Not a Poster Child

by Francine Falk-Allen

  (TMI alert: I still get angry, since I cannot squat, when women pee on the toilet seat, which I estimate at least 30 percent of American women do. Ick. I had an encounter a couple of years ago at a movie theater with a well-heeled, attractive blonde who had just done this; she was at first apologetic for using the DP stall, but I told her quietly, that’s okay, just please don’t pee on the seat because I can’t squat, and she spun on that heel and gave me her back. I called her a bad name under my breath and turned away myself. Not proud of my behavior, but, next time I’ll just make the request and leave it at that. My appeal: Take a seat, ladies. Use a seat cover if you like. You’re not going to get a disease. And please don’t use your foot to flush. Many handicapped people cannot use their foot; they generally must use their hand, and the bottom of your shoe is the most germ-laden thing in the bathroom.)

  My next most memorable altercation after Steven the Bully took place in second grade when a friendly Italian girl, Eva, started calling me “Baby.” I was shorter than nearly everyone else in the class, if not the whole grade, and still wore those high-topped “baby” shoes. Eva liked to lean in toward me with a smile and say, “Ba-by! You’re a ba-by!” and laugh.

  She knew she got to me with her name-calling. She may have thought we were having fun together, because she didn’t seem to be a mean girl otherwise. Maybe she had brothers who teased her at home.

  “I’m not a baby!” I would protest. “Don’t call me that!” I’d get upset; be angry with her; limp off in a huff. Nothing seemed to deter her. Boy, she made me mad. I hated being teased. I took myself so seriously and had worked so hard to be grown up, to look nice, to do the right things to be respected as a big girl.

  Finally, one fateful day, Eva pushed me to my limit. “Ba-by!” she said with a big smile, right up close to my face—and I hauled off and slugged her in the nose with my little right fist.

  Her nose promptly began to bleed profusely. I gasped. We were both shocked. We looked at each other with the same expression: What do we do now?

  “Let’s hide in the bathroom,” Eva said.

  “Okay,” I said, glad that she wasn’t going to report me. I think she saw before I did that she was also going to get into trouble for taunting the crippled girl if the entire story were told, but I was sure I was the one that would be sent to the principal’s office this time.

  We sneaked into the restroom just as the bell rang for the end of recess.

  “Here’s some toilet paper,” I suggested, handing her a few sheets. The tissue didn’t do much good, but at least it kept the blood from dripping down her face.

  “I’m sorry!” I said.

  “It was my fault too, Francine,” Eva said. “I’m really sorry.”

  We stood there in the cold bathroom looking at each other, unsure what we were going to do. The bleeding showed no sign of stopping.

  Mrs. Palmer, our nice-but-no-nonsense older teacher, missed us both immediately after the other second-graders had filed into the classroom. The first place she looked was in the bathroom.

  “You girls are late for class!” she admonished us. “Didn’t you hear the bell ring?”

  “But Eva has a bloody nose!” I said, leaving out the details.

  “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “You can stay here with her, Francine, until it stops. I have to get back to the classroom. Here, Eva, lie down on the bench.” (There was a wooden bench installed in there, with metal plumbing pipe legs.)

  Mrs. Palmer pulled a paper towel from the wall dispenser, tore off a little piece of it, wet it under the cold faucet, and folded it up into a rectangle about an inch-and-a-half long and a quarter-inch wide. “Now, Eva, open your mouth a little bit. I’m going to put this under your upper lip.” She did so, and said, “Okay, you two girls come back to class when her nose stops bleeding.”

  When Mrs. Palmer’s footsteps had gone down the hall and into our classroom, we both started to giggle.

  “Thank you for not telling on me,” I said.

  “It’s okay; you didn’t tell on me, either,” Eva said.

  Then we had a silent truce. I liked her more at that moment and saw that she had not meant to be mean, she was just a tease and had taken it a bit too far.

  Eva said in a few minutes, “Did it stop?”

  “Yes, I think it stopped. I wonder why that works?” (Why putting a wet paper towel under an upper lip could possibly stop a nosebleed is still a puzzle to me.)

  She sat up carefully. “Well, I guess we have to go back to class now.”

  We smiled at each other.

  I, like Steven the Bully, had had no idea that I could cause such harm, let alone produce all that blood! Movies in the ’50s were a bit sterilized, and cowboys and other men were always punching each other. Who knew a nose would bleed like that? Eva was totally clear that she had pushed me to violence and defensiveness, and I was clear that I had caused worse damage than her taunting. We were not “best friends forever” after that, but we did invite each other to a couple of birthday parties, and neither of us, to my knowledge, ever told anyone what had really happened. It felt like a pact between sisters.

  I don’t remember, prior to pubescence, being particularly aware of what people thought about my gimpy leg and lopsided walk, other than what I’ve mentioned before: being imitated, heckled, or picked on by children because there was no likelihood that I’d be able to run away or fight back—which, I’d privately proved to myself and my friend Eva, was a false assumption. Having learned that punching someone in the nose was not a good option, I turned to chanting, “Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me”—but they did. The words did hurt. I didn’t want to be The Crippled Kid; I just wanted to be like everyone else.

  Me and Daddy, December, 1947

  Reading the paper, December, 1953

  9

  —

  daddy

  In the fall of 1954, after we had taken a multi-state western United States trip in our new 1953 two-tone green DeSoto— the only trip outside of California that my family ever took together—my dad set about procuring two big new white International Harvester milk trucks. He, one of his route drivers, and Grandpa Weber, my mom’s dad, went to pick them up out in St. Louis, Missouri. Given the new DeSoto, the vacation, and the new trucks, things must have been going well for Daddy’s milk delivery service.

  The three men took the train east in September, and on Sunday the 22nd, Daddy called and talked to Mama in the evening. He told her they were going to leave at five-thirty the next morning, before dawn, with the two trucks; Daddy’s employee would drive one and Grandpa would drive the other while my dad rode with him.

  When Mama got off the phone, she said, “I feel like I should call them back and tell them not to leave so early. Your grandpa’s going to drive.” I had an inkling what this meant: Grandpa was notorious for falling asleep in a chair fifteen minutes into any TV show.

  Monday morning, the 23rd, was a warm and sunny September day—typical, except that there was a very early knock at our front door as I was getting ready for first grade.

  I answered the door for Mama while she did the breakfast dishes and found a man standing on our front porch—a policeman, except he was dressed in beige, so I know now that he must have been a sheriff.

  He took off his hat as I looked at him with wary curiosity through the screen door.

  “Is your mother here?”

  I knew something was really wrong; I thought perhaps something had happened to a neighbor.

  “Yes . . .” I turned. “Mama? There’s a policeman here . . .”

  She came out of the kitchen and as soon as she saw the sheriff through the screen door, she cried out, “Oh, no!” and her face contorted, close to tears.

  “May I come in, Mrs. Allen?” He opened the screen door and respectfully entered our living room. Then he said, gently and quietly, “Mrs. Allen, I am so sorry. Your husband was killed in an accident outside Downs, Kansas, early this morning, a
round 5:30 a.m. Kansas time. Your father, Mr. Weber, was driving.”

  Mama collapsed into a chair and wept profusely while I tried to take in this information. I just didn’t have a context for death at that point. I knew what it meant on TV, and had witnessed the traumatic and grisly death of my kitten, Gracie, when my dad ran over her with the DeSoto, but I was vague on what the entire meaning was when someone you knew died. Someone who lived with you and cuddled you and was a milkman. I did understand that my daddy was dead, but what now? I felt frozen in time, and frightened that Mama was so devastated. My mother’s grief took precedence and I tried to comfort her, my hand on her shoulder, as she sobbed in the rose-colored chair in our living room—the same chair Daddy had sat in with her perched on the arm when he’d commented to her eight years before, “When we get married . . .” That had been his shy proposal.

  “Your father fell asleep at the wheel and the milk truck they were driving went off the road and into a ravine,” the sheriff explained. “Mr. Allen went through the windshield and was killed instantly. He was sleeping in the back of the truck and we believe he never woke up; he likely died in his sleep.”

  Through her sobs, my mother managed to ask, “Is Daddy okay?”

  “Yes, he has a broken knee and some minor chest damage and is in the hospital there. Would you like me to go and get a neighbor?”

  She answered yes and told him to go across the street to Inez Rice’s house; she came immediately and stayed with my mother for a few hours.

  I had a picture in my mind of Daddy’s truck going off the road and down and his body going through the windshield. I saw this over and over. I did not know what a ravine was and asked about that later, when my mother was more composed. One thing I didn’t quite believe was that he hadn’t woken up. If he hit the windshield, I thought, that probably woke him up. But none of us wanted to think he went through the agony of knowing that in moments he was about to die, or that he was conscious of the pain when his chest was crushed.

  Mama blamed herself ever after for not calling Daddy back the night before and asking him to make a later start. He was only forty-one years old. A few years later, I would think, Why in the world did Daddy let Grandpa drive, given his habit of falling asleep?

  Prior to this haunting question, I had considered my dad a genius.

  It seemed like dozens of relatives came to stay with us, but I’m sure only my sister, her husband, and their toddler daughter actually slept at the house. Many of Mama’s ten siblings came— the ones from Los Angeles, at least—along with their spouses and children. The church brought casseroles and other food, particularly on the day of the funeral. My mother, in her devastation, allowed this—others coming into her home, taking over, and handling the food. She liked to cook, but she clearly could not have managed this on her own.

  I was enjoying getting to spend time with my teenage boy cousins. I had a big crush on Lynn, who was too old to consider me anything other than the poor little crippled cousin whose dad had died. But he and my cousin Donald and uncle Ralph, my mother’s teenage brother, actually taught me to play poker, and I was pretty good at it for a nearly-seven-year-old. We sat in our small, dusty-rose-colored living room and dealt the cards on my little Disney-themed card table, using match sticks for ante. Math and logic came easily, and I understood the hierarchy of the face cards and the numbers. (I still like five-card draw, even on video poker.) I can only guess that these older boys were tolerating me because they had to, but I don’t remember them being unkind at all. The women and men were in the kitchen, cooking food and doing dishes and talking about whatever it was adults discussed when there’d been a death. Probably stories of days gone by and sibling updates. I don’t remember hushed tones or crying, but it was a relief for me to have the distracting card game and be treated like a big kid.

  The funeral was crowded with relatives I knew and people I didn’t recognize. My dad was their brother-in-law, their uncle, my half-sister’s stepfather, their milkman who helped plant their fruit trees and came in for coffee, their friend. I don’t remember a single word of the service—I’m sure the complexity was over my head—but I knew the mood was quiet and unhappy. “Somber” was a word I’d learn later.

  The scent of the few standing funereal flower arrangements was overpowering: gladiolus, which Mama loved, roses, carnations, mums, a cacophony of floral aromas. Were we taking them all home, Mama? No, we weren’t. (They’d stay at the gravesite.) Several had ribbon banners hung diagonally across them. The one that caught my eye had gold paper letters that said, “D A D D Y.” Was that from me, Mama? Yes, it was. (Florists’ shops still smell like a funeral to me. So glad to be able to order online.)

  My mom wanted me to go and see my dad in the casket so I would know he really was dead, because she thought I didn’t understand—thought I believed he was coming home with my grandfather on the train.

  I never thought that; I knew Daddy was not alive, just like Gracie the kitten. I knew he was coming home dead, in a box. I’d heard the adults talking at our house. Still, against advice from relatives and friends, who wanted to protect me from this hard, inescapable reality, Mama had me sit next to her in the front row. She took me right up to the casket and held me up to peer down at my daddy through the black net over the open section of the coffin, like a bridal veil but with an opposing purpose. He looked surprisingly good. Mama held me in her arms and said, with a catch in her voice, “He looks like he’s sleeping, doesn’t he? He even has a little bit of a smile on his face, as if he’s playing possum.”

  “Playing possum” was something my dad did at the end of his naps in the afternoon, after arriving home from his milk route. I’d approach the couch and say, “Daddy, are you awake?” and he’d smile and lie there with his eyes closed. I’d get the joke and say, “You’re not asleep, you’re awake!” and push on his chest until he opened his eyes and threw his arms around me, laughing. “He was playing possum!” Mama would say.

  But I knew this was not the case here. I was just glad that he looked so peaceful, as Mama said. Knowing he’d been in a terrible accident with his new trucks, and that his chest had been crushed, I had been afraid of what he’d look like—that he would look all beat up and have terror on his face. But then, I reasoned, he had been sleeping when the truck went off the bridge. I’d heard all this when it was discussed. All the words.

  Why did Mama think I hadn’t heard all that? Did she think I wasn’t paying attention? Because I was a child? I just didn’t have the words to describe what I was thinking and feeling. I was shocked and afraid. And a little insulted that Mama thought I was so dumb. I didn’t tell her; I didn’t know the word “insulted”—and besides, she was so upset. That scared me too. I felt her grief was so deep and all-encompassing. I knew this was because her love for him was as deep. I knew this, though no one had said it. Though it seemed I was the one who needed sheltering, I was protecting my mama. I felt that her loss was more important than mine. She never knew this and I never thought to bring it up as an adult.

  He looked truly beautiful lying there in the polished wood coffin—smooth maple or maybe even mahogany, like good furniture.

  “They did a nice job with him, he looks really good,” Mama said.

  I could see that he had makeup on. I heard later that it was to cover his bruises and scrapes, as was the dark net veil.

  I don’t regret seeing him; this is my last memory of my father: a handsome, peaceful, half-smiling face, some remainder of his affectionate, teasing humor still there.

  My mother, sister, and I—and possibly my father’s sisters—rode in a black limousine to the funeral and the cemetery. This seemed highly luxurious to me and I thought it was nice of them to treat us so well, not knowing that no one in deep grief is fully capable of making that drive.

  At the gravesite, I was expecting the twenty-one-gun salute that Mama had explained would happen because my dad was a World War II Naval veteran. She didn’t want me to be frightened; I had
never liked loud noises and would cover my ears for firecrackers. I assumed they would fire twenty-one guns, one at a time, and thought that would take a pretty long time, but knew it was in honor of my dad. Instead, the gunshots were actually three rifles shot seven times. I thought maybe they were doing the shortened version because we lived so far out in the country and they couldn’t get enough soldiers with guns, or perhaps my dad was a lesser war hero. It still seemed to go on forever, and was so startling every time they fired a shot. I had never heard a gun fired before, other than on TV Westerns, and was unprepared for the volume and the shock. My ears rang afterward and I thought that as tributes went, I liked the flowers better than all those awful guns.

  They lowered the casket into the ground and all the adults cried. Finally, we left the flowers standing around the grave and solemnly made our way the seven miles back to our house, where we were surrounded by casseroles and the effort at jovial company of siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles.

  After the relatives departed, it was back to the business of trying to live a normal life, but my mother was never the same. She lived most of her life in grief, and it was pointed out to me by an intuitive friend, long after she died, that the way I later grieved loss as an adult was with a depth that seemed to be in honor of my mother, beyond the sadness measured in my own adult life. (I came to see in my forties that I had lived feeling that if I were not sad, I was dishonoring my mother’s grief and my father’s death. In 1984, when she was married to my second stepfather, my favorite of the two, my mother told me that it was the first Christmas she had not been sad “in thirty years,” and gave me a meaningful look.)

  Every morning that I lived with Mama, she sat with her cup of guilty coffee and chain-smoked guilty Salem cigarettes (she was a devout Mormon), staring out the window, thinking of the past. I believe she did this for all of her widowed life, even through her third and fourth marriages—up until my last step-dad’s understanding of the depth of her love for my dad, as a widower himself, finally broke the spell. She then lived a few years of long-deserved relative happiness before her death from lung cancer in 1993.