When We Were the Kennedys

by Monica Wood

  “Please, Mum,” I whisper into the Vaillancourts’ receiver. What I don’t say: I love it here. No cats but so what? I love this sense of order, the impossibility of catastrophe. Mr. Vaillancourt’s in the prevention business. This seems like a place where nothing can go wrong.

  “You’re not being a pest?” Mum asks.

  “No, Mum,” I tell her. “Honest. Mrs. Vaillancourt asked.”

  “Well . . .” Mum says. She knows the Vaillancourts from church; they’re good people, devout people. But in truth my mother doesn’t want me at another mother’s table. I ate here last night, too; will people think she’s farming out her kids to keep them fed?

  And there’s this: She misses me.

  “All right,” she says. “But come home right after.”

  Mrs. Vaillancourt finds another chair in a kitchen no bigger than ours, adding a kid to the four already assembled, one of them so little she hasn’t gotten the hang of a fork. When Mr. Vaillancourt presses us to converse in French, I feel grown-up, included in my pretend family practicing s’il vous plaît and merci and passez le lait, a good Catholic family unscarred by death. Despite the aprons we must wear to protect our clothes, supper here unfolds as a pleasing, chatty affair, and I even like the change in menu, most notably Mrs. Vaillancourt’s “hamburg steak,” flattened ground beef baked on a cookie sheet and served up in rectangles with A-1 sauce. Yum.

  Then I go home—content and vaguely guilty—to hug my mother hard.

  Wednesday at the Vaillancourts: hamburg steak. Thursday at the Vaillancourts: American chop suey. Friday at the Vaillancourts: fish sticks with ketchup. On Saturday Mum insists that I ask Denise up for supper.

  “Can’t I go there? They invited me.”

  “You have a home,” Mum says.

  “But—”

  “It’s polite to return favors. That’s what well-brought-up children do.”

  First I have to walk to Fisher’s to pick up something special—pork chops. We’re having pork chops with applesauce. Then Mum sends me back out again, this time all the way “down the corner” to Sampson’s, our first and only supermarket, because she’s run out of something that’s nobody’s business and the clerks at Sampson’s aren’t as likely to know me as one of the Wood girls.

  Returning home for the second time, I round the corner and—

  Oh, shoot.

  The Norkuses are out.

  Our landlords have installed themselves at their post—the first-floor landing—whence they can surveil, like perched owls, the stairs and the driveway and the garden and the mailboxes and the trash shed. Mr. Norkus—we call him Jurgis—can be gruff and bewildering, using ambiguous hand gestures to fatten up seemingly unrelated instructions. He rarely smiles, though on occasion, through layers of language and history and foreignness, he can surprise our whole block with a joke. As in, the last time Mrs. Hickey went to the store:

  Where you go?

  Fisher’s. Chicken’s on sale.

  On sale ’cause they die themself! No have to kill! HAHAHA!

  His wife—we call her Mrs. Norkus—is ancient and vaguely military in bearing, her command so absolute that even when she isn’t guarding the landing I know the heat of her presence. She keeps watch through wind and rain and sleet and dark of night, support hose rolled down to the tops of her Keds. Her white duck-cloth hat, which on anyone else might add a note of whimsy, reminds me of a helmet from World War I, something she probably knows a thing or two about.

  The Norkuses came to America with rags on their feet. That’s how Mum and Dad had always told it, an oft-repeated detail from which I assembled a larger drama: disembarkment in a cold rain, the words Mexico, Maine, pinned to a rotting sleeve, the thronged and misty vista of New York Harbor. They’d stumbled stiff-kneed down a gangway, impossibly young and yearning to breathe free, a sepia-toned couple impossible to connect with the Technicolor czars who swivel their joint gaze toward me as I come up the driveway with my grocery bag.

  “Hi,” I say. I bend to pat Tootsie, tightening my grip on the bag.

  “Lazy poodie!” Jurgis yells. He means the cat, a white tumbleweed with gum-pink ears. “Lazy poodie!” he yells again, then a downpour of Lithuanian accompanied by laughter—or something—and a slashing gesture with his open palm.

  Translation one: I am happy my cat pleases you. Is she not exquisite?

  Translation two: I intend to chop off your head. Wait here while I prepare the cleaver.

  “Uh . . .” I say. “Okay.”

  Sister Ernestine had skipped right over Lithuania, its war-torn history, its imports and exports, and so I’m left with no map, no assigned reading, no worksheets that might help me understand the Norkuses. Mexico brims with Franco mémères and Italian nonnas and Irish grandmas who speak in burred English, but the Norkuses alone seem like visitors from another country.

  Jurgis gives the cat a perfunctory pat and tromps down the stairs toward his backyard garden, leaving me alone with Mrs. Norkus. Alone.

  “What you gut, Munnie?”

  I freeze like a bunny in the brush.

  “Munnie! What you gut?”

  “Groceries,” I say, caught literally holding the bag.

  Mrs. Norkus hooks the lip of the bag with one finger and peers in. “Ash-ash, ticka-ticka, push-push.” She shakes her head.

  Mum has a secret and Mrs. Norkus knows what it is.

  “She looked in the bag?” Mum fumes, flinging the goods onto our narrow counter, the bloody shame of it for all to see: beef kidney. Packaged in cardboard and cellophane.

  Red. Pricey. Bite-size.

  For the cat.

  In the Norkuses’ world, this petty crime against the frugal-minded, food-chain-respecting citizens of the United States of America is a mortal sin of profligacy, certainly for a new widow with three little girls and a monthly Social Security check. But Mum’s a fool for animals, especially cats, and most especially Tom, our muscled, odoriferous, anvil-headed tabby who sits on the sewing machine all day staring into the birdcage. We have other cats, but Tom is Mum’s loverman now, her gentleman caller, her heater in the bed, and she’ll do anything to make him happy, upgrading his chow in unwitting increments until he’s eating exotic cuts we have to ask for special.

  The Norkuses, on the other hand, eat from the land. Even now, so early in the summer, their vegetable garden has thickened with frilly rows of carrots and beets, its perimeter trimmed with lacy stalks of dill, pumpkin-colored marigolds, and dark fronds of rhubarb. They separate this bounty from the yard (No go in garden!) with a gated wire fence lined with hydrangeas we call the snowball bushes. As Mum rages in the kitchen—“She looked in the bag!”—mortified at being exposed as a spendthrift, I steal out to our back porch and look down.

  Jurgis is bent over, harvesting greens from the lettuce bed and weeding between clumps by hand. At the garden’s northeast corner, just over the back fence, flourishes a second garden, equal in breadth, the one tilled by Margie’s nana, Jurgis’s sister. Like Jurgis, Margie’s nana is out there, too, slow-moving between the beanpoles in her swishing cottons. The siblings do not speak, or wave, or even face each other over the stone’s throw that separates them. Nana and Jurgis’s only sign of kinship survives in their rainbow of vegetables, a paean to the motherland. They live close enough to call I sveikata! if one of them sneezes, but they’ve been hardened by family trespasses too fossilized to undo. Instead of forgiveness, they cultivate cabbages big as bowling balls, purple-black beets that dye your fingers pink, squashes the color of sunshine; and they harvest their prizes alone.

  Such a mystery, these siblings who came through untold heartbreak to get here. In the wake of my own heartbreak I’d watched them prepare their plots back in May, the ground still tough and cold and marred by dirty blots of snow; they’d dug and dug, undaunted. And now, green things gush from the ground. Crouching behind the porch rail, I watch Jurgis nursing his garden, Nana nursing hers, these old, Lithuanian-speaking mysteries who grow such luscious
things. Haunted by their slow motion, their bent backs, their profound silence, I feel in my own heart a bloom of pain, then rush back inside to my own broken family.

  “The nerve!” Mum is saying, slapping pork chops into the electric frying pan. Little things knock her clean off her axis now. “The nerve of that woman!”

  “Here,” Anne murmurs. “Let me.” It’s actually too early to start supper—time slips around for Mum these days—so my sister turns off the pan, removes the chops, sets them on wax paper to salt and pepper them. Mum forgot.

  She sits down hard. Why is she so angry? “I’d like to give them a piece of my mind,” she says. But she can’t. She’s afraid of being evicted—a new word since deceased, a word that can halt our yes you did no you didn’t bickering in mid-shriek (“Are you two looking to get us evicted?”)—a word even more sinister than strike.

  “Can I go get Denise now?” I ask.

  “Go ahead,” Mum says, composing herself. She’s still fuming but doesn’t want us to know.

  I get there moments too late to watch Mr. Vaillancourt unpack his lunch pail, that coming-home ritual I love; he’s been called back in, something wrong with the Number Five paper machine. I hide my little wallop of disappointment by telling Mrs. Vaillancourt that we’re having pork chops special for Denise. Over here they’re having meat loaf, which I hate but would eat anyway.

  “Make sure to say thank you,” Mrs. Vaillancourt reminds Denise as we head out. “‘Thank you very much’ is what you say.” We walk from her block to mine, around the mailbox and down Gleason Street and then Worthley Avenue and then—

  Oh, shoot.

  The Norkuses are back at their post, settled into chairs. Jurgis is reading the Times; Mrs. Norkus isn’t. “Ash-ash,” she murmurs to her husband.

  “Just act normal,” I tell my friend.

  “What—?”

  “Shh. Do what I do.”

  We saunter up the driveway. We make a move for the stairs.

  Jurgis lowers his newspaper with a menacing crackle. “No bring friend!” he growls. “Too much stairs!”

  A squeak of shock from Denise, who rabbits back into the driveway and gapes at me, aghast. Now what? I look up, my mother so near and yet so far. Feigning indifference, I trudge over to my friend, my consolation, my supper guest, and whisper, “Pretend we’re going back to your house.” We stroll away, then run the whole block in the opposite direction, ending up on the blind side of the house where even the Norkuses, who have more eyes than a fly, can’t spot us. From here, we hatch a multistage plan for smuggling Denise past the border guards, splitting up like soldiers on a recon mission.

  We’d been unwittingly preparing for this task, roaming the neighborhood as “girl sleuths”; we’d written in our notebooks and hidden behind trees; we’d followed footprints that led nowhere, searched low branches for ominous scraps of cloth, trailed hapless souls who curdled our nerve with the first dirty look. We’d written a code that coordinated with the movement of curtains across our respective top-floor windows, a lexicon of phrases that I’d churlishly kept from Cathy, who threatened to invent a competing code but didn’t, as I’d predicted, have the juice to write it all down.

  Now Denise and I prepare for a fully executed stakeout. She makes a dash around back and dives behind the snowball bushes to hide; I continue up the driveway, plunk myself on the front steps, and pretend to bask in the late-afternoon daylight.

  Mrs. Norkus has gone inside, probably to cook supper, but Jurgis is still here, eyeing me over the top edge of the paper. “Where’s Tootsie?” I ask him, hoping he’ll go inside to fetch the cat, whom he adores. But he wasn’t born yesterday.

  I glance at the shivering snowball bush. I wait and wait—even the Norkuses have to pee on occasion—but nothing happens until Mrs. Norkus calls Jurgis in for supper. He folds up his paper, eyes me again, and as soon as he turns his back I shriek, “Now!,” whereupon Denise springs from the green like a flushed quail.

  “Ash-ash ticka-ticka!” Jurgis shouts. “No bring friend! Too much stairs! Make stop you jump!” Mrs. Norkus, too, has suddenly materialized, towering and foursquare. Instead of breaking for the stairs, as I do, Denise recoils in terror.

  Please don’t go! I think. They’re harmless! More than anything, I want Mum to get her wish for me to look like a well-brought-up returner of favors.

  I’m at the top of the first flight, but Denise is down there in the yard, her mouth forming a little oh of horror, so I trudge earthward and join her, the Norkuses faintly push-pushing in Lithuanian.

  Denise regards me with something akin to awe. “Maybe . . .” I say to her. Think! Think! But I’ve got nothing.

  Then, a dainty tread on the stairs above us, and Anne appears. Bermuda shorts, crisp white blouse, hair done up in a chignon: the pretty schoolteacher on summer break. She smiles at the Norkuses, who nod in turn. “Suppertime,” she says, and we follow like found lambs, away from the thwarted Norkuses and toward Mum’s pork chops and baked potato and cherry pie. All of it smells so good. Anne and Mum exchange a look. Mum pulls out a chair for my friend.

  “Come on in!” I say, with a theatrical sweep of the arm. Welcome! Here is our laden table, our full cupboards, my mother spooning out applesauce and my sisters waiting at the table. A family at supper. Everything, to all appearances, still whole.

  Norkus Rules:

  NO GO IN GARDEN!

  NO CAR IN DRIVEWAY!

  NO TOO MUCH GARBAGE!

  NO BRING FRIEND!

  NO PUT BIKE ON GRASS!

  MAKE STOP YOU JUMP!

  TOO MUCH STAIRS!

  For a long time I thought these rules, like the God of my childhood catechism, had always been and always would be. But a singular, lucid memory points a different way. It unfolds in the garden—their forbidden garden—during our time of bounty.

  “Dad,” I said. “Daddy?”

  I was lying next to him on the grass, fearful of an ant navigating the hairy, complicated whorls of his ear.

  “There’s a ant in your ear, Dad. Daddy? There’s a ant in your ear.”

  He was half asleep, on his back, his shirt soft and plaid. We’d been picnicking. Hot and sweaty, I’d swooned down next to him, out of breath, which means we girls must have been running among the Norkuses’ early plantings of corn and cukes and pole beans. We’d been let loose among the stakes and twine and the Popsicle sticks that marked fragile rows of parsnips and beets.

  Where does this memory come from? Mum is there, and we three girls. Anne is away—at college, I presume—so I could be as young as five.

  “Dad? Daddy?”

  “He’ll find his way out,” Dad said of the ant that had so captured my concern; he grinned, eyes closed. So I relaxed. Dad said the ant was all right and so it was.

  “Dad? Do ants go to heaven?”

  Oh, how did he answer? If only I could dredge his voice back through the murk of time, to know his thoughts on this, on everything. The garden memory, like all memory of Dad, lives as a shard of mica embedded in smooth gray stone. This lovely man, irretrievable but through these glints and flickers. So I recall, or imagine that I recall, how the sun beat down on my reddened, snoresome father, how I admired the male, sandpaper stubble along his jaw, his solid chest, the fact that he was unafraid that an ant might get inside him. But ever more astounding, as this memory unspools, is that we are lounging inside the garden and no Norkus appears to order us out.

  This trespass is so electrifyingly against the rules that it could not possibly—not then—have been the rules.

  And this memory: a shopping trip on a Saturday morning, Dad packing us into the car for a trip to Congress Street, the heart of Rumford’s business district. We were going to buy shoes. Sensible ones, Mum had warned him, unnecessarily. All the kid sections in all the shoe stores in all of Rumford displayed sensible shoes and nothing but—a monochrome of boring, boyish, tie-up shoes worn by all of Mexico’s schoolchildren, shoes built to last from September to June. We
didn’t complain; why would we? No child we knew wore stylish shoes. We were all too “heedless” for trim and rivets and patent leather, too “hard” on our things.

  We followed Dad into Lamey’s to look things over. Cathy wasn’t feeling quite right, pale and belly-achy, so she took the first ones she spotted, a bland and stolid pair that fell nimbly within Mum’s exacting guidelines. Cathy was still little, not yet in school, not yet in the habit of questioning logic, rules, nuns, the very turning of the earth. So she’d picked her pair without a fuss. Betty picked what Cathy picked, and I would have, too, had I not been thunderbolted by a pair of red shoes in the store window, an apparition—from Oz, it seemed; from Dorothy herself—magically dropped into a dowdy sea of shoes more suited to the Wicked Witch’s flying monkeys.

  “Can I try them, Daddy?” I pleaded, all but undone with desire.

  “They’re a rig,” he said. Which meant he liked them.

  A man with pretty eyelashes cradled my foot and eased it into the handsomest shoe I’d ever known or thought to imagine. I pointed my toe. I turned my ankle, fetchingly this way, fetchingly that way. I tried the other one. My feet in these ruby slippers were beautiful. My whole self—beautiful. Dorothy was a Kansas clodhopper compared to me.

  “Please, Dad?” I asked. So he bought them.

  Mr. Eyelashes rang us up. Three boxes and only one of them glowed. “Isn’t your grampy nice to buy you these shoes,” he said.

  We bristled like insulted cats as our too-old father laughed—a loud, chortling hee-haw—then carried the tale home to Mum, who also found this outrage hootingly funny. Good thing, too; when Dad unveiled the shoes, she said, For crying out gently (which meant Oh, all right), still snickering over having married a grampy.

  My shoes had a natty little ankle strap, and pinkish cross-stitching along the toe end, a ludicrous extra. In the slat of sunlight coming through the kitchen window, the leather took a vigorous shine, its red the dark, dressy hue of a freshly laid brick.