When the current dance is over, I excuse myself and head over to the Kansas guy, who’s still waiting with my Coke. Before I reach him, the tall blond guy intercepts me. He looks to be about forty-five, the perfect image of a handsome blue-eyed American soldier you might see in an old war movie. Up close, I can see that his skin is pale, almost gray, and his chin is stubbled. His overcoat is unbuttoned and too large.
He stares at me for a long moment, drawing me deep into the vague shadows in his eyes, plunging me with him into some dark, unspeakable horror.
Finally, he speaks in hollow monotones. “In Korea. I was a pilot in Korea. A bomber pilot. I dropped bombs on people.”
I try to respond gracefully, as a good USO hostess is trained to do, but his unwavering stare unnerves me.
“That must have been a while ago,” is all I manage to say. He seems puzzled by my words.
“Is it a while ago?” he asks, then turns away from me, wheeling abruptly in an about-face, and walks stiffly away to resume his place at the edge of the dance floor.
I spend the rest of the evening dancing with the younger soldiers, still catching, from time to time, the older soldier’s solemn stare. I learn later that he is under psychiatric care, that he is supposedly “harmless” and is allowed weekly outpatient visits to the club. His only “bad habit,” I am told, is this persistent telling of his personal war story to every newcomer at the club.
I see him on several occasions after that, approaching new club members to tell his story, like a twentieth-century Ancient Mariner trying to expunge his soul of evil wartime deeds, trapped forever in the mercilessly grinding cogs of combat.
In February, I go back to college for more evening courses, and stop going to the USO. I’m too busy with coursework. The Vietnam War churns on under Richard Nixon, and the kids don’t like it. The peace movements on campus are becoming more audible, but I don’t take part in any peace marches. The noise and the crowds don’t seem peaceful to me, and I guess I’m still on the fence about the war. Aren’t Americans supposed to be the good guys? Maybe. Aren’t communists our enemies? Maybe not. I am confused, and I am a coward. I just want to be safe. I bury my nose deeper and deeper in French novels and try to avoid thinking too much about American current events.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
QUACKERY AND THROUGH THE WIRE FENCE
DADDY and I are in the sun parlor, in “Florida,” as Daddy calls it. He leans back in his cushioned rocking chair, and I take my customary seat opposite him on the watchmaker’s stool. There’s no cigar today. Daddy’s given them up entirely. His reason: shortness of breath.
“Can’t walk down the driveway to the mailbox anymore without getting out of puff. And that’s just a little more than a hundred feet. Must be the cigars.”
Even though the afternoon sun casts light and warmth through the parlor’s bank of south-facing windows, Daddy’s voice today is distressed and grim.
“I don’t trust doctors, Lissa. Doctors are just a bunch of quacks, and I’ll tell you why.”
I adjust myself on the stool and wait to hear Daddy tell a story he’s told me many times before: a tale he calls “Quackery,” about the untimely deaths of his pappy and his sister Katie.
Resting his arm on the rocker’s arm, Daddy stretches out his open palm to me and says, “Lissa, today you are a golden butterfly, rimmed in pink. Come settle here on the palm of my hand, and rest content while the dreams are flowing.”
I move the stool closer and let him close his hand around mine.
“Once upon a time, on a long-ago day, Lissa, Tulip Hill wore a cloak of sadness. The sky was gray, the rain fell steadily, mist surrounded us. On this day, I lost my favorite sister, Katie.
“Katie was the big sister who walked with me on my first day of school. She held my hand firmly in her own and protected me from the older children’s bullying and teasing. I still keep locks of her auburn hair, nested in with her obituaries, in a little cedar box at the bottom of my dresser. Will you keep them for me always, Lissa?”
I nod. This is not the first time he’s asked me to do this. I know where he keeps the cedar box. I’ve seen its contents.
“My Katie was just fourteen when she came down with a strange illness. I was sent to fetch old Doc Turner, our family doctor. Well, he went about examining Katie, saw that her tongue was coated white, and said she must have been eating too many crackers. Told her to lay off those crackers, and she’d be fine in a couple of days. Hurried off to his next patient, never asking how she was feeling or if anything hurt. Well, she hadn’t been eating crackers. We had no crackers in the house at that time. Next evening, Katie took to her bed and died.
“A few months passed, and another fog set in over Tulip Hill. That fog hung over us for weeks, shrouding the natural light. Day after day, I walked with Pappy out to the fields at sunup, and back home at sundown. We couldn’t see the sun. I had to carry my pocket watch along to gauge the hour. Mists filled the hollows. Tall trees hovered over the edges of the fields like white-shrouded specters overseeing our work.
“An invisible pain began to gnaw deep within Pappy’s stomach. But Pappy had seven young mouths to feed and another on the way, so he kept on working the fields. The pain got worse and worse, until finally, he collapsed at the supper table in unbearable stomach pain. He took to his bed, his belly swollen and enflamed. Once again, I fetched old Doc Turner. He instructed my mammy to apply a raw potato poultice to Pappy’s abdomen, and had him swallow a hearty dose of castor oil.
“Later that night, Pappy’s appendix busted open. By sunup, he was dead. So now you can understand, Lissa, why I don’t trust doctors. Look at what happened with your mother. Those so-called surgeons cut her up. Sawed off her breast. Gave her a hysterectomy. And when that didn’t stop the cancer from spreading, they burned her up with radiation until the skin on her back was burned raw, and her body couldn’t take any more of it. That’s when they just filled her full of morphine and let her die.”
Although I don’t contradict Daddy, I do know that his views about doctors are pretty narrow. And regarding the truthfulness of Daddy’s stories, I’ve come to see that the truth may vary with the telling, and that an old man’s fragile memories can shift and move with the sands of time.
Because on other days, Daddy changes his story, and tells me how his pappy was crushed to death by a tulip poplar.
“Long ago, a grove of poplars began to grow on the crest of Tulip Hill. Among the most ancient of these was a tulip poplar more than a hundred feet high. Now, it’s been confirmed by wiser minds than mine that, from the time of birth, each of nature’s creations carries within its innermost core the exact time—day, hour, and instant—that it is destined to die.
“Well, as it turns out, the time of death for this goliath tree was synchronized with that of my pappy. On one predetermined summer evening, as I stood watching Pappy ride home from the fields on his sure and patient draft horse, Dolly, the colossal tulip poplar came crashing down, crushing Pappy and Dolly beneath it. My two oldest brothers, John and William, came running. They toted Pappy’s crushed remains up to his bed. John came back to put Dolly down on the spot, and I was sent to fetch Doc Turner. Doc Turner pronounced Pappy dead, and my brothers set about making a coffin for our father from that very tree.”
By the spring of 1972, Daddy’s health is failing. He’s ninety-three now. His feet are heavy and clumsy, and he has trouble lifting them. One afternoon, driving home from picking up pizza for us at the local Italian carryout, rounding a curve, his foot slips, and he steps down hard on the gas pedal instead of the brake. Daddy drives the 1964 Corvair Monza—the car he bought not long after Jimmie died to replace the ailing 1950 Olds—through the fence at the abandoned Nike Missile Base. He comes home, carrying the cardboard pizza box. The pizza is fine, and he’s not hurt—at least not physically—and his car is still drivable.
“Let’s have some of this peesha,” Daddy says. Because of his missing teeth, his faulty hearing, or ma
ybe because he never learned to pronounce the word correctly, he always calls it “peesha.”
But as we share the pizza, I can see that he is shaken, dejected. He runs his right hand through his hair, and begins to pluck out—one at a time—the hairs near the front of his scalp.
I rush over to Daddy, as I always do when this happens, pull his hand away from his head, and plead, “Please stop pulling the hairs out of your head, Daddy.”
Daddy strokes my hand and says, “What would I do without you, Lissa, to watch out for me?” And for a while, at least, he refrains from plucking out his hair.
“This is the first accident I’ve ever had in all my years of driving,” Daddy says. “I’m disgusted with myself. Guess I’m not fit to drive anymore. I’m giving up my driver’s license. You’re going to have to learn to drive so you can take me to the places I need to go.”
While I was in high school, I did take the driver’s education course, but I’ve never tried for a driver’s license. I’m not like Jimmie; I’ve been content letting other people drive me around. Anyway, now Daddy pressures me to get my learner’s permit, tells Spence to take me out on a Sunday to practice at Sweeney’s empty parking lot. Eventually, Spence drives me to Belair for the driver’s test. I’ve studied for the written part, and selecting all the correct answers is super easy.
Next comes the part where you have to drive an examiner around the block. I’m about to switch on the car’s ignition when the examiner asks me for the car’s registration card. I can’t find it in the glovebox or anywhere in the car. The examiner scowls at me and says, “I can’t give you the driving exam until you show me a valid registration. You should be carrying that at all times in your vehicle.” Spence drives me back home, where we learn that Daddy has left the car’s registration card out on his desk.
Daddy apologizes. “I’m so sorry to make my little girl go through this ordeal twice.”
Spence sighs, shakes his head, and resignedly drives me back to Belair. This time, I luck out. I’m assigned a different examiner, who seems much more amiable than the last guy. I do pretty well driving around the block, except for getting a point or two subtracted from my score for not coming to a complete stop before the stop sign.
The parking test comes next. I’m worried. Parallel parking has never been my strong suit, but again, I luck out. As soon as I manage to back the little maroon car just partway into a very large space, my examiner smiles and says, “Good enough.” This time, I go home with a brand-new driver’s license. I’m still a little nervous about driving, so I let Spence drive us home until I can get more practice on back country roads.
I show Daddy my license. “I’m so proud of you, Lissa!” And so, at the age of twenty-one, I become Daddy’s chauffeur.
CHAPTER TWENTY
BABY STEPS
WEEKS go by. My life is going nowhere fast. I need to find a good way to earn money for myself, to become more independent. I remember what the Hutzler’s fashion director said to me, and I think maybe I can make a living being a fashion model. I could try contacting that woman, but I don’t remember her name, and besides, that was more than five years ago. She’s probably not even there anymore. Instead I look up local modeling agencies in the yellow pages, find one downtown that looks promising, and talk to Daddy about it.
Daddy keeps saying, “I need you here to take care of me, Lissa. It’s a hard world out there. You’ll never find anybody who’ll treat you as well as I do.”
I get angry with Daddy. I yell at him and say, “The more I do around here, the less I get.” I cry, run away from him, out behind the corn crib, which is falling apart now. Beside it, a sapling grows inside the part of the barn where Granddaddy Friedrich used to park his tractor. The slender tree has pushed its way up and poked a hole in the barn roof. I collapse in a pile of fallen boards and sit facing a jungle of poison sumac and other weeds that have grown up thick and tall, choking out what used to be Jimmie’s vegetable garden.
Eventually, Daddy comes out to find me. “What’s wrong with you? I don’t recognize my little girl anymore. Have you gone crazy?”
I don’t answer. He shakes his head and goes back to the house. When it gets dark, I come back in and fix supper.
A frantic anger seems to be surging up inside me, a raw energy I don’t know what to do with. I try to channel it in some positive way. Desperate to fix up the house, to make things better, I pull my hair back tight in a bun like Jimmie’s, tie a scarf over my head, and repaint all the chipped white kitchen cabinets an avocado green to match the teapot I keep on the stove to boil water for tea or instant coffee. With a trowel, I tear up the buckled, gritty bathroom floor tile and replace it with squares of inexpensive linoleum I pick out in the Montgomery Ward catalog and get Spence to buy for me—for the house. At night, I sneak out to Daddy’s woodshop and use his jigsaw to cut curved pieces of linoleum to fit around the toilet, then set it all in place with black adhesive. Sweaty and sticky, I am briefly satisfied.
Then I see ads on TV showing a thrifty, tidy housewife lining her kitchen drawers with adhesive vinyl contact paper. Once again, I consult the catalog. This time, I order rolls and rolls of contact paper—marbled avocado green for the kitchen, flocked gold for the bathroom. Once again, Spence pays for these quick-fix home improvements, and I go about cutting, peeling, and sticking contact paper—in kitchen drawers and on pantry shelves, above the kitchen sink and stove, on the walls above the bathtub. Daddy seems to watch me warily, but he doesn’t ask any questions, and Spence doesn’t complain about the money. I think they both just want to keep me satisfied with the way things are.
Eventually, Daddy agrees to check out a modeling agency downtown. I’m still too new a driver to feel comfortable driving downtown, so we take the number eight bus, walk a block, turn down a Baltimore side street, mount wide marble steps to an old stone office building, and pass through an elegant tile vestibule. Once inside, we are directed by a secretary to the director’s office.
We find the agency director—a heavily made-up woman, probably in her forties or fifties, with dyed black hair pulled back in a sophisticated French twist—seated behind a wide desk in a small office. Photos of young models line the walls. Daddy and I sit side by side in leather chairs across from the director.
“Tell me a little about yourself,” she says.
I try to think of something that might impress her. “I was Miss Baltimore USO. Just recently, 1970,” I tell her.
“That’s good, good,” she says in a deep smoker’s voice, turning her head to one side and blowing out a stream of smoke through a corner of her mouth. She crushes her cigarette against the base of a steep ashtray, and I notice that the dark red lipstick stains on the cigarette butt match the glossy polish on her fingernails.
“Mount Vesuvius,” she says, glancing down at the ashtray with an ironic smile. She coughs a deep, wet smoker’s cough, then pauses a moment to study my facial features.
She smiles over at Daddy, who is holding my hand. “She’s a pretty girl. We can work with her, show her how to use eyeliner and shadow and mascara to open up those eyes.”
Daddy tugs on my hand to let me know he’s eager to leave.
“I’ll have to talk it over with my father,” I say. Daddy has already gotten up to leave.
The director lights another cigarette, hands over a packet of information about the agency, and shakes hands with Daddy and me.
We haven’t walked a block when Daddy says, “That brazen bat, all painted up like a whore! I’m not going to let her get her hands on my little girl.”
A few weeks later, when Daddy seems to have calmed down, he agrees to go with me to a modeling school in Towson. Here, on the top floor of a modern office tower, the director chats with us in a spacious room. We sit in a casual grouping of chairs facing a bank of sunlit floor-to-ceiling windows. Daddy gets along okay with this woman, and gives me his permission to enroll here. To pay for modeling school, I take a job as a nurse’s aide at the Mason
ic nursing home, a.k.a. Bonnie Blink, in Cockeysville. Daddy is very pleased with this.
“When you take care of the old folks there, you’ll learn how to take good care of me.”
Bonnie Blink—an old castle built in Scotland, dismantled, and reassembled in Cockeysville, Maryland—stands watch over Shawan Road from the crest of a hill.
On my first night, with some trepidation, I drive the little maroon Corvair up a long, steep driveway to the stone-clad home where aging Masons and their wives go to spend their final years. I’ve been hired to work the graveyard shift, eleven P.M. to seven A.M. It’s called that, the nursing director has warned me, because that’s when most of the residents’ deaths occur.
The nurse who supervises me explains that some of the geriatric residents, who seem pretty normal during the day, tend to behave a little strangely at night. On my first night, the supervising nurse takes me and another new aide, a girl named Stephanie, on rounds in the assisted living ward to show us the ropes and meet an unforgettable cast of characters.
Here, we meet old Mr. Tyson. “Mr. T. is senile,” the nurse advises us.
As we pass by his bed, he reaches out and grabs Stephanie by her arm. She shrinks back—but not in time to avoid getting smeared with the feces Mr. T. has hidden in his other hand. Stephanie, whose face has gone as white as the nurse’s uniform, is given a break so she can wash up and collect herself. Mr. T.’s behavior is so absurd I find myself trying to suppress a nervous laugh.
While Stephanie is gone, the nurse introduces me to an elderly man with a pacemaker who makes no sign of recognition, and never says a word, as we change his bedsheets. “You’d never know it to look at him now,” the nurse tells me, “but he used to be a physician.”
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