Autobio.
Endings

By Carolyn

Friendship

They were the best of friends. My dad and Neil lived across the alley from each other in the little town of Sheridan, Missouri. From the time they were five years old, they were together all day and stayed at each other’s home almost every night. I remember my dad telling us stories of how he and Neil played ball in the park, created their own game of ice hockey with sticks and tin cans, slide down the steep, icy hill in the winter and warmed themselves at the bonfire at the foot of the hill. They rode horses together, walked to school together, picked gooseberries with their mothers along the Platte River, helped each other with the animal chores, played by the grist mill and went fishing together…a Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn childhood. My dad didn’t have a brother. Neil was like a brother.

One Sunday while on a picnic with his family, Neil and his friend were playing along the Platte River. Ten year old Neil didn’t know how to swim. He fell into the river and was drowned. He was only ten years old. My dad lost his best friend at the age of ten.
Another young friend and my dad were the honorary pallbearers at Neil’s funeral. They marched ahead of the little procession… from the church… down Main Street through the town… to the cemetery on the hill. The church bells at the Methodist church tolled their sad sound until the little procession reached the burial site. A turn of the century picture comes to mind with the black horse drawn hearse, folks dressed in black standing outside the church, a warm summer day in the picturesque little village filled with mourners, the slow cadence of the procession of family and friends, many of them children, across the bridge by the grist mill, over the Platte River, up the hill to the cemetery, with two little ten year old boys leading the sad procession.

My dad never forgot this tragedy. He never forgot his best friend, Neil. He kept a favorite picture of the two of them in a safe place on his desk. The picture was taken on Easter Sunday when they were eight years old…Neil standing on the left, my Dad on the right, in their Sunday suits. The last time Dad showed it to me was the year he died. The friendship of two ten year old boys came to an end on that day in 1917. Or did it?

Beware the Bargain - nmm

One morning, while visiting my parents, I was in my bedroom dressing when I heard a loud raucous noise. It sounded like it was coming from upstairs, possibly my parents’ bedroom. I couldn’t tell what it was or even if it was human voice. Concerned, I threw on my robe and ran upstairs to investigate.

From the hallway I could see my parents in their bedroom facing each other. I paused to observe. My mother, dressed in underwear and slip, sat at the foot of the bed, hunched over, head in her hand. She was shaking. My father, dressed for work in suit pants, white shirt, and dark tie, stood in front of her. His head and shoulders drooped; his eyes looked down at her. The noise came from Mom.

I had never seen my parents like this. It looked almost like a stage scene of the aftermath of a domestic violence incident, the man contrite as he asks his wife forgiveness. But my father is not violent; he isn’t even good at arguing. And Mom would more likely be hostile if they’d had a fight. So that explanation vanished. But obviously something had occurred between them and I wasn’t sure it was wise for me to get involved. I crept forward cautiously.

When they heard me approach, Dad straightened his head and shoulders, turned slightly to face me, glanced at me, then looked back down at Mom. The look on his face was difficult to interpret. His mouth stretched wide in what could have been either grimace or a grin. The rest of his face was blank, in either chagrin or suppressed laughter. Mom lifted her head and turned it toward me. Tears streamed down her contorted face.

Mom attempted to regain her composure. Between gasps for air she spoke. “Your father was in Sears the other day and passed a table with a sign that said items on the table cost fifty cents. You know your father, he can’t resist a bargain. He rummaged through everything and found a pair of boxer shorts. They were folded and in a sealed wrapper so he couldn’t see what he was getting.” The last words were barely decipherable as she was overtaken with convulsive laughter. She put her head back in her hand to stabilize herself.

Dad slowly turned around in a comedic Charlie Chaplin style to show me his backside. There, on his posterior, through the suit pants, I could see stenciled on the boxer shorts a large red octagon with white letters in the center: S T O P.

I hooted. Mom raised her head enough to look at me. Still laughing so hard she could barely talk, she managed to squeak, “I’ve been telling him his suits were threadbare but he wouldn’t believe me.”

The Prom

If ever I was in the pits of hell, it was at the time of my high school senior prom. The Prom was somehow made to seem like the reward on the other side of a magic arch. One exits from the miseries of high school and enters, through the Prom, the independence of the big world, like Cinderella entered the royal castle through the ball. I lived in Naperville, Illinois which at that time had a population of 15,000 people, many of them working in the Kroehler Furniture Factory, many others commuting 30 rail miles to Chicago on the Burlington Line. Their 1940 crop of offspring were my 199 classmates. By April 1958, we and our teachers had done all we could do together scholastically and we were exhausted.

Now began talk about The Prom. In fact, it had begun some time before I realized I needed a date and quite a number of my classmates had already paired off. Those were the days when only boys did the asking and girls were the passive victims. Permanently in place were the couples that were practically engaged and, as expected, the alpha males had claimed the three popular Judys and two popular Bettys. After that, all sorts of surprise and non-surprise combinations of girls and guys had happened. More to the point, I had no date. I had no illusions about my allure but had pinned hope on one or two of the boys I chatted with sometimes. But they did not ask me. Every day dashed me into ever-greater misery. My awards and honor society membership no longer meant anything. To miss The Prom seemed now to mean I had spent my high school years in a black hole.

Then Frank Groves asked me to go with him. I did know who he was because sometime in the last ten years of classroom roll-calls he had been in some classes with me but had I ever talked to the guy? I don’t know. He hung out with the greasy car guys. He was gawky and probably had yellow teeth but now he was my visa from misery into Prom happiness. I said yes.

There is little to be told about the actual prom evening. A tuxedoed Frank appeared at 7:30, hair slicked down like a grease patch, a boxed pink carnation corsage in hand. My immigrant parents gazed at this prom phenomenon in fascination and at me with pride. My brother is smirking—although I know he is away at college, in my mind’s eye I see him standing there, smirking. I am wearing a light gauzy pink formal dress but I don’t look good in it. My shoulders are too wide and my skin too much the same shade of pale as the dress. Frank has a hard time figuring out how to get the corsage attached to me without touching me so my mother comes to the rescue. Thank god we are double dating, with two other losers. Frank is driving his Studebaker. He has apparently rebuilt the car innumerable times and is very proud of it. It is his one topic of conversation. The dancing is a blur, but we stumble around gamely, even to some of the slow mushy pieces during which the engaged couples are glued together. “O my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch…” I see some people are having fun, laughing and smiling but others look just like I, and probably Frank, feel. My feet, unaccustomed to high heels, hurt; the garter belt is pinching my hips and the strapless bra has its own type of torture. At 1 a.m. the band plays its final piece and we, like everyone, go for post-dance eating. We drive to a pizza place; finally the pizza arrives and finally the night is over. Frank gives me the dreaded good-night kiss on my doorstep. It’s a little peck and I have survived the first half of this coming of age ritual.

At 10 a.m. the trio, Frank, Larry and Mary, pick me up and we head to Starved Rock State Park, an hour and a half drive from Naperville. Now we are to have fun in the sunlight. Our little group could walk 13 miles of trails, over bluffs and canyons and climb the namesake bluff overlooking the Illinois River. The “Starved Rock” comes from a native American (we said “Indian” in 1958) legend that had a band of Potawatomi avenging the killing of their chief by trapping a band of Illiniweks on the top of the 125 foot high rock and letting them starve to death. Personally, I thought to myself, I would have leapt off into the river rather than starve. Anyway, as soon as I heard that the name of the chief being avenged was Pontiac, I knew why the two car guys had chosen this place for our outing day. (Coincidentally, both of my family’s cars were Pontiacs.) After the long and boring ride it felt good to hit the trails in single file. First we went to the top of that starving rock to gaze around. The river was pretty far down. Each of us knew that we had the unspoken mission of seeming to have fun and that it involved staying until at least four o’clock. We headed down the nearest trail.

After a few minutes we came to a sort of pond. 6 or 8 people were standing at its edge shouting at a kid splashing in the middle of it. They were telling him to come out but it seemed clear to me that he was panicked and couldn’t do anything other than bob up and down, splash, scream and swallow water. I kicked off my shoes and waded in and pretty soon I had to swim to get to him though he was only about ten feet from the edge. Luckily I was a Junior Life Saver, as I think everyone in Naperville was, so I dragged him out, cutting my foot on a broken bottle on the last step. The kid’s parents grabbed him, thanked me and hustled him off to dry clothes. Several people came over and said, “Great job!” and told me to get a band-aid for my foot. I was shivering and clearly I had to get home. The ride seemed short since we suddenly had a lot to talk about. We stopped at a drive-in on the way for a burger and milkshakes each and arrived in Naperville content and happy. We had survived the prom ordeal, had had an adventure and ended the day early, legitimately.

There was a short paragraph in our weekly “The Naperville Clarion” the following Thursday about the “bold rescue” of a drowning child by a high school student from Naperville. It seems that someone at the rescue scene had asked my three companions for my name and where we were from. That's how I survived The Prom,became a wiser woman and even achieved my fifteen minutes of fame before my eighteenth birthday.

STILL THE STUDENT by C.Bahti

Though I have been teaching for nearly a quarter of a century, it is I who continues to learn so very much from my students. The one constant in my teaching has been that each and everyone of them have a story to tell and are just hoping that someone will listen.

As the semester is coming to an end, the calls from students are increasing: one has mono and will miss class --again; one has a seriously ill husband and will miss class --for the first time; one is moving out of state; one is in the midst of a break-up from an abusive beau; a few are worried about passing (a little late to worry about that I'd say), but all in all, the message is the same,
I have a story to tell.

I should have started documenting student stories years ago; they would make an unbelievable book: the student who, at nine, watched his father get shot, and was wounded himself as the bullet richocheted into him; the student who, at nineteen, discovered she had breast cancer, thanks to the exploring hands of her live-in boyfriend; the student who, as a freshman in college lost both parents in a car accident while they were driving back from Vegas;the young man who lost his mother to Melonoma, but still managed to come to class the morning of her death in order to give his group his research and provide them with a boom box; the student whose father was in prison for killing his mother; the student who was recently released from a juvenile institution where he had served time for manslaughter; and the stories go on and on.

Next semester, I am going to continue to teach, but more importantly, I am going to continue to hear, to learn, to truly listen to the stories; I am forever, still, the student.

The first clear memories I have of my maternal grandmother (Narcissa Cross) I was four years old. I may have been young, but I knew evil when I saw it. She scared the bejeesus out of me. Although Narcissa was, probably, only five foot eight, or so, my grandma seemed, to me, to be a giant. She always wore dark dresses that buttoned up to the neck and down to the wrists. She had black hair and piercing, inky black eyes, and her mouth turned down at both corners, in a, perpetual, angry frown

When I was older my mother and I used to talk about her early life and family. She was the ‘middle child’, and her family made sure that she knew her place. Her sister, Ruby, was the oldest, and, the “pretty one”. Her brother, Jess, was the baby of the family and the only son. And, as her mother (Narcissa) explained to my mother, as a child, “You are the one we didn’t want.”

It is hard to imagine someone being so deliberately cruel to a child, unless you know it was Narcissa speaking. This is a woman who, when my mother was four, beat her until she passed out to “break her spirit.”

I think some of the hatred must have been because my mother was so dark. Narcissa was a racist, and one of the more embarrassing family secrets was the introduction of Native American blood into the family line when the wife of a missionary on a reservation in Oklahoma gave birth to a ‘half-breed’ child; one of the many ‘secrets’ in our family. And, it must have been ‘bitter rue’ to my grandmother when she realized that this dark and alien looking child she didn’t want was the brightest of her three children.

Over the course of many years, my mother and I talked about my grandma and what might have made her into this harsh and bitter woman. My mother said that she thought that Narcissa might have done well in the modern world, with her ambition and brains, but, life in the late 1800s and early 1900s gave her no opportunity to channel her energy in the direction she would have liked.

She had been married, at seventeen, to a man twenty years older than herself, and by the time she was nineteen she was a widow and back to living at home in Missouri, with her parents. This is where she met my grandfather, who was married, at the time, and had six daughters. This didn’t stop Narcissa. In fact, nothing ever seemed to stop her from getting what she wanted. Within a year my grandpa had divorced his first wife, abandoned his family, and moved Narcissa to the barren plains of Eastern Colorado.

Over the next six years, between his trips to try to find oil in the Southwest, they had three children, but by the time Jess was born, Grandpa had had it and he left his new family, and never came back to stay. That may have been one of the smartest things he ever did.

I was, probably in my mid-thirties when, during the course of a conversation, my mother said that when Narcissa’s first husband died there were some unanswered questions, and, on the part of the dead husband’s family, some open suspicion regarding his demise. There was no legal action and nothing ever proven, but Narcissa had not seemed to be, exactly heartbroken.

This brings me back to my instinctive fear of her. As afraid as I was of her, I must have stayed out of her way as much as possible, so the only clear memory I can call up, from my early childhood, is that of a confrontation between Grandma and my sister, Dolores, when I was four.

Dolores was always ‘sickly’; if she didn’t have a runny nose, she had an earache, and if it wasn’t that, it was something else. She was seven, just three years older than I, and was skinny as a rail, and as I said, my grandmother seemed to be a giant. The memory is like a movie in my mind. My grandma was standing in front of the screen door and beyond her I could see the freedom of the dirt yard and the bright sunshine. In the house it was cold and dim, and my sister, in her faded flour-sack dress, was standing between my grandma and me. My grandma had just told us, “If your mother loved you, you wouldn’t be living in a shack like this.” (I found out, when I was older, that this was very typical for Narcissa; undermine the parents, whenever possible.)

My scrawny sister looked up at her and said, “Bullshit!”

I remember that, for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. I was paralyzed with fright, and I think I was waiting for lightning to come out of her eyes and strike Dolores dead.

Dolores grabbed my hand, and pulling me behind her, went around my grandma and out the door.

In 1996, my mother and grandmother both long gone, I received a call from an author, in Missouri, who was writing a biography of my cousin. He had gotten my name through family sources and he asked if I would mind giving him some background on the family.

We must have talked for an hour, on the first call, about the family and who was married to whom, and the children, and as much as I could tell him about my cousin. He asked if he could call, again, and I said, “Why not?”

About three months later, I received a second call. We talked for a few minutes, and then he asked me how much I knew about my grandmother.

I laughed and told him, “Well, she scared me, and I’m fearless.”

That loosened him up, After we quit laughing, he asked me what I knew about her first husband.

I said, “Virtually nothing. He’s just a name to me.”

There was a pause, and then he said, “Would it surprise you to know that there was speculation that she might have murdered him?”

My reply, “There is no evil act that she could have committed that would surprise me.”

He said, “That’s a pretty brutal indictment.”

I said, “She is one of two truly evil people I’ve met in my life. I don’t think there was anything she wouldn’t do to get what she wanted.”

I believe that all of the family knew what my grandma was. She left a trail of damaged and broken people and families behind her all of her life. This family “secret” was never truly a secret, at all.