Rohn Federbush - Sally Bianco 02 - The Appropriate Way (6 page)

Dick seemed okay; not needing the female attention, trying to act grown up or bored with their non-stop questions. “Some of the guys wake me up at night crying.”

A rush of hated at Mother’s shortcut for getting into heaven by handing over her children to God overwhelmed Sally. At least, Madelyn escaped her mother’s plan for a life spent in a convent praying for their salvation. “Remember when you made us get in the basement, the summer when the sky turned green?”

“I do,” Loretta said.

Madelyn contributed, too. “You dragged Sally out of the bath tub.”

Sally’s father came back in to claim the last piece of pie. “I pulled them up out of the basement into the garage,” he told the husbands. “Mother made them quake in their boots. I showed them the storm sweeping right by the open garage door.”

“You made us promise to be nuns and priests.” Sally grumbled at the direction of Mother’s cold, blue eyes.

“Never happened.” Her blonde mother gathered up the plastic silverware and paper plates.

Sally folded her paper napkin into an origami swan. Trying to remember the exact story about Mark Twain, she listened to Mother’s voice as she chatted with blonde Madelyn about a modeling job for a Junior League benefit. The loving warmth in Mother’s tone dissolved when her attention was drawn back to the rest of the family -- except for Dick, who was also blond. That was when, Sally witnessed real joy. She could almost hear Mother’s increased heart rate. Sally wondered if she would ever love a son too much.

In the story about Mark Twain, Mrs. Clemens stood at the bottom of the main staircase listening to her husband’s string of riverboat curses, after his single-edged razor took a nick out of his ornery hide. Mrs. Clemens repeated every one of her husband’s swear words. He leaned over the banister and critiqued her performance. “You’ve got the words right but the tune’s all wrong.”

Mother said all the correct, charitable things to the brunettes in the family; to Sally, Loretta and Daddy, but the song was out of key. The dulcet tones of love shied away from her tongue when speaking to them. Would she recognize love, if ever she was loved? How did it feel to be truly loved by a mother?” Sally tried to draw Dick’s attention into the conversation but he was off chasing his little blonde niece, lost in Mother’s dream of sainthood.

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May 1958

For the last day of high school, Sally wore black silk bell-bottoms with a wide cummerbund waist. Her yellow blouse with buttoned sleeves above the elbow caused the sleeve to puff up at the top of her shoulders. Her hair, for once, behaved into a pageboy curl, resting symmetrically near her neck. In front of the mirror, she thought she looked as perfect as possible. Smiling at herself, she felt oddly confident. But the day turned harsh. Jill asked what she was all dressed up for, instead of returning a good-bye hug. Two of her classmates, Alan and Greg, acted as if she were a stranger instead of a member of their small study-hall group. As she left school for the last time by the side exit, Art Woods and his buddy, Tony Montgomery, stood outside on the steps. They were home from college for Jill’s graduation. Sally stopped short, her hand on the door.

“There she is,” Art said to Tony. “Watch this.” Art held the door open, smiling into her eyes. “How’s Sally?”

“Fine,” she managed to whisper. Her heart seemed stuck on one of her ribs, swelling to a warning beat.

Six-feet-two inches of Art brushed against her as she stood transfixed by his stare. Her face was red with embarrassment, but Art’s eyes stayed locked on hers as he passed. Then his gaze burned a path down her upturned throat, over her rising chest, into her stomach, heating the blood all the way to her knees. At the open door, a breeze from the school’s ancient oak tree blew away the hall’s stale odors. Breathing in the shadow’s coolness, Sally restored herself to some semblance of order.

In the corridor behind her, Tony expressed his awe to Art. “I thought she was going to faint.”

Before the door closed, she also heard Art’s boastful reply. “I told you!”

Sally walked dejectedly away. She would miss school, not the kids and their idiotic games. Instead, the smell of new books and the opening of new ways of thinking would be missed. She yearned for those continuing pathways, new avenues for her brain to embrace. The prejudices taught at home, by Daddy, who hadn’t graduate from eighth grade but provided an answer for everything, and Mother, who lived within narrow religious confines, were proven wrong. They were not mean-spirited, just ignorant of a wider world’s perspective.

She counted the schools she attended as she numbered her steps down
Dean Street. First grade in Huntley, second grade in Algonquin, third grade in Crystal Lake, fourth grade in Wayne, fifth, sixth and seventh in Plato Center on the Rossmoor farm, and eighth grade was spent at St. Patrick’s. The family moved nearly every year until Daddy stopped managing farms for other people to start house painting. His hot temper wasn’t fit for steady employment. If he left a customer as a house painter, the family could at least stay put in the same community. As a consequence, Sally endured a friendless existence. She was most comfortable talking to strangers. The entire world was filled with interesting people.

Her middle name was
Alice, and as Lewis Carroll said of his brave Alice in the journey through the Looking Glass, she found in her world, “Everything happened so oddly she didn’t feel a bit surprised.” She certainly couldn’t control much. The family’s extras went to support her brother in the seminary. No one encouraged her to apply to college.

As she was growing up, her older sisters and Dick, four years younger than Sally, were spirited away to school or worse. In Algonquin when her mother fell down a haymow in a suspicious accident, they were at school, her father in town. The farm’s crop failed to turn a profit. Their unpaid wages were deemed a further investment in their share of the land. Her father contacted a lawyer, which only added fuel to the dispute. The family was asked to vacate the premise in the middle of the school year, so her mother’s convenient accident solved their lodging problem. An aunt opened her home for Mother while her broken pelvis healed. Madelyn and Dick accompanied her. Loretta and Sally were shipped off to grandmothers; first Daddy’s and then Grandma
Kerner gave them a home.

Nearing the end of
Dean Street, Sally thought she could taste an apple pie. The factories behind the house smelled of rust and oil. Maybe there would be no pie tonight. No siblings either. One sister lived five blocks east; the eldest across Main Street, six blocks away. Dick was still tucked away in the Seminary.

Art Woods was playing games with her to entertain his buddy. What was it with guys? Jill probably presented her fantastic stories for the same reason. Sally stopped before opening the front door. They were more immature than she was.

Sure she dived into books at the first hint of trouble, but at least she knew who she was. They were all pretending, while she was content to what, read scripts? Almost the same thing! Understanding their need for escape helped Sally draw her next, more mature, breath as she called hello to Mother.

Nevertheless, Sally longed to return to a simpler time on the farm when copulation was only fit for farm animals.

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September 1958

On the first Monday in September after Art and Tony returned to college for their second year, Jill called asking Sally to spend the weekend with her down in Lincoln, Illinois, where the boys attended Lincoln College. “Art Woods asked Tony if you could come down with me. Are you dating Art?”

“I know him from school.” Sally couldn’t understand why she was defending herself.

“So you have been dating.”

“No. We just ran into each other.” Sally didn’t want to share the details of the last time she’d seen Art Woods in June.

Sixty miles west of Chicago the mighty Fox River cuts a north-south meandering path through the farming plains of Illinois. In St. Charles, ‘streets’ were laid out parallel to the river on the west side balancing the ‘avenues’ which terrace the riverbed’s rising slope to the east. As a teenager, she hoped to escape the valley.

The first week out of school, she accepted a job at
DuKane, a privately owned electronics firm. Each day she drove her father’s Buick east to her secretarial job. Each night she returned west. She often thought if the sun would stop blinding her, she might find a way out of the river valley. Typing dull business letters left her hungry for more exciting worlds -- and words.

Watching Sally grumble through their scant bookshelves one Friday night, Mother reminded her the public library was only eighteen blocks away on the other side of town. Daddy needed the car in the morning but she could walk the short distance.

Bright and early Saturday morning Sally headed for the library. The four blocks of Dean Street ended at the high-school hill, which was the highest point on the west side of town. Descending east toward the Fox River, she passed St. Patrick’s school, the priest house and the church where they attended seven o’clock Mass each Sunday. Regulars, her mother was pious, Daddy off-handed. Sally’s beliefs claimed the one constant and sanctioned toe-hold on life.

Past the gas station and hardware store, she slowed her pace, gawking into the windows of
Carson’s, the most expensive women’s clothing store in town. Across the street the shoe store beckoned. Daddy said she owned enough shoes to put soles on a caterpillar. The Hotel Baker’s Nelson’s jewelry-shop window held a few trinkets of interest, but the sound of the wide Fox River spilling over the north dam drew her down the hill to the bridge.

She would check out the south dam on her return trip. Maybe all farmers’ daughters love to watch water flowing toward promised destinations. The past made sense standing next to the talking stream. But she was a house painter’s daughter now, making her weekend more pleasurable with a gallery of books. The steepest hill, thankfully on the way to the library, passed between twin peaks of the modest Methodist and the fancy Presbyterian churches. Planning to carry as many books as possible back from the library, she calculated each slight incline. She scheduled her trek early enough to arrive cool and un-rumpled as the main doors opened.

The domed, modest brick structure boasted Ionic columns outside and mahogany paneling inside. If souls needed buildings, Sally’s spirit chose a library over a church, anytime. She breathed better among books. The promise of friends remaining constant on the shelves, their words of wisdom unchanged, their homes secure in idyllic sites, compelled her to appreciate each book’s binding, each category’s rightness, each hushed word appropriate to the hallowed air. The smells of leather, glue, and mildew rose as a heady incense in the diffuse light from the rim of high windows in the oval room.

The librarian recognized her as a frequent patron; but never presumed on her privacy by asking about her family. Besides, Sally underwent the creation of a new personality each time she entered, transformed by the content of the latest, borrowed books written by Kafka, Maugham, Stevenson, and Emily Dickinson. It was a miracle her feet still reached the pavement because her mind rose another inch above reality. She brought a pillowcase to lug new books home. After two hours careful selection, Sally picked eight red books by
Anatole France, a slim blue volume by Voltaire, a yellow one by Christopher Fry, Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
and
Othello
, and three volumes of the
History of the Jews
. Trying to ignore the frowning librarian, Sally filled her cloth bag with the treasures.

The summer heat of late June made the burden heavier than expected. Tempted to drag the bag, Sally rested at the bridge before hitching the load up onto the other shoulder.

“Santa Claus.” Art Woods taunted as he slowly drove up in his father’s MG. “Need a lift?”

Sally stopped to put down her load. “Is there room in that little thing for these and me?”

He double-parked and came over, lifted the bag of books into the trunk. “Way too many. I thought you were too smart for summer school?”

“Don’t you read?” She asked, trying not to sound snobbish as she stretched out her grateful legs in the little car.

“Not in summer. College will come fast enough.”

Sally wished she’d brought more Kleenex as she dabbed at her forehead and nose.

In the car, Art chatted about not getting accepted at Princeton the year before, and his father’s disappointment. Lincoln College would do for a second year, if he could maintain a passing grade. “Dad says one more semester of bad grades and I’m out.”

Sally couldn’t seriously consider going away to college. Mother insisted she take shorthand and typing the last two years of high school. Her little brother needed the family’s extra funds for the Seminary. “If I can afford it, I guess I’ll take evening courses at Elgin Community this fall.”

“We should trade parents. My dad would love to have a kid with your brains.”

“You’ve read Robinson Crusoe, right?”

“Everybody had to.”

“No they didn’t.” Sally pulled the visor down and checked her hair in the mirror. “You own a brain.”