Millicent Glenn's Last Wish: A Novel

by Tori Whitaker

  I closed my eyes, imagining a baby in each arm. It would be hard. But I was strong.

  By the time the mailman dropped our letters into the black metal box on the porch, Janie was in her bouncy seat, and I had time to scan the latest Gunnison Homes catalog that just arrived, produced by the manufacturer for dealers like us to use. Its headline got my attention, with its big, bold print: Man’s Greatest Gift to Woman.

  I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  I skimmed through the catalog while Janie played her toy xylophone with its metal keys in primary colors. The catalog was a slick full-color piece with pictures of all the home models, interior floor plans, and new optional features like fireplaces and porches. When I came to building specifications and engineering data, the section was titled “For Men to Read.” It explicitly targeted potential home buyers—husbands. There was also a dedicated section called “For Women to Read.” It dealt more with a floor plan’s convenience and decor and addressed the needs of the wife:

  Nothing is more conducive to happy family life than a cozy, comfortable home. It is a woman’s contribution to the marriage union.

  I grimaced. So women couldn’t make contributions to the marriage besides cooking and cleaning? My sister-in-law Abbie Glenn could have written that copy herself.

  My occupation was housewife. Did that mean I was married to a house?

  While I enjoyed sewing, I didn’t want to be a paid seamstress as Mama had been. I didn’t want to be a nurse or to teach second grade either, though these were all considered appropriate feminine pursuits. During the war, I had worked at Kroger and assisted customers with their ration books. Other women had driven ambulances on battlefields or built planes in factories. Women had helped win the war. Since the men had returned from serving our country, many of these same women had lost their manufacturing posts. The production lines turned back over to the male breadwinners. The women could go back home to bake bread.

  Thank goodness the birthday party that night for one of the husbands in the neighborhood was casual and held indoors. It was muggy outside. I wore slim red slacks and a sleeveless checkered top and sipped on a Coke through a straw while the wives rambled on about meatloaf or steak. The topic of hobbies arose—knitting, embroidering, and flower arranging.

  “What about you, Millie?” the hostess, Deloris, asked from her living room filled with vases of thornless red roses.

  “I love to cook and am learning to sew for Janie,” I said, “but as for true hobbies, I don’t have time. I help with the business from home—handling ledgers, getting out mailers, developing newspaper ads. That’s what I like to do.”

  Deloris’s mouth opened into a wide O. The men in a circle nearby looked over and laughed. Her husband, Ray, the birthday boy, slapped Dennis on the back, saying, “Good God, man, you don’t work the little lady’s fingers to the bone, do you?”

  I suspected I’d gone too far. This crowd of suburbanites wasn’t ready for the likes of me.

  “Get her a girl to do the floors,” another husband said before plopping a plump green olive into his mouth.

  Still another guy said skeptically, “So Mrs. Glenn’s taking a job away from a man?”

  Taking a job away from a man? I bit my tongue. Were men so much more important then? I wanted to jump back into the conversation, but although I’d already created a fiasco, I wouldn’t make a scene.

  Another husband put in, “My wife’s always saying that keeping house is job enough in itself.” He snickered.

  “I’ll say,” Deloris said, bringing attention back to herself. “I scarcely have time to file my nails.”

  All the wives tittered. Except for Pauline and me. My jaw was too clenched to even fake tittering. While my best friend wasn’t driven to be the absolutely perfect housewife, she didn’t long to be something else. But she knew me. She sipped her martini and shot me a compassionate look over the rim of her long-stemmed glass.

  I turned back around to find Dennis, hoping he’d jump in and support me. But he was stabbing a cheese cube with a toothpick, pretending he hadn’t heard.

  After last night’s embarrassment at the party, I felt more guarded about approaching Dennis than ever. I had to get this right. There was too much at stake: my job, my fulfillment. Pauline had suggested I butter him up with a lovely meal before telling him my news of another baby. And before telling him my . . . demands? No, my requests? My opinions. Yes, I’d tell him my opinions about work. I’d allow myself the best odds and follow my friend’s advice. Swiss steak with tomato gravy was one of my husband’s favorites.

  I flipped the raw pieces of round steak over on my cutting board, sprinkled them with salt and pepper and flour, and picked up my aluminum meat tenderizer. Pound, pound, pound.

  The neighbors’ comments still annoyed me—I wasn’t being worked to death, and I certainly did find time to file my nails. Pound, pound, pound.

  The Gunnison catalog still irritated me every time I thought about it, too. I was feeling nauseous. Pound, pound, pound.

  Then an image of old Mr. Hatter at the bank, from a day back before Janie was born, squirmed into my head. I needed my husband’s permission for a savings account? Phooey. Pound, pound, pound.

  I dropped the metal meat mallet into the porcelain sink with unexpected force. Janie shrieked from her high chair. The mallet crashed and splintered a dirty water goblet. Damn it.

  Now I had a bigger mess to clean up before I prettied myself for my husband.

  2015

  My granddaughter and I busied ourselves by making a mess in Kelsey’s kitchen while Jane was at the doctor’s. Jane would return to pick me up later, and she’d be in possession of her written order for a diagnostic mammogram. As a treat, we’d have monkey bread warm from the oven awaiting her. Kelsey had taken the day off, and the bread had been her idea. She was smart, because baking had also allowed us a reprieve, however briefly, from our worries over Jane.

  Kelsey had a gorgeous kitchen. She and Aaron had bought this condo within the last year. I’d been astonished when we’d pulled up in their car out front the first time. The condo was on Republic Street in Over-the-Rhine—in a refurbished nineteenth-century tenement on a block where I’d lived as a child. Before I was born, the street had been named Bremen. But anti-German hysteria during the Great War had changed all that. Even President Wilson had referred to German-Americans as “hyphenated” Americans. On the day Kelsey moved into her condo, I would have been no more taken aback by where they lived had it been Neuschwanstein Castle in the Bavarian Alps.

  Republic Street was one street over from Washington Park, where I’d first waded in a pool with Opa. This urban Cincinnati neighborhood was now called the OTR, and it had climbed out of a shambles and was hip and chic, as Kelsey would say. Craft breweries, cocktail bars, restaurants, and boutiques lined the streets. Mama had always made sure the inside of our home was safe and clean—furniture dusted, floors mopped, dishes done, and cobwebs cleared. But for a time in this neighborhood I had played outside with older kids who hit balls with sticks in the streets, dodging cars that zoomed past. I played with kids who dared each other to climb wooden fences that were falling down from disrepair. A boy in knickers once shoved me to the cobbled street for fun—and I had run home crying with my knees and palms scraped, my wounds bloody and filled with tiny gravel.

  The first time I had come to Kelsey’s place, I’d said, “Can you imagine what Mama would think of all this?” It was beautiful. A dream.

  Kelsey’s two-bedroom condo on an upper floor cost more than three hundred grand. Mama and Opa had barely been able to scrape up the rent. In 1930, that’d been about twelve dollars a month. Maybe less.

  Kelsey’s kitchen was open to the living area. She had two walls of exposed brick and engineered floors of red oak. Large, silver ductwork ran across the white ceilings for function and to make a fashion statement. There was a small faux fireplace painted matte gray, and a dark-gray sectional unit with throw pillows of red velvet and flu
ffy white fur. The furry ones played off the thick shag rug—and both brought to mind my burying my fingers in old Raggsie’s fur years before. The kitchen picked up the color scheme, too, with glossy red cabinets, a white quartz island, and barstools with gray seats and sleek legs. We stood at the island beneath its hanging light that was designed like something from Mars. It had sixteen prongs—I’d counted each one—tipped with bright, warm bulbs.

  My granddaughter peeled the outer wrapper from a tube of store-bought biscuits. Then she gave the tube’s seam a whack on the corner of the counter, and the fresh dough popped out. Mother Glenn would’ve had our tails. Her farm table saw only biscuits from scratch—with flour and buttermilk, lard and leavening. She’d taught me to smear the biscuit tops with grease from fried sausage, using the back of a spoon. Pauline was the one who’d introduced me to monkey bread. That was back in the 1980s. While canned biscuits couldn’t hold a candle to Mother Glenn’s, they could be finagled into a coffee cake pretty darn quick.

  Kelsey quartered the unbaked biscuits with a paring knife. Despite how my knuckles ached, I coated the chunks with melted butter, cinnamon, and brown sugar. And we both artfully plopped them into a greased Bundt pan to bake. I savored my girl time with Kelsey, but I was grateful Jane had moved back—and grateful that Kelsey and I could care for her.

  “Think your mother will be in good spirits?” I said while we washed up.

  “I think Mom’s still adjusting. To a lot. We need to get this diagnosis out of the way,” Kelsey said. “But she misses her work.”

  Kelsey was coping by being pragmatic. Yes, Jane had dedicated years of her life to a mission—between her volunteering and then working with the Cincinnati chapter, and then moving south to join Habitat’s management. She missed her career. And while I totally agreed with Kelsey, this failed to mask my underlying fear. What would Jane’s health hold in coming months?

  “You’re right,” I said. “Of course she misses her work.”

  Maybe Jane could return to volunteering with the local chapter of Habitat. Maybe she would dodge this health bullet. Her lump could be benign. And then she could revel in being a grandma. But the sinking feeling in my stomach would not wane until this period of limbo ended.

  I returned my gaze to my granddaughter. Her blue irises had gone glossy. She was as worried as I was, and that made me worry more. Kelsey might be feeling more pain than any of us realized. She’d never had a father. She didn’t want to lose her only parent.

  “Let’s move out to the cushy gray seats,” she said, shaking it off. “I’m trying to decide what I’m going to do regarding work myself. I mean, I really love my job.”

  More pragmatism. Her approach was to not delve too deeply into her mother’s state, or her own fear.

  “The History Library values your work,” I said. “You’ve got a great boss.” Kelsey had gone to school for seven years to get where she was. She had met Aaron at Ohio State, hence the red-and-gray colors in their home. I’d gotten to meet Aaron long before Jane had. Jane had moved to Georgia to pursue her own dream career once Kelsey started college. When OSU won the national championship during Kelsey’s last year of grad school, which was also Aaron’s last year of law school, I’d fixed them a dinner the following weekend to celebrate. I served homemade chocolate-peanut-butter Ohio Buckeye candies for dessert. I treasured those times, being less than two hours away—Kelsey’s closest family connection while she was at school. And then I got to send her off on her first day at the museum, in Jane’s absence. Kelsey’s first career job. When Jane later visited, she demanded Kelsey time alone. I understood. When the three of us gathered, Jane was perpetually behind on things Kelsey and I took for granted. Kelsey had wanted a dog, but she and Aaron had decided to wait; Jane was the one who barked—about how no one had told her. Kelsey had tried a new diet, something called Paleo; Jane picked at her plate, having lost her appetite from being left in the dark. Kelsey and I had gone to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on opening night; Jane had exclaimed that that was going too far. “That’s cruel and unusual punishment,” she’d said. We hadn’t left Jane out on purpose. But my having Kelsey to myself in some ways replaced the time I’d lost with my own daughter during her commune years.

  I closed my eyes for a moment. If God saw way to make Jane okay, I’d never again resent not having Kelsey all to myself.

  “You’re good at your work,” I said to Kelsey now.

  She sat with her hands cradling her stomach. “It’s cool to know that my hours with the manuscripts will help historians in the next century.” Kelsey’s ancestors’ lives in the beer-making industry had inspired her life’s work. In her position at the museum, she documented everything from the defunct old breweries to lager beer caves hidden beneath the streets of OTR. “And I love having my own purpose in addition to my role in my marriage,” she said, “if that makes sense.”

  I got what she meant all too well.

  “What are your options?” I asked.

  “I can return when my maternity leave is over. Or I can stay home and raise the baby. There may be opportunities to work from home or even go part time. Mom’s offered to keep the baby a day or two a week.”

  Oh, the choices women had now, compared to my day. The paradox was that Jane could care for the baby now that she’d returned to Ohio—but we had to ask how realistic it was to plan for that with her health issue. Was that really an option at all? The question lingered unspoken between Kelsey and me.

  I didn’t know whether I should ask this different question, but I did it anyway: “And Aaron’s opinion about your working?”

  “He’s up for whatever I want. We’re lucky. If we cut back, we can afford for me not to work. If I stay on the job, we can afford good childcare if need be. And with his law practice, he’s got some flexibility to pitch in on snow days and whatnot once our child’s in school.”

  I gloried in how Aaron supported his wife, not in the financial sense, but rather the marital-partnership sense. There was a time when it had been very unlike that for Dennis and me. No matter how old I became, I never forgot my warring feelings during that period—the angst between my love for my husband and the loss of my identity by his having marginalized my work.

  Kelsey pulled the monkey bread from the oven. “But I’m freaking out. I should let my employer know my choice two months before I’m due. I think I would miss being part of the action. But part of me doesn’t want to miss the small things as a mother either, you know? I’m only going to do this once—an ‘only child’ in our family again. As you were, and I am. And Mom is.”

  My skin heated. I’d let that observation pass.

  “I’ll get the whole job thing figured out,” Kelsey said with a smile. “Let me show you my plans for the nursery.” She logged on to her laptop as we scooted together on the couch. She googled knitting patterns for booties on something called Etsy. Kelsey then dragged out her motherhood manuals. Should she lay her infant on its tummy or on its back to sleep? One way, the child might get a flat head—but the other way he might risk choking on his own spit-up. Didn’t the experts’ opinions flip-flop every couple of decades? And how was I to know that nowadays the practice was no sheets, no bumper pads, and no blankets in a crib? Too much chance of suffocation.

  Echoes of past conflicting advice circled in my brain. Breastfeed your baby. No, bottle-feed your baby. Let your baby cry. No, pick your baby up. When it came to guidance for caring for infants, one thing hadn’t changed: it seemed there were many ways in which a loving mother might inadvertently harm her child.

  “Well, that was a big nothing,” Jane said after returning. She slid her mammogram order across Kelsey’s counter.

  Relief rolled over me. Jane was practically her usual irreverent self.

  “What’s next?” I said more casually than I could have expected, given the tension in my neck minutes before. I pinched a chunk of sticky monkey bread off the loaf and stuffed it into my mouth. These days they called thi
s comfort food.

  “Damn,” Jane said, doing the same. “I almost forgot how gooey, melt-in-your-mouth good this stuff is.” Buttery brown sugar syrup dribbled on her lip. She licked it clean. Kelsey’s idea had been a hit.

  “Daughter dear,” Jane continued, “you’ll be happy to know I’ve already scheduled my appointment for the diagnostic mammogram, too. One week from tomorrow.”

  Kelsey looked crestfallen. “Ugh. I wish I could go with you, but I’ve got a big meeting at work about the upcoming renovations at the Terminal.”

  “That’s fine, I don’t need—”

  “I’m going, anyway,” I said, interrupting Jane. “We don’t all have to be there.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Jane said. “I don’t need an escort. I’ve had plenty of mammograms in my day.”

  “Only screenings,” Kelsey said. “Not diagnostic.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “I told you, I’m going.” I held my ground. “I need to be there, even if you don’t need me to be.”

  “OMG,” Kelsey said. “A week from tomorrow is October 6—your birthday, Grandma! I can’t even believe it—with everything going on, the date crept up on me. What do you want to do?”

  I looked at both of them. “We’re not celebrating my birthday or anything else until all of this is settled.” I waved the page with the medical order.

  “Don’t be crazy.” That was Jane. “We’ll go to dinner. We’ll have some wine. Or at least, two of us will. We’ll have cake with ice cream and candles.”