The Daughters of Erietown

by Connie Schultz

  “The list of friends I’m not allowed to talk to anymore. Georgie, Philomena, Mary Agnes…”

  Brick turned and slammed his fist on the table. “Family, Sam,” he said, staring at the table. “Family comes first. In the end, it’s all you got.”

  He looked at Ellie as he tucked his faded cotton shirt tighter into his belt. “I don’t ever want our kids to think that money buys class.” She nodded. “I know, Brick.” She reached for his hand.

  Sam’s shoulders relaxed. She knew what she had to do.

  After dinner, she helped with the dishes and waited until her parents sat down on the porch swing before slipping out the back door. She walked three houses down and knocked on the kitchen door, forcing a smile at the sight of Lenny Kleshinski.

  He tapped the bridge of his glasses to push them up on his nose. “Sam,” he said, easing open the screen door. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to see you, Lenny. I figure it’s time we became best friends.”

  He stepped outside and closed the door. “I thought you and Jenny Grandin were best friends.”

  Sam shook her head. “We gotta stick with our kind. Your dad and my dad work at the same plant. We go to the same Christmas party, and our mothers belong to the same coffee club.” She shrugged. “There’s nothing in the Bible that says a boy and a girl can’t be best friends.”

  “I’m Catholic.”

  “So was President Kennedy.” She looked up at the darkening sky and pointed to the moon. “It’s getting late. Let’s meet here tomorrow, after church. I’ll bring my bike.”

  “Okay,” Lenny said, pushing up his glasses again. He opened the door and stepped back into the house.

  Sam was halfway down the driveway when she heard him shouting something through the screen door. She turned to look at him. “What did you say?”

  “I said you’re pretty smart.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s no way your dad will say you can’t be friends with a union brother’s kid, even if I’m a boy.”

  “Lenny,” she said. “That’s not why—”

  “It’s okay, Sam,” he interrupted, smiling. “I need a best friend, too.”

  It took a while for Brick to comprehend what he and Ellie had lost. They could rebuild a marriage, but he would never again see that earlier version of himself in Ellie’s eyes. Even after Sam was born, Ellie sometimes looked at him as if she couldn’t believe her luck. So random, the way she’d suddenly stop in her tracks to watch him, pressing her palm against her bosom as if she had just stumbled upon a mirage.

  “You’re my dream come true,” she’d whisper in his ear, after rising on tiptoes and holding on to his shoulder. God, how he had loved that.

  After she found out about Kitty, Ellie never said that to him again. Every once in a while he would still catch her staring at him. He’d get his hopes up, holding his breath as he waited for her to tilt her head with that shy smile of hers. Every time, she startled and looked away.

  What can I do? he wanted to know. What can I do to win you back? He was too afraid to ask. “There are some things you can’t take back,” she’d told him after she found out about Kitty, her face contorted in disbelief. “You were inside her. Inside her.”

  He had promised he would never step foot in Flannery’s again, and he kept his word. He started coming home every night after work, too, and for more than a year he refused to join the other guys at Mickey’s unless Ellie went with him. Whenever she did, Ellie didn’t think twice about leaving Reilly in Sam’s care.

  “That girl was born old,” she said.

  Brick wasn’t so sure of that. Around Ellie, sure, Sam was a little mother. But when his daughter was alone with him she still seemed like a little girl, eager to hold his hand and peppering him with questions about the smallest things. “How does the radio station know when you’ve picked them to listen to?” she asked one day when they were driving to Cal’s Corner to pick up sandwich meat and beer. The last time they went to Dairy Queen, Sam held up the waffle cone and said, “Look, Daddy, it’s like a tiny brick wall all around the bottom. How do they do that?” She was such a curious kid.

  One thing Brick wouldn’t give up was softball. “I need it, Ellie,” he said. “I need it to work off all the bullshit at the plant.” She didn’t argue. Less than a year after the strike, three guys had been injured at the plant, and she knew all of their wives. One of the men, Herman Pinkard, was almost killed, and by the end of that workday Ellie was waiting for Brick on the porch. “Here,” she said, holding out a bottle of Schlitz. “Thought maybe you needed this sooner today.” She’d been crying, he could tell. She still cared.

  Brick was now a senior shop steward for the union, and it was a second full-time job holding management accountable. After Pinkard was injured, Brick backed Prick Kennedy into a corner and jabbed his finger just an inch from his chest. “Danger is incremental,” he said. “One shoddy shortcut leads to another and then another, until one of our men is dead.” Last month, Brick had been introduced as “Erietown’s hero” at a statewide meeting at a union hall in Columbus, to wild applause. For the first time since high school, he felt like a point guard again, the brains of the team.

  He loved this new role, but he needed the release of hitting that softball, and Ellie seemed to understand. She came to Brick’s games, and sometimes tagged along with him to join the other players and their wives at Mickey’s. That worked for a few months, until one night on the way home Ellie announced that she was done.

  “I’m sick of watching you flirt with the waitresses,” she said in a flat voice, staring straight ahead as they drove home. “It’s humiliating. It makes you look ridiculous, and makes me look like a fool.”

  “Ellie, you’ve had three beers and you’re imagining things.”

  “Yes, that’s your problem. My drinking.”

  Only then did it occur to him how much Ellie had changed. She didn’t need him in the same way she used to. She was volunteering at the front desk at Erietown General two days a week, answering phones and giving people cheerful directions. She joined the Women’s Guild at church, too, and was in charge of its annual rummage sale, which required a few evening meetings.

  The third time, after Ellie didn’t come home until after ten, he accused her of neglecting Sam. “She’s eight, and you’ve got her in charge of dinner and Reilly’s bedtime,” he said. “She’s too young for all that responsibility.”

  Ellie just laughed. “It makes Sam feel good to be in charge,” she said. “I cook before I go, so all she’s doing is serving and cleaning up. And she’s been giving Reilly a bath since she was six.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I’ve got a brain, Brick, and I plan to use it. Besides, it’s nice to be appreciated once in a while.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “If you don’t know by now,” she said, turning off the dresser light, “I’m done trying to explain.”

  If he hadn’t been drinking, he told himself later, he would never have raised his hand. He was bone tired, his head pounding, his shirt drenched in the humid July night. That new look on Ellie’s face, as if she thought he was too stupid to understand, triggered something old and familiar deep inside him. His hand froze in midair, but Ellie had already backed up and fallen against the open window. He leapt and grabbed her waist, terrified that she was about to fall to the ground.

  They collapsed on the floor, both of them in tears. Brick grabbed her face with both hands. “I’m sorry, Pint, I’m so sorry.” He kissed her cheek. “Tell me the name of one husband who doesn’t sometimes lose his temper. Tell me one husband who’s perfect.”

  She cupped his hands with hers, tears running down her cheeks. “Not a single one. Not one of you.” He pulled her into his chest, taking fragile comfort in her concession.

&nb
sp; The following morning, Brick grabbed his lunch pail, which Ellie had packed, as always, and paused at the door. “I’m sorry, Ellie. I promised I’d never hit you. And I never will. That was the booze last night.”

  She set the coffeepot on the burner and turned to look at him. “That was your father last night, Brick. That was Bull McGinty. He’s been dead for three years now. Let’s leave him buried in that pauper’s grave, where he belongs.” She walked over to him and surprised him with a kiss.

  Work that day was worse than usual. He had to break up a fight that a new union hire, Johnny Wilcox, started with a supervisor, who had a broken nose before Brick could pry them apart. “I don’t care how mad you were,” he yelled at Wilcox in the locker room, “you don’t throw a punch at a manager. We’re going to have to fight like hell to keep your job.” Instead of thanking Brick, Wilcox took a swing at him. Two guys had to pull Brick off of him, and Wilcox was sent home.

  Three hours later, Brick’s head still throbbed from the whack. On the drive home, he thought about what Ellie had said to him the night she accused him of flirting at the bar. “I’m never enough for you,” she’d said. “Those waitresses, with their pink lipstick and their long bleached hair. Did it ever occur to you that the reason they’re working in a bar is because they’re too selfish to take care of anyone else? Look at them, our age and trying to look like teenagers. Of course they’re going to laugh at your stupid jokes. They aren’t raising your kids and scrubbing grass stains out of your softball pants.”

  He started picturing those girls’ friendly faces. No good could come from stopping at the same bar where he took Ellie.

  He looked at his watch. Four-fifteen. “Why not,” he said, tossing what was left of his cigarette out the open window. He turned right and headed into the biggest regret of his life.

  * * *

  —

  Brick loved the smells of Sardelli’s. He was a meat and potatoes man, accustomed to coming home to the same bland blend of aromas that had been in his childhood home. He’d never thought twice about it until he walked into Sardelli’s. The garlic of marinara, the capers and lemon of chicken piccata—so many foods not afraid to announce themselves. He liked to walk in and see how many of the night’s specials he could figure out by the smells from the kitchen.

  Brick hoped Ellie would be willing to try a meal there soon. She always said feeding her family was one of her most important jobs as a wife and mother, which was why cooking made her so miserable. “I’m just no good at it, Brick,” she said so often after dinner. “Nothing about it comes naturally to me.”

  He thought she cooked just fine, but once he went back to working a lot of overtime he thought it’d be fun to take her and the kids out to dinner once in a while. Neither he nor Ellie had ever eaten in a restaurant when they were kids. Brick saw it as a sign of their rising station in life. He took them to Bob’s Big Boy or Sweeney’s Café and felt a surge of pride watching his wife eat off dishes she didn’t have to serve or clean. He liked how the waitresses fussed over the kids, too. In one of their few conversations about parenting, Ellie and Brick had agreed that their kids’ clothes would always be clean and pressed, and that their manners would be good enough to cause them to be mistaken for the richest kids in Cleveland.

  “Just because we don’t have as much money as those people doesn’t mean we have to look or act like it,” Ellie said. Brick liked that about her, the way she raised her chin in the air and insisted on their rightful place in the world. “That’s right,” he said. “Money can’t buy class.”

  Brick pulled into Sardelli’s parking lot and tried to remember the last time they’d eaten out as a family. It’d been months. Why’d he stop offering? His mood lifted as he parked. He’d go in for one drink and then get Ellie and the kids and bring them back for dinner.

  He walked in and his shoulders relaxed. The dinner crowd hadn’t arrived yet. He sat down at the far end of the bar and reached for the menu of the day.

  “Now, there’s the face of a hungry man.”

  He looked up and returned the barmaid’s smile. “Am I that obvious?”

  She laughed and tossed back her blond mane of hair. “It’s my job to notice. And with that gorgeous red hair of yours, that sure is an easy thing to do.”

  Brick laid the menu on the bar. “Well, thanks. Guess I’m not your usual clientele.”

  She nodded. “You’re Brick McGinty.”

  Brick leaned back on the stool. “How did you know that?”

  “I read the stories just like everybody else. But those black-and-white newspaper pictures don’t do your hair justice. Or your blue eyes.”

  “So, you know my name, but I don’t know yours.” She leaned toward him, her breasts inches from his fingertips as she held out her hand. “I’m Rosemary.”

  “Well, hello, Rosemary,” he said, clasping her hand. “What’s good around here?”

  “You mean on the menu?” she said. Brick laughed and she stood up, releasing his hand. “The lasagna just came out of the oven.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Give me that. And a salad.”

  She walked to the kitchen door, swung it open, and yelled out his order, then walked back over to him and pointed to the tap. “What’ya having?”

  “Schlitz.”

  “Schlitz it is.” She returned with his beer, then crossed her arms on the bar and leaned forward again. “So, what are you doing here all alone on a Wednesday evening?”

  “Technically, it’s not evening yet.”

  “Technically, you’re not alone either.”

  Brick laughed again. “How long have you worked here?”

  “Since I was seventeen. Started in the dining room, then learned how to cook everything on the menu. I switched to bartending four years ago. More money. And I like the conversations.”

  “I can see that. More variety, too.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know about that. But you’re definitely a change of scenery.”

  Brick looked across the bar. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not talking loud.”

  Brick shook his head. “So, you’re a mind reader, too?”

  She smiled. “Not really. As a matter of fact, I was just trying to figure out what you do for a living, and I’m comin’ up blank.”

  “Erietown Electric.”

  “The power plant.”

  “Right. I make electricity.”

  “And how do you do that?”

  Brick smiled. “I won’t be boring you with that story.”

  She leaned in closer. He could make out the dusting of powder on her breasts, the smell of something exotic on her neck.

  “I want to know,” she said.

  He studied her face for a moment. “You got a pen and a napkin?”

  She reached under the bar top and set a stack of white paper napkins in front of him, then reached into the back pocket of her pants and pulled out a pen.

  Brick pulled a napkin off the stack and drew a large square. “This is a furnace,” he said. “It’s bigger than this bar.”

  Ellie felt Sam’s breath on her arm and elbowed her away. “Sam, for God’s sake, I’m standing at a hot stove. Announce yourself when you walk in the room.”

  Sam swept her arms out at her sides and bowed. “Mother, it’s your daughter, Samantha Joy McGinty. I have arrived.”

  Ellie laughed and waved her spoon over the pot. “Let me finish filling these stuffed peppers. Go fetch the potatoes.”

  Sam dipped her finger in the sauce and tasted. “Mmm, good batch. What did you do different?”

  “I added a little Worcestershire.” She tapped the tattered cookbook with her free hand. “Mardee’s idea. She says this book’s good for basic recipes, but it lacks imagination. We need a little more spice in life.”

  Sam picked up the cookbook and re
ad aloud the title on the faded green cover: “The Betty Furness Westinghouse Cook Book.” She continued in a high-pitched, clipped voice, “Prepared under the direction of Julia Kiene.”

  “Very funny,” Ellie said. “It wouldn’t hurt you to crack that book open on occasion.”

  “I hate to cook.”

  Ellie scoffed. “As if that were ever the point. Welcome to every day of a woman’s life.”

  Sam opened the book and read aloud her mother’s handwritten inscription: “A gift to me from Julia Williams when I worked for her during my summer vacation before I entered my senior year. Eleanor Grace Fetters, 1956.” Sam closed the book and set it on the counter. “Why do you always write who gives you a book?”

  Ellie picked up the pot and carried it to the sink. “Because every time I see it, I remember the kindness of the person who gave it to me. The lady who gave me that book, for example. She took over Williams Appliances after her husband died, and I helped her that first summer. She taught me how to use the cash register and how to make total strangers feel as if they’d just walked into our home.”

  Ellie looked out the window as she kept talking. “I admired her. She was one strong lady. My first day on the job, she said, ‘Ellie, life must go on. God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle.’ ” Ellie looked at Sam. “Not sure what she’d make of me now.”

  “You could ask her.”

  Ellie shook her head and shooed Sam away from the oven door to open it. “She died. Not even two years after her husband died, she had a heart attack and she was gone. I remember Grandma saying maybe life was just too hard for Julia without her George.” She slammed the oven door shut and looked at Sam. “That’s what she always called him,” she said, her voice softer. “ ‘My George.’ They spent every hour of every day together.”

  “You okay, Mom?”

  Ellie wiped her hands on her apron. “Of course. Just telling a story.” She pointed to the pot in the sink. “Fill that with water, and set the table. Daddy’s working overtime again, so don’t set a place for him. We’ll do up a plate and leave it on the counter for when he gets home.”