All She Ever Wanted (13 page)

“Can you dance, Kathleen?” I shook my head, and Fiona’s beautiful smile faded. “If I were younger I would teach you all the old dances: the waltz, the foxtrot, the Charleston. …”

“I’m really clumsy, Grandma. Even my gym teacher says so.”

“Nonsense. A willowy lass like you? Why, I’ll bet you would make a wonderful dancer with a few lessons.”

“Did you used to dance when you were young, Grandma?”

“Aye, you should have seen me, Kathleen. I was the belle of New York. And Arthur had
wings
on his feet. He could glide across the dance floor so smoothly that his feet barely touched the floor. I could have danced with him all night. And I did, too.”

“Who’s Arthur?”

Fiona looked indignant. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything about your ancestors? Shame on her! And what’s wrong with Leonard that he doesn’t tell you these things?” I shrugged, not knowing where to begin when it came to describing what was wrong with my loony uncle.

“Anyway, Arthur is your grandfather,” Fiona continued. “We lived in Manhattan at the time, and we used to take a boat out to where the ships would anchor—miles offshore—so you could get something to drink. It was Prohibition, you see. And there would be music and food on board and… well, never mind. But we would dance beneath the stars until the band played the very last note.”

I could see it all in my mind, and when she put more music on the record player, I closed my eyes and pretended that I was on that boat, dancing with Arthur with the wings on his feet.

Later, Grandma brought out an album filled with sepia-toned photographs and showed me pictures of her and Arthur. He looked old, even back when Grandma looked young. He always wore a suit and tie, and Grandma wore fancy jewelry and furs. I could see expensive cars and elegant furnishings in the background.

I saw photos of my mom and uncle when they were fat-cheeked babies, being pushed in a “pram,” as Grandma called it, in Central Park. Near the end of the album, I saw my mom and Uncle Leonard as older children, living here in Deer Falls. My uncle looked just as morose when he was a child as he did as an adult, but Mommy looked young and pretty—and happy. I never knew she had such a nice smile. I saw pictures of her sitting beside the lake in a bathing suit, laughing with her friends, and I wondered how she had changed into the woman I lived with.

The life that Grandma Fiona showed me in that album was so different from my family’s life now that it seemed made up. I wondered where that beautiful world had gone—because it had certainly vanished, as surely as our present world would vanish if the Russians dropped their bombs.

Grandma Fiona sipped sherry while we talked, and after a while she got weepy. “You have Arthur’s eyes,” she told me as she took my chin in her hand and gazed into them. “Such deep, deep brown eyes. Looking into them was like looking down a well.”

“Did Arthur die?” I asked her.

She nodded sadly. “Aye, a long time ago, luv.”

Connie and Uncle Leonard finally turned off the radio and came inside when the night air got too cold. He saw Grandma reminiscing and frowned. “That’s enough of the past, Mother. You can’t get it back.”

“I can bring it back in my memories.” She smiled faintly, and for a fleeting second I saw the beautiful young woman my grandmother had once been beneath the aging skin and faded hair.

“It’s almost midnight,” Leonard said, shutting off the phonograph. “We should go to bed.”

I slept in Grandma Fiona’s bed with her that night. The sheets were soft with age, just like her skin; they both smelled of lavender. But before we turned off the light for the night, she let me try on some of her costume jewelry—necklaces and bracelets and rings that were too big for my fingers.

“Aye, you’re a lovely girl,” she said. And as I sat at her dressing table and gazed at myself in her wavy, age-cracked mirror, I almost believed it.

I never wanted to go home. Grandma Fiona looked right into my eyes when she talked to me instead of looking through half-closed eyes, the way Mommy always did. Grandma listened to me—really listened—as if what I had to say was the most fascinating thing she’d ever heard. And the way that she caressed me—touching my face, stroking my hair, rubbing my back, holding my hand—made me feel more cherished than I had ever felt in my life.

But after a six-day standoff, the Russians backed down. President Kennedy had played the highest-stakes poker game of his life and won. I was probably one of the very few people in the world who hated to see the Cuban missile crisis come to an end. It meant that I had to leave my grandmother and the charming village of Deer Falls and go home to my miserable, unhappy family in Riverside.

“Come and visit me again, luv,” Grandma Fiona begged as she hugged me good-bye. She stood on her back porch with tears in her eyes, waving to us with a lace handkerchief.

“I will,” I promised. “I will come again!” I meant it, too.

But that was the last time I ever saw her.

Chapter
11

I
endured yet another loss that autumn of 1962; the Cuban missile crisis dealt the final blow to my friendship with May Elizabeth. The crisis intensified the hatred and fear that people felt toward Communists, so even though a nuclear war had been averted, May acted as if it had been my fault that she’d spent a long weekend in her fallout shelter.

There were plenty of other reasons, too. We were in junior high now, and she had much more in common with Debbie Harris, who teased her hair and flirted with boys and listened to Peter, Paul and Mary records— than she did with me. May and I attended most of the same classes and our lockers stood right next to each other, but she acted as if I didn’t exist. I should have known that our friendship couldn’t survive. Hadn’t I heard anything Uncle Leonard had tried to preach to me all these years about the proletariat and the bourgeoisie? Sometimes I wished that the world had come to an end while I was eating roast beef in Deer Falls with my grandmother.

Our regional school district bussed kids into town for junior high and high school from all the neighboring villages. We now had 101 kids in our grade instead of forty-seven. May Elizabeth found a whole new set of friends to hang out with, cool girls who wore training bras and garter belts and nylons. Her Sunday shoes had tiny little heels on them now. I went back to being “Cootie Kathy” because I didn’t dress in the right clothes or wear my hair in a flip. It was hard to get my hair to do much of anything since we were always running out of shampoo and I had to wash my hair with a bar of soap in the rust-stained bathroom sink.

My daddy made parole that winter, and he stayed home for the longest period of time that I could ever recall. He supposedly had a job in Bensenville and rode there with Uncle Leonard every day. I didn’t ask him where he worked. I didn’t want to know. I was still mad at him for being an exconvict, and I refused to cuddle up with him or let him try to cheer me up. Besides, he had a full-time job trying to cheer up Annie. Whatever Daddy’s day job was, I don’t think he liked it very much because he came home tired and sad every night. It seemed like we all walked around for the next few years acting gloomy and woebegone. Mommy, Uncle Leonard, and Annie had always been morose, but now Daddy and I joined their pity party.

The gloom deepened a year later when President Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963. I remember walking home from eighth grade and finding my mother sitting in front of the TV set, crying. “Somebody just shot President Kennedy,” she said.

I couldn’t believe it. “Why?” I asked.

That question continued to occupy the nation for years. We were all sad, even Uncle Leonard, who had disliked President Kennedy long before the Bay of Pigs invasion. “Still, it’s a shocking thing,” he murmured.

“Shocking.”

We watched TV for days it seemed, feeling numb and listening to the news commentators talk on and on about the Texas Book Depository and the grassy knoll and Lee Harvey Oswald. We saw rerun after rerun of Jackie Kennedy in her pillbox hat and blood-splattered pink suit, looking grief-stricken and hollow. When Lee Harvey Oswald’s Communist ties were discovered, Uncle Leonard feared a backlash and worried that he would have to leave town again.

I went to church one Sunday morning and came home to find Daddy wild-eyed and raving, pointing to the TV set and shouting, “Somebody just shot Lee Harvey Oswald! I sat right here and saw it live on TV! They shot him right in front of me!”

We watched the president’s funeral procession, deeply moved by the riderless black horse with the empty boots turned around in the stirrups. The poise and courage of his young widow, Jacqueline, inspired us; the tragedy and poignancy of little John-John’s salute touched us. I mourned, not only for John F. Kennedy, but for all that he had represented. He had been a man of power, handsome and strong, blessed with a beautiful wife, adorable children, wealth, and respect. My family was nothing at all like his, and I would never have any of the things he had. But for a little while, I had almost felt as if I did. The Kennedys were the all-American ideal, our nation’s shining First Family, and in them we had tasted perfection. Now that ideal had been violently destroyed, the perfect life I so longed for cruelly snatched away by an assassin’s bullet. It had been only a dream.

For most of the young people in Riverside, the gloom finally lifted a few months later when the Beatles landed in America in February of 1964. By then, our TV was so decrepit that Ed Sullivan looked as though he was stranded in a raging blizzard, buffeted by gale-force winds that blew him up to the top of the screen, then tossed him to the bottom again. But when I watched his show one Sunday night and saw the Beatles singing “IWant to Hold Your Hand,” I fell in love with Ringo Starr. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

The next day, all the boys came to school with their hair combed down over their foreheads. The girls starting buying Beatles records and listening to their music on transistor radios and reading all about John, Paul, George, and Ringo in fan magazines. I didn’t have a record player or a radio, let alone money for fan magazines. Any knowledge I had of the Fab Four had to come secondhand through the scraps of information I overheard in the school hallways. I lay on my mattress at night, fantasizing about how I would miraculously meet Ringo Starr and be whisked away to live happily ever after in his mansion in England. But I would be magnanimous with my newfound wealth; I would buy my family a new TV set as a parting gift.

I started high school in 1964 and entered an entirely different world from junior high. Nevertheless, it was still a world in which I was shunned and excluded. During our high school years May Elizabeth’s life and mine took two entirely different courses, as if we lived in parallel universes on
The Twilight Zone
. May and her friends were cheerleaders and had boyfriends and went steady. She was voted homecoming queen and rode to the football field in a convertible, holding a bouquet of roses and waving her gloved hand like the Queen of England. I didn’t actually see this performance since I never went to football games, but her picture appeared in the school newspaper.

May’s brother, Ron, was the star quarterback, the captain of the basketball team, the prom king. He drove a red V–8 Mustang, and pretty girls swarmed all around him. My brothers drove the town constable to drink, and the only things that swarmed around Poke and JT were allegations. If anything was missing, demolished, dented, looted, or burned, the blame fell on the Gallagher boys. They had turned into regular hoodlums: shooting out streetlights with slingshots, soaping car windows, exploding firecrackers in mailboxes, stealing candy and comic books and squirt guns from the Valley Food Market and Brinkley’s Drugstore.

“The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree,” I heard people saying. “The father is no good and neither are the sons.” And they were right. I was old enough and wise enough to understand what was going on when Poke and JT would go “shopping” in Bensenville with Daddy. He had trained them well. The poor store clerks were so busy keeping an eye on the two little street toughs that no one noticed Donald Gallagher stuffing all kinds of things up his sleeves and inside his coat.

“You need anything from the store, Kathleen?” he would ask as he and the boys piled into the rusted Ford.

“No, thanks.” My hair always felt dirtier when I washed it in stolen shampoo.

While the other kids went to football games and basketball games, I worked in the Riverside Diner washing dishes. With my mousy brown hair and skinny body and flat chest, I wasn’t cute enough or perky enough at age sixteen to be a waitress, so they kept me hidden in the back. The diner was the town hangout, and all the kids congregated there after the games for hamburgers and French fries and milk shakes. Sometimes I would hear May Elizabeth’s tinkling laughter above the roar of the dishwasher, and I’d catch a glimpse of her through the pass-through window when I brought the cook a stack of clean plates.

She was beautiful now, blonde and fair-skinned. Her pudginess had shifted around on her growing body and settled into voluptuous curves. She was always the center of attention, always animated and dramatic. I wished her well. I envied her. I knew I could never be like her.

I hated myself so much that I finally stopped looking in the mirror. I hated my scrawny, underdeveloped body and my stringy hair and my baggy, thrift-store clothes. I hated the way my clothes smelled and the way my house smelled and the way I smelled after working a shift in the diner’s greasy kitchen. I had no girlfriends, let alone boyfriends. I went to school, sat in class without ever saying a word, ate lunch alone in the cafeteria, and walked home alone. No one noticed that I never attended a school dance or a football game or hung around the diner afterward. No one said, “Hey, where’s Kathleen Gallagher? We should see if she wants to come along.” No one noticed that I stopped attending Sunday school and didn’t join the confirmation class and never went to church anymore. No one cared.

I hated my life.

I fought with my mother constantly. For as long as I could recall, she had taken my brothers’side in every argument and had looked the other way while they wrecked everything I owned. But the last straw came when the boys stole my new padded training bra and let Charlie Grout see it for a dollar. Thanks to Poke and JT, everyone in Riverside High School knew that Cootie Kathy wore falsies.