Oh. It was Grant. Just last week, he and Stuart had accompanied Kari to the fabric store—she was making her brother Anders a sport jacket and wanted their sartorial advice (well, Stuart’s; Grant’s taste was better suited for help in outfitting a Vegas showgirl).
She watched several more minutes as they finished patting their snowman into place. Grant then took a flag of some sort that had been leaning against one of Slip’s elms and stuck it in close to the snowman. Kari couldn’t make out if there was any pattern on the fabric—from where she sat, it looked like a white banner.
Audrey took something out of a bag and pushed it into the snowman’s head—a dark scarf of some kind. She then took out something Kari couldn’t quite make out. It looked like a branch, maybe, or a hanger. They both gave the snowman a few more grooming pats and then raced off down the street.
“Good for you, Audrey,” Kari whispered, smiling at whatever peace-making effort the snowman represented. And then she began sewing the pocket on the glen plaid jacket she was making for Anders.
December 1977
HOST: SLIP
BOOK: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
REASON CHOSEN: “Flannery’s reading it in school and I remembered how much I loved it as a young girl.”
The edge of the sky was red that morning; it looked as if dawn had pulled an all-nighter and now had to face the world all cranky and bloodshot. Of course I know that dawn doesn’t have a personality, but I do, and I sure felt all cranky. I didn’t know about bloodshot because I didn’t bother looking in the mirror when I splashed water on my face.
I was sure I was coming down with Gil’s cold, and I hate coming down with anything; it makes me feel as if I’m not as in control of myself as I’d like to be. Plus it’s no fun running when your sinuses are all clogged up and your throat feels thick, but I knew not running made me feel even worse than running with a cold, so I ignored my husband’s soft voice telling me to come back to bed, pulled on my long underwear and Jerry’s old University of Minnesota sweatshirt, and prepared to meet the day.
Although what can prepare you for meeting a strange snowman in your front yard—especially a snowman you know you or your children did not make? A snowman ominously looming upward in a circle of trampled snow, wearing an awful black wig and holding a stick skewered with green olives (at least I think they started out being green; they had blackened in the freeze) and a white flag?
I blinked hard in that corny gesture of disbelief, but the snowman was still there. I pulled off the envelope taped to the olive stick.
The note inside read: I surrender to this terrible war of ours. Please accept the olive branch I humbly offer with my sincerest apologies. Sincerely (I can’t say that enough), another Angry (and lonely) Housewife.
I jammed the note in my pocket. Taking giant steps in the snow to the plowed road, I began to run.
I was almost to Lake Nokomis when I started to smile. Halfway around the lake, I started to laugh. Hard. Hard laughter is good anytime, but on that cold morning in that gaudy sunrise it felt almost divine. When I had gone to bed last night with my sick and snuffling son, I had no idea that I’d wake up the next morning and something would make me forget about hating Audrey. I was so tired of hating Audrey, so tired of being the tight and unforgiving person I didn’t think I was. It wasn’t in my nature to be in fights with people; I had never been one of those nasty junior high girls who suddenly has a vendetta against her best friend, or the kind of girlfriend who liked to argue with her boyfriend for the sheer drama. I had always been a diplomat who brought people together (how many times had I served in that capacity when my brothers fought?), but I didn’t know how to be a diplomat in my own battle. But I had accepted the olive branch from the snowman! I laughed again—it sounded like a phrase spies might use to check each other’s authenticity. I had accepted the olive branch from the snowman! We were going to be friends again!
I knew she’d be up; in fact, I told her that when I saw her open the door as I ran up her walk.
“Oh, so now you’ve got ESP too?” she said, and quicker than you can say “I’m sorry,” I was buried in her big hugging arms.
JERRY HAD HEARD ME RANT and rave about Audrey, but I’d never said anything to my kids, not wanting to start a whole neighborhood feud. Joe and Bryan played well together, and Gil and Mikey were the kind of best friends who couldn’t walk together without draping their arms around each other’s shoulders. Whenever Audrey’s boys were over at our house, I made every effort to hide the fact that their mother, as far as I was concerned, was persona non grata. It was an easy enough task; boys at that age aren’t sensitive to much other than their own needs and pleasures.
Flannery of course was a different creature; she knew exactly what was going on at all times. It was like having a tabloid reporter in the house.
“Do you think you and Mrs. Forrest will ever make up?” she asked me.
“Oh, I’m sure we will,” I said, feeling as if I had just stepped onto the witness stand.
“What exactly are you fighting about anyway? Her creepy son, Davey?”
“Oh, there’s a good one, Flannery,” I said. “It’s just the right size for Gil.”
We were ambling through a pumpkin patch, picking out the pumpkins we thought would be transformed into the best jack-o’-lanterns. It was an annual fall ritual: spend the morning picking apples at an orchard a farmer opened up to the public and then pillaging his pumpkin patch. In between we had a picnic of summer sausage sandwiches and fresh apple cider. We’d been doing this since Flan was three and had only been rained out once. This particular visit had fallen on a day that Jerry said perfectly demonstrated “autumn’s ability to stun the senses.” Of course, my husband, Professor Meteorology, can wax rhapsodic about sleet storms and fog banks just as well, but in this case, he was correct: it was an absolutely gorgeous, sunny, burnished fall day.
Too bad my daughter thought she had to get the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
“Flan,” I said, hefting a pumpkin, “why don’t you try to find Dad and the boys?”
“Gee, Mom, why don’t you try to change the subject in a more obvious way? Now come on, why don’t you answer my question?”
I looked up at Flan. As much as I was used to looking up at practically everybody, it was disconcerting looking up at my own daughter, whose height had passed my own this summer. Even though it felt strange to be shorter than someone I’d given birth to, I was glad she wasn’t going to be a shrimp like me. In all ways, evolution was on display; she was taller than me, certainly prettier than me (who wasn’t?), and almost as smart as me (I wasn’t ready to totally concede that one yet). Most importantly, there was not a red hair on her.
“Flan, what if I told you that some things are my business and not yours?”
“What kind of mother-daughter relationship is that? Don’t you want us to be able to share everything?”
“Do you want us to share everything? If you do, why don’t you tell me why you like Neil Norton so much?”
Flan’s face reddened as if she’d come down with a sudden case of wind burn. “Who said I like Neil Norton?”
“Settle down,” I said, chuckling at her outrage. “Nobody told me; it’s just something I picked up.”
“Because if Joe told you that, he’s going to be in so much trouble—”
“Flannery, methinks you doth protest too much.”
“Yeah? Well, methinks Joe is really going to get it.”
We stepped aside to let a couple pass, the woman carrying a baby in her arms, the man three big pumpkins.
“So I’ll bet you’re fighting about Davey,” Flan continued. “I’ll bet you said something about him—something I’d told you—and she got all mad, right?”
I saw Jerry and the boys gathering up their things from the picnic table and wished they’d hurry up so I wouldn’t have to answer Flannery’s question. But I could feel her eyes on me like laser beams, and the words that I’v
e spoken to my daughter throughout her life came back to haunt me: Don’t ever be afraid to ask me anything.
A breeze fluttered by, carrying in it the scent of red apples.
“Well, Flan,” I said, “I guess it started with something like that.”
“So then it was my fault, right? I’m why you two are fighting.”
Her voice caught me by surprise; she sounded as if she was on the verge of tears.
“Oh, Flan, no.”
“Because I know I tattle sometimes—I mean, that’s what people tell me—but I just feel like I’m telling the truth, you know? Reporting the facts. Last week this slam book was going around—you know what those are, Mom? Kids’ names are at the top of each page, and then other kids write what they think about them, and on my page . . . on my page people wrote things like ‘teacher’s pet’ and ‘tattletale,’ and one kid even wrote, ‘I hate the little squealer!’ ”
“Oh, Flan!”
She sniffed, shaking off the hand I put on her shoulder. “Well, don’t have a cow, Mom. Nobody had nice stuff written on their page, except for Sharon Emory, and that’s because she’s perfect. But it did make me think a little, that maybe it’s better to protect someone than tell the truth.”
For once I truly didn’t have anything to say.
“But then I thought about it some more, and I thought, well, it depends on how much you like the person and what they need protection from. And it’s not like I told the principal or anything on Davey Forrest; I just told you.” She smiled slyly, her braces glinting in the sunlight. “ ‘Cause I knew you’d tell Mrs. Forrest, and then maybe if she yelled at him enough, he’d stop bugging people in the lunchroom.”
“And has he?”
Flannery shrugged. “I don’t really bother myself with what Davey Forrest does anymore. But you know what?” Again she had that sly smile.
“What?”
“I did leave an anonymous note on my homeroom teacher’s desk, telling her about the slam book. And she confiscated it during first hour.”
“Why’d you do that, Flan?” I was worried about her, worried about her getting caught, because seriously, nobody likes a tattletale.
“Because it was so mean! Because just because some jerk’s bad opinion of me doesn’t ruin my life doesn’t mean it won’t ruin Karen Yarborough’s, who weighs about two hundred pounds, or Heather Lucchesi’s, who’s got the world’s worst BO.”
Well, if my daughter had to be a rat, then thank God she was a noble rat!
“Anyway,” she said as Jerry and the boys waved to us from the other side of the pumpkin patch, “if something I said was the cause of your fight, I’m sorry, and I wish you’d tell Mrs. Forrest that. I don’t like you two not being friends. It makes the whole neighborhood feel weird.”
“FLAN’S A GOOD KID,” said Audrey after I’d told her all this as we had a quick cup of coffee before having to get our kids up for school.
“So’s Davey,” I said, and I did think so, on the whole. I mean, holy security shatterer, divorce puts kids through a lot. Knock on extremely hard wood that my children never have to cope with their parents’ divorce.
“So when did you make the snowman?”
“Oh, it was after midnight sometime. Didn’t Jerry tell you that after book club we came by to try to interest you in a snowball fight?”
I shook my head. “He was still in bed when I left for my run. He just muttered something about coming back to bed.” I took a small sip of coffee; Audrey made it triple-strength, and it had an effect on me similar to that of putting rocket fuel into a VW Bug. “So then you guys decided to build a snowman?”
“No, then we all went home. I couldn’t sleep, and then I happened to see Grant taking out the garbage—he says Stuart’s in bed by ten-thirty, but he’s a night owl—and so I invited him in for a nightcap and told him what I’d been up to, and after one or two martinis, we decided on the snowman . . . woman . . . uh, me.”
“The olive branch was a nice touch.”
“Oh, Slip, we had so much fun thinking of the whole thing. Grant’s been pestering me all along to do something big—he’s a fan of the grand gesture—to show you that I was sorry and wanted to make up.”
I smiled, pushing aside my coffee before I went into cardiac arrest.
“Well, it worked. Peace reigns once more on Freesia Court. But now I’ve got to get my kids up.”
Audrey looked at the clock. “Oh, yeah, me too,” and without getting up from the table, she deepened her voice and hollered, “Davey! Bryan! Mikey! Time to get up!”
AFTER WHIRLING AROUND in the mini-tornado of my own kids’ morning routine, I got ready for work.
When I got my degree in history, I thought: How will I use this? Will I ever use this? The only teaching I could imagine myself doing was grandiose and not affordable in most school budgets—taking a classroom of high school freshmen on an overnight to the Colosseum, or sitting around telling ghost stories at Stonehenge. I didn’t have the patience to map out the spice routes of Marco Polo on a dusty chalkboard while kids lobbed spitballs at my back. I did entertain working in a museum, preferably in a European capital, but when I met Jerry, cataloging artifacts in a musty basement office in Prague didn’t seem as exciting as Jerry and then marriage and then kids.
I had been volunteering for years, of course, but when Mikey entered first grade, I decided it was time to get out in the real world and see what it felt like to collect a paycheck.
“Well, what exactly would you like to do?” Jerry asked, pen and notebook in hand.
“What are you going to do—interview me?”
“No,” said Jerry, sitting on the couch. “I just thought it might be helpful if we write things down, make a list, see what jumps out at you.”
“I’d like you to jump out at me,” I said, kissing him. I found his interest in my burgeoning career exciting.
Jerry kissed me back a long luxurious moment but then pulled his face away. “I won’t be that easily distracted, Ms. McMahon,” he said, clicking the pen. “Now, come on. If you had the ideal job, what would it be?”
“I don’t know . . . president?”
“Of what kind of company?”
“Jerry, give me some credit here. Of the United States!”
Jerry scribbled something on the pad. “All right, what are the first steps we should take toward reaching that goal?”
“Unfortunately, a sex change,” I said. “The world’s not ready for a woman president yet.”
“Oh, it’s ready,” disagreed Jerry. “It just doesn’t know it’s ready.”
God, I loved my husband.
“Maybe it’ll really be ready when Flan grows up,” I said. “She’d make a good president, don’t you think?”
“So would you, Slip.”
Did I say I really loved him?
We spent more than an hour writing all sorts of lists with headings like “Strengths” and “Goals” and “Ideals.”
“Well, ma’am,” said Jerry, tapping his pen on the paper, “from what we’ve been able to learn about you in this job interview, it would seem the perfect job for you is either liberating some oppressed country or starting a revolution right here.”
“So where do I send my resume?” I said, feeling totally defeated. “Anarchy Inc.? The Corporation for Ending Tyranny?”
“Don’t give up before you’ve begun,” counseled my husband. “You might not find the perfect job your first time out, but for now, let’s just get you out in the workforce and see if you even like it.”
I did. Like it, I mean. I looked through I don’t know how many sections of classified ads, but it was only when I started to put the word out that I was looking for work that I began to hear interesting things.
Grant flagged me down one morning after my run.
“Hey, Audrey told me you’re looking for work, and guess what?” he asked, wrapping his bathrobe around him as he raced down the front walk. “Stuart does some consulting work for this great
little nonprofit company that gets housing for low-income people, and he was just in there yesterday and said it was chaos with a capital C. I mean, they’re in desperate need of an office manager. I don’t know if that’s up your alley or not, but why not give them a call?” He looked around, as if only just aware of his surroundings. “What am I, nuts? It’s freezing out here. Bye-bye, good luck.”
I liked the name, Building Communities, and called them. Now I’ll be starting the new year as an employed person. The hours are ten to three, which is perfect since the kids get off school at three-thirty, plus I don’t have to dress up. That had been on my list—Don’t want to have to wear nylons—and even though it ranked much lower than Want to feel like I’m helping someone and Want to feel like I’m using my brain it is my theory that panty hose, along with underwire bras and girdles, is part of a conspiracy to thwart women’s circulation and thus their effectiveness. But I won’t be wearing any of that . . . so watch out.
PART THREE
The Eighties
January 1980
Dear Mama:
Well, break out the champagne and the rose bouquets—it’s official, I am now the proud owner of a degree in interior design. To celebrate, Wade took me to a fancy restaurant where a string quartet actually serenaded us at our table! Wade made a toast—“May everyone’s home be as beautiful as you’ve made ours”—and as we started eating our meal, a picture of you sitting on the back steps at MawMaw’s house popped into my head.
I remember it was a dusky summer’s night; the sky had purpled and was on its way to darkness, and you were wearing a man’s sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans you’d cut into shorts, and I thought, gee, my mama’s so young and pretty. You weren’t drunk or even drinking, and I was so excited to have you all to myself in this state that I was standing in front of you, dancing around to get your attention.
“Sit down, you little pest,” you said, but it wasn’t in a harsh way, it was more like you were amused by me.
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