Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories

by Jean Shepherd

  “I hear,” he answered.

  Finally, as I picked up my sack of groceries, Howie leaned over the counter and said: “You’re takin’ Josie, eh? Well, good luck.” He said it in a kind of voice that could mean anything.

  “Thanks,” I answered in the same voice. He looked tired, as though he had worked 18 hours that day, which he had.

  Sure enough, I met Josie on the way home again. This time she hung on my arm and brushed up against me as we struggled home with the grocery sacks.

  “I hear you met Stosh.” She spoke in a husky, throaty voice, not at all like her brother’s.

  “He came over when I was polishing the car.”

  “You’ll like him.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “You’ll like my uncles, too. They want to meet you.” She snuggled closer as we sloshed through the slush. Somewhere a radio was playing White Christmas, with old Bing Crosby crooning away. We never really had a white Christmas in northern Indiana, since the snow came down already gray from the steel mills, but it was a nice thought. Once in a while we had a fall of rust-colored snow, and that could be kind of pretty once you got used to it

  “Especially you’ll like my uncle Stanley.”

  “Yeah, that’ll be great.” Inside my gut, those roaring waves of excitement crashed so loud that I didn’t realize how sinister it was that all her uncles wanted to meet me. The streetlights played over her magnificent cheekbones, her fantastic eyes, her coal-black hair. I felt hints of her body, round and soft, through her corduroy parka and my sheepskin coat I clutched desperately to my bag of groceries.

  The great Atlantic salmon struggling thousands of miles upstream, leaping waterfalls, battling bears to mate is nothing compared to your average high school sophomore. The salmon dies in the attempt, and so, often, does the sophomore, in more ways than one. As we ambled on through the gloom, I didn’t have the slightest hint of what was coming; neither, I suppose, does the salmon, just does what he has to do. So did I.

  “Hey,” I said just before we got to her house. “Where is this party going to be?”

  She looked into my eyes with that gland-tingling look that can drive a man out of his skull—if he’s lucky.

  “It’s a surprise. You’ll have fun.”

  Instantly I pictured a mysterious, blue-lit den somewhere with writhing bodies and the distant thudding of orgiastic drums. Her smoldering gaze promised everything. I felt deep-down stirrings, and I was glad it was dark. A few snowflakes drifted down between us. She closed her eyes in the dim light. I leaned forward. Our lips touched. My ears roared. Passion rushed in a mighty torrent through my veins….

  RRRRRRRIIIIPPPP! I felt my bag of groceries give way. I grabbed frantically at a box of eggs as it hurtled to the frozen pavement, followed by a bottle of ketchup and a jar of strawberry jam. Crash followed crash.

  Lightly she breathed, “I’ll see you tomorrow … darling.” And was gone.

  Blindly I struggled amid the gray heaps of snow. I salvaged only a half-pound of sliced bacon, one No. 2 can of carrots and a loaf of rye bread. All the rest was ruined or lost. But it was only the beginning.

  I was up at seven the next morning, nervous and excited. As I left for school after the usual oatmeal, I tried to catch a glimpse of Josie, but her house was dark and silent. All day at school the talk was about Zodnycki and what he had said about our ball club. Naturally, passions ran high. The Whiting Oilers had always been menacing, but with Zodnycki at the pivot and popping off like that, it was going to be a grudge match. I played it as cool as I could, pretending to be deeply involved in the game. It was a peculiar feeling, since I was normally a red-hot basketball nut and for the first time in my life something else was sneaking in by the side door.

  “Hey, you want to sell your ticket?” Schwartz asked after school. “You got a date tonight, so what are you goin’ to do with the ticket?”

  “I may sell, if the price is right,” I lied, since I knew that I never could sell a ticket to one of the big games of the year, even if I couldn’t use it. Just having the ticket meant something.

  “I know a guy who’ll give you four dollars, in my biology class.”

  “Nah, I’ll hang on.” Tickets cost students a dollar and a half, so four dollars wasn’t much of a deal, and I wasn’t going to sell anyway.

  “Well, you lucky fink, just don’t catch anything I wouldn’t catch, ha-ha,” Flick yelled out at me at the top of his lungs as I left the crowd on my way home.

  “Where you takin’ her?” asked Schwartz as the December wind sighed through the telephone lines and the branches of the trees creaked under the load of ice they carried. Just before Christmas, it gets dark early in the afternoon on the Indiana plains. School had just let out and already it was almost dark. Two kids struggled by, pulling a Christmas tree on a sled.

  “How ‘bout the Dreamland Roller Rink?” Schwartz sarcastically suggested. “Girls love roller skating.”

  I said nothing, just chucked a piece of ice in his direction and headed home.

  “How come you’re not eating the creamed onions?” my mother asked at the supper table.

  “Uh … I’ll have some later,” I answered. I didn’t want any onions lousing up the plans I had in mind. I wasn’t hungry. I was out for big game tonight, and food meant nothing.

  I went into the bathroom and carefully shaved, and as usual the mysterious Nicked Chin Law went into operation—a peculiar phenomenon that I was not yet familiar with but which later became part of my life. All men know of this and have pondered it. On the evening of every important date, the razor invariably bites deep, leaving rich geysers of spurting blood in its wake. I stuck bits of toilet paper all over my face, attempting to stanch the flow. They didn’t help, so I splashed Aqua Velva on my raw jaws. My face sizzled like a halibut on the broiler.

  “Yer sure shavin’ close for a basketball game,” the old man tossed at me as he peered in the bathroom to see how much longer I’d be. He liked to finish the paper in there every night after supper.

  “I’ll be right out,” I said noncommittally.

  “Well, just don’t take all night,” he said, rattling the editorial page.

  After the shave I doused myself with Bloode Of The Sheik, a spectacular cologne that my father had won on a punchboard and that came in a bottle shaped like an Arab riding on a glass horse. The label, in jade and gold, read:

  “LOVE ELIXIR OF THE EAST… 47% PERCENT ALCOHOL.”

  I sloshed it over my head and down my chest, and instantly an explosive aroma filled the bathroom and clouded the mirror. For a few seconds my head reeled out of control as the love elixir did its seductive work. I staggered out into the fresh air. The mixture of the cologne with Aqua Velva was irresistible.

  Meticulously I got dressed, making sure that my T-shirt and Jockey shorts were snowy, my mauve-colored Tony Martin roll-collar sport shirt tucked carefully into my best slacks. Everything had to be absolutely right. This was a historic night. Never again would I suffer the guilt of knowing that I had never really done much with a girl except smooch with her in the balcony of the Orpheum.

  I examined myself in the mirror in my room. A magnificent specimen of sophomoric manhood. Bits of toilet paper still clung to my chin. The rich exhalations of the mysterious East rose about me in a purple haze. I was loaded for bear.

  Slipping into my mackinaw, I clamped my green earmuffs on my head, wound my precious eight-foot purple-and-white scarf around my neck 36 times—purple and white being our school colors, a combination so adroitly selected as to make all acne-ridden complexions look leprous by day and absolutely necrotic in gymnasium lighting. Casually, yet with a touch of stealth, since the old man had been known to change his mind without warning, I picked up the car keys from the dining room table.

  “Don’t forget to fill the tank,” he bellowed from the next room. I went out into the icy darkness and over to the garage. Tonight I had a date with an actual girl from East Chicago. An East Chicago Polis
h girl. At last, after a measly lifetime of basketball games and double features and French fries at the Red Rooster and Monopoly games with Schwartz and Flick, I was in the big time! I put the key into the ignition and the Olds started instantly, as if it, too, sensed impending ecstasy.

  Since Josie lived next door, it wasn’t much of a drive over to her house, but I hummed happily all the way as waves of excitement coursed up and down to every nerve ending. The Olds had a gasoline heater that, when it was in the mood, was hotter than the hinges of Hell. I flipped it on. Immediately a great flood of scorching air engulfed my feet and steamed the windows. Hot dog! Everything is going great! I pounded my mittens on the steering wheel in a frenzy as I eased out of the driveway and up to the curb in front of Josie’s house. Life stretched before me, a vast unexplored continent of voluptuous abandon. With throttle wide open and a full head of steam, I hurled myself full tilt toward the unknown, little suspecting what lay ahead.

  For a full half-minute I sat in the darkness, peering up at the porch through the frosted window of the Olds, composing my mind for the opening ploy. The heater roared. The car felt richly warm and dark. Straightening my earmuffs, I swung out into the cold, leaving the engine running.

  I knocked on the front door and waited. Inside, all was silence. I peered in through the heavy curtains that hung at the front windows. Pitch darkness in the parlor, where once the Bumpuses had spent their squalid hours amid pig and chicken, dog and mule, guitars twanging at all hours, hawking and snorting and squatting amid old Montgomery Ward catalogs.

  I knocked again, louder. Something seemed to be moving inside. The door opened a tiny crack.

  “Who you vant?” A beady eye peered out at me.

  “Uh … I come for Josie.”

  Silence. The eyeball glinted piercingly in the streetlight. Finally: “Josie?”

  “Yeah. Me and Josie are going to a party.”

  “You vait.” The eye disappeared.

  I stood alone on the windswept porch. For a brief moment, I had the wild urge to flee into the night. In fact, I was just about to turn and make a break for it when the door opened to a larger crack and the same voice, possibly female, said, “You come in. She not ready.”

  I found myself in the black parlor and was aware of dim, blocky shapes of furniture set with geometric precision about the room. A crucifix gleamed dully from atop an upright piano flanked by what looked like stone urns. I was led through the house and into the darkened kitchen. The overpowering aroma of Polish cooking engulfed me like an octopus. Coming from a family where Franco-American spaghetti was considered an exotic dish, this was enough to make me stagger slightly as I felt my way past the redolent stove.

  The figure ahead moved steadily to the cellar door and we descended the steps. Fear clutched at my vitals. At that time I was deep in the works of Sax Rohmer, the illustrious author of The Claw of Fu Manchu, The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu, beside which Ian Fleming and his insipid Dr. No pale to the pasteboard figures that they are. Well I knew that Dr. Petrie had been many times lured into sinister traps down just such a passageway as I was traversing now. We reached the first landing. If I was going to escape at all, it was now or never. But like C. Nayland Smith himself, I allowed myself to be lured into the spider web of foreign intrigue.

  For a moment, I was blinded by the bright light of the cellar.

  “You sit. You eat.”

  For the first time I saw that my guide was a short stocky woman wearing a black shawl over her head, her cheeks bright red with peasant health, her eyes a brilliant china blue.

  “Me Josie’s mother.”

  A heavy-set man sat at the table, huge shoulders bulging under his uncomfortable-looking shirt. He wore suspenders, something I thought only firemen did. He had a handlebar mustache of such magnificence and daring that he would have been an instant hit in any of today’s hippie communes. His thin blond hair was parted in the middle.

  “You take Josie to party,” he said, his voice heavy and blocklike, like chucks of iron ore clanking out on the table. I recognized instantly that I was in the presence of a first-class open-hearth worker. [Polish steel-men are legendary, and in fact the Paul Bunyan of the Gary mills was a Pole. This could have been Joe Magerac himself, a man capable of personally rolling out hot ingots between the palms of his hands.]

  I squatted at the table, surrounded by dishes loaded with boiled potatoes and slices of dark home-made Polish bread. Josie’s mother, beaming, shoved a huge white plate of thick foreign china in front of me.

  “You like cabbage, yes?”

  Josie’s father, as I suspected he was, dug into his own plate, a fine spray of juice rising about him as he tucked into his nightly meal. I looked down at my plate, and there before me was a mountainous, steaming portion of God knows what.

  “But I already had supper,” I protested weakly.

  “You eat,” she repeated, still beaming happily.

  There was no way out. But if this was what I had to do for a night of passion, it was worth it. Taking a deep breath, I took a bite. For a moment, the heady mixture of cabbage, spice and meat was a great, wet wad in my mouth, and then its haunting, incandescent succulence, inevitability and rightness hit me where I lived. My God, I had never eaten anything in my life that came anywhere near this; even the chili mac at the Red Rooster, which had seemed to me to be the ultimate in cuisine, wasn’t in the same league with this incredible concoction. Across the table from me, Josie’s father attacked his second platterful, washing it down with a stein of dark beer. As I wolfed the cabbage down, it was like some long-contained dammed-up secret part of me had broken into the open and was on the hunt.

  As I ate I glanced around, noticed chair, tables, couches, chests—a whole house in the basement. It was the first time in my life that I had met anyone who lived in the basement and kept the upstairs of their house, I later learned, for state occasions such as weddings, funerals and visits from the taxman. They had painted the furnace, which loomed at the far end of the basement like some multi-armed fairy-tale monster, a bright robin’s-egg blue. All the furniture—the wooden tables and chairs and benches—was the same Easter-egg color.

  “Josie almost ready,” her mother said, pressing a half-dozen Polish pickles on me. Gripped by an uncontrollable rapacious hunger, I ate and ate, spurred on by the slurpings and fork scraping of Josie’s father.

  “You have good time. You good boy. You like cabbage?” she asked, forking a potato scented with bay leaves onto my plate.

  “Cabbage good. I like.” I found myself picking up the cadence of their speech.

  A huge belch welled its way up from the dark hidden caves of my body. I couldn’t control it. It rumbled deep in my throat like a passing freight train laden with smoked hams and late fall turnips. My fellow eater burped amiably through his handlebar mustache and gulped down another two liters of beer.

  “You good eater,” he rumbled, and I hate to use that word because people are always “rumbling” things in bad books, but he really rumbled, the way only a Polish open-hearth worker can.

  “Pickle, potato good, too,” I mumbled between bites, elbow-deep in cabbage juice and beating down an insane desire to lick the plate.

  The next moment my eyeballs were straining at their moorings like two barrage balloons. Josie was with us. She had come down the stairs while I was in mid-burp and sucking a fugitive bit of cabbage from under a back tooth. She wore a dirndl skirt, which at that time was a big deal among high school girls, but she wore a dirndl the way a tiger wears its skin. Her narrow waist flared suddenly into broad, sculptured peasant hips. Above a wide dirndl belt, her embroidery-laced puffed-sleeved blouse-stuffed fuller than the cabbage—billowed and rippled like the heavy white clouds that scud over Warsaw in the spring. I have heard stories of German soldiers after World War Two refusing to leave Poland, being literally dragged home by their heels, protesting every inch of the way. I can understand them. It isn’t often that a kid in the sophomore class has a dat
e with an earth mother.

  It’s hard to explain the combination of the basement, the blouse, the stuffed cabbage, the handlebar mustache and the mysterious shrouded parlor furniture, but all of it made me feel that I was in some kind of exotic delirium. Was the cabbage drugged? Were these actually highly trained dacoits in the pay of a power-mad Oriental? Their eyes did look strange, not like Esther Jane Alberry’s wholesome Sunday School orbs.

  “Hi,” was all she said, her voice rich and low like the waters of the Danau flowing past the ancient bridges of medieval Europe.

  “Hi,” I answered, my rapier wit honed to its finest cutting edge.

  T see my mother’s been feeding you,” she said, smiling in a way that made my socks itch deep inside my Thom McAn saddle shoes.

  “Yeah. It sure was good. Boy. Yessir.”

  “Josie good cook,” said her mother, clearing away the dishes and preparing to serve what appeared to be a plate of spectacular plum dumplings topped with sour cream. “She make cabbage.”

  “Josie cooked the cabbage?” I said stupidly, struggling to get to my feet and finding, unaccountably, that I seemed to be carrying several cast-iron bowling balls under my waistband.

  “She make good wife one day.” A claw gripped at my intestines. There was something in Mrs. Cosnowski’s eye that I had never seen in the eye of a mother before. I would learn to know that look well in later years. At the time, I thought it was just the cabbage clouding my eyesight.

  “Well, what do you say? Shall we go?” Josie asked lightly, touching my arm suggestively with the tips of her fingers.

  “You come next, we play pinochle?” Her father stood up, towering above me like a stone god from Easter Island, his head bowed under the ceiling. Seated, he was a human being; standing he became a monument of 6′5″ or 6′6″, wearing what must have been a size-75 shirt with probably a 22-inch neck.

  “I play pinochle good,” I answered, which was the truth. We shook hands, or rather I stuck my tiny fist into the vise for a moment or two. My knuckles clattered and snapped.