A Notion of Pelicans

by Donnna Salli

  “That damn Marcus,” I said, out loud.

  Leave it to Marcus to pick a day like this, one where we’ve got to be somewhere, at a certain time, to pull some kind of stunt. I’m not one to quibble with the Lord. But some days I wonder. Why’d He put men and women in the same galaxy, let alone the same house?

  My mama shed more tears.

  If you ask me, she was too beautiful. Mama was a slip of a woman, about five-foot-three, less than a hundred pounds, and she had unbelievable hair. It was thick but soft, and when she took it down, it hung in waves down her back. That hair had multiple personalities. If you ran your fingers through it or brushed it for her, you’d find shades of blonde and dark, with a trace of auburn to boot—straight hairs and curly ones, fine hairs and unruly ones, all mixed together. I loved to stand behind her and run her hairbrush down the length of it, watching her face in the mirror. Back then, Mama always had a surprised look when she saw her own face. Like, somewhere between frying morning eggs and drying the last supper dish, she’d forgotten how pretty it was.

  Too pretty. That wasn’t her fault—but once the bus has mowed you down, whether you were in the street or on the sidewalk doesn’t matter. All Mama ever wanted was to be a good wife. I heard her say it a hundred times. But she had a run of rum luck. If you ask me, she was destined for it. Not only was she beautiful, she was sweet—and that was her fault.

  My daddy was pretty, too. Lord, how we loved him. He was tall and dark, about six feet, I guess, with broad shoulders, strong arms and a face like a cherub. But his best feature was his smile. I’ve got this thing for smiles. Daddy had a hypnotic face all on its own, but when he smiled, the heavens took notice. He seemed to glow with this boyish light that life couldn’t put out. And life was doing its damnedest in those days.

  I was three when I really started remembering things. We were in the Depression then, and everybody we knew was rowing the same boat—if you can imagine so much rowing in northern Iowa. The thing Marcus and I have always loved about life up here is the water. At night a person can sit in our darkened great room and watch the lights of freighters gliding past out on the lake, chugging off to some port in Canada or on over to the St. Lawrence Seaway. What we looked at out the window in Iowa was tillable land. Mama was born a Southern belle, then her family moved to Iowa. She married Daddy at nineteen, and they set up on a little farm. It was a few acres, a few cows, a few chickens and pigs. Things were hard, so hard that Daddy took to going off to look for work. He’d hop a train and be gone for a spell. There was no shame in it. A lot of men rode the rails back then, and I’d bet Daddy wasn’t the only married one. The important thing was, he always came back.

  The farm was off the main road next to the tracks, and Mama and I would see hoboes walking down them every day. Hoboes came to the house all the time, asking for food. Sometimes they’d do some odd job for Mama, sometimes they’d just eat. Some of them, she let spend the night in the barn. Nowadays you’d have to wonder if you weren’t letting some pervert in, to practice God-knows-what on your cows. But back then, it wasn’t such a problem. People could still believe in the milk of human kindness. Mama would always say, “We’ve got to share what we have with the less fortunate.” But she didn’t let me talk to the men much. I always wished she would, because I wondered if they hadn’t seen my daddy, or if they had a little girl of their own in some far-off place like Des Moines or Sioux City. I minded Mama, though, without question. If I didn’t, she’d settle into her rocking chair and call me to kneel in front of her. I had to place my hands on her knees and keep them there, while she looked into my eyes and scolded me. The words seemed to go right into my soul. She didn’t need to do more.

  It seemed like I was always waiting for things—which maybe explains why I’m not one to wait for things now. When I was about five, the most beautiful dress in the world hung in Harriman’s for what seemed like forever. It was blue velveteen and had a white satin tie that went almost to the floor. I wanted that dress. Mama kept saying, “It’ll go on sale, Lucy. You’ve got to learn patience.” I learned patience until it was coming out my ears. Every time we went into Harriman’s, I held my breath. I dreaded the day we’d go in and find that some other little girl’s mother had bought my dress. But then, mercifully, the price came down to two beautiful dollars.

  And, of course, there was Daddy. We were always waiting for him. We never knew when he was coming. We’d hear footsteps on the porch, the door would open, and there he’d be. The times when he was home were like a holiday. I’d pull down the few books we owned, and he would read to me. Mama got younger and prettier—she hummed a lot and got this mysterious smile on her face. In the morning, she’d float out of their room when she went down to start the fire.

  From where I’m sitting now—and in my mind, we couldn’t get much softer—I can hardly believe those years were in the same century. Mama canned everything, from green beans to applesauce to meat, which in summer was hard to store fresh. Compared to how we live today, everybody roughed it. The only bathrooms we had were outhouses, aromatic old things the neighbor boys tipped over every Halloween. For light, people burned kerosene—it was dirty, stinking stuff. But what I remember most is bath nights. I miss them. Daddy would drag the big round tub next to the stove, and then he and Mama would put into it the water heating on the stovetop, then add cold water to make it just right. “You first, Lucy Belle,” Daddy would say. Then, when I was done, Mama would get in, and finally, him.

  All of us in the same water.

  I wish Mama and Daddy could see this house. They would be amazed. Marcus and I have our own rooms with attached baths, each with a separate shower and tub. Marcus’s is the master bath. The shower in there is a walk-in, sit-down affair with dual showerheads. Good Lord, I thought when we moved in. As if an old coot like him had even a prayer of luring someone in there with him—unless it was a home care nurse.

  Even with Daddy going off to find work, he and Mama couldn’t make the payments on the farm, and we had to leave it. We moved to a house in town, and that turned out to be okay because Mama and I had less to do when Daddy was gone. They sold all the livestock except Araby, our youngest cow, so pretty and red with a white star between her eyes. She made the move with us, into a stall Daddy fixed up in the back shed. Every day, Mama and I milked her. I think Araby liked me best. She stood very still as I pulled at her teats and let me tuck my head up along the warm underside of her belly. I could almost do the whole job myself. Mama only had to step in and get the last few squirts. In the evening we walked door-to-door selling milk, the pail balanced between us like it was brimming with gold.

  One thing I’m sure of—coming out of a background like that, you know when you’ve got it good. You appreciate a windfall. Candy was a rare thing in our house, but my best friend, Mattie Hastings, was never out of it. Her family was lucky enough to still be out in the country, and the Baby Ruth Company rented advertising space on her father’s big round barn. How I envied Mattie that barn. As long as the ad was on it, the company kept the Hastings supplied with boxes of Baby Ruths. Lucky for me, Mattie wasn’t stingy.

  Marcus and I have always tried not to be stingy, either, which is why we were going to this fancy reception tonight, which we were about to be late for. Criminy, where can that man be? I thought. I zipped up my new black dress and called the east side store. I run our novelty and gifts business, while Marcus runs the liquor stores. We’ve got three of them, so he can be hard to find if he wants to be. Gary, the manager, got called to the phone from unpacking a shipment of Argentinean wine. “Boss man came through about three o’clock,” he said.

  “You haven’t heard from him since?”

  “Said he was going straight home . . . Say, Gordy, you want to check this lady out? This one—she’s first. That’s okay, ma’am. Okay. Sorry, Lucy. What was I saying?”

  “Marcus. You haven’t heard from him.”

  I could picture Gary doing an ill-at-ease shuffle, trying to figure
how to not tell me something, or how to convincingly not tell me something that he couldn’t because he didn’t know. I waited. Finally, he said, “What can I tell you, Lucy?”

  I let him off. “Yeah, I know. Thanks, Gary. If he shows up, tell him I’m waiting on him and I’m not getting any younger.”

  Marcus and I have been under a truce for years. I thought, Okay, he stopped off at the bank or something. It’s not the end of the world. I’m not going to let him get my goat over this. I plucked my Cuban heels off the rack in my shoe closet—even a grande dame likes to wag a few tongues—and hurried down. I’d do my part. I’d have dinner on the table when he dragged his sorry ass home.

  I dropped the heels by the front door and sprinted for the kitchen. For an old biddy, I can still move pretty fast. I tied Marcus’s Kiss-the-Cook apron on, lifted the lid from the potato pot, and on the strong smell of the spuds shot back to the worst year of my life. 1933. My breath stopped. My pulse soared. I stood back and watched Mama lift the lid on her big cast-iron pot.

  The bubbles were rising and breaking around the potatoes as she pierced them. I heard a knock at the front door.

  “Get that, Luce, will you?” Mama said.

  I was just turned six, and happy to help. “Yes’m.” I skipped from the kitchen into the front hall. It was Daddy’s brother Jess and a stranger. Uncle Jess introduced the man. “This is Mr. Cudahy, from the railroad.”

  By this time Mama had joined us, and they said to her, maybe she should sit down. She said, looking scared, “Why?” and when she didn’t move, Mr. Cudahy said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Matusek, ma’am. Your husband’s body was found on the tracks down in Muscatine County. Looks like—I’m sorry, ma’am. It looks like he fell off a train, got caught up under it.”

  Mama’s eyes clouded over as he spoke. She started to shake. She fell to the front-hall rug and hunched into a little ball. Then she started flailing at the air. Uncle Jess dropped to his knees. He held her wrists and talked low to her. Mama started to wail, then, and say Daddy’s name. “Al, Al, Al.” She didn’t stop.

  That’s when I couldn’t stand it. I turned and ran through the kitchen to the back porch. I scrunched up sideways in the swing and pressed my hands to my ears.

  I don’t know how long I was there, but suddenly, the house smelled of something burning. The water in the potato pot had boiled away, and the potatoes had seared to the bottom. I saw Uncle Jess come into the kitchen. He wrapped his fingers around one of the metal handles, then pulled away quick. “Damn!” he said, hopping and sucking. When the pain wasn’t so fierce, he pulled the pot to the side, using his shirttail for a potholder. Even when the pot cooled, it stunk to high heaven. Uncle Jess carried the whole shebang out and threw it in the alley.

  Marcus and I drove by the house last summer. The place was a mess—the window glass was gone, the doors were off. It occurred to me that potato pot might still be out there, right where Uncle Jess dropped it. But I didn’t look. You know how some things in life stick with you? I found out later Daddy had been naked from the waist down when they found him, that a train will do that to a body. I was married for years before I could bring myself to boil up a pot of potatoes. Marcus had to do it. The smell of the damn things cooking gave me horrible shivers.

  Marcus. Where was he? I put the lid back on the pot and shrugged off a bad feeling. I checked my watch and kept thinking about Daddy. After he was gone, I missed him terribly. And if that wasn’t bad enough, from that day on, I really lost Mama, too. At the wake, she threw herself onto the casket and shrieked she had nothing to live for. Grandmama pulled her off and glanced at me sitting between Grandma and Grandpa Matusek. She said to Mama, “Mind what you say.”

  Mama went into a spin. With Daddy’s death, the life went right out of her. We spent the first couple weeks after the funeral at Grandmama and Grandaddy’s, and when we did come home, Mama would lay on the bed and not get up. My older cousins came over morning and evening and milked Araby, and they took over carrying the milk pail around. I begged Mama, “Let me go, too,” but she refused.

  “You’re too little to go without your mama.”

  “M-a-a-a-ma.”

  “Lucy, don’t talk back.”

  I sat there and watched her get smaller. She even stopped caring what she looked like—and that was scariest to me. Her beautiful hair got dirtier and messier. I’d try to brush it and could hardly get the bristles through the tangles. They were bunched up like a hornet’s nest underneath. Mama would put her arms around me and say in a voice I hardly recognized, “Poor baby, lost her daddy. Poor baby. Poor, poor baby.”

  She wasn’t the Mama I’d known. She scared me, and she scared other people, too, I guess, because Grandmama and Grandaddy came over one day and took us home with them. Some farmer bought my beautiful Araby for a song. Then every trace of life with Daddy was gone.

  I think I started to see, then, what a woman could become if she loved anyone too much. Maybe Mama was just weak-spirited and would have gone a little off even if Daddy had lived. I don’t know. But I figured out early on, a person would do well to be wary—just in case—and keep from getting too fond.

  Alone at night in my room, I started thinking of myself as the Roman goddess Diana. I’m not much of a reader, except an occasional romance, but one of the books Daddy used to read to me from was about the gods and goddesses. I pictured myself snapping a golden whip, driving Diana’s chariot, or sprinting across the fields, bringing down pheasant and white tails with a shining bow and arrow. I especially liked that Diana was goddess of the moon. Those winter nights the first year after Daddy died, nothing seemed as strong to me as Lady Luna, hanging naked over the world behind that round, unpierceable shield.

  With Grandmama tending her, Mama came back to health. She wasn’t ever her old self, but if you hadn’t known her before, you mightn’t have noticed. A couple of years later, she got married again. That didn’t make me very happy. I couldn’t stand the man. Well, I guess I liked him okay at first. But she went too far. She tried to make me call him Daddy.

  “He’s not my daddy,” I said. I dug my heels in, deep.

  Before Mama could call me to the rocker, Wallace stepped in. “Don’t push the girl. She can call me anything she wants, long as it’s not Asshole to my face.”

  That’s how Wallace always talked, even when I was around. After he married Mama, he moved us to a nice-enough little house on the outskirts of town, right next to the Byerly brothers’ place. Out our back windows, we could see their big fields of corn, row after row of healthy green stalks stretching tall and promising from the edge of our yard farther than a girl could see.

  Wallace could be like a drop of honey on your tongue, then turn into a bitter pill. Mama was pregnant and not having an easy time—her body weakened at the same time as her mind. She was in the outhouse one morning, heaving her insides up, when Wallace marched across the yard. He was really put out, and yanked the door open. She was kneeling with her head hanging over the hole, and he snorted and said, “When you going to be done in here? I need some hot water, to shave.” Like she was having a facial or something.

  “I’ll be in. I’m just a little slow this morning.”

  “More like every morning. I don’t understand you. My ma birthed twelve and she never made a stink out of it. Forget it. I’m going to town.”

  “What time you want supper?”

  “When I’m ready. Think you can handle that?”

  God forbid he should get a bottle in him. One Sunday toward the end of Mama’s pregnancy, he sat at the table all afternoon, downing whiskey. Mama tiptoed around him and talked real careful. When she started to get dinner, Wallace said, “I don’t want no supper.” He got up and sidestepped out. We found out later he went to the local still and drank some more. He came home just after ten. Mama and I were sitting together at the table, playing cards and listening to the radio, when he stumbled up the porch stairs and tripped over the threshold. He landed smack on his nose.

>   I knew better than to laugh. Mama and I stood up and grabbed hands. We just looked at each other.

  “Waddaya lookin’ at?” Wallace said. It was like he’d never seen either of us before. He picked himself up, sloppy-like. “I’m tired of the way you females treat me. An’ I’m tired of not feelin’ welcome in my own house.”

  Mama pushed me behind her. “Now, Wally, you don’t know what you’re saying. We’re always happy to see you. Aren’t we, Luce?” She prodded me with her elbow.

  I nodded. “Yes.” I was telling a lie, but I learned early that a lie can sometimes save you.

  “Hell,” Wallace said. “No other man would put up with what I do. You gotch’er nerve, keepin’ a goddamn shrine in the front room. A goddamn altar to goddamn Al Matusek.” Wallace lurched past us and started for their bedroom. “I’ll blow the godda—” He hiccupped. “Go’damn miserable thing away.” Mama and I knew he meant business. He was heading for the closet where he kept his guns.

  “Wallace, don’t,” Mama begged.

  He kept going. Mama grabbed me, and we bolted like rabbits for the front door. My heart was pounding, it was going to jump out of my chest, and I could only imagine what Mama’s was doing, carrying so much baby. I grabbed the offending picture of Daddy and me off the front room table on the way out. It had been taken the last Christmas. I was wearing the velveteen dress. Daddy had on a white shirt and smart-looking vest.

  We didn’t have any neighbors close—in later years, I’d think Wallace planned it that way—so there was nowhere for us to go except out back to the corn field. Mama pushed me in ahead of her. She was frantic. “Faster, Lucy—go. Don’t you dare stop.” We half ran, half crawled, until we were deep in the field.

  Thank God, Wallace was too drunk to follow.