Cassie: The People I Come From

By Liz Zuercher

I wanted to tell you about the people I come from – about where I grew up and what I ran away from at eighteen.

I’m sorry, I guess I should introduce myself first.  My name is Cassandra Marie Petersen, Cassie for short.  I’m forty-five years old and single.  I live by myself in a two year old condo.  No husband, no children.  Not even a boyfriend, for Pete’s sake.  Just me and my mortgage, which about now is pretty suffocating.  When I bought the place, I was raking in the dough.  But now that the real estate market is in the dumper, so’s my income. 

Oh, did I tell you I sell new homes for a living?  Living.  Is that what this is?  I go from the condo to the sales office to the condo to the sales office to the – well, you get the picture. Fun, huh?  It’s getting a little old, and I’m beginning to wonder how I ended up in this situation. What’s more, I wonder if I’m stuck in this rut for the rest of my life.  Sometimes it feels that way.  I only have myself to depend on, after all.  I have so many responsibilities.  I can’t just quit, can’t just chuck it all and try something new.  Can I?  

Lately, I’ve been mulling over the decisions I’ve made along the way, trying to see where I went wrong, what I could have done differently.  There must be some point at which I could have chosen a different path and ended up in a happier spot.  All the what-ifs and if-onlys of life are what I’m searching through.  I figure if I could pinpoint where I made the wrong choices, I could change course now. But it doesn’t work that way, does it? You’re faced with a crossroads and you select a road to travel.  Even if you don’t end up liking where that road takes you, you can’t go back to the original crossroads.  There’s too much overgrowth on the path by the time you try to go back.  You have to either accept where you are or find a way to change it going forward.

Here’s the problem.  I’ve gotten what I always said I wanted.  I’m on my own.  I’m responsible for myself and no one else.  I make my own decisions and earn my own keep.  “Better to be lonesome than sorry,” Grandma Elsa always used to say.  But she never said anything about how to avoid being lonesome AND sorry.  That’s where I am right now.  What do I do about that, Grandma?

Did I say that out loud?  Sometimes I talk to Grandma Elsa when I’m trying to figure things out.  I talk, but she never answers me.  I don’t believe in ghosts or spirits or things that go bump in the night, so I don’t really expect Grandma’s voice to come out of the blue. But it would be nice if she could give me a hint, a little nudge.  She’d be telling me to believe in myself, and I do.  At least I used to.  Oh, for Pete’s sake, this is getting so depressing.  See what I do to myself?  Snap out of it Cassie!  Sometimes I think I’ll end up an alcoholic like my parents, but I’m stronger than that I tell myself.  I can do this by myself.  I can. But do I want to?  I used to think so, but lately everything I used to think I wanted looks thin and gaunt.

         So, back to my people, the ones I come from.  I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately and what I might have inherited from them, how they may have influenced the path I took and the choices I made.  Not my parents – they’re lost causes, cautionary tales.  I hope I’m not like them.  I’ve been thinking more about my grandmothers, how different they were and how I’ve taken something from each of them, whether I wanted to or not.

Grandma Elsa

         Just like her neighbors and friends, Gertie, Fanny and Ida, my Grandma Elsa Winchester swept her big front porch every morning at eight o’clock, no matter what. She told me it was good to start the day out in a clean space, that when you went out your front door, you should feel like your house was in order.  Of course, she kept up the inside, too, but it was the house’s face to the world she was most concerned about.  In a small farm town like Colfax, Illinois, people put a lot of stock in what they can see with their own two eyes. 

Grandma Elsa wasn’t what I ran from.  If she’d still been alive when I was a teenager, I might still be in Colfax, married to a farmer and mother to a passel of kids.  No, come to think of it, I probably wouldn’t have stayed even then, but I might have stayed longer, if I could have sought refuge in Grandma’s warm tidy house.  I might have gone on to the University of Illinois, before I struck out on my own. I might have done a lot of things, if my father hadn’t been a mean drunk and my mother a simpering one.

If the people of Colfax had been paying attention to my family, they would have seen the turmoil inside my childhood home.  Maybe they knew what went on behind that farmhouse door, but if they did, they only talked about it in whispers.  They never intervened.  Of course, country people are hesitant to step into other people’s business.  It’s not seemly to interfere, go where you’re not wanted.  We were all taught that.  But we were also taught to be good neighbors.  I guess sometimes the line between being a good neighbor and interfering is a pretty fine one, especially if no one asks for help. 

 Grandma Elsa taught her daughter, Grace, my mother, the merits of good housekeeping and the pleasures of a joyful home, but she couldn’t teach her how to deal with a man who abused her.  Mom didn’t have the fortitude to stand up to such a man, or the confidence to turn her back on him when she should have.  Instead, she tried to appease him. She worked to make a home he’d want to come back to at night with a good hot meal that he’d look forward to eating at the end of a day in the fields.  It was never enough for him, though, and it nearly killed her more than once.  Little by little, her spirit was extinguished, until she could no longer hold herself together without her rum-spiked coke and cigarettes.  Grandma Elsa couldn’t help her only daughter find her way.

But for my sister and me Grandma Elsa was a safe haven.  She was round and soft and no sharp angles.  She was warmth and fun and caring.  She was everything I didn’t get at home, everything I craved from my mother.  I could never figure out how my mother missed out on those qualities as she grew up in Grandma Elsa’s house.  Maybe she had them once.  Maybe life’s twists and turns took them away from her, or buried them deep.

What did I inherit from Grandma Elsa?  I used to think I was warm, fun and caring, too.  I don’t know anymore.  There was an ease about her.  She had a way with people and a pithy saying to cover every situation.  She made people smile.  I can do that with my customers – put them at ease, make them feel at home.  But I’m not so sure that’s the real me.  It’s becoming harder and harder to put on that smile with strangers and welcome them. I have to dig deeper to find my inner Elsa.  Is she still there?  Or am I more like Grandmother Petersen?

Grandmother Petersen

Vera Baldwin Petersen wouldn’t let her grandchildren call her Grandma Vera or Grammie or Nana or any other endearing grandmother nickname.  She insisted on being Grandmother Petersen or just Grandmother. She had all the sharp, hard angles Grandma Elsa lacked. Behind her back my sister and I called her The Witch. But from today’s vantage point, I have to admit she was a force of nature. She was steel and ice, grit and determination.  She knew what she wanted and she went after it.  And what she wanted was the respectability of being a Petersen.  

The Petersens, my father’s grandparents, immigrated to the United States from Sweden in the late eighteen hundreds and being farmers, they found their way to the flat rich soil of Central Illinois, where others had come before them.  Many Scandinavians ended up in Minnesota, but my father’s people stopped in Illinois where they established their homestead.  They worked the land and had five sons, bringing them all up to be farmers, too.  Little by little they bought more land when it became available, until they had several farms across the county, on which they installed their sons when they married. The Petersen empire some of the locals called it.  Their plan worked well until Vera Baldwin came along and stole the heart of Johannes Petersen.

Vera Baldwin’s family lived in town, the wrong part of town.  She possessed a strong will and a deep desire to rise above her heritage, a heritage that included the most infamous of Colfax citizens, Old Man Baldwin, who had cold-heartedly murdered three people, including a thirteen year old girl he’d been accused of molesting.  Old Man Baldwin was only a second cousin to Vera’s father, but the connection clung to her nonetheless.  People in town had a habit of curling their lips just the slightest amount when the name Baldwin was mentioned.  Memories run deep in a small town.

Even as a child Vera plotted her escape from Colfax, but in those days escape was difficult for a girl.  The second best thing to leaving town on her own would have been to marry someone who’d move her away from there.  That didn’t happen either.  Strangers didn’t come to Colfax and hardly anyone left town.  It was a farm community. People stayed put.  They worked the land and passed it along to the next generation.  Opportunity to meet someone who’d take her away from there was next to nonexistent. So she settled on the third option – find someone very respectable to marry and assume his mantle of respectability. No family in the county was more respected than the Petersens, so Vera set her sights on a Petersen.  

Johannes wasn’t her first choice.  She liked the looks of his brother Henrik better, but Gloria Wissmiller scooped up Henrik Petersen and the others were either too young or too old and already married.  Johannes it would be and Vera planned her campaign for his heart.  She flirted.  She played hard to get.  She batted her eyelashes and made sure she was always walking where he was walking. She dressed in colors that made her look her prettiest.  To be honest, she was not a beauty, but there was a spirit about her, a spark, that appealed to the boys.  And there was a little bit of danger to her, not the least of which was the family history, a murderer in the closet so to speak.  Though Vera wanted to leave that association behind her, she knew enough to embrace it when she needed to.  She knew how to scheme and she was an expert at pulling the wool over the eyes of her prey. 

Long story short, she managed to reel in Johannes Petersen, who had his own issues and was itching to find a way out of his parents’ house and onto his own spread. The only way his folks let a son move out was if they got married and needed a place of their own.  So the inevitable followed, and in spite of the fact that Johannes’ mother had grave misgivings about the suitability of Vera Baldwin for her son, Johannes and Vera married as soon as he finished high school. He was a year ahead of Vera, so she dropped out of school to become his wife, keep his house and bear his children. They had a modest white house on a one hundred sixty acre plot of land across the road from his family home.

But Vera wasn’t satisfied.  She did enjoy some of the respectability she’d craved, but because she lived out in the country and didn’t get to town that often, it was difficult to show off her new status to those who had disrespected her.  Church was what she settled on to elevate her status further. She joined the Missionary Society of the Lutheran Church, and sang in the choir, planned church socials and taught Sunday school.  She wasn’t sure she believed in all the gobbledygook the minister said, but she was good at putting on the proper expression, and slowly her reputation as a pious woman grew.  She began to believe it herself – she was a pious woman, but it wasn’t necessarily God she was pious about.  She was her own altar.  She was what she worshipped most.  

After a while she settled into being Mrs. Johannes Petersen or Vera Petersen, instead of Vera Baldwin or even Vera Baldwin Petersen.  She was on her way to the respectability she’d always sought. Only one thing was missing – a grand house in town that would show everyone what her position in the community was.  She started in on Johannes when the children were still in grade school.  It took her until my father, her middle child, was about to get married before Johannes finally agreed to build the house in town.    

By the time I knew my Grandmother Petersen she had hardened considerably and was ensconced in her trophy house in town – the brick house that Johannes built for her, the one that didn’t belong on the street of modest white clapboard homes. There were two garages, an expansive front porch, a screened in summer house and a grand central staircase in the foyer with a crystal chandelier ordered from Sweden.  She was on top of the social heap in Colfax, if there was a social heap.  She was a trendsetter, if there were trends set in Colfax.  People looked to see what Vera Petersen was wearing and what kind of plants she put in her flowerbeds.  Then they followed suit, if they could afford to do so.  Most folks, though, could only look on in envy.  Or disdain.  

Yes, Vera had certainly achieved her goal.  By that time no one in town even remembered Vera was a Baldwin.  For that matter, the whole sordid history of the Baldwins had faded into the back reaches of ancient minds.  Except for Millie Baldwin’s house, the one where her uncle the murderer had lived when he committed the crime and that Millie inherited, living there as a spinster.  People gave the house a wide berth, but mostly because Millie was a little spooky, not because anyone remembered the story of Old Man Baldwin.  Kids called it the haunted house, because Millie let it fall into disrepair and could be seen occasionally peering out from behind tattered lace curtains.  As for Vera, she was careful to distance herself from Millie and her house.  She’d worked too hard to establish herself to purposely remind anyone of her Baldwin blood.   

To many in Colfax Vera’s efforts to be on the cutting edge, to be a leader in the community, fell flat, though.  They thought she was a little uppity, too big for her britches, and if they smiled and nodded their heads in seeming respect when she passed on Main Street, behind her back they were clucking that she was stuck up and heartless.  

I was in their camp.  Never hers. What I never could understand was why God would take a lovely woman like Grandma Elsa before a hard-hearted ice queen like Grandmother Petersen. She scared me when I was little, and even if she were a shriveled old woman of one hundred and I was still living there, she’d scare me today.  At the very least she’d make me shiver a little bit.  I don’t know if she’s still alive.  I haven’t stayed in touch with my family.  I don’t know if any of them is still alive.  It’s easier that way.  Less painful. 

In some respects knowing Grandmother Petersen explained why my father had turned to alcohol.  Maybe my mother, too, though I blame my father for that.  Neither one of them could ever do anything to suit Grandmother Petersen, and she insinuated herself into every aspect of our lives. She had lots of rules, so many I could never remember them, and sometimes I thought she made them up to fit the situation, to throw us off balance.  She was very good at that.  I never felt a sense of equilibrium around her.  Neither did my mother.  Neither did my father, come to think of it.  He was powerless before her and always backed down.  

I never tried to understand my father.  It didn’t seem worth the effort then.  Now that I’m older and have some distance from the whole situation, I think he was probably a tortured soul who could never live up to his mother’s expectations.  Maybe he reminded her too much of the Baldwin side of the family, the part she had worked so hard to bury.  The Baldwins were drinkers.  The Petersens weren’t.  The Baldwins didn’t amount to much.  The Petersens were supposed to be solid citizens.  

Karl Petersen was definitely more of a Baldwin, and that meant Grandmother had no use for him.  It meant she also had no use for his wife and children.  That was fine with me.  I had no use for her either.

The older I get and the more distance I have from Colfax and my family there, the more I see what the people I came from have passed on to me.  I always swore I was nothing like Grandmother Petersen. I was way more Grandma Elsa.  But I see now that was wishful thinking.  Yes, I can be warm and caring and fun like Grandma Elsa, but I also have Grandmother Petersen’s drive, her determination and singularity of purpose.   She longed to better herself.  She longed to get out of that town, and when that didn’t seem possible, she found a way to shed her past, her heritage, and make a new life for herself.  Isn’t that what I did?  I hated my situation, so I ran from it.  I put it behind me and created a new life for myself.  What I wonder now is whether, like Grandmother Petersen, the effort has hardened me the way it did her.  I hope not.  Help me, Grandma Elsa.