The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion (8 page)

“No, I’m not. I failed algebra three years in a row. How smart is that, Earle?”

After she had her soup, Sookie sat up for hours reading and rereading the papers, feeling just like she was in the Twilight Zone. It all seemed so unreal. She knew that the baby girl with the strange name listed on the birth certificate was supposed to be her, but she still couldn’t quite believe it. Earle felt terrible and kept walking in and out of the room, asking what he could do, but there was nothing.

At about three-thirty, Earle came in and insisted that she come to bed. But even after Earle turned off the light, her mind was still racing a mile a minute. They say when you are dying, your whole life passes before your eyes. She supposed that was what was happening to her now. Every time she tried to calm down and sleep, something else from her childhood flashed before her eyes, and she’d think about all the things she had done to try and please her mother, trying to be what Lenore thought a Simmons should be. Her hair had always been dark red and straight, and she remembered all those mornings when Lenore had tried to fix her hair for school and how she always looked at it with disappointment and would say, “You don’t have an ounce of curl.” She thought about those hours she had spent at the beauty shop, getting all those horribly smelly permanents, having her hair fried into one big red frizz, trying to please her mother, or else her mother would get discouraged and have it cut in a short straight bob with bangs. All her life, she had either looked like Little Orphan Annie or the little Dutch boy on the can of paint.

Lenore hadn’t liked how dark Sookie’s hair was, either, and at least once a week, would always look at it and say somewhat wistfully, “Of course, when I was your age, I was more of a strawberry blond. I don’t know why your hair turned so dark. It was blond when you were a baby.…”

Sookie had even tried dying her hair strawberry blond, but it had turned a really unattractive shade of pink. She had spent a good part
of her freshman year of high school with bright pink hair, long before it was fashionable to have bright pink hair. And for what?

Surely, this was just some terrible nightmare she was having, and she would wake up tomorrow, and things would be normal again. It just
couldn’t
be true.

P
ULASKI
, W
ISCONSIN

1928

I
N THE YEARS FOLLOWING
W
ORLD
W
AR
I,
THE SLEEPY BUCOLIC WORLD
of rural America was beginning to change, and a man named Henry Ford was to blame. When he invented the first Model T automobile, he put America on wheels, and as more roads were built and cars were improved, people who had never traveled farther than the outskirts of their own towns started traveling by the thousands. Roads couldn’t be built fast enough, and suddenly, family motor trips were all the rage. Americans were of pioneer stock and naturally adventurous and soon began driving all over the country. And if they could have built roads across the ocean, they would have driven all the way to Europe and on down to South America.

New businesses started popping up all over the country: auto courts, tourist camps, hotels, motels, and restaurants to accommodate the traveler along the way.

In 1920, there were 15,000 gas stations in the entire country, but by 1933, the number had jumped to 170,000.

It was clear the automobile was the future, and what better business to get in than owning a gas station? Gas companies were selling franchises left and right. And Stanislaw Jurdabralinski had the perfect
spot for a filling station, on the empty lot right beside his house. So using their savings and another loan from the bank, and after finishing a two-week course in service station management, Stanislaw received his Phillips 66 uniform, complete with hat and black leather bow tie, and soon, a brand-new twenty-four-hour full-service filling station opened in Pulaski.

Stanislaw was so proud to have a family business at last, but when they were naming the station, he thought Jurdabralinski’s Phillips 66 was too long, so he just named it Wink’s Phillips 66, after his son, who would inherit it someday.

The first night the station opened, when the pump topper with the big, round, illuminated glass globe lit up, the entire family stayed up for hours and watched it glow in the dark. Poppa, who would now be sleeping on a cot in the back of the station, flicked the neon
OPEN ALL NIGHT
light in the front window on and off for them to say good night.

From then on, their lives revolved around the filling station on the side of the house. The cheerful ding of cars and trucks coming into the station day and night meant that Poppa was busy, and that was good. Wink and the girls grew up playing with hubcaps, air hoses, old spark plugs, and rubber tires, and the smell of gasoline. It seemed like fun to them. By the time Fritzi was eleven and Wink was nine, they already knew how to change a tire and pump gas and make change at the cash register. Soon the Jurdabralinskis were simply known as the Gas Station Family. Every town had one … or soon would.

I
N
1936,
AFTER THE
Depression had hit the country, it had been devastating, but the Jurdabralinskis did better than most, with milk and cheese from the nearby farms and eggs from the chickens that Momma kept in the backyard. And thanks to Wink, who had grown into a big, strong guy, who loved to hunt and fish, there was always food on the table.

Stanislaw had worked out a contract with the county to supply all the official vehicles—fire trucks, police cars, snowplows, and all the school buses—with gas and repair service, so when many stations
across the country had been forced to close, Wink’s Phillips 66 managed to stay open.

In the summer of 1937, life at the Jurdabralinski house was anything but depressed. Momma played in the Thursday night Ladies Accordion Band of Pulaski, and they practiced in the living room four nights a week. The younger girls were all in the school accordion band, so they played along as well, and on most afternoons, the boys and girls from the high school would gather upstairs in the huge third-floor attic with the big record player on a table in the corner and dance and play Ping-Pong.

Fritzi and her sisters were of an age when boys were always either hanging around the station or sitting on the front porch of the big two-story brick house next door.

Even Wink, who worked at the station with his father after school, had female admirers who would pile into their cars and drive over to watch and giggle as he walked around and did a full service on their cars, washing the windows, checking the oil, water, antifreeze, and battery, and filling up the tires. They usually had only enough money for a fourteen-cent gallon of gas, sometimes just a half gallon. One local girl, Angie Broukowski, who was younger than Wink, borrowed her father’s car, and she and her friends seemed to come in more than usual, even when she didn’t have money for gas. Poppa said Old Man Broukowski’s tires had been checked more than any other car’s in the state of Wisconsin.

But at the Jurdabralinski house, Fritzi was the main attraction for both the boys and girls. She had just graduated from high school, and in her senior year, she had been voted most popular, best dancer, most athletic, biggest cutup, and most likely to succeed. Fritzi was definitely the personality kid of Pulaski High. Poppa was proud of her, but Momma worried that if Fritzi didn’t slow down for five minutes, she was never going to get a husband. If she wasn’t swimming, she was bowling or skating all night at the Rainbow Skating Rink or running up and down the roads to see how fast some car would go or running to the movies, and if she wasn’t doing that, she was busy smoking cigarettes. Momma found a half-full pack of Chesterfields hidden in her top drawer. And as usual, when he was told what his daughter was
up to, Poppa just shrugged. “She’s a modern girl, Momma. They all smoke.” Momma hoped that in the fall, when Fritzi went to work at the pickle factory, she would settle down with one of the local boys, so she wouldn’t have to worry about her so much. Momma had already said a novena and prayed to Saint Jude about it.

P
OINT
C
LEAR
, A
LABAMA

T
HURSDAY
, J
UNE
9, 2005

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, E
ARLE BROUGHT
S
OOKIE BREAKFAST IN BED AND
sat down beside her and said, “Honey, do you want me to cancel my appointments and stay home with you today? I will. I just don’t think you should be alone.”

“No, I want you to go to work. I need to think this out and decide what I’m going to do.”

“Okay, whatever you want … but call me and let me know how you’re doing.”

After Earle left, Sookie did fall asleep for an hour, but when she woke up, she was still so devastated, she couldn’t get up. She called Netta and told her she had the flu and asked her if she would feed the birds. She lay in bed and cried all morning. She knew she had to talk to someone else about this—someone she could trust not to tell Lenore—so she rolled over and called her old college roommate, Dena Nordstrom, in Missouri. Dena picked up right away.

“Dena, it’s Sookie.”

“Sookie! Hello—”

“Thank God you’re home. Oh, Dena, something terrible has just happened.”

“Oh, no, has something happened to Earle?”

“No.”

“The children?”

“No.”

“Your mother?”

“No … it’s me!”

“Oh, honey, what’s wrong? Are you sick?”

“No,” she sobbed. “I’m Polish!”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s a long story … but … oh, Dena … this man from Texas called and said I wasn’t who I thought I was and at the time, I thought I knew who I was. But yesterday, I got a letter and found out that I was adopted—that Lenore is not my real mother and Daddy is not my real daddy either. And not only that … I’m a year older than I thought I was. I’m not even a Leo. All my life, I’ve been reading the wrong horoscope.”

“Wait a minute … are you sure about this?”

“Yes, I’m sure. October is Libra.”

“No … no … about being adopted?”

“Yes, it’s all written down. I have it right in front of me. It says that on July 31, 1945, Mr. and Mrs. Alton Krackenberry adopted a baby girl named Ginger … Jurdbberlnske or something or other Polish. Anyhow … that’s me. Or who I was supposed to be. Anyway, my real mother was born in Wisconsin, and I’m probably a Catholic to boot. You know how quick they are to baptize.”

“Oh, wow … oh … what does Lenore say about it?”

“I haven’t told her.”

“Oh … well, have you said anything to the kids, yet?”

“No, you’re the first person, besides Earle, that knows, and I knew you, being married to a psychiatrist, would understand. I just feel so confused and betrayed. Lenore knew I wasn’t her real daughter, and she went ahead and pushed me into all these things … and all under false pretenses. She always made me feel so bad because I wasn’t just like her. And I wasn’t just like her, because I wasn’t just like her! And now, thanks to her, I’ve been a card-carrying member of the Daughters of the Confederacy since I was sixteen, and I’m not even a Southerner.
I’m a Yankee. And, Dena … here’s the worst part,” she sobbed. “I’m not even a Kappa.”

“What do you mean? Of course, you’re a Kappa.”

“No, I’m not. I’m a fraud. I can’t go to the Kappa reunion. I’ll just have to resign. The only reason I got in was because I was a legacy through Lenore. I’ll have to turn in my pin and everything.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Sookie, you’re a Kappa because everyone loved you. I went through rush with you, remember?”

But Sookie wasn’t listening and continued to ramble on. “Oh, my God. I even made my debut at the Selma Country Club under false pretenses. I told Lenore I didn’t want to be a debutante, and she went ahead and let me make a fool of myself. What will people think when they find out I’m not a Krackenberry or a Simmons—that I’m an illegitimate Yankee Polish orphan?”

“Wait a minute. What makes you think you are illegitimate?”

“Because … it’s written on my birth certificate: father unknown.”