The Lady Business

Another post from my off-again, on-again coming of age novel.

by Susan Matthewson

In our city neighborhood, the blocks were divided by single-lane, gravel-top alleys lined on either side with an eccentric assortment of fences in various states of repair. Every summer morning we gathered in the alley to begin our day and it was there that our imaginations spilled over. We searched for treasure in the trash cans stacked along the fences, fought pretend wars behind trash can barricades, and slew monsters hidden in the fiery incinerators behind each house.

It was also in the alley that we learned about the differences that divide people in more ways than physical boundaries ever can and about the hidden parts of family life that can only be seen from the back alley.

It was from the back alley that we spied on Mrs. Gersten, the lady from somewhere in Europe with the strange accent and dark eyes. The Gerstens had moved in the previous November but an early and harsh winter kept us huddled in our homes and their arrival went almost unnoticed until spring when we’d see her working out in her yard and gradually became aware that she received a steady stream of women visitors at various times during the day.  Soon our mothers began to whisper about Mrs. Gersten and certain repeated phrases wafted over the backyard fences and stuck in our minds without our completely understanding their meaning—phrases like “a camp survivor,” “numbers tattooed on her arm,” “a Jew,” “intellectual,” and “very bohemian.”

We began to spy on Mrs. Gersten because of these whispers and because she was so different from our mothers. Our mothers wore their hair in short permed bobs or stylish chin-length waves. Mrs. Gersten’s hair hung in a heavy, dark, wavy mass down to her waist. She tied it back with colorful scarves, the ends floating free like the wings of a butterfly.

Our mothers wore knee-length Bermuda shorts with crisp cotton sleeveless blouses in the summer or tailored wool pants with silk blouses or button-down oxford shirts in the winter. Mrs. Gersten’s wardrobe knew no season. All year-round she wore black tights and a black leotard covered by wrap-around skirts of a gossamer-like fabric in colorful prints or brilliant solid shades of flamingo, buttercup, sapphire, and emerald. She was a brilliant tropical parrot in a neighborhood of sedate little wrens and sparrows.

Our mothers only wore earrings when they dressed up for church or a special evening out. Their earrings were clip-on designs no bigger than a large button usually set with imitation gems. Mrs. Gersten had pierced ears and wore earrings all the time, even while working in the yard or sweeping her porch. Her earrings did not sit sedately on her ears like our mothers’ earrings did. Mrs. Gersten’s earrings dangled down to her shoulders, they danced, they tinkled, they flashed, they fandangoed like gypsy dancers, and they fascinated us.

Mrs. Gersten was also different from our mothers because she worked and most of our mothers did not work except for Mrs. Clark who taught music at the elementary school and Mrs. DeGrazia who was a nurse in a doctor’s office. But Mrs. Gersten worked at home and it was what she did that we spied on from the alley behind the big concrete incinerator.  For Mrs. Gersten taught modern dance to a collection of similarly clad, leotarded women, many with foreign accents like her own.

We did not exactly understand modern dance so at first we snickered at the grown women contorting their bodies in Mrs. Gersten’s empty dining room, but gradually we fell under her spell and loved watching as she led them through their movements with the soft lights of the chandelier glinting off her blue black hair as it swayed back and forth in rhythm with her body. We came to love her deep rich voice with its strangely accented syllables as she caressed her ladies into celebrating the rites of spring amid the faint echoes of flutes and French horns from the record player.

 “Now my lofflies,” she’d say in her heavy accent, “ve must bend to da breeze and blossom vit da sun. Bend now, tendu, degagé, lift, point the toes, round the back, raise the head, and bloom, bloom, bloom.”

Oh, my, how desperately we wanted to bloom, bloom, bloom and to be one of Mrs. Gersten’s “lofflies.” There in the alley, hidden behind the incinerator, we would point our toes, arch our backs, and lift our heads to the sun. We wanted to bloom, bloom, bloom. We wanted black tights and a leotard, we wanted a feathery filmy skirt that wafted around our legs, but even more we wanted pierced ears and a pair of dancing, dangly earrings.

So we let our mothers’ cautionary whispers about Mrs. Gersten waft away and dissolve in the summer sun while we whispered a promise to each other: we’d have pierced ears by the start of school or die trying.   

Ice Cream Sundaes

by Susan Cameron

My rental car gingerly feels its way around the dirt road potholes
as it stutters up the hill toward the exhausted farmhouse.
For a hundred and fifty years, the house had endured
sunbaked days and frozen nights, drought and deluge,
freeze and thaw, and the indifference or poverty of its owners.

Creaky-floored, rattle-piped, drafty-windowed,
it sags under the insubstantial weight of its latest renters --
my old friend, her two kids, her new husband, his two kids:
skinny refugees from urban warfare seeking shelter
in rural Noplace, Michigan.

Her son and daughter slam-bang the screen door open
and joyfully whoop their way into my arms.
Not once do I exclaim, "My God, you're so big, and
I used to change your diapers!" -- too SoCal Cool for that now.
Then comes a smaller boy and a younger girl, trailing behind,
cautious and quiet as field mice; the new step-siblings.
And then, there's my friend!  Her husband, too,
on his way to work, driving truck, local truck, for minimum wage.
My friend sometimes babysits for a few women who work in town
at the Walmart, but not today...

Today, I take everybody to town for ice cream sundaes!  Hooray!
At the ice cream parlor, the kids are a small orchestra playing
Eine Kleine Gigglemusik.  We're all so happy -- it's a party,
a two-hour party, and the waitress is getting a big tip today.
But no party lasts forever.  Night is coming, and it's going to get cold.

My friend and I are back in her kitchen, and she seems to be
struggling with words half-stuck in her throat.
I hear noises -- the children are dragging mattresses to the living room,
around the fireplace, since that's where the heat will be.
If she asks me to dinner, there won't be enough food for everyone.

I kiss everyone goodbye and drive away through the cricket-singing twilight,
glancing through the rear-view mirror at the rosy sunset glow
lighting up the peeling paint of the old farmhouse porch,
amazed at the lovely patina glazing rural America's
picturesque poverty.


Susan Cameron, copyright 2013

The World According to Hattie May

By Liz Zuercher

A year ago we went to Peoria, Illinois to bury Gary’s mother, Hattie May. The funeral director led us to the room where the services would be.  All the pink flowers and the pink satin dress didn’t surprise me.  Hattie loved pink.  What surprised me was the woman in the casket.  This couldn’t be our Hattie.  The Hattie May we knew wore a perpetual look of childlike wonder.  Where was that?  Where was her wide-open face, her ready smile?  Where was the love that poured out of her, that desire always to please?

“Don’t you want a donut?  A strawberry sody?” she should be saying.  “I’ve got Drumsticks in the freezer.”  She always had ice cream Drumsticks in the freezer.  We could count on that, just like we could count on those sayings of hers, the ones she’d heard from her mother, Grandma Sweet.

“You can’t get finished, if you don’t get started,” she’d say when you were dragging your heels about doing chores.

If you were whining about something you really wanted, she’d say, “If I gave you the world and a fence around it, you’d still want a slice off the moon.”

If she asked you to do something and you said, “What?” she’d say, “I don’t stutter and your ears don’t flip back and forth.”

Our Hattie May was not shy about telling you how she felt – good or bad.  You always knew where you stood with her.  Like she said, “When my heart gets so full, it spills out my mouth.”

She didn’t suffer fools, and had some choice sayings to express her point of view:

“Good is good, but too good is a fool.”

“When drink goes in sense goes out.”

“Can’t wipe yourself clean on a dirty towel.”

“You are talking when you should be listening.”

We always listened to Hattie May.  Her wisdom sprang from the lessons of real life.  She worked hard and kept her modest home spotless.  She wasn’t fancy - she had all she needed, she told us. She loved simple things: doing word search puzzles with colored pens, because the page looked so pretty when the puzzle was done, or watching Lawrence Welk and Disney movies with a bowl of popcorn.  And she loved a good joke.

“Many a true word is spoken in a joke,” she’d say.

Hattie loved her church, and Sunday was her favorite day of the week.  “Some day it will be Sunday every day,” she’d say.  That was the day she thanked the good Lord for all her blessings, the day she got to relax and enjoy those blessings with her family.  For her nothing was better than that.

Above all, she loved her family.  She was fiercely loyal and generous to us. Her husband, Charlie, was the love of her life, and she missed him every moment of the decades between his passing and hers.  Reminiscences often prompted another saying, “Oh, happy days gone by.”  This one might bring a tear to her eye.

No, the woman in the casket, dressed all in pink, surrounded by pink flowers, wasn’t our Hattie.  Our Hattie May was with Charlie and the rest of the family who’d gone before her.  They were all relaxing together on an eternal Sunday afternoon.

           

           

            

The Lady Business

(This is part of a novel I've been writing off and on (mostly off but trying to get back to it now. More to come, hopefully.)

by Susan Matthewson

It is Wednesday afternoon in mid-June, the day after my twelfth birthday, which was my worst birthday ever because I got my first period. Menstruation wasn’t exactly the surprise I was hoping for. Mama is thrilled to death that I am now, as she says, becoming a young lady.  I’d rather have leprosy.

I am grumpy and feeling mean. I am sitting in the rocker in the corner of the front porch that wraps around the side yard. The rocker is behind mama’s big potted philodendron where I am hiding from Patty Ann Tipple.  I spied Patty Ann minutes ago from the front window riding her bike towards my house. When she turned into the driveway, I snuck out the side door and curled up in the rocker.

           

I hear Patty Ann tromp up the steps and ring the doorbell. I tuck my head between my legs, trying to become invisible. I begin to inspect the hair on my legs. I like the hair on my legs; it is soft, silky, and light brown. I like the way it feels. Mama says now that I am a young lady, I need to shave my legs and underarms. I do not see the point in this. Mama says young ladies do all sorts of things that I find mostly inconvenient and time-consuming.

            

This “lady” business has caused problems between me and mama lately. She started in at Easter saying I needed a bra for my bosom. That’s what mama calls breasts. After inspecting my chest in the mirror, I could not detect any sign of a bosom and told mama so. That didn’t stop her. Next thing I knew she presented me with what she called a “starter” bra.

            

But worst of all mama wants to cut off my waist-length hair into a “bob with bangs” and give me a Toni Home permanent. This is not going to happen. My four-year-old sister Abby is the cutest little girl you ever saw, with smooth, shiny white blond hair in a Dutch boy style that frames her funny little face. That is she was cute.  Then mama gave her a permanent. Now she looks like a cartoon character that stuck a finger in an electric socket resulting in fried hair that stands on end. She reminds me of pictures I’ve seen of Albert Einstein.         

            

“Charlie,” mama calls. “Patty Ann is here.  She has a new charm for her charm bracelet that is just precious.” I scrunch down in the chair. I am hardly breathing now. In fact, I am holding my breath, wondering if I can make myself pass out so that if they find me, I will be unconscious and have to be rushed to the hospital, avoiding Patty Ann once again. 

Mama thinks Patty Ann is the “sweetest, loveliest young lady” she has ever met. I do not. Patty Ann’s recent attachment to me is a mystery because she and I could not be more different. I have a sneaking suspicion what’s behind her interest, but more about that later. She’s been stalking me since school got out and I’m pretty fed up at this point.

            

The screen door bangs shut and Patty Ann clatters down the stairs. I peek through the thick vine that smothers the porch railing and watch her leave, decked out in her pink shorts, pink and white striped blouse, pink headband, and white sandals. Patty Ann is always color coordinated. It’s just one of the many annoying things about her.

I sigh with relief. This is not a good start to the summer. Between trying to avoid Patty Ann and mama’s makeover plans, I’m a nervous wreck. But I have a plan. Things are going to change.