Making It Work

by Kathleen Glassburn

  Lily handed Tommy to this person who was supposed to be their father, and said, “Here’s the son you’ve been yearning for.”

  He gave the brown man some coins, while Sheila wondered, What’s yearning?

  Her daddy had been gone a long time. Her mama wasn’t fat when he left. He didn’t have black whiskers. Now, he pressed his hairy face close to the crybaby. When Sheila was in the backseat of the dusty blue Hudson, and Mama sat in front feeding Tommy his bottle, this stranger turned from the steering wheel. “How’s my girl?”

  Sheila stared at her hands.

  “Your father’s speaking to you.” Mama didn’t sound tired or hurried anymore. She sounded angry.

  “All right.”

  “We’re close to the house I rented. You’re going to be a big help there with Tommy.

  In the summer of 1949. Carl Doty had been working at the Bunker Hill Mine for nine months. Wages from the flour mill and the bar hadn’t been enough to make ends meet. When he heard about plentiful, well-paying jobs in the Idaho mines, he left pregnant Lily and two-and-a half year-old Sheila with his mother. There they stayed for many months until Tommy began to thrive so that they could travel.

  Tommy had been born with the cord wrapped tightly around his neck. Mama said the nurses called him a “blue baby.” Tommy didn’t look blue to Sheila.

  The house Carl rented in Kellogg consisted of a big room with woodstove, icebox, and sink. Two smaller rooms held beds—in one room Carl and Lily would sleep; in the other room Sheila and Tommy would sleep. An outhouse perched atop a hill.

  “Is this the best you could find?” Mama’s face scrunched up.

  “Not much to offer here, but you can keep looking.”

  “When I’m not hauling wood and ice, climbing hills, and taking care of kids.”

  “We’re together.” Daddy pulled her close, but she kept that scrunched-up face.

  Later, Mama and Sheila trudged to the outhouse. Sheila had never gone potty in such a place. It smelled horrible, like a huge pile of Tommy’s dirty diapers. There were bugs. What if they bite my bottom? What if I fall down in the black hole?

  That night when Mama really did cry, Daddy brought her a glass of brown medicine, and said, “It’ll make you feel better.”

  During the day Mama took care of Tommy while Sheila sat in a corner singing Grandma’s sunshine song, and paging through her books. Once in a while, Mama said, “Stop singing! Don’t you think I miss her?”

  Sheila would silently continue to page through her books. Soon, however, she started to hum and then started singing the words. Singing always made her feel better.

  Daddy would return to their three rooms, covered with black dirt and hunched over like an old man. After a shower, he held Tommy and called him “my little man,” while he ate his dinner. Then, he held Tommy and looked at a tattered fish and game magazine, drank another beer, and hollered at Mama, “Quiet Sheila down!”

  When Tommy started walking, Daddy got mad at him too. Sheila dragged her little brother to their room where she “read” stories to him and he clapped his hands and barked like a puppy and mewed like a kitty. This made them both roll on the floor in giggles.

  Daddy talked about men from the mine, another black hole, only a whole lot bigger than where she went potty. Once, he drove Mama and Sheila and Tommy to take a look at the mine. Sheila didn’t like the noisy, open boxes that took the men deep down into that black hole.

  Daddy said, “These are fun times.”

  Sheila figured the black hole must be better than it looked from the outside, but she didn’t want to see.

  Once, for a whole day, there was a dead elk on the big room floor. It smelled like Mama’s black skillet and made Sheila almost throw up.

  Daddy chuckled when Tommy poked at the elk’s antler. “This boy’s gonna be some hunter.”

  Despite his teasing, Sheila refused to come out of their room. Every few minutes she said, “Is it gone yet?”

  Daddy said, “Sheila! If you don’t stop it, I’m giving you a spanking.”

  She tried to stay quiet, feeling trapped, and after several hours the bloody carcass got taken off to where it was butchered. Sheila never could eat any of it, despite her parents’ threats of, “Nothing else for dinner.” She remembered the dark red puddles on the floor and the elk’s lifeless eyes.

  When Mama talked about the mine’s danger, Daddy said he liked going two miles underground in a speeding bucket car and pounding with a pickaxe. “It makes me feel useful—a real man’s job. Better than a storekeeper or working at the mill or even a barkeep. I could stay in Kellogg forever.”

  “Stay until you get the black lung or killed in an explosion,” Mama would say.

  During that summer, she took Sheila and Tommy to the doctor because of red sores inside their mouths. The doctor, who had a big brown mustache, said, “It’s trench mouth. From playing in the dirt. They’re too young to remember, but they need to keep their hands away from their faces.” He gave them shots in their bottoms that ached for a long time afterward, and while they cried, he gave Mama greasy gunk for their lips and some bitter stuff to swish around in their mouths.

  “Be sure not to swallow it!” He told Sheila and Tommy. To Lily, he said, “You’re going to have to make certain they wash their hands often.”

  “Does this mean they can’t play outdoors?”

  “They can play, but you have to supervise them at all times.”

  That night Mama said to Daddy, “How am I supposed to get anything done around here if I have to be outside with them all the time?”

  Daddy turned to Sheila and Tommy, “Keep your God damn hands away from your faces! Sheila, watch out for your brother. You’re old enough to do this.”

  So every time Tommy tried to rub his eyes or pick his nose or put a peppermint in his mouth with a dirty hand, four-year-old Sheila said, “No! You can’t do that. You’ll get another shot!”

  After a miserably cold winter, spent mostly indoors with Mama getting crabbier by the day, Rose arrived in Idaho.

  Weeks ahead of time, Mama talked about the upcoming visit until Sheila grew fluttery as a canary. She recalled pressing her head into Grandma’s talcum-scented bosom when they cuddled together in the good grandfather’s scratched wooden rocking chair. But at first, Sheila felt shy—until the old lady sang their sunshine song. This made her seem like Grandma Rose again. She took Sheila for long walks, all by themselves, and told Daddy, “Just because you lost the store doesn’t mean you have to stay here. You’re going to die in this godforsaken place!”

  What if Daddy died? Sheila didn’t think she wanted this to happen.

  Grandma helped Mama pack their things. They all rode the train back to Chambers, Minnesota. Daddy hunched in his seat, next to the window, a scowl on his face and few words for any of them. Mama tried to keep Tommy entertained with books and games.

  Sheila snuggled close to Grandma, happy to be making this trip.

  CHAPTER 10

  Chaos

  AFTER BRENDA LEFT FOR JAPAN SHEILA SPENT ALL HER WEEKENDS WITH THE KLEVENS.

  “You could stay here until Jim gets back from overseas,” Jane said.

  For a few moments Sheila considered this, her eyes scanning the yellow guest room with its white ruffly comforter on the brass bed and window seat overlooking Jane’s vegetable garden bordered by pink petunias. “No. I need to stay at my own place. Jim would want it that way.”

  Unlike her manner when she talked to Mary Beth, Jane didn’t push. Sheila almost wished that she would give a good shove.

  “It’s bad enough that she’s always messing with my life.” Mary Beth sat on her bed, looking sullen, shortly after Jane’s invitation. “And Bradley thinks he can tell me what to do. I wish you would move in. It would take some of the attention off me.”

  Dolls and stuffed animals and shelv
es full of books filled the childhood bedroom that Mary Beth still occupied. Her trundle bed stood atop a large braided rug crafted by Jane with fabrics from Mary Beth’s outgrown dresses.

  Have lots of friends used the extra bed? “They’re looking out for your best interests,” Sheila said.

  “If she doesn’t lay off my eating, I’m going to really blow up. She makes me want to head right for the ice cream. What about her? She’s not exactly slim and trim. And I’m tired of Bradley telling me to make goals for my life.”

  When Sheila was five years old, the family once more left Chambers and her grandmother and the yellow frame house and Carl’s jobs at the mill and Bernie’s. They moved to Minneapolis, where he worked as a parking attendant and went to school at night to become an electrician. In a stifling apartment with the walls closing in, her parents slept on the front room’s sofa bed. Sheila and Tommy’s bunk beds filled up the tiny bedroom. For extra money, Lily took in laundry and babysat for two boys across the hall—Dennis, a year younger than Sheila, and Larry, the same age as Tommy. The three little boys liked to gang up on her. Tommy pounced from one activity to another in their shared space, scavenging through Sheila’s dolls, toys, and books, leaving behind messes of broken limbs, scattered parts, and ripped-out pages. His cohorts aided in the destruction. Sheila grew to hate them. But that wasn’t exactly right. Sometimes she hated Tommy so much, she wanted to take Mommy’s hot iron and slam it into his smirking face. Other times, all she wanted to do was protect him from Dennis and Larry, who often struck out at Tommy when he got too “riled”; from their father, who came home tired and with a short fuse, ready to give Tommy a “good whipping” if he got too “wound up”; from outsiders who never understood his frustration at something like making his Lincoln Logs into a simple cabin. First, he’d smash the logs, sending them flying, then he’d hit his own head against the wall.

  Sometimes Rose sent a check and the family took their old Hudson to visit her in Chambers. This gave Sheila a welcome break from the clutter and noise and chaos in the apartment. Grandma’s large house had a special bedroom where Sheila read and colored and made up songs and slept without the hollers that Tommy made every night.

  When it came time to go back to Minneapolis, she would clutch Grandma and say, “I want to stay with you.”

  Grandma would try to comfort her. “You can come again … real soon.”

  Back in the apartment, she missed Grandma terribly, but she also missed that wonderful, private bedroom where no one disturbed her.

  When the terrible trio made Sheila scream in anger, Mama, with a glass of her brown medicine on the edge of the ironing board, said, “Please overlook it. You’re the oldest. I count on you.”

  During their rare moments alone, Sheila cuddled up beside her mother on the sofa and stroked her soft, freckled cheek. “I promise. I’ll help. But please, guard my stuff.”

  “Of course, dear.”

  Will she stay awake?

  School was Sheila’s favorite place in the world, except for church and Grandma’s house. She learned how to really read instead of memorizing, turning the pages of new, good-smelling books. Dick and Jane and Spot and the two parents who looked so stiffly smiling, were a lot different from the people in her family—a grumpy-looking father, a tired-looking mother, a wild-looking little brother, and no dogs or cats. Still, Sheila could identify all the words. Before long, the library became one of her special places at school. She took out all the Marguerite Henry horse books, and decided that someday she would have a horse of her own.

  On the way to Grandma Rose’s house, Lily would say, “Can we stop at the pony ring? The children will enjoy it.” Carl always looked exasperated. He was in a hurry to finish driving but would say, “If you think it’ll make them behave.”

  Sheila and Tommy went around and around for fifteen minutes on dusty, old Shetlands hooked to a big wagon-wheel-type contraption. Sheila pretended they were wild stallions. She galloped over the moon, away from a little brother to care for, an exhausted, preoccupied mother to help, and a bossy father telling her what to do.

  Her other special place at school was the music room where the children tried different instruments and learned songs for programs. By first grade, she was named the best reader and the best singer in her class. While the other kids played kickball and climbed the jungle gym on the playground at recess, she retreated to the library and music room. In these places she didn’t have to pretend she could gallop off and be free. When she read and sang, Sheila really did escape from her real life.

  A little less than a year after moving to Minneapolis, Carl and Lily moved from the tiny apartment to another, bigger apartment with two bedrooms—one for Mama and Daddy, one for Sheila and Tommy. Sheila never saw Dennis and Larry again, and she sure didn’t miss them. She had a new school with new girls who weren’t friends yet and a new library and a new music room. To save money, her parents became caretakers in this building, and many others during the coming years, each one a “better deal” and another new school. Carl and Lily talked about buying a house with open spaces where Tommy could run and “blow off steam.” No one knew how long it would take for this to happen. Sheila wished for it all the time—a house and a bedroom all to herself, with a lock on the door.

  She had a recurring dream about a big, white house. She would walk in this house straight toward a large staircase. She would walk up the stairs to a landing, then turn and walk up more stairs to another landing, then turn and walk up more stairs to another landing. Here she would stop and look at the ceiling. There was a flat door in the ceiling and a rope hung from it. When she pulled on the rope the door opened and down came a ladder. She climbed up into a huge, airy room. A piano surrounded by stacks of music stood in one corner. There were windows everywhere, looking out on the ocean. Between the windows, shelves full of books awaited her. She pulled up the rope and slammed the ceiling door shut and closed herself off from the rest of the world.

  She loved having this dream. For at least half an hour after she woke up it filled her with happiness—like imagining a jump over the moon on her horse, or in real life sitting for hours at school in the library and the music room. Sheila had this dream so many times that she came to believe the house and special room was a real place, if only she could find it.

  When three-year-old Tommy played outside in the courtyard of one apartment building, he never stopped to go inside and use the bathroom. Instead, he ran to a brick wall and peed. It seemed like every night Daddy came home to a call from one of the elderly lady residents. He’d say to Mama, “She informed me that Tommy’s doing it outside again.”

  Daddy talked and spanked. After a while he began to say, “If you do that one more time, I’m going to cut it off!”

  This terrified Sheila. She felt frightened for Tommy, and sick at the idea of so much blood. A home surgery was never done. One day, much to her relief, Tommy started going inside to pee, all on his own.

  At only seven years old, she could tell that the new apartment was exactly like the last, except in this building’s gloomy-as-a-cave basement.

  Daddy said, “We’re going to save more money.” Daddy always said that, like he always told Mama that each electrician’s job of his would be better than the last, “I’ll be making a whole lot more this time.”

  For Sheila, nothing seemed any different, except another new school. This apartment had two bedrooms like the last one, the biggest for Mama and Daddy. It had a window in the front room, high up near the ceiling that showed a sidewalk and legs of people walking by—some with trousers, some bare because of dresses, some with kids’ overalls. The smaller bedroom, in back of the kitchen, smelled like old fried bacon. This was for Sheila and Tommy. At four years old, he had grown wilder than ever.

  “Where will I put my stuff so he doesn’t ruin everything?” Sheila asked. She watched Mama put her glass of medicine down and draw a crooked line
in the air with her finger, then she squinted and studied the rest of the room.

  “I’m going to hang a curtain, right down the middle of the room,” Mama said. “One side for Tommy, the other side for you. That’ll keep him out of your belongings.”

  On Sheila’s side, a window way up by the ceiling showed a row of garbage can bottoms. On another wall, a door opened to the kitchen. Tommy didn’t have a window or a door. “He’ll come on my half to go in and out.”

  “We’ll have rules. No touching Sheila’s property.”

  Sheila didn’t believe that Tommy would ever follow any rules.

  “You and I can paint a mural for him. It’ll make him like it here and want to play on his own side.” Mama gave a lopsided smile. Her words weren’t coming out exactly right either. “Won’t that be fun?” sounded like, “Wo tha be fu?”

  “What kind of mural?” The one at school had letters and numbers. Tommy hated letters and numbers.

  “Animals. What kind?”

  “Monkeys.” The jabbering, running-around, scuffling, wrecking-things kind of monkeys, behind bars at the zoo. Sheila wished for a cage in the room to keep Tommy trapped.

  She had only two special toys left. One was a white, turning greenish, teddy bear. The green came from Vicks that Sheila put on him when she lay in bed with a cold and her chest was rubbed with it every night. She victimized poor teddy by cutting some of his hair down to the fabric when Mama said she had to keep braids and couldn’t get a ducktail. First, Sheila chopped out a chunk of her own bangs, then attacked Teddy. Worn holes around his neck opened up to let clumps of cotton spill out. Sometimes Mama, trying to salvage him, sewed his head back in place with zigzagged, loopy stitches.

  Sheila’s other toy was a rubber baby doll. It drank water from a tiny bottle before wetting its diaper. With a ballpoint pen, she colored black circles in Rubber Baby’s blank eyes. Smudged gray splotches from pressed-in dirt mottled its pink skin. Crevices along its arms were worn through to crumbliness.