Whistling In the Dark (3 page)

Mother and Hall went out that night to a movie called
Vertigo
that starred Jimmy Stewart. On the ride back out to the farm, Mother told us all about the movie and how Jimmy was afraid of heights and he would get an attack if he went up too high. I remember worrying that maybe Mother had caught vertigo. That’s how dizzy she sounded when she went on and on about Hall buying her popcorn and Jujubes and wasn’t he the nicest guy?

After that, Hall started coming out to the farm for supper almost every night. He’d tell us about his days as a sailor and how many shoes he sold that day, gobs of Mother’s tuna noodle casserole peeking out of his mouth. And he always burped so loud when he was done with dessert that Troo’s old dog, Butchy, growled at him like he was a thunderstorm.

“Hear ye . . . hear ye. I’ve got an announcement to make,” Hall said two months after their first date. Oleo was dripping off his chin.

We all quieted down, except Butchy was still growling.

“I have asked your mother to marry me,” Hall said, grinning at Mother. His teeth were the same color as the oleo.

Nell and I were struck dumber than dirt, but Troo jumped up out of her chair and asked Mother in her best disgusted voice, “You didn’t say yes, did you?”

Mother told Troo to sit back down and Hall said, “We’re getting hitched next week and then we’re all moving into the city.”

Troo and me shouted like Siamese twins, “No!” We could not leave Daddy’s fields. Nell didn’t say anything. She just looked choked up.

Going on in a bossy voice, Hall said, “I’m gonna be your new father and what I say goes. You’re movin’ into the city. I got a dependable job at Shuster’s and I already got us a place to live.” Then he drained his beer bottle and smacked it down on the kitchen table and bent down right into Troo’s face. “Don’t you know children should be seen and not heard? Quit complainin’ before I give ya something to complain about.” Then he straightened up and grinned yel lowly at Mother, like he had just been joking around. But he wasn’t.

And even though us sisters got down on our hands and knees and begged Mother that night, she didn’t call Hall up on the telephone and tell him that we didn’t want to move into the city. When she tucked Troo and me in, she told us, “Someday you’ll understand.” Her eyes started watering up and she swiped at them and said, “Damn hay fever,” and left.

I suspected that a little part of Mother wanted to move to the city, too. Daddy not being there for the harvest, that had to have been as hard on her as it had been on me. And I also suspected Mother was looking forward to living closer to Daddy’s grave and Granny and Uncle Paulie. Well, Daddy and Granny anyways.

So, on Halloween of ’57, Hall and Mother got married at the white courthouse in Waukesha. After the ceremony, Nell whispered to me, “I think Mother might be letting herself in for more trick than treat, don’t you?” The next week we moved to Vliet Street.

 

Out on the farm, me and Troo had mostly hung around with Jerry Amberson, who lived down at the end of our gravel road and peed on my leg once after we got done swimming in his pond in the woods. All the other kids we went to school with lived on farms just like ours that you could just about die of tiredness walking to. So if we wanted to play hide-and-seek or some other game like kick the can, where you had to have more than two kids, we were stuck with peeing Jerry Amberson, like it or not.

But on Vliet Street . . . well, for once in his life, Hall was right. There really was a shitload of kids. Somebody was always sittin’ on their front steps waiting for you to ask them to jump in a pile of leaves or go sledding at Statue Hill or swimming at the pool in the park. That’s because the neighborhood was chock-full of what Granny called “products of Catholic marriages.” (Her eyes bulged out of her head when she said that because she had a condition called a thyroid, which was located in her leg somewhere.)

Besides there being a whole lot more of them, just like Mother said when we played the name game, people really
were
different in the city. Like Fast Susie Fazio, the kid on the block who always seemed to have news before everybody else did. She was the one who told Troo and me about Dottie Kenfield.

Our second summer in the city had just started up. After the streetlights popped on, the three of us were sitting on the O’Haras’ front steps, waiting for the others to get there for our nightly game of red light, green light. Fast Susie was brushing her long, straight black hair that she had never cut since she was a baby and her skin got so tan in the summer she almost looked like an Egyptian in the movie
The Ten Commandments
that Troo and me had seen at the Uptown Theater, which we went to whenever we got a quarter. And because she was Italian—a people that Mother said matured faster than other people—Fast Susie was not only hairier than the rest of us, she had those bosoms. They’d even had to order a special Girl Scout uniform for her, one with more material in the chest.

“I heard that something bad happened to Dottie Kenfield,” I said to her.

“Oh ya did, did ya?” Fast Susie never liked it if you heard a story that she hadn’t told you. “Well, this time ya heard right, O’Malley. Month before last your next-door neighbor just up and disappeared. Just vanished one day.” She put on a spooky voice and made her eyes look like venetian blinds. “Gone. Right into thin air. Poof!”

You had to pay close attention when Fast Susie told you a story because she liked to wave her arms all over the place, like all the Italians did. She even gave Willie O’Hara a black eye one time when she was acting out the Crucifixion.

“Yup, Dottie Kenfield is probably dead, just like Junie Piaskowski,” Fast Susie said, back to brushin’ her hair. “I bet they find her body soon. All dead and green and her eyes rotting out of her head and smellin’ like Doc Sullivan’s breath.”

Last summer, Fast Susie said that Reese Latour had made her touch his weenie and told her that it could be used to make girls beg for mercy, and that when you got to be about thirteen blood would start coming out of you and that was when you could get a baby. See? Sometimes it was hard to know exactly when Fast Susie was telling the truth. Especially since I had every reason to believe that Dottie Kenfield wasn’t dead.

“But what about that crying Troo and me hear comin’ out of Dottie’s room at night?” I asked.

Fast Susie jabbed me in the arm with her elbow and said in that trembly voice of hers, “Just watch your step, O’Malley sisters.” She made a smile that was extra creepy because her eyeteeth were more pointed than they oughta been. “If you’re hearin’ crying coming out of that house, that can only mean one thing. The Kenfield place must be haaaunted.”

That’s exactly what she said. That all the crying next door was Dottie Kenfield’s ghost.

And maybe Fast Susie Fazio was right this time after all, because that crying was the most horrible haunted sound you have ever heard. Poor Dottie!

Sometimes, after the crying stopped, I would go stand at my window and look into Dottie’s bedroom because I was too afraid to do that when the crying was going on. A picture of a beautiful girl with brunette eyes and hair hung on a wall. I knew she was eighteen in this picture because she was in Nell’s class. Dottie had on her mint-colored Senior Dance dress and her hair was swirled up on top of her head like a Carvel cone and there was a ruby going-steady ring around her neck. I remember the day she bought that dress downtown at Gimbel’s. Right below her picture there was a small light that shone down from an aquarium hood into the water. And it had one of those deep-sea divers and little bubbles racing goldfish up to the surface.

Standing in the dark watching like that, I woulda bet anything that the Kenfields had not changed one thing about Dottie’s bedroom even though she disappeared into thin air two months ago. Because maybe there was still the smell of her in that room. Like after Daddy died. In his closet I could breathe in his Aqua Velva. One day I sat in there next to his boots that still had some farm dirt on them and wouldn’t come out. The day after that Mother gave away all his clothes to Goodwill Industries and shook me by the shoulders and yelled, “For godssake, Sally. He’s gone and he’s not coming back. It’s time to let bygones be bygones.”

But I hid one of Daddy’s shirts . . . a blue one. To remember my Sky King. I kept it inside my pillow where Mother couldn’t find it. Because at the end of the day, no matter what she said, I needed to lie my head down on Daddy, listening to Troo sucking on her two middle fingers, squeezing the life out of her baby doll, Annie, and not ever let bygones be bygones.

CHAPTER FOUR

Some nights, Troo and me could also hear crying coming out of Mother’s bedroom, which was so hard to believe. That sound almost seemed like a mirage in the desert. Because during the day you never would hear something like that. During the day Mother was tough like beef jerky and would tell you that crying was for people who felt sorry for themselves. Granny told me that Mother really wasn’t so tough, that she was just doing something called whistling in the dark. (Since I had not once ever heard Mother whistle, I knew right then that this granny was getting the hardening of the arteries the way the other gramma got.)

Troo was sitting on the soft stool in front of the dressing table that had a mirror and two drawers on each side. Another smaller mirror shaped like an ice skating rink sat on top of the table with her bottles of perfumes and lotions. I was holding the gold hairbrush with the swirls on the back that Daddy had given Mother for her birthday one year. We were watching Mother fold her blouses and put them into her round blue Samsonite bag between layers of tissue paper.

Mother snapped the luggage shut and brushed down the hem of her tan pleated skirt and said, “I have given Nell her instructions. She will do all the cooking and mind you during the day until Hall comes home from work at five thirty. You give either of them any guff and . . .” She took the hairbrush out of my hand, smacked it against her palm and then let it drop on the bed. “Hall took the car to Shuster’s this morning, so I’m walking over to the hospital.” She picked up her suitcase and slipped on her shiny black high heels with the bows. “I’ll be back in a week or so.”

“Can we come with you?” Troo said, which surprised me because she didn’t usually act like she’d miss you if you went anywhere.

Mother said, “Don’t be silly.” And then she gave us her powdery cheek to kiss and we could hear her heels smacking against the wooden steps that led down to the front porch and then finally the door slamming shut.

We sat there for a while not saying anything, but I was feeling bad because we weren’t ever supposed to be in Mother’s room without her. Troo said suddenly, “Let’s play dress-up.”

She slid open the jewelry drawer and fingered the green glass beads and a silver medallion on a long chain and Daddy’s old Timex, which I thought Mother’d given away to Goodwill Industries along with everything else. It made me so happy to see the watch that I slipped it on my wrist and held it up to my ear and it was still ticking. I wished I could wind it back so far that I would have a do-over of the day Daddy died. So I could say sorry. Troo lifted out the beads and put them around her neck. Then she pulled the cherry red lipstick out of the fancy golden tube and spread it on her pouty lips and rubbed them together like we’d seen Mother do. Troo was looking at herself in the mirror, turning her head from side to side.

“You look just like her,” I said, staring at her reflection.

Troo smiled and got some of the lipstick on her teeth and said, “I know.”

I pulled out another drawer and saw a picture of Daddy laying on top of Mother’s white chiffon scarf. It was the picture from when he just got back from the Air Force and he had his uniform on and you could tell he was so happy to be home. Next to him, Mother was looking off into the distance like she hadn’t even realized he was there.

“Let’s go,” I said, because I was starting to feel worried about Mother, and maybe if we went to the front window we could see her walking over to the hospital and we could yell something out to her like get well soon!

I let Daddy’s watch slide off my wrist and set it back in the drawer. “You should wipe off that lipstick.”

“No,” Troo said, and plumped out her lips even more.

“Troo.”

“I ain’t takin’ it off.”

“Troo!” We weren’t ever supposed to say
ain’t.
That was something Mother told us the riffraff said.

Troo laughed and pulled on a pair of short white gloves she found in the drawer. So I walked to the living room by myself and stuck my head out the window. I could smell pink peonies mixed in with the chocolate chip cookie smell coming from the Feelin’ Good Cookie Factory. Mother was small up on the corner of North Avenue. I was sure that would be the last time I’d ever see her again because look what happened to Daddy when he was in the same hospital. So I started to yell to her to please come back! But then she turned the corner and was gone. And she didn’t come home in a week or so like she said.

CHAPTER FIVE

We were on our way to meet Mary Lane the next morning at one of our usual summer hangouts. Washington Park was 1,747 steps away from our front door and had everything a person could ever want or need. There was that lagoon that we skated on in the winter and fished in during the summer and where they’d found Junie. There was also a band shell that looked like a giant clam where we could go hear Music Under the Stars and a swimming pool that had a high dive. And best of all, on the far side of the park, there was my absolute favorite. The zoo!

We were almost to the park, right in front of Fitzpatrick’s Drugstore, when Troo bent down to tie her shoe and said out of the blue, “I’m thinkin’ about running away to France,” and didn’t say anything else.

I looked into the drugstore and wished I had a dime for a soda because even though it was still early morning, it was already so hot that my eyeballs were sweating. “France?”