The Mighty Queens of Freeville

by Amy Dickinson

  I packed our stash, along with a flashlight and some extra batteries, in an old suitcase and put it near the door. Emily asked me for a Diet Coke. “You could have it now and regret your choice later when we’re in our hazmat suits and there’s nothing to drink, but honestly its up to you,” I sniffed, though we did agree to split one pack of Twizzlers before dinner.

  I was seriously contemplating cutting our losses in Washington and moving back to Freeville (where I knew I could get a job at Clark’s Sure Fine Food Mart) when I read in the paper that Ann Landers had died in Chicago. Unbeknownst to me, the legendary advice columnist’s passing was my own personal weather system forming over the Great Plains. Eventually the storm would gain strength, move east, suck us up into its funnel cloud, and carry us back to the Midwest.

  Jim Warren, a friend and editor at the Chicago Tribune, had tossed some freelancing assignments my way during my leanest times. When Ann Landers died, I sent Jim an e-mail saying, “Now that’s a job I’d take. Ha Ha Ha Ha.” Jim told me that the Tribune had no plans to replace Ann Landers, and I assured him I was joking. Ha Ha Ha. About a month after this exchange, Jim contacted me and said the paper was going to try to launch a new column; he invited me to try out.

  It was summertime, and Emily and I were staying in our little house in Freeville. Jim e-mailed me five pretty typical advice questions and told me to take a week to answer them. I checked them out. One was about two cousins who had had a brief affair; one was about a family of siblings fighting over their father’s possessions while their father lay dying; one was a fairly standard question about wedding etiquette. Jim said the newspaper had several candidates and that we had all been given the same questions and the same week-long deadline. I decided to tackle the work right away because, frankly, I didn’t have much else to do.

  Like many jobs I’ve gone after, I had a fairly neutral attitude about this one at the outset. I thought there was a chance I could fail my way up into it, but the prospects seemed even slimmer than usual. It wasn’t until I started doing it that I realized how much I wanted to be an advice columnist for a living. After all, a good advice columnist is at least as useful as a welder or an FBI agent.

  It was a hot afternoon. My hometown had settled into its daily mid afternoon doldrums. As I read and then contemplated the problems of these complete strangers, I realized that I was in the perfect position to offer advice to people. It’s not that I’m a natural at giving advice, in fact, I couldn’t think that I’d ever been asked my opinion on a personal dilemma, but as the plankton at the end of my family’s food chain, I have been on the receiving end of plenty of advice (all of it unsolicited). I thought of my mother and her three older sisters and of my own two older sisters. In my family, the advice flows downward, and I’m at the bottom of the hill holding a bucket.

  I e-mailed my audition column back to Jim that afternoon. He replied, “You have a week so please take it. I’m not even going to look at this.” I thought about it. I knew I could jump on my bike, ride down to my mother’s house, and run everything past her. I could get my aunts and older sisters to weigh in. But then I realized that I had already absorbed and appropriated the voices of the women in my life. I already knew what I was supposed to know. I decided to wing it on my own. “Go ahead and read it. This is my final answer,” I replied.

  The Tribune took all of the audition columns and test-marketed them for groups of newspaper readers. In every single test market, the result was the same: readers’ first choice for an advice columnist was to bring Ann Landers back from the dead.

  Once bringing Ann Landers back from the dead was ruled out as a possibility, it was decided that I would do.

  On my first trip to Chicago, I got out of the cab in front of the Tribune’s magnificent Gothic building on Michigan Avenue, twirled around in the street, and threw my hat into the air like Mary Tyler Moore. I didn’t actually do that, of course. I got out of the cab and my hat fell off of my lap onto the street and the cab ran over it on its way to pick up another passenger, but my prospective employers offered me the job anyway.

  Now I had to break the news to the kid.

  I was driving with Emily along a particularly picturesque stretch of a parkway in Washington when I decided to give her full access to my awesomeness. I had read an article that kids and parents often have meaningful conversations in the car. Emily and I had of course already had plenty of meaningful conversations—sometimes in the car and sometimes shouted tearfully through the closed bathroom door—but I admit to deliberately setting the stage for this talk, because this conversation was going to be memorable as well as meaningful. It turned out to be both.

  “Well, I have great news. I got the job!” I’m not sure why, but I seemed to be shouting.

  “Mom—that’s great! Yay! I’m so happy for you!” she shouted back.

  “So we’re going to move to Chicago like we talked about,” I exclaimed. I was a puppy pawing the air for attention.

  “Yeah—that’s right, I remember,” she said.

  I was wondering if it would be possible to both steer the car forward and physically reach back with my right hand in order to pat myself on the back. Would the seat belt have enough play for me to lean forward and reach between my own shoulder blades? I hoped so.

  We were quiet for a second.

  Emily said, “I’ll be able to finish school here, right?” (She was currently in the eighth grade.)

  I thought about it. It was February and I was starting the job in July. “Of course you can finish school here. No problem!” I said.

  We rode along, each enveloped in her own thoughts. I was mentally packing our apartment, a fantasy process that involved pitching garbage bags filled with our lesser possessions out the window and onto Connecticut Avenue, eight stories below. After fantasy packing, I moved on to dreaming of a paycheck. I hadn’t had one of those in a long, long time. It was one whole presidential administration ago since I’d had a job of any consequence. I was distressed to realize that my luck seemed to run out on roughly the same timetable as Bill Clinton’s.

  Emily and I rode along quietly for a few moments before I got that familiar sinking sensation. It was a slow dawning of the sort a cartoon character reveals just before the grand piano drops on her head.

  I looked sidelong at my daughter. “When you say you want to finish school, you mean…?”

  “My senior year,” she said.

  Emily was clear on this issue. She would be happy to move to Chicago—in four years.

  I pulled the car over. We were in a leafy neighborhood in a town I had always loved and which we would now be leaving. I had made some bonehead choices in my checkered work life, but I had never before packed up and moved for a job. In my mind, moving is what you did for people, not for work.

  I realized that in the several months I had been trying out for and wrangling over this job, I hadn’t ever given Emily the unvarnished truth about it. In our life together, I always maintained the fiction that we were in complete control of our destinies, so I had never prepared Emily for the eventuality of a grand piano falling from the sky. I turned toward my girl. “We’re going. I’m sorry; I know it’s hard, but we are.”

  Emily is the most even-tempered person I’ve ever known, but those rare times when she is angry are fearsome. I saw the irises of her eyes go from chestnut to black. Cyclones and tornadoes raced across her pupils. I wondered if she could set me on fire with only the power of her adolescent mind. I was quite sure that she wanted to.

  Watery tears chased the storms away, and we rode home in silence.

  The swearing commenced soon after. True to her nature, Emily picked her moment well. She waited until the next morning when we were getting ready for church. I awoke to that morning’s Sunday New York Times, which carried a half-page story with a headline reading “Possible Successor to Ann Landers Named” accompanied by a small headshot of me alongside a large full-length photo of Ann Landers. Perhaps the photo placement wasn’t
deliberate, but I looked like a pipsqueak next to the late legend, who was shown standing jauntily in her palatial Chicago apartment. The article implied that I was plucked from obscurity to take the advice column job, and though that makes a nice story, it isn’t quite true—I wasn’t really that obscure, certainly in my own mind.

  Emily stood behind her closed bedroom door—the one she knew I could hear through, especially if I pressed my ear against it, which I of course did. I listened in horror as my daughter quickly ran down George Carlin’s checklist of the seven most unspeakable words and then added whole categories of epithets of her own invention. Listening in, I played my own little mental Jeopardy game of foul-mouthed invective.

  “Alex? I’ll take ‘Where My Mother Can Shove It’ for $500.”

  “What is: ‘Where the sun don’t shine’?”

  “Let me try ‘The Lord’s Name in Vain for $1,000.’”

  It went on like this for a while. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I knocked on the door with my knuckle. Tap tap tap. “When you’re done… I’ll be in the car,” I said as calmly as I could.

  Emily spit out two or three more epithets that had my name attached to them, walked out of her room wearing her pretty Laura Ashley going-to-church dress, shot me a satisfied look, and held the apartment door for me as we left. Clearly, she thought she had won that round. I agreed.

  Once I took it upon myself to assume responsibility for Emily’s devastation over our move, she and I settled into a teary truce. We spent several months saying a very long good-bye to our home, clinging to the places and friendships that had sustained us over twelve years. I lingered at Little Folks School, absorbing for the last time the grand lessons that working with toddlers had taught me: to be in the moment, to play with abandon, to nap when you need to, and to preserve your friendships by saying “I’m sorry” when necessary.

  The moving van came on the last day of June. I rented a smaller panel van and decided to drive Emily and the cat and some of our possessions to Chicago. After running out of boxes, we stuffed our things into garbage bags and threw them into the van. That’s when I realized the essential truth about garbage bags. Anything put into a garbage bag, no matter how precious, has a way of becoming garbage once it’s in the bag. We looked like we were headed for the land-fill. The very last thing we grabbed from our apartment before closing the door was the emergency stash of Twizzlers, pretzels, and Friskies I’d placed in a suitcase the year before. This symbol of my anxiety would sustain us during the drive.

  Our exit from Washington was as inglorious, poignant, and full of hope as our arrival had been, exactly twelve years before. That night we smuggled the cat into a motel in Ohio. The following evening we pulled onto an overpass on the outskirts of Chicago and got our first look at its muscular skyline. Far away, high over the center of our new city, Independence Day fireworks bloomed in great bursts. Chicago was throwing a grand party, and we assumed it was intended just for us.

  EIGHT

  Playing Hearts

  Dating in the Age of Dread

  ONE OF MY grander dreams when changing cities was to mix up and revive my dating life. I’d never had much of a dating life, but in Chicago I decided I would become new and improved. I would be better groomed. I’d be more of a “listener.” Maybe I would go to “clubs” and take up “dancing.” I would get contact lenses, wear boots with heels in the wintertime, get a decent haircut, and in general work harder to be attractive. I had never worked at all at being attractive, so working harder didn’t involve a lot of effort, which made it easy to commit to the concept.

  I got the haircut and the contacts. I even submitted to a brow and lip wax that left me with red welts in the shape of a Groucho Marx unibrow and mustache. I went home and applied ice to my face, and once the swelling went down, Emily and I decided that I had taken baby steps in the right direction.

  Most significantly, Chicago had rolled out the red carpet for me. For a month or so, I was everywhere—on the Today show and CBS Sunday Morning, featured in newspaper advertisements and in a series of radio ads where I talked about my new high-profile job. A week after I’d started writing the “Ask Amy” column, Emily and I took a cab home from the office. The driver looked in the rearview mirror at us and then did a double take. “You’re that advice person! You’re ‘Ask Amy!’” he said.

  “But you can call me ‘Ask,’” I said.

  Emily and I ran into our apartment, laughing.

  “Mom—you’re famous!”

  “Jeeze, now I wonder if I should have given him a bigger tip. I mean, I bet Barbara Walters is a big tipper.”

  “And Kelly Ripa,” Emily added, helpfully.

  The quick flash of local celebrity supplemented my new eyebrows nicely, and for the first time in recent memory, boys started to call.

  Despite all of my experience to the contrary, I have always maintained a very optimistic outlook about my romantic prospects—especially during those long dry spells when I haven’t been out much. For me, dating is a lot like going to a professional baseball game—it’s an activity that always seems better in the abstract. I get very excited, for instance, at the prospect of watching the Chicago Cubs play, but once I get to Wrigley Field and have that first hot dog and beer, I’m usually ready to go home. Pretty quickly, the players—like my many blind dates, first dates, future prospects, and near misses—start to blend together, and I wonder what’s on TV.

  My first Chicago date seemed promising—as all of my dates do before I have them. This was a person, let’s call him “Leif,” who I rejected (and though other details have been forgotten, I remember this with complete clarity) because of the lettuce.

  I was first introduced to Leif just after I started my new job, when he cold-called my office and told me that we knew some people in common. We had a brief “getting-to-know you” chat on the phone, and he invited me to lunch. This was a nice development. In the vision I had of my new Chicago dating life, I would be having lunch with nice gentlemen who called me up and invited me out.

  Before meeting Leif in person I was, as usual, extremely excited and optimistic about the outcome. I Googled him and read some of his work. I was happy to learn that though he was a lawyer, he was the good kind—not the Washington lobbyist type I’d met in DC, but a Chicago sort of lawyer who actually helped people in ways that I was sure would be revealed with passionate sensitivity when we met.

  I also Google-imaged him and liked his looks. He wore little rimless Trotsky glasses that seemed the perfect accessory to his old-school liberal politics. I pictured him wearing his little glasses and handing out food and green cards to masses of immigrants down at the Chicago stockyards.

  I accessed the Chicago Tribune’s database and read stories mentioning him. This I did for an entire afternoon. When I ran into one of the colleagues Leif had mentioned to me on the phone, I told her that Leif and I were going to meet for lunch. “Oh, Leif?” She gave a knowing little chuckle. “He goes out with everybody. Going out with Leif is like a right of passage when you first move here. I went out with him myself in the 1980s, before I was married,” she said. This didn’t sit particularly well, but I decided that even if Leif wasn’t a keeper, perhaps dating him was like doing a short tour in the minor leagues. Dating him would polish me up for the show. I called my friend Gay and told her about him. I also called my friend Margaret and told her about him. Then I called my friend Nancy, Rachel, and my mother and told them all about him.

  We met at an old-timey downtown deli/lunch joint—the kind of place that has been around forever, with older waitresses and a faithful clientele. The first thing I noticed was that he was thin as a celery stalk. I wondered if he was a smoker, though he had good coloring. Maybe he was an ultramarathoner. We made our way to a table. I told Leif I loved the choice of restaurants and he explained that it was a classic old Chicago place famous for its schnitzel, cabbage rolls, and sauerkraut.

  We looked at the menu and the waitress came over. I was tryi
ng to decide between the weiner schnitzel and the mixed grill sausage plate with German potato salad so I asked him to order first.

  “Do you have a clear broth? Like a chicken soup, but without any noodles—oh, and no matzoh ball?”

  The waitress had a thick Polish accent. She sighed. “Sure, OK on that. Anything else?”

  “Salad. I’d love one of those small salads, but no mushrooms or green peppers. And do you use regular-size tomatoes or cherry tomatoes? Never mind, I don’t want any tomatoes at all. Really, just the lettuce in a bowl. What kind of dressing do you have? Actually, I’ll just stick with vinegar. Just the lettuce and vinegar.”

  The waitress looked at me.

  “Wow—it’s sort of like having lunch with Meg Ryan—you know, from When Harry Met Sally,” I said to her.

  Leif interjected, “She doesn’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, gesturing toward the waitress.

  “Sure I do. Meg Ryan can’t ever order off the menu, just like you,” she said.

  I decided to go with the open-faced grilled Polish sausage sandwich with peppers and onions. I also ordered a chocolate shake and knew from the first slurp that I could never like someone thinner than I am who wouldn’t give a waitress credit for knowing about a classic movie that is, after all, sort of all about ordering food and pickiness.

  Leif called once after our lunch. As I listened to his message on my office voice mail, I worried that I had been overly picky and hard on Leif, but then I thought about the lettuce and disliked him all over again. I didn’t return the call, and he never called again.