the presence of mind to turn the lock. But that would only temporarily thwart her attack.
“Open this door now, Claire! Do you hear me? And you,” this addressed to my brother, “don’t you go anywhere. Stand right there.”
My time was up. I could no longer postpone the inevitable. I couldn’t desert, couldn’t flee to Canada, couldn’t demonstrate with raised fist and sing clever, passionate anti-war protest songs with Country Joe and the Fish at Woodstock. No, I was dug into my foxhole and it was time to engage the enemy.
I crumpled up the soaked toilet paper. It resembled a red paper rose in my hand. I shoved it into the pocket of my corduroys and took a last quick glance in the mirror. My nose was red, bruised-looking. It would not pass inspection.
The metal latch clicked as I opened the door. With head held high and a steady chin, I faced my personal Torquemada. I would go to my death, I silently vowed, before I would reveal anything.
The Grand Inquisitor stood in the middle of our little square hall, her dark hair askew, dark eyes fixed, hands on her hips, a dust cloth hanging from her tightly closed fist. Would she use that as a blindfold when she hauled us off for our execution?
“What happened to your nose?”
“It was bleeding.”