by Jenna Blum
“You’d better call me,” he said, “or I’ll call you.” He blew her a kiss. “Hurry back, Mrs. Robinson. I already have withdrawal.”
* * *
When June and Elsbeth landed in Minneapolis in the afternoon on July 2, June’s mother, Ida, was there to pick them up. June was relieved and a little surprised that Ida was still driving; Ida was only sixty-five, but ever since she sold Bouquet’s LadiesWear and retired, June had watched her mother anxiously for signs of old age. Today Ida was wearing a natty olive-green pantsuit that matched her Buick, and she managed the airport traffic with aplomb. Her hair was still a neat acorn cap of brown. But June could see the white of her roots bleeding through, and Ida had to lift her chin to squint over the wheel in a way that let June know her mother’s glasses prescription needed to be strengthened, and her chin wobbled periodically for no reason. It was disconcerting.
They drove south over the Mendota Bridge onto Highway 52. Elsbeth slept in the back seat, exhausted from the excitement of the TWA wings pinned to her OshKosh overalls, the glimpse into the cockpit, and breakfast on the plane—“Mommy! Eggies in the sky!” Ida asked how Peter was, how was the restaurant, what were the fashions like in New York these days? She filled June in on all the New Heidelberg gossip: who had died, who had married, who’d had more babies or gotten sick or become a hopeless drunk, who was stepping out on whom.
They reached New Heidelberg at twilight, which lasted a long time in July, the sun not setting until after nine. June twisted in her seat to look for all the familiar landmarks in the evening’s orange haze. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” June’s friend Dominique, a French model, used to sigh about her suitors; in New Heidelberg, as with faithless men, the more things changed, the more they were the same. There was one stoplight, downtown at the intersection of Elm and Main. The pharmacy was closed, but Ida could fill her prescriptions at the Ben Franklin instead of going all the way into La Crosse. There was a second water tower, two big blue pushpins holding the town in place, and on the west side, just before the sign saying welcome to new heidelberg! wild turkey capital of minnesota, a new housing development was going up, named, without any irony that June could see, Green Acres. “I don’t know who they think’s going to live there,” commented Ida as they passed. “It’s all so fancy.”
Ida still lived in the house where June had grown up, in the older postwar subdivision called Brigadoon. Ida pulled into the driveway, and they sat looking at the house, Ida with satisfaction: when she sold her shop, she’d been able to pay off the mortgage, concluding a thirty-year financial journey she’d begun with her husband Oscar’s death benefits in 1945—government compensation for Iwo Jima. “Uncle Sam and I bought this house,” Ida liked to say. It was small and neat as a Monopoly piece, the grass in front cut on the diagonal, tubs of marigolds bracketing the front door. The trees that had been saplings when June played hopscotch and roller-skated on these sidewalks were now mature elms, shading the street.
Ida looked fondly at her granddaughter in the rearview mirror. “Should we wake her? I hate to when she’s sleeping so nicely . . .”
“I know,” said June, “but she’ll be up in the night if we don’t give her some dinner.”
“Does she still have such a good appetite?”
“She does. Like a trucker.”
“Oh, now,” said Ida, “I wish you were little more like that. You were always picky. . . . Let’s see, I could make sandwiches—I have some olive loaf. Or would you girls like to go out?”
“Out, I think,” said June diplomatically. She would never forget Peter’s horror during his visit here, his barely suppressed shudder over the sliced bologna studded with pimentos. “It looks like typhus,” he’d whispered.
Going out in New Heidelberg after 7:00 p.m. meant one of two places: Wilmar’s Supper Club, where there were polka bands on weekends and Duke Ellington was rumored to have once played, or the A&W. Since the supper club was no place for a little girl, Ida drove them to the root beer stand with its orange roof and drive-in bays, casting beckoning fluorescence into the fields.
June hadn’t been to the A&W for years, so Ida ordered for them: roast beef sandwiches, onion rings, two frosted mugs of root beer, and a child’s float. Elsbeth stirred, awakened by the voice on the squawk box. “Mommy,” she said in wonder, “are we in a spaceship?”
“No, sweetie pie, we’re in Minnesota with Grandma,” said June, and Ida waggled her fingers over the seat.
“Look who’s awake,” she said. “Did you have a good nap, honey? Would you like to sit up here with us?” Elsbeth nodded shyly: yes, please.
June got out to help Elsbeth slide out of the back seat and into the front, aware that in the other cars diners were staring at her, her macramé dress and cork heels, trying to figure out who she was. June waved, and they returned the gesture or lifted fingers off steering wheels, then turned to each other to talk.
The waitress roller-skated to the Buick with their food, attaching the tray to Ida’s window, and Ida unwrapped their sandwiches. The car filled with the smell of grease. June’s mouth watered. She’d forgotten how much she’d loved the beef, the horseradish, and—her favorite—the onion rings; she nibbled the breading off one, eating around its circumference while helping Elsbeth with her napkin and ketchup.
“Use both hands,” she said as Elsbeth lifted her float; “you don’t want to spill in Grandma’s car.”
“Oh, she won’t,” said Ida, “she’s a big girl now, aren’t you, honey?”
Elsbeth nodded and smashed a whole onion ring into her mouth. Ida smiled. “Just look at those curls,” she said, threading her finger through one and pulling, then letting it spring back. Elsbeth grinned up at her, chewing.
“A gift from her dad,” said June.
“Oh, I know,” said Ida. “Everyone around here still talks about his movie-star hair.” She wiped her fingers on a paper napkin and began winding Elsbeth’s ringlets around them. “Do you know my mother tied my hair in rags to give me curls when I was little?”
Elsbeth laughed. “Grandma,” she said, “that’s silly.”
She leaned back against Ida, letting Ida twist her hair into long, shining tubes. Elsbeth’s face was blissful in a way June rarely saw it at home, unless Peter was reading her a story or helping her stir something on the stove. June sighed. She was thrilled Elsbeth got along so well with her mother, but she was jealous, too. Ida had whatever June didn’t have—as did most women. What it was, what June lacked, was natural maternal instinct. She’d never had it; she’d been born with it left out of her. She’d hated dolls, their clicky eyes scaring her, and unlike all her friends, June had never wanted to babysit, didn’t understand how they could sound so dreamy when they talked about having babies of their own. Oh, I want at least four or five, all girls so we can play dress-up! June liked to play dress-up by herself. She was perfectly content in her mother’s shop, clomping around in scarves and faux fox stoles and clip-on earrings and heels far too big for her.
June had confessed this flaw to Elsbeth’s pediatrician, when Elsbeth was four months old and had colic and June was going out of her mind. Nothing, nothing she did could help her baby stop crying, she’d said; it had started the first moment she’d held Elsbeth, and it was all June’s fault, because Elsbeth knew June had never wanted to be a mother. There was something wrong with her. “You’re right,” the doctor had said, “there is: your neurotic fantasies. You’re letting them run away with you. All women are meant to be mothers,” he’d said, ripping a prescription for Valium off his pad; “it’s simple biology, it’s what you’re designed for, and you’re no exception. You’re not special, Mrs. Rashkin. Put her in a bouncy chair or drive her around when she’s fretful, and stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
June had, for the most part. Her maternal deficit was somewhat easier to bear in New York, where a woman could, even should, question her options; where she could wear T-shirts that read “A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a
Bicycle.” But June felt alien here, where women were wives and mothers and did not work—unless thrown into some difficult and pitiable circumstance, as young Ida Bouquet had been by her husband’s death. What had made June so different? Why did she want other things? Was it restlessness inherited from some pioneer ancestor lying over the hill in the New Heidelberg Lutheran cemetery? Some gift, like Elsbeth’s curls, from the heroic soldier father June didn’t remember? June lit a cigarette, cranking her window down so the smoke would float off into the night. The sun was finally going down behind the horizon in stripes of watermelon and gold; the air smelled sweet, of hay and clover and a hint of manure. The loudspeakers played cheerful ditty-bop music from June’s own childhood—Chantilly Lace and a purty face / and a ponytail hangin’ down!—and beyond the highway cows were lowing. Finally June relaxed against her vinyl seat; whatever her troubles, it was good to be home.
* * *
The Fourth of July was a highly anticipated event in New Heidelberg, the morning parade with the Sons of Norway and their wives dancing the polka, and of course fireworks—but for Ida, nothing was as important as the luncheon she had arranged for June the next day. Two of the guests were usual suspects, Ida’s best friends Minnie and Lois: her bridge partners, former employees, honorary aunts to June. The third woman, Pat, June didn’t know at all, even though Ida said, “Oh, you must—Pat Peeper; she was in your grade at school!” Sure, of course, June said finally, to make Ida happy, though the truth was she had no recollection of this Pat. June suspected Ida had invited her because all of June’s close friends from growing up had married and moved away, to Des Moines or the Twin Cities or even Texas, but Ida still wanted June to have a girl her own age to play with.
The luncheon was set for noon, and the moment the siren went off at the fire station there was a corresponding knock on the door: in they trooped, Ida’s friends and the mysterious Pat, bearing in Tupperware yesterday’s transformed leftovers. They hugged June, exclaimed over her Halston dress and how thin she was, made much of Ida’s new pantsuit—light blue today—and filed into the parlor off the sun porch, all the better to fold back Ida’s accordion door and peep through it at Elsbeth, who was lying on her stomach next to the hi-fi, enraptured by Ida’s album of My Fair Lady.
“Can you please say hi to the ladies, sweetie?” said June, and Elsbeth said, “Hi, ladies!” then resumed listening, chin propped on her fists and heels swinging idly in the air. She was wearing the new lavender dress Ida had taken her to get at Doerflinger’s in La Crosse and let Ida coil her hair into fat sausage ponytails, though she had insisted on also wearing her princess apron.
“Oh my, that hair!” said Minnie, as they arranged themselves at the card table June had helped Ida set up that morning and cover with her best tablecloth. “It’s to die for.”
“She’s a regular Shirley Temple,” boomed Lois, who was built like a silo and had a voice like Foghorn Leghorn.
“How’s your hubby?” asked Minnie, taking out her cigarettes and setting them next to her plate for after they ate. She was a doll-like woman with a brown perm—they all had brown perms—and eyes the color of cornflowers. Before June came along, Minnie had been the prettiest girl New Heidelberg had ever seen, except for that German war bride who lived out on the Swenson farm and didn’t count because she was an import.
“I bet he’s handsome as ever,” Minnie continued, bumping elbows with June. “I always thought he looked just like Errol Flynn.”
“God, you’re old,” bellowed Lois, “I was going to say Leslie Howard myself,” and they all laughed, even Pat, although she had yet to speak, and when June smiled at her she flushed the color of her red jumper.
“Please, everybody, help yourselves,” said Ida, and the ladies started dishing the food. There were many exclamations over the cleverness of the recipes: Minnie’s July 4 fried chicken was now salad, with the addition of mayonnaise, bacon bits, and cheddar cheese; Lois’s deviled eggs had been chopped and mixed with celery and Miracle Whip. The most ingenious transformation, however, belonged to Pat, who shyly confessed that yes, her salad was ham—only she’d put it in Jell-O and poured it in a mold, so it was now octopus-shaped and studded with pineapple, olives, and—were those stars?
“They are,” said Pat, the flush creeping up her neck again. “They’re cranberry sauce? From the can? I slid it out and made the stars using a cookie cutter?”
This drew exclamations of high praise from everyone, including June, who was taking mental notes with which to torment Peter—and the olives, she would say, were canned. Pat looked shyly at June and smiled, and suddenly June knew exactly who Pat was, and felt her own face grow hot. Pat Peeper had once been Pat Mueller, but all the kids had called her Fat Pat—she had weighed close to three hundred pounds. June knew this because some of the football team had carried Pat, screaming and struggling, to the livestock scale at the county fair and held her down until they got her weight. That had been in sophomore year, and the reason June didn’t remember Pat was that she’d gone to stay with an aunt in Cedar Rapids after that, although some said she’d had a nervous breakdown and had to go to Black Wing Asylum. The world was not kind to fat women.
But here Pat was, reinvented—almost as thin as June herself. She took a slim segment of the ham salad mold and cut the pineapple ring into slivers with the side of her fork, a maneuver June recognized. “You look terrific,” June told her.
“Thanks,” said Pat, “so do you. But you always did,” and her face grew so red June feared she would have an embolism. “Are you still modeling?”
“Not as much anymore,” said June, “since I had Elsbeth.”
“Every time I drive to La Crosse I look for you at the stationery store,” Pat burst out, “in Vogue and Glamour and Mademoiselle!”
“That’s sweet of you. But honestly, I’m too old now. It’s a very competitive industry.”
“Oh, I don’t know, June Ann,” boomed Lois, “you could always do catalogs. Don’t they need older models?”
“Sure, to play the moms,” said Pat. “You could model for Dayton’s.”
“Or Macy’s,” said Lois.
“Or Sears!” said Pat, “I bet you’d look so cute on a rider mower!” and then she glared at her plate again.
Minnie patted June’s hand. “June Ann doesn’t need to work now, with her husband to provide for her.”
“Well,” June said, “actually—”
“How’s his business, June? Your mom says he’s got a whole chain of restaurants.”
June raised her eyebrows at Ida, who suddenly found the beaded necklace her glasses were attached to very interesting. “He has one. In New Jersey, where we live. He used to have one in New York, but it closed.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” said Minnie. “Though I wouldn’t want to go into New York City to eat, myself. The dirt! and the crime! They say there’s a mugging there every minute.”
“Well—,” June started again.
“Your mom says you’re doing real good, though,” Lois bellowed. “She showed us the pictures you sent of your house. It’s beautiful.”
“Thank you,” said June.
Minnie nodded enthusiastically. “I love those turn-of-the-century homes. Big, though—hard to keep up. I suppose you have a girl.”
June was momentarily bewildered. Of course she had a girl; hadn’t Minnie just seen her? Then she realized Minnie didn’t mean Elsbeth; she meant a maid.
“Not anymore,” she said. “We did have a cleaning lady a long time ago, but when the recession hit we had to let her go.”
Minnie looked confused. “I thought your husband was Jewish.”
June felt equally confused by the non sequitur. “He is.”
“But I thought all Jews were—” Minnie rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. “Ow! Who kicked me?”
“I did,” said Lois. “You are plain ignorant, Minnie. Sure, plenty of Jews have money. But lots of them are just as poor as we are! Like those immigrants who
came over after the war, from the camps. Like June Ann’s husband did—right, June Ann?”
“Well, I know that,” Minnie said. “June Ann knows I didn’t mean anything by it. Goodness, Lois, you’re so sensitive.”
“That’s true,” Lois agreed, “I am.”
“But he did have some wealthy relatives who helped him get started here, didn’t he?” said Minnie. She looked anxiously at June.
June reassured Minnie it was true and decided she’d waited long enough for a cigarette. Minnie didn’t mean any harm; all she wanted to hear was that June was well taken care of. But how Peter would hate to hear himself described this way, after putting as much time and effort between himself and the past as humanly possible. It had been hard for him, coming here where most people had never seen a Jew before—except maybe in the service. In New Heidelberg, Peter had become the instant poster boy for Judaism. Peter wore a suit and tie every day? All Jews wore suits and ties! He never rolled up his sleeves? No Jews showed their wrists! Peter talked with a slight accent? It was Hebrew! He ordered his grilled cheese with tomato? All Jews ate tomato in their grilled cheese. On Peter’s last night they had taken him to Wilmar’s, where he had been filling a plate at the salad bar when a little towheaded boy ran over to him. “Are you the Jew?” he’d asked, and when Peter said, “Why, yes, I am,” the boy had run back to his parents in the booth, yelling, “He don’t look like he killed Jesus!”
“Speaking of husbands,” said Lois, “guess who I ran into the other day.”
“Who?” said Minnie, Ida, and Pat.
Lois slid a sly glance at June. “Dwayne Knutsen.”
“No,” said Minnie.
“Yup.”
“I thought he’d moved to Iowa,” said Minnie.
“Well, he did,” said Lois, “but I guess he was back visiting his mom and dad.” She looked expectantly at June; they all did. June smiled and sipped her coffee.
“Well, June Ann,” said Minnie, “don’t you want to know how he looked?”
“Not particularly,” said June, but when all the ladies said “Awwww,” she laughed and said, “All right, since you’re obviously dying to tell me. How’d he look?”
