I waited for a respectful amount of time, then asked, “How did you leave Occonomowoc? How did you come here?”
Connie began rambling. I couldn’t understand her. I thought perhaps she had drunk too much and now the talk was over. I realized after a minute that she was talking about her house in Occonomowoc.
“I always wanted new furniture for my livin’ room. The stuff we had was ugly. Not anything I picked. Somebody’s old sofa, pillows they gave away at the bank, junky stuff, nothing that I ever picked. So I started savin’; I worked overtime at the cannery, keepin’ that extra for my livin’ room fund. I didn’t tell Dwight—that’s his name. I told Clara though, after a while. That fund made me feel better. Things got worse though. He got meaner, beat me harder. I got meaner too, stopped feelin’. I remember him smackin’ me; I could hear the smacks, but I couldn’t feel ‘em. I don’t think my face showed anything to him, but inside it was like my eyes were squintin’ at him, and I was thinkin’, Now I’m meaner than you. I drank more, off on my own, and I worked lots of hours, savin’, thinkin’ about the fund.”
“That’s when I was most scared about you,” Clara said. “You stopped talkin’ about it anymore.”
“It was such tired shit; there wasn’t nuthin’ more to say. I’m glad you got scared. That last week Clara visited me at the cannery for lunch every day. I remember the first day she bought us each an ice-cream sandwich. We were lickin’ away and Clara says, ‘I got a fund too.’ She’d been savin’ it ever since her fella left her. But she didn’t tell me about it. I still don’t understand what the secret was, Clara.”
“It was important. If I’d talked about it, I might have lost my purpose. You know, we talk about quittin’ cigarettes every day; then we chew up two more packs before the next day.”
“So, if you’d told me, I could have helped save more.”
Clara reached over and rapped her knuckles on Connie’s cigarette pack. With each word she rapped, “If I’d told you, you’d ‘ave talked me into buyin’ new living room curtains.”
I could see that something sore was passing between the two of them, and I made awkward movements of leaving the table.
I never learned the details of their departure from Occonomowoc.
The summer was coming to a close; the neighborhood families continued to leave their kitchens because of the heat and crowded into O’Donnel’s fish fry. The sisters had made friendly acquaintances and had grown to glory in their role as the cooks.
Odd uncles and divorced husbands came to visit the two at the kitchen window. Lighters flared in friendship; burly arms reached across the space to light Connie’s or to light Clara’s. Single men ordered two highballs with a wink to O’Donnel, and the second highball disappeared somewhere in the sisters’ region. I had watched the drinks increase in number. O’Donnel watched across his bar as they teased one more fellow to bring a couple. He poured them out with concealed irritation, compromised between being a good manager and a good old boy at the same time.
Seagram’s confessional overflowed after hours. In the beginning I liked sitting with them. They’d tease me and tug at my ponytail. They would introduce me to certain customers as “our college girl.” What I didn’t like was when they became drunk and emotional. Clara would stroke the back of my head, and Connie would pat my hand. They would say things like, “You’re a good girl,” and “You’re going to be okay.” Across the table they’d look at each other, nodding their heads in agreement. Once Clara looked at me, and her dolphin eyes welled with tears. Such a sad smile, I thought. Even her smile was like a dolphin’s. She was looking at the whole world with that look, not just at me. After that I needed to convince myself that Clara couldn’t see into the future.
O’Donnel lost patience one night. “I don’t want you two hanging around here after hours anymore. Take your boyfriends somewhere else.”
The last Friday I worked, Marge O’Donnel called me in early. “Your sister Annie? What’s she, about seventeen? Bring her in; she can make some spending money. Those bitches are on a binge, no doubt about it. Ruthie Shulta was in here a bit ago, and she told me they’ve been sneakin’ drinks out’a her and Ed’s liquor cabinet. He had to start marking the bottles. Then yesterday was their day to clean over at the Shultas’ house and they never showed, never called or nothin’.”
We were failures as fish-fryers. Three more helpers and still the fish wouldn’t have been on time for the customers. We lacked harmony. I tried to imitate the little I knew about the beer-batter recipe. Marge got half-through grating the cabbages and gave up. She pulled her nephew in from the bar to finish the job. Annie would have the potatoes fried before my fish was even a pale yellow. The food wasn’t good. Customers made jokes about one more chance or they would switch to Weber’s fry on State Street. Marge circulated around to most of the tables, berating the sisters when she could. O’Donnel draped his arm over the tap handles and shook his head to himself.
My college was small, isolated in the Wisconsin River valley. I settled into dormitory life easily. The other girls were like me. Though they came from different places, they had similar stories of home. We had nightgown sessions, all of us together with our knees touching. We determined out loud the details of our futures—our children, our husbands, our careers. Maggie Brandt was going to be an optometrist, like her father, and live somewhere near the ocean. Barb Cunningham was going to have three children before she was thirty. She would send them to Montessori schools and go to graduate school when the youngest was twelve. I was as dreamy as the rest of them. I decided whatever I would do it must allow me to travel.
Liz Bently said, “Ah, India or Thailand!”
I said I didn’t think I was ready for the Third World.
“Well, what are you ready for?” she asked.
“Europe,” I said. “It would be interesting to be in the place where we come from.” She rolled her eyes at this. “Besides,” I said, “there are so many trains there. I love riding trains. You can just sit by the window and watch the country go by; watch all sorts of people getting on and off.”
“Just like watching a movie,” Liz said. “Safe as that. Why not just get a job in a movie theater?” She hurt me with those words.
One Friday night, after a particularly satisfying and giddy slumber party, I rolled away from the other girls to sleep and then dreamed about the sisters. We were together in a bus full of strangers. It seemed in the dream that I was their sister, and we were going somewhere together, but I didn’t know where. It was black outside; the bus windows were covered with rain. The only light was the occasional glare of headlights from passing cars. The only sound was the rumble of the bus engine and the back-and-forth rhythm of its windshield wipers. I sat in a seat alone. Clara and Connie sat in the seat across the aisle, and they were as quiet as everyone else in the bus. I could see their faces only when they were illuminated by the passing headlights, and this illumination lasted only a moment at a time. Everyone was in the dark—no one made a sound—and when I finally opened my mouth to ask where we were going, I had no voice. It was a horrible feeling of being alone; we were all together on the bus, but no one seemed to acknowledge it. More than anything I wanted Clara and Connie to know I was there. I wanted Clara to reach over and touch my hand the way she used to in the tavern.
I awoke in my darkened dormitory, all around me the individual sleeping forms of the other girls. I still had no voice, no idea if I were to awaken one of the girls what I would ask her. I drew what comfort I could from the proximity of their bodies, the rhythm of their breathing.
Not far into my senior year, I was offered a position as sixth-grade teacher at St. Agnes School. It wasn’t what I had aspired to. I had thought of my college education as preparation for the larger world, and I had set aside the offer as an option to fall back on if all else failed. But when I returned home in the spring for an interview with our pastor, our principal, and our parish board, I couldn’t say that failure in my other pursui
ts had brought me there, only my failure, perhaps, to pursue anything. Liz Bently had been astute when she asked me, “What are you ready for?” The truth was I was afraid of the future, and I thought that being afraid was the same as not being ready.
On the second day of school, still steadying myself in my new shoes as teacher, I found myself on the playground, heading off an argument between two of my tougher boys. I stood with both arms around the basketball they had been fighting over. Our discussion was about the advantages of sharing. It seemed I was getting through to them. But then I realized the small one, with the red hair and the slightly vicious overbite, had focused his attention on the sidewalk behind me. He was nudging his companion.
“Here come the cat ladies,” he whispered.
I turned to see Clara and Connie on the other side of the cyclone fence. Connie, as wiry as ever, pulled an equally wiry white cat along by a leash. The cat was uncooperative, circling around Connie’s ankles until it was tangled. At one point it pulled its head back against the leash with its small pink eyes squinted closed. Clara held her big, orange cat almost hidden in the fold of her great arms, the loop of her leash wrapped around her thick wrist. They made little progress along the walk. Connie spent time unraveling her charge. Finally she set it on the ground, positioning its paws in a straight line. Clara would walk ahead, then stop and wait for her sister, stroking her cat as she paused to smile at individual children on the playground.
I was uneasy about approaching them. They looked so odd, and some of the older children were laughing at them behind their hands. I called to Clara, who seemed to be smiling in my direction. I walked up to the fence, where some of the children were already congregating. Clara kept staring over my shoulder, but Connie recognized me.
“Clara, are ya blind? Look who’s here! Lady, what are you doing at school?”
“I teach here.”
Clara stroked the face of her cat with her thumb. “Isn’t that sompthin’, a teacher.”
The recess bell was ringing. Children were sifting back into the school. “Don’t go until you see where we live,” Connie said.
“I really have to go in,” I said.
“It’s right over there.” Clara pointed at the gate house across the street.
“There?”
“Yeah,” Connie said. “Stop by for a Coke later.”
I did walk across the road to the gate house that evening. I was curious about the sisters, but perhaps even more about the gate house. It had always been a kind of familiar monster across the road. A place I had thought I would only continue to wonder about. Once close to it, I found it a less threatening monster, more like a regular house when the shiplike lines were lost to my perspective. The landscape of graves was also out of my view behind some shrubbery that surrounded the yard. There was no front door, as the fence along the sidewalk came up too close to the border of the house. There appeared to be at least three possible entryways along the rear of the house, and I walked back and forth, at a loss as to which door I should knock on.
Before I came to any conclusion, Connie called from the deck above.
“Couldn’t find the door, hey?” She smiled, waiting for me at the top of the stairs. Clara was shaded behind the screen door. I couldn’t see her face, but in a shadowy way, her body smiled.
“Well, Connie, bring the girl in. Not much to see out there but rows of gonebys.”
“Rows of gonebys? Oh, the graves.” I laughed.
We passed through a dark entryway where we had to squeeze by Clara. First there was a smell of indoor cats and the stale, heavy air left by a thousand cigarettes.
“This is it,” Connie said, leading us into the main room with a flourish of her arms.
The room was spacious, brilliantly illuminated by the early evening sun, which shone through the many floor-to-ceiling windows. From what I could see, there were three cats total. The largest cat, the one that Clara had been holding that afternoon, lay supine in a square of sunlight reflected on the floor. The cat that Connie had been leading earlier was now clawing at a large padded structure supposedly designed for that purpose. The third cat I only glimpsed as it scurried down a darkened hallway. The floor was largely bare, and our heels echoed against the wood as we crossed it. The whole space reminded me of a dance studio. It could easily have been converted into one, but care had been taken to huddle their furniture around little area rugs to form little rooms within the larger room.
“Well, sit down here in the living room, my lady.” Connie pulled me down by my elbow into a plaid sofa. “That’s new, and that, and this.” She pointed to a coffee table, a lamp, and magazine stand. “Got all of this for less than half at a fire sale. A little smoke damage, but it’d get that way anyway just being with us.” This was true, since smoke pervaded the room, little clouds of it poised in the low sunlight. With each object she showed I would say, “Oh” and “That’s nice.” At the same time saying in my head, “Cheap veneer on the coffee table, or The fabric on the couch is loud and passed out of style five years ago.”
“How about some Cokes? Clara, get us some Cokes.” Clara slid away on her heavy feet.
“Over there is the dining room,’” Connie waved toward a table with four chairs. “That’s an old set, but we’ll get a new one someday.” She flickered about from one object to the next. “And that’s my baby.” She pointed to a modern-looking keyboard instrument.
“An organ?” I asked.
“Yeah, but it’s a special kind. It has numbers on all the keys that you match to numbers in a book. You can play just about anything but never have to read music. Hey, I tell you what, I’ll set up at the organ while you go see what is keeping Clara with the Cokes.”
I was relieved to get out of Connie’s new living room. I remembered the time Clara became angry with Connie—that business about spending their getaway money on new living room curtains. Her living room was all wrong—everything bought in a hurry. Standing in that room somehow made me feel her life was even more desperate than before.
I found Clara cutting up cheese. She said over her shoulder, “You see, we’ve quit drinking.”
“Yes, I thought so.” And since she brought it up, I risked, “How’d you do it?”
“Connie didn’t want to die. I didn’t want her to either.”
“Wouldn’t you have died too?”
“Maybe. You know, we drank together, but we drank different. I drank until I got too slow, passed out. Connie drank over the edge. She made herself stay awake to have another drink. She’d leave her body behind and just keep drinking.”
“Did she really almost die?”
“Damn right. She was sick and yellow. I could have kept drinking fine save for looking at her in the morning. We were barely working; then we weren’t working at all. I could handle that, but not for long, mind you. We had to turn around eventually. But Connie couldn’t stand not working, so she made drinking her job—like it would get her somewhere.”
“How are you now?”
“Good. This boat that we live in is the best place I ever lived. I’m getting close to sixty now; I enjoy the peace. We’ve got this place. We don’t owe.”
“How is Connie?”
Clara moved into the back hallway and lit a cigarette. “I think she must be fine, otherwise I couldn’t be fine, or is it vice versa? She plays her organ. The furniture here is the best she ever had. She keeps herself busy.”
“And you have your cats. How long have you had them?”
“Well, our two we’ve had since we came to Milwaukee. The shy one just came out of the cemetery one morning. Never made a sound, just sat on our steps and waited. Until we finally figured out to give her something. Strangest cat, doesn’t seem to care about either of us. But she doesn’t go away either.”
Clara eased her shoulders into the corner of the foyer and lodged her foot in the crack of the screen door. She would squeak it open when it was time to flick a glowing ash out into the night. Once she kept the door
open and stood in the air. “Did you see my garden down there?”
“No.”
“It’s right on the south side. I’m still pulling a lot of good stuff out of it. Maybe you’d like some squash.”
“Sure.”
Connie had started in on her organ music—“Greensleeves.” Clara said, “He’s been good to us you know.”
“Who?”
“The owner of this place. He owns the cemetery, isn’t that funny? Well, anyway, he was on the board of the treatment center me and Connie turned ourselves in to. When we got better, he took note of us and offered us this. Free rent, and we make enough with our house cleaning to take care of food and a lot else.”
“Does it ever bother you, living in a cemetery?”
“No—bothers Connie though. She pulls the curtains over the windows that look out on the grounds.”
That was my longest visit with the sisters. I wasn’t comfortable in their house. I didn’t like the smoke or the smell of cats. Sometimes I cut out articles about gardening or cats and took them to the two after morning mass, or I would stop by their fence on the way home if Clara was watering her garden. I maintained a certain social distance. This seemed appropriate. Did they understand this? They must have, since I don’t remember them pulling on me. They had their life, and I had mine.
I already had three thousand dollars in a savings account for my summer trip to Europe. It fascinated Connie that I could go that far, to places where the language was foreign. I handed her my small French-English phrase book over their fence one day. She stood still for a change, with her head bent down in the sun, her cat winding its leash around her skinny legs. She read the first line, “How are you today? Comment allez-vous aujourd’hui? Huh! That’s not so hard.”
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