by Lesley Kagen
When she reached the stretch of sand, she heeled off her shoes, peeled off her socks, and set them on a Goodyear tire that’d washed ashore. The grit between her toes brought back the days when their sun-worshipping mother would take Birdie and her to the beach when they were kids. Louise could lie for hours on a white sheet, oiled up from nose to toes, her eyes half open to take in the admiring glances from the other beachgoers. She was a fine-looking woman with a ripe figure. A cinnamon toast tan made her downright edible.
On those late-afternoon drives back home to the duplex after they’d spent a summer day at the lake, the smell of sun-burned skin, and songs by Duane Eddy and Bobby Vinton, would fill the woody station wagon. Birdie loved to stick her head out the back window and lap at the air, but Tess would hold her breath while she studied her mother’s pale-blue eyes in the rearview mirror looking for signs of what was to come. Sure, she was in a good mood now, she always was after a day in the sun that always seemed to melt some of her anger, but what about tonight?
To her love-thirsty girls, she was an oasis that would appear and disappear at will. They could never be sure if after they got home unpredictable Louise would suddenly refuse to talk to them for no apparent reason. She often went mute, mostly for an hour or two, but there were times she didn’t speak for a week. It didn’t bother Tess all that much when she gave them the cold shoulder, but it just about killed Birdie to be ignored like that. She’d beg Louise to tell her what she’d done wrong, but when the only answer she ever received was a snarling, “Don’t give me that. You know what you did,” the both of them learned to stay out of her way until the sweet surprise that would mark their mother’s mood shift appeared under their pillows.
The sisters’ fingers would brush up against the corner of the prickly serrated paper of a Three Musketeers bar because that’s how Louise would refer to them when she was on an upswing. Tess and Birdie would stay up most of the night nibbling, and reminding each other to profusely thank their mother for her thoughtfulness first thing in the morning or there would be a price to pay. If they didn’t sound grateful enough, she might even resort to a “drop-off.” She’d force them into the woody wagon and let them off at a park pond because she knew that Tess was frightened of water and if she was scared, so was Birdie. Or she might choose a back alley or a vacant lot, and off she’d go to do some shopping or stop into Lonnigan’s Bar for a cold one. She’d return for the girls after she thought they’d learned how lucky they were to have her.
The particular “drop-off” that’s etched in my mind took place on the night Louise drove furiously east through the streets of Milwaukee and left the girls at the corner of 3rd and Walnut Streets because they hadn’t cleared the supper dishes fast enough. “You made your bed now lie in it,” was all she told them before she drove off.
This part of the city was miles from their home and known in those days by a few different names, the politest being the “Core.” Louise, who referred to black people as, “jigaboos” or “jungle bunnies,” thought they’d be terrified because they didn’t know any people of color in real life, only movies. The Finley sisters were scared, but just a smidgeon. Their love for To Kill a Mockingbird—the first movie they’d seen that portrayed Negroes not as scary jungle natives looking to use their blow guns on white explorers, but like regular people—soothed any ruffled feathers.
When a woman with coffee-two-creams skin and a distinctly southern drawl appeared next to the bus stop bench where they’d settled in, Tess and Birdie set their hands in hers and didn’t think twice when she led them to a white wooden house up the block because there was just something about her. An Etta James album was playing in the parlor and the sound of her sweet voice drifted out of an open window. After the gal who reminded the sisters of Calpurnia from their favorite movie set them down on the front porch steps with rolled sugar cookies and two tall glasses of milk, she patted their backs and told them that there was nothing to be afraid of, that they were safe, and for the first time since their daddy’s death they felt so.
Yup. The evening of August 5, 1960 was when my very first meeting with Tess occurred. She doesn’t remember me, or even what transpired that night, all she knows is that whenever she hears the greatest singer of all time crooning At Last, for some reason she doesn’t understand, she feels rescued.
My friend’s voice cracks when she goes back to writing to her sister.
“…But when I tried to scatter the ashes the way I told you I would, there were some technical difficulties.”
Tessie both feared and despised Lake Michigan. Thought of it as a murderer and herself as its accomplice. Despite therapists telling her time and again that that there was nothing she could’ve done to save her father that afternoon after he tumbled over the side of the boat, words, no matter how wise, have a way of fading over time if not grasped deeply enough by the heart. The difference between knowing and believing is a deep chasm to cross without a safety net.
Tess withdrew the golden cube from the market bag and cautiously approached the foamy, scalloped edge of the water. She knew she should say some parting words. She tried, but failed to think of anything nice to say about her mother before she heaved the box into the same water that had claimed her father’s life.
If the sun had been out that afternoon a ray of light might’ve illuminated the cube before it tumbled to the sandy lake bottom, but the sky was fittingly tombstone gray, and Louise proved to be as uncooperative in death as she was in life.
Tess watched with growing horror as an east wind kicked up and the waves seemed to grow magically larger. Each crest brought unsinkable Louise closer…closer…closer…until the cube landed back at her daughter’s toes.
Panicked, she was about to abandon Louise there on the beach, until she remembered the information on the side of the box that an employee at the Neptune Society had engraved for some unfathomable reason:
Theresa Marie Blessing
314 Chestnut Street
Ruby Falls, Wisconsin 53012
If Tess’d been anywhere else, say the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf Coast, she would’ve taken off, sure that her mother would be found by a homeless man. Eureka! he’d say on his way to a pawn shop where he’d make enough to buy a bottle of Thunderbird to soothe his sad heart. She could live with that outcome. She might even be able to convince herself that she’d performed a charitable work in Louise’s memory.
But she wasn’t anywhere else, was she. She was on the shores of Lake Michigan. For the most part, Wisconsinites are a fun-loving, God-fearing people raised on the Golden Rule. There’s a bar or church on almost every corner, sometimes both. If Tess left Louise’s box on the beach, she knew some Good Samaritan would eventually show up on her doorstep. Hey, there. I’m Bob. I found this when I was usin’ my metal detector down by the lake this mornin’, the man would say. He’d be rosy-cheeked and plump, maybe a little lit up. Ya probably been lookin’ all over the place for it, eh?
As Tess stared down at the golden box in the sand, it suddenly occurred to her that in her haste to be rid of Louise, she’d forgotten an important step in the process. She’d tossed the whole box into the water. How could she be so stupid! What she needed to do was open it and release the ashes!
With mounting desperation, she grappled in her purse for something sharp and her hand landed on her father’s Swiss Army knife. She flicked open the big blade and was about to begin stabbing at the cube when an awful thought grabbed a hold of her. What if she succeeded? On a calm day that might’ve been all right, but with the wind coming in strong the way it was, when she tipped the box to free her mother’s remains, the ashes would blow back in her face. She might inhale Louise. She’d become part of her and she’d never be free.
Horrified by the thought, Tess shoved her daddy’s knife back into her lucky purse and her mother into the damp grocery bag, and scrambled up the same slippery slope she’d come down.
After she arrived home, exhausted and defeated, she didn’t return Lo
uise back to the kitchen cabinet next to the bone china. She set the ashes of the woman who still tormented her during the day, and woke her in the middle of the night with nagging criticisms on a garage shelf behind the bag of salt that Will scatters atop winter ice, which I found more poetic than anything ever written by Robert Frost.
Tess mumbles to herself as she pecks out the note.
“Please, forgive me, Birdie. I’m sick. I need you. You’d love Ruby Falls. There’s a store called The Emporium that sells the kind of candy we ate when we were kids. And there’s a spooky convent and cute shops and I miss you like I’ve never missed anybody.
Butterfly kisses,
Tessie”
Before she sends it off, she reads over what she’s written through tears that all but douse the flicker of hope that this might be the mea culpa that does the trick.
Bellowing
Tess rolled over in bed and called Haddie first thing this morning. She was thinking she might feel better about today if she could only hear the sound of her daughter’s voice, but there’d been no answer in the dorm room that she and Will paid extra for because her daughter couldn’t risk exposing her gaunt body to a gossipy roommate.
Henry, who was generally disgruntled and more so at 7:13 a.m., lifted his hoodie-covered head, mumbled something about eating breakfast with his friends at the Wooden Goose Café and disappeared through the backdoor before Tess could give him the hug she so badly needed.
Will, who’d returned home last night later than usual, managed to rouse himself on this momentous morning to prepare breakfast for his wife before she took off for her biopsy appointment then settled in behind the Sports page at the kitchen table. He read a story aloud about how Tiger Woods was playing with a bad knee. “Isn’t that brave of him?” he’d asked with a hitch in his voice. “To be in so much pain and keep going?”
To show compassion for a sporty stranger, but have such a hard time expressing to his family the same kindness instantly enrages Tess. Most of the time she can tame her anger and dark fantasies—both symptoms of her PTSD—using the special relaxation techniques psychiatrist Dr. Drake had taught her, but already wild with grief over Haddie’s recent departure, Henry’s blow-off, and her impending procedure, she imagined Will’s head on a tee, hauling back, and smacking it so hard that a group of polite bystanders would say in subdued whispers, Wow! Tess Blessing killed that!
Thatta girl! Louise cheers.
Why couldn’t Will see that Tess wanted, no, needed, him to insist that he drive her to the appointment even though she’d told him it was fine if he didn’t? To punish him for not reading her mind, she pushed away the eggs Benedict he’d prepared, which took real willpower since it’s one of his signature dishes and quite scrumptious.
She wishes she hadn’t now. Her stomach is putting up a fuss as she turns into the parking lot of St. Mary’s City.
A sexless winter-coated someone is shoveling the walk in front of the entrance of the turn-of-the-century hospital. The scraping of cold metal against cement was once a comforting sound, but as she enters through the pneumatic doors, from that moment forth, Tess knows the sound will always be associated with cancer.
“The Women’s Center?” she asks the bow-tied Orville Redenbacher look-alike seated behind the reception desk.
“Down the hallway, make a quick right then a left past the gift shop. You can’t miss it!”
Her mind otherwise engaged, as usual, Tess doesn’t catch most of what the nice man with the loose dentures had to say, but she can’t bear asking him again, so she thanks him and wanders off confused.
She is lost. Wishing she had someone to lean on. This is it! The time has finally come for me to make myself known again!
I make the adjustments necessary to actualize and swoop in behind her. Setting a warm hand firmly on her elbow, I say in the reassuring small-town Alabama drawl that’s been handpicked by Tess, “Allow me to show you the way, my friend.”
She startles, does a double take because I look vaguely familiar, then says with a polite Brownie smile, “Thank you,” but not much else on our way to her destination. (She’s much too scared of what she’s walking into to form words or further wonder who I remind her of.)
The gal in her early thirties seated behind the Women’s Center’s glass doors is gypsy pretty. She doesn’t acknowledge the handsome black woman dressed in a herringbone coat because, of course, she can’t see me, but after Tess identifies herself, the receptionist tells her with an enchanting smile, “Welcome, Mrs. Blessing. If you could fill out these forms….” She passes a pink clipboard over the counter. “I’ll also need your insurance card.”
It’s never easy finding anything in that lucky black purse of hers. After she fingers past the Swiss Army knife, her copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and discovers her wallet shrouded in the shards of her children’s baby blankets, she leaves the Blue Cross card on the counter and takes a seat in the farthest corner of the overheated waiting area.
I ease down next to her even though we’re the only two in the room. I’m emanating powerful energy that I’m having a hard time controlling because I’ve waited so long for Tess and me to be reunited. I’m giving her the heebie-jeebies. She doesn’t like people to get too close even if they were nice enough to show her the way to the Women’s Center. She could change seats, but she knows it’s futile, I’d only follow her. Since she can remember, certain types of people are attracted to her. The different ones, the ones operating on another wavelength, they hone in on her. She’s a big hit with schizophrenics. She wonders if she puts out some sort of vibe. Cats like her too, even though she’s really more of a dog person.
She’s just about completed the required admittance forms when she hears, “And how are you this fine morning, Mary Ann? Gettin’ any?”
Tess’s head jerks up. She recognizes the high-pitched voice. On three-inch heels, Babs Hoover has come tottering through the door of the center pushing a metal cart loaded with magazines and various sundries. Tess shrinks into the folds of her puffy red parka, brings the clipboard up to her face, and remains perfectly still so as not to garner any attention. She’s vowed to keep her illness a secret and the last thing she needs this morning is the biggest blabbermouth in all of Ruby Falls noticing her and asking, What are you doing here? Oh, no! Don’t tell me you have cancer!
Circling her emotional wagons, quick-witted Tess has already come up with a response if Babs does come wheeling by. She’ll tell her that she has procured a position at nearby University of Wisconsin’s psychology department and she’s at the Women’s Center to do some research on the effects breast cancer has on one’s sex life. She’s sure the second Babs hears the word sex, whatever else she has going on in her brain will be shoved to a back burner. The gal loves to brag about how often she and her husband, Ernie, owner and proprietor of Hoover’s Hardware, do the “tongue and groove.”
Babs chats a bit longer with the pretty receptionist, drops off a few gift items on the desk, and says, “Well, I’m off to labor and delivery.” She wiggles a pint-sized plastic champagne bottle filled with candy. “We have four ladies about to pop their corks. See you next week.”
That big mouth Babs didn’t notice her fills Tess with a relief that’s thick enough to eat. Keeping her potential illness quiet isn’t only about protecting Haddie’s or Henry’s delicate emotional states, she’s also concerned about the family business. True, the diner has been one of the mainstays in town for over sixty years, and she’d like to believe that her sickness wouldn’t affect business, but let’s be honest, no matter how you plate it, cancer does not go well with a Super-Duper Blessing burger, an order of fries, and a chocolate shake. Much too real for customers who love the joint because it allows them to slip into carefree yesteryear without hardly trying. The diner suffering financially? Tess wouldn’t let that happen. Not only for the obvious bill-paying reasons, but for the further stress it would put on her marriage. She couldn’t relive those months she and Will had fou
ght so viciously after he borrowed the money to build the diner’s party room. Rationally, she realized it wasn’t his fault that the room took some time to catch on. But with all the hours he worked to make sure that it did, he was barely home. He wasn’t there for her and the kids, and that brought up feelings she had toward the other important person she hadn’t been able to count on—her mother. She threatened numerous times to leave him. (Of course, the both of them knew she wouldn’t. She could never leave anybody.)
“Theresa Blessing?” The nurse who’d come through the double doors is a smart-looking, mid-forties gal with a short, layered haircut, and muscular arms.
“God bless,” I tell her as she gathers her things, but she’s too focused on what she believes to be her gallows walk to let my words sink in. I need to keep an eye on her, but I can’t come on too strong. She’ll get scared and block me out if I do, so I artfully deactualize and follow her.
After the nurse introduces herself as Jill Larkin, Tess asks her to please call her by her nickname on their walk to a conference room where they perch in brown vinyl chairs. She used to have a bit in her stand-up routine about Nauga’s and their hides and she’s about to use the old joke as an icebreaker, but the nurse shuts her down with a curt, “Do you have any questions before I take you back to prepare for the procedure?”
“How big is it?”
