Making It Work

by Kathleen Glassburn

  In a joking way, this time with a smile that looked more like a sneer, he would make a comment like, “So, you have a new friend.”

  She would say something back like, “Please, Bill. I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

  He would retort with something like, “I was just saying hello.” Or, “I’m only watching out for your wellbeing.” Or, as a last resort, “Can’t I have anything to do with you?”

  And she would say, “We’ve been through this before. I’ve had enough.”

  She never brought up what he had done when she broke it off with him.

  This went on for the month before he left to move back to Ardenville. She questioned if Mr. Petersen noticed the tension between her and Bill. Would she get in trouble? This seemed unfair, but that’s how it worked—the support staff, which were all women, received the blame during any controversy. She was going to get out of the bank one way or another as soon as she could but wanted to leave on her own terms.

  Sully called Sheila occasionally, and when he heard that Bill continued to pester her, he again gently suggested that she come to work at his bank.

  She said, “I’m not going to be here that much longer. It doesn’t make sense to start a new job.”

  Sully said, in a protective way, “You have to shoot him down. Hang up on him. Ignore him. Don’t let him get to you like this.”

  She never told Sully the worst of the breakup, feeling ashamed for having gotten into such a situation.

  At least she didn’t directly work for Bill anymore. An older woman who had recently transferred in from the steno pool, divorced with a couple of teenagers, worked for him. The woman reminded Sheila of Jim’s mother—the ostracism she had experienced. No wonder she never talked much. But, Divorce is becoming more common.

  The weekend after her last trip to Ardenville, she had told Bill it was time to end their relationship. He’d taken her to one of the dance clubs they frequented. Given her mother’s problem, Sheila seldom drank more than one glass of wine, but on this night, perhaps to bolster her courage, she over-indulged.

  After the club closed, Bill was driving them to her apartment.

  Later, Sheila thought, The red Mustang—what a terrible place to break up with him. At the time, probably because of the wine, this never occurred to her.

  “It’s not going to work out,” she had started.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t want to see you anymore.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re getting married.”

  “No, Bill. I don’t want to get married. It’s not you,” which, of course, was a lie. “I don’t want to marry anyone.”

  “This is crazy,” he began to shout. “Everyone in town knows we’re planning a wedding. My mother will freak out. My father will say he knew this would happen. What are you thinking?”

  “You need to drop me off. I don’t want you to come up to my apartment.”

  “Not going to happen!” With that he raised his hand from the steering wheel and lashed out, hitting Sheila on the cheek below her left eye with his Mankato State College ring.

  “Are you out of your mind?” she screeched, and felt her cheek and nose. Her fingers came away smeared with blood.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.” Minutes later he parked in front of her building. “I felt so out of control at the thought of losing you.”

  Sheila didn’t know what to say. No one had hit her since she was a kid at home. As many times as her father raised a hand to her when she mouthed off at him, there had never been blood.

  She dug tissues from her purse and mopped at her face.

  “I’ve got to come in and help you clean up,” Bill insisted.

  “Leave me alone. I don’t want to see you anymore. I don’t want to talk to you anymore. We’re done!”

  Sheila ran from the car and to the entry door and up the steps to her apartment, relieved that he didn’t follow.

  And later she thought, Thank God we didn’t have an accident. It could have been so much worse.

  The flowers and candy and jewelry started to arrive the next day, as well as the phone calls, and she saw the red Mustang parked across from her building every night. Bill was watching her comings and goings. The only places she ever went were to class and to pick up some groceries. It was a good thing that Sully wasn’t still working at her bank. He would have noticed the bruises she did her best to cover with makeup. Sheila could hear what his protective, big brother words would be, “I’d like to knock that guy around myself.”

  Eventually, she did what Sully advised during their telephone conversations. Every time Bill called, she hung up. It took a while, but at last he quit. One day there was no communication, and after that, he sat turned away from her while he worked. When they passed each other, he acted like she wasn’t there. At last, he left to move back to Ardenville. She never loved going into work at the bank, but once Bill was gone, she felt such relief that the place began to look pleasant.

  Sheila came to think of Bill as her “penance partner,” the price for any left-over guilt feelings about Jim, and in a lesser way, Bradley. She also decided that dating someone from the bank had been a very poor idea. Bill badmouthed her to all his work friends, so no one wanted to ask her out anyhow. But she was so busy with school that there was little time to date. As far as penance, she came to realize that Jim had been as much at fault as she had been in the divorce. Yet, it took this miserable situation with Bill before Sheila allowed herself to quit feeling like she could have tried harder.

  And after Bill, surprisingly, she didn’t miss Jim anymore. She didn’t mind being alone. She occasionally wondered, Will I ever find someone and want to marry again? But the prospect of being by herself forever didn’t bother her. Music had become the most important thing in her life. She decided it was better to use her precious time for this rather than to spend it with someone she really didn’t care about. She had never tried to contact Jim about the annulment. This made Sheila come to the conclusion, I must have known all along it wouldn’t work out.

  Every night when she walked into the music building at the University of Minnesota and heard different instruments being played in practice rooms and listened to choirs going over their pieces, she soaked in the wonderful atmosphere and felt thankful to be a part of it.

  On January 27, 1973, after the Paris Peace Accord, President Nixon announced the suspension of offensive action against North Vietnam. He said that there would be a sixty-day period for the total withdrawal of American forces.

  It was finally over. Sheila gave a prayer of thanks.

  It came time for Sheila’s student teaching, and being a night school attendee she didn’t know how this would work out. There was no way she could take time off from work at the bank to spend hours at a local junior high. With special permission from the head of the Music Department, she was able to work all day Saturday at a community center that had an abundance of enthusiastic elementary-age children participating and a few drifting junior high-aged kids. One of these was Sally Blake, a twelve-year-old who had recently discovered makeup, smudging on thick blue eye shadow, and wearing grownup clothes that looked like they were her mother’s cast-off dating attire. She wore beat up white go-go boots with skirts that barely tickled the top of her thighs. Sally came from a broken family. Her father had deserted the mother a few years before. No one knew where he landed. The mother worked as a cocktail waitress late into the evening, so Sally spent too much time by herself.

  Aside from her flamboyant appearance, the first thing Sheila noticed about Sally was her sweet soprano voice, so much like her own. “Have you done a lot of singing?”

  “Not much.” Sally scuffed the toe of her boot on the linoleum floor.

  “I’d like to show you some of my favorites. Would you agree to that?”

  “When?”
<
br />   “I’m teaching all the others until three in the afternoon. Could you stay after they’re gone?”

  “I guess so. Don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  So, the private lessons began.

  Sheila played her guitar and sang, among others, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and “Simple Gifts,” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” When she started “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” she noticed that Sally choked up and couldn’t sing. Sheila decided to put this one away.

  “I could teach you to play the guitar too, if you’d like.”

  “Cool.”

  By the end of Sheila’s six-month stint at the community center, in addition to putting on a performance of the whole group, attended by relatives and friends, she felt quite positive about Sally’s upcoming role in school. Her mother had not come to the performance. In fact, Sheila never met her. But Sheila felt confident that Sally’s buried talent would help her get through future difficult years, and give her much joy along the way.

  A few months before her grandmother died that year, Sheila paid a visit to the nursing home, a place she had gone at least once a month since her return to Minneapolis. Usually, her grandmother didn’t know who she was, so after sitting with her for a short while, holding her wrinkled old hand, Sheila left. This time she experienced delight that Grandma was having a lucid day. This happiness proved to be short lived.

  They talked about the weather, of course, and television game shows her grandmother watched but never understood, and the terrible food at the nursing home. She didn’t ask anything about Sheila’s life, and Sheila didn’t offer anything.

  All at once, she felt stunned, like a sparrow crashing into a pane of glass, when Grandma matter-of-factly told her that she had given the doll away to a little girl—the granddaughter of her next-door neighbor—when this child came with her mother for a visit. They’d been served coffee, milk, and cookies by a staff member. “A real party,” Grandma said. “She played with my doll and all her lovely things … had such a grand time.”

  How could she? Sheila stared out the streaked window next to her grandmother’s old chest of drawers. Beds of petunias circled a courtyard. The sun shone on them, making their pinks bright and cheery. All Sheila could see was a path in need of weeding.

  “No father … lived with her mother in a tiny apartment … no money for toys … never any toys at the orphanage.”

  But she was mine! Her grandmother had given the doll to this unknown girl who never even cared about Victoria. Knew nothing about the history—Sheila’s history—with her. Sheila squeezed her eyes tightly shut, words catching in her throat.

  As she was wont to do, Grandma changed the subject, forgetting all about the doll. “Carl gets angry … eyes turn black … leaves the house.”

  For a minute, Sheila thought her grandmother was talking about her father.

  “Walks for hours … all by himself. Comes back … everything better.” Grandma’s expression compressed into deeper lines.

  A long walk wouldn’t help how I feel! Sheila was stuck on the doll.

  As she had grown into adulthood, occasionally Sheila pictured Victoria and imagined a time when she might share her with some future daughter, something that was never said to Grandma, just assumed. I should have taken the doll when she moved into this place!

  By modern standards, maybe the doll wasn’t that remarkable, but from Sheila’s little-girl perspective, Victoria had been loved so much that, naturally, she became real. So, Sheila couldn’t understand, and now too hurt, too afraid of crying, she didn’t draw her grandmother’s attention back. Confrontation would only add to the old lady’s confusion. Instead, Sheila let her ramble on about the saintly grandfather. Grandma had quit speaking of him in recent years, so this came as a surprise, along with what followed.

  “Kept asking why …”

  “Why? What do you mean? He took long walks?”

  “No note. No reason … Why?”

  “What happened?” Sheila suddenly felt jolted away from her own disappointment by her grandmother’s increasingly stranger words.

  “Out in the field … blood … so much blood.”

  The hunting accident? “Grandma, what are you saying?”

  “No note.”

  But her grandmother had gone back to the faraway place, where she couldn’t be reached. Minutes before, tears ran down her cheeks. Now, a smile turned up her shrunken lips. Wherever she’d gone, Grandma was happy.

  Sheila found her father in the garage, puttering at his workbench on a broken lamp. When she spoke to him about what her grandmother had said, he turned away and began shuffling back into the house. “What’s past is past.”

  “No, Dad.” She grabbed his sleeve. “You need to tell me about this. You need to tell me right now.”

  Carl turned, and Sheila was certain she had never seen such pain in his face. Anger, yes. Frustration. Annoyance. Disdain. Sometimes, though infrequently in recent years, cheerful abandon, deep dimples dancing. But pain? Her father never showed any sort of pain. At this minute, he flopped onto a beat-up wooden chair, head hanging down toward the garage’s dirty cement floor.

  “What happened to my grandfather?”

  “One day, he couldn’t … take it anymore.”

  “Take what?”

  “The store. Business had steadily slowed … Life.” Then, silence.

  Am I going to have to pull every word out of him? “I thought the store was fine, until you took over.”

  “That’s what we said. He made poor investments. It was going under when I stepped in. He’d lost the farm years before. He just couldn’t take another failure.”

  “So, he shot himself?”

  Her father was shrinking smaller and smaller in the chair. “Yes,” he said in a jagged, quiet voice.

  “Grandma said there was no note, no reason.”

  “No note, but he had plenty of reasons, at least in his mind.”

  For her whole life she had heard stories of the saintly grandfather. Of his goodness. Here he had actually left his wife and son in a most terrible way. Along with the shock, this caused Sheila to wonder, Was the wicked grandfather as evil as everyone made him sound?

  In a short while, Sheila got over the loss of the doll. In fact, it started to represent something to her. She wasn’t that precious doll of Jim’s. She had outgrown that loving name, just as she had outgrown Victoria. Her life was full. Before long she would graduate, and this was the most important thing. The doll, after all, was really only a toy. After so many years of being played with, her many outfits had grown shabby, and her hair was a dull, tangled mess instead of a mass of shiny curls.

  Still, Sheila hoped that the little girl would care for Victoria at least half as much as she had cared. And she hoped that maybe someday, this girl would tell a story about the little old lady, the one with the pillow-soft bosom, who not only shared her cookies and gave talcum powder–smelling hugs but also presented her with a wonderful gift.

  Getting over the information about her grandfather was harder. Sheila wished she could let go of this horrible image. At the end, Grandma forgot about her need to know the whys. Years earlier, she had quit talking about the sainted grandfather and the baby girl who had come to replace him. As her dear face rested into the peaceful features that Sheila adored, it seemed that all the unanswered questions quit mattering.

  Thinking about what her grandfather’s suicide must have meant to his loved ones, Sheila’s own familiar closed-up throat set in. But this time, those feelings melted away with wet cheeks and sobs, as she grieved for the lost doll and her grandmother’s sorrows, and her father who had carried his own grief, silently, angrily for so many years. And for her grandfather, who must have been filled with so much despair that this was all he could think of to do.

  Sitting at her piano bench, looking at he
r music with blurred eyes, Sheila decided that this piece, “Moonlight Sonata,” would be for her father’s and grandmother’s and grandfather’s sadness, as well as for her own.

  CHAPTER 29

  Almost There

  OCCASIONALLY SHEILA SAW PATTY CLARKE AND OTHER WOMEN FROM HER HIGH school days. Most of them had married and were mothers. Whenever she stopped by Patty’s house, the main thing she came away with, after sitting in the living room cluttered with toys, was the difficulty of communicating. Patty’s twin boys, who were now almost a year, constantly interrupted their conversations. Despite baby fat that she complained about hanging onto, Patty had never seemed better.

  When Sheila left, her departing words would be, “I’m glad you’re so happy. Someday, I’d like to have a family too.”

  “You will,” Patty would say, and give Sheila a formula-smelling hug.

  Her closest friend remained Eleanor Dillingham, back in Washington, D.C. They wrote frequent letters, and quite often Eleanor called, knowing that Sheila, on her limited budget, couldn’t reciprocate.

  On a freezing January day in 1974, Sheila sat at her piano, working out a musical piece for one of her classes. The professor had given his students a choice to write an original song, or to take the melody from a published piece and write a new arrangement. Since Sheila didn’t have a lot going on in her life that she could draw upon for inspiration, she chose an old song from her San Francisco days. “Turn, Turn, Turn” had been a favorite. She seldom went to church anymore, choosing instead to reach out to God by lighting her candles and praying at home and playing her music. But the Biblical words from the book of Ecclesiastes were especially important to her. Working on the chords, she wondered what this time of her life would be called. She’d had a time to love. A time of war. Would she come to think of this as a time to learn? She wanted to keep on learning forever.