Women surrounded Steve, being the only boy. Dad came from a small town in Michigan and lost his mother at an early age. He got to college by being an athlete and expected his own son to have the same physical abilities. All four of us however, inherited my mother’s klutziness when it came to sports. These were the sixties and although the girls were expected to go to college, I don’t think my parents had any high hopes of big careers from any of us. Those demands however were different for the only boy. I suspected Dad wanted something more out of Steve because he was the only son. That Steve didn’t have what Dad wanted may have been the reason for his apparent apathy.
***
Now having been exposed to the celebrity New York City had to offer, I was soon exposed to something dirtier and more sinister about living in a big city. Our bellies full and show tunes dancing in our heads, we headed straight to the den and the comfort of the red sofa. Dad settled in to his chair and turned on Hawaii 5-0. I curled up in the corner of the sofa closest to him. He reached over and rubbed the top of my foot that hung over the arm of the couch.
“Linda, go wash your feet. They’re filthy,” he said.
“Huh?” I gave a typical thirteen-year-old answer before twisting my right foot around to see what he was talking about. “Ooo. Gross. Where did that come from?”
At home in Cleveland, I went barefoot all summer and my feet never ended up looking like this, pitch black from toe to heel. Following Dad’s instructions, I sat on the edge of the tub and scrubbed my feet. Rivers of black sooty water curled down the drain. When my feet were sufficiently clean, I dried them off and padded back down the hallway to my place on the red sofa.
“Linny,” my father said this time in a happier tone of voice. Linny was my nickname. We each had one. Susie Booze, Marthy, Steve Boy and Linny. And we knew the difference between being called our pet name or our full given name. “You can’t go barefoot while outside on the patio. Put some shoes on.”
“How come?” I’d never been a child to take instruction well. With a curious mind, I asked a laundry list of questions until I fully grasped the purpose of the action.
“This is the city. It’s dirty. You track soot all over the house and Junie has to clean it.” He had taken his eyes from the television and stared directly into mine. “Understand?”
“OK.”
***
The next day the lesson of dirt versus cleanliness would be solidly driven into my head. How dirty and disgusting New York City could be was about to teach me the true meaning of last night’s lecture. Dad ate his daily breakfast of Special K with skim milk that gave the golden flakes a grayish tinge, popped his dose of vitamin C, put on his suit coat and walked out the door to work. That was the cue for Steve and me to make the bed and put the red sofa back to its normal sitting position.
At home we were required to wash our own dishes, or at least get them into the dishwasher. June never accepted our offers to help. She didn’t want us under foot. She was used to cleaning up by herself because she’d been single, living alone for most of her life. Possibly it was because the kitchen in this apartment was the smallest on the planet. One person barely had room to turn around in it.
A tiny galley kitchen was tucked into the corner of the dining room. A swinging door hid it from the view from the living room. The door could only be opened enough to squeeze through without hitting the garbage can along the wall in front of the refrigerator. Counters lined each side with a sink and dishwasher on one and the stove and oven on the other. The kitchen had a window looking out on the terrace, so at least you had light to see if you were about to bump into the misplaced handle of a hot pan.
While June finished cleaning up the breakfast dishes, Steve watched game shows and I wrote letters. Yesterday June took me to a huge Hallmark store on Fifth Avenue and I bought three new boxes of stationary. I studied each box carefully before selecting the red, white and blue paper for today’s correspondence. Writing letters was my lifeline to my usual teenage life back home. I wrote page after page to my best friend, Georgia, about the big city lights, buying a delicious hot dog from a corner vendor, and our trip to the Museum of Modern Art. June gave me a stamp and I rushed out to the hallway to drop it in the mail slot by the elevator.
The rest of the morning was spent riding up and down the elevator to the dank and dreary basement of the building with the laundry. I got the creeps every time I went down there, past the rows of storage lockers with metal grates for walls. Inside I could see the piles of over stuffed and misshapen cardboard boxes, discarded end tables and the now shade-less lamps that once sat on top of them. The old musty smell of cold and dampness changed slightly when I got to the laundry room to include a hint of bleach. Several well used washers and dryers all sporting a locked box attached to the top with a metal slide. Laundry here required quarters another new concept for the girl from the suburbs.
I helped June carry the dirty sheets and clothes. She threw her coin purse on top of the basket and we made our way into the depths of the earth underneath the floors of urban dwellers. Dad had a habit of emptying the change from his pockets each night when he came home from work. I suspect June picked out all the quarters when he wasn’t looking and stashed them in her little black coin purse. During the week, the laundry room wasn’t busy so we were able to find empty washers for all of our loads.
“I hate it down here,” June said. “It gives me the creepy crawlies.” She scratched her forearm before reaching for her head.
“It smells kinda gross,” I added. At home I did my own laundry so it was kind of nice to have company to talk to while navigating the cold, dark city basement. June and I never seemed to run out of stupid teenager things to discuss. I think she read my Seventeen magazines when I wasn’t looking. She loved fashion and makeup at any level.
Just then I heard a loud snap. I looked at June and she at me. We didn’t want to know what it was but I suspected a rat had just met his demise. It could have been some pipes rattling. I tried my best to believe it was the latter. The basement wasn’t ever a quiet place, with a symphony of strange beeps, bumps and clacks. We hurried back upstairs to wait for the loads to finish.
June sent Steve and me back to the basement armed with her coin purse when it was time to put the loads in the dryer. Steve didn’t appear to be bothered by any of it. June said boys were no good at folding so I accompanied her when the clothes were dry. We didn’t waste time talking however, and got right to the task at hand. My skin crawled as a cockroach ran in front of my feet. I didn’t dare scream. June was now scratching her arms and head at more frequent intervals.
The morning had been taken up with laundry and the afternoon would be filled with the art of grocery shopping in the crowded city. I always enjoyed food shopping with Mom at Heinen’s, our neighborhood supermarket where they put a number on your cart when you checked out. You dropped the full cart off at the special pick up room and then drove your car up to the door so the contents could be loaded into the trunk without you lifting a finger. The protocol in New York City for buying and getting the food safely to home and into the kitchen cupboard was a very different experience.
The aisles at D’Agastino’s were narrow, barley enough room for one person to walk single file. And they were tall. If June, at barely five foot two, needed something off the top shelf, she was out of luck. Maybe the store had an employee in charge of helping customers in that situation who carried a reacher stick, the kind with a rubber claw at the end, but I never saw one.
The three of us squeezed through the aisles, collecting the items June instructed us to get into the miniature sized shopping cart.
“Go get the kind of pop you want to drink,” she said.
Steve and I rushed to the drink section.
“Orange Crush,” Steve demanded.
“Dr. Pepper,” I whined.
We hogged the aisle arguing over which six pack
to purchase knowing we wouldn’t be able to carry more than one home with all the other food already in the cart. June came around the corner.
“We can get both. I’m having our order delivered,’” she said. “We’ll take the ice cream though so it doesn’t melt.”
My brother and I looked at each other with wide eyes.
Delivered? This was 1969. We never heard of grocery delivery. Was it that June was buying ice cream? Dad loved ice cream, especially Dairy Queen.
In New York City however, there wasn’t a Dairy Queen so almost every evening, after dinner, the four of us walked down the street to Baskin Robbins and got whichever one of the thirty one flavors that struck our fancy that day. I rarely strayed from my usual favorite mint chocolate chip. Having ice cream at home would be a break in the routine.
“It’s a surprise,” June told us.
We were all in for a surprise as long as it involved eating ice cream, and having some leftovers handy in the freezer for seconds.
A knock on the door announced the grocery delivery about an hour later. I helped June put them away. Everything came packed in brown paper bags that we lined up on the kitchen counter until there was no more room, the rest went on the floor. That left little space for the two of us to navigate. I put the bananas on the counter and a swarm of tiny flying bugs came with them. I haphazardly slapped the air to put an end to the swarm.
“Linda,” June screamed. “What’s in my hair?”
She bent her head down in my direction. I understood by this action, I was supposed to look for something moving in the nest of golden, tease and sprayed hair.
“I don’t see anything,” I said glancing slightly without touching the highly teased hotbed.
“There’s a bug in my hair,” she squealed while hopping up and down. “Go get my hairbrush. It’s in the bathroom. Hurry!”
I walked down the hall at my usual pace. There wasn’t a bug in her hair. At least I didn’t see one. June’s voice climbed a couple octaves whenever she got excited and it seemed to me she did that a lot, over one of her unknown celebrities, creepy noises in the basement laundry and now a bug. At thirteen, I didn’t yet grasp the different levels of urgency in my own mother’s life let alone those of my stepmother.
I’d never been invited into the master bedroom; I only ever viewed it from the doorway. The bathroom oozed of the same sweet and soapy fragrance that accompanied Dad and June wherever they lived. The older I got, the more sickening the odor became to me, the comfort of sitting on the bathroom floor watching my father shave turned into a distant memory. A hard brush, with loads of brown wiry hair wrapped around the bristles perched on the edge of the sink. I picked it up.
With the windows open to let in what little breeze existed, June’s screams could be heard over the constant cacophony of honking horns and ambulance sirens. In Cleveland, a neighbor would soon be knocking on the door to make sure no one inside was being murdered. Here, if anyone were home, they’d just turn up the volume on the television and return to the intensity of today’s soap opera storyline and wait to see what happened next door on the evening news.
“Hurry! Linda, hurry!” Her muffled screaming sounded more desperate even with the long hallway between us. Not understanding why anyone would get so excited over a little bug, I saw no urgency in the situation. I pushed open the kitchen door a few inches as far as it would go and squeezed the brush into June’s wriggling grip.
Brush in hand; June kneeled on the kitchen floor among the brown paper bags. With hard, furious strokes, she tried to brush the bug off her head.
“Ooo, Ooo,” she shrieked. I never heard such a sound out of a human being before. High and squeaky, half bird like, half like an oink of a pig. I stood motionless, Steve lay sprawled out on the couch reading his Mad Magazine.
“It’s crawling on my head! Where is it?” She brushed more furiously. “Ow. Ow. Ooo.”
I thought she brushed all the hair right off her head when June’s bright red face looked up at me. With tears running down her cheeks she announced, “I think I got it.” She brushed a couple more final strokes before crawling away from the door. I came in and helped her get up off her knees, while scouring the room with my eyes for the escaping bug.
As an observer, I never saw any kind of bug fall from her head and scurry under the refrigerator and I think she lost half a head of her colored and permed hair that day. The bug episode became my first exposure to the highly excitable, tense and mercurial June. Next to my reserved and often apathetic view of the world, I wondered if we would ever get along with one another. She was so different from my own mother who I felt very little for, and at this age I still struggled with knowing how she fit into the puzzle of my life. Would my stepmother fall into a similar kind of distant and uncaring parental relationship with me and the rest of her stepchildren?
I remember the date of the real or maybe imaginary bug well. July 20, 1969, the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. When we watched it on television. Dad, Steve and I took our usual places in the den and glued our eyes to the screen as he spoke those famous words, “One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.”
“Wow, how do they send the TV picture all the way from the moon?” I asked.
I grew up watching rocket launches on television. In elementary school, the teachers would pack us into the music room; bring in a small black and white television propped up on a wheeled cart. In unison all the kids would countdown ten, nine, eight until we arrived at one and the space capsule lifted off over a ball of smoke and fire. Man now walked on the moon, which meant our world was changing and growing at a mind blowing pace.
With our minds engaged with what was happening over two hundred thousand miles away on the surface of the moon, June appeared in the doorway.
“How about some dessert?” she smiled without a trace of the bug episode in her voice. “It’s moon cake.”
Handing us each a plate, I spotted a heaping scoop of vanilla ice cream between two fat gooey chocolate brownies. Being so excited over the ice cream, I never noticed the brownies amongst the groceries. I ate my moon cake in honor of the first man on the moon and wondered if June ever told my father about the bug.
If she did tell him I can hear the conversation in my head.
“Junie. It’s just a bug. It’s wouldn’t hurt you.”
“But it was crawling on my head!” she’d say.
“Oh. You’re imagining things,” he’d answer.
I am my father’s daughter after all.
“The worst bullies you will ever encounter in your life, are your own thoughts.”
- Bryant McGill
Chapter Fourteen
By early afternoon, the kitchen cupboards were empty and the dining room stacked with boxes. The table and chairs I used as my desk had disappeared. Only the upholstered sofa and side chairs remained. Roger told me right off the bat he wasn’t interested in those. The bareness of the place should have brought relief, but it didn’t.
A good stiff drink probably wouldn’t calm my frazzled nerves either. June still had a bottle of Robert Mondavi chardonnay in the refrigerator waiting for me. When I stopped drinking in 2010 she kept a bottle on hand just in case I ever changed my mind if I came to visit. She never thought she had a drinking problem even though she couldn’t go a day without one. Therefore I didn’t have a drinking problem either. That’s how June saw just about everything in life. If it didn’t affect her, it didn’t affect anyone else she knew either. I thought about the chilled bottle waiting patiently for me and only me every moment of the day.
“Miss Linda, we don’t want all the canned goods in here,” Sarah stuck her head in the pantry and held up a can of Progresso. “But there’s some vodka in here. Five big bottles. We can sell that.”
“You can sell the vodka?” I didn’t believe her. Who would buy open bottles of vodka at a furniture auctio
n?
June loved her vodka almost as much as she loved her cigarettes. Every night before dinner, she eyeballed and poured what she called a half a shot into an old fashioned glass over some ice and then added water. She convinced herself she restricted her alcohol consumption in roughly the same manner she did cigarettes. Only for a drink, she never measured anything and had no tally sheet and tiny yellow pencil to help her keep track. After dinner, the glass was refilled more than once with mostly water according to the drunken old woman. If she’d marked her vodka bottles like she did her cigarettes, June might have to admit she drank more than her share.
The yellow pages became June’s best friend after Richard and I moved away and our outings ceased to exist. She scoured those pages under “L” for liquor stores until she found one to deliver a case of half gallons of the cheapest vodka on the shelves. The delivery charge most likely added up to more than the cost of the rotgut liquor. Even on her limited income, her priorities became fixed and non-negotiable. Cigarettes, then vodka followed by a few groceries and the electric bill.
“You’d be surprised at what some people will buy. We’ll sell this as a lot, all five bottles together,” Sarah said.
“Help yourself,” I said. “Can you sell cigarettes? I’m sure there are some Virginia Slims hidden around here somewhere.”
“Not allowed to sell cigarettes. But if we could, there’d be a buyer.”
“It does smell kind of smoky in here,” Tina piped in.
My plug in air fresheners weren’t doing their job. My throat dry and scratchy, my temples throbbed as usual.
A Bittersweet Goodnight Page 9
