My Uncle Harvey needed to be taken to Syracuse a few more times over the course of the late autumn. His health seemed to improve a little between each trip, and I got so I looked forward to these outings. After the appointments, we made a point of stopping somewhere for a meal. My relatives usually travel in clumps, so seeing my aunt and uncle by themselves was a rare treat. Fortunately, over a creamy white lunch of chicken and biscuits followed by rice pudding, I thought to tell them both how much I was enjoying our time together.
In October, I went to Chicago on a business trip. Being out of Freeville for the first time in three months made me think. I’m pushing fifty. I’ve seen the world, but I’m living on the same tiny patch of land where I was born. I’m surrounded by people who are not impressed with me. They don’t care that my syndicated column has twenty-two million readers, that I’ve been on the Today show—that I’ve locked horns with Bill O’Reilly, or that my name was once used as a clue on Jeopardy. They remember what a doofus I was in high school. My nemesis of thirty years ago from the cheerleading squad, “Pepper,” works at the local ob/gyn office. When I saw her at our reunion last summer, she said, “Oh, Amy, you cut your hair.”
I was a mediocre cheerleader. My heart was in it and I could yell plenty loudly, but my muscles, tendons, and cartilage were basically uncooperative. Seeing Pepper at the reunion, all I could think about was how I couldn’t quite do a Russian split and how mean she was to me, three decades ago. “Yeah, Pepper, that’s right,” I replied frostily. “I did cut my hair. In 1982.” (Given my luck, when it’s time for me to get my next pap smear I have a feeling I know who will be snapping her gloves into place.)
I started thinking about my choices. What I mean is that I started to wonder if driving elderly people around or taking cats to be shaved was really a good use of my time. I still had a daily column to write and professional prospects to explore. I was still thinking about this on the way back from Chicago. I was driving back from the airport, headed back into my little hometown and back into our small lives. Despite my daughter’s advice, I hadn’t had a date in many moons. The last good kiss I had was years ago. Following Emily’s directive after dropping her off at college I went on Match.com and typed in Freeville’s zip code and the guys in the database looked—every last one of them—too familiar to me. I couldn’t think of the last time I’d come home tipsy and decided to sleep in. On a recent Friday night, I found myself feeling kind of excited because my niece had a soccer game and I was going to go. For the first time in many weeks, I wore lipstick.
I returned from Chicago on a Tuesday night. The next morning, I called my mother to see if she wanted a ride to the Queen Diner, because it was Wednesday and that’s what we do on Wednesdays. Rachel answered the phone. “Come down here,” she said.
I raced to my mother’s house. My Aunt Millie, Rachel, and Mom were sitting in the living room. Aunt Millie asked me to sit down. Then she got tears in her eyes, and so Rachel took over. Rachel said that Aunt Lena had died of a heart attack the night before. Aunt Lena—she wasn’t even sick. But then I thought about how tired she had looked, there in the hospital waiting room, sleeping with her purse in her lap.
Lena was eighty-five, and the death of an eighty-five-year-old woman can hardly be described as a tragedy. But it was a shock, and we started missing her immediately. Our family has been so blessed, it’s almost embarrassing. The last family member to die passed away in 1966. That’s over forty years of everybody waking up each morning, healthy.
Family members from all over the country converged in Freeville to celebrate and mourn. It was obvious that Lena had lived well because she was so loved. My aunt—she worked at the Freeville school cafeteria. She was a lunch lady. She also raised a family and then she raised a few of her grandchildren and she had rescued a few of her great-grandchildren. They were all there to thank her. She was something.
At the funeral at the Freeville United Methodist Church, my cousin Roger led the service, and Rachel, my cousin Jan, my niece Clara, and I performed as an auxiliary gene pool choir and sang the old gospel song “I’ll Fly Away.” During our rehearsal at the church I couldn’t get through the song because my tears kept chasing the tune away. I asked Rachel how to sing it without crying. She gave me a tip: “You have to look down at the music. Don’t look out at the congregation. If you look at them and see how sad they are you’re toast.” But when the time came and we were gathered in front of the altar, standing in a little cluster overlooking my beloved aunt’s casket, I realized that I couldn’t not look at my family.
I found my mother sitting next to Anne in her usual pew. My mother, who never says “good-bye” but only says “so long” was still and expressionless. Her face was a stoic mask, but her gray eyes were red-rimmed and watery. That morning Mom had said to me, “I only wish I had known Lena better.” I wondered how you could possibly know a person better whom you had been acquainted with for seventy-eight years and had seen almost daily for much of that time, but I think I understood what she meant. Lena was by far the most reserved of my aunts. And when you love people you always want to know them better.
We sang.
“Some bright morning when this life is over
I’ll fly away
To that home on God’s celestial shore
I’ll fly away
I’ll fly away oh glory
I’ll fly away (in the morning)
When I die hallelujah by and by
I’ll fly away.”
Aunt Millie stood up. She said she couldn’t eulogize her sister. But then she said, simply, “We used to be four sisters, and now we are three.”
I know it’s a substantial and unique burden my generation faces. We can have babies until we’re fifty years old and still our parents linger at the party—too healthy to give up this world. Studies show—and many letters to my column reflect—that this lifestyle of being sandwiched between needy generations is extremely hard on us. We miss work, we miss school, we miss having friendships and relationships because of our caregiving duties. We get sick, we get tired, and we wonder when we’ll catch a break.
Here I am in advanced middle age and I finally realize what it means to be an adult. To give, with no possibility that I’ll be rewarded. I used to think that being a parent defined my adulthood. Mothering was the making of me. But emotionally, mothering is little league caretaking; it’s nothing compared to trying to keep these wonderful women in my life—knowing all the while that one day they will leave it.
Autumn took on its own beauty. I saw the leaves change and listened to the daily progress of hundreds upon hundreds of geese honking overhead as they headed south for the winter. I hadn’t experienced fall in Freeville since graduating from high school. Football and soccer season heated up. I sat with Rachel in the shadow of our old alma mater and cheered for my niece, fourteen-year-old Clara. I painted the porch steps, put away the kayaks, and put my garden and my mother’s garden to bed.
From my house on Main Street I watched the leaves dangle from the trees and drift to the ground in a rain of color. I spent the morning of my forty-eighth birthday raking them into giant mounds. I handed out candy from my front porch to a couple hundred ghosts, goblins, and little Paris Hiltons on Halloween, called Emily and described the scene to her. I felt my usual seasonal craving for sharp cheese and maple syrup. On my occasional business trips to Chicago I wandered around our quiet apartment with its beautiful lake and city views and realized that I no longer really lived there. I had moved back home.
Emily and I sent letters back and forth—written on paper and sealed in envelopes. She described reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and said, “Samuel Johnson reminds me of Bill Clinton.” She was happy, and I was happy for her. I wrote back, describing how Chester the cat kept escaping off the porch and how one of these days I wasn’t going to go after him and he could just see how he liked living on the street, reduced to dancing on the corner of Union and Main for Friskies. I caught her up on th
e doings of her grandmother, aunts, and cousins. I described our most recent Wednesday breakfast at the Queen Diner and told her how her great-aunt’s death had left an empty chair at our gatherings that I couldn’t quite adjust to. I also told her I was seriously thinking about renovating and enlarging our house in order to make it better suited for a permanent home.
My little house on Main Street was starting to feel too small. I wanted ten more feet upstairs, with a sleeping porch overlooking the creek. I could see it in my mind’s eye. Sometimes I pressed my hands against the wall of the back bedroom upstairs. M-o-o-o-v-e.
I called a local builder I knew and asked him to take a look at the house. I first met Bruno when I was in seventh grade. Over the years he had built up a successful business, and Emily and I would see signs bearing his name in front of construction projects and handsome historic houses around the county. We ran into him now and then with his daughters at day camp, ice-skating, or over at Clark’s Sure Fine Food Mart in Dryden. When I checked his company’s Web site I noticed his motto: “Dreams built on time.”
Bruno said he was happy to hear from me and that he’d meet me at the house to talk about the renovation project. He parked his truck in my driveway and came inside. He walked around my little place, went upstairs and down, grabbed a piece of paper and distractedly drew the floor plan.
“Well, what do you think?” I asked him. My voice was suddenly high-pitched and eager, like a chipmunk.
He looked me in the eye. My, but his eyes are blue, I thought. “Well, Amy. It’s like this. This is a tiny house on a little lot right on the street. The renovation would cost more than the house is worth.” He paused. “Now—some little houses are so special that it doesn’t matter. You’ll do whatever it takes to make them right.”
I thought about the day Emily and I moved in and how the screen door came off in my hand as my family stood on the porch and watched. Every year I had done one thing that I could afford to improve the place, and by now it was on the verge of adorable. I was proud of my little house and happy that Bruno thought it was so special. He had a reputation for having impeccable taste.
He continued, “… this, however, is not one of those special houses. I think if you want a bigger house, you should probably move.”
He asked if he could sit down, and I offered him coffee. He asked if I had heard about his divorce. I had not. He started to talk. He stayed a little longer, and then he stayed even longer after that.
After he left, I thought about him. Like everybody else in my hometown world, I’ve known him for most of my life. He was one of thirteen children who grew up on a dairy farm three miles from ours. After our own farm fell apart, my sisters and I spent part of every day during three successive summers at their house. Mom had gone to work full-time and our place was lonely and quiet, so we joined the herd of kids and livestock at their farm. We swam in the pond and ate chaotic suppers at their table. I remembered watching Bruno herd their Holsteins through the pasture and toward the barn for the evening milking. The harvest before my freshman year of high school, my sisters and I helped him and some of his many brothers and sisters stack hay bales into their barn.
Watching as Bruno drove away, I remembered exactly the way he looked in his high school basketball uniform in 1974—he was a rangy farm boy wearing a ponytail and short satin trunks. His legs were like springs, and he had a nice jump shot, but his strength was under the boards. Bruno was a scrappy rebounder and turnover specialist. I remembered him as being fast, strong, unpredictable, and hard to contain. Life seemed to have sanded down his edges, however. Now he seemed both strong and soft at the same time. I had a hankering to go after Bruno, to ask him to take a walk with me. I wanted us to play checkers and to sit at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper together. I wanted to go on a bike ride with him.
Snow was in the air, and I could smell the long northern winter on the horizon. Soon a new season would drift down and cover Main Street—and the fields, woods, and streams beyond—in a six-month blanket of white. In a couple of weeks, Emily would be coming home for Christmas. The day before I had pulled two pairs of ice skates from the closet—one for Emily and one for me—and placed them next to the front door.
It’s funny how things happen. It was nothing like what my friends had all told me over the years when they would try to worry me into a relationship: “Get out there! You’ll never meet a guy in your living room!” they’d say. I took their advice and also reflected this take-charge philosophy in my advice column, telling singles to sign up for online dating sites and to take cooking classes. I have been single for seventeen years. I have stopped trying, I have started trying, and then I have given up all over again. I have forgotten and revived my adolescent crush on Donny Osmond in—golly—four decades.
And now, what do you know? It turns out you can meet a guy in your living room.
Wednesday morning came around. I was standing in the parking lot of the Queen Diner, about to join my family and resume our lifelong conversation. I pondered my options. I knew exactly what my mother, sister, cousins, aunts, and I would talk about. I pictured our little pile of separate checks and the tip coins next to the plates. I wondered if the women of my family would miss me at breakfast—just this once. I stared at my phone, nervously rehearsed my side of the conversation, and dialed Bruno’s number. He answered on the first ring.
“I figured that since you turned down my renovation project, the least you could do is buy me a cup of coffee,” I said to him.
“Where and when?” he asked.
I ran into the Queen and joined my family at the table. I ordered coffee but no breakfast. Rachel asked why I was so antsy.
“I think I need to skip breakfast today,” I said.
“What, you have to work?” my mother asked, rhetorically. (I had never missed Wednesday breakfast for work—or any other reason.)
Aunt Jean said, “Hot date?” Everyone except for me laughed.
“Um. I have to meet someone in Ithaca,” I said.
“Well, I can’t believe you’re blowing off breakfast just to meet someone in Ithaca,” Rachel said.
Then she looked at me. She knew. “But if you have to go, you have to go…”
As I reached behind me for my scarf and coat, Mom said, “Well, it’s not like we won’t see you later.” One thing my family and I are really good at is seeing one another later.
We’ve been seeing one another later for generations. And so on this day, I decided to cut short my weekly date with the women in my life, and with their grudging permission, I took a chance on having a Wednesday morning conversation with someone who doesn’t share my DNA.
Bruno and I met and talked for a long time. We drank three gallons of coffee apiece. Then we drove out through town and into the countryside, past the hills, fields, and forests and through the landscape of our shared childhoods. He talked about raising his daughters alone, and I talked about raising my daughter alone. Between us we had five daughters, all in the throes of various stages of adolescence—his oldest and Emily were born exactly a week apart. Bruno told me the sad story of the ending of his marriage and I told him mine. We had both taken many years to figure out what had gone wrong.
He said, “I have an idea, Amy. Let’s do everything differently this time.”
When Emily came home for Christmas vacation, she walked into the house and said, “Wow, what’s with all the flowers, Mommy?!” I replied with a sentence that, in all our life together, I had never once uttered to my daughter.
“Honey—I think I have a boyfriend!”
“I think I have a boyfriend too!” she said. He was a boy at college who had taken her out for coffee, movies, and dinner. “So, who’s your boyfriend, anyway?” she asked. When I told her she said, “Bruno? Hubba hubba.”
Over the next few weeks Bruno and I surrounded ourselves with our combined five daughters, sledding, skiing, skating, playing games, watching movies, and cooking together. I gingerly brought him around Mo
m and the aunties and they offered their hearty approval; at our next breakfast at the Queen, we clinked our coffee cups together and toasted this surprising romantic development.
Then, one frosty night, standing together on the sidewalk, Bruno said that he was sorry he had declined to renovate my house, but then happily—he asked if he could renovate my life instead.
And I decided to let him.
© Brasco Productions
AMY DICKINSON is the author of the syndicated advice column “Ask Amy,” which appears in more than 150 newspapers nationwide. She is the host of a biweekly feature on NPR’s Talk of the Nation and is a panelist on NPR’s quiz show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! She lives in Chicago and Freeville, New York.
Also by Amy Dickinson
Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things:
A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Coming Home
Praise for
The Mighty Queens of Freeville
“Dickinson’s irresistible memoir reads like a letter from an upbeat best friend.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Buoyant and bright, Dickinson offers a refreshingly open and sincere tribute to life’s most important relationships.”
—Booklist
“[Dickinson is] a woman who understands the power of defusing pain with humor. Which just might be the best advice there is.”
—People
“A charming new memoir.… [It’s] true to that familiar voice, yet it also reveals a Dickinson who is as sophisticated as she is folksy.”
—The Daily Beast
“The book hits all the right contemporary women’s-lit buttons, from the title, which immediately tells you you’re in sisters-of-the-traveling-pants territory, to the wry, bright writing style, to the cast of characters in Dickinson’s family. They may suffer from an unusually high divorce rate, but they’re terrific at sharing communal pancake breakfasts and being there for each other.”
The Mighty Queens of Freeville Page 17