Rhonda the Rubber Woman

by Peterson, Norma;

  “I know.”

  “Another thing, I know you’ve been through a real hell up there, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to meet your father.” Clark’s voice was somber now. “It might help you to understand yourself in ways you haven’t even thought about. And who knows. He may be thrilled to find out he has a girl after three boys.”

  “I have no interest in thrilling my father.” I pulled the telephone cord tight in my fist.

  “Hmmm. Well, I can understand that,” Clark said. “God, I wish I were there to help you talk this mess out.”

  “Oh, Clark, I do, too. I get so confused.” And I realized I meant it, and after I hung up, that confused me even more.

  By May, I knew I was getting itchy feet again. There was something about spring. You’ve been cooped up all winter and suddenly you walk out one day and a warm breeze brushes your cheek and you want to waltz down the street. Next thing you know, there are baby leaves on the trees and a flower pokes up through the old slushy snow, looking so pretty it practically breaks your heart.

  Plus in the spring Dr. DiSalvo took me off the nerve pills and the nightmares started. I’d be stuck on a high narrow bridge in black space, so narrow I could only walk one foot in front of the other, as fierce rapids churned and roared far underneath me. A cold wind would blow up from the water and call “Nancy, come to us, Nancy,” as ghosts in gray robes floated by. I’d wake up with sweat on my chest and race into the bathroom, turn on the light and stare at myself in the mirror to be sure I was real.

  Sometimes in the morning I’d watch my mom sit at the maple table smacking doughnuts and looking innocent and I’d want her to stop so much I’d go rigid holding back the tears. All day long at school I’d hear her smacking doughnuts until by the time I got back home, I’d want to scream at her, “Why didn’t you just put me in the rag man’s truck if you wanted to? Somebody would have adopted me and raised me in a normal family and I could be a hot shot like Shirley Metzger and wear real velvet dresses and marry Bobby and everybody would say, look, aren’t they cute instead of ugh, how disgusting. Why didn’t you just go ahead and put me in the truck?”

  Sylvia was all mixed up in it, too. Just about the time I’d go weak with rage at how miserable my life was, I’d think Sylvia would be happy just to be alive, and I’d scold myself for being so evil and selfish and promise to try harder to forgive even if I couldn’t forget. I carried around little scraps of paper saying, “Only the brave know how to forgive.” “Without forgiveness, life is governed by an endless cycle of resentment.” “To err is human, to forgive divine.” The quotations got me through the day, but they didn’t help the nights.

  36

  NANCY, 1947

  In mid-May my mother pulled all our summer clothes out of garment bags like she did every May, and on Decoration Day we got dolled up and went to a celebration Mildred threw at a resort in the Poconos. Cora and Walt were there, too, plus a couple Mildred knew from Keller’s Creek, a town near Clinton.

  My mother wore an organdy V-necked dress and I had on a melon-colored cotton dress with a gathered skirt and a scoop neckline. We put on our summer shoes and my mom said, “We should wear gloves. We haven’t been out for a while. We need to put our best face forward.”

  I was thrilled to be going to the Poconos. It would give me a chance to picture what it would be like being on the road with Bobby. I knew lots of combos played there.

  Uncle Walt and Aunt Cora picked us up at three o’clock. “We tossed to see who’d drive,” Uncle Walt cracked with a grin as he pulled up and we climbed into the DeSoto. “You lucked out. I won. Cora’s driving is picking up, though,” he went on. “These days she’s getting twenty miles to the fender.”

  Aunt Cora looked more gorgeous than ever. She was back modeling part time at Finkel’s now.

  We drove toward forests full of green pines past neat pastel houses perched in fields that looked as if they stretched to the end of the world. Traveling up the mountain road, we passed small wood cabins curled around a lake, as blue and shiny as a satin ribbon. Roadside signs announced the resorts up ahead: Pocono Pines, Bear Creek, Promised Land.

  By the time Uncle Walt pulled up in front of Sugar Notch, my heart leapt with joy picturing me and Bobby, walking arm in arm through the grounds full of hollyhocks and lilac trees and weeping willows that encircled the small hotel.

  Inside, the lobby had a brick-colored tile floor and a milk can full of pussy willows on a polished wooden counter. A man with a name tag on his lapel that said “Kenneth McBright, Assistant Manager” showed us to the restaurant, but as we followed behind him, I peeked back at a curved staircase that I figured must lead up to the rooms and I daydreamed of Bobby and me snuggled together underneath a fresh-smelling starched sheet as the moon smiled in at us through the window.

  Mildred and the others were at a table in a small room all decked out with red, white, and blue balloons. On the table were two platters, each with a mound of soft yellow cheese in the center, then a circle of radishes cut to look like flowers, a circle of green olives, bologna slices, and around the rim, an edging of Ritz crackers overlapping one another.

  There were lots of hellos and bustling about. Aunt Cora recited “Flanders Field” and all our eyes got bright with tears until Uncle Walt said, “Well, look at this sorry bunch of crybabies,” and we laughed and started wolfing down the fried chicken, scalloped potatoes, and coleslaw.

  Aunt Cora straightened an American flag on a toothpick in Uncle Walt’s lapel and he turned, flashing her a brilliant smile. I thought back to one day when she’d brought us dinner. “Walt’s doing real great,” she’d said. “He has his ups and downs, of course. He has his Bela Lugosi days. But most days he’s Gary Cooper, my own matinee idol.” Then she got serious. “At first I thought it was the VA counseling that was helping, then I thought it was probably Barbara. I’m sure it was partly both of those, but in the end it was something even more important that made the difference.” She took waxed paper off the top of the bowl and looked me in the eye. She put a hand on my arm as if she wanted to be sure I heard what she said. “I used to suspect this but now I’m sure of it. In the end, it’s that he knows I can get along on my own now if I have to.”

  Mr. McBright came around our table, hopping from person to person, asking if everything was all right. He was a stocky man with thick gray hair and two steep peaks in the center of his upper lip, like bridge spires. When he got to my mother’s place, he spotted her name card and said, “Georgia, what a pretty name. I was born in Georgia. The state, that is.” He laughed.

  My mother looked up at him smiling and you could see the red start to creep up her neck like a thermometer.

  Then he left.

  “Hey, you two should take a vacation together, you deserve it.” Cora sipped her Scotch and water. “If you want a chaperon, count me in.”

  My mother and I both laughed but I felt my spine go stiff and my mom looked uncomfortable, too. She was probably thinking the same thing I was. Now that we were growing stronger, we were getting on one another’s nerves again. We tried to pretend it was different, we specialized in fake smiles. Some days I’d try to convince myself that maybe if two people gave each other enough fake smiles, one day they’d become real.

  But other times I’d find myself just weary and resentful.

  Everyone got up and headed for the lobby but I walked outside and sat on a huge veranda that wrapped around three sides of the hotel.

  I watched the sun do a rhumba on the porch floor, but I was really picturing me and Bobby at the Jersey shore. Atlantic City.

  He’d be on stage with a combo on the Steel Pier, playing, “I Only Have Eyes For You” as I stood by the bandstand wearing the same lilac sweater and swirly black skirt I wore on our first date.

  When the set ended, Bobby would jump down and we would dance together as the juke-box played “I’ll Get By,” moving as much to the rhythm of our heartbeats as to the music.

  My mother�
��s voice brought me back to real life. “Nancy, you should see the cute rooms,” she called, stepping out onto the veranda with my aunt and Mr. McBright. “The beds have flowered chintz counterpanes and they use Sani-Flush in the bathrooms just like home,” my mother said.

  I chuckled to myself. She swore by Sani-Flush and she used it twice a week to avoid unsightly toilet bowl stains. She liked the ad for Sani-Flush in Good Housekeeping that showed two women looking disgusted, one whispering to the other, “Some things are inexcusable.” She liked that nobody would ever whisper about Georgia Sayers’ toilet bowl.

  My mom looked at Mr. McBright. “I always say that’s a sign of a good place, if the bathrooms are clean. Even though I’m just a widow now, I still keep a nice clean house.”

  Mr. McBright’s face took on a half-surprised, half-pleased expression, and I thought to myself, my mother sounds almost brazen. Then I realized why. She was finally respectable. More and more I’d noticed she would mention poor Earl, her poor late husband, even in conversations where Earl didn’t exactly fit. More and more she seemed to find reasons to say things were hard when you were a widow but you had to go on. Being a widow seemed to give my mother a kind of confidence she’d never had before. “Have you seen the parlor behind the lobby?” Mr. McBright asked, his eyebrows arching. “We have a television there. Not too many hotels have them, you know.”

  “Television?” My mother’s eyes grew huge. He might as well have said they were giving out hundred dollar bills. She turned to me and my aunt.

  “You go ahead, Georgia,” Aunt Cora said. “I’ll wait out here on the veranda with Nancy.”

  When they were out of sight, my aunt smoothed her white accordion pleated skirt, then asked, “How are you doing, Nancy? Really.”

  I stared down at a bed of roses in the garden, watching a red beetle lug a tiny piece of twig across the dirt.

  After a long minute, I answered, “I can’t stay in Marysville. I have to go.”

  Aunt Cora’s mouth twitched. “I know.” Her blue eyes looked at me straight in a way my mother never could. “Your mother knows, too.”

  “She does?”

  “Yeah. She calls it wanderlust. She said she’ll probably move in with Mildred anyway. She’s gone gaga over television, and she likes Mildred’s women’s group.”

  I glanced up at Cora. Maybe that was another thing giving my mother confidence, getting in more with the girls at work. I noticed all of them spoke their minds more lately instead of waiting to see what somebody’s husband had to say.

  “Or who knows?” Aunt Cora rolled her eyes toward the hotel lobby. “Maybe she’ll marry again. With Georgia, anything can happen.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me she didn’t care if I went?” My voice sounded whiny again and I couldn’t help feeling bitter, thinking of all my sleepless nights, the terrifying dreams, the guilt.

  My aunt wet her lips. “I thought about it. Nancy, I know you’re fighting demons. I know I might have lightened the load for you.” She reached out and touched my hand. “But in the end I knew you needed to make your own decision. I learned that from going through the past year with Walt.”

  My gaze traveled back to the beetle. I knew my aunt was right. I thought of telling her Bobby and I might go away together. I wondered if that would shock her but decided that it probably wouldn’t. She’d probably just shrug and say, “Stranger things have happened.” The beetle stopped, zig-zagged for a minute, then went on again without the twig. I wondered if he was sorry to lose it or if the twig had just got stuck to him by mistake.

  I watched a slice of sun jiggling on the veranda floor. “It’s easy for you to say with Georgia anything can happen. She’s only your sister. But when she’s your mother.…”

  Tears pricked my eyes. “Some days I feel so furious I just shake and then she looks at me with that baby girl expression and I know it’s … hopeless. I suppose it’s a terrible thing to say, but all that damned cheerfulness makes me so sour by comparison, sometimes I want to scream.”

  “Oh, Nancy, I know.” Aunt Cora said huskily. “I remember when we were little. We’d get into mischief like any kids, but if we ever got caught, Georgia would run to Daddy and hug his legs and say I made her do it.”

  She laughed quietly. “That was usually true. But Daddy would give Georgia a hug, and then ask if I wanted my mouth washed out with soap and I’d say yes just to shock him.” A light breeze ruffled her hair. “If I had to put up with a mouthful of Lux suds to get a little attention, that’s what I’d do.”

  I looked in my aunt’s eyes and realized she was telling me she’d had to learn how to deal with my mother, and I had to find my own way. I thought of saying if I didn’t run away with Bobby I might go back to Philadelphia and see a shrink or go to college, but I knew how she’d just say, “Seeing a shrink wouldn’t hurt. Going to college definitely wouldn’t hurt either.”

  Aunt Cora slipped closer to me and gave me a hug just as we heard Uncle Walt’s deep laugh and watched my mother and Mr. McBright step back onto the porch.

  “Listen, kiddo,” Aunt Cora said, “anytime you want to talk, call or write or come and stay with me, I’ll always have time for you, you hear? We have a special connection, you and me. Remember the good old days pouring over the thesaurus and the joke books? Remember the pelvic tilt exercises and hip thrusts?” My aunt flipped her right hip up a tiny bit, the way models are taught to do to help clothes hang better. I flipped my hip up to match and we both giggled, but I noticed her eyelashes were damp.

  A young couple drove up to the hotel entrance in a fire-engine red Chevrolet coupe. My uncle, who was standing there with Mr. McBright now, put his hand up to his mouth as if he was letting him in on a secret, but his voice was loud as brass.

  “Well, you know what they say,” he bellowed, “in a cigarette it’s taste, in a whiskey it’s age, but in a coupe it’s impossible.”

  Mr. McBright laughed and headed for the car.

  My mom made a beeline for me and my aunt. “Such a nice man,” she said, her face flushed. “And he looked at me special. I could tell. You didn’t have to be blind to see it.”

  We watched Mr. McBright greet the young couple and escort them inside.

  “I wonder what it would be like to live in a cute place like this” My mom’s voice was high. “I wonder what it would be like being married to an assistant manager of a nice resort.”

  Aunt Cora looked sidewise at me and I faked a smile.

  “Not that I’m interested, of course,” my mother went on. “Being a widow. And he’s probably married anyway.”

  Mildred came into view at end of the lawn, the late afternoon sun behind her. She waved and walked toward us.

  “In which case,” Aunt Cora said, “it might be more interesting to wonder what it would be like to be an assistant manager of a nice resort.” She gave my mom a wise smile. “You start with a can of Sani-Flush and a cheery smile and who knows where it’ll lead.”

  My mother looked confused for a minute and wet her lips. Then her eyes brightened. “That’s right,” she said, her voice rising, “I bet someday there will be girl assistant managers.”

  Aunt Cora and I burst out laughing as Mildred came up and asked what was so funny.

  “Life,” Aunt Cora said.

  “Right. Life,” I echoed, and the four of us stood on the veranda together, watching our shadows lengthen in the blazing sun.

  37

  NANCY, 1947

  Bobby drove me to the bus station. I looked back at Marysville as we pulled out, watching the neat rows of pastel houses slide away like stage scenery. I twisted to see behind me until the whole town became a gray smudge in the distance.

  I stared at Bobby’s profile as he drove. His sandy hair was longer than it used to be and some wisps curled up in the back at the curve of his neck. He drummed his fingers lightly on the wheel. I wanted to go away with him more than I wanted to breathe, wanted to say, “Oh, Bobby, forget it. It was silly, thinking I needed
a week in Philadelphia. Let’s just turn around and go off together right now.”

  Instead I closed my eyes and watched pinwheels spin and disappear and felt my eyelids flutter.

  Bobby broke the silence. “I worry it’s the guy there you’re really going to see.”

  “Oh, Bobby, no, it’s not the guy at all. That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about.” That was true. My heart didn’t turn somersaults over Clark, but I couldn’t help thinking to myself there was something about what Clark represented that made my blood race—a kind of life where you might do neurotic things like put on your Rhonda act in a nightclub, that made you want to try new things and find new ways to laugh at the insanity in the world.

  I looked out my car window. Houses with gray fences and overgrown yards raced by. Shades were pulled down halfway, making windows look like sleepy eyes.

  I was going to stay with Betsy, but what I was really looking forward to was having the time alone to sit in Fairmount Park, stare at the Schuylkill River and try to write out everything I wanted to tell myself.

  “It’s only a week,” I reminded Bobby. “And when you drive down next Friday to pick me up, you can meet the whole crazy mixed-up bunch for yourself.”

  He gave me a sidewise glance, and I knew what he was thinking. How would I introduce him. This is my boyfriend. And, oh, by the way, he’s also my brother? That would certainly put us in the avant garde. Or would I just blurt, “Meet Bobby, the two of us are running off together next week.” Bobby has a gig playing clarinet with a combo in Scranton, then in Pittsburg, and after that who knows? And I may go to college, a class here, a class there. We’re thinking of getting married.

  At the station we stood side by side underneath a hazy sun, arms around one another. The air was warm and still.

  “Oh, before I go, I just remembered. My mother gave me a note. She told me to read it after I got to the station.” I pulled a blue envelope from my skirt pocket. Inside there was a single piece of blue scented writing paper. I unfolded it.