by Lesley Kagen
Tess hears her family laughing the way you hear music in a passing car—the beat, not the melody. She’s worrying about how the children will cope when she kicks the bucket, but she’s not concerned about Will. He’s already distanced himself from her, so he’ll do just fine after the cancer kills her. The man who was voted Mr. Popularity in high school will have everyone in town to console him, including former Prom Queen, Connie Lushman. They’ll probably marry quickly. The same way Tess’s mother had after her father had passed.
The widow Finley bumped into Leon Gallagher at the Clark gas station on North Avenue after she had a flat tire on her way to work at the hat shop. Leon knew the owner and he was doing him a favor that day by pumping gas and cleaning windshields because the regular guy, who was known as “The Peeker” by the children in the neighborhood because he spent too much time around the restroom window, hadn’t turned up for his shift. Mr. Gallagher, a thin man with small feet and hands and a melting jaw line, asked the gorgeous Louise out to dinner and a movie that night, even after she’d accidently let it slip that she had two mouths to feed. A few months later he married their beautiful mother and moved her and the girls away from the cemetery house to an upper duplex off 66th and Center Streets to “Get a whole new start,” and to be closer to his job at the American Motors factory where he worked on the assembly line making Ramblers.
As you’d expect, Tess and Birdie were beside themselves about leaving the home that held cherished memories of their daddy, but were relieved to find they didn’t hate their stepfather as much as they thought they would. The girls, in fact, welcomed an additional target for Louise’s volatile moods. Also in the plus column, Leon had a job, so their mother could quit hers, which made her slightly more pliable. And the duplex was near enough to their old neighborhood that the sisters could still ride their bikes to their usual haunts—Holy Cross Cemetery, Dalinsky’s Drugstore, the Tosa Theatre, and the Finney Library. They would attend a different Catholic grade school—Blessed Children of God—which was good by them since things hadn’t gone too smoothly at St. Catherine’s due to the “Finley Ghouls” love of the dead and Tess’s increasingly delinquent behavior.
During the muggy summer nights in the new neighborhood, the sisters would sit outdoors on the stoop and listen to the shouts of the kids up the block playing nightly neighborhood games without an iota of desire to join in. Ghost in the Graveyard seemed pretty dull considering what they’d been through, and they had each other, and Birdie had Bee, and they were fine with playing their usual games, watching TV, and pedaling up to the cemetery and movie theatre every Saturday and the library twice a week.
When, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” came drifting out of their next-door neighbor’s window on one of those summer nights—they were always playing Elvis over there—Mrs. Hauser laughed at her husband, Gary, who could do a pretty good impression of “The King” after he hoisted a few at a church shindig.
Birdie stopped picking at the scab on her knee, cocked an ear, and said, “That song always makes me miss Jane Russell.”
“Yeah, me too,” Tess said as she handed her the Kleenex she always kept in her pocket to mop up the blood that’d stream down Birdie’s leg. “Jane was a good dog while she lasted.”
Leon’s pet, an affectionate black Labrador retriever he’d named after his favorite movie star, had also made him more palatable. The dog had puppies a month after the wedding, and Louise, who could be whimsical at times, appeared delighted. But around six weeks later, the girls returned from a trip to the library to find that their mother had sold the black babies to a pet store and given Jane Russell to the pound. “Too much shedding,” she snapped at the girls.
Tess told Birdie at the time that their mother wasn’t telling them the whole story, and she was right. Louise needed cash to pay off a debt. Her new husband shot craps after work and he’d lost a bundle to an overly-muscled fella name of Tiger Hardesty, who was threatening to break his right arm, which would make it impossible for Leon to bring home the bacon.
After the streetlights popped on, which was their signal to head back into the house, Tess told Birdie, “It’s movie day tomorrow.” She rode their red Schwinn to check for the new features at the Tosa Theatre every Friday because she enjoyed movies so very much. But sometimes her sister didn’t want to go to the matinee. She didn’t care for the movies set in outer space. It was hard enough for her to follow stories about people with regular names, but if you threw Dr. Zarkov and Ming from Mongo at her, that was just asking for trouble. “Something called To Kill a Mockingbird is playing.”
Birdie thought about that as they climbed up the last of the duplex steps. “Sounds like one of those animal-dying movies like Bambi and Dumbo. Okay.”
On the three-block walk back home from the neighborhood theatre the following afternoon, the girls took turns kicking a rock and agreeing hands down that To Kill a Mockingbird was the best movie they’d ever seen. And how next to their daddy, Atticus Finch was the best father. Tess, who’d been profoundly and forever affected by the film, said, “Finch even sounds like Finley! That’s got to be some kind of sign!”
Birdie kicked the stone hard and replied with a wistful, and what would turn out to be a prescient smile, “But the name of it reminds me of me, just me.”
When the flashback fades to black, Tess finds herself yearning for her little sister, uses her napkin to dab at her welled-up eyes, and drags her attention back to her family at the dinner table. Will and the children have stopped talking and are looking at each other bemused. Familiar with her internal interludes, but unclear about their origin, they roll their eyes at one another when they catch her drifting off. Eventually, one of them would make a, “Houston, we have a problem,” or “Find any life on a distant planet?” quip.
This time, it’s fifteen-year-old Henry, who says with a laugh, “Hey, Kevin!” (Spacey.)
That’s something mother and son have in common. A love of movies. Tess isn’t, but Henry is also a gifted writer. His scathing movie reviews for the school newspaper are not so popular with the teachers, but the students of Ruby Falls High eat ’em up. Hadley looks more like her dad, but her red-headed son bares a strong resemblance to his mother except for his height. Tess is pretty sure who he got his length from, but there are other parts of her son that remain a mystery. A potboiler. She absolutely adores the boy. Even though he isn’t much fun to be with most of the time now, she thinks, no, she knows their hearts are a matched pair that have been temporarily separated. When she folds the laundry and cannot find its mate, she’s sure it’ll eventually turn up in the most unexpected place to be reunited with its other and she thinks of Henry.
“Take your time reentering Earth’s atmosphere,” he tells her with a winning smile. “I’ll clear.”
Since getting her teenage son to help around the house is nearly impossible, she knows that after Henry walks the dishes to the sink he’ll ask her for money.
You’re a doormat, Louise says disgusted.
Haddie scoots her chair back from the table and tells her dad again, “Delicious.” He acknowledges the compliment with a show of his impressive dimples because she’s licked her plate clean. She won’t eat for her mother, but she binges for her father. Will can’t face the truth, but Tess knows that their daughter will stick her fingers down her throat the minute she gets the chance.
What did I do wrong? my friend wonders for the umpteenth time.
When the nurse had brought the impossibly beautiful Haddie into the hospital room for her first breast-feeding, Tess was shocked at the ghastly error in judgment she’d made. This helpless innocent was depending on her, a messed-up woman with no experience in loving and nurturing a child. “I’ve changed my mind,” she cried. “I can’t…please give her to someone who can take care of her.”
The seasoned nurse muttered, “The blues,” and showed Tess how to fasten Haddie onto her nipple, which is where she kept her until she became so chubby that no one would
dare question the fact that she’d been taking care of her properly, not even her.
Allowing her to nurse too often and for too long, was that how I screwed up? Tess asks herself as she walks her daughter’s plate to the kitchen sink. (She believes that her sister’s eating disorder was the result of Louise’s bad mothering, and if A=B and B=C, then she has failed as well, but her logic couldn’t be more off. All sorts a things figure into a child’s makeup. Bad mothering plays a part, but so do brain chemicals and friends and television shows and destiny and wiring and even past lives. A soul is a quilt stitched of many patches.) As she turns on the hot tap water to rinse the dinner dishes, she wishes again that Birdie, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, would return her e-mails. Tess misses her so much, and her strangely wise little sister might even be able to help undo the damage she believes she’s done to Haddie.
The diner is open seven days a week, so Will is leaving to attend to business. “Cheerio,” he says as he breezes past Tess on his way to the mud room. He leaves an unfamiliar aroma in his wake. It isn’t his usual English Leather, but some other high-school cologne. It reminds her of beer cans, and making out in the backseat of muscle cars to an eight-track tape of Rubber Soul. Was it Jade East? Had his amour Connie Lushman given it to him? Is that the scent Will wore when they were going steady?
The thought of losing him suddenly strikes fear in Tess’s heart, so when her husband calls out from the backdoor, “Later,” she shouts out a desperate, “I love you!” and he answers breezily, “Yeah, you too.”
When Haddie grabs the Volvo keys off the rack above the desk a few minutes later and disappears on Will’s heels, Tess doesn’t ask where she’s going. She’s too afraid that she’ll tell her that it’s anywhere she isn’t.
Henry hops up on the kitchen counter next to the sink and asks, “How about stakin’ me ten bucks? The guys are getting together tonight to play Texas Hold ’Em.” His goal in life is to become a professional poker player like Phil Ivey or Wisconsin’s own, Phil Hellmuth. (He’s planning on legally changing his first name to the obvious at a later date to increase his odds.)
Tess dries her hands on the checkered dish towel, takes her wallet out of her black lucky purse, and slips a twenty into the back pocket of Henry’s jeans. Figuring he owes her one, she steals a hug after he hops down from the counter. She tells him, “Have fun.” He’ll receive his learner’s permit next month, but tonight he’ll ride his ten-speed bike to his big-time, high-stakes poker tournament. “Wear your helmet.”
Once she finishes tidying up the kitchen, she switches the light off above the stove, and heads toward the mud room. Seems like the house, and the dog, are the only ones who want to talk to her anymore. The radiators clank. The grandfather clock in the front hallway ticks. A creak here, a longer creak there. Garbo’s nails click on the wide-plank wood floor as she follows Tess out to the garage where she retrieves the cancer pamphlets that Ginger had passed across her desk that afternoon. She’d hidden them under the car’s floor mat for safekeeping.
Her stomach jackknifes on her way back into the house and she dashes to the powder room off the kitchen. Kneeling in front of the toilet, she thinks of her daughter and how much time she spends worshipping the bowl. Her already-fragile girl wouldn’t be able to handle the thought that her mother could be dying. Same goes for Henry. Beneath his crusty boy exterior, he’s mushy. So like she promised herself earlier, she’ll not tell either of the children about the cancer.
Is that a crown of thorns appearing on your head, Mother Theresa?
After the rest of her dinner comes up in three more heartfelt heaves, Tess collapses against the cool white tile wall and stretches her legs out to make room for Garbo’s warm, bicycle seat head. She shows her golden retriever the pictures in the brochure and says, “Try not to worry, but some doctor is gonna stick a needle into me in a few days and take something out that he’ll use to predict my future, which I’m sorry to inform you, dear girl, isn’t looking too rosy.”
Garbo licks her mistress’s salty cheek and backs out of the powder room. She’ll return with her Frisbee. It’s their usual after-dinner routine.
Tess rinses out her mouth, opens the door off the den that leads to the expansive deck out back, and flips on the flood lights. She looks past her recently created flock of snow angels and flings the Frisbee with all she’s got. When a panting Garbo returns, my friend crouches down, picks up the toy, and says with appreciative pats, “Oh, my goodness, that’s a magnificent duck you’ve retrieved!” It’s a fill-in-the-blank running joke between the two of them that’s based on the holiday calendar. “I’ll clean it and we’ll cook it up for Easter dinner!”
Another wave of nausea hits when Tess realizes that she may not be joining the family around the antique dining room table to enjoy Will’s honey-baked holiday ham and sweet-potato casserole. The spring robins building nests in Henry’s birdhouse, the yellow daffodils that always bring Haddie to mind, and the unfurling lilac bushes alongside her garden that are a tribute to her beloved Gammy might be lost to her too.
Will I be around to plant my garden on Mother’s Day the way I always do?” she wonders as she rushes back to the powder room. Or will I be the one getting planted?
Erroneous Assumptions
Downtown Milwaukee whizzing past the car window reminds art-appreciating Tess of a sporty Leroy Neiman painting.
Will hadn’t gotten around to doing the work he needed to do on the used Taurus they’d bought Haddie for graduation, so instead of him driving her back to school as originally planned, her parents dropped her at the airport to catch the flight back to Savannah. She’d given her dad a clenching goodbye, but she felt like a slab of cement between her mother’s arms.
Tess’s breath makes a frosty patch on the passenger window of her husband’s perfectly restored turquoise-and-white ’57 Chevy on their trip home from Billy Mitchell Field. She uses her fingernail to create a heart and draws an X through it.
She still hadn’t told him yet about the suspicious mammogram. She’d planned to last night. She’d slipped into the lacy nightie with the slits in all the right places hoping that after Will returned home from the diner, they would make passionate love. Afterwards, with her head resting on his chest, would’ve been the perfect time to deliver the news. But as she listened to him stripping in their dark bedroom, she smelled the usual French fry oil and his father’s famous meat loaf, but she also got a whiff of something womanly that didn’t belong on her man—Connie Lushman’s Tabu, so she rolled up in a ball and pretended to be asleep.
When Will leans forward to crank the car radio up, the sun catches his tarnished hair that seems darker around his temples. Is he trying to spruce himself up for Connie? Tess knows she should confront him instead of torturing herself like this. She’s thought about doing so many times over the past month. She even cruised by the diner this past Wednesday night to see if the Chevy was in the lot, or parked in front of Connie’s house, but after years of managing her PTSD, if there’s anything she knows it’s her limits. She couldn’t discover for sure that on top of dying, she was being cheated on. She might lose control and kill one of them. Probably Will.
When her husband starts singing along to the Stones, “You can’t always get what you waaant,” I hoped Tess would smile, but she doesn’t notice Mick’s plaintive wailing, she’s too busy obsessing over whether or not she should share the results of the mammogram with Will at all. He’s been so distracted lately, cold, but it’d be irresponsible not to give him some warning if she’s about to die. How fast does this disease move? Does she have weeks? Months? He doesn’t know where she keeps the kids’ birth certificates and their school reports and….
She makes a kitten in distress sound.
Connie doesn’t make baby-animal noises. Everyone in town thinks your husband missed the boat when he dumped her for you, mean Louise points out.
“What’s the big life-threatening situation today?” her hubby asks in response to h
er mewling.
He’s expecting her to tell him something like…I saw a mouse this afternoon in the attic, but it could’ve been a small rat, and I heard on the news about a case of bubonic plague in India and…and it could’ve snuck off one of the boats that dock in Milwaukee and then hitched a ride to Ruby Falls in a…a…truck delivering vegetables to the diner and then…attracted by all the chrome on the Chevy—they love shiny things—it climbed into the frame and after you parked in the garage it…it hopped out and—Oh, my God! We gotta get home and call the exterminator before it’s too late!
“This time it really is a life-threatening situation,” Tess says, a tad angrily. She lets her hand hover above her right breast like Will might need a visual aid to remember where it’s located. “You know the yearly mammogram I had a few days ago?”
He checks the fur-lined rearview mirror and flicks on his turn signal. “Uh-huh.”
“Well…I…I probably have cancer.”
“No, you don’t,” he says as he changes lanes.
Now, this might seem like a steely brush-off, cruel even, but Will no longer puts much stock in her fears. He doesn’t feel compelled to rush to her side and rescue his damsel in emotional distress any longer. While Tess has remained essentially the same woman he married due to her emotional challenges, he’s changed. Not lately, but he can still be compassionate, just not like he used to be in the good old days. He’s no longer the hand-holding man who had reassured her countless times over the years, “I’m pretty sure the teller with the cold at the bank didn’t lick your deposit slip.” Or, “I’m pretty sure that the cook at Dunkin’ Donuts didn’t put rat poison into your jelly-filled to get back at his wife who looks a lot like you.”
When Tess would choke out, “Only pretty sure?”
“Real sure,” Will would say with a nuzzle of her scared, sweaty neck that he loved the smell of. “Like chicken soup on the simmer,” he’d told her.
