Laura and I flitted about the party stargazing and celebrating a few hours longer before making it back home around 3:00 a.m. I’d been awake and mostly out and about for twenty-three hours straight. If only I hadn’t had a bum foot, I’d have made it to twenty-four.
15. Don’t Move Without a Job
My parents stood beside a plate-glass window at the Raleigh-Durham Airport, waving goodbye to my Boston-bound plane.
“That’s the last you’ll ever see of that money,” my father said to my mother, she told me later. “Katherine has a very short future in any of the jobs she’s mentioned she might get. Housekeeping? She hardly makes her own bed. Waitressing? Can’t put her plate in the dishwasher without spilling crumbs. Working a cash register? She’s terrible at math.”
My mother had loaned me $1,000 to pay my share of a summer rental in Nantucket, where eleven friends and I planned to live and work the summer after our sophomore year at Carolina.
I paid her back in full by July 10, thank you very much.
With no waitressing experience, I fibbed my way into a job at one of the finest restaurants on the island, and by July 4, I was making $100 in cash five nights a week. Never mind that I couldn’t memorize the eight or more nightly specials, and we weren’t allowed to read notes off the back of our order pad like I’d seen the waitresses do at Bennigan’s. When guests asked me at 6:00 p.m. what delectable meal the people at the next table were enjoying, I had no idea. So, I’d apologize that we were already out of that special, even though the restaurant had only been open thirty minutes.
Two of my friends drove up to Nantucket first and found a three-bedroom house owned by a lawyer who presented them with an iron-clad rental contract that stated seven times in English, five times in Japanese, and twice in a strong Boston brogue that no more than six people could stay in the house at any point. No guests allowed.
So, six of us signed our twenty-year-old lives away, and we moved twelve girls into the two-story shingled house on Back Street. After our first keg party, we were known among the summer college crowd and Nantucket police as the Back Street Girls.
We divided into rooms, set up a rotation schedule for who slept on the floor and who had a bed, and embraced the first time we’d lived and worked on our own.
Since Southern schools got out earlier than our counterparts to the north, we had first crack at jobs, but before Memorial Day nobody was hiring except the Finast grocery store. Two housemates and I scored positions as cashiers, but my dad’s prediction was right. Too much math, plus there was a language barrier we hadn’t expected.
One afternoon our manager, Mary, asked us to go outside to collect all the cots and bring them inside. We brought in all the beach chairs, laughing amongst ourselves that she called them cots.
“What the hell is this?” Mary asked when she saw a dozen folding lounge chairs arranged in a neat row at the end of Aisle 2.
“You told us to bring in the cots,” I offered up meekly to the Great and Powerful Mary.
“That’s right. Cots. Not lounge chairs.”
The store’s assistant manager acted as an interpreter, and we realized Mary wanted us to bring in the carts, not the cots. My friends and I laughed. Mary didn’t find what was lost in translation quite as amusing and warned us we had just one more chance.
We spent the next three nights studying the Finast’s universal Price Look-Up codes to sharpen our recall of what numbers went with which items. Regularly purchased items were assigned three numbers that we keyed into the cash register so that each loaf of Portuguese bread or box of spaghetti didn’t have to have its own price tag. Bananas were 243, apples 256, Lay’s plain potato chips 125. Soon I knew the PLU codes better than my multiplication tables.
Still, the numbers proved to be too much for me. When I transposed the PLU for Breyers ice cream, 228, with cat food, 282, and greatly overcharged a customer buying sixty cans of seafood-flavored morsels, I was fired.
Within a week my friends were sacked, too. But not before Kevin Dobson, heartthrob of Knot’s Landing, came through their line buying a pack of Gillette razors. PLU 222.
I ended up at the Ropewalk restaurant right on the water, and they got jobs as housekeepers at the Cliffside Inn. Other Back Street Girls worked at Provisions sandwich shop, Young’s Bicycle Shop, Cumberland Farms, and the Juice Bar, which sold the best ice cream in New England and very little juice.
By July we had settled into a routine of alternating between beds and the floor for sleep, Cisco and Madaket for beach days, and The Chicken Box and The Muse for nights out.
Two roommates and I went off island one weekend to New York City to visit our UNC friend Whitney, who was taking summer classes at Parsons School of Design. She planned our weekend, and despite her best efforts, it was a late ’80s rendition of Country Mice Come to Town.
To reach New York City, we took a ferry, bus, plane, and another bus from Newark to Grand Central Station. After an exhausting day of travel, we were thrilled that a nice man with the cab company met us with an umbrella the moment we stepped from the bus onto the Big Apple pavement. He asked where we were going and calculated it would cost $20 a person for his partner driving the cab to get us to our hotel.
“This is soooo easy,” I said to my friends, as he shepherded us to the cab. When we arrived at the Sheraton Midtown our cab driver informed us we owed him $18 total for the fare. Believe it or not, he had no idea who that man was who hailed his cab. We were taken for $60 before spending even sixty seconds in New York.
The next two days were spent at Central Park and SoHo, all of us rubbernecking in hopes of spotting a celebrity to no avail. Finally, we could consider the weekend a success after we spotted a tall, dark man leaving a Vidal Sassoon salon almost a block away and declared him the man himself. Vidal Sassoon popularized the angular haircut and turned high-end hair products into a retail offering for the masses, and we saw him in the flesh.
Was he just a handsome man exiting the salon and not Vidal himself? Did Vidal really go to all his namesake salons? We pondered these questions but all agreed it was definitely the man, the myth, the legend himself.
At M. Butterfly, we were the only people on Broadway who didn’t know the plot. When the beautiful opera singer stripped down to nothing, we were more surprised than her lover of ten years to realize that she was a he.
After wrapping our minds around that one, we met up with a couple friends from Carolina who were working in New York for the summer. When we had a few beers at their tiny apartment across from the studio where they filmed All My Children, Vidal Sassoon became a distant memory.
Right outside the studio was a sign reading “Pine Valley. Where Anything Can Happen.” We spent the evening with eyes glued across the street and are certain we saw Susan Lucci leaving after a long day at work.
Back on Nantucket, the next weekend we threw a keg party and all those years watching Risky Business paid off when our landlords called to say they were on their way over because neighbors had alerted them there was trouble on Back Street. Why they warned us, I have no idea, but there was just enough lead time for the twelve of us to push forty college kids out of the front and back doors, throw beer cans into trash bags, and load the keg and six extra roommates into a Rabbit Cabriolet headed to the beach. By the time our landlords arrived, the six legal inhabitants were playing a cutthroat game of Trivial Pursuit.
“Well, we had a few people over earlier for a cookout, but then we decided we wanted a girls’ night in,” I explained when they asked what happened to the party.
“The next-door neighbor said she saw a couple fornicating on our lawn,” yelled the wife who co-owned the house.
“Gross, who took a dump in the yard?” one of my roommates blurted out.
We didn’t get kicked out, we didn’t throw any more parties, and we all learned the definition of fornicate.
Fast forward thirty years and my daughter Charlotte was eighteen, about to graduate high school, and asking to spe
nd a gap year working at hostels and farms in Europe in exchange for free room and board. I complained to a friend, who was a Nantucket roommate all those years ago, that this plan seemed too farfetched.
“She’s ridiculous. I’m just supposed to send her off with no job or place to live,” I lamented.
“Didn’t your parents think you going to Nantucket without a job or a place to live was ridiculous?” my roommate Kate reminded me. “But they let you go.”
She was right. We let Charlotte go. But believe you me, I called Kate when Charlotte missed a ferry crossing the North Sea and had to spend the night on a bench at a deserted dock in the Netherlands waiting eight hours for the next boat.
16. Don’t Talk About Death to the Dying
I assumed it was a wrong number when my phone rang at 2:30 a.m. and didn’t budge to answer. It rang again a minute later so I grabbed it.
“Hello?”
“Katherine?”
“Yes.”
“This is Lana, Lori’s sister. I am so sorry to bother you, but she’s hoping you can help her write the letters.”
Six months earlier, Lori Crotts and two other moms from my oldest daughter’s Girl Scout troop met for dinner at a Mexican restaurant in St. Petersburg. All of our daughters except Lori’s were long out of scouts, but we had remained friends after bonding over silly skits around the campfire and long talks in sunny fields at state parks while the girls worked on badges. When we met for dinner that July, Lori had colon cancer and was fighting for her life.
She assured us she was going to beat the cancer and become the poster child for the experimental drugs she was taking. We all agreed. Still, she wondered if she should write letters to her children in case she didn’t make it.
“You don’t need to do that,” one friend assured her. “You’re going to be fine.”
“Absolutely,” another added. “You have to think positively.”
The thought of her saying parting words to three teenage children was heartbreaking and terrifying, but I didn’t completely go along with all the positive thinking.
“Well, it wouldn’t hurt to have some letters tucked away somewhere,” I said. “I don’t have many talents, but I can type pretty damn fast. If you decide to write them, call me. I promise not to cry or say anything. I’ll just take dictation.”
“I’ll think about it,” Lori said, as the others shot me sad looks. Why had I brought the possibility of death into our cheerleading session?
Lori had just gotten back from a week in Atlanta where she’d learned to totally change her way of eating and hoped it would alter the cancer’s attack on her body. But it’s not like she was an unhealthy eater. I’d easily down a sleeve of graham crackers and a few Hershey bars while Lori nibbled on an apple as she lit the campfire for s’mores.
I once spent a morning planning Troop 519’s pilgrimage to Savannah, the birthplace of Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low. On this particular day, Lori was also hosting her older son’s high school football team for dinner so she was baking about 150 brownies. As we booked reservations online for a Southern buffet at Holden House, a tour of a church on the Underground Railroad, and a visit to Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home, Lori steadily removed one pan from the oven and put another one in. She wasn’t even licking the spoon, much less eating an actual finished product.
Finally, when the picture of the Savannah River transformed into the luscious dark moat from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and I kept referring to Juliette Gordon Low as Betty Crocker, I broke under the pressure.
“Lori, could you possibly spare one of those 150 brownies or what?”
“Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry,” my Midwestern friend gushed. “I just never eat when I’m baking.”
“Well, you see, I do. My jeans are so loose that I can button them if I lie down on the bathroom floor and hold my breath and frankly, that’s just not challenging enough.”
Lori was beautiful, smart, focused, and always in control. Oh yeah, she was a major runner, too. I wanted to hate her, but I just couldn’t. She laughed loudly and sincerely, loved to hike, had a badass obsession with Jon Bon Jovi, and traveled the country watching him perform.
Once on a campout, she asked us fellow moms if we thought the thirteen-year-old girls would be up for a dance party in the woods.
“I don’t know, Lori. I hate to extinguish your dance fever, but they might think that’s a little babyish,” I told her. She smartly ignored me, loaded eight fat D batteries into her vintage Panasonic boombox, and pushed play. The girls loved it and danced in the woods for more than an hour.
Beyond Girl Scouts, we weren’t in each other’s close circle of friends. But we had lunch once or twice a year, and Lori gave me regular book recommendations. She read constantly and suggested what are now some of my favorite books. Long before Water for Elephants was on everyone’s bedside table, Lori was a fan. She had just finished Wonder a couple weeks before she was diagnosed with cancer and told me she’d consumed it faster than any book she’d ever read.
“It’s hard to explain, but you would love it,” she said when I ran into her at the gym. “You’ve got to read it.”
“I’ll put it on my list,” I promised.
The next day a new copy of the bright blue book was on my doorstep. It was a young adult book, but the story was heavy. A boy in Brooklyn with a severely deformed face was transitioning from being homeschooled to attending a small middle school. The story highlights bravery, fear, kindness, stupidity, cowardice, insecurity, and tenacity. It took me less than a week to read it, and I saw five or more people of all ages at the gym reading the same book as they rode the stationary bike or ran on the treadmill. The bright blue copies of Wonder, a New York Times best seller, were all compliments of Lori.
Over the next couple of months after our summer dinner, the cancerous tumors didn’t get bigger, but they also didn’t shrink. Lori was busy checking off things on the “to do” list she’d written on the chalkboard in her kitchen. A couple more Bon Jovi concerts, hiking a mile on the Appalachian Trail with one of her sons, seeing her daughter get the Girl Scout Gold Award, and bringing an author to her book club.
The group of avid readers had talked about that for years but never made it happen. Then they did make it happen, for Lori. About fifteen women pooled their money to fly R. J. Palacio, the author of Wonder, from New York to St. Petersburg on a breezy day in October. Lori sat quietly beaming next to the guest of honor. I wrote a story about it for the Tampa Bay Times and received more than forty calls and emails from people saying the article prompted them to buy the book. Many were teachers who said they or their schools were making Wonder required reading.
After that call woke me in the middle of the night, I was at Lori’s house in fifteen minutes.
“I told Lana you’d come,” Lori whispered when I sat on the edge of her bed that night to write the letters. “I want to go outside.”
Her husband and children were asleep in other rooms. Lana and I each put an arm under her arms and pretty much carried her out to the front yard. It was peaceful and pleasant in the predawn hours that January morning. I was comfortable in just a sweatshirt and jeans and Lori was in crisp, light blue pajamas. We settled her into a wooden swing and then I sat next to her. Lana placed a little plastic bowl holding a few saltines in her sister’s lap and left us alone as I turned on my laptop.
And then Lori calmly and slowly did the hardest thing a mother can do: She said goodbye to her family. She dictated a different letter to each child, two sons and a daughter, her husband, and her sister. She told each one how certain attributes she loved in them would help them in life. She offered advice. She thanked them for what they had given her. I lifted a cup of apple juice after every few sentences, and she sipped drops of the liquid from a straw.
She died not long after that night. Andrew Meacham, the Tampa Bay Times obituary writer at the time, received numerous calls suggesting he write about Lori. I asked if I could track dow
n one fact for his story and called Penguin Random House, the publisher of Wonder. When I explained why I wanted to know how Wonder had sold in Tampa Bay, a compassionate media relations rep called back within an hour. More books had sold in Tampa Bay than anywhere else in Florida, even though Miami was a much bigger market. In fact, more copies of Wonder had sold in Tampa Bay than in all of Florida combined. The sales could only be the result of my story about Lori.
Lori left many things to the many people who knew her, as well as to the thousands of kids who have no idea that Lori Crotts ever lived. If they read Wonder because of her, maybe they are a little nicer to someone who doesn’t fit in or even an actual friend to someone who’s different. Then there are the kids who are different; I hope they find some strength through August, the protagonist in Wonder. I know every time I pass Lori’s former house and see where we sat that night on the wooden swing hanging from the live oak, I’m reminded to strive for her level of strength and compassion.
17. Sending Fan Mail is Tacky
My former pen pal, Oscar-winner Olivia de Havilland sued Hollywood hitmaker Ryan Murphy and the FX network, charging Murphy with false representation of her in his FX series Feud: Bette and Joan. She filed the suit at age 100.
The show depicted Old Hollywood and the clashing lives and careers of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Catherine Zeta-Jones portrayed Ms. de Havilland, who came off as a bit catty and gossipy. In her complaint, the elder actress stated neither Ms. Zeta-Jones or Mr. Murphy made any attempt to contact her to learn more about her friendship with Ms. Davis or Ms. Crawford or confirm any of the stories from the series. In the lawsuit, the two-time Academy Award winner best known for playing Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind described herself as a “unique role model for multiple generations of actors and fans.”
I am one of those fans.
Rules for the Southern Rule Breaker Page 8