A Bittersweet Goodnight

by Linda C Wright

  Kathy was June’s goddaughter. I never understood the concept of godparents, but she always referred to Kathy as that. Being raised Presbyterian I don’t have godparents. When a baby is baptized, the entire congregation pledges to take care of the child. Kathy’s mother, Nan was June’s best friend since childhood. I assumed June stood up in church and officially received the title of godmother, but it’s hard to picture. I never knew June to go to church or to show any kind of interest in a higher power.

  Nan was a creative woman, something June wasn’t; who handmade my Christmas cards for me for years. I placed my order with Nan every July and excitedly opened the box of cards when it arrived in November. My friends loved receiving the fat jolly Santa with the wispy white cotton beard, and Rudolph with a red felt nose. The card I loved the most was the year she crafted the angel who seemed to float on air while attached to a glittery white card. With much sadness I was forced to purchase store bought cards, after Nan lost her life to breast cancer. It’s now a struggle to find the right greeting after having sent Nan’s glittering handiwork for years to all my friends and family.

  Nan and Kathy came to visit June once after Dad died. June cooked her Pennsylvania Dutch pot roast and Nan showed me her newly created line of thank you notes with dried flowers prettily arranged on the front. We had so many laughs that night it was as if I had known them all my life. In a way I had, through June. She adored them both and spoke of them often but again kept her most precious friends from me for all these years. I don’t know why.

  Once again the knife at the bottom of my gut began stabbing at my insides. I opened the sliding glass door, walked over the ramp some handyman had fashioned for her so she wouldn’t trip over the door tracks, and sucked in a breath of hot, humid but fresh air. I wiped a puddle of green water from the seat of one of the white plastic chairs gracing the tiny, screened patio. I dried the seat with a thin and worn hand towel that had been left draped over the back of a chair to be available for this very purpose. A matching plastic table wedged itself between them.

  On the table, I found June’s ashtray still full of cigarette butts. Were these lipstick ringed stubs June’s final smoking frenzy before my sister marched her out the door, put her in the car and drove her to the Hawthorne Residence? Her makeup went on first thing every morning but did she take extra care that day knowing she’d be meeting many new people? Did she throw her tracking list to the wind during that final hour? Was she leisurely having her morning smoke unaware she’d wake up tomorrow in a strange bed without her cigarettes on her nightstand? I wanted to believe it was the latter, enjoying her final smoke.

  I knew the ashtray well. It came with June to every home she shared with Dad. White porcelain, in the shape of a seashell, trimmed in gold. More than likely the piece was a gift from a ladies dress manufacturer trying to win her business as a buyer for a major department store. Etched across one side, her name, ‘June D. Coackley’.

  I’m not sure when I learned her given first name was not June. Her given name had been Dorothy June Cockley. She hated the name Dorothy and at some point in her life told people to call her June. I had only ever known her as June.

  The odd thing was she never legally changed her name. When I started handling her affairs, all of her accounts were titled as June D. Wright. Social security and the long-term care insurance company never questioned me about a difference in her legal name. My guess was when she went to social security back in 1967 to change her name to Wright, she told them to switch the Dorothy and the June while they were at it. In the days before computers, those things were possible.

  However, her last name, since my siblings and I were never introduced to her family, remains a mystery to me. I vaguely remember her telling me one time she added the ‘a’ because she tired of people pronouncing it “Cockley” with a short ‘o’ as in slang for a male body part. She wanted it pronounced with a long ‘o’ as in a popular, soft drink. Once she took my father’s name, her maiden name fell off the radar, but the golden spelling of Coackley remained on the ashtray.

  Through the years I’d known her, June often put on airs that she was someone better or different than herself like switching her first and middle names, or changing her last name by adding a letter and hoping no one else would notice. She loved to casually referred to the man down the hall who she paid to drive her to her doctor appointments as her “driver” in order to impress her neighbors and make sure they knew she was self sufficient and had money. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t just be June. All the time we’d spent together had I been gossiping and laughing with June or someone she imagined herself to be in her mind?

  Sitting next to a pile of cigarette butts did little to clear my scratchy throat or ease the pounding in my head behind my eyes. I didn’t stay on the patio for long and took the ashtray with me when I went back inside. I dumped the whole thing, gold trimmed shell, stale butts and her made up name into the trashcan.

  The green eyes of jealousy glared at me from around the room. Did I feel I was the only one entitled to her precious things since I’m the one who knew her best? Am I angry I’m the only one here; angry I can’t leave here until this job is done, or angry June can’t live on her own any longer? By poking through all of her cherished possessions, things that were always in the same spot no matter which home she lived in, something about them now seemed jumbled, haphazard. I couldn’t make sense of how she decided who got which piece. Maybe nothing about June made any sense to me anymore. Her constant changing to fit into situations or impress different people was her disguise and I never really knew this woman, my stepmother, my friend, and a member of my family. A person I had known for more than fifty years.

  I picked up the crinkled, yellow list and tried to flatten it out. Writing Kathy’s name on a pink post it note, I placed it on the small gold and cut crystal umbrella that resided on the sofa’s end table. I wrote more names on the sticky note pad and walked around the room placing them on June’s precious items I would never see again.

  “Not all those who wander are lost.”

  - J.R.R. Tolkien

  Chapter Seven

  That summer Steve and I were packed up and shipped off to spend our allotted three weeks per the divorce decree with Dad and June in Seattle. We flew all by ourselves so someone thought we were sensible and grown up enough to make the six-hour flight across the country alone.

  We weren’t strangers to flying. Mom used to joke I’d been flying since before I was born. Those were the days when the stewardess passed out chewing gum to keep your ears from popping as the plane took off. I remember once our family flew from Minneapolis to Detroit to spend Christmas with my grandparents. When the stewardess held a black tray filled with brightly colored pieces of orange, pink and white gum in front of me, I struggled to decide which color to choose. Mom picked one for me so the attendant could move on to the next row. The gum was pink and I liked pink.

  On the airplane everyone got a hot meal with real silverware and a miniature pack of Winston cigarettes. The stewardess could see we weren’t adults but none of them bothered to remove the cigarettes before serving us. Society’s view of smoking has come a long way. If we’d been flying to Detroit to visit our grandparents, we saved the cigarettes for Granddad Husen. I gave him the six miniature packs of cigarettes when we arrived at Grandma’s house. He’d thank me and put them away where he stored the rest of his smoking paraphernalia. At age five, I didn’t know I was actually killing him, instead of giving him a gift from the heart.

  On this trip however, Granddad wasn’t waiting for us at the other end of the flight and we didn’t know we should be saving the cigarettes for anyone else. Dad smoked a cigar and we didn’t yet know about June’s love affair with cigarettes. I left mine on the tray. So did Steve. In those days flying was fun and full of freebies we were hesitant to leave behind.

  Steve got the window seat and me, the middle. Observing
the pecking order of siblings never deviated in anything we did in life. I spent the entire trip leaning across his lap in order to stare out the window. He didn’t seem to mind. He was used to me pushing and shoving my way to the front of the pack. When we flew over the Grand Canyon, the stewardess pointed it out for us since we were such well-behaved children.

  I didn’t know what Steve felt about this trip or Dad and June. He didn’t tell me. Being the only boy I recall both of my parents going out of their way to give him some different experiences. Once Dad took him on a father son trip to Cooperstown and the Baseball Hall of Fame. I wasn’t allowed to go. Steve also had an elaborate toy slot car track set up in the basement and Mom took us to several organized races so he and his cars could participate. Bored watching cars go round and round on a track, I had to stand by and wait until the race finished.

  He didn’t tell me until we were adults that once he was playing with his cars, which were kept in a dark hidden corner of the basement laundry room of our big house. Mom and Dad came to the basement to have an argument so the kids wouldn’t hear them upstairs. They didn’t know Steve was listening on the other side of the wall. Mom used the word ‘girlfriend’ more than once. So Steve had some frame of reference about June that he never shared with his little sister even while confined for six hours on an airplane.

  Dad retrieved us at the gate. These were the days when people walked freely from the check in desk to the gate and all points in between. He drove us home in relative silence since Steve and I were still engaged in staring out the window, gaping at the mountainous scenery surrounding the busy streets of this new city. We’d never been to the west coast before so seeing snow on the mountaintops in July went against everything we’d learned so far about the phenomenon of weather.

  Dad and June’s apartment, in a high rise building, was bright and spacious. I found it strange though to take an elevator to your front door. I was used to jumping out of the car and barreling through back door straight into the house. Elevators gave a different feel to being home by dragging out the comfort of finally arriving by navigating a maze of elevators and long hallways and saying a polite hello to strangers passed along the way.

  Inside June waited with Mia, her dog, a miniature black poodle. Mia wagged her tail a bit and sniffed my ankles before trotting off to take a nap in a plush dog bed in the corner. I don’t know how old Mia was at the time but it looked to me by the gray on her muzzle, like her best years were behind her.

  We had a dog at home, Heidi, a miniature Schnauzer. A dog was another one of those things for my brother that my parents thought would be good for him. Only the dog was unruly, Steve had no idea how to train a puppy, and the rest of us had no interest in helping him. My parents told me from day one, she was Steve’s dog, so he should be the one to walk her but he didn’t. Heidi ended up being Mom’s dog. No one could get close to Mom if Heidi was in the room. When we met Mia, neither of us knew that a dog could be loving and fun to play with, so we kept our distance.

  I looked around at the furnishings that were so unlike anything my mother had purchased for our home. The oversized sofa covered in a gold vomit colored crushed velvet overpowered the room. An antique settee upholstered to match sat at an angle in the corner. Dad claimed an overstuffed armchair and ottoman in front of the television. I knew it belonged to him by the haphazard pile of newspapers on the floor next to it.

  When Mom got tired of the sofa at home, she went out and bought a new slipcover. When it got dirty, she’d throw it in the washing machine and then tug and twist the shrunken fabric back onto the couch. The seat cushions turned up on the sides until we sat on them long enough to flatten them out. The skirt never quite made it back down to the floor and a ribbon of the old, original, white brocade underneath stuck out like a sore thumb.

  “Don’t sit on the settee,” Dad instructed us. “It’s old and fragile. And don’t sit on those little chairs over there either.” He pointed to two child-size chairs with carved wood backs and a peach colored velvet padded seat. I didn’t plan on it anyway. Neither looked very comfortable for watching television.

  The pictures on the walls were an eclectic mix of an abstract portrait whose mismatched eyes seemed to follow me around the room, a contemporary collection of sailboats and a painting of some odd and droopy orange flowers. At home we had paintings of Canadian geese, traditional landscapes and a barnyard scene complete with chickens and goats gracing the walls. I didn’t find comfort or see the beauty in anything hanging here.

  This home had a different smell to it too, kind of sweet and soapy. It reminded me of the scent of my father’s shaving cream I came to know when I would sit in the bathroom and watch him shave in the morning. It wasn’t just the bathroom that smelled that way here, it was the entire house. That scent left our home when Dad left, and here it overwhelmed me to the point I felt a little sick to my stomach.

  The dishes in the kitchen and the towels hanging in the bathroom had an air of impracticability about them, frilly and embroidered. Fragile crystal bowls and china vases were scattered across the coffee table as well as the two large square end tables on either side of the puke colored sofa. Obviously, none of these things was geared to use and abuse by children. Nothing here had come from our house with Dad when he left. He brought nothing with him from our home. Even the clothes he wore looked different to me. I would be spending these three weeks in a foreign land.

  At home I would spend the summer walking a mile to the Village Square shopping center to see what new stuff I could find at the drugstore. If there wasn’t anything interesting there, I’d head down to Davis Bakery for an oversized chocolate chip cookie. On the weekends though, my best friend, Georgia, usually invited me to her family’s cabin on a lake about two hours drive from home. I was already missing the hamburger cookouts, water skiing and being a part of a familiar family unit.

  I met June only once before at the dinner Mom invited her to. As a shy and awkward pre-teen, I didn’t kiss or hug her hello. Dad took our suitcases to the guest bedroom and June gave us a tour of the place so we didn’t feel lost. Mia lay in her dog bed ignoring us.

  Shortly after our arrival, June called me into her and Dad’s bedroom. In her hand she had some round tubes wrapped in white paper.

  “Linda, in case you need these, I keep them here in this drawer.” She opened a dresser drawer and pointed to a box full of these tubes in the corner.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “Tampons. In case you start your period while you’re here,” she said.

  “Oh. Okay,” I answered not wanting to reveal I had no idea where this conversation was headed.

  I never saw a tampon before and didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it. My mother bought me a thin, white elastic belt and showed me how to secure the ends of the bulky sanitary napkins, but I hadn’t paid much attention. I don’t believe they were packed in my suitcase for the trip here as a precautionary measure. Miss Larson, the health teacher had explained what would happen to us girls but I was convinced something this gross sounding would never happen to me.

  June never had children of her own, so Mom must have called her in advance of my visit and asked her to watch out for me. That I was old enough to have a period would never cross my father’s mind. He couldn’t remember my birthday let alone my age. That’s the way he was and all us kids became used to it at an early age. If June thought of it on her own, I’d be surprised. With no experience around children entering puberty, she couldn’t possibly come up with the need for this conversation all by herself.

  More likely is that the request from my mother was translated to June through my father.

  “Junie, Sallie thinks Linny might start her period while she’s here. Do you have some things for her to use if she does?” he asked. Junie was his nickname for June and Linny, for me.

  “She can use some of mine.” June answered.

 
; If Mom mentioned pads versus tampons, Dad didn’t retain that information to pass it along to June, or see it as necessary. He probably blocked out a lot of what Mom told him. June didn’t go out and buy any special products suitable for a young girl, she shared her own.

  As for me, I had no idea what on earth I would do with a tampon if the situation arrived. Thank God my period didn’t start that summer and I was left to become a woman under my mother’s instructions with bulky, uncomfortable super absorbent pads.

  ***

  To keep us entertained for an extended period of time, Dad had a full schedule planned. Living in a city opened up a whole new world. We rode buses and trains, and took an elevator to the top of the Space Needle. The biggest thrill of all however, happened to be the indoor pool right on the first floor. If Dad would let us, Steve and I would spend the summer immersed in water. The community pool behind the local high school at home lacked the luxury we discovered downstairs.

  Every morning after Dad left for work, June gave us each a beach towel and told us what time to be back upstairs. She didn’t have a job while they lived in Seattle so I don’t know what she did all day. Sending us off to swim by ourselves probably gave her a needed respite from active children. When we came back, she collected our towels, wet bathing suits and had sandwiches waiting on the dining room table with a smile. That was far more than our own mother could do between holding down a job and finding time to entertain children.