And now I have raised another question, have I not? You are likely wondering why Thomas called me Rosie when my name is Margaret. Again, I will settle the matter quickly. When Thomas and I first met over sixteen years ago, I had a hammer in my hand and was making my way down an aisle toward the cash register of Norman’s Hardware Store where Thomas rented space for his vacuum repair service. He paused from what he was doing—restocking nails of various sizes—and stared at me openly, then laughed and pointed at the hammer in my hand. “Well, now, ma’am, I think you got the wrong thing there in your hand,” he said. “Don’t you mean to be buying you a riveter?”
I stared at him coolly and replied, “I beg your pardon?”
He slapped his knee and said, “Oh, ’course you wouldn’t get it. You’re not old enough to remember them posters of Rosie. She was the home-front gal that rolled up her shirt-sleeves and went off to work in the factories back during wartime. Rosie the Riveter they called her. Not a real woman” (he pronounced it WOE-man), “’course, just a picture, like Uncle Sam.”
I said, “Of course I know of Rosie the Riveter. I have read of her. But she was more than just a picture. She was based on a real woman named Rose Monroe, who was a riveter in a war munitions factory. Not only was she featured in films supporting the war effort, but her picture appeared on countless posters promoting the themes of sacrifice and heroism during World War II.” I paused, and Thomas looked at me as if struck dumb. He then pulled a red handkerchief out of the back pocket of his overalls and began rubbing his face vigorously.
Normally I would not have said more, but during the silence I recalled from a book I had read a specific picture of Rosie flexing her arm, with the caption We Can Do It! printed beneath. “Rosie wore coveralls and tied up her hair with a bandanna,” I added, and Thomas lifted his face and studied me gravely as he stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket. “Poster art was a very persuasive patriotic stimulant during World War II, and Rosie was a noble heroine,” I concluded before turning to continue my way down the aisle. I heard him clear his throat behind me, but he made no reply.
No one was at the cash register, but Thomas ambled up the aisle behind me and walked behind the counter. “Norm’s gone off to his granddaughter’s wedding,” he said, “so I’m filling in.” He silently entered the correct figures on a small adding machine, then took my money and handed me the change, placing the coins in my palm first before handing me the bills. I found his manner as a cashier satisfactory. I dislike listening to a chatty cashier who feels compelled to wish me “a nice day,” and then lays down my change in the wrong order, bills on the bottom and coins piled on top, thus forcing me the inconvenience of sliding the coins off the bills, sometimes dropping one or more in the process, in order to transfer them into safekeeping. Coins should be deposited into the customer’s palm first, then bills. I have instructed more than one cashier concerning this point.
Thomas slipped my hammer and the adding machine receipt into a brown paper bag and handed it to me, clearing his throat again. “You always talk that way?” he asked, smiling.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. So…you know…like it’s written in a book.”
“I suppose my speech is rather bookish,” I replied. “It is not, however, a style that I affect. For me it is natural.” I paused and added, “I did not grow up here.”
Thomas was not the first to be taken back by my manner of speech. I can still clearly visualize the astonished expression that formed upon the face of my homeroom teacher when my grandmother enrolled me in the eighth grade in Marshland, New York, the fall after Mother died. My teacher, a young woman in her twenties named Mrs. Hartwell, asked me, in a tone that fell upon my ears as callow and indifferent, if this were my first year at L. K. Drake Junior High School, to which I replied, “Not only is it my first year at L. K. Drake, Mrs. Hartwell, it is my first year of formal schooling at any institution.” Several of my classmates laughed outright, and Mrs. Hartwell, who very likely interpreted my words as insubordinate, assigned me to a desk in the back corner. She was to be my English teacher as well as my homeroom teacher, and our relationship was not a happy one.
The smile faded from Thomas’s lips and settled in his eyes. “You do favor Rosie, you know. Anybody else ever said that to you before?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. We stared at each other briefly before I turned to leave. He had a kind yet friendly, inquisitive look, though not intrusive. I had grown accustomed to avoiding the eyes of men.
“I meant it as a compliment,” he called as I walked toward the door. “I always looked on Rosie as a real fine lady with a lot of grit and gumption. Pretty gal, too. Don’t think she had curls in her hair like you, though.”
His words found favor with me, for as a child I had studied pictures of Rosie the Riveter in books and had admired her both as an American icon of wartime fortitude and as a handsome specimen of womanhood, being tall, with strong, well-sculpted features and thick dark hair.
I stopped beside a display of gardening spades and turned around. I had thought of something. “Did you serve in the armed forces during the Second World War?” I asked.
He nodded. “Sure did, ma’am. Sure did.”
“Where and when?” I asked.
If his answer had been different, I am quite certain that our conversation would have ended there and would never have led, as it did three months later, to our marriage.
“I was in the second wave of forces that invaded Normandy,” he said. “June the eighth, nineteen and forty-four.”
“I see,” I said. “My father was there two days earlier on Omaha Beach.”
He inhaled sharply, a mannerism that he continues to this day. “Did he…I mean, is he…?” His brow was furrowed, and his gray eyes were the color of morning fog.
I shook my head. “He was killed exiting the landing craft—before his foot touched the sand.” I opened the door and walked out.
He followed me out to the car. “I’m sorry about that, ma’am. Your daddy died a hero’s death. Him and all those others like him led the way for the rest of us to get in.” He looked off sorrowfully toward a row of shiny green wheelbarrows lined up on end against the front window, as if seeing a phalanx of small armored tanks. As I opened my car door, he said, “You live here in Filbert, Rosie?”
“I do,” I said.
Three months later I repeated these same two words in the office of a justice of the peace in Berea. At the age of thirty-five, I knew full well that no human could ever fulfill such grand, sweeping vows, and now sixteen years later, I am still stung by the thought of my cowardly acquiescence. I should have spoken aloud my honest intention: “No, I do not assent to these awesomely abstract promises, but I will be Thomas Tuttle’s wife. I will keep his house clean and decent. I will mend and launder his clothes. I will cook his meals and sit with him in the evenings. Do not ask more of me, for I cannot pledge what these vows demand.” Instead, I answered, “I do.”
If the reader has never seen a picture of Rosie the Riveter, he may find one on the cover of the March 1994 issue of The Smithsonian, one of the two magazines to which I subscribe, the other being the Atlantic Monthly. I remember clearly the day last year when Thomas met the mailman beside the curb. It was a Saturday, and I was inside hemming a panel of draperies that hung too close to the baseboard heater. I heard Thomas give a whoop and looked out the window to see him hurrying toward the front door waving the new issue of The Smithsonian and shouting, “You’re a cover girl, Rosie! You’re a cover girl!” Of course, the picture of Rosie never ages. She is a much younger woman than I am now. She has no gray in her dark hair. It pleases me nonetheless that I have been compared to her—evidence, I suppose, of a vanity that, if accused of possessing, I would very likely deny.
In our prenuptial conversations, I made no pretense of marrying Thomas for love, as I said earlier. My conscience is clear upon that. I cannot say why I married, given my hist
ory and the premium I placed upon privacy. I have often thought that perhaps I was still searching for the father I had never known. Too, Thomas was not a man of drink and was handy with tools and repairs. I had an eye toward the maintenance of my duplex, having recently paid what I considered an outrageous sum for a new roof and gutters.
His manner of proposing marriage struck my fancy also. One evening, two months following our meeting at the hardware store, he brought me a largemouth bass that he had caught. He filleted, breaded, and cooked it in a small deep fryer outside in my carport (“or else your house’d smell to high heaven,” he said), and after we had eaten the fish along with the lima beans, corn on the cob, and fresh tomatoes he had brought from his garden, he looked me in the eye and said, “Barkis is willin’.”
I was nonplused—not by the allusion, for I identified it instantly, but by the unprecedented phenomenon of Thomas’s having made reference to a work of literature. Surely this distinctive quotation from David Copperfield was not the sort of thing one could utter accidentally.
He laughed heartily at my puzzled silence and said, “I sure hope it’s not gonna take as long for you to answer me as it did for Peggotty to answer poor old Barkis.” He went on to explain that his great-aunt Prissy, who had lived with his family for a time when he was a boy, had been a devoted admirer of Charles Dickens and over the course of several months had read aloud all sixty-four chapters of David Copperfield at the kitchen table after supper, regardless of whether anyone stayed to listen on a given evening. I believe it to be the only novel that Thomas is familiar with. If a person were limited to a single choice, however, he could do worse than to choose a work by Dickens, an author whom I deeply respect in spite of his penchant for sentimentality.
At any rate, Thomas’s proposal pleased me for its brevity and droll indirectness, and whatever my motivation, I married a man old enough to be my father: Thomas Alva Tuttle, named after the famous inventor. Thomas did not pry into my background, and I divulged very little. In fact, we had been married almost a year, a very quiet year, when I said to him one morning at breakfast, “Today is my thirty-sixth birthday.”
He looked surprised. “Today, right now? This day?” He had looked down at the date on the Filbert Nutshell, which he was in the process of reading at the moment. “You was born on June the sixth?” he asked. He looked up and frowned out the kitchen window. “Thirty-six years ago? That means you was born in 1944.” I removed a piece of toast from the oven, which produces a crisper piece of toast than an electric toaster, and began spreading plum jelly on it. Thomas was still staring at me. “Margaret, you mean to tell me you was born on D-day—the original, real McCoy D-day?”
I nodded, cut my piece of toast in half, and set the knife down. I spoke as if reading a report. “I was born just before midnight. My mother did not know that my father had died early that morning. She would not know for weeks.”
Thomas took a long drink of his strong black coffee. “How long was they married, your folks?” he asked.
“They married in September of 1943 after my father had completed flight training,” I said. “He met her on a Friday, asked her to marry him on a Monday, and on Tuesday they had a small wedding in a preacher’s living room. My father left for the war two days later on Thursday. He and my mother had known each other less than a week and never saw each other again.”
I believe that Thomas was overwhelmed by this sudden spate of information, for I rarely spoke of my past. I said no more, and he did not press me further. I did not tell him that throughout my life I had suffered recurring dreams in which I heard the roar of the ocean and saw white-crested waves rushing toward the beach, turning to red as they washed over my father’s dying body. He was twenty-three years old when he died. I did not tell Thomas that the only male relative whom I had known in my entire life was my mother’s father—actually her stepfather, I learned later—from whom my mother had fled at the age of twenty-two and whom I did not meet for the first time until I was thirteen. I did not tell him of the mighty waves of nausea that washed over me at the thought of my grandfather.
As I said earlier, Thomas has an extensive network of relatives, most of whom live in North Carolina. He had been married before, and his first wife had died in 1970. When I met him, Thomas had lived alone for almost nine years. When we married, all that I knew of his first wife was that her name was Rita and that she had borne him one daughter, who had lived only two days. To Thomas, family is a word of many pleasant associations, though I know now that some are darkened with grief. In spite of small tiffs and even a significant rift or two, as among Mayfield and his children, enough loyalty and goodwill exist to make the annual family reunion a robustly convivial affair.
To my mind, family is a word of small dimensions and ambivalent connotations. My mother, of course, was a genius and an angel. The only other blood relatives I have known were my grandparents: my grandmother, weak and fearful, puppetlike and willfully blind to things that she chose not to see; and my step-grandfather, fiendish arch-hypocrite and upstanding elder of the First Unified Bible Missionary Church in Marshland, New York. I never knew my father’s parents. I do not believe that my mother ever established contact with them.
The journey backward has become quite lengthy, one fact being linked as it is to so many others. I must therefore close this chapter and begin anew tomorrow. I find myself waking early each morning, for my story is like a continual dropping on a rainy day, and I must rise in haste and set pails to catch it.
4
A Shadow of Things to Come
From the moment I first saw her at the funeral, Birdie had the look of an earlier era about her, an anachronistic countenance and bearing. Each time my eyes came to rest on her, I felt a slight jolt, as if I were passing a 1950 Studebaker on the freeway. She had the kind of face to fit a name such as Lavinia, Adelaide, or perhaps Hepzibah. During that first week in the cafeteria kitchen, I set about measuring her character and intellect, a project that was to continue over the following months.
Vonnie Lee, Francine, Algeria, and I had worked together for ten years, a long time for a school lunchroom crew to remain intact. I myself had served in the cafeteria at Emma Weldy for twenty-two years but had been the supervisor for only fifteen. Through our cafeteria doors, I had seen many women come and go, and once a man named Dexter Bright was employed in the kitchen for five months. Another employee at the time—Sally Sue Slater—openly called him “Not-very.” Sally Sue had a wicked tongue to which she gave free rein. She left after a year to marry a race car driver, and I was not sorry to see her go.
Before the fall of 1984, our school district boundaries were hastily enlarged due to a fire that summer which destroyed the elementary school in Berea. As a result, the enrollment at Emma Weldy, a large school that had been built in 1941, almost doubled. The empty classrooms upstairs were reopened and aired out, and new teachers were hired or transferred from the Berea school. The cafeteria underwent staffing changes also, the result being that my two part-time workers moved to the high school in Derby, and Vonnie Lee, Francine, and Algeria came to Emma Weldy as my new crew.
I soon discovered that each of the women had her own gifts. Vonnie Lee, in spite of her incessant chatter, was quick-witted and resourceful. She could prepare 235 serving portions of any menu item with negligible excess and could accurately gauge the multiplying of ingredients if we were adapting recipes intended for small groups. She added salt by hand, tossing it into the pot as if it were grass seed. Vonnie Lee, in her early thirties when she first arrived at Emma Weldy, took pride in knowing all the words to every popular song from the years 1964 to 1973.
Francine was several years younger than Vonnie Lee. Though annoyingly silly, she was nevertheless industrious and consistently good-natured. Not overly keen of intellect, she was certainly smarter than she acted. Francine often retorted with remarks irrelevant to the situation. Considerably overweight, she frequently made self-deprecating comments about her size, although
she had, and still has, a soft, lovely face. Only twenty-six years old, she already had four children but no husband when she first began working in the cafeteria ten years ago. Her oldest child, a daughter named Gala, graduated from Derby High School this past year. As a lover of talk, Francine distinguished herself from the outset by her excitability, exclaiming extravagantly over the most trivial of circumstances, and even now she freely and cheerfully discusses embarrassing or inappropriate topics, such as surgical procedures, bodily functions, and gruesome crimes, savoring and repeating each detail.
Compared to Francine’s general bonhomie, Algeria’s temperament fell at the opposite end of the spectrum. In spite of her smoldering surliness, however, and her distrust of the white population in general, she and Francine developed a peculiar friendship, exchanging conspiratorial glances and sotto voce comments when I had to reprimand one or the other of them. These I pretended not to notice, then even as now. Algeria was forty-one when she came to Emma Weldy, she and I being only a few months apart in age. Tall, lanky, and powerful, she observed the world through heavy-lidded eyes and generally curled her lip at what she saw. These characteristics still apply to Algeria ten years later. She never married and to my knowledge has never participated in a romantic partnership, although she is unfailingly interested in those of others.
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