Sucking Up Yellow Jackets

by Jeanne Denault

  This was my family. No one else was going to love and protect them the way I instinctively did. No other woman would feel empathy as she supported their heads over the toilet bowl when they vomited with stomach flu then make them a towel bed on the bathroom floor and stretch out next to them so they knew they weren’t alone with this misery. No one else would listen to them, watch their expressions, worry when they looked depressed or had black circles under their eyes. There was no way I would abandon them.

  If I had spent the past ten years building up a name for myself, figuring out who I was and gaining the confidence in my own ability to make my own way in the world rather than raising a family I would still be in New York City and probably divorced. But I wasn’t. Even if I had backed into motherhood too early for the wrong reasons, I now had a family. And they needed a mother and a father.

  We moved to Chicago but the year without Pete underfoot had been instructive. My life was easier when he was somewhere else. He was interesting, well read and full of novel ideas. I still enjoyed being with him in short spurts but he would never again be the center of my existence. I don’t know if he ever realized what he had lost. Or cared, as long as I baked a lot of pies and didn’t cause a fuss.

  But I didn’t forget. I knew there would come a time when I could leave Pete without harming the children. I would reconsider divorce then if my life didn’t get better. It didn’t get better; but it was even harder to leave when it really went downhill.

  Chapter 24

  I stifled my grief and did what I could to make the move to Chicago fun for the children’s sake. I was polite to Pete but made it clear I thought moving was not a good idea for me or for the children. I had hopes of living in the city. Two couples with husbands who worked for the agency lived on what was called the Near North Side. Both couples had school-age children, large apartments and a Lake Michigan beach a block away. I could have dealt with that. But that wasn’t what Pete really wanted.

  Every family had myths. These could be acknowledged or secret. Or worst case, so deeply buried they weren’t even known to their owner. Pete’s myths were stuck so far inside his psyche they were just this side of China. What he said was rarely what we got.

  He acted as though he liked the idea of living in the city until the house in Philadelphia was sold and I was committed to moving then he pointed out how selfish living in the city would be for the children. They should be able to walk to school without escorts and play in their own backyard just as he and I had done. He couched this myth in guilt-provoking logic. He said he had always dreamed of raising his family in a friendly town with alleys behind all the houses and parades full of boy scouts and school bands. It took me a while to figure out where the alleys and parades came from but he finally mentioned they were in a book he read as a child. For some reason, he fixated on the bit about alleys and parades as though they were the magic talismans ensuring a happy childhood.

  I pointed out what seemed to me an obvious fact: living in any viable Chicago suburb put his children an hour or more away from his office. It was like Levittown with train service. I tried to convince him the children needed a father as much as they did a backyard. He said he was willing to commute so that his children would have all the advantages. It was obvious this was the only plan he was going to accept. He had already staked out the suburbs along the lake north of Chicago. We ended up in Wilmette. The town met all his criteria. It even had alleys. The lots were narrow, the houses large.

  After our first winter, I figured out why the houses were so large. Even the most dedicated outdoorsman balked at outdoor activity in day after day of windy, below-zero weather. Wilmette was out of our price range but we bought a broken house hopefully referred to as a fixer-upper. Money-and-time-pit would have been more accurate. It had been on the market for almost a year. It was large, had been well built by someone with taste and money and was once well-kept. Twenty years of owners who had no clue what maintenance meant had made it unappetizing to buyers but had not destroyed the integrity of the house. It didn’t have a stove, a dishwasher, or refrigerator. When prospective buyers saw the scraggly, massively overgrown greenery, peeling paint and missing roof shingles the few buyers who had shown interest decided it wasn’t for them.

  I had the movers crate the portrait Pete had painted of Linda and Max and tucked a couple of picture hooks and a small hammer in the bag with my nightclothes and toiletries. This crated picture went in the car. Before I even made up all the beds in the new house, I picked out the perfect spot for the picture and hung it. I would have to take it down to paint the wall but I wanted it somewhere I could see it in the meantime. I felt this picture was important: if I knew why Max had his hand clamped on his mouth, I would begin to understand a vital part of him. But he wouldn’t tell me.

  Because the company was moving us, real movers transported our stuff instead of our usual rent-a-truck and endless boxes of books. This was the good part.

  We discovered the bad part the first time someone rang the front doorbell and all the lights in the house dimmed. We couldn’t decide whether we needed to replace the roof or the wiring first. I was more afraid of fire than leaks so we put the rewiring first and hoped for a dry month.

  I had heard of Midwestern friendliness but was unprepared for the pies, cakes, cookies, lists of services, doctors and dentists and warm greetings from our neighbors. A sweet-faced woman called with forms so I could register to vote and had only Republican literature. When I asked where I could get information on Democratic candidates, she stepped back and said, “You’re a Democrat?” in the same horrified voice she would have used if I had just said I had Typhoid Fever and was in the contagious stage. That’s when I decided I had better not talk politics with my neighbors until they declared their party choices. The Midwest is predominantly conservative. I figured I would be a closet Liberal unless someone insisted on knowing my opinion on a touchy issue.

  I enrolled Linda and Max in the grade school the following Monday. Their records had been sent as soon as I knew where we were going to live. Hopefully the six weeks left in the school year would give them a chance to meet other children their ages.

  The school principal met with us before the children were sent to their classrooms. He said the Superintendent of Schools had told him he would be keeping an eye on Max’s progress because Max would have the highest IQ in the school. I didn’t get the impression this made the principal happy.

  I couldn’t blame him; it didn’t make me happy. This burden of other people’s unrealistic expectations dogged Max everywhere he went. I never did understand why so many trained educators assumed an abnormally high IQ meant Max would do everything the other kids did, only better.

  The fact that overly bright people were generally regarded with appreciative awe was a mistake. Having your child labeled as super intelligent was a curse unless the kid also had the savvy and charm of a gifted politician. I supposed the two were combined in some people but Max wasn’t one of them. Gifted politicians were con artists with the innate ability to read people accurately. Max was the opposite. He had no grasp of what went on in other people’s minds. He was so naïve he scared me.

  We were fortunate. His first grade teacher was experienced and confident enough to consider Max as an individual. She understood it was an asset that Max already knew how to read. She had her aide take him to the library to choose books and had him read to the class. For once we were lucky.

  Having lived in hilly areas all my life, Wilmette was a shock. It was flat, flatter and flattest. Except when there was a high wind roiling the water, Lake Michigan was like the water in a fish bowl. It was surrounded by dune-less sand with an edge like the rim of a pie pan. From the top edge of this rise, the terrain was pancake-like to the end of the ancient lake bed where there was another slight upward tilt to the flattest terrain I’ve ever seen. This stretched with little variation to the Gulf of Mexico. It was dull but made it easier to spot approaching funnel clouds.

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nbsp; There was a Memorial Day parade with Scouts of every variety, marching bands, Veterans and fire trucks. It was so Norman Rockwell-like we were speechless. Pete smiled like a choreographer pleased with the show he had orchestrated.

  The parade was followed by a neighborhood picnic. One of the two street-to-street legs of the H shaped alley behind our house ran along the side of our property. Picnic tables were set up next to our yard. Every conceivable picnic food was set out. One whole table had jellied and pasta salads, another held desserts. These were mostly frosted sheet cakes and brownies.

  Charcoal grills roasted fat white sausages called Bratwurst and ordinary hot dogs. These filled the air with pungent odors. The lack of a stove and oven limited my cooking to what I could produce on a hot plate, electric fry pan that often blew fuses, or what I could cook on the grill. I opted for the grill and soaked fine slivers of diagonally sliced flank steak in soy sauce, honey, grated fresh ginger root and minced garlic then skewered these accordion-style. Like most Japanese food, it was labor intensive but I figured it was a safe bet. Everyone I knew in Philadelphia loved it.

  My kids wolfed it down. Everyone else looked at it as though it were cow dung. One of the teenage boys was dared to eat it. He picked up a skewer and took a tentative nibble. His friend said, “Eeeuuu,” and backed away as though he expected the meat to explode.

  The boy eating the meat looked surprised. “This is real good. What is it?”

  “Japanese-style barbecued beef.”

  The boy finished the meat on the skewer, took a second one and waved it at his friend. “I hope you don’t like this so there’s more for me.”

  A few others tried the meat and it went quickly. The main comment was that it was a little odd but good. One woman even asked me for the recipe but lost interest when I told her it contained fresh garlic and ginger root I bought in a Chinese grocery store in downtown Chicago.

  Max was invited to play softball with a group of boys. He shook his head and backed away. He had retreated into an anxious silence. He was seven now but I don’t think he had ever played softball.

  Linda was anxious about meeting new friends but she hid it well. She was savvy enough to know finding a friend in a bunch of kids who had known each other since pre-kindergarten was going to take more than the few weeks left in this school year. She would turn nine at the end of July and would be in third grade next year. By the time girls were in third grade, the pecking order was well established. The grade school was large, had three sections in each grade and had a policy of re-mixing the individual classes every year in an attempt to forestall the inevitable cliques. I hoped this would help her find friends. There were two girls her age in our block but both went to the large parochial school on the far side of the street above ours. She jumped rope with one of these girls and bickered about the correct words to a jumping chant.

  Seth watched everything with a four-year-old’s bemused expression. I hovered on the edge of a group of women, listened and tried to look interested although I had no idea what or whom they were discussing. Pete stood on the edge of a clump of men talking baseball and drinking beer. He looked bored. When I went in to get a sweater, I found him sleeping on the couch. I hoped no one would notice he was gone.

  When the tables and barbecue grills had all been taken home and the alley was once again swept and empty, I stood in front of the front window of the strange house and mourned the good friends I had left behind. Essentially a loner, I was polite and smiled but had an innate reserve that made it hard to form close bonds. But when I did, these friends were vital to me—they reflected and accepted me with an affirmation I thrived on, they allowed me to be uniquely myself without apology. I exchanged letters with my friend Nan, who now lived in New Haven and with Mary in Concord. They were both wonderful letter writers but I wanted more.

  I hated feeling so bereft; it made me too vulnerable, too dependent on Pete. He liked this, liked me best when I needed to please him and no one else. I realized he was in for a surprise as soon as I got my feet on the ground.

  Chapter 25

  The beach was officially open on Memorial Day but the kids still had two weeks of school. I bought beach parking passes and the first weekday that they were on vacation we trekked to the beach. There were no people in the water. Ignoring this, Max ran full-speed into the lake. The edge of the lake was shallow and without the abrupt drop-off we were used to with ocean beaches. When the temperature of the water registered, he wind-milled his arms to avoid pitching head first into the lake. Momentum carried him about twenty feet before he could stop. Stunned, he squealed in a weird, high-pitched voice. He sounded like a whoopee pillow stuck with a pin. Fortunately, he was so shocked he was virtually breathless so only people close to him could hear the sound. I told Linda to hold on to Seth’s hand, ran in after him, scooped him up and ran back out. Ice water was warmer than Lake Michigan in June.

  The lifeguard sauntered over. “New to the area?” It was more statement than question. He glanced at Max, who had blue lips and a stunned expression on his face. “The lake’s not much good for swimming before August. And that’s if July’s hot. Even then it’s a waste; the bacteria count shoots up as soon as the water’s over seventy-two degrees so we have to close the beach.” He looked around and shrugged. “It’s a nice beach for digging in sand and sun bathing…otherwise…” He smiled and sauntered back to the lifeguard stand. Teenage girls’ eyes followed his progress with interest.

  Max couldn’t stop shaking so we went home, drank cocoa made on the hot plate and had our picnic on the kitchen floor. At least it was ant-free.

  In Philadelphia, shorts and tank tops were our primary summer garb. Close to the lake in Wilmette, you could go years without feeling the need for a tank top.

  The Fourth of July began with neighborhood kids riding bunting decorated bikes around the block. Small flags were distributed from a box a neighbor bought from a novelty company each year. We were just a ten-minute walk north of Central Avenue in Evanston where there was a serious parade. Seth didn’t like to walk so we got out his old stroller and walked. The parade had the requisite Scouts, plus clowns, fancy cars, fire engines, six marching bands and notable personages from the area waving at us from convertibles. All the women in the cars wore hats and white gloves. The waving gloves had an old Disney cartoon feel. I had to fight not to laugh.

  There were fireworks in the evening. These came from the Northwestern University football stadium. Tickets to the actual Fourth of July show in the stadium were expensive. It was supposed to be spectacular and worth the cost but I never ran across anyone who actually saw it so I couldn’t substantiate this. A free golf course paralleled the lake next to the drainage canal. The neighbors told me this was the traditional place to stretch out on a blanket and watch the fireworks. The neighbors warned us there would be no parking so we loaded Seth into the stroller again and walked. There was a cold wind off the lake so we wore our winter jackets and brought hats. Wilmette was not a great place for people who worried about hat-hair.

  We laid out our blanket in an empty spot north of Linden Avenue. The spectacular nine-sided Baha’i Temple rose up on the far side of the canal between our spot and the lake. Encircled by overlapping spotlights, its filigreed white stone made it glow like some swami’s dream. It was a bizarre sight in Wilmette.

  One of the neighbors had firecrackers he set off during the afternoon. He gave Max a bundle of sparklers and two strings of small firecrackers to set off during the fireworks. These were illegal in Illinois. He warned Max to move around when he set them off so the cops wouldn’t catch him. Max was smart enough to keep these hidden until we put down our blanket and stretched out. This cheered me. Any evidence of normal street smart gave me hope.

  Kids were tearing around anywhere they could find an open space. There was a constant pop-pop-pop of small strings of firecrackers. And shrieks of glee. Policemen were spotted along the sides of the golf course but they ignored the firecrackers until some
one set off a cherry bomb with palpable reverberations. Two cops converged on the boys Max was watching. Max was oblivious to the approaching police. With the uncanny mistiming that became his hallmark, he picked this moment to scratch a kitchen match across the seat of his pants and light one of his strings of firecrackers. I saw this happening but was too far away to stop him. The cop confiscated the intact string of firecrackers and the sparklers and obviously asked where his parents were because Max pointed at us. The officer brought Max over and asked Pete and me for ID, which neither of us had since we had walked. He gave us a lecture about following laws and controlling our children. Pete looked at him briefly then turned away and tried to ignore him. I could see his jaw flexing as he repeatedly clenched his teeth. All around us the rising and falling sound of popping firecrackers and the occasional boom of cherry bombs continued. With each resounding bang, the cop’s scowl deepened and his voice rose. He couldn’t seem to stop. When he railed about parents who thought laws were made for other people, I cringed and hoped Pete didn’t stand up and challenge the cop. I realized the poor man was venting his understandable frustration. Cherry bombs could blow off fingers and blind people. He wanted to nab the person who had set it off. Instead he had a small boy with a few mini firecrackers and a bunch of sparklers.

  I did my best to empathize with him but I couldn’t. I felt he was attacking me. It was unfair. I didn’t light off a string of firecrackers in front of him. I liked firecrackers but would have had more sense. When the policeman left and was out of earshot, I said to Max, “If you’re going to do something illegal, at least have the common sense to make sure you’re not in front of a cop.” My anger showed.

  The man sitting on the blanket next to us looked at me with a disapproving frown. Probably a lawyer.