Rhonda the Rubber Woman

by Peterson, Norma;

  “This is Earl,” my mom said to me. “He’s a bookkeeper.”

  He blinked at me and said “Hi.” One of his eyes seemed to wander.

  “Hello,” I grunted.

  “So the ball and chain here wants a drink before we go,” Walt announced, squeezing Aunt Cora’s waist. She flashed him a flirty smile.

  “He uses me as his excuse,” she laughed. You could tell they were feeling lovey-dovey about one another again. I thought back to the day she left. “He knows I can get along on my own if I have to now,” she’d said with a sly smile. “That’s going to make a difference.”

  “Oh, sure,” my mom answered. “Drinks.” She wasn’t used to being a hostess. “Let me see. I’ll get some … I think we have some…”

  “Actually, I brought a little something,” Earl piped up. He held out the paper bag and opened his mouth into a lower case letter “o.” I guessed it was supposed to be a smile but it was more round, sort of a miniature of the rest of Earl’s shape.

  “Well, my heavens, thank you.” She opened the bag and pulled out a bottle of Seagram’s Seven and a package of swizzle sticks.

  “Let’s see, I’ll get the glasses and some … uh … Nancy, why don’t you open the swizzle sticks? I’ll get the glasses and … uh … ice. I guess ice would be nice.”

  “Oh, that’s rich,” Earl declared. “Ice would be nice. That’s cute.” He smiled his little round smile again. It looked like he was eyeing my mother’s brassiere straps.

  I picked up the swizzle sticks, tore off the cellophane and when I saw what was inside I wanted to puke. Each stick was a different sideway silhouette of an African lady getting older and droopier as she went along. The first one was young with a flat tummy and boobs like fresh tomatoes, but by the last one her belly and her backside drooped like potato sacks and her breasts hung like fried eggs.

  I felt a buzz in my head and smacked the swizzle sticks down on the kitchen counter.

  “Oh, boy, get a load of these, Earl,” Uncle Walt said, picking up the fried egg stick. “See what we have to look forward to. The pin-up gals twenty years later.”

  Earl chuckled.

  I slouched into the bedroom and stared out the window at Matlock’s Stables. I wanted to be like my aunt and Yvonne and Clarissa. And Miss Sandercock. I wanted to get that look in my eye like I knew where I was going, but I was terrified I was destined to end up like my mom.

  “Cheers,” Aunt Cora sang out from the kitchen.

  Mr. Matlock was riding one of the horses around the corral, his shoulders bouncing as they went.

  “Right. Here’s mud in your cup.” My mom’s voice was so thin and cheery and innocent. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I watched Mr. Matlock ride the horse around and around, going over and over the same path. Why couldn’t he take the horse a different way for once?

  When I heard the door close, I snatched my book bag from my bureau again and pulled out a Christmas card from Yvonne. I stared at the return address in Philadelphia as a clap of thunder shattered the quiet, and a sudden spring downpour began.

  I grabbed my box of writing paper, knowing I couldn’t stand to stay in the apartment with my mother through the summer even if I had to be a kootch dancer to get away. If I was going to be Georgia Sayers’ slut of a daughter, I might as well go all the way, with spangles and sequins, and strut around in a spotlight on a carnival stage while a talker out front coaxed the marks into paying to see nature’s mistakes and extrah-vah-ganzas.

  I sat at the kitchen table and wrote, making up a juicy story that got better as I went along. I told Yvonne I had to join the Magic Midway because my mother had a new boyfriend and was kicking me out.

  “He has something called shell shock,” I wrote. “He goes along acting like a normal human being and then all of a sudden he tries to slug everybody in sight. Me. My mom.” I told her he’d beat up a guy over Christmas who was just trying to play “Silent Night” on the saxophone, and he’d said he was going to get me next. I told her I begged my mom to leave him but she wouldn’t. She loved him. She said she always headed for the roller coaster in life, and if I didn’t like it, I could lump it and get out.

  “Please write me back right away,” I told Yvonne. “I’ll do a kootch dance. I’ll sell hot dogs, sno-cones, collect tickets, anything, if you’ll just take me. I don’t have anywhere else to turn.”

  I finished the letter and paced around the apartment, reading it over. It sounded good. She couldn’t turn me down. I got myself an Orange Crush from the refrigerator, sat down at the table again and daydreamed about how nice it would be, me and Yvonne and Gus in a cute trailer somewhere, Yvonne making spiced peach preserves, Gus oiling a squeak in the door and me telling funny stories about my days and quoting clever quotes.

  I swigged the last of my Orange Crush and spun out of the apartment, hot-footing it past the Matlock’s lawn, down Carlton Road, and across the boarded-up service station on Lower Market Street.

  Just as I turned the corner onto Broadway, I spotted Mrs. Felker walking toward me across the street, maybe a block away. I felt my insides rise up out of me. I tried to think of all I’d said in the letters I’d written to her and never sent, letters telling how I was a girl she and Bobby could be proud of, but the words got all mixed up.

  I stood stiff as a pole, hoping for a miracle, hoping she’d run up to me and say, “Oh, Nancy, I’m so glad to see you, Bobby misses you so much.” But instead she all of a sudden stopped, looked into her purse and turned back.

  She must have seen me and decided to give me a good snub. I wheeled around and I ran into Mr. Repsher, the mailman. When he saw my letter he offered to take it for me.

  “Oh, sure, thanks.” I handed the envelope to him, fingers quivering.

  “By the way,” he said, rooting around in his pouch, “I got a letter for you from Fort Gordon, Georgia. Looks like that soldier boy you write to is back in the good ‘ol U. S. of A.”

  Fort Gordon? Duane? Duane was in Georgia? I grabbed Yvonne’s letter back out of Mr. Repsher’s hand and said, “Oh, Mr. Repsher I’ll take this back. I just changed my mind about something.”

  24

  NANCY, MARCH–JUNE, 1946

  “It’s not Hatfield but it’s sure a lot more like home than Salerno,” Duane wrote. “It feels great walking on good American dirt.” I felt a throb in my legs and looked at the pavement. A bright vapor rose in the sun from puddles of rain water as though Duane was sending me a special hello through the good American dirt.

  “Our company commander says we’re supposed to get sent up to Fort Dix any day. Hey, if I get that close, I’ll come and visit you in Marysville.”

  I sucked in my breath. I couldn’t let Duane come to Marysville. I couldn’t let him meet my mother or find out I wasn’t eighteen and planning to go to commercial school, just a kid who had roller-skated through the lobby of the Colonial Hotel wearing a Lone Ranger mask and got rejected trying out to be Rhonda the Rubber Woman.

  I stumbled home, past the newspaper store, past the shoe repair shop, my muscles aching, my underarms suddenly sticky. I had to find a way to get to Duane first. How far was Fort Dix anyway? Where could I get money? And what about all the lies? I had to come up with some kind of excuse for the lies—at least the ones I could remember.

  That night I dreamed I visited Duane in Fort Dix. He had splotchy pink cheeks and bright eyes, and his family was there. They took me out to dinner in a place called the Pump Room that had pink table covers and white napkins. Real cloth.

  “It’s soooo nice to meet you,” his mom said. She was heavyset with gray corkscrew curls. “We’ve heard soooo much about you.” She put her hand on my arm and her fingers turned into monster claws. Her face became Mrs. Felker’s.

  “We’ve heard just tons of things about you. But tell us about your mother. She must worry about you coming all alone to a place like Fort Dix.”

  “Oh, yes, she worries about me a lot. You know moms.” I laughed like I’d heard Shirley Metz
ger do, trying to get a little tinkle into it.

  Duane’s father’s head grew big and bobbed around. “I hope your father is a Mason,” he said between bobs.

  “Oh, yes, yes, he sure is a Mason.” I pictured a guy wearing an Arabian hat with a tassel, or maybe that was an Elk. I started to sweat. I wanted to say oops, I forgot, my dad is dead, but somehow sitting with Duane’s family in the Pump Room with a real cloth napkin on my lap, even a dead dad didn’t seem respectable enough.

  “I’m in the Eastern Star,” Mrs. Uhler announced. “Last month I hosted a luncheon for forty girls.” My hand had disappeared underneath her claw. “Does your mother host luncheons?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes. She loves to host luncheons.” My arm was throbbing with pain.

  “Oh, good.” Mrs. Uhler smiled. “I hope she’s teaching you some of her secrets.” Her breath came at me like a hot wind.

  “Oh, yes, she loves to teach me her secrets,” I stammered as Duane rode around the table on a unicycle beaming at me.

  I woke up sweating and I looked over at my mother in bed with her cold cream and spongy curlers. I knew it was hopeless. I sat at the kitchen table and wrote a letter to Duane saying I was sorry but I’d just got engaged to a boy from home, a boy who played the clarinet just like him. I said I was sorry this was so sudden, but it didn’t seem right to send him a Dear John letter when he was overseas, I thought I should wait until he was back on good American dirt.

  I stayed at the kitchen table for hours staring out through the branches of a budding elm tree at a black starless sky, listening to crickets.

  In the morning I rushed out to the post office to mail the letter to Duane along with the letter I’d written earlier to Yvonne.

  “Look,” my mother cried, poking a jittery hand in my face to show off a dinky diamond. It was a windy April day and I’d just come in from a movie.

  I was astonished. In my craziest daydreams I’d never pictured my mother married. I glanced at Earl, who sat in the living room like a newly purchased overstuffed chair.

  “Well, so when’s the big day?” I untied my scarf and stuffed it in the jacket of my pea coat.

  “June.” My mother laughed, breathless, her eyes big as pies. “I always wanted to be a June bride.” The four leaf clover pin she wore on her white bunny sweater throbbed with the excited pounding of her heart.

  That was all I needed to make some plans of my own. Later that night in bed, I thought it all out. I’d finish my junior year in June, and I’d already skipped the third grade, so why not the twelfth? I’d probably learn more in a big city anyway than in a two-bit school in the sticks.

  The best thing was, I could leave now without guilt. I didn’t have to picture my mother slumped alone in this shabby apartment that smelled like horses, chain-smoking her cigarettes, blowing on her coffee and staring at the cracked linoleum.

  My mother sat at the kitchen table, leafing through a Bride’s magazine. It was a week since she’d got engaged. I sauntered in, poured some juice, got out the bag of doughnuts and plunked down on a chair across from her.

  “Oh, by the way, I’m thinking of moving to Philly when you get married.”

  She set the magazine down. “Philly, huh?” She looked at me as if daisies were sprouting out of my ears. “Well, if that’s what you want…” Glancing at the newspaper, she opened to the want ads. She and Earl were looking for a new apartment.

  “Yeah.” I reached for a doughnut and tried to sound casual. “You know what they say. ‘Leave thy house, O youth, and seek out alien shores.’”

  “Where would you stay?” She looked serious.

  “Maybe the Y. A lot of girls stay there since the war. Or I might call Yvonne, the woman from the Magic Midway. You remember, she had me over to dinner a couple of times.”

  My mother nodded and I could tell she didn’t remember.

  “She lives in Philly and we got along pretty well. Maybe I’ll give her a call and see if I could stay with her.” I didn’t mention I’d sent a letter to Yvonne a month ago and I hadn’t heard back yet.

  My mom picked up the paper. “Well, that would be good, a grown-up to stay with.” She brightened. “I guess you always had itchy feet. I guess you might as well get it out of your … ah…”

  “System. Yeah.” I was glad she was being so agreeable, but somehow little disappointed, too.

  “What about school?” she asked. “Don’t you have another year of school?”

  “Well, yeah, but in Philly you can finish high school at night,” I lied, although for all I knew, maybe you could. School was the last thing on my mind.

  “Is that right?” My mother gave me a small, slightly surprised smile, as though she was pleased I was making things so easy for her.

  “Well, I suppose that would be as good a time…” Her sentence drifted off. She set the paper down. “Well, lucky, there’s plenty of time to talk about that later.”

  “Yeah. Lucky.” I took a bite of my doughnut, chewing it slowly. I felt a little numb.

  My mother got married on June eighth at the Good Shepherd Baptist Church. She wore a three-quarter length white dress with a chiffon top and a blue satin sash and a little skull cap that had white and silver sequins with a mesh veil. She looked gorgeous, a little bit like June Allyson but with wispier hair.

  Reverend Mackey performed the ceremony in a tiny courtyard behind the church. “We come to celebrate the sanctity of marriage,” Reverend Mackey droned. Mrs. Mackey stood behind him wearing a lemon yellow dress shaped like a hot air balloon.

  I glared at the reverend and muttered to myself, “Clodpole. Addlepated. Barmy in the brain.”

  “The scripture says it is not good that man should be alone…” I watched my mother’s shoulders bob as she stared expressionless at the reverend. “Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh…” Earl blinked and his mouth moved. I went stiff just thinking about my mother’s and Earl’s flesh.

  After the ceremony everyone threw rice and hugged the bride. My mom smelled like Joy perfume, and the sweet scent of her followed me as I walked back to stand with the others. I smiled in the sun but somehow the aroma of the Joy made me sad and teary.

  “So they’re gonna hear those bedsprings rattle in Niagara Falls tonight, huh, Earl?” one of the men joked.

  “Hey, Georgia, watch it, you’re gonna be walking bow-legged tomorrow,” another cracked.

  I wanted to scream. “Is that all you can say about my mom? Sex stuff? Don’t you understand, all this sex stuff is driving me crazy?”

  I excused myself and ran into the church basement where I sat on the john and cried until I heard the cars drive away. Upstairs the organist began to practice, “I Come to the Garden Alone.” I looked at the peanut-colored stall door and a voice inside me said, “Are you sure it’s the sex? Are you really sure? Suppose your mom came in right now and gave you a hug and said, ‘Oh, Nance, I know I’m a loose woman, an adulteress. I know I have no shame. But look what I got for it. I got you.’”

  I laughed a jagged little laugh. “Oh, sure,” I said to the dank church basement. “And then she’ll tell me, ‘Oh, incidentally, I found a million dollars in the crawl space under the apartment. Here, take half of it and have a good time in Philly.’” I padded out of the stall, splashed cold water on my splotched face and walked home.

  25

  NANCY, 1946

  I stood outside the Palm Gardens, a Clinton nightclub they’d turned into a sort of Stage Door Canteen during the war. Bobby played the clarinet there every Friday night in a combo. I’d got the bus to Clinton, telling my mother I wanted say goodbye to Aunt Cora and Uncle Walt before I moved to Philly, but the real reason was I wanted to sneak a last peek at Bobby.

  The door to the Palm Gardens was padded with gold-colored plastic. Black metal pineapples attached to each side held thin tubes of flashing neon that stretched up and across the top in arches. I stared at the pulsing neon and started to think things I’d been trying to forget: the feel of Bobby’s ribs a
gainst my chest, his lips on my ears. I almost turned, as though the garish neon was warning me away, but the need to see him once more was too strong. I pushed open the door and stepped inside. The air was bitter and smoky. Soldiers stood around in tight knots drinking Cokes and 7-Up. Bright-eyed young girls wearing sloppy joe sweaters smiled and snapped their fingers to the music. Nobody asked me for an I.D. or even noticed me walk in.

  A huge dusty palm tree separated the bar from the canteen. I edged past the fake palm leaves to get a better look at the combo. The musicians swayed with bent knees on a small bandstand as they played “Why Doncha Do Right?” A blue and gold banner behind them announced “Live Jive Every Friday.”

  When I spotted Bobby, my knees went rubbery. He was wearing a canary yellow shirt and olive green pants. His eyes were closed, and his back was arched as he rotated his clarinet in a slow circle, an expression on his face that looked like pain but I knew was something else. I knew he was really feeling a fullness in his heart so sweet it seemed too wonderful to last. I’d seen that same look on his face, and I’d felt the same sweet richness during the days we couldn’t keep our hands off one another.

  I inched closer to the stage in the grainy light past a tiny dance floor clotted with couples who could hardly move but you could tell they didn’t care. There was an edge in the air—an eat-drink-and-be-merry mood that I recognized from Jolly Jack’s. Soon I was alongside the bandstand and, as though he knew it, Bobby opened his eyes. They widened, seeing me, and they stayed on me until the end of the song, when he whispered something to the piano player who stood up and announced an intermission.

  Bobby jumped down, smiled, and put a hand on my elbow. I felt a thrill that started in my stomach, traveled up and made my throat tingle.

  “Let’s go outside,” he whispered and led me into a grassy clearing alongside the parking lot. Standing with his hands on my arms, he studied my face.

  “Nancy, I’m so glad to see you,” he whispered finally.