“The Beckers made money and spent money,” Gary now recalls. “Christmastime was crazy. You’d walk out of my in-laws’ house with carloads of presents.”
Early on, Shelley didn’t give a great deal of thought to the question of whether she and Gary were ready to start a family. It was just the natural progression for young couples in Fowler: marriage and then, in a blink, children. Yes, Shelley saw that Gary still liked to go out drinking with friends, often to excess; he hadn’t fully settled into responsible adulthood. But his heart seemed to be in the right place, and he had an obvious affection for Shelley. She figured he’d outgrow his immaturity.
Just twenty years old, Shelley felt prepared to be a mother, especially given a lifetime of looking after her siblings. And though she’d hardly been out of Fowler in her life, all of her experience at Becker’s led her to carry herself with a certain confidence. Motherhood didn’t scare her. And so even though neither she nor Gary were earning much money, and even though Shelley wasn’t quite sure how deep her feelings were for him, she was soon pregnant.
Their first child, Alyssa, arrived in 1986, a month overdue. “That baby does not want to be born!” relatives had been telling Shelley, who ended up having a C-section.
Because Alyssa was so late in coming, she didn’t seem like a newborn. She looked four or five months old, and she was totally wide-eyed and alert.
In the years that followed, Alyssa turned out to be precocious on many fronts. She walked, talked, and began reading very early. In kindergarten, while other kids brought in their dolls and their cats for show-and-tell, Alyssa brought in articles she was reading in the newspaper. Her teacher was concerned that Alyssa gave off such an aura of maturity, and seemed more driven than other kids in Fowler. The teacher asked Shelley, then twenty-six, if she was pushing her daughter along too fast.
“I don’t think it’s anything I’m doing,” Shelley told the teacher. And in truth, Shelley was so busy at the store that she didn’t have time to push Alyssa along academically. Besides, Shelley had never been much of a student herself. It just seemed as if Alyssa was naturally intelligent, soaking up everything on her own. Alyssa attended kindergarten in the morning, and because her parents were both at work, she spent afternoons at a babysitter’s house, which she didn’t like much. For one thing, the sitter served peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches everyday. It got monotonous. But mostly, Alyssa just missed being with her mother. And so she convinced Shelley to let her come to Becker’s in the afternoons.
Alyssa and her father, Gary
Little Alyssa tried to be of help at the store. She’d crawl around on the floor, picking up stray beads, or she’d tell customers that a saleswoman would be right with them. To pass the time, Alyssa would leaf through the wedding invitations featured on a desk near the front of the store. She decided that the Disney-themed invites would be the ones she’d use when she grew up and got married. At least when she was very young, Alyssa was idealistic. A bride was a princess. A groom was a prince. And so Disney ought to handle the invitations.
Alyssa wasn’t sure what to make of the brides, their wedding plans, and especially the uncertain feelings stirring inside of her about how men and women interact. Each day was an education, or a chance to play-act.
Once a young boy came into the store—he must have been the younger brother of one of the brides—and Alyssa walked back and forth in front of him with a pencil and a pad of paper, trying to look like an official saleswoman. The boy hardly noticed her, and she wasn’t even clear in her own mind about what she was trying to do with this awkward attempt at flirting.
Like Shelley did when she was young, Alyssa would hide out behind the dresses, or in the closet underneath the main stairwell, where the slips were stored. It was her own little cave. She could nap or listen to the muffled sounds of the brides out on the showroom floor. She felt secure there.
Alyssa’s grandparents, Clark and Sharon, were still running the store then, and once a year, on a Sunday afternoon, they’d put on a bridal show in a local auditorium. Daughters, daughters-in-law, and young saleswomen got paid fifty dollars to walk down the runway as brides. The Becker granddaughters, including Alyssa, got to be flower girls and junior bridesmaids. Grandsons were ring-bearers. Most of those in attendance never realized just how many Beckers were working that runway. Clark and Sharon would celebrate after the show by taking everyone to dinner at a restaurant in Lansing.
Shelley was very involved in planning these shows, just as she was becoming central to operations at the store. But through it all, she was still her parents’ employee, which was not always easy for her. She had ideas for how Becker’s could be better managed and promoted. She thought the sales floor had to be seriously spruced up. After all, the 1990s had arrived, and to compete, Becker’s needed to look more like a chic salon than a small-town dry-goods store. But Shelley sensed her parents’ resistance, and mostly kept her ideas to herself.
Alyssa didn’t have a full understanding of the pressures her mother was under, but she did see that Shelley had a lot on her mind. In part because her mother was so busy with work, Alyssa became something of an attention-seeker when she was young. Like daughters everywhere, she longed to be noticed, to get her mother to look in her direction. Sometimes, she found calculated ways to do this.
She liked to hide out in different places, without telling anyone, and she got a charge out of knowing that people were looking for her. She enjoyed listening to what they had to say about her as they searched; almost like Tom Sawyer at his own funeral. Maybe she needed to hear people she loved showing concern for her.
In the summer of 1991, for instance, during a family gathering at her grandparents’ lakeside cottage, five-year-old Alyssa slipped away from her parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. She folded herself into a tiny closet where beach towels were stored, and waited to see what would happen.
When Shelley realized her daughter wasn’t around, she started calling for her. “Alyssa? Alyssa?” And soon enough, Alyssa could hear fifteen of her relatives scurrying all over the house, chattering about her. “When did you last see her? Where was she?”
“Alyssa? ALYSSA?”
“Did anyone see her going into the lake?”
Alyssa could feel her loved ones’ trepidation, the growing panic. Had she run off and gotten lost? Had she drowned? And yet she sat in her hiding place, saying nothing.
Even at age five, she was intuitive enough to know that she had ratcheted up the stakes. If she simply stepped out of the closet and identified herself, she’d be reprimanded for not responding to those calling her name. And so she decided she’d stay there, and when and if the closet door was opened, she’d pretend to be fast asleep.
After fifteen minutes of searching, someone did open the door to the towel closet, and shouted, “She’s here. She’s sleeping!” Shelley came running up and gave Alyssa a hug. “Honey, I’m so glad we’ve found you. We were so worried.”
Alyssa rubbed her eyes, a little actress playing the role of a child just waking up, and hugged her mother back. She was relieved that she wasn’t getting in trouble. Though she felt a bit guilty receiving that hug from her relieved mother, she also felt happy in Shelley’s arms, happy to be front and center for that moment in her mother’s thoughts.
At the time, and in the months that followed, Shelley didn’t think much about Alyssa’s motivations for her disappearing acts. But now she understands. Maybe smart little Alyssa was noticing things weren’t always going well in their household, that her father was drinking too much, that her parents’ marriage wasn’t what it should have been.
“When a child is hiding, part of her is yearning to be found,” Shelley now says. “By hiding, it was as if she was saying, ‘Find me, talk to me, give me attention, notice me. I’m here.’ At the time, I didn’t see any of that. I just didn’t see it.”
Alyssa holds tightly to her warmest memories of her father and mother from the years when she and her two younger brothers
were kids. On Saturday evenings, after Becker’s closed, Gary and Shelley would often hold “Movie Theater Night” at their house. They’d buy a few bags of candy and rent a G or PG movie on VHS at Fowler’s mom-and-pop video store. The kids would earn tickets for candy and the show by doing chores all week long: washing the dishes after dinner, keeping their rooms clean. “Those movie nights were kind of an adventure,” Alyssa now says, “like we were going somewhere else, away from Fowler.”
On weeknights, Shelley was often at the store, and Alyssa liked spending time with her dad, just sitting on the couch, watching kid-friendly TV shows such as The Wonder Years. Gary identified with the show because Kevin, the Fred Savage character, was from his generation. Alyssa was drawn to fact that it was a family show, but the family was far from perfect. She also liked the running commentary delivered by the adult Kevin off-screen. “I like being inside somebody’s head,” she told her dad.
They watched reruns of Leave It to Beaver and Happy Days, and one year Gary helped Alyssa put together a Fonzie costume for Halloween. Even if her dad was drinking, at least in those early years there was a softness about him, a fatherly concern and love that made it through the haze of alcohol.
When Alyssa was in first grade, she decided she wanted to lip-sync the Jerry Lee Lewis hit “Great Balls of Fire” with her friends at her school’s talent show. After work one night, Gary surprised her by coming home with a cassette tape of the song. There was no record store near Fowler, and even down in Lansing, he had trouble finding the song. But he’d gone out of his way and tracked it down, and Alyssa loved him for that.
She practiced the song with her friends each day at recess, but before the auditions, the other girls chickened out, and Alyssa went by herself. Then she got scared too, and never performed in the show.
And yet Alyssa retains this warm memory of her father walking through the front door with that cassette tape, a wide smile on his face, eager to help her become a lip-sync star. It’s funny, she thinks now, how little moments can come to define acts of love.
Gary worried about how hard Shelley was working. He saw the stress on her face, saw how that stress affected their relationship. “You’re a slave to the store,” he’d say. She’d shrug. That was her life.
Each night when Shelley came home, Gary needed to feel her out. Had it been a good or bad day? Was she overwhelmed by a nitpicking bride’s mother, or was there a moment during the day that lifted her spirits, a bride whose story touched her?
Gary knew that Shelley was considering the possibility of someday taking over the store, and he knew she faced challenges working for her parents. Sometimes she’d confide in him about her dreams for the place, and for her life, and even for their lives together. Sometimes she’d shut down.
Alyssa, as a child, observed and absorbed the stresses in her mother’s life. She knew it wasn’t always easy for Shelley to work with her parents. She knew Shelley felt guilty when she wasn’t at home. She never thought: “My mother loves her job.” She thought: “Wow, my mother is working hard and it’s not easy. I worry about her.”
Shelley felt guilty about all the hours she was at the store, and so she sometimes overcompensated by taking on even more responsibilities on the home front. Alyssa’s Girl Scouts troop needed a troop leader, and though there were plenty of girls whose mothers didn’t work outside of the home, it was Shelley who stepped up to the task, serving for ten years. When the woman in charge of the entire territory of Girl Scouts troops resigned, Shelley took on that job too. It was partially the working mother’s guilt, but she also relished the chance to escape from the store.
Alyssa’s favorite Girl Scouts activity was Trade Day. The girls would bring items from home to trade with each other: candy, fruit, toys. Alyssa was the star trader on two fronts. First, she felt like she had a clear business sense, just from hanging out at the store. On top of that, she also had the best stuff to trade, because her mother would let her take home pieces of inexpensive jewelry from Becker’s that no one was buying.
Alyssa and Shelley at a Girl Scouts outing
Sometimes, Shelley would bring the troop down to Becker’s for a tour or to try on veils and to look in the old mirror. “I wonder who I’ll marry,” she’d hear them saying as they looked in the old mirror. Alyssa, a store veteran, would show the girls all around, including a tour of her secret hiding place under the staircase.
For years, Shelley also hosted third- and fourth-grade classes at the store. Fowler was such a small town that the students could walk over, single file, from the local elementary school. Shelley talked to them about how the business was run, how the brides went about choosing dresses. Some brides enjoyed a pack of kids watching them conduct their dress searches. Others were a bit peeved that their big moment was being spoiled by curious third-graders.
Shelley hoped that she was inspiring all the girls who came through to notice that women could run businesses. But beyond that, she also hoped she was teaching them about growing up and falling in love, about finding a man and what a wedding dress represents—about starting a life. Offering rosy views of romance to wide-eyed third-grade field-trippers seemed like a simplistic no-brainer. Young girls needed the vision of happily ever after, didn’t they?
It’s ironic, really, that Shelley was selling the concept of love down at the store when there was so much uncertainty at home. And truth was, those years were overwhelming for Shelley on a lot of fronts. She was working hard at Becker’s. She had an alcoholic husband, and there was a growing distance between them. And every moment she was not at work, she was committed to being there for her kids. It was like she was on a merry-go-round that wouldn’t stop.
Alyssa saw this, day after day. She felt it. Her heart went out to her mother. And as she got to know her mother’s caretaker soul, her selfless streak, she wanted to emulate it and celebrate it. Eventually, Alyssa found an outlet to showcase Shelley’s unsung attributes. In sixth grade, she showed off her blossoming writing skills by winning a countywide essay contest on the subject “I Love My Mom Because . . .”
“I love my mom because she is like a lost-and-found box,” Alyssa wrote. “When you lose your mittens, she brings them back. If you can’t find your teddy bear, she can convince him to come home with a smile on his face, like the one my mom always has. If you lose your balance, she picks you up and gives you a hug. When you lose hope in yourself, a talk with her will make you feel like you can touch the sky. If you lose your friend, she will give you the strength to get her back.
“Unlike other lost-and-found boxes, my mother has love and a whole box full of it. She would never leave you in the dark without a flashlight. She would never forget to give you her heart of love.”
All along, it wasn’t just Shelley noticing that Gary had alcohol issues. Alyssa saw it too. She saw the tension between her parents. She saw that the more her father drank, the more her mother pulled away. Not infrequently, Shelley would get home from the store and Gary would be asleep on the couch, or passed out from drinking. She would wake him and berate him. She would nag. He’d be resentful. Or he’d promise to clean himself up, but he couldn’t do it. Shelley sometimes wondered if he felt inadequate, having a strong working woman for a wife.
Most of all, Shelley worried about the children’s safety. What if Alyssa or her brothers hurt themselves while Gary was watching them? Would he be sober enough to help them? What if he had to drive them to school or a friend’s house? Would he be too drunk to get them there safely?
An incident would sometimes happen at home, while Shelley was at the store, and she’d never get wind of it. There were times when Gary got sick from drinking, and Alyssa would clean up after him. She was fastidious, making sure her mother wouldn’t notice anything amiss. Like her mother before her, Alyssa was a caretaker, only she was looking after not just her two younger brothers, but at certain times her father, too.
Alyssa’s heart went out to her father. As young as she was, she recognized that an alcoh
olic isn’t really his true self when he’s drinking. She longed for him to be sober, but loved him and tried to forgive him when he wasn’t.
One evening, when Alyssa was in Girl Scouts, she attended a fatherdaughter dance with her dad, and entered the “cakewalk.” Numbers were placed on the ground, music was played, and if a girl stopped on the right number, she’d receive a cake. Alyssa ended up winning a beautiful cake, and was very proud of herself. She was just beaming.
Gary had been drinking that night, however, and as they walked out of the dance, with him holding the cake, he dropped it, took a look at how it had plopped on the ground, and started laughing. Given his drunkenness, something about the way the cake fell seemed completely amusing to him. But he wasn’t so drunk that he didn’t see the look in Alyssa’s eyes. “She was heartbroken,” he now says.
He has apologized to her repeatedly in the years since. He has bought her several cakes. “There are dumb things I did,” he says, “and when I think about them, I cringe. I know alcoholism is considered a disease, but that doesn’t lessen my responsibilities. The look on Alyssa’s face that day I dropped the cake, I won’t ever forget that.”
The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters Page 13