The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion (11 page)

“Yes, ma’am,” he said and ran in the back and got Poppa.

Gertrude May, who happened to be looking out the window of the second floor, saw it next. “Oh, geez,” she said and started running downstairs to get her twin sister, Tula June, and Momma.

By the time Momma looked out the kitchen window, the woman was out of the car, and Poppa was already talking to her. Momma had never been nervous before, but when she saw how official the woman looked, standing there in her crisp uniform, holding her clipboard under her arm, she suddenly panicked. “Oh, dear Blessed Mother of God,” she said. “Whose turn was it to clean last?”

“Fritzi’s,” said the youngest girl, Sophie Marie, and Fritzi could have killed her.

“Oh, no!” Now Momma was really scared. Fritzi was terrible at cleaning. Momma grabbed her by the shoulders. “Fritzi, look at me. Did you remember the soap?”

“Sure, I did.”

“Did you scrub the sink?”

“Yes, and it wasn’t all that dirty anyway.”

Momma looked out at Poppa, still standing there doing a lot of nodding. What was he saying? Then, suddenly, the nurse briskly turned on her heel and marched toward the women’s bathroom with her clipboard held high, like she was headed for battle.

In the windows of the house, five pairs of eyes were fixed on the door, waiting for the nurse to reappear, but after several minutes, she still had not come out. Momma twisted her apron. “Oh, I wonder what’s taking her so long?”

Tula June said, “Maybe she had to go to the bathroom or something.”

Another minute went by and then they got a quick glimpse of her leaving the women’s bathroom and entering the men’s room. Momma said, “Sophie Marie, go and get my rosary. I’m a nervous wreck.”

A short while later, Momma was still staring at the station and working her beads when the nurse came out of the men’s room and spoke to Poppa. Again, there was lots of nodding, and he kept looking over and pointing at the house. “Oh, geez … what’s he doing … for gosh sake,” said Momma.

The nurse turned and walked over to the house, climbed up the steps, and knocked on the door. Sophie said, “She’s at the door, Momma. Should we hide?”

“No, no—just stay where you are, girls,” she said, as she took her apron off and smoothed her hair. She took a deep breath and opened the door.

“Are you Mrs. Jurdabralinski?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Hello, I’m Nurse Dorothy Frakes from Phillips Petroleum. Congratulations on having scored a perfect 100 and having the cleanest restrooms I have ever had the pleasure to inspect. Why, you could eat off the floor in there, Mrs. Jurdabralinski, and so, at this time, I would like to personally present your official Certified Restroom emblem.”

Momma was so overwhelmed, she burst into tears while Fritzi nattered in the background. “One hundred. I told you so. Ha-ha-ha,” Fritzi said. “I don’t know why people don’t believe me.”

After that day, Registered Nurse Dorothy Frakes became just plain Dottie, and the whole family loved it when she stopped by. She never bothered to inspect the bathrooms again. She just liked to go to the house and sit down, put her feet up, smoke a cigarette, relax a bit, chat with Momma and find out how all the girls and Wink were doing, and then head on out on her appointed rounds. “I’ll tell you, Linka,” she said one day. “I know being a Phillips Highway Hostess may seem glamorous to a lot of people, but it can get mighty monotonous at times. If you’ve seen one bathroom, you’ve seen them all. And if it weren’t for nice people like you, I’d turn in my uniform tomorrow.”

S
ATURDAY
, J
UNE
11, 2005

S
OOKIE DECIDED TO CLOSE ALL THE SHADES AND LOCK ALL THE DOORS
, and other than feeding Peek-a-Boo, she stayed upstairs. Her nerves were so on edge, every time the phone rang, her heart would start to pound, especially when she saw it was Lenore’s number, so she finally took the phone off the hook.

At around twelve-thirty, she went downstairs. Lenore had her DAR meeting from twelve to one, so she was safe on that account. She was headed back upstairs when suddenly the doorbell started ringing. She heard someone calling out her name, and it wasn’t Lenore. It was Marvaleen. Oh, Lord … just what she didn’t need right now—a visitor.

She went over and unlocked the door and said, “Hi, Marvaleen.”

“Oh, there you are. I was just about to leave. I was on my way to yoga, and I thought I might take a chance on finding you at home.” Then Marvaleen looked at her intently and asked, “Sookie, do you get colonics?”

“What?”

“Colonics.”

“No … I don’t know what it is.”

“They’re like a very high-powered enema.”

Sookie made a face. “Oh, Lord …”

“Oh, no, Sookie!” she said. “I’ve already had six high colonics, and I’ve never felt better in my life. Edna Yorba Zorbra says that before you can ever move forward with your emotional healing, having a clean colon is absolutely necessary. It’s all part of learning to release the old negativity you’ve been holding on to.”

“I see.”

“Anyhow, I go to this terrific gal in Mobile.” She opened her purse. “Let me give you her card. I’m telling everybody I know about her. And when you do call, be sure and tell her that I recommended you. She’s giving all my friends a ten percent discount and a fifty percent discount on a series of ten. And you really need ten. Hey, maybe we can go together sometime … and then have lunch afterward. Call me.”

“Oh, okay, Marvaleen. I sure will.” She took the card and waved good-bye to her friend, but she couldn’t imagine anything more she would rather not do than have a high-powered enema and then lunch with Marvaleen afterward. She would just stick with her two tablespoons of sugar-free orange-flavored Metamucil at night.

Marvaleen had always been somewhat of a spiritual seeker and was still seeking. Ten years ago, she had talked Sookie into going to a women’s Bible study group, and Sookie had gone through a very short born-again period. She had been so happy, but Lenore had been horrified. “My stars, Sookie … you can believe in God, but you don’t have to go around town telling everyone! You’re embarrassing the family. The next thing I know, you will be handling snakes and speaking in tongues!” Eventually, Sookie told Marvaleen and the group she couldn’t come anymore. She still went to church and still believed in something, she guessed, but she wasn’t sure what.

But now after what had just happened, she wasn’t sure of anything. She had always just assumed that a person’s life was planned out somewhere, and that someone was in charge and paying attention. But the more she thought about it, the more Sookie came to realize just how random the events in her life had been. And in her particular case, alarmingly precarious!

As a baby, she had been just like some cat or dog at the pound put up for adoption, and the people in charge of her had quite obviously given her to a crazy person. Don’t they check people out first, before
they just hand over a baby? If they had known about Lenore’s brother and sister, surely they would have found someone else. Sookie had a good mind to call those people in Texas and tell them they should have been more careful.

It was particularly upsetting when she realized that throughout her entire life, her every move had been controlled by Lenore saying, “Oh Sookie, a Simmons would never do this” or “a Simmons would never do that.” She had no idea what a Jurdabralinski would or would not do.

She knew everybody had to have a mother, they even gave poor little motherless monkeys a ticking clock wrapped in a towel as a substitute. But now, thinking back on her life with Lenore, she wondered if she wouldn’t have been better off with just the clock.

P
ULASKI
, W
ISCONSIN

A
UGUST
1938

I
T
’
S FUNNY HOW ONE EVENT CAN CHANGE THE ENTIRE COURSE OF A
family’s future. For the Jurdabralinski family of Pulaski, Wisconsin, that event took take place on August 9, 1938.

In the 1930s, hero worshipping and movie star crushes were in full bloom. Pictures of glamorous movie stars were plastered on the bedroom walls of most teenage girls, but a new craze hit when a tall, lanky flier named Charles Lindbergh had flown across the Atlantic Ocean. His picture had appeared everywhere. He was in the movies and on billboards, and every boy wanted to grow up and fly a plane like Lindy. All of America had fallen in love with the handsome young Charles Lindbergh, and a year later, they fell in love all over again with his female counterpart, Amelia Earhart, so bold and dashing with her auburn tousled hair and dressed in men’s trousers. Girls sent off for her pictures and added them to their photos of their favorite movie stars.

Hoping to cash in on what Lindbergh and Earhart had started and take advantage of the new flying craze that was sweeping the country, Phillips Petroleum came up with an advertising promotion
that was sure to be noticed. In a bold move, they hired skywriters to fly over their gas stations and write “Phillips 66” in the air. Most of the skywriters were old World War I pilots or barnstormers, the name given to the men who flew around the country performing aerial stunts, picking up a little extra cash on the weekends. But the pilot assigned to fly over Wink’s Phillips 66 filling station in Pulaski, Wisconsin, picked up more than a little extra cash.

Billy Bevins’s uncle had been a flier in World War I. He started his own flying school when he came home and taught Billy to fly when he was fifteen. Billy had been flying ever since. It was a good way to make a living, and in Billy’s case, a good way to meet girls. He had done it all, from barnstorming to crop dusting, and had even flown a Davis Waco with the Baby Ruth Flying Circus. It was an advertising blitz unlike anything the country had ever seen. Billy would fly over county and state fairs, racetracks, and crowded beaches in his red and white plane, dropping hundreds of tiny rice paper parachutes—each one bearing a small Baby Ruth candy bar—on the crowds below.

It was a great job; however, one day, after too many drinks, Billy took it upon himself to fly in between the buildings in downtown Pittsburgh and it caused a riot in the streets. Several people almost fell out of office windows trying to grab the candy bars as they floated by. Traffic was snarled for the next two hours as people left their cars sitting in the streets to look for Baby Ruths. The next day, Billy was fired. Now he was back to barnstorming around the county and skywriting on the side.

T
HE PEOPLE IN
P
ULASKI
had been waiting for weeks for the skywriter to fly in. In preparation, Poppa and some of his farmer friends had brought in tractors and cleared out the large field in the back of the house, and Wink and all his friends got busy and cleared out all the rocks and made a long, smooth runway where the plane could land. When word got out that he was coming one Saturday morning, the entire town went out into their yards or stood waiting in the empty lot behind the filling station. Pretty soon, they heard the sound of a faraway
motor. Fritzi was the first to see the plane and shouted for everyone to look up. Soon, a large white “P” was being formed in the sky. The entire crowd stood looking up in awe as the word “Phillips” was spelled out, then the number “66.” As the icing on the cake, the pilot flew the plane straight down toward the ground and then back up and formed an arrow that pointed right down at the station. He then made a large circle in the sky, came back around, and landed the plane to wild applause from the waiting crowd.

But the pilot who opened the door and jumped down from the plane was not like anything they expected and a far cry from Charles Lindbergh. Billy was a short and stocky young man with a wide grin who clearly loved his work. “Hiya, pals!” he said as he made his way over to the filling station with the crowd following behind him. Fritzi was blown away. She had never seen anyone so confident, so self-assured, and she loved the way he had said “Hiya, pals!” with such flair. It was as if he had stepped right out of a movie.

Billy walked over to the station and posed for pictures and gave radio and newspaper interviews for about an hour. Later, he waved good-bye to the crowd with a “So long, pals,” and went inside the house next door and was treated to lunch with the Jurdabralinski family.