by Lesley Kagen
But sitting there in the doctor’s office that smelled like shots, I reconsidered about that for a while, and finally said to Dr. Sullivan, “Okay, maybe it wasn’t the Creature who murdered Junie.”
The doctor smiled and nodded his head.
“Because of those pink undies being tied around Junie’s neck,” I explained. “The Creature doesn’t have very nice fingers and you’d need very nice fingers to tie undies around a girl’s neck, wouldn’t you?”
Dr. Sullivan made me swallow some cod-liver oil and then put his face right up close to mine, so close that the pores in his nose looked like the insides of an empty egg carton. “Sally O’Malley, you have what is known as an overactive imagination.” His breath was warm and putrid, just like I imagined the Amazon would be. “That’s not good. In fact”—he looked over at Mother and shook his head—“it just goes to prove once again that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. Have you been attending mass regularly?”
Him saying that didn’t give me a lot of faith in Dr. Sullivan. Because he was so wrong. My mind was never idle. Never ever.
The noon whistle blew over at the cookie factory and I heard Mother say from far off, “Sally? Sally! Did you hear me?” in that tone she got to let you know she had better things to do.
“Sorry.” Thinking about the Creature and Daddy like that, that was what Dr. Sullivan called a flight of the imagination, which was something I musta inherited from my Sky King.
Mother sighed one of her big sighs and said, “I have to go to the hospital tomorrow to have an operation. My gallbladder has to come out.” She placed her hand below her right ribs. “And while I’m gone”—she pointed her finger at Troo—“I want you to work on your charitable works, and you”—she pointed at me—“get control of that imagination of yours or I’ll take you back to the doctor.”
Then she looked down at her hands and twirled the wedding ring that Hall had given her, which seemed like it hurt because she had a pained look on her face. With the bad luck Mother was having with her husbands, Troo and me figured that one of the reasons she had married Hall so fast after Daddy died was because he didn’t look like he’d decease anytime soon, with his muscles and wavy Swedish hair and that tattoo on the top part of his arm that said MOTHER. Nell said that tattoo must have impressed the hell right out of Helen. And maybe it had right after Daddy died. But now Mother was stuck with Hall because if you were a Catholic you couldn’t get a divorce unless you wanted to go straight to hell and burn for all eternity. If you were a Catholic, Granny said, the only thing you could do if you didn’t want to be married anymore was to pray really hard for a certain shoe-selling louse to get run over by a bus on his way to work.
Mother got up off the bench and said in her sternest voice, “While I’m gone, the O’Malley sisters better mind their p’s and q’s, because when I come home, if I hear you gave anybody any trouble at all, I’ll give you a spanking that you’ll never forget.” And then she walked away like she’d just remembered what that better thing was that she had to do.
I waited until the screen door slammed behind her and then I said to Troo, “She’s probably gonna die just like Daddy, don’t you think?” I didn’t used to worry a lot, but I started up after Daddy died and now it was something that I did almost all the time. Because if you coulda seen my daddy. He was strong and brave with big hands and black hairy arms and wide shoulders. He was never even sick, my Sky King. So that just shows you what can happen when you least expect it.
Troo was holding a chubby blade of grass up to her mouth and trying to make it do that kazoo sound you can get out of it sometimes. “Nah,” she said. “She’s not gonna die. Helen’s too ornery to die.”
Troo never worried and had hardly cried when Daddy died, which I thought was a little weird. Because although Daddy loved me very, very much, so much that I’d never forget him in a million years, he loved Troo just a little bit more. That hurt my feelings for a while, but when you had a sister like Troo, well, you just had to expect these things.
Troo was also right as rain about Mother. She wasn’t ornery when Daddy was alive, but nowadays she was and I knew whose fault that was. So that night I planned to say extra prayers that Hall would forget to look both ways before he ran across North Avenue on his way to Shuster’s Shoes because that would give Mother another chance at marrying someone else who didn’t talk with his mouth full. If she came back from the hospital. Which she probably wouldn’t. Like I said, I didn’t have a lot of faith in Dr. Sullivan. His breath, and I’m sorry to have to say this, his breath alone could just about kill you.
CHAPTER THREE
Hall and Mother getting married was another perfect example of what could happen when you least expected it.
A month after Daddy died, we went to Milwaukee and brought flowers from the farm to put on his grave up at Holy Cross Cemetery, where Daddy was buried next to his daddy. I laid down in the grass next to him and didn’t want to leave, but Mother told me to get up and quit making a cryin’ scene or she’d make me regret I was born. Later, we had ham sandwiches and Ovaltine at Granny’s. Troo washed and I dried, Nell changed the sheets on the beds, and Mother laid a piece of shirt cardboard down on the wobbly kitchen table. She used Granny’s laundry pen to write out—For Sale. 525-6788.
When Troo asked Mother, “Why you making that sign?” Granny answered, “No life insurance.”
Mother made her mouth look like a minus sign and started looking in the mess drawer for Scotch tape. (I already knew we were just about out of money because Mother kept it in her sock drawer, and when I put her laundry away that morning I noticed that sock was pretty flat.)
Troo and me followed Mother outside and watched while she stuck the sign to the back window of our Plymouth. When the edges were all smoothed down to her liking, Mother jiggled her car keys above our heads and said, “O’Malley sisters, I’m taking you over to Shuster’s for new school shoes.” Uncle Paulie walked past us on the way to his job up at Jerbak’s Beer ’n Bowl, and Troo muttered under her breath, “Thank God for small favors,” which meant she was happy Uncle Paulie was leaving. Mother thought Troo was being thankful for the new shoes or she woulda said something to Troo about bad manners, even though she herself could hardly bring herself to say “Pass the mashed potatoes” to her own brother. Was that why Troo didn’t like Uncle Paulie? Because Mother didn’t?
“No matter how poor we are,” Mother said, backing into the parking space in front of Shuster’s Shoes up on North Avenue, “we still need shoes.” She winked at us. “They’re important to our souls.” Troo and me were bustin’ a gut but stopped real fast when a Mr. Hall Gustafson met us at the shoe store door and said in an overly friendly way, “And what can I do for you beautiful young ladies today?” He was smiling at Mother like a rabid dog and just about drooling when he slipped a pair of pumps on her pretty feet. She didn’t seem to mind one bit.
Mother and Hall went out that night to a movie called Vertigo that starred Jimmy Stewart. On the ride back out to the farm, Mother told us all about the movie and how Jimmy was afraid of heights and he would get an attack if he went up too high. I remember worrying that maybe Mother had caught vertigo. That’s how dizzy she sounded when she went on and on about Hall buying her popcorn and Jujubes and wasn’t he the nicest guy?
After that, Hall started coming out to the farm for supper almost every night. He’d tell us about his days as a sailor and how many shoes he sold that day, gobs of Mother’s tuna noodle casserole peeking out of his mouth. And he always burped so loud when he was done with dessert that Troo’s old dog, Butchy, growled at him like he was a thunderstorm.
“Hear ye . . . hear ye. I’ve got an announcement to make,” Hall said two months after their first date. Oleo was dripping off his chin.
We all quieted down, except Butchy was still growling.
“I have asked your mother to marry me,” Hall said, grinning at Mother. His teeth were the same color as the oleo.
Nell and I we
re struck dumber than dirt, but Troo jumped up out of her chair and asked Mother in her best disgusted voice, “You didn’t say yes, did you?”
Mother told Troo to sit back down and Hall said, “We’re getting hitched next week and then we’re all moving into the city.”
Troo and me shouted like Siamese twins, “No!” We could not leave Daddy’s fields. Nell didn’t say anything. She just looked choked up.
Going on in a bossy voice, Hall said, “I’m gonna be your new father and what I say goes. You’re movin’ into the city. I got a dependable job at Shuster’s and I already got us a place to live.” Then he drained his beer bottle and smacked it down on the kitchen table and bent down right into Troo’s face. “Don’t you know children should be seen and not heard? Quit complainin’ before I give ya something to complain about.” Then he straightened up and grinned yel lowly at Mother, like he had just been joking around. But he wasn’t.
And even though us sisters got down on our hands and knees and begged Mother that night, she didn’t call Hall up on the telephone and tell him that we didn’t want to move into the city. When she tucked Troo and me in, she told us, “Someday you’ll understand.” Her eyes started watering up and she swiped at them and said, “Damn hay fever,” and left.
I suspected that a little part of Mother wanted to move to the city, too. Daddy not being there for the harvest, that had to have been as hard on her as it had been on me. And I also suspected Mother was looking forward to living closer to Daddy’s grave and Granny and Uncle Paulie. Well, Daddy and Granny anyways.
So, on Halloween of ’57, Hall and Mother got married at the white courthouse in Waukesha. After the ceremony, Nell whispered to me, “I think Mother might be letting herself in for more trick than treat, don’t you?” The next week we moved to Vliet Street.
Out on the farm, me and Troo had mostly hung around with Jerry Amberson, who lived down at the end of our gravel road and peed on my leg once after we got done swimming in his pond in the woods. All the other kids we went to school with lived on farms just like ours that you could just about die of tiredness walking to. So if we wanted to play hide-and-seek or some other game like kick the can, where you had to have more than two kids, we were stuck with peeing Jerry Amberson, like it or not.
But on Vliet Street . . . well, for once in his life, Hall was right. There really was a shitload of kids. Somebody was always sittin’ on their front steps waiting for you to ask them to jump in a pile of leaves or go sledding at Statue Hill or swimming at the pool in the park. That’s because the neighborhood was chock-full of what Granny called “products of Catholic marriages.” (Her eyes bulged out of her head when she said that because she had a condition called a thyroid, which was located in her leg somewhere.)
Besides there being a whole lot more of them, just like Mother said when we played the name game, people really were different in the city. Like Fast Susie Fazio, the kid on the block who always seemed to have news before everybody else did. She was the one who told Troo and me about Dottie Kenfield.
Our second summer in the city had just started up. After the streetlights popped on, the three of us were sitting on the O’Haras’ front steps, waiting for the others to get there for our nightly game of red light, green light. Fast Susie was brushing her long, straight black hair that she had never cut since she was a baby and her skin got so tan in the summer she almost looked like an Egyptian in the movie The Ten Commandments that Troo and me had seen at the Uptown Theater, which we went to whenever we got a quarter. And because she was Italian—a people that Mother said matured faster than other people—Fast Susie was not only hairier than the rest of us, she had those bosoms. They’d even had to order a special Girl Scout uniform for her, one with more material in the chest.
“I heard that something bad happened to Dottie Kenfield,” I said to her.
“Oh ya did, did ya?” Fast Susie never liked it if you heard a story that she hadn’t told you. “Well, this time ya heard right, O’Malley. Month before last your next-door neighbor just up and disappeared. Just vanished one day.” She put on a spooky voice and made her eyes look like venetian blinds. “Gone. Right into thin air. Poof!”
You had to pay close attention when Fast Susie told you a story because she liked to wave her arms all over the place, like all the Italians did. She even gave Willie O’Hara a black eye one time when she was acting out the Crucifixion.
“Yup, Dottie Kenfield is probably dead, just like Junie Piaskowski,” Fast Susie said, back to brushin’ her hair. “I bet they find her body soon. All dead and green and her eyes rotting out of her head and smellin’ like Doc Sullivan’s breath.”
Last summer, Fast Susie said that Reese Latour had made her touch his weenie and told her that it could be used to make girls beg for mercy, and that when you got to be about thirteen blood would start coming out of you and that was when you could get a baby. See? Sometimes it was hard to know exactly when Fast Susie was telling the truth. Especially since I had every reason to believe that Dottie Kenfield wasn’t dead.
“But what about that crying Troo and me hear comin’ out of Dottie’s room at night?” I asked.
Fast Susie jabbed me in the arm with her elbow and said in that trembly voice of hers, “Just watch your step, O’Malley sisters.” She made a smile that was extra creepy because her eyeteeth were more pointed than they oughta been. “If you’re hearin’ crying coming out of that house, that can only mean one thing. The Kenfield place must be haaaunted.”
That’s exactly what she said. That all the crying next door was Dottie Kenfield’s ghost.
And maybe Fast Susie Fazio was right this time after all, because that crying was the most horrible haunted sound you have ever heard. Poor Dottie!
Sometimes, after the crying stopped, I would go stand at my window and look into Dottie’s bedroom because I was too afraid to do that when the crying was going on. A picture of a beautiful girl with brunette eyes and hair hung on a wall. I knew she was eighteen in this picture because she was in Nell’s class. Dottie had on her mint-colored Senior Dance dress and her hair was swirled up on top of her head like a Carvel cone and there was a ruby going-steady ring around her neck. I remember the day she bought that dress downtown at Gimbel’s. Right below her picture there was a small light that shone down from an aquarium hood into the water. And it had one of those deep-sea divers and little bubbles racing goldfish up to the surface.
Standing in the dark watching like that, I woulda bet anything that the Kenfields had not changed one thing about Dottie’s bedroom even though she disappeared into thin air two months ago. Because maybe there was still the smell of her in that room. Like after Daddy died. In his closet I could breathe in his Aqua Velva. One day I sat in there next to his boots that still had some farm dirt on them and wouldn’t come out. The day after that Mother gave away all his clothes to Goodwill Industries and shook me by the shoulders and yelled, “For godssake, Sally. He’s gone and he’s not coming back. It’s time to let bygones be bygones.”
But I hid one of Daddy’s shirts . . . a blue one. To remember my Sky King. I kept it inside my pillow where Mother couldn’t find it. Because at the end of the day, no matter what she said, I needed to lie my head down on Daddy, listening to Troo sucking on her two middle fingers, squeezing the life out of her baby doll, Annie, and not ever let bygones be bygones.
CHAPTER FOUR
Some nights, Troo and me could also hear crying coming out of Mother’s bedroom, which was so hard to believe. That sound almost seemed like a mirage in the desert. Because during the day you never would hear something like that. During the day Mother was tough like beef jerky and would tell you that crying was for people who felt sorry for themselves. Granny told me that Mother really wasn’t so tough, that she was just doing something called whistling in the dark. (Since I had not once ever heard Mother whistle, I knew right then that this granny was getting the hardening of the arteries the way the other gramma got.)
Troo was sit
ting on the soft stool in front of the dressing table that had a mirror and two drawers on each side. Another smaller mirror shaped like an ice skating rink sat on top of the table with her bottles of perfumes and lotions. I was holding the gold hairbrush with the swirls on the back that Daddy had given Mother for her birthday one year. We were watching Mother fold her blouses and put them into her round blue Samsonite bag between layers of tissue paper.
Mother snapped the luggage shut and brushed down the hem of her tan pleated skirt and said, “I have given Nell her instructions. She will do all the cooking and mind you during the day until Hall comes home from work at five thirty. You give either of them any guff and . . .” She took the hairbrush out of my hand, smacked it against her palm and then let it drop on the bed. “Hall took the car to Shuster’s this morning, so I’m walking over to the hospital.” She picked up her suitcase and slipped on her shiny black high heels with the bows. “I’ll be back in a week or so.”
“Can we come with you?” Troo said, which surprised me because she didn’t usually act like she’d miss you if you went anywhere.