The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion (22 page)

“That’s not what I meant, Mother, and you know it.”

But Lenore wasn’t listening. “I don’t think I like this room. Sookie, go down the hall and ask them if they have something with a better view.”

P
ULASKI
, W
ISCONSIN

W
ORKING AT A FILLING STATION COULD BE REALLY DANGEROUS
. G
AS
was highly flammable. Hubcaps could pop off and hit you in the face. You could burn yourself on overheated engines. Tires could blow up if you put too much air in them. And when slamming down hoods, if you weren’t careful, fingers could be broken.

Fritzi had told the girls a hundred times that they needed to keep their minds on what they were doing. So far, there had been only one serious mishap at the station. And, of course, a man was involved.

T
ULA WAS ALL ATWITTER
, because Arty Kowalinowski, the handsome six-foot star football player from Pulaski High, was home on a four-day furlough from the army. And thrill of thrills, he had asked her out to the movies that Friday night. He had not known it, but Tula had spent most of her junior and senior years writing “Mrs. Arty Kowalinowski” all over her notebooks and dreaming about him at night. But this was the first time he had asked her out, and so she was over the moon. Tula had not even gone on the date yet, but she was already hearing wedding bells and planning what she would wear. Something with a lot of white netting, she thought.

That Thursday night, she spent hours washing her hair over and over again—trying her best to get the gasoline smell out—scraping the grease out from under her fingernails, and picking out her outfit. The next morning, she didn’t want to chip one of her newly painted bright red fingernails, so she showed up at work wearing big, thick workman gloves.

She was in such a daze all day that it was hard for Fritzi to get her to do much of anything. And Tula was not happy when late that afternoon, a huge black 1936 Chevy with transmission problems came in for service. Tula wanted to wait and do it the next day, but Fritzi wouldn’t let her. Tula was their main mechanic, so she rolled under the car on the wooden dolly, grumbling about it, but she still wouldn’t take her gloves off.

Tula was an excellent mechanic, but that day, she must have been thinking about her date with Arty Kowalinowski, because when she was underneath the car working, she somehow unscrewed the wrong valve, and suddenly an entire pint of thick five-year-old filthy oil gushed out and landed all over her face.

Tula screamed so loudly that Momma heard her all the way over at the house. Gertrude got to her first and grabbed her by the legs and pulled her out sputtering and spitting out black oil.

Her screams were so loud that the fire truck and the police showed up. Five minutes later, Tula was still hysterical and dripping oil as they led her over to the house to try to clean her up.

It was already five o’clock, and she had a date in two hours. She knew Arty was leaving the next day, and she might not ever get another date with him again.

But the oil was everywhere: in her hair, her eyelashes, up her nose, and in her ears. After being scrubbed for at least an hour, her face was still stained a strange gray color. She and Momma had shampooed her hair three times with Oxydol soap, but even so, she still reeked of old, rancid oil. Tula looked in the mirror and realized it was no use. She couldn’t possibly go. “I look like a dead rat,” she said.

T
HIRTY MINUTES LATER
, A
RTY
Kowalinowski was standing in front of the Pulaski theater waiting for his date, when Fritzi and Gertrude
showed up instead. Tula had threatened to kill both of them if they told him what had happened, so all they said was, “Tula’s not coming.”

He was disappointed, but they all went inside anyway and had popcorn and saw the movie
Kitty Foyle
with Ginger Rogers and a cartoon.

While they were sitting in the theater enjoying the movie, Tula was upstairs at home, sitting in the big claw-foot tub, soaking her hair and bemoaning her fate to her mother and Sophie. “I begged Fritzi to let me wait until tomorrow, but she’s so bossy. She wouldn’t let me. She said, ‘No, it has to be done today.’ I hate her. I just hate her.”

“Now, Tula, she’s your sister. You don’t hate her. That’s a sin.”

“I don’t care. Arty Kowalinowski is the only boy I ever really loved, and she made me miss my one chance to go out with him. Now he’ll probably meet some other girl, and I’ll wind up an old maid, and it’s all her fault.”

When Gertrude and Fritzi got home later that night, they went upstairs to see Tula, who unfortunately, still looked gray. “We brought you some popcorn,” said Gertrude. “And Arty said to tell you he was just heartbroken not to get to see you this time.”

“He did?”

“Yes,” added Fritzi. “And when we gave him your picture, he said he would be looking at it and thinking about you every day until he got back.”

“He did?” said Tula, reaching for the popcorn.

“Oh, yes …”

It was a bold-faced lie, but it made Tula feel better.

B
OOTH
N
O
. 7

A
T THEIR NEXT SESSION
, D
R
. S
HAPIRO SUDDENLY LOOKED UP FROM
his notes and asked Sookie a question that surprised her.

“What about your father?”

“What about him?”

“I’ve heard a lot about your mother, but you haven’t mentioned him.”

“I haven’t?”

“No.”

“Oh … well, he was so sweet, bless his heart.”

“He must have seen your mother’s behavior. Did he ever try and stop it?”

“No. But you didn’t know Daddy. He thought she was the most wonderful woman in the world. And when I would complain that she was pushing me around, he would say, ‘Oh, honey, I know you don’t want to join that club or do whatever, but she’s only pushing you because she loves you, and it means so much to her,’ so no, he was never very much help.”

“How did you feel about that?”

“You mean, did it make me mad? Oh no. He couldn’t help it. Poor Daddy always had a blind spot when it came to Mother. When they
met she had evidently been the belle of the ball … and I don’t think Daddy ever got over the fact that she married him. Every year on their anniversary, he would play the song they had danced to at the Senior Military Ball … and they would waltz all around the living room.”

“So in other words, you and your brother grew up in a house with a domineering mother and a father who gave you little or no protection.”

Driving home, Sookie thought about what Dr. Shapiro had said. It was true. Her father had seen how unhappy Lenore had made her, and he really had not stood up for her. Should she be mad at Lenore for that or mad at Daddy? Or mad at both? Oh, Lord. She didn’t want to be mad at anybody. There was a part of her that just hated sitting around, whining about her childhood. It was embarrassing at her age. But Dr. Shapiro said it was important. Still, it made her feel creepy, like she was doing something bad, betraying the Simmons family secrets, and there were a few.

T
HE
S
IMMONSES
,
LIKE MOST
families in the South, had lost everything during the war, and all they had left was their pride and stories of the “glorious past.” Her grandmother told tales of how her mother, Sookie’s namesake, Sarah Jane Simmons, had single-handedly saved Greenleaves, the family plantation, by charming the Yankee soldiers and dazzling them with her beauty, and how after the war, three Yankee officers had written and begged her to marry them, which was, of course, out of the question … and on and on.

As a child, all these stories had enthralled Lenore. But in Lenore’s case, with each passing year, the “glorious past” had become more and more glorious until in 1939, she had confided to a friend, “I could have written
Gone with the Wind
about Greenleaves, but Margaret Mitchell beat me to it.”

When Buck and Sookie were growing up, Lenore had waxed poetic, ad nauseam, all about the grandeur of the old Simmons family plantation, “almost a complete replica of Tara,” she said, “only much better furnished.” But when he was in high school Buck had looked it up in the Selma Civil War Archives over at the courthouse.

The truth was that Greenleaves was never a plantation. It was just
a nice two-story farmhouse located on a few acres of land, and the Simmons family’s only encounter with the enemy during the war was when one little skinny half-starved Union soldier, who was lost, stopped by and asked for directions. But to hear Lenore tell it, hundreds of Yankee soldiers had marched through the county, looting and stealing and digging up every inch of their land, looking for buried silver and gold. The fact that the man her grandmother later married got drunk and burned the place down was somehow never mentioned.

P
ULASKI
, W
ISCONSIN

1942

A
LL THAT YEAR
,
EVERYBODY IN TOWN WAS BUSY PITCHING IN TO HELP
with the war effort. Housewives were saving grease for bullets, and were collecting all the rubber and aluminum and scrap metal they could scare up. The Jurdabralinski girls, like all the others, had given up their nylon stockings, which were needed for parachutes, and now everybody had a victory garden.

The good news was that Poppa had come home from the hospital, and they all celebrated. But the war news was not good. Pulaski had already lost three of their boys, and Fritzi was worried about Wink and all the other guys she knew who were now in the thick of it.

They got another letter from their friend Dottie Frakes, who was tending to wounded soldiers in the Pacific. It made Fritzi feel so damn useless. Momma and Sophie went to mass every morning and prayed for the boys overseas, Gertrude and Tula rolled bandages for the Red Cross in their spare time, and all she did was pump gas. And since gasoline was now being rationed, she pumped less and less of it every day. The posters down at the post office had a picture of a soldier and read “They do the fighting, you do the writing.” Fritzi had written to all the guys she knew, but she wanted to do more.

So a few weeks later, when Mr. Hatchett, the Civilian Pilot Training instructor over at the college, was drafted, and they asked Fritzi if she would step in and take over his job while he was gone, Fritzi said she was more than glad to do it.

Teaching would give her a chance to fly again. The college knew they were taking a chance on trusting a former female stunt pilot with their students; however, they needed a replacement for Mr. Hatchett. But Fritzi turned out to be an excellent instructor, and her students loved her—especially the boys. Between running the gas station and teaching, she was pretty busy, but sometimes after a lesson, she would take off and fly for a while by herself. It was wonderful to be up in the air again, even if it was in a Piper Cub.