When We Were the Kennedys (11 page)

We'd been unwittingly preparing for this task, roaming the neighborhood as “girl sleuths”; we'd written in our notebooks and hidden behind trees; we'd followed footprints that led nowhere, searched low branches for ominous scraps of cloth, trailed hapless souls who curdled our nerve with the first dirty look. We'd written a code that coordinated with the movement of curtains across our respective top-floor windows, a lexicon of phrases that I'd churlishly kept from Cathy, who threatened to invent a competing code but didn't, as I'd predicted, have the juice to write it all down.

Now Denise and I prepare for a fully executed stakeout. She makes a dash around back and dives behind the snowball bushes to hide; I continue up the driveway, plunk myself on the front steps, and pretend to bask in the late-afternoon daylight.

Mrs. Norkus has gone inside, probably to cook supper, but Jurgis is still here, eyeing me over the top edge of the paper. “Where's Tootsie?” I ask him, hoping he'll go inside to fetch the cat, whom he adores. But he wasn't born yesterday.

I glance at the shivering snowball bush. I wait and wait—even the Norkuses have to pee on occasion—but nothing happens until Mrs. Norkus calls Jurgis in for supper. He folds up his paper, eyes me again, and as soon as he turns his back I shriek, “Now!,” whereupon Denise springs from the green like a flushed quail.

“Ash-ash ticka-ticka!”
Jurgis shouts. “No bring friend! Too much stairs! Make stop you jump!” Mrs. Norkus, too, has suddenly materialized, towering and foursquare. Instead of breaking for the stairs, as I do, Denise recoils in terror.

Please don't go!
I think.
They're harmless!
More than anything, I want Mum to get her wish for me to look like a well-brought-up returner of favors.

I'm at the top of the first flight, but Denise is down there in the yard, her mouth forming a little
oh
of horror, so I trudge earthward and join her, the Norkuses faintly
push-push
ing in Lithuanian.

Denise regards me with something akin to awe. “Maybe . . .” I say to her.
Think! Think!
But I've got nothing.

Then, a dainty tread on the stairs above us, and Anne appears. Bermuda shorts, crisp white blouse, hair done up in a chignon: the pretty schoolteacher on summer break. She smiles at the Norkuses, who nod in turn. “Suppertime,” she says, and we follow like found lambs, away from the thwarted Norkuses and toward Mum's pork chops and baked potato and cherry pie. All of it smells so good. Anne and Mum exchange a look. Mum pulls out a chair for my friend.

“Come on in!” I say, with a theatrical sweep of the arm. Welcome! Here is our laden table, our full cupboards, my mother spooning out applesauce and my sisters waiting at the table. A family at supper. Everything, to all appearances, still whole.

 

Norkus Rules:

NO GO IN GARDEN
!

NO CAR IN DRIVEWAY
!

NO TOO MUCH GARBAGE
!

NO BRING FRIEND
!

NO PUT BIKE ON GRASS
!

MAKE STOP YOU JUMP
!

TOO MUCH STAIRS
!

 

For a long time I thought these rules, like the God of my childhood catechism, had always been and always would be. But a singular, lucid memory points a different way. It unfolds in the garden—their forbidden garden—during our time of bounty.

“Dad,” I said. “Daddy?”

I was lying next to him on the grass, fearful of an ant navigating the hairy, complicated whorls of his ear.

“There's a ant in your ear, Dad. Daddy? There's a ant in your ear.”

He was half asleep, on his back, his shirt soft and plaid. We'd been picnicking. Hot and sweaty, I'd swooned down next to him, out of breath, which means we girls must have been running among the Norkuses' early plantings of corn and cukes and pole beans. We'd been let loose among the stakes and twine and the Popsicle sticks that marked fragile rows of parsnips and beets.

Where does this memory come from? Mum is there, and we three girls. Anne is away—at college, I presume—so I could be as young as five.

“Dad? Daddy?”

“He'll find his way out,” Dad said of the ant that had so captured my concern; he grinned, eyes closed. So I relaxed. Dad said the ant was all right and so it was.

“Dad? Do ants go to heaven?”

Oh, how did he answer? If only I could dredge his voice back through the murk of time, to know his thoughts on this, on everything. The garden memory, like all memory of Dad, lives as a shard of mica embedded in smooth gray stone. This lovely man, irretrievable but through these glints and flickers. So I recall, or imagine that I recall, how the sun beat down on my reddened, snoresome father, how I admired the male, sandpaper stubble along his jaw, his solid chest, the fact that he was unafraid that an ant might get inside him. But ever more astounding, as this memory unspools, is that we are lounging
inside the garden
and no Norkus appears to order us out.

This trespass is so electrifyingly against the rules that it could not possibly—not then—have been the rules.

And this memory: a shopping trip on a Saturday morning, Dad packing us into the car for a trip to Congress Street, the heart of Rumford's business district. We were going to buy shoes.
Sensible
ones, Mum had warned him, unnecessarily. All the kid sections in all the shoe stores in all of Rumford displayed sensible shoes and nothing but—a monochrome of boring, boyish, tie-up shoes worn by all of Mexico's schoolchildren, shoes built to last from September to June. We didn't complain; why would we? No child we knew wore stylish shoes. We were all too “heedless” for trim and rivets and patent leather, too “hard” on our things.

We followed Dad into Lamey's to look things over. Cathy wasn't feeling quite right, pale and belly-achy, so she took the first ones she spotted, a bland and stolid pair that fell nimbly within Mum's exacting guidelines. Cathy was still little, not yet in school, not yet in the habit of questioning logic, rules, nuns, the very turning of the earth. So she'd picked her pair without a fuss. Betty picked what Cathy picked, and I would have, too, had I not been thunderbolted by a pair of red shoes in the store window, an apparition—from Oz, it seemed; from Dorothy herself—magically dropped into a dowdy sea of shoes more suited to the Wicked Witch's flying monkeys.

“Can I try them, Daddy?” I pleaded, all but undone with desire.

“They're a rig,” he said. Which meant he liked them.

A man with pretty eyelashes cradled my foot and eased it into the handsomest shoe I'd ever known or thought to imagine. I pointed my toe. I turned my ankle, fetchingly this way, fetchingly that way. I tried the other one. My feet in these ruby slippers were beautiful. My whole self—beautiful. Dorothy was a Kansas clodhopper compared to me.

“Please, Dad?” I asked. So he bought them.

Mr. Eyelashes rang us up. Three boxes and only one of them glowed. “Isn't your grampy nice to buy you these shoes,” he said.

We bristled like insulted cats as our too-old father laughed—a loud, chortling hee-haw—then carried the tale home to Mum, who also found this outrage hootingly funny. Good thing, too; when Dad unveiled the shoes, she said,
For crying out gently
(which meant
Oh, all right
), still snickering over having married a grampy.

My shoes had a natty little ankle strap, and pinkish cross-stitching along the toe end, a ludicrous extra. In the slat of sunlight coming through the kitchen window, the leather took a vigorous shine, its red the dark, dressy hue of a freshly laid brick.

Why did these shoes mean so much to me? Dad had given me my name (
Why don't we call her Monica?
he said to my groggy mother, who was too surprised to say no), but this new gift from him unfurled as a conscious pact, a mutual inkling that miracles lay dormant everywhere, that one could navigate the world as an optimist and be rewarded for it.

Tock, tock, tock
went my red shoes on the stairs. Every tap of their heels pleased me.
Tock, tock, tock
on too much stairs. Which meant the rules must have been different before. Or, that the rules were the same but didn't quite signify when we had a man in the house.

Suddenly I see Dad's car—not the Chrysler but the one before that, a bulbous Pontiac in a shade of green I still love, parked in the driveway where cars are not allowed. And I see the new car, too, gleaming on the swept asphalt. I see our garbage tossed into the trash shed uninspected. I see bags and bags of groceries floating unmolested past the first-floor landing. I hear Dad's steadfast tread.
If those aren't the most desperate-foolish rules,
say the footfalls of a man with a thundering laugh, a man with Popeye forearms, a man who works sixteen hours at a crack and holds tabby cats cradle-style. Make all the rules you want, fulla; they don't apply to me.

 

Because Denise insists that I walk her downstairs after our special pork-chop supper, Mum gives me the rent money—“As long as you're going.” Dad had always paid the rent himself, but now, on Saturday nights, Cathy and I draw straws; the loser has to creep downstairs with seven dollars and hand it over in the cabbage-y smog of the Norkus kitchen. That's our chore. Our contribution to the running of our fragile household.

Tonight the job is mine because I've had the honor of hosting a friend. Denise creeps down the stairs ahead of me, peering around each landing. “They don't yell on the way down,” I assure her, but she can't be convinced. On the bottom landing no Norkuses appear, but Denise sneaks past on her toes anyway. As she hits the driveway and makes her dash for home, I heave a great sigh—the kind of noise you might hear at a guillotine—and knock on the Norkuses' door.

“Thank you, Munnie,” says Mrs. Norkus as I thrust the bills into her hand.

Everything down here in cabbageland emanates Old World mystery, vaguely Communist, even as we transact the American capitalist exchange of money for shelter. “Seven dulla,” Mrs. Norkus whispers, filling out the receipt. I wait, wordless. She says nothing of the
NO BRING FRIEND
infraction from earlier. For all their bluster, the Norkuses' anger doesn't accumulate; they keep starting over from scratch.

“Seven dulla, seven dulla.” Her handwriting, like everything else I associate with her, is deliberate, effortful, correct. She gives me the receipt. “You wait.” She opens a box, lifts out a chocolate. “You take,” she says. I hold out my hand as ordered. Mrs. Norkus places the droplet in my palm, whereupon I thank her as I've been taught, stuff the chocolate into my mouth, and make a break for the door.

When I get back upstairs, Anne's washing Betty's hair and Cathy's in the parlor watching the
Jackie Gleason Show.
Mum is nowhere, with Tom purring in her arms, nowhere. She looks at me and comes to. She smiles. “What a good eater.” She means Denise, who cleaned her plate as her mother had warned her to.

“It was so good, Mum. She liked it.”

“Do you get pork chops over there?”

I shake my head no, even though she knows this already.

“Mum?” A pause. “Mumma?”

She looks at me.

“Why do we live in a block?”

This question has never occurred to me until now. After the day's Norkus drama, seeing Mum staring at nothing in a kitchen that costs seven dollars, I wonder: Why wouldn't Mum want her own kitchen, her own window boxes, her own trash cans, her own stairs on which her kids can run wild?

So she tells me a story—not all of it on this particular night; not all of it in any case—but some of it. Enough. All her life, she believed in God. She believed in Jesus and Mary and Joseph and St. Anthony and the pope and the president. But she also believed, shyly, in her own turbulent intuitions. One of these intuitions, rooted in a dream, was that if she and Dad bought a house, something bad would happen to him. This warning had lived in her, undimmed through all their years in the Norkus block, until Dad came home from work, a year before he died, with three words:
Contract. Overwhelmingly. Approved.

Overwhelmingly,
Dad said. And why not? The Oxford at peak production then, the town's population growing, the schools so bloated with fourth-graders that both Rumford and Mexico had plans to build a new high school.

Mum said,
Maybe it's time.

She didn't have to ask Dad twice. He longed for his own garden to replace his backyard patch at Aunt Rose and Cumpy's. He wanted his own soil. His own fence. His own claim on a quarter acre of sunshine.

They didn't look far—Mum didn't want to move far—and the right house did not appear. Then, in February, two months before Dad died, snow still banked over the Norkuses' petunia planters, Mum got wind of a house up the street that had been sold without a
FOR SALE
sign. The Desjardins place: single-family, two stories, big yard, corner lot.

“It would have been perfect,” Mum says. “I couldn't believe that house was gone. On the market a month and I never heard a word.” She puts down the cat, shakes her head. “I was just sick about it. Sold right under my nose.”

Her crushing regret, however, had turned out to be a blessing in disguise—didn't everything?—for shortly after losing out on the Desjardins place, she dreamed Dad's death. Dreamed that her fifty-seven-year-old husband dropped dead on his way to work.

Then she dreamed it again. And once more. Then it happened.

For nearly three decades she'd declined to buy a house in case something bad befell him—a mill accident her most reasonable guess—and just when she thought it safe to succumb to her heart's desire, her fear came true.