As they spun around to fast songs, Tommy made comical faces and strummed a pretend guitar. As they cuddled during slow songs, Tommy pretended like he was playing a violin. Before long, Sheila and Jim would collapse on the sofa in hysterics. They were starting into some grabbing games of their own.
That winter Tommy became a paperboy. Carl told Lily, “What my son needs is a job. It shows initiative.”
Every day at 5:00 a.m. Tommy arose without complaint and through icy Minneapolis streets, delivered the news before heading off to school. After many weeks of this regimen, Carl received a phone call. Sheila could tell by the look in his piercing dark eyes that someone was going to catch it. Did he know about Jim being at the house?
Reprieve came when Carl told Tommy, “You have a problem!” and Sheila was sent to her bedroom.
Even with her door shut, trying to study to a Paul Anka album, she could hear her father’s loud voice.
The gist of his rant was that someone had accused Tommy of window peeping. Carl demanded, “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Nothing.”
“Can you explain why you did this?”
“Nope.”
His thundering voice went on for what seemed like an hour. Tommy continued to ignore his father’s questions. All this time, Lily stayed in their bedroom with a “sick headache,” and now that she had started drinking again, a half empty tumbler on her nightstand.
At last, Carl said, “Sheila can take over delivering papers. Maybe a girl will handle this job better than you.”
Because Tommy had grown to be almost as tall as Carl, at five foot nine, his father had quit beating him and begun the seemingly endless lectures—using his words where once he had used his belt. He finished this one with, “No outings, anywhere, for the next month.”
Sheila liked the idea of extra money to buy more clothes, and figured she could do the route as well as Tommy, who never seemed to get anything right. But on the first zero-degree morning, she ignored the alarm clock. Carl yanked her out of bed, told her to get dressed, and stood at the front door until she threw the canvas newspaper bag over her shoulder and left the house.
A few mornings later, while walking down a quiet street, tossing rolled-up papers onto front steps, Sheila saw a lit-up window among all the darkened ones. In it stood a large, hairy, naked man who looked like a gorilla. She dropped the bag on frozen ground, then slipped and slid all the way home.
She entered, panting. “Some freaky guy exposed himself to me! I’m never going to deliver papers again!”
Lily, her eyes bloodshot and her shoulders slumped, got in her Ford with Sheila next to her in the passenger seat. They retrieved the papers and finished the route before Lily went to work. The gorilla man was gone and the window was dark.
That night, Carl agreed—Sheila must quit. No one questioned whether Tommy saw this man, and out of curiosity, merely moved in closer.
On visits to Grandma’s house, Sheila sat in a corner of the living room, leafing through teenage beauty and movie magazines, trying to generate as little attention as possible. Too grown-up now for the doll, she left it put away with her grandmother’s other treasures.
At family dinners, Grandma still recited stories of how the saintly grandfather unexpectedly died and left her bereft beyond belief. She continued to question, if his accidental death was a punishment because they’d left the Church. After Carl Senior had too many disputes with the small town’s parish priest over things like poor attendance and paltry contributions (it was the Depression) he quit going at all. Rose, with her own bad memories from the Catholic orphanage, started to attend the nearby Episcopal Church with her best friend. Similar ritual, not as many rules. After the loss of Carl Senior, Rose, filled with guilt, returned to the Church. She reasoned that God gave the baby girl—little Sheila—to ease her pain.
At Carl’s insistence, Lily had converted from being a Lutheran, and they were married in the Catholic Church. After children came along, she took them to mass every Sunday while he stayed home reading his newspaper, developing his opinions, and drinking cup after cup of black coffee.
By this time, when her grandmother recited the old stories about how important Sheila was to her, the teenaged girl fought back tears, trying not to embarrass herself in front of the family, her throat feeling like it was stuffed with a bunched-up hanky. Dad had said, so many times, “Sheila’s bladder is too close to her eyeballs,” making her shrink and want to hide. Much later, she figured out that her father probably said this because, at the thought of his father’s death, he fought back his own tingling, unshed tears.
The astronauts had to be frightened every time their spacecraft took off. Sheila thought about this over the next several days after Bradley asked her to go to the demonstration. The space program was something those astronauts believed in. Otherwise why would they put themselves in jeopardy? The anti-war movement was something that, with each article of Bradley’s she read, each news report showing bodies of dead boys coming home in black bags, each of Jim’s letters telling her that he had no idea when the ship would come home, she believed in.
On Saturday morning she called Bradley, and despite a thumping heart, said, “Pick me up. I’m going with you.”
“Glad to hear that.”
As with so many other things that she worried about, the demonstration itself was a nonevent. Only about twenty-five people showed up. All the young men did burn their draft cards in a garbage can. It seemed like such a huge thing to do, but the few people who walked by, listened to Bradley and her songs for peace, put some change in his open guitar case, and must have assumed the fire was to keep them warm. It was a cold day. The police never showed up. After a couple of hours, passing out copies of Bradley’s latest writing, most of which were tossed in the garbage can, everyone left the area.
“That wasn’t as successful as I hoped. But it’s a start,” Bradley said.
Sheila gave a relieved laugh. Soon, she would be back to her own apartment where she could play songs by herself. I won’t tell Jim about making music on that sidewalk.
“Next time will be better.” Bradley set his jaw.
A few weeks before Jim’s ship came back to Long Beach, Mr. Grey emptied the storage apartment next door, and new neighbors moved in.
He told Sheila, “They shouldn’t bother you. The man tends bar in San Pedro, and the woman works as his barmaid. Their hours are upside down from yours.”
For the first couple of nights, she didn’t hear them. Then it started, and more nights than not, a repeat performance occurred. Shortly after two in the morning they arrived, slamming their door and speaking loudly. The noise escalated. He hollered. She screamed. He accused her of coming on to customers—men she had spent too much time serving. She accused him of having a dirty mind. Before long, Sheila would hear crashes against the wall, like chairs being thrown, and the man yelling, “Don’t hit me, you slut!” The woman would shriek, “It’s none of your business, you son-of-a-bitch,” and then another crash.
The first night of these disturbing noises, Sheila had her hand on the receiver, ready to call Mr. Grey, when she heard, “Sweet stuff … please stop,” in the woman’s softened voice. The noises changed. The man moaned, “Baby … oh baby.” And for the next ten minutes, Sheila huddled in the dark, staring across the room at that shared wall, glad it wasn’t the bed wall, waiting for their clamorous release, wishing they had a radio on at peak volume.
Some of these people that Sheila either met or merely heard during her early days in California caused her to realize that even though her family was sadly lacking, a lot of people had stories that were even more difficult and colorful and bizarre than her own. She also wondered about the way things could have been different, to make the Doty’s life together better. Especially, to make Tommy’s life better. There had been problems for Tommy right from the start, and as he got
older, the problems only increased.
Once he began high school, a gymnastics coach spotted his wiry frame and asked him to join the team. He excelled on the trampoline. The talk of teachers as well as students in the hallways was that, with his magnificent flips, Tommy Doty would be a sure shot for state.
His parents talked of going to Tommy’s matches, but Carl always ended up saying, “I’m beat from working all day. Maybe next time.” Lily would continue to sip her “one” after-work drink and nod in agreement.
Jim and Sheila attended a match, and Tommy was spectacular. He was so thrilled to have them there, and excited when they went out for pizza to celebrate his win. After that, Jim insisted that he’d rather go on some other kind of date, by themselves, usually a movie, and always a long time afterward spent in his parked Mercury on a deserted road.
Gary, another skinny boy on the team, was Tommy’s friend. He came from a “broken home.” The only other family like this in the neighborhood was Jim’s. For years, after his mother and father divorced, she raised the two boys alone. His father had moved to Boston, and was seldom heard from.
Tommy and Gary skipped a few practices, got warnings, and all of a sudden, for some unexplainable reason, decided to take off. Tommy stole a couple hundred dollars that his parents had stashed away in a metal box on the floor of their bedroom closet, saving to buy a butchered steer from the company where Lily worked.
Sheila worried that she would never see Tommy again. This caused her to recall a dream that Tommy was dead when they first moved to the house. She had awakened in her new bedroom, peered around, and he wasn’t there. At first alarmed, she then remembered that he had his own bedroom. She ran to it and he was gone. She searched the unfamiliar house, and the last place she looked was the basement recreation room. Tommy lay asleep on the sofa, the room dimly lit by a television test pattern. She grabbed him and hugged him tightly, repeating, “You’re all right!”
He rubbed his bleary eyes, and said, “What’s with you?”
Since his disappearance with Gary, Sheila questioned why she had always acted so superior. Why didn’t I take better care of him? For the next three days, she barely slept or ate. Then, a call came. They had been picked up hitchhiking in Wyoming and were jailed, awaiting retrieval. Carl immediately told Lily and Sheila to get ready. An hour or so later, they headed west. After they picked the boys up from jail, with the sheriff saying, “Better not ever see you two again,” the five of them stayed together in a cheap Casper motel room. They said little to each other, watching one game show after another on the small television screen, then falling into restless sleep.
Next day on the drive back to Minneapolis, Lily acted extremely relieved and upbeat, perhaps because she had been so concerned about Tommy that she hadn’t drank a drop since he went away. Maybe this was her way of doing penance. Sheila did notice that she’d put a bottle in her suitcase.
Lily tried to make the atmosphere in the car pleasant with remarks like, “Isn’t this scenery interesting?”
Carl grunted, not bothering to respond or look at the snow-covered tumbleweeds she pointed out. The others followed his lead, ignoring her remarks.
Giving up, Lily turned the radio on to scratchy Johnny Cash music.
Sitting between Tommy and Gary, the way her father had ordered her to do, Sheila heard whispers about hitching rides with redneck truck drivers and eating undercooked scrambled eggs in rundown cafés. The boys made choking faces that brought on shakes of stifled laughter, all accompanied by music from Folsom Prison. Between suppressed giggles, she almost choked from a dirty socks smell coming off the two of them.
After at least twenty hours driving, Carl pulled up to a small house with a ripped screen door.
“Will your mom be here … to get you a meal?” Lily asked Gary.
“Naw. She’s at work.” He peered at Carl before bolting from the car.
As Carl drove away, Lily said, “You should wait to make sure he gets …”
“The kid’ll figure it out. That kind always does.” He turned to Tommy. “If you ever see him again, you’ll wish for that jail cell in Casper.”
Tommy didn’t answer, chewing at his already almost nonexistent fingernails, blood dripping onto his shirt.
“Forget about the gymnastics team. You owe me a lot of money. Boss down at the Point says you can start tomorrow afternoon.”
So Tommy ended up flipping take-out hamburgers instead of competing at state.
Sheila graduated from high school in 1964, and started college with Patty and her other girlfriends that fall. When her father insisted that she move home, refusing to pay her bills, she quit school and began to make plans for a wedding. Carl, after much arguing, accepted that she and Jim would take off if he stood in their way.
Around that time, the American space probe Ranger 7 transmitted four thousand pictures of the moon’s surface—before crashing into it.
CHAPTER 12
Return and Reality
ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17, 1966, WITH A SKY COVERED BY SMOG, AFTER BEING gone almost exactly nine months, the USS Matthews AKA 49 docked in Long Beach.
For several months beforehand, Sheila’s period hadn’t come. She attributed this to nerves and visited a doctor.
“Please do something so that I can start my birth control pills.”
The white-jacketed man peered at her over his glasses. His mouth crimped up on one side.
“My husband’s ship is coming in soon. I have to be … ready for him!”
“Do you have something else to tell me?”
For a moment Sheila tried to figure out what he meant.
“Could you possibly be pregnant? If you are there’s nothing I can do to help you.”
“Absolutely not!” She thought of all the lonely nights by herself. She had never, ever, considered going out with the girls at the office, doing anything that would be a betrayal of Jim.
Sheila mostly kept her eyes tightly closed during the whole rushed, painful examination, but did squint once at the doctor. His lips were pressed together. I hate him!
At the end of the embarrassing ordeal, he said, “You can sit up.” His lips relaxed. “You’re not pregnant … I’m sorry if I assumed …”
“Can you make things work?”
“I’ll write you a prescription. These hormones should get everything going.”
To her relief, they did. A few days later her period came, and she was waiting, ready and eager and protected, the day Jim returned.
A few hours before she had to leave for the base, Sheila stood in front of the bathroom mirror trying to comb her hair into submission. The new cut was quite a bit shorter than her usual style. Erratic curls framed her face. She rubbed a hand along her bumpy cheek. In addition to her period disappearing, blemishes spotted her skin along with the freckles. She pushed the sides of her hair in order to hide some of the larger splotches. Hardly satisfied with the effect, she gave up and went to her closet.
The jacket and skirt she’d bought at a store downtown came from the children’s department. She wondered, Will he notice how much weight I’ve lost?
After arriving by taxi, at least an hour early, she found Leeza and her boys standing on the pier with some of the same wives and children as when the ship had left. As badly as Sheila felt about her own appearance, it was a shock to see what nine months of being a navy wife and mother left behind had done to Leeza. She’d gained at least twenty pounds, and her face was covered with acne. Her once-glossy black hair had turned dull and scraggly.
As if in explanation for the way she looked, Leeza said, “Taking care of the boys on my own has been awful this time. They kept crying for Chuck. First, it was chicken pox. Next, the flu. Thank God for other navy wives who helped me.”
Sheila thought of the Rollys and how their boys never mentioned Ted, and how the couple had avoided living on ba
se, so they could “do their own thing.” Now, they were stuck since there weren’t any other options in Japan. Anxious for Jim to get out of the navy in a couple of years, she knew that, God forbid, if she was married to a lifer, living on base would be the best option. If they could have moved there as short-timers, that’s where she would have been, with lots of caring people around her.
As the ship tied up, everyone’s eyes were stuck on it, as if pulled by a magnet. The band played “America the Beautiful.” Welcomers stared at more than a hundred white uniforms lining the rails, each waiting person trying to find the face of a special sailor. At last, Sheila recognized the one she searched for, and waved both arms above her head. Jim waved back with just as much enthusiasm. She had never seen him with such a huge smile. It lit up his darkly tanned face. After at least thirty impatient minutes, Jim and Chuck, along with a throng of others, ran down the gangplank. They hugged Sheila and Leeza for dear life, completely forgetting about their whites, which soon became smeared with lipstick and mascara.
“We don’t want to stick around.” Chuck scooped up a son in each arm. “But we will get together soon.” He didn’t offer to drive Sheila and Jim back to their apartment.
Sheila was glad. All she wanted was to be alone with Jim. She never even gave a backward glance at the ship that had been such a huge part of her recent sadness as they stepped into a waiting taxi.
Jim kept his arm around her shoulders for the whole ride while she rested her head on his chest, breathing in his English Leather and suddenly feeling exhausted.
Making It Work Page 13