The Daughters of Erietown

by Connie Schultz

  Rosemary cradled her coffee cup and looked out the window. “You don’t need to be so specific.”

  “Apparently I do.”

  Rosemary turned to look at her. “Why do you look so angry, Aunt Lizzie?”

  “I’m not angry, honey. I’m smart. Is he at the bar a lot?”

  “No.”

  “Your answer should have been, ‘I don’t know.’ Sounds like you’ve been on the lookout for this guy. This married guy.”

  Rosemary wadded up her napkin and threw it on her plate. “Well, I’m not. I’m just observant. And to be honest, Aunt Lizzie, I’m not crazy about your tone of voice.”

  “Good, because I’d hate for there to be any doubt about how I feel about you going after someone else’s husband. Nothing but heartache for everyone involved, Rosemary. You remember that.”

  Rosemary tried to reach for Lizzie’s hand, but she pulled it away. “Listen to me, honey. Coming here to Erietown was your one big chance. You’ve been here eight years now, and you’ve built quite a life for yourself. You’ve got your own place, your own car. You’re blond and beautiful, and you’re in charge of your own life. You don’t want to lose the most important thing a woman has, and that’s your self-respect.”

  Rosemary sighed. “Aunt Lizzie, you’re overreacting.”

  “I know that look on your face. I’ve seen it on every woman who has convinced herself that she’s entitled to something she knows she shouldn’t have. He’s married, Rosie.”

  “It’s Rosemary.”

  “Not if you act like you never left Foxglove. Show some class, honey.”

  “You sure are assuming a lot. All I said was he was handsome.”

  Lizzie leaned toward Rosemary. “I know you, honey. You lose interest in a man as soon as you know he’s all yours. You want the guy you can’t have. I blame your miserable excuse for a father for that.”

  Rosemary pushed her hand away. “This has nothing to do with my father. I haven’t seen him since I was nine years old.”

  “I know that. He was the most important man in your life, and he abandoned you. You’ve been trying to replace him ever since.”

  “That’s sick,” Rosemary said. “That makes it sound like I want to marry my father.”

  Lizzie touched her cheek. “Oh, sweetie, we all do. Why do you think we’re all so fucked up?”

  The Grandin family lived only three houses down from Sam’s house, but they were a world away. They had the first dishwasher in the neighborhood and two TVs. The second one was in the kitchen, and Mrs. Grandin almost always turned it on in the last hour before Mr. Grandin came home. Sam liked watching the vertical groove between Mrs. Grandin’s eyebrows slowly disappear as she sat at the table and sipped on her crystal glass of ice and “mommy juice.”

  The Grandins owned Speedy Dry Cleaners, and even though it was just down the street, Mrs. Grandin liked to drive her convertible there when she dropped off Mr. Grandin’s lunch. Sam liked the convertible but agreed with her mother that Mrs. Grandin went overboard when she named the car Miss Daisy Mae. Proof positive, Sam’s father said, that Mrs. Grandin was “Miss Daisy-crazy.”

  Mr. Grandin wore a suit and tie every day. “That’s how you know he doesn’t work for a living,” Sam’s dad said. On top of that, he was a boss, which in the McGinty family was as bad as voting for Nixon. Brick said the word “boss” was just code for Republican, but Ellie insisted that wasn’t always true.

  “Mr. Baylor put a Kennedy sign in his bakery window in nineteen sixty,” she said. “For all the world to see.”

  “And how dumb-ass was that?” Brick said. “Republicans boycotted the bakery for two whole months. Every man in our local had to take a turn driving across town to buy six-dozen donuts from Baylor’s every morning until Election Day to keep him in business. You aren’t taking a stand if everyone else has to hold you up.”

  Sam loved the Grandins’ driveway. It was paved, instead of the black cinders in the McGinty drive. Perfect for jumping rope and better for hopscotch, too. For this, Sam was willing to put up with the Grandins’ only child, Jenny, who never ran out of reasons for why she was sorry Sam’s life wasn’t as good as hers.

  “I’m sorry your television is smaller than ours, Sam.”

  “I’m sorry your sheets don’t match your bedspread, Sam.”

  “I’m sorry you have that hole in the toe of your sneaker, Sam.”

  Sam didn’t blame Jenny for bragging. If she had a canopy bed and her own bathroom she’d probably have a hard time keeping it to herself, too. Sometimes Sam watched Jenny’s lips move as she yakked on and on, and Sam had to picture Jesus to stop thinking about punching Jenny in the mouth. This was new for Sam. Even when her brother, Reilly, popped the head off her Bubble Cut Barbie, it never occurred to her even to pinch him, let alone smack him.

  No matter how mad she got at Reilly, when she looked him in the face she saw their mother’s eyes looking back at her and their father’s red hair standing straight up on the top of his head. Whenever Sam and Reilly sat down side by side on the porch swing, the knobs of their knees were perfectly matched, like four little acorns from the same tree. Reilly was five years younger and all boy, but he was a part of her.

  Sam tried to remind herself it wasn’t really Jenny’s fault that she was spoiled and rich. For that, she blamed Jenny’s father. A suit and tie changes a man. Every time Sam saw Mr. Grandin, she thought of Mary Agnes Lane’s dad, and what had happened that day a year ago.

  Mr. Lane worked at the People’s Savings and Loan. He’d seemed nice enough the first and only time he saw Sam standing in their kitchen. He set down his briefcase, leaned toward Sam, and said, “Hi there. And what’s your name?” Wanted to know where she lived, what her favorite subject was at school. He asked for her father’s name, too, and asked where he worked. As soon as Sam told him about her dad’s job at Erie Electric, he stood up and smiled at Sam again, but it felt different. He walked into the dining room, where Mrs. Lane was setting the table. Didn’t even whisper. “Let’s not make this a habit,” he said.

  Sam looked over at Mary Agnes’s face and watched her invitation for dinner evaporate. “Maybe tonight’s not—” Mary Agnes didn’t bother to apologize.

  Sam’s mother had already given her permission to eat dinner at the Lanes’. She’d know something was up if Sam came home early. So Sam walked around for a while to give her face time to stop burning. The longer she walked, the easier it was to forgive Mary Agnes. It wasn’t her fault. Their fathers hated different people, but their daughters’ shame was the same. Sam prayed every night that her black friends at school would never know what her father said about them, but she still worried that someday he’d say the wrong thing at the precise moment when God was distracted and not available to rescue her.

  Sam was determined to keep to herself what had happened at the Lanes’ house. A doomed plan in Ellie McGinty’s house. Two nervous weeks had passed when Sam was doing homework at the dining room table and her mother stopped kneading the meatloaf mix just long enough to say, “Why haven’t you invited Mary Agnes Lane over to reciprocate the invitation?”

  “She says she can’t, Mom.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Can’t come over.”

  “Why not? She’s been here plenty of times.”

  Sam really didn’t want to get into it, as her mother liked to say whenever it was Sam who had all the questions. But she could tell by the look on her mother’s face that avoidance was a failed strategy. She laid down her pencil as her mother washed her hands. “Maybe it has something to do with her dad saying not to make it a habit.”

  Her mother wiped her hands on her apron as she walked toward Sam. “Not make what a habit?”

  Sam sighed. “Me, I guess.”

  Ellie sat down next to Sam and folded her hands on the table. With every answered q
uestion, Ellie’s knuckles grew whiter.

  “When did he say that?”

  Sam lowered her head. “After he asked where Daddy worked.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “I said he worked in maintenance at Erie Electric.”

  “Oh, Sam. That makes him sound like a janitor. He’s a maintenance mechanic. Your father can fix anything in that entire plant. Only a handful of men in this whole county can do his job.”

  Sam looked up at her. “Mom, I think what Mr. Lane cares about is where Daddy works, not what he does there.”

  “Well,” Ellie said, pushing away from the table, “we’ll see about that.”

  Her parents had a loud and spirited conversation in the driveway before dinner, and after saying grace Brick told Sam that she was to have nothing more to do with Mary Agnes Lane.

  “Act like you can’t even see her,” Brick said. “Treat her like she’s the white trash she is, Sam. We’ll see how her asshole of a father likes that.”

  Sam had a few things she wanted to say to her father. Mary Agnes’s father was never at school, so how was he going to notice if Sam ignored his daughter? Also, all of Mary Agnes Lane’s clothes came from Brennan’s department store. Unlike Sam, whose clothes came from the JCPenney and Hills department stores. Mary Agnes Lane was not white trash.

  The immediate problem was Mary Agnes’s proximity. She sat right next to Sam in class, all day long. Not only would Sam pretending she couldn’t see Mary Agnes be impossible, it would be un-Christian, if her mother’s frequent lectures on the topic were true.

  The more pressing problem was Brick McGinty’s growing list of friends Sam was supposed to avoid. Until Mary Agnes, their only crime had been skin color, and that was no crime at all. Every time Brick slammed his palm on the dinner table and shouted that horrible word about black people, she saw the faces of Valerie Jackson and Philomena Dyer and Gary Colbert. This made her want to cry. They were her best friends, and they were nicer to her than any of the white kids whose fathers wore ties to work. Two of her black friends’ fathers wore suits all the time, and even they liked her.

  Sam knew from experience that saying any of this to her father would ignite his temper faster than a match to a cat’s tail, so after talking it over with God for a few weeks and getting no answer as usual, she decided to ignore her father’s orders. Every bad thing he said about black people made no sense to her. So she ignored him.

  She had a feeling God approved.

  * * *

  —

  Four months after Sam was disinvited to dinner at the Lanes’ house, Jenny Grandin’s name was added to Brick’s list of banned friends.

  Mr. Grandin had always nodded hello to Brick when both of them were out mowing their lawns, but that was about it for exchanges. Her parents never visited the Grandins, but Sam didn’t think much about that because the McGintys seldom invited anyone for dinner.

  “Daddy works hard and wants to relax when he’s home,” her mother said whenever Sam brought it up. That didn’t stop Sam from wondering why they never had any relatives over. As far as she knew, Sam had only one living grandparent, and Brick hadn’t spoken to his father since before she was born. The only time Sam worked up the nerve to ask her mother, Ellie jumped back like she’d been hit by lightning. “That man put your grandma Angie into an early grave.”

  Sam was six at the time, and she had no idea if that meant he’d shot her grandmother or buried her alive, but it relieved her of any desire to meet the man.

  The only outside people who came into the McGinty house were the neighbor ladies who came for coffee after Brick left for work. The coffee club, her mother called it. They were the same women in her monthly canasta club, and Sam had known them all of her life. Last month it was Ellie’s turn to host the card club, but she had to ask Eloise Bender if she could swap months because the strike at the plant “made things tight.”

  Sam didn’t know much about the strike, except that her father and his friends did all the real work and the bosses wanted to cheat them out of the money they had earned. Local 270 had finally had enough of that bullshit—that’s how Brick always said it and so Sam said it, too, in her head—and one morning at 11:00, right after the coal train had arrived, they threw down their shovels and tools and walked off the job. Sam looked at the picture of the picketing workers on the front page of the Erietown Times and asked her father if that meant their lights would stop working.

  “The scabs will keep the lights on, Sam. They always do.” Sam had no idea how the stuff of scraped knees had anything to do with making electricity, but she could tell her father was in no mood for the question.

  For nearly three months, Brick drove to the plant and took his turn with the men on the picket line, singing labor songs and shouting swear words at anyone walking into the plant. Sometimes on weekends Sam and Reilly went with him. It was the closest Sam had ever gotten to the monster of the building that took her father away from them so many days and nights. She liked the way her father sometimes wrapped his giant hand around hers as they walked and sang the same songs he used to sing to her at bedtime. “Which Side Are You On,” “Union Maid,” “This Land Is Your Land”—Sam knew them all. She loved how all the men looked up to her dad, just like she did. Whenever someone called him “Brother Brick,” she pretended she’d just found another uncle.

  Sam’s mother mostly worried during the strike. “I don’t know how many more ways I can serve Spam for dinner,” she told Sam as they lined the baking sheet with pineapple slices. “We’ll never make back the money we’ve lost on this strike.”

  Brick heard and walked over to Ellie and squeezed her shoulders. “We can’t think about it that way, El. This is the only way to get better pay and work conditions. This is about the future.”

  One Saturday evening, on day twenty-seven of the strike, Sam walked to the Grandins’ to play with Jenny. Minutes later, she returned home. Ellie was standing at the counter, hovering over her red-plaid Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. She held her finger in place on the page and looked at Sam. “What are you doing back already?”

  Sam took a deep breath and decided to just get it over with. “Jenny’s dad said he didn’t want me over there as long as Dad’s strike is going on.”

  Ellie raised her finger to her lips to shush Sam, but it was too late. Brick was sitting at the dining room table. He looked up from the stack of bills. “What did you say, Sam?”

  “Go outside,” Ellie said, turning Sam to face the door. “Go find Reilly and play some catch.”

  “Samantha Joy,” Brick said. “Get in here.”

  Ellie sighed and patted Sam’s back. “Do what your father says.”

  Sam walked into the dining room. “Hi, Daddy.”

  “What did you say about Bill Grandin?”

  “Nothing. Just that I can’t play at their house until your strike is over. I don’t care. Really, I don’t. Jenny brags too much.”

  Brick tipped his chair back onto its hind legs and webbed his fingers behind his head. “He did, did he? Did he tell you that himself?”

  “No, Jenny told me. But I could see her dad standing behind her in the kitchen.”

  “What a coward,” Brick said, slamming the front legs of the chair onto the floor. “Making his daughter do his dirty work.” He looked at Ellie, who was standing in the doorway, and then back at Sam. “You know why, don’t you?”

  Ellie walked up behind Sam and wrapped her arms around her. Sam looped her fingers around her mother’s clasped hands and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know, Daddy. ’Cause he hates workers?”

  “It’s about money, Sammy. He’s got a cleaning contract with the plant. As long as we don’t have a contract, he doesn’t have one. This is all about lining his own goddamn pockets.”

  “Brick.”

  “How could he be that
way?” Sam said. “I’m one of Jenny’s best friends.”

  “No, Sam, you’re Jenny’s backup friend.”

  “Brick, don’t.”

  “Ellie, she should know how these people think. Sam, you’re Jenny’s friend because you’re always available, any time, any day.” His voice grew louder. “You’re around when her real friends, her rich friends, are on vacation in Florida or in Canada or back in the Old Country in It-a-ly. Their real name is Grandinetti. Did your little friend ever tell you that? Her father changed his name so that he could do business on our side of town. Ashamed of his own name. Damn dago.”

  Sam’s heart started to pound. “Daddy, I don’t think Jenny knows about her dad cleaning your clothes.”

  Brick looked at his daughter, his eyes narrowing. “Don’t kid yourself, Sam. They probably laugh about it over dinner.” He stood up. “Well, you know what? He’s not going to clean my clothes ever again. After this strike is over, Ellie, I’m going to bring my work clothes home.”

  Ellie sighed. “Brick. All that white dust you’ll bring home.”

  “What have you got to do all day anyway? It’s not like you have a job. It’s all on me to support this family.”

  Ellie stepped back, and Sam reached for her mother’s hand. “Fine,” Ellie said, batting Sam’s hand away. “Fine, Brick. And when is that going to happen, do you think? When are you going to start supporting this family again?”

  Brick stood up, his fists flexing at his sides. “You know we’re striking for money. For safer work conditions, too. You know that, El.”

  He turned to look out the window, plunging his hands into his pockets. “And Sam?” he said, jingling his change. “I don’t want you going anywhere near that Grandin girl again. Strike or no strike, she doesn’t deserve you.”

  Sam started blinking back tears. “But, Daddy, she’s the only girl who lives near me who isn’t already on the list.”

  “What list? What the hell are you talking about?”