Suburban Renewal

by Pamela Morsi

  Even after being married to their daughter for two and a half years, I still called Corrie’s parents Doc and Mrs. Maynard. I was hoping to someday work my way to George and Edna, but I knew they would never be Mom and Dad.

  The mother and grandmother were seated together on the couch, cooing over the little fellow’s wide-eyed look at the world. I stood leaning against the doorjamb of my own house and feeling like the outsider.

  Corrie’s mom was chattering to Nate in the most nauseating baby talk possible. It was all oogy-boogy-ba-ba. It was all I could do not to roll my eyes. I caught Doc’s glance. I was pretty sure he wanted to roll his eyes as well, but we both had the good sense to refrain.

  Lauren, in pink shorts and a T-shirt decorated in butterflies, was going nuts, of course. Behaving as if she’d suddenly become hyper. She was talking too loud, banging her toys, demanding attention that she wasn’t getting. My heart went out to her. I’d never had a little brother, but I could imagine that it might not seem like that much fun at first. She was so used to the care, the love, the admiration of everyone in the family. Nobody was looking at her today and that was infuriating. She was getting more noisy and boisterous.

  Wordlessly, I held out my arms to her and she jumped at the opportunity to climb into them. I sat her upon my hip as she wrapped her arms tightly around me. Her stringy blond hair smelled like strawberries.

  “Your baby brother is brand-new,” I explained to her. “That’s why everyone is looking at him. They’ve never seen him before.”

  She leaned close and whispered in my ear.

  “He’s ugly.”

  “I know,” I admitted. “But don’t tell Mom or Grandma. It might hurt their feelings.”

  She nodded solemnly, agreeing to keep our secret.

  “Oh, dear,” Edna complained as she glanced up and noticed us. “Look, Corrie, your husband and daughter don’t even have a place to sit down. George, we’d better leave. There’s just not room for everyone in this tiny place. I can’t imagine how either of you can think that you’ll be able to raise two children here.”

  The words stung, and even though they were typical, I couldn’t help but resent them.

  “People all over the world raise children in places smaller than this,” Corrie defended. “I love keeping my children close.”

  Mrs. Maynard sighed in exasperation as she rose to her feet.

  I said nothing.

  In a way, it was a good thing that Corrie’s mother was such a complainer. As long as she kept up her litany of my failings as a provider, Corrie would staunchly defend me. And if she was defending me, she couldn’t reasonably be discontented as well.

  The truth was, of course, that her mother was right. The place was way too small for a family of four, but every penny I made was tied up in company expenses and equipment. Personal sacrifices were a necessity when trying to get a business off the ground. Corrie understood that. Unfortunately, her mother did not.

  It was going to take a lot of long hours, hard work and thrifty living to turn Braydon Oil Field Service into a profitable company. But business was great.

  With OPEC crunching the price of oil up to thirty-four dollars a barrel, producers were looking at secondary recovery as more cost effective than new development. I hadn’t got my start on the ground floor, of course. But there was still a lot of money to be made, even by a small independent company like mine.

  In truth, making money wasn’t that tough. As the Midnight Mechanic I’d already established myself as reliable and dependable. I had a long list of clients who called me first when they had a well down. I actually had more jobs than I could reasonably take on. And I couldn’t accept any more, because I didn’t have the crews to do them.

  The biggest challenge of my company was not making money, it was keeping up with the progress in technology and hiring good workers.

  The boom was on in the oil fields, there was full employment. The statistics said there were three percent out of work. From my perspective, that three percent didn’t particularly want to work. I was hiring guys straight out of high school, giving them top pay after a couple of weeks’ training, and then watching them leave me for Big Four jobs with better benefits. It was frustrating. The ones that stayed on were usually too lazy to work or had trouble getting along. It wasn’t the best of circumstances. And it kept me doing six twelvehour days a week. I was paying down debt and growing my business, but I missed my family.

  With a flurry of more picture-taking and lots of hugs and kisses all around, my in-laws finally left us alone. But I wasn’t free to lounge around in domestic bliss. I’d already taken off the whole morning.

  I kissed my wife and kids goodbye and went back to work.

  When I said, “I missed my family,” I guess I should explain that I didn’t simply mean that I thought about them all day and wished that I was home. That was true, of course. But what I really meant was that in those early years of our marriage, my family was growing, changing, doing exciting, memorable things every day. And I was missing all that.

  Most nights I’d come home very late. Lauren would already be sleeping. The baby would sometimes be awake, but he was growing so fast he looked like a different kid every time I saw him. Corrie would be exhausted, walking around like a zombie in a bathrobe. She kept her hair cut close to her head, like a boy’s. And there was never so much as a smear of makeup. She bore little resemblance to the sexy college girl that I’d married. I suppose that was all right, though. We never got to have sex anymore, so if she’d looked good, I guess I would have really missed it.

  When I did get a rare evening to be home, it wasn’t like things went perfect. They had their routine and my presence was like a disruption.

  “Let’s go, Lauren, it’s time for your bath.”

  “No! Daddy’s home. I doan wanna baff.”

  “You have to have a bath.”

  “I doan wanna!”

  Lauren would curl her little lip and stamp her foot. She had the exact same expression on her face that Corrie got when she stood up to her mother.

  “Why don’t I give her a bath?” I suggested.

  Lauren immediately complied.

  Problem.

  Routine bath with Mommy takes fifteen minutes, then ten minutes more to get into pajamas and into bed.

  Bath with Daddy takes an hour of laughing and splashing. Ten minutes to get into pajamas and then two hours’ worth of song, stories and threats to counter overstimulation before finally succumbing to sleep.

  Corrie never complained of my intrusion or the fact that my help cost her more time. Not that she was a saint. She could be as cranky or whiney as anyone, but maybe she was too tired to complain. She’d just snuggle up against my chest and listen to me voice my dreams.

  “What I really need is a frac truck,” I told her one night.

  “What’s a frac truck?” she asked.

  “It’s a truck you use for fracing.”

  She giggled like a little girl. “Tell me what fratching is and maybe the truck will make more sense.”

  “Fracing, it rhymes with cracking. It’s making fractures in the rock with high-pressure pumps. You inject those fractures with sand that holds the cracks open so that the trapped oil can work its way through to the main zone. It increases recovery to thirty, sometimes thirty-five percent.”

  She nodded thoughtfully.

  “How much does a frac truck cost?”

  I shook my head. “A half million bucks.”

  A sigh of exclamation escaped from her lips in one little puff.

  “I know,” I agreed. “That’s a lot of mac and cheese. This is not a poor boy’s business.”

  “Will the bank loan you that much?”

  I nodded. “They are handing out checks down there like you wouldn’t believe,” I told her. “It’s almost crazy.”

  “So would the oil companies pay you more for fracing their wells?”

  “Fracing is very expensive,” I said. “But if you’re go
ing to make these secondary recovery fields pay off, it’s what you’re going to have to do.”

  “Then go talk to the banker,” she said. “If he thinks we can eventually pay all this off, then we should surely believe it.”

  “What about your house?” I asked.

  “My house?”

  “Our house,” I corrected. “I know we’ve got to buy a house. We can’t raise these kids cramped in this little place forever.”

  She shrugged. “We can last a little bit longer,” she told me. Then glancing around at the toy-strewn main room, with Lauren’s little screened-off bedroom/corner on one end, she added, “It will be less for the kids to mess up.”

  Corrie

  1982

  If it hadn’t been for my brother, Mike, I’m not sure that Sam and I would ever have gotten around to buying our own house. Dear old Mrs. Neider passed away on an exceptionally warm afternoon in February. She’d been sitting on the porch playing with Lauren and Nate. Nate was still shy and reserved with everyone except me, but she and Lauren were good friends. There were always having tea parties or playing mail delivery or grocery store.

  I was washing up the lunch dishes. I had Mrs. Neider’s harvest-gold kitchen wall phone pulled as far as its coiled cord would allow so that I could talk to Mom on the phone. It was an emergency meeting of the Maynard women. Mike had invited Cherry Dale Larson, the former Cherry Dale Pepper, ex-cheerleader and notorious local divorcée with two small children, to the Chamber of Commerce Citizens Banquet.

  Mom was certain that they must be having a secret affair, which would explain why Mike did not seem to be particularly interested in dating any of the younger, more eligible women of Lumkee.

  I was trying to both ease her fears and raise her level of tolerance.

  “Mom, just because he’s escorting her around town doesn’t mean he’s sleeping with her,” I pointed out.

  “I can’t imagine any other reason he’d be willing to be seen with her, the little tramp,” Mom responded.

  “They have known each other since high school,” I said. “And from what I’ve heard she’s trying to get her new gym classes off the ground. Mike probably invited her as a prospective member of the Chamber.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Corrie.” Mom’s voice was exasperated. “An empty dance floor with mirrors on the wall is not a gym. And she’s not even providing classes for children. She says it’s for women only.”

  I never really liked Cherry Dale, but at this point felt called upon to defend her. She’d rented the old Hay Biscuit Dance Hall and was opening a place right on the highway. The sign read Cherry Dale’s Pepxercise.

  “Mom, it is a business,” I told her. “These fitness centers are springing up everywhere. They have them in Tulsa.”

  Mom made a haughty, derisive remark.

  “I can’t imagine that any woman in her right mind would want to waste her time going to some smelly gym, when she can get just as much exercise shopping on Main Street.”

  “Mommy.”

  Lauren walked into the kitchen and tugged on my shirt, distracting me from my conversation.

  “Mommy, I have to show you something.”

  “Just a second,” I told my mother. “Lauren, I’ve told you a dozen times, when I’m on the phone it is the same as if I were speaking to someone in the room. Interrupting is very bad manners. When you see that I’m on the phone, you should wait until I’m finished and then you can politely tell me anything you have to tell me.”

  “But Mommy…”

  “You do understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, Mommy, but…”

  “I know that it’s hard and that you’re impatient, but you have to learn to wait your turn.”

  She stood then, waiting, though not so patiently, standing on one foot and then the other. I deliberately stalled her for about a minute. “Excuse me, Mom,” I said into the receiver. “Lauren wants to tell me something.”

  I smiled at her proudly. She was very bright, and growing up to be so sweet and well behaved.

  “What do you want to tell me, Lauren?” I asked.

  “I think Mrs. Neider’s dead, Mommy,” she said. “She’s still sitting in her chair, but she looks really dead.”

  I hung up on my mother without another word. I am certain that Lauren had never seen a dead body in her life, but she knew what she was talking about. Mrs. Neider was sitting in her rocking chair, eyes closed as if she were asleep. She was not asleep.

  Nate, for once, had overcome his shyness and was struggling to climb into her lap.

  I jerked him away and into my arms and led Lauren back into the kitchen. I picked up the phone and called Dr. Kotsopoulos. I didn’t know that doctors don’t even make house calls for the dead. The office told me to call her family and the funeral home.

  We got through the next few days with only a fair amount of difficulty. Sam took off work the day of the funeral. Our intent was to go to the service to show respect for the dear old lady. The family asked us not to.

  “Somebody has to stay here and guard this house,” her daughter, Betty, told us. “Since everybody knows the family will be at the church and the cemetery, no telling who will show up here to try to take something out of the house.”

  So Sam and I honored Mrs. Neider by sitting in her house while she was eulogized and buried.

  “You didn’t miss much,” Sam’s grandmother assured us later. “It wasn’t the best funeral. Her niece, Doris, did the music and it was very gloomy.”

  Since Gram had been to more funerals than most, we took her word for it.

  Our immediate concern was for a place to live. The family made it eminently clear that we needed to vacate the premises as quickly as possible. In fact, the eldest son, Howard, suggested that we should begin paying rent retroactively. He said it in such a way that it sounded as if he thought we had been living off the kindness of an old woman, completely discounting all that we had done for her in the four years we’d lived in the garage apartment.

  His attitude made Sam furious. He was ready to pack up and move into our car rather than spend another night in the little apartment that had been our home for so very long. I insisted that we had to have a place to go before we left.

  I spent the next morning looking at rental properties. I didn’t see anything that really felt like a home, but there were a couple of possibilities that I could probably bear to live in.

  It was a gray day. The weather had turned and the wind blew through my coat. If I was cold, I figured the kids were shivering. We went to the drugstore to warm up. It was not really a good idea to interrupt the workday at Maynard Drug, so I made sure that we didn’t do it often enough to wear out our welcome.

  Dad was delighted to see us. He so rarely got to see Lauren and Nate when my mother was not around. He took them to the back, entertaining them while I stepped behind the soda counter to pour myself a cup of coffee. The saucer clanked loudly upon the marble, but it was a familiar sound. The drugstore was as much a part of my childhood as home or school. Every afternoon throughout the elementary grades, I came here to sweep up. By high school I was working two evenings and Saturdays.

  The place was like an archeological site turned upside down. Near eye level it was a 1980s pharmacy with all the brightly labeled cold remedies and glossy magazines that represented. A little higher, however, were the sleekly modernistic plastic clocks of the sixties and the pants-down Coppertone advertisement and rock-and-roll motifs of the fifties. Up next to the fifteen-foot ceiling were sepia-toned panoramic photographs of Lumkee as a raw boomtown. There was even a brightly painted Gibson girl sipping a Coca-Cola.

  I took my usual behind-the-counter seat on the Dr. Pepper cold box, leaving all eight chrome-and-vinyl bar stools available for paying customers.

  A minute later my brother came up and joined me.

  “I’ve always heard it’s bad to drink alone,” he said, gesturing toward the coffeepot.

  I poured him a cup and set
it and the little one-serving cream container in front of him.

  “If you’d spent the morning driving around Lumkee with Raylene Wallace, you’d be looking to drown your sorrows as well.”

  He feigned abject horror and then laughed.

  Mike had a great laugh. He and I looked a lot alike. Everybody said so. But somehow, it looked better on him. With honey-brown hair and green eyes, Mike was six foot two, long and lean, with ruggedly handsome features and a dentist-perfect smile. He’d played all the sports in high school but had settled on swimming by the time he got to college. It kept him fit and tanned. Even in the middle of winter, he drove all the way into Tulsa two or three nights a week to swim at an indoor pool where he had a membership. “So did you find the house of your dreams?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Most of the Lumkee rental market is more like a nightmare,” I told him.

  “Well, maybe you should take this opportunity to actually buy a house,” he said.

  I narrowed my eyes and gazed at him speculatively. “Are you a lobbyist for Mom these days?” I asked him.

  He chuckled.

  “No, she already has more influence than could ever be bought or sold,” Mike assured me. “But it does seem like a convenient time to be going after something you want.”

  I shook my head. “Sam’s business is just getting on its feet. I hate to put any more stress on him.”

  Mike was thoughtful for a moment and then he spoke in the soft, gently prodding way that he’d always used to encourage me to study hard and do my best.

  “Buying a house isn’t about Sam or his business,” he said. “I know this might be a radical concept, sis, but you know you could go out and get a J-O-B.”

  He spelled out the last in a whisper, as if it were a subversive idea.

  I chuckled and shook my head. “Oh, yeah, Mike, that’s why Mom thinks you’re the smart one,” I told him facetiously. “Maybe this has escaped the notice of a carefree bachelor like yourself, but I have two small children.”

  “And?”

  “And it would cost more to put them in day care than the pay scale at Burger Barn currently allows.”