In the evenings, before I can fall asleep, I ritually listen to Mom’s muffled weeping seep out from beneath her bedroom door. I listen because it is my way of making sure all is in order and she hasn’t left us too. But it’s on those random nights, when Mom’s pain is so great, that I hear her cry out to God, “Why?” It is on those nights that my heart breaks with hers, and our voices and tears blend into one long, pitiful wail, rising up into the splintered, hollow walls of our house. She can’t believe her dream for a better life in America has deteriorated to this—working so brutally hard and watching her children be consumed by the streets. Mom fears that we are damned, and this terrifies me.
Mom gets the call one April morning in 1976. Dad is not only in the States, but he is in Florida, not far from us, and is coming home this afternoon.
When I first hear that Dad is coming back, I think the world will begin to turn in our direction again. The way I see it, life can now be something to look forward to, not to cower from. Somehow, in my desperate need to find hope, I create an image of my father, the man who abandoned us to this hopeless place, as my hero.
My mind reels. I flash on the idea of “normalcy,” something we can have again. I yearn for my life to be like the happy family television shows I spend my afternoons escaping into. Maybe we can have a family like the Waltons. I’d even take the Bradys. I don’t care. I do care that we be like them: supportive, compassionate, and never experiencing a problem that can’t be worked out. They are perfect families. The fantasy makes me feel warm and tingly with anticipation. Can all the wrong or missing things in our lives suddenly be whole because Dad is coming back? Can we be a family again?
We are thrilled. My brother, sister, and I race around the house, screaming at the top of our lungs, running in and out of each other’s rooms, frantically attempting to straighten up for Dad’s arrival.
Mom gets caught up in our enthusiasm at times, but a strained, nervous look never really leaves her face. She sees that we are quick to forgive. There is no way we can really understand her burden of raising us alone these past seven years.
“Vee’ll see,” she mumbles and tries not to dampen our spirits. Perhaps she foresees how easy it will be for Dad to win us over, that his absence will make him seem kinder to us when he arrives.
I can sense how much she hopes it won’t happen.
It does anyway.
Wayne William Schiller. An all-American, blue-suede-shoes kind of guy: That is my father.
In 1957, he sneaks out to make a short hop to Philadelphia from New Jersey with his older cousin, Lash, to stand in line at ABC-TV. At sixteen, he is chosen as one of the first American Bandstand dancers, but back home, he gets a beating from his father for disobeying—and he never returns.
My dad is a very bright man who likes being hip with his hair combed back in a cool “duck’s ass” and wearing his peg-leg pants. Accused of being “incorrigible” by his mother during his parents’ divorce, he is rescued by my great-grandmother, who thinks boys can do no wrong and is passionate about bailing her grandson out of everything.
Awed by the art of savoir faire, Dad fancies himself a master. He can always find a way to get out of an uncomfortable situation and look like the good guy. His grandma has taught him that.
The world is his oyster as he strikes out on his own at a young age.
Soon he is an Army man stationed in Germany, where he meets Mom.
In a bar in 1959 on base in Amberg, Dad dances with Edda Therese Ilnseher, a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty. Mom’s a babe, and it doesn’t take Dad long to swoop in with his charm.
Standing five feet tall and looking awkward next to my dad’s six-foot-two stature, Mom, like many other German women, is looking for a better life, away from the hard times she grew up with in postwar Germany.
Born on a farm in Bavaria in 1939, she and her brothers and sisters were displaced war refugees, Old World survivors. Dad calls them Gypsies, and I think of her family living in caravans, wearing turbans, and reading fortunes on the side of the road. They were orphaned when my grandmother, whom I never met, died on a meager farm in the country. Mom was eight years old and the youngest of six children.
A few years after World War II, Mom was shipped to a Catholic orphanage, where she remembers the nuns being strict and cruel. She lived in one of Munich’s cold, crumbling brick nunneries for several years, until her older sister raised enough money to bring her and her brothers and sisters back together again.
There, in that bar in Amberg, it is my parents’ night out to dance.
Mom thinks the streets are paved in gold in America, and she is feeling pretty lucky that the American GI smiling at her is also very handsome. When Dad speaks perfect German to her, she takes it as a sign that God has answered her prayers. She knows very little English and innocently trusts that he will guide and protect her in the New World.
On December 2, 1959, they are married at the city hall in Munich, Germany. It is a simple wedding with a justice of the peace and two witnesses, who are friends of Dad’s from the base and strangers to Mom. A few months later, he is stationed back in the States near his home in Toms River, New Jersey. Happy and in love, Mom and Dad take off for America.
We live at 718 Main Street in the big house my great-grandfather built. Since his passing, my great-grandmother, Cora Hilbert, has lived in the house and now lets us live with her and her sister, Great-Aunt Ella.
“Grandma,” as we call Cora, is a thin-faced woman with broad hips and tight, gray, bobby-pin curls pinned painfully close to her scalp.
Aunt Ella, barely five feet tall, wears her white hair in tight curls too. She is a very round woman with a matching circular, soft face, and one of her legs is a good six inches shorter than the other. My grandma tells us the story of how, when Aunt Ella was a baby, she was so small their mother used a shoe box for her cradle. I think shoe boxes were big back then.
Grandma and Aunt Ella speak High German and wear plain housedresses, aprons, and black lace-up boots six days a week. Sundays, they dress up in their customary church-day attire, complete with hats and gloves.
Aunt Ella’s one boot has a higher sole on it, and she uses a cane so she can walk properly. She is, we are told, an “old maid.” She never married, and everyone in the family takes care of her. To me, Aunt Ella is the sweetest, kindest lady, always soft-spoken and polite, ever prepared with a hard candy in the pocket of her housedress or apron. When we children are being scolded, she often stands up for us, stepping into the middle of Mom’s cross words or wild backhand swings or rage as she drags us upstairs to “get the belt.”
“Now, Edda, what has the child done?” Aunt Ella asks. As quickly as she can, she stands and then wedges her lame leg between Mom and me. Anchoring herself with her cane, she distracts Mom and buys me time to hide. Aunt Ella knows if she questions long enough, Mom’s temper will subside. It works—sometimes.
But most times it doesn’t.
Still, many sweet childhood memories are made here in the big house on Main Street. Grandma does the cooking, and Aunt Ella always bakes. Crumb cake is my favorite: cinnamon, buttery crumb cake. In the pantry every Sunday morning is a large bowl of sweet dough, the ingredients mixed from scratch. Aunt Ella’s faintly lavender-and-stale-rose-scented black sweater drapes tightly over the bowl’s edges, and the yeast, thick and rich, fills the air in the warm pantry closet.
“Keep the door closed,” Aunt Ella says, “so the dough will rise.”
It always rises mysteriously.
Downstairs, at night, it is customary for Grandma to sit in her favorite rocking chair facing the darkened mouth of the massive redbrick fireplace. Tilting to and fro, the old, worn, knotty-wood rocker creaks when I sit in it, pretending I am grandma, gray and wise.
On many an evening I discover Grandma snoring loudly in her chair, head leaning forward on her chest, arms crossed tightly around her waist in a hug.
“Grandma, Grandma, wake up,” I whisper one time, gently sha
king her arm after watching her snore awhile longer. I ponder how odd and different she looks while asleep in the low living room lamplight.
“Oh, did I fall asleep?” she mumbles, her voice sweet and sleepy.
I quietly guide her up the polished oak stairs to her bedroom.
Grandma and Aunt Ella share a large bedroom on the second floor, and before bedtime each night, we children ritually appear to unlace their boots and to say our “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayers together, blessing everyone we know afterward.
One winter evening, after saying my prayers with Grandma and Aunt Ella, I turn to leave their room and see through the window the year’s first snow gently and silently fall. I lean against the radiator at the window and excitedly call out the snow’s arrival.
“How lovely,” my grandma says, too tired to get up and look.
They let me stay for a while in their room as I watch the shadowy street and trees become blanketed in white. The streetlamp below the window illuminates the quickly falling flakes and bathes everything in a pale blue light.
I love them—Grandma and Aunt Ella. Filled with the magic of an angelic moment, I feel so much love for them that particular night. After a while, I say my good nights and kiss each again.
It is a perfect moment that will be etched into my memory forever.
Aunt Ella and Grandma are religious. They are Lutheran by birth, but it seems Grandma wears the Bible on her dress. On her bad days, she has a tendency to call on the devil and offer to send us to him should we “not mind.” Of course, she does this with God’s permission and always asks us, “Is that what you want? To go to hell and the devil?”
“No, Grandma!” we cry. “We’re sorry. We don’t want to go to hell and the devil.”
I don’t know what hell and the devil is, but one thing’s for sure: It isn’t good.
When Grandma says this, it seems we are going there even if we don’t want to. Sometimes at night, when unlacing my aunt Ella’s boots, I ask her worriedly if that’s where I’m going—to the devil. I worry mostly because of the memories of my uncle visiting my room at night, those nights when I felt blank inside, like a dirty rag doll. She never answers, but instead casts a disapproving sideways glance in my grandmother’s direction. Grandma then purses her lips, making them thinner than ever, and says a short, sharp “good night,” turning over in a huff without reciting her prayers. I never really know if I’m going to the “bad place” or not, but I feel terrible that she won’t pray with me.
Still, the best and most fun hours we children spend are outside in our sprawling yard. Filled with wild honeysuckle, it is home to big, funny, flowering trees good for climbing. Behind our clothesline is the little garden patch, where we grow radishes and carrots. Farther back still, behind the garage, is a never-ending cluster of woods, as big as the whole world.
Here, we find box turtles, and we keep them as pets until Grandma or Mom makes us let them go. (Aunt Ella always lets us keep them.)
Here, too, we pick wild strawberries. Then we dash into the house for a bowl and sugar and scurry back out into the afternoon sun to sit and eat our prize picks.
Dr. Bricker, our neighbor to the left, owns a large portion of tangled woods that melds into ours. We pick dogwood blossoms from the short, gnarled trees in his part of the back woods and bring them in as presents for my mother, grandma, and Aunt Ella. Sitting out on our large, green lawn, my brother, sister, and I gather dandelions, playing the game where we hold them under each other’s chin to see if we like butter. I always like butter.
The best thing about this time in New Jersey is the wonder of summer twilight, when the fireflies come to show their luminous, green flashes. They are magical, sweet remnants of my fairy-tale dreams. While I sip tea with my royal court of dolls under our climbing tree, the fireflies protect me as they soar above. I am their queen, and they love me.
Warm days lazily turn into nights. The eastern sky blazes purple and pink at the peak of the fireflies’ evening arrival. Their little lights blink randomly, floating on the thick, honeysuckle air.
Sometimes near, sometimes far, the fireflies dare us to believe in them. When they grace us with their presence, my heart knows they come out to enchant us and remind us of their existence.
I try to stop my brother, who, to my horror, only wants to catch their glowing bodies. “Maybe they’re fairies,” I tell him.
When he catches them anyway and puts them in jars, revealing their insect nature, I am still convinced they are magical beings that simply change when caught. Insisting that the glass prisons will kill their magic, I free every firefly my brother gathers. Soon he believes in them too.
I arrived the firstborn of three children. Mom was pregnant with me soon after coming to the States with my father. Born in a neighboring coastal town called Point Pleasant on December 29, 1960, I had golden curls and crystal blue-green eyes exactly like my father’s. In fact, it is said among family that, aside from being a girl, I was the spitting image of my dad.
Dad calls me his little princess, and I shine whenever he gives me attention. It means everything to me when I hear him say how beautiful and smart I am.
When Dad comes home at night in his fatigues and Army boots, I run to greet him at the door. Sometimes, after he settles into his armchair, I unlace his tall, black boots and then bring him a frosty stein of beer.
“Ahhh. Now, that’s my princess,” he praises. “That’s a good girl.”
I am special, and he loves me because I take care of him. I am proud of myself for making him happy.
Thirteen months younger, my sister, Terry, was hairless for the first three years of her life. Freckle-faced, she is bigger boned than I am—a fact our parents repeatedly announce, to Terry’s dismay. Even though I am older, we appear to be the same size.
My mother likes to dress us girls in similar clothes, only in different colors. (We hate this.) I always get blue; Terry always gets pink. We learn to dislike these colors.
Terry’s eyes are the purest green-yellow, reminding me of cats’ eyes with their glow-in-the-dark quality. They are a cross between my mother’s and father’s: not blue-green, not hazel-brown, but spooky green.
I forever wish for her color of eyes.
My brother, Wayne Jr., is just shy of four years younger than me. He is the first boy and the baby of the family. Named after my father, Wayne is, in my grandmother’s opinion, like a missing link in our family chain. How she hoped for another male to be in charge!
Wayne has dark brown hair, and his hazel-brown eyes sparkle with mischief. His chubby cheeks stay with him into his teens, and Terry and I tease him mercilessly for resembling a chipmunk, giving him plenty of excuses to torture us in return.
To Grandma’s chagrin, however, my brother doesn’t much look like my father. He looks more like my mother than anyone else in the family does. But Grandma will overlook his dark features because, after all, he is a boy!
In 1965, Dad signs up for Vietnam. Then in 1966, he re-ups! In the Army’s Aviation Brigade, Dad becomes a helicopter door gunner stationed at Camp Holloway in Pleiku with the 119th Assault Helicopter Company, aka the Gators, or the Flying Dragons.
At the time, I don’t understand just how much danger he is in. A door gunner’s average life expectancy is only seven days. Every day, we wait for the mailman to arrive. It’s a relief to see a letter from Dad and not from Army headquarters. It means he is still alive.
Dad’s letters tell us how much he misses us and can’t wait to come home. He says Vietnam is hell and that he cries when he sees our pictures. He sends photos of the young Vietnamese children picking through garbage piles for food and of him hanging out the side of a helicopter, his band of ammunition draped over his shoulder as he aims his machine gun at the camera.
These are tearful times. Mom, Grandma, and Aunt Ella are never without a handkerchief, dabbing their eyes, avoiding our stares. They speak German to each other so as not to scare us with news of the war. They know
our young eyes and ears record everything, seeking some hint of news. In the three years Dad is in Vietnam, I understand only that he is a good guy fighting the bad guys and he is in danger.
Being the oldest, I am allowed to stay up late and help pack boxes with blankets, peanut butter, and canned food that will survive the rains and humid weather of southeast Asia. The women bicker over what is best to place in the care packages, while I stand, somberly watching. I know they’re arguing because they are scared too. Even with all their commotion, the package is wrapped carefully so as not to break on the long journey to Dad. As the final seal is placed on the box, Grandma turns away and hides her tears while Aunt Ella says an audible prayer.
In 1967, the day arrives when Dad comes home from the war.
It is the last part of winter, and several feet of snow still blanket our town. Looking out an upstairs window, I see the sun’s harsh glare off the snow-packed front yard.
Then I hear the doorbell.
“He’s here!”
I run down the stairs, crashing into Mom’s leg. She holds me back at her side as she opens the door. Decorated in metal stars, colored bars, and oak leaf clusters, Dad stands there in full uniform, legs apart and hands behind his back. Almost in slow motion, he smiles and looks at us.
The next thing I know, Mom and I are squeezing him hard. Dad pauses, takes a minute, and then embraces us back. After holding Mom again for a long time, he picks me up and spins me in the air.
“How is my little princess?” he asks. “Have you been a good girl for your mother?”
I realize I must’ve said, “Yes,” because suddenly he is crying and hugging me tight, while my brother and sister cling like little monkeys on his legs.
Dabbing handkerchiefs at their eyes and noses, Grandma and Aunt Ella have appeared to welcome him too, and Dad sets me down to greet them.
Home again, but still in the service, my father is stationed in different parts of the US, and we’re along for the ride, first to Fort Hood, Texas, then to Barstow, California. Dad is working his way through the sergeant stages of the military and is very proud. I am proud of him too.
The Road Through Wonderland Page 2