“Walt’s doing great, acting like a doting dad already. He’s working full time so we can sock a little away for the blessed event. Plus he helps out weekends at a mortuary on his mail route. The VA counselor convinced him keeping busy would be the ticket. So far, so good.”
I put down the letter and thought about the year I’d lived with Aunt Cora. I pictured us walking with books on our heads and huddled over Readers’ Digest, building word power. I remembered how she’d said you had to take something for yourself in life, you only go around once, and I wanted to, but it seemed so hard. I needed more confidence. Clark was probably right, finding my dad would be the answer. A father’s love would clear the cobwebs out of my brain and make me smart and witty and suddenly I’d know exactly what to take in life and how to take it.
I opened a letter from my mom. She sounded more grown-up in letters. You couldn’t hear the little girl voice or see the cheery smile saying, “See me. Aren’t I cute?” Her penmanship was neat as a row of tulips.
“We went to a banquet at the Order of the Rainbow last night. Vera Buzzard was installed as Worthy Advisor. You remember Vera. She looks real good. The doctor gives her water pills.
“Mildred has been giving pep talks to the girls at work who started like me back before the war. She says we have to consolidate to keep our jobs. Consolidate. How’s that for a $10 word? Anyway, plants all around have been laying off everybody and their sister with the boys coming home. But I’m not worried. Mr. Hildebrant wouldn’t let me go. He always calls me Georgia Sunshine. Plus we’re making stockings again and I’m back on seams and I’m the best seamer they have.”
I let the letter flutter to my lap. Even my mom could hold onto a job. I felt my eyelids twitch, opened them hard, and glanced down.
“I just got back from Mildred’s this afternoon. Her neighbor was there with her twins. Two sweet little blonds. They’re so cute, growing like tops.”
“Topsy,” I said, loud as a gunshot. “Growing like Topsy.” And how come all the sweet little kids had to be blonds anyway? I slammed the letter down.
I closed my eyes, wondering if my mom ever bragged about how cute I was. I wondered if my father ever saw me and thought I was cute. I pictured storming to Marysville and sitting my mom down and saying I wanted to know once and for all who my father was, without worrying that she’d bounce and cry and say what a thing to ask your mother.
I got up, walked to the window and gazed out at the city. It looked huge and cold and made me feel small and pitiful. I shuffled back to the bed and arranged my letters, spreading them around on the bed as though that might make things turn out better. It was so quiet, it seemed like the world had come to an end.
Out in the hallway, I called Clark.
“Hi, chum. What’s up?” he said.
“Bad news.” I felt tears swell in my eyes again.
“Oh oh.”
“I got fired.” The tears streaked down my cheeks. It was like saying I’d been arrested. “They lost an account and they had to let some of us go.”
I was glad Clark couldn’t see my tears. “It’s just a little setback, I know. Uh … what’s the saying? Don’t take life too seriously or you’ll never get out of it alive?” One thing, at least.
He chuckled. “Atta girl. That’s the spirit.”
“Sure.” My nose started running. “Uh, speaking of spirits…”
“So come on over. We’ll have a snort together.”
“Oh, Clark, thanks.” One thing about Clark, you could count on him to help when you were down. His crowd was all like that, friendlier when you were blue.
He opened his door, brushed my cheeks with his lips, and handed me a drink.
In his studio, a girl with a big nose sat eating a sweet roll. “How,” she said, putting her hand up like an Indian. “I was in the neighborhood. No hanky panky. Honest.”
“Nancy, you remember Betsy,” Clark said. “From McElhatton’s Pub, couple of weeks ago.” All I remembered was that she had gotten soused and run out into the intersection singing at the top of her lungs, “Love is a Many Splintered Thing.”
“So what next?” Clark asked, his green eyes looking pale in the afternoon light.
“Oh, I don’t know.” I sighed. “Maybe I should go home for a while.”
“Good God, no, that would be the worst thing, going home sniveling.” He put his arm around me. “Come on, kiddo, show some backbone.”
“Listen, don’t let it get you down,” Betsy said, her cheek bulging with sweet roll. “Lots of people get fired. I got fired once.”
“Really?” I looked at Betsy closer. Her dark eyes sloped down at the corners like they might slide off her face.
“Yeah, it happens,” she said. “People boss you around. It gets to you. Plenty of people get fired. Probably the smartest people.”
I felt the drink going to my head. “Huh, you know, I think I read that somewhere,” I said. “The smartest people, they don’t always fit in. They march to a different drummer, right?” I realized getting laid off at Ad Land with Glenda wasn’t quite the same thing, but it was close.
“Well, look, gals,” Clark said, “enchanting as all this chitchat is, I have a deadline, so how’s about you two come back at five, and we’ll get plastered.”
Outside it was warming up. People sat in the park across the street with their faces turned up, happy for a dose of sun before the cold weather set in.
Betsy asked if I wanted to go to her place and I said sure, feeling friendlier toward her, two girls who’d been fired.
Her apartment was L-shaped with two wide doors opening to a kitchenette along one wall.
Betsy got out two Cokes and a box of Cheez-Its. Taking a swig of her Coke, she said, “Uh, look, I got an idea. If you want to stay with me for a while, you’re welcome. You can just pay whatever you can afford until you get back on your feet.”
“Really? Oh, gee, I don’t know.” It made me sad to think I had to get back on my feet. I was only sixteen.
“Well, it’s up to you. You’re welcome. Think it over.”
The apartment looked so inviting, with a bright rug and a bathroom of its own, I perked up. Clark had been telling me I should get out of a dump like the Y just to show I had a little respect for myself.
“So Clark tells me you got mom problems,” Betsy continued. “Welcome to the club.”
“You too?”
“Yeah,” she said. “My mom is a socialite, always gallivanting. You name it, she’s there, everywhere but home.” She started ticking off all the things that were wrong with her mom, but I wasn’t listening.
I was thinking maybe getting fired meant I was supposed to move in with Betsy. Maybe it was fate. Two girls who’d been fired. Girls with mom problems.
I took another sip of Coke. Imagine living with a socialite’s daughter, I thought to myself. I could probably learn a lot from Betsy.
“Uh, listen, maybe I will take you up on your offer. Uh … to move in with you.”
“Oh, hey, terrif,” Betsy said, her eyes brightening, as if there was a little kid behind all her sophisticated ways.
“Yeah? Really? Great. Thanks a lot.”
I leaned back on the sofa and thought boy, my luck is finally changing. I even found another job in three days at a place called Cranston’s Claim Service. They handled claims for insurance companies, but mostly tried to figure out ways the company wouldn’t have to pay.
I wrote letters home, telling everyone I had a glamorous new job and had moved in with a socialite’s daughter. By the time Aunt Cora’s baby was born in November—a little girl, Barbara—I was earning $16 a week, enough to pay Betsy half the rent, and we got along great. Sometimes she stayed at her boyfriend Jake’s, and if her mom called I was supposed to say she was at the library. It was fun living with another liar.
She gave me a book called Generation of Vipers by a guy named Philip Wylie that was all about moms. The book said moms were vain and vicious, pretending to be angels but ca
rrying swords. One thing I’ll never forget, it said moms were forever reminding you that they’re moms, acting like martyrs but their urine would etch glass. It took me a while to figure that line out but after I did, I loved it and I used it every chance I had.
“They ought to make you get a license to be a mom,” Betsy said one night as we sat at the little kitchenette table, eating pizza. “They make you pass a test to drive a car but any moron can have a kid and ruin its life.”
“You’re right,” I agreed, watching Betsy drop a string of cheese into her mouth. I pictured the girl at the Y with the eggplant head and the belly big as a bathtub. What kind of a life was her kid going to have? “There ought to be a law against having a kid any old time you feel like it.”
Once we got into the swing of it, Betsy and I could find a way to blame practically any problem on our moms. I felt debonair hanging out with Clark and Betsy. I loved being a bohemian. I loved it that Clark and Betsy and their friends looked down their noses at all the bigwig kinds of people who used to look down their noses at me.
I went home for two days at Thanksgiving and hated every minute of it. My mother and Earl’s new apartment didn’t have an extra bedroom so I had to sleep on a cot on a closed-in porch. We were supposed to go to Aunt Cora’s for Thanksgiving dinner but my mom caught a cold and Aunt Cora was afraid she’d give it to little Barbara, so my mom and Earl and I went to a diner in Wind Gap instead, where my mother coughed on my mashed potatoes and Earl ordered a steak instead of turkey and slathered butter all over the top of it. It was disgusting.
At least I talked to my aunt on the phone for a couple of minutes, but it wasn’t the same between us as before. It started off okay. She asked, “How’s life treating you in the big city?” but a couple of times in the middle of my sentence, she’d say “Oops, Barbara just curled her itty bitty hand around my finger.” Or “Oooh, she just smiled the sweetest little smile. Walt kids that it’s gas but I don’t believe it.” I twisted the cord of the phone around my wrist and said I couldn’t wait to see the baby when I came home for Christmas, but it wasn’t true. I was jealous already. I couldn’t wait to get back to Philadelphia.
Clark decided that I was probably neurotic after all; my problem wasn’t just an inferiority complex. I was glad. At night I’d lie on the sofa bed in Betsy’s apartment and whisper to the dark, “Neurotic. Neurotic. I’m Nancy and I’m neurotic.”
Clark said I was stuck in the past and I wouldn’t be able to be a normal grown-up until I found my father and also unleashed all the rage I secretly felt at my mother.
I tried to envision finding my dad. I daydreamed of him sitting on a cliff, with a breeze behind him tousling his dark hair, his eyebrows knitted together like Tyrone Power’s. I’d run up to him and he’d say, is it you, is it really you, and I’d nod and he’d light up and whisper, “Thank God. Now my life is complete.” But then in my real dreams, it would turn out different. In one dream I found him on Skid Row, wearing cardboard shoes tied on with a string. Another time he was an elevator operator with a five o’clock shadow. When I announced myself, he said, “Who? Why in the world would I want to meet you?” And he swung the door shut in my face.
Betsy got drunk pretty regularly. She got me a fake I.D. and introduced me to Bloody Marys. I loved them. They had the funniest name I’d ever heard, and I liked that they didn’t seem like real drinks, more like little snacks. Tomato juice and celery sticks.
One Wednesday night in December, Betsy and her boyfriend Jake and Clark and I went to a club called Blondie’s Eleventh Hour, where a Negro woman played jazz and a stand-up comedian in a too-tight suit told jokes.
“My wife keeps imitating Teddy Roosevelt,” he said. “She runs from store to store yelling ‘Charge.’” “The meanest thing you can do to a woman is to lock her in a room with a thousand hats and no mirror.” The audience laughed straggly, lukewarm laughs but the comedian kept smiling and babbling on as though he was a wind-up doll.
During intermission, Betsy got the bright idea I should run up on stage and do my Rhonda act. She always said it was the craziest thing she’d ever seen and when I’d shown it to Clark, the night I’d poured out practically my whole life story to him, he’d grinned and said, “Nancy, whoops, Rhonda, you’re priceless, one of a kind.”
I’d beamed.
“Go on,” he said now, with a glint in his eyes. “You’re a hell of a lot better than that two-bit comedian. It’ll be fun.”
“Do you think so?” I was jittery. Betsy had given me a pep pill before we came. She took them all the time and said they gave you confidence. I needed all the confidence I could get with Clark. He could go along being sweet and then I’d say something I thought was clever and he’d laugh and tease, “Oh, this young blood.” I couldn’t be sure if that was supposed to be a compliment or an insult. Another thing. We necked a little once in a while but he’d never tried anything funny and I couldn’t help worrying there was something wrong with me. Betsy’d just said, “Oh, that’s Clark. He wants to hold off until you’re panting for it. He’s like that with all the girls.” I had thought to myself, well, this is one girl who can wait until hell freezes over, but then later I realized I wasn’t so sure. Sometimes I wanted Clark to pick me up and carry me off like Rhett Butler had with Scarlet O’Hara so I could wake up the next morning madly in love with him instead of still writing love poems about Bobby.
Right now, though, sitting in Blondie’s Eleventh Hour Club, I felt more confident than I could ever remember feeling before. “In the Mood” started up on the jukebox and I felt a rush of energy.
“Hey, why not?” I thought. I looked down at my swirly gray skirt and black sweater and stockings and thought it was too bad I didn’t have my Rhonda costume on underneath but I scooted up to the stage anyway. I grabbed the microphone and announced, “We have an extra act tonight.” I loved the audience staring at me. “A debut act that I think you’ll enjoy.” I flashed a wide smile. “Here’s Rhonda the Rubber Woman.”
And with that, I hurled myself into a backbend and walked around on all fours in a quick circle. My skirt swirled up and landed in folds somewhere around my midsection but by now I didn’t care. Somebody hooted. I stood up, shaking my hair and then bent forward, planted my hands flat on the floor and lowered my nose to touch them. I went slow, inch by inch with everyone wondering if I’d make it.
When I finally did, a man yelled “Yo, Rhonda,” and I heard coins hit the floor of the stage.
They like me, I thought. Maybe Clark was right. Maybe I am priceless. I bet I could do my Rhonda act right here in Philadelphia, right on a stage in Blondie’s Eleventh Hour Club. I pictured my photograph out front, alongside the Negro woman’s.
I sat on the floor, hitched my skirt up to my thighs and started curling into a ball. I heard Betsy snicker and felt my muscles stretch and strain, but I knew they’d do whatever I told them. I loved it.
“It was a such riot when the comedian came back and you didn’t notice,” Betsy gurgled the next afternoon as we were in the kitchenette drinking cocoa.
“Yeah.” I giggled. I’d been finishing my curl up, ready to roll into a ball, when I noticed pant legs close to my right cheek, cheap pants with metallic threads in them. Then he’d leaned down and slanting the microphone toward me. “Would you mind, miss? You have all night to make a fool of yourself. They’re only paying me for another fifteen minutes.” Everyone had howled, and I’d laughed and unwound myself, and pranced back to my seat. I didn’t mind the comedian ridiculing me; I knew I’d put on a good act. Betsy’d been right. The pep pill did give me a lot of confidence.
“Good show,” Clark announced and gave me a pat on my backside. We all ordered another round of Bloody Marys.
But now as I stared out the window watching the tangerine sunset, I wasn’t sure the whole thing had been such a riot, after all. I thought of something Clark had read to me from a psychology book: “We so-called love children are too quick to go bad. We’re too quick to beli
eve nobody will ever love us anyway so what do a few slips matter?” Maybe that writer was right. You started to let things slip and before you knew it you were the kind of girl who’d go all the way with a guy and give free shows in public and take too many pep pills and who knew what you’d do after that?
The phone interrupted my thoughts.
I jerked and turned to Betsy. “Ah, it’s probably Paramount Pictures,” I teased. “Why don’t you answer and say you’re my manager, and whatever they offer, Rhonda has to think about it.”
Betsy grinned and picked up the receiver. “Heh-lo,” she said in a British accent.
She listened, then handed the phone to me. “It’s for you. It’s a teary-sounding lady.”
I felt my stomach clutch as I got on the phone.
“Nancy, it’s Cora. A terrible thing happened.” Her voice broke. “Earl had a heart attack this morning. He died. Come home quick.”
30
NANCY, 1946
The day of the funeral, a dreary misty rain covered the whole town. During the ceremony at the graveyard, my mother screamed, “My honey,” every couple of minutes even after the reverend said Earl finally had found everlasting peace. Once she lurched from her folding chair toward the grave as if she might jump in. Uncle Walt and two of the pallbearers—men from Earl’s work—rushed to hold her back, then returned to huddling underneath the edge of the tan canopy with their fingers laced together in front of their crotches.
I tried to help the only way I could think to do. I leaned over from my chair and whispered to her, “Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me. May there be no moaning of the bar when I put out to sea.” That stopped her. She looked at me for a minute like she was trying to see through a tunnel. “That’s from Tennyson,” I muttered. “The Crossing of the Bar.” I’d memorized it just that morning and I’d thought it sounded deep and hoped my mother would listen to the no moaning part, hoped it might inspire her to let up, but it didn’t. She blinked, swallowed, and started yelling “My honey” again.
Rhonda the Rubber Woman Page 21