Suburban Renewal

by Pamela Morsi

  By spring, she was a basket case, crying all the time in the garage. The kids were weirded out and scared.

  “Why is Mommy so sad?” Lauren asked me one evening when I arrived home late to find the two of them eating cereal for supper in front of the TV.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “I do!” Nate offered, jumping to his feet with his hand raised as if he were in school. “I know, I know!” He was almost seven now, skinny as a rail, but a good-looking kid if you could get past the big excited grin that had several missing front teeth.

  “How could you know?” Lauren’s voice was disdainful.

  “Paw-Paw told me,” Nate replied, his voice dripping with superiority. “Mommy cries cause she’s ‘one bitch that’s permanently on the rag.’”

  Lauren’s brow furrowed with question. My jaw dropped open in shock.

  “What!”

  Both kids immediately stilled at the tone of my voice.

  I reined in my temper, but not my disapproval. “Don’t you ever let me hear you talking about your mother that way,” I scolded him.

  Nate was wide-eyed. “What way?” he asked. “It’s what Paw-Paw said.”

  I didn’t doubt for a minute that was true.

  “Your grandfather is who he is,” I told Nate. “But you are my son and you will show respect to your mother or I’ll take this belt off and whip your tail with it.”

  Nate stared at me in disbelief. I’d never spanked the children. I wasn’t opposed to it. Gram had gotten my attention more than once with granddad’s old razor strop. And I thought it had probably done some good. But Corrie didn’t think corporal punishment was necessary and she always managed, more or less, to make the children behave without it.

  I wasn’t sure this was the best time to change that system. So I stormed out of the front room before the little guy could make some inappropriate comeback that would force me to follow up my words with action.

  I went to the phone to call Corrie’s mother. We were drowning and we needed help.

  Fortunately for me, it was Doc Maynard who answered the phone. I was able to describe what was going on in our house and he responded like a medical professional.

  “She needs to be on some antidepressants,” the old man told me. “I’ll call Dr. Kotsopoulos tomorrow and get him to see her. Try not to worry, Sam,” he told me. “Half the wives in town are on them these days.”

  By May, when my loan payment came due, it felt like I was living with a Stepford wife. Corrie went about her days, doing what she was supposed to be doing. She cooked now, and cleaned, and the kids were back to having hot meals and help with homework. She puttered about, humming and smiling. But when I tried to talk her about what was going on, she waved my words away.

  “Do whatever you think best, Sam,” she told me. “I’m sure everything will be fine.”

  I did not have that confidence.

  Since I’d already renegotiated a second mortgage on our house, and we didn’t have that much equity in it, anyway, I decided that I was going to have to liquify our remaining assets. I tried to sell the Volvo. I stuck a sign on the windshield and placed an ad in the classifieds. I didn’t even get one phone call. So I drove it up to the Volvo dealership in south Tulsa to see what they’d offer me. The manager just shook his head.

  “I’ve got thirty repossessions coming in,” he told me. “We’re shipping them east for half of what they would have brought on this lot last year. Nobody here is buying, around here everybody is selling.”

  I drove home, forlorn.

  I went to talk with Dad. He was, after all, the crew supervisor, my closest relative and the person I spent the most time with these days.

  I drove out to Cherry Dale’s double-wide set on the lot next to her parents’ bungalow. The place was nicely kept up with attractive faux-wood metal sheeting around the skirt and a decklike front porch with a comfortable cushioned glider surrounded by pots of bright blooming flowers.

  Dad had pretty much moved in with Cherry Dale. He still kept some of his stuff at Gram’s house, but he’d never really lived there.

  “It gives me the creeps,” he admitted to me once. “The damn place smells like that old woman. I’ve smoked a dozen cigars in the living room and left a stringer of fish to rot in the kitchen sink, but I still can’t get the stench of her out of the place.”

  I didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about. But I’d grown up there. It was my childhood home. Of course it would feel differently to me. I knocked on the front door of the mobile home. I didn’t see my dad’s pickup, but Cherry Dale’s blue Firebird was parked under the carport.

  I heard movement inside, but there was no immediate answer to my knock. I tried again.

  Clearly somebody was home. I thought maybe they’d been in the shower and were getting dressed. I was patient, but eventually knocked on the door a third time, more vigorously.

  Reluctantly it opened a few inches. Cherry Dale was on the other side.

  “Hi, Sam,” she said. “Floyd’s not here. He’s gone to the beer joint, I think.”

  She was forcing me to look through the narrow slot of the doorway. Her face was in shadow, but something was wrong.

  “You’re not at work today?”

  “No, I’m not feeling very well,” she said. “Didn’t think I’d go in today.”

  I wondered idly who ran the place when she wasn’t there. As far as I knew, her fitness center had always been a one-woman show. But she didn’t seem particularly eager to talk.

  “Well, I’ll try to catch Dad downtown,” I told her, and turned to walk away. Just as I reached the step, I turned and waved. “Hope you get to feeling better.”

  The perspective from the step was different, and for one instant I caught a glimpse of her face looking dark and swollen. The sight stopped me in my tracks. Abruptly the door shut and she was gone.

  Thoughtful, concerned, I started back across the porch to knock on the door again but thought the better of it. Instead I made my way to the car and drove down to the beer joint. Sure enough, Dad’s pickup was parked in front. I angled the Volvo in beside it and went inside.

  There was a pretty good crowd in the place. More than I would have expected on a weekday afternoon. I’d sent my crew home because I didn’t have anything for them to do. I suppose other employers might have done the same.

  Dad was sitting near the doorway on a stool at the bar. His back was to me and there was a bottle of Bud in front of him. He was in the middle of one of his long, drawn-out stories about a lazy drunk and his complaining wife. He dragged through every line with an accentuated accent and deep baritone drawl. Every eye in the room was focused on him. His good looks and perfect smile made him stand out in every crowd, but with that wonderful charm added, he just drew people to him. It was a charisma that I envied. Like the rest of the patrons in the bar, I waited patiently for the punch line. It was as raunchy as expected.

  I walked up and slapped him on the back.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said. “Do you want to buy me a beer?”

  He grinned at me. “You’re the boss, you should be buying for me.”

  I shrugged and shook my head before calling out to the bartender to bring me two. I settled down on the stool next to Dad.

  “I was just at Cherry Dale’s,” I told him. “What’s wrong with her? She looks awful.”

  Dad didn’t answer immediately, instead he took another swallow of beer.

  “Car wreck,” he said finally.

  “Car wreck?”

  “Nothing messes up your face like a car wreck,” Dad said. “Even a little fender-bender can make you look like hell.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so,” I said. “Wow, that’s too bad. She didn’t say anything about it. Was anybody else hurt?”

  “No, no, she was all alone. I don’t think she’s told anybody. Probably too embarrassed by her own stupidity. Women drivers,” Dad commented, warming up to the subject. “It’s downright scary to have �
�em on the road. Cherry Dale’s just fine. She’ll be back out on the highway in a couple of days, as bad at it as ever.”

  There was some lingering question that niggled at my brain, but I ignored it. I had something important that I had to bring up. I glanced around the room. There was certainly no sense of privacy here. Maybe this wasn’t the place to bring it up, but I felt as if I couldn’t wait longer.

  “Dad, we need to talk,” I told him.

  “What about?” His question was gruff, defensive.

  “About the house,” I said.

  “What house?”

  “Gram’s house,” I said. “I’m going to borrow some money against it.”

  He looked at me, strangely guarded.

  “Oh, yeah?” he asked evenly.

  I nodded. “My business loan is up for renewal,” I explained. “We haven’t really been making enough money to make the payment. Normally, a guy would just go in at this point and renegotiate. But with the entire industry in such terrible shape, the banks have their backs against the wall. They’re going to want some more collateral to sweeten the pot. I’ve already got a second on my house. Gram’s house isn’t much, but I think it will keep them from calling the loan.”

  He took another long draw on his beer, followed by a breathy sigh.

  “Not a good idea,” he said.

  I was a little surprised at his response, but it was not completely unexpected. I’d learned working with him over the last few years that Dad was what they called in the oil fields a size forty-seven jacket with a size five hat. Healthy and strong, but not too clear on the complexities of the business.

  “Well, in fact, Dad,” I told him gently, “it’s a very good idea.” I took a deep breath, glanced around to make sure nobody was paying any particular attention and then continued. “The downturn in the price of oil is severe. But it’s not going to last forever. The businesses that manage to stay in business through this crisis are going to come out of it bigger and stronger and with a larger market share. I want to be one of those businesses.”

  Part of the time Dad was looking at me. Part of the time he was looking at his beer.

  “The bank doesn’t really want to bankrupt me,” I explained. “They’ve already got enough foreclosure equipment to make the stuff almost completely worthless. All they need is a tiny excuse to keep me on. Just a small piece of real property to give them cause to renegotiate my loan. If I can get another year, maybe I can pull out of this. I’m just trying to buy a little time.”

  Dad continued to look at me, saying nothing.

  I glanced around nervously again and then lowered my voice. I hated even speaking the next words aloud.

  “The alternative is that I go in there with nothing but a drooping balance sheet and a big smile,” I said. “That won’t get us anything. They’ll call in my loan and I won’t be able to pay. I’ll lose the business, Dad. I’ll lose everything. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  He nodded slowly. He set down his beer and lit up a cigarette.

  “I get it,” he said. “Oh, I get it completely. I’m supposed to lose my house so you won’t lose yours. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “That’s exactly it,” he insisted. “I give you my damn house to prop up your fly-by-night business. I get nothing so you can get everything.”

  I was shocked, even stunned by his words. Six months earlier I had given him the house, just signed it over because he’d asked me for it. He’d never even lived in the place and now he talked like I was trying to cheat him somehow.

  “It won’t be for nothing,” I assured him. “Putting up collateral is like putting money in the company. I’ll give you a partnership, like Corrie’s brother, Mike. It will be your company as well.”

  “Big freaking whoop-ee,” Dad said facetiously. “Like I want a part of a company that’s about to go belly-up?”

  “We’re not going belly-up.”

  “You are if I don’t hand over my house,” he said.

  “You don’t have to hand anything over,” I said. “You’ll still have the house. It will just have its address listed on the loan papers.”

  “And what happens next time you can’t make the payment?” he said. “Then they take my house. No way. It’s not worth the risk to me.”

  “Dad, this is your job as well,” I said. “If the company goes down, you’re out of work.”

  He snorted. “I never much liked the damn job, anyway.”

  I couldn’t believe what he was saying. I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t willing to help me. And his crappy comment about the job just went through me like ice. I was suddenly furious.

  “I pay you twice what anybody else in this town—what anybody else in this state—would pay you. And if you had been anyone else but my father, I would have fired you for being the lazy, incompetent, son of a bitch that you are.”

  My anger delighted him. He laughed. “So you can get pissed off, I see,” he said. “I was beginning to think that you were completely candy-ass like your mother. At least that’s good. I got something out of this thing. I got a smelly old woman’s house and a rise out of my son. That’s more than I ever hoped to get from that side of the family.” He rose to his feet. “You don’t have to fire me,” he said. “I was getting ready to quit, anyway. That woman of mine makes a pretty nice dollar. I don’t need to punch a damn time clock anymore.”

  He got up and walked out the door.

  I followed him and stood on the sidewalk as he got into his pickup and drove away.

  I went to my own car, sat down in the driver’s seat and grasped the steering wheel with both hands to keep them from trembling. My heart was pounding as if I’d just run a marathon. The stress of the last months swelled up in me and I wanted to just sit there and cry. I wanted to cry like a little boy.

  As a little boy, of course, I hadn’t cried. The memories suddenly came back to me in a flood that washed all the optimism out of my brain. Dad’s smiling face and charming stories were always for somebody else. When he came home to us, he was mostly mean. He’d get mad about something, nothing, anything, and he’d slap me hard. If I cried, he’d slap me harder.

  “Crybaby! Crybaby, just a crybaby like your mama!”

  He did the same to her. She tried to please him, but she never could. When he’d hit her and she’d cry, it made him want to hit her harder. It was just the way he was. He was a bully. Exploiting weakness was like a drug to him. The more he did it, the more he wanted it.

  In all my worrying, plotting, planning, maneuvering, I had tried to think of every possibility, every situation that could go right, every detail that could go wrong. In all of those, I had taken comfort in my fall-back position. Never had it occurred to me that my fall-back would be foiled. I had allowed myself to be deluded by Dad. To believe that he was a man like me, rather than the man he was. He had let me down. But it wasn’t his fault. He was only what he was, and at least now I was pretty clear on what that meant.

  The fault was mine. I was the one who’d given Gram’s house away. I had lost my own business. I had no one to blame but myself.

  The truth was so painful to me that I could hardly hold it in my mind. My thoughts kept pushing away from it, wanting to focus on anything, anything but the reality of where I’d gone wrong.

  It was at that precise moment when I figured out the question that had niggled at my brain earlier. If Cherry Dale had been in a car wreck, how come there wasn’t a scratch on that Firebird?

  Corrie

  1987

  White noise. That’s how I think of my recovery from depression. I had been drowning in blackness. Until I was dragged into the world of white noise.

  It was Mike and my dad who got me help. Mom just kept yelling at me. Ordering me to snap out of it. Accusing me of faking it to attract attention. Claiming that my deliberate agenda was meant solely to embarrass her among her friends.

  I didn’t even have the strength to fight back.


  I knew the children were suffering. Nate drew even further away from me. He kept his distance as if I had the plague. Lauren seemed to want to emulate my role. If she was playing, giggling, laughing, I’d see her stop herself, as if she believed that being an ordinary happy child was somehow bad behavior.

  I could see this. I could see what I was doing. But I couldn’t seem to stop. I couldn’t drag myself out of the abyss. I just wanted to sit in the garage in Gram’s chair. I just wanted to sit there until I could die. It was too hard to face living anymore.

  “You need to be on medication,” Mike told me. “You have to see a doctor. This can’t go on.”

  “I can’t see a doctor,” I told him. “What would Mom say? What would Sam say?”

  “Mom knows when to keep her mouth shut,” Mike insisted. “And Sam’s the one who called us for help.”

  I told him I would do it. But I made no moves in that direction. Mike took the reins out of my hands. He made the appointment. He told me when I had to be there. Then he showed up to take me.

  I was still in my bathrobe.

  “I can’t go today,” I told him. “I don’t even feel well enough to dress.”

  “Then don’t,” Mike said. “You can go just like that.”

  “I can’t go see some stranger dressed in my bathrobe.”

  “This doctor is a friend of mine,” he told me. “The guy’s seen just about everything. I don’t think he’ll be fainting from shock at the sight of a housewife in a bathrobe.”

  Just that threat got me to bathe and dress. I looked like hell. All my muscles had turned to fat. The only dress in my closet that fit me was a muumuu that Mom had brought me three years earlier from her Hawaiian vacation. My hair was styleless, dull and overlong. The best I could manage was to run a brush through it and pull it into a ponytail at the nape of my neck. My makeup-free skin was so pale and sallow, I almost looked jaundiced. But when I opened my cosmetics case, with the intention of at least putting on some foundation, the process seemed so difficult that I gave up without even starting.